Blue Stew Blog

I’ve got a jumble of impressions and photos from bluesfest, but nothing that seems to want to organize itself into a coherent blog post. So today I think I will just make a Blues Stew.

Does anybody else think that this year’s Bluesfest logo looks like a box of Tide?

This is Jake Shimabukuro, ukelele wizard. I’d never heard of him before, and I only caught a couple of minutes of his set because I had to meet someone somewhere else…but I would have loved to have stayed and heard more. If you visit his website, you can listen to him too.

I got to meet blogger extraordinaire, Dave Scrimshaw, who is just as warm and appealing and gracious in real life as he is on his blog. The Llama introduced us. (As I’ve learned over the past week of bluesfest, the Llama knows everybody.) Here they are: Dave and the Llama. (They’re not as tall as they look …I was sitting on the ground when I took that photo.)

This here’s a new thing at Bluesfest this year: the Cupsucker. You drop your beer cup in there, and it gets composted instead of being tossed into landfill. Approximately 200,000 beers are sold at bluesfest each year. (I tried to re-use my beer cup one night, which would be even better from an environmental perspective, but apparently that’s illegal.)

Now for something completely different. This is a photo of my first-ever pedicure, which took place on Thursday. No, it wasn’t at bluesfest, but it was during bluesfest week, and my feet were blue, so I’m throwing it into the Blue Stew. (I don’t think the pedicurist is accustomed to clients wanting to document the experience…she looked a little startled when I asked if I could take a picture.)

This is Dan Bern. Janet and I liked him, and we bought his CDs.

I have no idea who this group is…they didn’t appear to be on the program. But MAN, could this guy dance! I’ve never seen a man who could move like that. If I’d been thinking, I would have taken a few seconds of video instead of an out-of-focus photograph. You’d be in awe!

This is the monument to anti-poverty activists in Ottawa. I attended the official unveiling of the monument a couple of years ago, but the monument wasn’t finished in time for the official unveiling. So this is the first time I’ve actually seen it. It’s a slice of bread, with a house-shaped cut-out in the centre. If you’re at Bluesfest, look for it in the Black Sheep Stage area.

And finally, in the This-Is-None-Of-My-Business-But-I-Have-An-Opinion-Dammit category…if you’re going to keep your child in diapers all his life, at least make him wear something over the diaper after the age of two – shorts, pants, whatever. It just looks weird to see a big kid like this running around in a diaper while carrying on conversations with people. At least if he was wearing shorts we could all enjoy the illusion that he’s toilet-trained.

Well, there’s still two more days of Bluesfest, so I might be throwing a little more into the Blue Stew before it’s over.