Month: December 2020

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The Christmas Potato Masher

here, for the record, is how what will probably be a future family running gag was born. A completely true story of the events of the evening of December 25, 2020.

The Christmas Potato Masher

A new fable for our times.

Christmas was quiet. Just me and my spouse.
All four of our children moved out of the house.
Mama in her kerchief and I in my cap
Had just settled down for an empty-nest nap.

When what to our wondering ears should appear,
But a phone call from Tyler. “Help me, Mama dear!
We’re cooking our dinner. Can you be here in a flash? er…
It turns out we don’t have a potato masher.”

As dry leaves before the wild hurricane fly,
When your son needs some help, you must leap to the sky!
We found our lone masher, and got into the car
And drove to see Tyler. (It wasn’t too far.).

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We handed it over – a small ceremony
Took place. See the photographic testimony
But as we drove off, across the street, saw a store
Rabba Fine Foods. Open 7/24!

We thought they might have a small utensil section
Perhaps a new masher’d be in their selection
And lo! They had one potato masher there
For $4.99. ‘Twas the last one, I swear

“Thank you for this Christmas miracle”, I said
To the clerk, and he smiled and nodded his head
“That’s why we’re all here”, he declared, as I paid
And we drove back to Tyler, to offer a trade.

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“Give us back the old one”, we asked, “Make it quick.
It’s plastic, and all of OUR pans are non-stick.
I’ll trade you this new one from Rabba. It’s metal.
We’ll take one more picture, and that will be settled.”

A new running gag was created that night,
The mashers might now be an annual sight.
Get ready for photos on Facebook each year
More potato mashers will surely appear!

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Sleigh Ride?

Blogging this for posterity. Anybody who’s ever played in a band or orchestra has probably done the Leroy Anderson classic Sleigh Ride a bunch of times – and if you have, I hope you’ll enjoy this incredible version.

Is this brilliant or terrible or both? It takes a lot of skill to produce a train wreck like this. I find something new to laugh about every time. The pianist arbitrarily changing keys, the other players rushing to catch up, the ending that goes on too long, the final guitar honk, and maybe my favourite bit – all the extra eighth notes the second time through the bridge at 1:02 or so.

It reminds me a bit of Argonotes. Talented musicians all acting as directionless independent contractors and nobody really following the leader too carefully, and everybody having fun.

The Youtube comments give us an explanation.

This was recorded in one take by Nashville studio musicians in 2007, during a recording session for a legitimate artist’s Christmas project. The artist intended to use this as a “hidden track”, but then decided their audience wouldn’t get the joke.

Well that would be me, Jerry McPherson, on guitar, Scott Williamson on drums, I believe it was Joeie Canaday on bass, and the always amazing Jason Webb on piano.

This is a new Christmas favourite for me.

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Grey Cup 2001 (Montreal; Calgary 27, Winnipeg 19)

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Ah, Montreal. The band’s first overnight grey cup trip. In 1998 we’d come down for a regular season game at Molson Stadium – worthy of a blog post of its own, the team chartered 3 cars of a Via train to Montreal and miraculously offered the band a free ride – and we all remembered that so fondly, how could we NOT go to Montreal for the Grey Cup?

Plus it’s an eastern division cup. Those are easy. In all our history, we only ever managed to get the band to fly somewhere once (to a “home” game in Fort McMurray, Alberta) but hiring a bus to go to an eastern opponent seems simpler. And here’s Rick, our bus driver from Great Canadian, a great guy.
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(More to come, this blog entry more or less a placeholder.)

I’m indebted to Colin “Trombone” Leech for the photos on this page (and for showing up! As the Ottawa branch of Argonotes, we could always count on Colin to show up only for certain road games.)

Argonotes at the 2001 Grey Cup

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Grey Cup 2017 (Ottawa; Argos 27, Calgary 24)

Part of our Ongoing Series of Argonotes Grey Cup Memories.

2017 Grey Cup

Wait, what? Argonotes at the 2017 Grey Cup?
Didn’t the band fold in 2017?

Well, yeah, it kind of did, the band packed it in after 22 years just before the start of the 2017 season (and reunited for one reunion performance in July) but that’s a topic for a much longer post. Or if you subscribe to The Athletic, you can read about it here…

However, Argonotes did actually perform on Grey Cup Weekend. Sort of! So it gets its own entry in the archives.

the eastern final

So I guess the Curse of Argonotes that we applied to the team didn’t work, because they won the Eastern Final and made it to the Grey Cup against Calgary.
I was delighted to take my dad (and brother (and one son)) to the Eastern final at BMO Field, and the Argos beat Saskatchewan.

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should I stay or should I go

Yours truly was kind of moping around that week, debating whether to go to Ottawa for the game.

I’d talked myself into Not Going. I can’t go. Not without my band.

But after some intense lobbying by basically everybody I’d ever met in my entire life, all saying “What, are you nuts? Go!”, and especially after an invitation to connect with the Saskatchewan Roughrider Pep Band (who were making their 4,000th straight Grey Cup trip), I found a ticket and headed to Ottawa for the weekend.

hanging out with musical friends

The Roughrider band even let us hang around and play and possibly even conduct.

Drums

It was a fantastic experience, and I owe a lot to the Rider band for the invitation, and to my Argonotes colleague Jenn “Piccolo” “Or Bass Drum” Annis, because I think we both agreed that two people is, legally, a band.

two people are legally a band

Two Argonotes

And we found ourselves at the Argo bash. I had this informal plan to have the entire Riders band show up and I was going to give them Argos shirts if they’d just play Go Argos Go and pretend to be Argonotes, but that kind of fell apart when they said “Sure, we’ll do it, but wearing green”, which wouldn’t have been nearly subversive enough.

So, what the heck, whaddya gonna do, there’s a stage and a rowdy group of Argo fans and there’s beer and we had a trombone and a bass drum, what more do you need, and without further ado, here is a performance of “Go Argos Go” by Argonotes, the Until Recently Toronto Argonauts Band, at the Argos Ottawa party the night before the Grey Cup, and I promise you, there are much better recordings of this song!

My thanks to Spitzka for the video and all his support over the years.

Was it a great weekend?
Absolutely! Inspired, no doubt, by our performance, the Argos beat Calgary in an epic snow globe of a game, with some wild plays, an incredible finish, a great halftime show by Shania Twain (who arrived on a dogsled) and I had a great 2nd row seat surrounded by Ottawa REDBLACKS fans who couldn’t have been more gracious after the victory.

Was this our greatest Argonotes performance ever?
Probably not. Other than the part where it inspired the Argos to victory the following day.

Was it our final Argonotes performance ever?
Hey, you never know.