A Tune in a Canoe

I’ve been inspired, I’ve a new aspiration: to play bagpipes in a canoe. And the inspiration?
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Another Year-end List: My Top 12 in ’12

I thought I might as well jump on the year-end list bandwagon and dream up my own list. Blogs are made for lists and here’s one: my “top 12 in 12”: a random list of twelve of my very personal standout mostly piping memories of 2012 (“random” meaning I might have a different list if I sat down tomorrow and again thought about the year that was).

In no particular order:
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Support the Music before it Fades Away

Ten years ago Arthur Herman wrote an interesting book about how the Scots invented the modern world. Adam Smith, David Hume, James Watt, Alexander Graham Bell – the list of Scots firebrands and original thinkers is long and impressive.

In Canada we know that Scots had a big hand in inventing the country. Sir John A MacDonald, Canada’s first Prime Minister, was a Scot through and through. Same for his successor, Perthshire-born Alexander Mackenzie. Canada’s history is riddled with Scots. Canada’s pathfinders and trailblazers are disproportionately over-represented by Scots. Time’s are changing and, sadly, I say, that while a strong weave of Scottishness can still be felt in the backbone of Canadian society, the cultural imprint of Canada’s Scottish forebears fades.
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MyVote: Cool App or Seriously Seditious?

Earlier in the summer pipes|drums was one of the first news outlets to announce the launch of Kenny Constable’s free MyVote app. Since then the app is getting loads of play – and use – from keeners around the pipe band world.
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Australia’s Funniest Home Videos

After Saturday’s Toronto Indoor Games and a late night on the D-town I was out and about at the crack of dawn today helping a film-maker friend shoot the famous Paris to Ancaster bike race [N.B. must say, I’m quite proud of myself for having tip-toed out of the house without stirring couch-surfing band members].
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The Blog’s Fifth Anniversary

April will mark the fifth anniversary of this blog. I never planned to “blog”, or write about stuff and post it online, but Yoann Le Goff, the technical brains behind dunaber.com, pitched me the idea, then built the site and, well, the rest just happened. I came across an online study the other day (so definitely not scientific) and it seems something like 60-80% of all blogs that are started are abandoned after one month. Whatever. I’m surprised I’ve lasted five years doing this.
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Log Driver’s Waltz

Here’s a nice sample of Canadian folk music – or a kind of a Canadian folk music: Wade Hemsworth’s bouncy, cheerful “Log Driver’s Waltz”. Produced by the National Film Board of Canada in 1979 this little “vignette” as the NFB calls it, has become an iconic bit of Canada’s cultural flotsam and jetsam.
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The Secret to Finding Good Reeds?

Many of us have always wondered. The truth is out:
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Gaelic College Fiddles with the Great Highland Bagpipe

Cape Breton is surely a beautiful part of the world – in the summer, anyway. I’ve spent a good few summer weeks in the past teaching at the Gaelic College of Celtic Arts and Crafts in St. Ann’s. Happy times, for sure, with a hundred kids or so running up and down the hills with their chanter and pipes and plans aplenty for pranking (mostly) suspecting teaching staff. Though “from away”, as they say in CB, my time at the GC gifted me some truly great memories, lifelong friends and some modest insight into how things “go” in that part of the world.
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Halloween, Geisha Girls and Fat Bastard

I like Emily Post’s definition of good manners, “Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter which fork you use.” I wonder sometimes if the whole phenomenon we know as “political correctness” is a hammer-over-the-head attempt to fill a good-manners gap.
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