A Road Trip to 65 MYA

There should be no way that I should be disliking any of my vacation time; yet I have been. Four days passed into my stretch of time off, and I was finding it all pointless. The weather forecasts since Canada Day have been a 100% chance of cloudy/rainy suck-ass, as well as tornado watches in effect at times. Although I’ve been eating well, one can eat only eat so much, accounting for only a small fraction of a day. Medications disallow me from drinking the necessary volumes of booze that would actually put me in my happy place. I can only drink so much coffee at the coffeehouses that I feel very little need to frequent: just sitting there, watching other people brood about things has no entertainment value. I was becoming angered with getting interference from what are still work related calls over last weekend. I dipped into what is my all-too-massive personal syllabus of reading material (science and non-fiction mostly); I overdid it and consequently suffered too much eye strain from having my nose in too many books.

I spent most of the following Monday feeling wounded, the source of that being from having a dental appointment that morning. I didn’t have the sense to book a time outside of my vacation days. As per usual, the dental hygienist performing the cleaning service managed to poke at each and every special acupressure combination of nerve endings along my gingiva, which made me feel like I was being repeatedly struck in the face with a pick axe throughout the ordeal. A migraine ensued after and stayed with me for rest of the afternoon. More time wasted; not a good vacation day. I suppose it wasn’t enough to already feel like a luckless loser for the day. I went to the casino later in the evening to have it confirmed. I lost most of the small stakes that I thought acceptable to part with, and that time passed quickly. I realized then that I had to do something else with myself than handling kitchen knives, reading/screen-watching, or waving bye-bye to my hard-earned money at the slots and roulette table. I saw that another staycation was going to shove me into a pit of misery. Lunch with my friend on Tuesday gave me a little time to decompress as I examined my situation. I was made to see afterward that I have always been shirking travel off in the guise of being responsible. Another reason is that there isn’t much fun doing it alone anymore; or I’ve been hating my own company enough to the point where I am starting to bore myself: a symptom of something very wrong, I think. Whatever the case, I found myself really having to leave this town, badly.

I packed a few essentials; Ella happily joined me in the car. As I didn’t have any real plan, I chose to visit my folks first. If I got nothing else done, I would have at least spent some time with them. Wherever else I decided to go to, the Battlefords is not too far out of the way as a jump off point: a better one if going north was feasible, and an acceptable loss in highway time if I had to retrace any route back through and past home. I used Wednesday afternoon, watching the news and weather channels, formulating things. The process for narrowing down my destination decision was as such:

1.       The Weather Corridor – Forecasts for rain were for the north and east, and I was getting chased by funnel cloud warnings from the southeast. That left me with west or southwest if I wanted to find someplace without inclemency.

2.       Geographical Variation – the idea of a vacation is going to someplace that doesn’t look like home. Some people are content enough with walking into another room for a change of scenery. Other people, like me, need the entire landscape to change to feel like they’ve gotten away and escaped to someplace. That’s a tough deal when one has been an inhabitant in an area smack dab in the middle of the Canadian parkland/prairie . . . a region that’s so expansive. There is the Boreal forest, but as I said, weather wasn’t making going north an ideal choice, neither was my lack of camping gear. The next closest options for going southwest were: Cyprus Hills (with an elevation as high as that in Banff), or the Badlands. Next factor . . .

3.       My Six Hour Driving Radius – six hours in a crammed in a vehicle in a day seems to be my absolute limit. After that, I start having some adverse psychological effect from it, especially when I’m the one driving. If I have bad company with me as a follow passenger, then it’s triply worse. They risk being punched out and then abandoned in some ditch in the middle of nowhere if they exhibit too many marked signs of stupidity or impudent assholery for each and every minute approaching hour six, crammed in a vehicle with me. Life is short. I travel to see new places and experience new things; so sitting in a metal box (with toxic people), like a goddamned trapped rat, longer than necessary, is wasted time. The trip between Saskatoon and Calgary is an example of the longest one I can endure by car. If longer than that, then I fly; using only three hours or so to take me to places in this country much further away with less overall cost, hassle, and energy needed to attend to driving. I’ll happily spend more money to buy more time to stay off a road. The whole issue of me now being more prone to idiopathic thrombosis and blood-clotting makes the matter of prolonged periods sitting/immobility a more genuinely serious reason to avoid extra long of car rides. Cyprus and the Badlands fall within that six-hour radius from the Battlefords.

