Water of life

A little while back Mark, an old of Chris’, e-mailed me and mentioned in passing a YouTube video he had come across which featured a photo slideshow of UWO library school students – including Chris! He had stumbled onto the video while searching for music by local Celtic band Uisce Beatha. Turned out that there were a lot of interesting coincidences as this story unfolded…

When I lived in Ottawa in the early '90's, I was good friends with a brother of Uisce Beatha’s bass guitarist and a group of us used to go see the band play whenever they came through town.

Years later when I met Chris, Uisce Beatha came up in conversation somehow or perhaps I saw one of their CDs in his collection. Turns out that during the same years that I saw them play in Ottawa, Chris and Mark were going to see them play in London regularly for the home town crowd!

Jason, the creator of the YouTube video, "Rarin' Librarians", was a former TA student of Chris' at library school. It turns out that Jason’s decision to include the Usice Beatha song “Old South London” as background music for the video was influenced by Chris.

Jason did a blog post about creating a SW Ontario playlist and Chris, the music guru, submitted a few songs that fit the bill, including "Old South London". Jason had never heard the song before - even though he too had seen the band live in concert - but he realized that it was a perfect soundtrack choice when he was creating his library school slideshow.

None of us knows if Chris was even aware of the video’s existence - but I know that he would have enjoyed it! And he would definitely appreciate the myriad of social networking connections in this tale – nodding his head knowingly with that wry smile and a twinkle in his blue eyes. We’re all connected, in past and future, in more ways than we can even imagine.
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