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| The Miss Buffalo In The Buffalo Harbour |
A
belated Happy Canada Day to all my Canadian friends, and Happy 4th
of July to all my friends stateside. I didn’t want to go an entire week without
writing this report, but I am a little late. As I am still a yank, I suppose
the 4th is an appropriate day to post. I could make the excuse that
it was because of all the festivities surrounding Canada Day, but in truth the
week just got away from me. I was in Huntsville on Canada Day to attend the
first ever Hunters Bay Radio Canada Day music festival (“Canadafest”),
featuring bands from Huntsville to London, England. The weather was beautiful,
and I thoroughly enjoyed the day. Huntsville’s River Mill Park venue is a great
place to hear music, and although there were likely other Canada Day events
taking place in Huntsville, nothing beats a free music festival by the
waterfront. Attendance was respectable, and I expect that next year’s festival
will be an even bigger success.
As
an American, I am tempted to devote this entire report (but won’t) to the
latest atrocity foisted upon us by Donald The Imbecile. Nothing says Happy 4th
of July like placing Army tanks in front of the Lincoln Memorial in D.C.. Let’s
completely ruin the celebration of my country’s independence by showing off our
military might with a garish display of weaponry, smack dab in the middle of
our nation’s capital. This tasteless sabre rattling is just one more in a series
of undiplomatic blunders which more resemble the dictators Rump is embracing
than the actions of a responsible leader of the Free World. I’m surprised “His
Orangeness” didn’t order a fireworks display to emblazon the sky with his
likeness. The antithesis of diplomacy, Rump wants to turn a 4th of
July celebration into a self-aggrandizing political rally, and it turns my
stomach. There, I did it in a paragraph.
I
love fireworks, and I particularly loved explosives in my ill-spent youth. I’m
not talking about lady fingers, or even cherry bombs; I’m talking about
construction-grade explosives. A friend used to buy a gross of M-80’s shortly
before this holiday, off the back of a pickup truck from a nice little old lady,
who would mysteriously appear in downtown Buffalo shortly before the 4th,
then return to the bowels of hell wherefrom she came. There’s nothing like a
well-placed M-80 to wake the dead. We also used to drive our boats into the
Buffalo Harbour for the annual fireworks display on the waterfront, and that
was usually an adventure. Lots of people who own boats are not particularly well
versed in the common sense rules of boating, and when one adds alcohol into the
equation, that is a recipe for disaster.
Of
all the fireworks displays I have viewed from the Buffalo waterfront, one stands
out. At the time I owned a classic 1957 Chris Craft Sea Skiff utility, I, along
with a group of my friends, motored to the Buffalo Harbour for the fireworks
display. For some reason, the boating crowd was particularly unruly that night,
and there seemed to be a lot of heavy drinking going on. The police boats were
very busy, as some of the more inexperienced boaters moored in the inner harbor,
directly in the path of a well-marked channel, meant to be kept clear for the passage
of The Miss Buffalo tour boat. One boat, a large cruiser, was not only in the
path of the Miss Buffalo, but its drunken passengers were shooting off hand-held
Roman candles at the other boats. Before the police could get to these bozos,
fate intervened, and the Miss Buffalo came motoring through. As she sounded her
unmistakable horn, none of the offending boaters in her path were prepared to
pull up their anchors fast enough to avoid the inevitable. As impressive as the
fireworks display was, nothing was as entertaining as watching that 100+ foot
tour boat barrel through the Buffalo Harbour, dragging five or ten unlucky
boats by their tangled mooring lines off her stern. As these drunken idiots banged
into each other, scrambling to cut their mooring lines, hundreds of the more
responsible boaters cheered and honked their horns. Karma is indeed a bitch. Again,
Happy Canada Day week to all my Canadian readers, and Happy 4th of July,
to my American readers. I am thankful to live in a free country; and my
greatest hope is that it will always remain so.
Jamie Oppenheimer,
Songwriter, Author, Blogger, Radio Producer, & Host has been writing THE
OPPENHEIMER REPORT every MONDAY since 1992 and has published the articles on
his blog since 2006. We are including Jamie's weekly reports, as a new feature
of #HuntersBayRadio, The Bay 88.7FM.
#GotLocal? HuntersBayRadio.com #WeAreMuskoka #WeAreAlmaguin
#GotLocal? HuntersBayRadio.com #WeAreMuskoka #WeAreAlmaguin
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