4.       An Act of Rebellion Against Ignorance – as I sat with my Dad, switching to the channel with Wheel of Fortune for him to watch (and Jeopardy for me after), I caught the last few minutes of the CBS nightly news which showed a story that disgusted me as a person who appreciates progress and education in science. I watched this story about some guy in Kentucky, who built a supposedly full scale replica of Noah’s Ark for an amusement site. It cost millions to get this thing made. The guy who founded this project is a self-proclaimed Creationist, who truly believes that the Earth is only 6000 years old or so, and that humans and dinosaurs co-existed together. He actually has models of dinosaurs penned up along with other contemporary species in this excessively ridiculous display. He, as an employer, actively discriminates by making the workers there sign some sort of “statement of faith” to prove that they are “Christian” enough to work there. He goes so far as to say that evolution is a “junk science”, and this crazy tacky spectacle is the length he is willing to go to refute and take a stand against it. You may just say “pshaw . . . whatever, it’s just a goofy spectacle”. I would agree too if it weren’t for another crazy issue about this damn stupid boat. The most disturbing issue of it for me was that some of the millions that he used to build this wretched monstrosity actually came directly from the state government of Kentucky itself, i.e. the Kentucky taxpayers were pitching in a fortune to have this idiotic thing built. It’s bad enough seeing that Kentucky is regarded as being one of those have-not states in the USA and suffering for it, with fewer resources for better healthcare, and an adequate education system*. To see this kind of insane amount of money (in the high tens of millions) being squandered away by their state government to sponsor the creation of something that takes away from science education and promotes more ignorance to suit the whim of a lobby of biblical-literalist right wing nut jobs** goes far beyond obscene in my mind. How did this guy manage to con some government official to permit him access to this kind of money for such a moronic endeavour? I admit to having some moments of a fantasy after I saw that story - it was that of Neil Degrasse Tyson himself, going over there to pop a cap in the ass of this ignorant bastard perpetuating this nonsense. Thinking about Richard Dawkins storming over to this ark thing, and then beating seven shades of shit out of this fundamentalist huckster with one of the limbs torn off of the animatronic Noah mannequin was an entertaining visualization too. It helped, in a way, to settle the question as to where I was going to go then for my holiday for my narrowed down options. I chose to take a stand! I’d then make a pilgrimage to the Badlands to use my tourist dollars to support science. So, Drumheller ended up becoming my chosen destination.

I heeded my Mom’s advice. She told that I really needed to take some time for myself. It meant surrendering the dog to her care as I went on this trip: so I had one less thing to tend to, and fewer problems, like finding lodgings that take pets. My car stereo quit working, meaning that I had no tunes, or CBC radio to occupy my mind as I drove for so long. I was a sort of on a true pilgrimage: just me, without my dog, driving for a long time, no distractions, being alone with my own thoughts. Stray thoughts slipped into my mind about those of whom I’d love to have riding shotgun with me on such a venture. I thought about where I would go to in the US if I ever took a spontaneous turn to head to the border (that is, if I hadn’t procrastinated and gotten a valid passport). Given the current political mayhem going on down there, the current currency exchange rate, the obscene amount of (recent) gun violence, and the reflection about the types of mindsets I’d be dealing with, like those who would allow and support something like the bizarro Noah’s ark down in Kentucky, any curiosity about finding anything interesting to do in the states extinguished pretty quickly. Those same reasons I just gave for not heading over the border maybe are the same ones as to why I saw so many vehicles with American license plates around where I was touring.

