The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

The car is loaded, there’s just a tiny bit of last-minute packing, and then I’m off to Ottawa to start the new job! See you in a few.

It’s election day in Canada! Go put on your ethnic costume, go to the polls and cast your vote!

And yes, that means you too, young voters. The world just watched people in the Middle East risk their lives to vote, so you have no excuse to do the same in far more cushy conditions. Rick Mercer explains:

In the spirit of the election, here’s Rick’s rant on bad behaviour during Question Period:

And finally, here’s Rick talking with the Steve Paikin on The Agenda:

Now get out there and vote!

If I were Barack Obama, I’d have shortened last night’s press conference to just this…

…and then I’d pimp-walk off the Podium, Bender style.

With Osama Bin Laden dead, it’s time to bring back this Family Guy scene:

…and I found out from this guy (warning: NSFW language):

(I wonder what it would be like to get all my news from him.)

I expect that we’ll be hearing additional details, such as how long he’s been dead (days? months? years?), the circumstances of his death, and maybe even the formation of the “deather” movement who’ll demand the long-form death certificate.

12 years ago today, my friend Karl Mohr and I took to Toronto’s streets with our accordions. By the end of that day, we’d learned a number of rock and pop hits, joined a hospital cutbacks protest, accepted DJ Todd’s challenge to perform onstage at Toronto’s most notorious goth club (The Sanctuary Vampire Sex Bar, whose owner went by the name of Lance Goth – it’s now a Starbucks) and gotten all the free beer we could drink.

Such a day calls for a happy dance. It might even call for the happiest dance ever invented: Double Dream Feet, shown in the video window above. (And yes, it closes with jazz hands.)

I used to have the story and photos from that first accordion day out on the blog, but it seems to have vanished; it was one of the articles that got lost in the process of changing blogging platforms over the nearly ten years this blog has been in existence (I was first on Blogger, then Blogware and finally, WordPress). I’ll have to rewrite and post the story sometime, but in the meantime, you can hear the story in a presentation I did at CUSEC a couple of years ago called Squeezeboxes, Startups and Selling Out: