Month: December 2009

Trading emails

My bro emails me as follows.

This is what Margot looks like to me all the time:

ಠ_ಠ

Concerned cat is concerned.

I email him back.

^    ^
O~O

is more accurate.

He emails me back….

Sez you.

_________________

The mailman was very happy I put down de-icer yesterday.  I try to do as I would be done by, with variable results.  This time it worked.

I can’t find my cell phone charger.  I have no idea what I did with the darned thing, which is rather anxiety making.  At the same time, I know it’s in the house, so I am not too worried.

My cousin Katherine had a b-day yesterday; facebutt lets you know when people on your friendslist are approaching their natal day, so I and many other people wished her a happy birthday.  Her userpic in facebook is a piece of anime art she did herself.  Talented lassie!

My mother also had a birthday recently.  She and pOp celebrated, in part, with a drive in the country, a family tradition to which I, alas, cannot subscribe, as I don’t have a car and I don’t have any friends or relatives in town willing to indulge me in my fondness for aimless carbon release.

Eddie crawled into my lap … twice … yesterday.  Gizmo, not to be outdown, followed me into the bathroom at one point and insisted on being brushed.  It amazes me; both of the cats have changed so much since Margot came along, and apart from the truly remarkable noises Eddie makes when Margot goggles at him unexpectedly, I’d say their behaviour has become more affectionate.  Now, if we could stop them from throwing up.  But in the words of Dr. Jane, the singing paleontologist (now Dr. James):

Cats they shed, and cats they throw up

Cats they defecate and spray (and they spray)

And I’m gonna be a multi millionaire

The day that I can make these products pay.

Hey, if you’re going to sing about cats, one should strive for accuracy with those, dare I say it, caterwauls.

And now we learn a new use for an old word.

The word is ‘rhino’.

Not that anybody cares, but Dr. Peter Watts, a noted Canadian SF writer, was beaten, pepper sprayed, stripped, and made to walk across the Bluewater Bridge and driven to the Canadian side in his shirt sleeves during a snowstorm.  I have already contacted my MP. More deets here. Obviously the US Border Thugs who did this believe they were justified, and have charged him with assault.  Update here http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=935… unfortunately I can’t seem to paste links at the moment.

What are the odds this is BS, and the guards overstepped their authority?

PZ Myers on death

We should feel grief. Pretending that they have ‘transcended’ into some novel quantum mechanical state in which their consciousness persists, or that they are shaking hands with some anthropomorphic spiritual myth in never-never land, does a disservice to ourselves. The pain is real. Don’t deny it. Use it to look at the ones you love who still live and see what you can do to make our existence now a little better, and perhaps a little more conducive to keeping our energies patterned usefully a little longer.

Correction REDUX

I know I haven’t been posting much about The Correction, but not because I haven’t been thinking about it. One of the reasons I took some time off (apart from the fact that I felt I had to) was that I knew the money I’ve earned or been handed due to no effort on my part is going to be worthless at some point.  I am currently guessing 6 to 18 months.

Some American politicians are trying to work on the problem. Without a complete withdrawal from foreign wars, I fail to see how reducing the American debt to the point it can be paid back is possible.

This article, which comes from an American think thank which is focused on the effects of economic policy on working families, but which is centrist by Canadian standards, gives the skinny.  By Murrican standards they are scandalously left wing, but Canadians have kind of a different take on that.  Let’s just say they ain’t the Fraser Institute.  The skinny is that without an immediate deflation of the dollar of 20 to 30%, there cannot possibly be a controlled or ‘soft’ landing of the economy in response to a global shift away from the dollar, and a crisis in which the major nation lenders extend the digitus impudicus to the continuation of American government borrowing.

The US is our biggest trading partner.  For 35 out of the 50 states, we’re the biggest single customer.  Over 50% of what we produce, manufactured or services or food or energy, goes south.  When that market dries up, and believe me, it will, Canadians will be very glad that our infrastructure is in better shape and we can actually feed ourselves, heat and electrify our homes (at hellish cost), and have the banking structure in place to weather the disaster, although the economy will be disabled and crushed by horrific interest rates for a long while.  We may actually have a ‘replacement’ currency for foreign money to flee to… if there’s no place for the Euro-seeking investors and speculators to go.

I really feel for my kids; but we have survived pogroms, forced immigration, religious repression, the Russian Revolution, global depression and war, historically, as a family, and we will do it again.  It’s not an option to whine.  It is what it is, as my old employer used to say.

Right now, it seems like the market collapse is happening someplace else.  It isn’t.  It’s happening right here, right now.  We’re moving goods on credit across the ice of Lake Ladoga, and when the thaw comes, we’ll be pooched. I predicted that the collapse was imminent back in 2004.  The US bailout prevented bad things from happening, but the evil day is still coming.

The future is here… it’s just  unevenly distributed. (William Gibson).

The glue

I think my family is glued together with movies. Last night, Jeff and I watched Support Your Local Sheriff for about the nth time, but it was Keith’s first time watching, and I don’t watch movies the same way I used to, so I was impressed.

James Garner makes being effortlessly masculine and a bit of a selfish bastard poetry in motion; Joan Hackett does the smart but ditzy daughter with a verve and authority which is delightful; Jack Elam is flat out brilliant; Bruce Dern as a yob = lucky guy, he got some of the best lines; Walter Brennan as his long-suffering crusty cuss of a father is like a multi-layered parody of himself; all the casting is marvellous.  The script is where it starts though, and William Bowers, also responsible for Advance to the Rear, the remake of My Man Godfrey with David Niven, and the Sheepman, wrote one for the comedy ages.  Highly recommended.