I went to Drumheller a couple times before in my life: once as a kid who was awestruck with dinosaurs, and again as a twenty-something with university classes in zoology still fresh in my head to make me appreciate the experience even more. Now, with a little more life wisdom and knowledge at this stage of life, and some more conscientiousness of how to put big concepts in a whole new perspective, I thought it would do me well to see the place again before I become a fossil myself. Given the things I said before, what else can a nerd who is travelling alone with limited time really do?

I eventually made it there, and after touring the Royal Tyrrell Museum, and scrambling around the Hoo Doos for a while, I went to the first hotel I could find – more accurately, I went to the first hotel I spotted that didn’t look like it was slapped together with pieces of flotsam from a shipwreck. I passed by three other places that fit such a description. This place was a short walking distance from a place that sold cold off-sale beer - a nice bonus. I managed to claim the last of the vacant rooms there. I was given a whole room with two double queen beds. I guess, to the clerk, I looked like the sort that rolls around a lot. I discover that the day after was an event called the Passion Play of the Badlands, happening the next day: apparently, it is an affair that attracts more fundamentalist types from all over the continent, and such goers to this sort of thing snapped up most of the rooms. Aw Shit! Religious nuts to contend with?! I couldn’t help but to be bewildered by the irony of it all: a place with the richest bed of fossil evidence of dinosaurs in Canada, confirming their existence and extinction 65 million years ago, scientifically proving the workings of evolution; being swarmed by a clique of religious people, many of whom still believing in this myth of creationism, like that knob in Kentucky. They probably show this religious theatrical production here, just because out of all the places in Canada, this one perhaps has what looks most like the natural scenery of Golgotha of ancient Judea.

I couldn’t stay to be bothered by all this to witness how cheesy and tacky it would all be. I thought about proceeding to Calgary, but then realized that the Stampede starts the day after. I wouldn’t have had a hope in hell of finding a hotel room. Just as well, because my time wasn’t going to be used mingling around in a place celebrating country music and cowboy/rodeo culture***. I spent what little time I had left wandering the hills in the early morning, contemplating and meditating: about the massive explosions of both life and death that occurred here, captured in the layers of sandstone throughout this valley that act as chapters of a book capturing the history of all life on Earth in this region for many aeons. I thought about how I wouldn’t even have been here to witness all this if it weren’t for an asteroid wiping out these monstrous creatures 65 million years ago. If that rock was even a small percentage larger, the likelihood of any life existing on this planet today would be zero. The intricacies of cause and effect being quite overwhelming, as I sat on those rocks, thinking about courses of natural selection and what comes about for each beings’ evolution. All this was pondered, plus a great myriad of other things involving the natural catastrophes involving extinction . . . that are a hell of a lot more interesting and rational than some story of a flood and an old dude on a big boat full of animals.

I returned back to the Battlefords after another long drive. I was happily greeted by my own little dinosaur who was missing me: attacked with eager kisses from the Ellabooboosaurus. I stayed long enough for a reprieve from driving, and helped to do some DIY electrical work installing new fixtures in my folks’ home. I returned to my own place later that evening, happy to use my own bed.

More holiday time is due to me in August, and I’m debating whether or not it will be worth booking a flight somewhere east (if there are any cheap enough); it would be a thing I genuinely would like company for though. The places I have in mind are walking and bike tour intensive.

*- I found an infographic recently on Mental Floss, which compared the education level of each state in the USA which similarly corresponded to the level of education with a world nation on the United Nations Development Index. Kentucky's education level was most similar to that of Honduras.

**- I’m not bashing all religious acts. Pray if you like to: if that, or meditation, really gives you a centred mindset for empowering yourself to do better for yourself and others, I’ll even encourage you to do such things. It all costs nothing to do, and it’s harmless while you are sitting there still and silent doing it. However, when huge sums of government money are being used for propagating mythology as fact, instead of fostering true science education, and being diverted away from more socially valuable “Christian” ways of helping people, like for instance, supporting and equipping care homes for the elderly, sick, and disabled, it obviously becomes an evident problem for everyone. I guess there is no such thing as separation of Church and state down in Kentucky.

***- Some people want to relive the bloody Wild West. I believe in living in a progressive, civilized, and educated one, if you haven’t figured that out already.

Canada Day 2016: Whiskey vs. Schnapps

My stretch of holiday time officially began at 4:05 PM yesterday. It was the kind of day yesterday when all I could do after coming back home, and briefly allowing my dog outside around the block, was to flop on my chesterfield and forbid myself any movement. The hour long nap I was hoping to get at the very least only lasted for about eight minutes after interference by the rudest and most obnoxious of nuisance alarm noise that came from someone’s car, and wouldn’t stop. As it is, I’m already convinced that it was Satan himself who invented the car alarm to begin with; and this one was malfunctioning. It kept switching itself on and off steadily for 20 minutes before I abandoned all hope that the neglectful idiot who owned this particular vehicle would show up to disable it, so I took off out of my place frustrated; trying to use my time a little more fruitfully without anymore annoyances and contention* for the rest of my day.

But today is Canada Day, and a time to reflect on the nation in comparison to the rest of the world. The morning greets me with a bit of a chilly breeze, and a sky full of dark clouds and possibility for rain later. A disagreeable state for this special day for sure. I started off making breakfast the most Canadian way I could: pancakes and bacon; only for the reason to have it serve as a platform to use maple syrup. I don’t really fancy pancakes all that much, but it’s only thing I could make with what I had around here right now. If I could have my patriotic breakfast of choice for the day, if such things were available, given my true appetite (for something less greasy), I would have been more content with some local homemade Saskatoon Jam on some Winnipeg rye toast, maybe poached eggs for protein, and some double-double coffee, perhaps about four cups of it if I want my brain to fly straight right now.

My mind drifts again to subjects of contention. In regards to our nationhood, I reflect on something that really took me totally by surprise. As a Canadian, I’m rather ashamed to admit that I’ve been ignorant about such a matter; it being unbeknownst to me until like just a week or so ago. Recently, I had read a post on Facebook from one of my Danish immigrant friends about how Canada and Denmark are currently, and have been for some while, involved in some sort of conflict. “What?! How so?”, I wondered. How, for shit’s sake, did all this come about? It sounds too crazy to even contemplate! Both Denmark and Canada rank highly as being two of the happiest nations on earth, I believe ranking first and second respectively according to one list. Both are reasonably progressive, I’m sure, in some other human development/social well-being indices. I always thought that there was a good political rapport between us as far as relations between nations go. How could one nation that does delightfully ingenious things like taking its power grid off of fossil fuels, making wonderful beer and cheese, and manufacturing Lego, the best toy ever, get into a snit with this other nation that initiated the idea of a peace-keeping force in the UN, sired Rush, the best power-trio progressive rock band ever, and perhaps even had a hand in helping to liberate the other nation in WWII?

Well . . . it turns out that Denmark and Canada are both trying to lay claim to some frozen rock up in the Arctic Ocean: a place called Hans Island, lying somewhere between Ellesmere Island and Greenland. This silly little island is probably no bigger in area than the schoolyard in my neighbourhood, except it has a lot less on it. It serves no apparent practical use whatsoever, unless for Canada, it may be a great observation point for tracking migrating narwhals and walruses, or else perhaps the Danes secretly found some sort of radioactive isotope on there that would permit them unlimited energy for manufacturing Lego blocks. Whatever the case, possession of this barren little speck on a map is somehow a big enough deal for both nations’ respective royal navies to send patrols up there to secure this place since 1973. The way this dispute is occurring between forces is weirder still. Canada’s navy plants our red and white flag there and leaves behind a bottle of whiskey to stake this place as our territory. Then the Royal Danish Navy comes along, takes down our flag and then props up their red and white banner, taking away the whiskey and leaving behind a bottle of Danish schnapps as a claim to the island, which the Canadian sailors clear away later, and the process is repeated. This place must be really remote and insignificant for Arctic dwellers, even for the Inuit, to bother visiting, because if they knew that there were bottles of booze just lying around on this island, and if it was more accessible, they would be invading the place for sure**. Both nations seem to be opting for the same strategy: of either somehow making the other opponent sailors too pleasantly pissed to want to fight, or just dulled into indifference to care about a stupid chunk of Arctic rock out in the middle of nowhere. As far as conflicts go involving military engagement between nations, it is a strange little affair, and I am l relieved to say that it is as such. It probably makes for the friendliest sort of “battle” for a patch of land that’s currently happening on this Earth right now. It makes one think that if this battle were to escalate or intensify, the resulting dead flesh amidst this conflict of nations would probably (hopefully) just amount to an exchange of Canadian bacon and Danish ham along with the spirits.

There sometimes is a perplexing vagueness involved in trying to find out what it is that gives us as Canadians our own unique national identity. As a natural born citizen here, I still struggle to find all-encompassing adjectives to describe what and who we precisely are. However, the paragraph above is fine example of how things are approached when it comes to conflict here compared to other nations: stand your ground when you must; try to settle things kindly when you are allowed to do so. I’m happy that my greatest nuisances are akin to the noises of car alarms blaring off accidently, or the fireworks bursting off later this evening that will terrify my dog, rather than the sounds of bombs going off around me. In viewing the news as of late, I’m glad that we are a lot luckier in this respect than a lot of other nations.

Tonight, as I view the fireworks from my balcony, hopefully without any rain, I’ll raise one of my glasses of whiskey to any Danes out there and wish a peaceful resolution between us, one way or another, and hope there’s some Dane out there raising their shot of schnapps on his or her national holiday wishing the same. Right now, no one is really hurting from this little conflict, and I hope it stays that way.

*- For the benefit of my friends who use English as their second language, a note about how stupid this language sometimes is. If you are content, it means you are pleased and satisfied; yet if you have contention, it is the complete opposite of that, meaning that one is involved in a dispute, or becoming upset by a disagreement.

**- Let's not kid ourselves: regardless of ethnicity of the people living up there, the higher rates of alcoholism and substance abuse, and fewer available resources for intervention, continue to be the worst of the social ills in the remote and isolated Northern and Arctic communities.

The Power of a Prisoner with a Nail

I should be trying to sleep for longer, but finding a moment to sit outside on a wonderfully calm and peaceful Sunday morning in early summer is the next best thing. It sets a fine stage for a lot of mental clarity, so I thought I would write. It has been a long lapse since I wrote anything on this blog. I’ve had nothing that I would have cared to come forth with and share for a long while. I’ve been working a couple of months now in a position in which the daytime hours are much more agreeable to my physical and mental constitution. Before that, I was suffering all sorts of things between last entry and now that I would rather not post. Thankfully, most of those conditions from back then have since improved.

I accomplished a goal a couple days ago. I managed to commit to learning nine language modules each day: one for each different language I’m learning, for a hundred days straight. It is a sub-goal to apply to the greater mission; that is to get to tour Europe someday* (without the insanity of being confined in a bloody tour group). As for now, I’ve only been able to apply them to the odd text now and then, and answering questions in trivia games now and then. Retaining absolutely everything that I’ve learned is doubtful. The real prize is knowing that I’ve been able to get this far into it. I’ve been able to translate some foreign phrases from Facebook posts more instantly in my head with less effort; even in Russian, the hardest (I find) of the set of languages I’ve been trying to learn. I caught myself even dreaming in Spanish one night. Hopefully that’s a sign that some things are being integrated mentally and thus sinking in; but more likely, it is probably because it is the only other language, besides French and German, with which I have had the most practical experience in using.

