Month: September 2021

many ripe swears

The PPC is just about the worst political party in Canada; Maxime Bernier is a racist POS, and I can only thank my neighbours that I have NOT HAD TO LOOK AT A SINGLE PPC CANDIDATE SIGN ANYWHERE IN BURNABY SINCE THE ELECTION STARTED.

FOR WHEN THE LINK DISAPPEARS:

Lisa Steacy September 15 2021 News 1130

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – A Vancouver People’s Party of Canada candidate has been distributing flyers comparing B.C.’s vaccine card to residential schools, and outraged Indigenous leaders are demanding accountability.

The flyer says it was “authorized by the official agent of Renate Siekmann,” who is running in Vancouver-Quadra— a riding that includes the Musqueam First Nation. The image of children outside of a residential school is overlaid with the text, “Discrimination is wrong: No vaccine passport.” In B.C., people need to show that they have received one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine in order to access non-essential businesses like restaurants, movie theatres, and gyms.

BC Assembly of First Nations (BCAFN) Regional Chief Terry Teegee says the comparison is deeply offensive, and trivializes the genocide of Indigenous people in Canada.

Delightful visit and some news about that chat

All my relations, I acknowledge my unpayable debt to the peoples, lands and waters of MST country.

For Paul’s bday his double cousin Jim and spouse Jan cooked dinner; a pink salmon (they are hard to cook right and you need a meat thermometer), corn on the cob and a delicious greek salad with veggies from their garden.

Katie turned up later after dropping off Alex and Keith was supposed to go gaming but didn’t and was too upset in the tummy to eat with us. It’s all good, it was the perfect amount of food, no leftovers.

While we were talking, as we do, Jan was curious about my encounter with a yellow breasted chat.  I had read that they live in BC so hadn’t worried too much about where it appeared, but it turns out that they are rare in the lower mainland, possibly not regulars at all. She found something on line about the chat – how it was the subject of habitat rehabilitation in the Okanagan. It needs a bunch of stuff to breed. A wild rose bush in a clearing of a forest with willow and cottonwood is their idea of a home in Heaven. If you clear the wild rose bushes for development bye bye chats. Also, they just got themselves into a new bird family because they’re chonky, among other things. The one I saw was monosyllabic, but in the spring the wee bastards never shut up and have as many as 40 separate calls. Also the boys dangle their feet and shake their booties to attract girls, who watch from underneath, and they have big goddamn marks on their plumage only visible in UV. All in all a wonderful evening of natural history, family love and damned good food.

December 31-2021 – I also learned this year that chats SING AT NIGHT

BREAKING: BC MASK MANDATE FOR ALL INDOOR SPACES REINSTATED

Training advice from hunger4words

from Christina Hunger, Speech Pathologist and the woman who taught Stella to ‘talk’:::

As you introduce new vocabulary to your dog, teach contrasting words together.

It’s easiest to teach a word when you have something to compare it to. This helps differentiate word meanings! Here are some examples of pairs of words to teach together:

Outside & inside
Happy & mad
All done & more
Yes & no
Your name & your dog’s name
On & off
Now & later
Ball & Toy
Come & go or come & stay

Example 1: When you’re playing with your dog, you can model “more” each time you throw a ball or toy for them. When you stop throwing the ball or toy, you can model “all done.” The meanings of “more” and “all done” become clearer with each other’s point of reference.

Example 2: Every time you come over to your dog, you can model “come.” When you leave the room or walk away, you can model “go.” The meanings of the actions are more defined when you have the opposite action to compare it to.

Interesting

Norm Macdonald is dead and the only people I can see who are mourning him are men on Reddit…. quite interesting. Waiting for a woman celebrity OTHER THAN SARAH SILVERMAN who really is a Sspecial cKase to praise him.

When Robin Williams and George Carlin died there was an incredible outpouring from a huge range of people and with Norm… just men. And Sarah Silverman. Makes ya think, don’t it?

I have started taking the medications. I’m not experiencing side effects so far, bar being a little off my feed. The real whoopsiedoodle will be the ADD meds, but I’m going to wait a while to start those.

PLEASE DON’T DRINK AND DRIVE.

Ken Burns made a documentary about ‘the greatest athlete of the 20th c’ – Mohammad Ali. That’s funny, because by many objective measures the greatest athlete of the 20th C was Babe Didrikson, and she sewed her own fucking clothes while she was winning.

 

garooooovy

Shit. Metformin doesn’t get along with Inderal. They may intensify each other’s side effects according to this long list of side effects….

In about an hour someone’s coming over to look at the hand drum to see if they want to buy it.

 

and in yet another outburst of schadenfreude I am sharing that a well known religious pest, street preacher and homophobe WHO IS NOT BEING NAMED because the RCMP doesn’t want a lawsuit has been stabbed at Metrotown, was treated and released in hospital

what a thing to have a brO (and friends)

REPENTANCE BEFORE UNITY

With thanks for the many simple pleasures of MST Country, with thanks to the people and the stories that make this place, for the sky, land and water, for all the beautiful creatures herein. It is a good day.

Jeff has (like Thorkel) stood in the ‘undeviating stream of my complaints’ as I whined about my health (okay the rumours about brain damage are true! what it is!) and survived!

Also I called Dave and wordsaladed all over his uncomplaining ear. He’s got to haul himself off to a doctor as well, shortly, and he’s looking forward to it about as much as I did. I have to go into the clinic 14 days hence.

