THE AMAZING STUFF YOU CAN FIND ON GOOGLE

Google "alerts" are intriguing things. The other day, I got a message that my name had showed up all over the place - but most of the entries were way in the past, including a whole mass of e-mails that I had posted to MaplePost (that's the Canadian folk music "list") in September 2001!  I presume that a skillful computer whiz could easily go back and find out EVERYTHING I've sent to that list in the last half dozen years - just how many amazing mistakes in judgment and/or fact have I committed?

Google also came up with the obit I wrote for the Globe and Mail back in 1999 on my old friend Richard "Hock" Walsh (that's apparently still up on the Downchild website), a list of all the sleeve notes I've written for various CD projects (they listed 22, but I know I've written many more than that), and a notation on one music site that suggests if you like me, you'll also like Holger Petersen and Ian Tyson.  Sure thing!

And best of all I found a citation from Toronto radio DJ and excellent postie Steve Fruitman, who - a few years back - gave me the

Golden Porcupine Award on his Back to the Sugar Camp radio show on CIUT. You can share my blushes: Here's the citation.

GOLDEN PORCUPINE FOR LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT

Richard Flohil, Toronto, Ontario

Richard came to Toronto as a young man on a mission in the late 1950s. He wanted nothing more than to meet the great Muddy Waters and other

Chicago blues men he had heard about in his native England. Not only did he meet his hero, he brought him to Toronto to play a gig which, incidentally, was the start of a long and illustrious career in the Canadian music business.

A frustrated trumpet player, Flohil left the music making to the experts and did all he could to get audiences out to hear, first hand, what the great ones could do. He introduced Buddy Guy to Canada on a Mariposa stage in 1967, something Buddy has never forgotten. Managing artists, promoting their events was a specialty that Richard learned to excel in. Able to do just about anything and get away with it, Flohil took risks that most others would just balk at. As editor for twenty years of the CAPAC (Composers, Authors and Publishers Association of Canada – for-runner to SOCAN) magazine, The Canadian Composer, Richard became a roving ambassador for the organization serving as an indispensable part of their game plan.

Co-founder of the Canadian music industry trade magazine, The Record, he had just about every Canadian release sent his way, some of which should never have been recorded in the first place. Good or bad it all found a home in Richard's huge record collection, now bordering on being a national archive.

Artistic Director of the Mariposa Festival in its waning years, Richard tried to bring back the old glory from the old mule but that was not to be its fate. As publicist for artists ranging from Loreena McKennitt to Eric Bogle, Ian Tyson and countless others, as well as his official capacity as Eastern Canadian operative of Holger Petersens's Stony Plain Records, Flohil has his finger in just about every roots oriented pie that there is.

Now officially collecting his old age pension Richard is still as lively, controversial and active as he always has been. He enjoys life to its fullest. Congratulations Richard Flohil.