The new position is a bit more rigorous, but I have no complaints about it. The extra rigour prompts me to think of how to do things more efficiently to save my energy. Thoughts of exercising efficiency along with improving skills with hacking languages has prompted interest in me to start thinking about ways of hacking other things that are more practical and applicable. Learning, applying and entertaining myself with tricks and shortcuts for mental arithmetic is becoming a renewed fascination for me. It comes at an emotional price though. When I review them I get extremely pissed off when I find brilliant hacks and mnemonic techniques, some of which are actually centuries old, that were never shown to me during my elementary/high school/university years which could have made life so much easier. I hate the so-call modern education curricula because so many things that are truly practical and brilliant to learn are rarely included in them. These tricks and hacks become repressed because it conflicts with what is institutional. It’s a sign of a system that really doesn’t want you empowered; just controlled and conforming. After entering “mental math hacks” in a search engine, I found links to the Trachtenberg system. I tried out a few tricks with it, and I must say that I’m impressed (and I don’t impress easy). As interesting and unique as the techniques for calculation are with this system, the background story of its creator is far more intriguing. I’m pleased to say that I have found a new hero who merits his story being shared. It’s like a story akin to something that Ian Flemming could have wrote. It’s a story of a heroic champion nerd who challenged and came out on top of defying the worst of the “schoolyard bullies”. The next couple of paragraphs is my precis of it**.

Jakow Trachtenberg was an engineer by vocation, an aspiring and brilliant one, who began of his career soon after the beginning of the twentieth century in a shipyard in the Ukrainian port city of Odessa, which was then ruled by the Romanov dynasty of Tsarist Russia. During his rule, Tsar Nicolas II was very intent on having a modern navy, and Trachtenberg was put in charge as Chief Engineer of this project, managing up to 11,000 workers to build those ships and their armaments. Despite this particular assignment, he was a dedicated pacifist, going so far as to found a society of Good Samaritans when World War I broke out: preparing others for the care and treatment of the wounded. All of that changed though. The course of his life was interrupted by the Russian Revolution in 1917. When the Communists took control of Russia, and all the lands within its empire, Trachtenberg soon found himself out of work because their mandate didn’t include building ships (or perhaps it was just because since it was the former Tsar’s plan, they had to be contrarian to it). Being appalled by the violence of the revolution, and the brutal and widespread killing of the citizenry, Trachtenberg became quite an outspoken critic against the Communist regime. As this choice act clashed with Communist ideology, it pissed off the respective authorities enough to make him a target dissident whom they were going to detain and most certainly do harm to. They had already killed some of his family members. So, under disguise, he fled to Berlin to make a new life. There, he managed to have enough charm to woo and then marry a woman of aristocratic status; he applied his intelligence into developing an inventive system for teaching foreign languages, and also started to publish a pacifist magazine. If he rolled any dice for deciding to move to Germany, he wouldn’t have guessed that he was going to crap out given the way its history was about to unfold. It undoubtedly seemed like a good idea at the time, since Germany had just ended a horrible war that cost them millions of lives, and the folks there might be interested in learning a thing or two about how to live in peace. However, the National Socialist Party that was coming into power under Hitler had a bit of a different take on such things.

