Christmas Lights

Taken at dusk, these Christmas lights are in the South Keys area. The hotel property has several of them lit up.

Falling Water

Christmas trees can be found in many places in Ottawa, such as in the atrium of this office building.

A waterfall spills down beside it.

Wreath

This wreath hangs outside the Lord Lansdowne retirement home in the Glebe. I've shown it before, but I like the simplicity of the wreath.

A Bear

I found this photograph in my archives from last year. I remember taking the shots, but not publishing them. The bear sculpture is at the end of Sparks Street, facing the War Memorial, and has been there for many years. Someone at the time thought it was a good idea to add some Christmas decorations to the sculpture, in the form of the ribbon and Christmas lights. The widow of the artist did not like that at all, and the additions were quickly removed.

The electronic screen and billboard behind this have since been removed. There was talk for awhile of moving the bear down the street; some buffoon thinks a sculpture of the Stanley Cup should be placed here, simply because the concept of a hockey championship was hatched at this intersection in the 19th Century. It might have been the same dolt who thought the lights and ribbon was a swell idea. If by chance this post falls under the eyes of the aforementioned buffoon: you're an idiot, sir or madam (most likely sir, and why on earth am I being polite by using polite terms? As I said, I think you're an idiot). 

Trickery

Rounding out my series for the Buskers Festival today, we finish with this complicated act. People from the audience were brought in (as is often the case with buskers), while the two performers you see here were juggling knives. They crouched down for the third member of the act to jump over the whole lot while the knives were being thrown. Needless to say, the audience loved it.

Juggling

This busker on Sparks Street was in the midst of a juggling act for the audience, who were quite caught up in his antics. Here he was using balls, but the act would progress to involve bowling pins, knives, and even lit torches.

Balanced

While living statue buskers get a steady amount of business and tips during their performances, often lasting an hour, their audience tends to be more transitory, watching for a few minutes and moving on. That's not the case here, where the act has the audience more stationary. Here on Sparks Street, these two are balanced (for the moment), high on these customized unicycles.

You try that.

Tin Woman

The events at the Bytown Museum were not the only festival going on here in Ottawa on the Civic Holiday weekend. We have an annual Buskers Festival on the Sparks Street pedestrian mall featuring performers, acrobats, jugglers, mural artists, and other acts that draw out the crowds to watch. This first act was a woman doing the living statue act, entirely in silver as a robot. She reminded me of the Tin Man of the Oz books. It's fun watching living statue performers engage with the audience. They're mute, and occasionally move. Little kids are particularly astonished by living statue performers in a way that doesn't happen with other buskers; it's as if they don't quite know if they're real or not. 

There has been another living statue busker here in previous years named Kate Mior, but she was absent this year. She has a few personas in her act, including one being Marie Antoinette and another being a windup doll. Watching her perform and silently flirt with her audience is a blast. Another absent busker this year was Bendy Em, an Australian contortionist who can fold her entire body into a square glass box. Hopefully both return next year.

The Colonel

Today I finish this series within the Bytown Museum with this bust of Colonel By himself. I will be back in here again sometime soon.

Old Time Tools

A note to those of you wondering what the captcha issues are about Blogger. Apparently the issue is being worked on as of this writing. There is a temporary fix for those of us who never use captchas on our blogs; if you have your comments set up as a pop up window, switch to embedded status instead. My writing blog was set the other way, and I've switched over to embedded for it. No more unwanted captchas.

I have more artifacts in the Bytown Museum today, including these tools in the cabinet. The building of the Rideau Canal established the city, and some of the tools we see here would have been typical of that time. In the years afterwards, Bytown was a rough and tumble lumber town, known for being rather violent, which is addressed in the museum's exhibits. The town was renamed Ottawa in 1855, and designated the capital by Queen Victoria. Whether or not she simply pointed to the map and said "there" is another matter.

 Taking the name of the river, which in turn is named after the First Nations tribe, the city evolved from there. Still, Colonel By's name and legacy is all over the map and history of Ottawa.