October 04, 2003
Scarecrow festival
Galesburg has it every year, first weekend in October. People and businesses from all over town decorate scarecrows, which are then exhibited in Standish Park for a few days, with a few craft vendors and a music stage to round the thing out.
This morning, the real highlight was a folk band called Hammer and Pick, with a double bass and guitar, and one guy switching between banjo and hammer dulcimer. Awesome stuff. (Steve Martin is right, by the way---you can play a song about a train wreck and it'll sound cheery if there's a banjo involved. "Old 97" is just such a song. :) One of the dulcimer songs was called something like "Old something country down", and was almost exactly the same as a church song called "The Canticle of the Turning" with which I'm familiar. Pretty nifty.
Now I'm off to Davenport to help supervise our kids doing a practice programming contest. Not sure how much I'll have to do, so I'm taking along a book and some knitting, too. :)
"Your business success will depend on the extent to which programmers essentially live at your office. For this to be a common choice, your office had better be nicer than the average programmer's home. There are two ways to achieve this result. One is to hire programmers who live in extremely shabby apartments. The other is to create a nice office." --Philip Greenspun
Posted by blahedo at 10:46am on 4 Oct 2003