Trachtenberg, once again, found himself falling ass-backwards into bad luck by preaching peace and non-violence under the watchful eye of the wrong sort of political opposition. Being some kind of guy who was doing all this crazy-talk about peace, which conflicted with the crazy-talk of a dictator who was planning for world domination – well, it kind of brought him under a lens of suspicion at that time. Strike one for Jakow! Doing that as an Auslander (foreigner) no less in the beloved Fatherland no doubt didn’t sit well with the new Nazi party either. It was probably perceived as a lot more intensely negative being that such a foreigner was originally from one of the lands east of Germany, which were supposedly full of those inferior Untermenschen, like Ukraine was regarded to be in the propaganda. Strike two for Jakow! And just to be really screwed with bad luck, the fact that Trachtenberg was ethnically Jewish had thrown another few shovels full onto the shit pile of trouble that he was already buried neck deep in with the Nazis. A smart fellow like Trachtenberg saw that he needed to make some tracks . . . right the hell out of Germany. So, he fled to Austria and worked with a science magazine there for a while; but then the Nazis started the Anschluss, annexing Austria into the Third Reich, so that had him on the run again. The Gestapo and the SS had sought him out everywhere, as his reputation put him high up on Hitler’s shit list of people to be arrested and detained. Although he did his best to evade them, he was soon captured in Yugoslavia, and then was shipped off to a Konzentrationslager.

During that time of his imprisonment, to keep his sanity and wits about him, while witnessing and enduring the despair, and the horrific ruthlessness and brutality of the concentration camp, Trachtenberg mentally retreated into the abstract world of mathematics and numbers. They couldn’t take that away from him. Possession of paper or writing implements was risking severe punishment or worse by the guards, as well as having any other arbitrary thing that could be assumed to be used for forbidden communications. Since he didn’t have any access to even simple materials to help him make complex calculations, he devised his own system of algorithms that he could use to make mental shortcuts to compute large numbers mentally. The only other calculation instrument he had (besides his brain) was a nail he found somewhere in the camp, which he used to scratch in the dirt, or on wood, to do ciphers and devise his theoretical algorithms. He regarded that nail as his best friend and his salvation while he was in that camp. When he did find paper to write on, it was bits of wrapping paper and old envelopes, and because it was so scarce, he used it only to secretly record his finished theories of his method.

His real salvation to escaping that camp was the action of his aristocrat wife, who managed to bribe a guard to get him out. It happened just before he was given a death sentence. Long story short, he managed to escape with his wife to a refugee camp in Switzerland. He and his wife remained there after the war, and established a mathematical institute in Zurich, based on the theories and mental shortcuts he devised when he was in the concentration camp. He began teaching it to children who were once failing miserably in classes based on the traditional math teaching methods, who then began to excel at solving math problems using his system. He instructed children who were deemed “mentally retarded” who, after being taught his system, were doing arithmetic that challenged most average adults. His institute was highly regarded as the best the place to be if one wanted to pursue an advanced career in architecture, engineering, and anything else math related in Europe since its founding in the 1950s, at least until the tech and computer revolution.

It’s a shame that this triumphant bit of history isn’t more well known. I guess that’s why I chose to share it here. My youngest nephew will be graduating soon, and going into post-secondary education program in the fall that will be more intensive for learning maths and physics. I hope he has the sense to do his own bit of hack-seeking, to find out what works best for him mnemonically, and in practice. He should be at least thankful that he has more than a nail at his disposal.

*- Knowing so many languages might be a bit impractical, I am not OK about touring any place where I’m plunged into an environment where in essence I’m rendered functionally illiterate; no matter how well I’m accommodated with services in my native language. Misunderstandings will inevitably occur: one should know some manners and polite greetings, and basics at the very least to help smooth things over when that happens. Numbers are an absolute must to learn, since math and counting money is universal.

**- Given that it’s close to the anniversary of D-Day, sharing something that is somewhat of another victory during World War II seems right as well.

La Loche

I tried to have a good as a weekend as I could, given the horrible events in this province that happened recently. It’s not an incident I want to make a special effort to remember; yet it is one that simply can’t be ignored . . .

