There are no winners in the pandemic.
Who am I kidding, of course there are winners in the pandemic. And you know how I know this – I googled ‘winners in the pandemic’ and I got back 2,320,000,000 hits! You might think that you get two billion hits for anything you google. So I checked it out. I googled ‘frog singing opera’ and I only got 6,530,000 hits – and pretty much all of them were clips of the loony tune frog singing ‘hello my baby’ – you know the one (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsROL4Kf8QY) and which I hasten to add, is not a frog singing opera but rather vaudeville which is a whole different thing.
But back to the matter of pandemic winners. I’m not really interested in learning why company X has done so well during the pandemic. I know it happens but profiting from worldwide misery is not something I want to celebrate. On the other hand, there are ideas or concepts that flourished during the pandemic and I’m happy to see them as winners. One of these things is the Greek alphabet.
The World Health Organization or the WHO have taken to using the Greek alphabet to describe COVD variants. Before I continue on this point, can I just say that Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey, the last original surviving members of the real Who, the rock band who gave us My Generation and I Can See for Miles and Baba O’Reilly and lots of other great songs, have been really nice about letting this other WHO take their name. No lawsuits no threatening letters; that is one classy rock band (even if they did one or two or seven too many farewell tours).
Back to the Greek alphabet. So that other WHO decided that for the general public they would give the COVID variants Greek letters. Why Greek letters? I don’t really know. Fraternities and sororities use Greek letters in their names to make them sound intelligent and give them a veneer of history which covers up the fact that they are basically just party hubs. And people often pick up diseases from parties at fraternities and sororities so maybe that’s why the WHO went to Greek letters (full disclosure, I was never invited to join a fraternity or ever attended a frat party so I’m just speculating here).
On the COVID front we had original COVID which would have been alpha, and then the beta and gamma and delta variants. Those are the first four letters of the Greek alphabet, and one might have expected that the next variant would have been the fifth letter of the alphabet – epsilon, but it wasn’t. And it wasn’t the sixth or the seventh or the eighth or the ninth or the tenth or the eleventh or the twelfth or the thirteenth or even the fourteenth. No, for some reason they jumped right to the 15th letter of the alphabet – the ominously sounding omicron.
This is odd.. Those other letters between delta and omicron seemed perfectly acceptable. They’re just as Greek. And at least if they kept the variants in alphabetical order we could have learned the Greek alphabet as we cowered in fear from the ever-evolving variants. Now we’ve lost that chance. Thanks for nothing WHO.
We, the fine folks at Gordon’s Acoustic Living Room (finally), would never confuse people like that. Our shows – and we are having shows again – are always on the third Sunday of the month – except when they aren’t. Like in December when we’re doing our monthly show on Sunday December 12th which is the second Sunday.
But some things remain the same. We are still at the Free Times Café (College just west of Spadina) and the show still starts at 8. And for the second month in a row, we are offering a special dinner/show package where, if you make a dinner reservation before the show, you get a great reserved table near the stage and you get to see the show for free. If you don’t make a reservation, you can still see the show for free – because there’s no cover – but you might not get a table.
And I just want to say that it was so cool to see a full house having dinner when we arrived to setup last month. The Free Times, like other restaurants, is fighting to get back on its feet so please do bring some friends and have dinner before the show. That way you will all have eaten before we play and so you won’t be singing along to our tunes with your mouth full which isn’t a good look.
Hope to see you there.
Jonathan
P.S. Just a warning that our January show will be on Robbie Burns Day which this year is Tuesday January 25 and when there will be more bagpipe tunes that you can shake a stick at – and I can tell you from bitter experience that shaking a stick doesn’t make the bagpipes stop.
| December 12th Set List: | |
|---|---|
| Set #1: | Set #2: |
| Christmas Medley Santa Claus Is Dead 3 Downs to Heaven Pamela Brown Gumboot Cloggeroo You Only Live Twice Famous Blue Raincoat Different Drum South Train Glenora Ferry |
Lost on the Bayou Mr. Grinch Spanish Pipe Dream Lay Lady ay Chemical Workers Song I Really Don’t Want To Know Linda Put the Coffee On Brandy Every Time That You… Two of Us |