Another movie I watched recently, which I am not going to recommend because it’s a damned strange, disturbing, and not very kind to animals movie, was The Holy Mountain.  I was whipping around somebody’s personal best 100 movie list on the internet and this one got mentioned with such inarticulate adoration (“Just see it.  It’s too hard to describe”) that I had to make Jeff get it from Zip.

I LOVED IT.  I can hardly wait to show it to all my coolest film fan friends, because it is strange and marvellous and disgusting and eye-popping and very memorable.  About an hour in, I thought, “Man, this movie simply cannot get ANY better (this was at the point a six foot ball python showed up… there are A LOT of animals in this movie.)  In another scene a guy gets to take a symbolic (rebirth) bath with a baby hippo; women get their heads shaved; a guy who’s like Jesus shares a joint with a quadruple amputee; one hundred lamb carcasses are paraded around on crucifixes; a man gets hauled up the side of a building in an incredible, bizarre shot; tarot cards are invoked; and the end … well, it predates the end of Monty Python and the Holy Grail by quite a bit, and there’s NO WAY on earth you can convince me that Terry Gilliam didn’t see it before they made Grail.  Anyway, the movie is about spiritual quest(s) and it pauses occasionally to kick militarism, consumerism and religion with glee and hobnailed boots, while mocking itself and occasionally giving hints about how to deconstruct the movie.

Even if you don’t follow the ‘plot’ it is an amazing and very big budget piece of awesome weird, and the visuals completely saturated my ability to take them in.  And I liked the hippy dippy music, so there.  The director says, “I ask from film what most people ask of psychedelic drugs” and the only response to that was/is, “Yes.”

News of note

Something in my house that I don’t own (Don’t you weep) is now finished.  I am back writing songs down again after taking a break.

Margot is cleaner.  I bathed her (again!) this morning.  I also applied conditioner, because she’s so staticky she’s attracting dirt like a CRT.  She is an indoor-outdoor cat, and they say you should never let Persians be indoor-outdoor cats because

  • They are purebreds and people will steal them (she’s chipped)
  • They get filthy laying about in the debris outside
  • They are none too smart and rather too docile

Unfortunately, the place has a cat door, so what can ya do?  Besides, she looks so cute chasing bugs in the backyard and galloping up the back deck stairs.

Speaking of stairs, I have installed the anti-skid tape on the basement stairs, and this should prevent all three cats and any relevant hoomins from skidding down those stairs asswise.  (All three cats have wiped out on the stairs).

I am glad I haven’t had the R John Caspell memorial signage made up yet because it must now include the words “And Cat Vomitarium” under “Memorial Pinball Parlour” because, like, you know, the cats enjoy throwing up on that blue carpet.

Here is my hat with a rainbow on it

Part of my remarkable afternoon at Mike’s last week was coming back into his place from a couple of hours on that nice toasty balcony and finding my hat with a rainbow splashed across it.

rainbow hat

It reminded me…

… of the rainbow on the living room floor in the house on Oakridge Drive when I was growing up.  We had a fishtank in the front entrance way, and at the right time of day, at the right time of year, the light would hit one end of it as if it was passing through a prism, and throw a spray of brilliant colour on the hardwood floor. I think we got at least one picture of that squirrelled away someplace.

…. of the rainbow on the slate floor in the cafeteria at my old job.  Same thing… light would come into the atrium, bounce through the an edge of a glass plate on the railing, and throw colours on the floor.  As far as I know, Jarmo and I were the only people who ever noticed, or at least commented about it.

Deb, that tiny feather is from your bird room. After all this time it hasn’t fallen out or blown away.

Photo credit Mike.  The rest of the pics from that afternoon are, thanks to the mental image of my brother clawing his eyes out, NOT being posted.

Remarkable science news culled from eurekalert.org

Our skin can feel sensation with more than one set of nerves.

Instant battery… just add paper?

There’s something deeply wrong with this story.  I don’t care about the radiation, I just don’t want to fly through a thunderstorm.

Fit teenaged boys are smarter. So go get some exercise, ya little punks.

As a result of our long childhood, which seems to get longer every year, parents are involved with their kids longer. Nodding, nodding.

This has implications for everything from analysis of disease outbreaks to making more robust computer networks.

Odds und sods

Doris Lessing interviewed. She has a way of saying things that is resonantly remarkable.

Alan Moore is inta majic. Now why the heck would anybody be startled by that.  What he says really resonates.  I know I am supposed to be a hard ass atheist, I should be a materialist, blah ha ha woof mew.  There’s a lot I don’t know, including my own mind, sometimes.

A picture…. The guy who plays Esposito on Castle getting ‘bit’ by the Eric Northman from True Blood. For shiz like thiz twitter was invented….

Onion-style article about the stupidity of contemporary Brits.

So about all this type casting, stereo typing, and other mental short cut stuff….  Will be very hard to read, but I thought it was pretty funny.

I would have posted links to MP3s of Emma Goldman’s writings, but when there was a mispronunciation in the FIRST 30 SECONDS I say to myself, damn those modern anarchists, can’t they get anything rite write right??

And with this last link, I realize that irony explodes into a cloud of multiversial memes, and go back to transcribing Dennis’ reminiscences.