Today I am going to wander down to the drugstore and find out what manner of side effect lies in wait for me there. DO NOT WANT a YEAR OF NAUSEA.

Tomorrow I’m going to the Junction to help Katie set up the baby room and nag her dad about how old he got, since he’ll be 72 tomorrow. Last time I was there we had a talk about the things that could have killed him, like the time he hit a wall on his motorcycle at 50 miles an hour, then (limping four ways from Sunday) rode what was left of it to Ron M.’s place in London and crashed on his couch. Shook it off and beat most of the dings out of it the next day. The shit we get up to when we’re young! and then after we’ve survived it we wake up in a cold sweat decades later going HOLY SHIZZBALLS OF RECKONING. I still get a chill when I think about the plane crash. Surviving stuff like that should make you a better person, but as best I recollect the only thing that came out of it was that we should have wills, although we didn’t actually DO anything about it until years later.

I’m up to 2700 words on the haunted object story and I’m loving the dialog, it’s most hilarious and effective (and yes I do say so myself, dialogue is one of my writing skillsets).

I now veer wildly off into Schadenfreude land. He was a cruel and evil and anti-science man, and now he’s fondling Satan’s dick in hell, and GOOD. For when the link disappears:

(Ed Mazza, Yahoo News, Monday September 13 2021)

Bob Enyart, a notoriously homophobic right-wing radio host who refused to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, has died of COVID-19.

The death was announced on Facebook.

“It comes with an extremely heavy heart that my close friend and co-host of Real Science Radio has lost his battle with COVID,” wrote Fred Williams, co-host of the ironically named show, which routinely pushed anti-science talking points, including creationism.

Enyart was 62, according to Newsweek.

My age. LOL Fred do tell me your vaxx status

after all, repulsigans, you have taught me that the cruelty is the message as “Cops” returns to Fox Media

later that morning – Mike called and told me about the Reddit Herman Cain award and it’s all for vile people who said covid was a hoax and then died of it so I was able to tell Mike I already had an award recipient on my blog this morning DOUBLE LOL

Veers wildly between weird, cool and impossible

This is bloody hilarious

Do you hear that, hsifyppah? A SHRUB PLAYS THE BANJO FROM THE SHADOWS.

I’m still in shock from the doctors appointment. I have DO SOMETHING and I do not wish to know these facts.

Did I mention that I’m going to sell the hang drum and that Keith has grown a full beard and he looks splendid?

More China

Election influencing?  Oh, I imagine so.

 

Released Wednesday (note, Nanos Poll from August), it found two out of three Canadians want the government to be more forceful in its dealing with China, with 88 per cent saying they support or somewhat support a foreign agent registry for anyone working on behalf of a foreign government or organizations to influence Canadian policies, which is something the United States and Australia already have.

fill the cup

For the beauty of the lands and waters and the strength of the people and creatures, I give thanks. To walk on this land is a great gift.

Got a plum cake over to Tom and Peggy, it was still warm in the pan, yesterday morning. Mebbe it wasn’t biscotti (me yelling over the phone at Tom I’M NOT A ONE HIT WONDER YOU KNOW while Peggy was no doubt rolling her eyes) but it sure is edibibble.

Walked in Fraser Foreshore Park and received the gift of a new bird; it was a yellow-breasted chat. I got a good long minute of him, yellow underneath like a waistcoat, over pale trews, and browny-green on top, and then my goodness he flew so I got his flight pattern and then there was his call, which was what got my attention in the first place.

I walk those woods, or I should say that little strip of biodiversity jammed and vulnerable between Sto:lo and Burnaby South’s industrial zone, often enough that I know what the background noise is like; nothing but crows and possibly eagles on a really hot day in August. A pleasant sunny day with a bit of wind in May and the woods ring with everything avian that has the capacity to sing, pretty much all blowing up their syrinxes at once. But this fellow was alone, and he said chak, like a bird four times his size and bellicose, and I thought who the hell is that? for he is not much of a conversationalist and I have not heard him before.

He kept making noise, that irritating chak! noise, until by great good fortune he turned out to be as yellow as a goddamned Minion and thus almost comically visible to an amateur such as I. (Less than five metres off the trail, less than five metres up a tree, and in bright frikkin sunshine. HULLO. He flopped from branch to branch and he didn’t care who saw him. And I could have stood there a while longer but chose not to, because I don’t persist in standing as well as I used to, and I had enough markers to be able to figure out what manner of critter I was looking at (I’d also clocked the eyestripe). This species is omnivorous. He’ll do well in that park if he eats millet, someone is feeding the ground birds.

I offered to take Paul to lunch and he deferred to Keith who was on another call. We were on the way back to my place and heard from Keith, so we went over for a late lunch there and I got to see the whole family including Alex, which was very pleasant. My plum cake was well received. Paul and I then spent an hour singing and playing (I of course, even with my recent illness, am well rehearsed, so I made it hard on myself by picking up an instrument I do not regularly play at this time, a standard sized mandolin. I felt like butterfingers and clumsy had come to live in my hands, it was quite comical.)

THAT BUILDING IS CONCRETE. I sang as loud as my body can when I’m sitting down and Katie didn’t hear a thing.  It was so good, so very good to see her. Alex had a new game which he was playing with his oldest friend on line, which is in my view cute as hell. How else are kids supposed to sustain friendships without some technology I esk you.

I ate the bean chili that Keith made, and drank beer, and came home.

Doc appt today

mOm have you seen this birding site?