The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

In the past few days, I’ve run into a couple of friends — either directly or indirectly — whom I haven’t seen in a while:

• George Justus

  found me while Googling for our high school alma mater, De La Salle

  College “Oaklands”. He and I were part of a small group, the “Eight

  Year Men”, who attended school at “Del” for the complete span of grades

  it offered: from sixth grade to grade 13 (yes, back then, there were

  five years of high school, 9 through 13). He dropped me a line via

  email last week — Hi, George, and expect an email from me later today!

• I ran into Anthony Famularo

  yesterday at Easter Brunch at the Boulevard Club. Anthony is also a

  classmate of mine from De La Salle, and he plays a role in the Best Date Ever story, which I shall continue soon.

  Anthony’s got a blog. I knew it was his the moment I stumbled across

  the phrase “my asshole lawyer friend Nick”. I too am a friend of that

  asshole lawyer.

  (Some of you may say that “asshole lawyer” is redundant. Seeing as the CEO of my company,

  my department-mate Darryl Green, my future father-in-law and several

  blood relatives are lawyers or have law degrees, I’m going to do some

  hand-waving and say that not every L.L.B. is an asshole. However, if it

  were a crime to be an asshole, there’d be enough evidence to execute

  Nick twice.)

  Anthony told me that a mutual friend of ours, Nadine Lacalamita, who also happens to have been a classmate of my sister’s at her high school, Havergal College, owns and runs the 2 Cats

  lounge on King Street West, which happens to be stumbling distance from

  my house. He goes there every couple of weeks, and I’m hoping to join

  him and catch up with him and Nadine.

• Cliff, the original owner of my first accordion, found my Why Accordion? article and wrote back to me in the comments. Good to hear from you!
• Like Cliff, Sean Silcoff

  was a fellow member of Crazy Go Nuts University’s “Media Mafia”. Sean’s

  now Montreal Bureau Chief for the Financial Post and his current series

  of articles (part one / part two) is on Embraer, the little Brazilian aircraft company that

  could. Ever since flying down to Boston to see Wendy became a regular ritual

  for me, I’ve become rather familiar with the ERJ — the Embraer

  Regional Jet, the “commuter plane” which acts as the workhorse for

  regional airlines such as American Eagle.

It’s happened without fail since this blog got its first mention in

BoingBoing in late 2001: every Good Friday, I get email that goes

something like this:

Hey

dude, I heard you were born in the Philippines and thought you might

not know that every Easter, they do an actual re-enactment of the

Crucifixion! Did you know that?

Two such emails appeared in my inbox today. We’re down from last year.

This is like emailing a high-profile employee of Microsoft (say, Scoble) and going “Hey man, did you know that Bill Gates dropped out of school to found your company?”