This province is a place that’s normally so obscure to most of the rest this globe: except to those who were part of the diaspora of leaving here for grander opportunities, or who still have family settled and rooted here. Lately, there has been a terrible light that has been shone upon us. For those of us who live in this province, which few people on this globe can pronounce, or would care to otherwise bother to find on a map, it’s a spotlight shining most unfavourably, on a remote place with little of anything redeeming to offset its reputation of being a rough spot to live in this province. We are (were) an ordinarily peaceful region in comparison to the rest of the world. Now however, we are no longer exempt from the list of places where violent shooting rampages can possibly occur. Now, a signal of further collapse towards the dark side of humanity in the northern communities and the first nations’ reserve lands is beckoning. This recent result: four dead, several others seriously injured. It’s a harsh glimpse into a community where society is already close-knit yet fragile, where families are already shattered with higher than average rates of poverty, unemployment, addictions, and suicides. Its isolation and lack of basic amenities and services don’t help either, nor does the clash of cultures, or having a provincial government who is largely dismissive of having mental healthcare, or even healthcare in general, accessible to its citizens; doing what it is doing to dissolve more of what little there is available already. It occurred at a time of year when the trough of wintertime depression is the deepest for most. There simply was less chance and resources for adequate intervention and prevention for things like what happened in La Loche recently. Most people are shocked, saddened, and angered about what happened there. As for me, after considering all the factors at play, it was no longer a question of if things like this could happen there, but a question of when and how severely the outcome would be.

Whether this all stemmed from long term recurring generational community strife and social problems, or simply is a punctuation of this script as a volatile short term mental derangement of one individual is debatable. There are not enough things yet released in the news suggesting how this storm of rampant untamed violence ultimately erupted. All we know for now is that it was a male young offender who did this, meaning under the Young Offenders Act of Canadian law, his name won’t be released to the public. The exact factors, precursors, and triggers of the events in this town will remain in question, as will the more detailed psychiatric profile of the perpetrator. There was some suggestion of bullying going on. As much as I can empathize with that young man given his age for struggling to deal with such an issue, I certainly don’t condone his chosen course of action to deal with it.

Mass shootings were once thought be limited mostly to the domain of that crazy nation downstairs*, with their psychotic fascination and promotion of gun culture, the ridiculous interpretations of their constitution’s second amendment, and the more relaxed regulations for firearm ownership and types of weapons one can own. Now, this insidious trend is appearing in other normally peaceful and civilized nations and societies, albeit (thankfully) in a less frequent degree. Norway, Sweden, Finland have suffered such tragedies in the past decade. Paris France, of course, is still a salient memory. Australia had the Port Arthur incident in the 90’s. Quebec (like École Polytechnique) and Alberta (Taber) are the other provinces in this nation to have had gunmen charging into schools and opening fire.

I can only imagine the sorrow and mood in such a community that has been unwillingly thrust by these circumstances into the view and focus of the whole nation, and to the rest of the world with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s announcement of the tragedy in such an international forum like Davos, Switzerland. It’s moment of infamy that won’t ever be erased from the hearts and memories of those who were families and neighbours to the slain and wounded victims. Two teachers were lost, in a place with already precious few positive engaging role models who could have benefited that community. I hope the survivors get the support they need somehow; no simple bandage of financial support is going to make this nightmare go away for them, or reform an already shattered community.

*- To date, the first 25 days of this year of 2016, at this moment, the United States alone has had 786 recorded deaths by guns. That already amounts to more than half of all the gun deaths that occur in Canada for an entire year (an average of roughly 1300 for the past 25 years, according to Statistics Canada). Statistically, you are more likely to be shot to death in the United States than you are to die in a car accident in Canada.

Sub Minus Forty*

The sweeter days of the El Niño part of this winter seemed to have slipped away, and allowed for something more aggressive to move in and establish itself here in their stead. The wind chill was -44 this morning. I don’t really wish to belabour the point that today is not just cold, but frigidly cold. We expect these cold snaps to arrive here every January, we plan for this coming, we try our best to adapt to it around here, but we never really cease the bitching and complaining we do about it; questioning why we live here, and wishing we were somewhere else. My chosen course of dealing with it, for at least today, is to try to focus on being productively active with cleaning, fixing gizmos, and other house work, plus doing some weights and cardio exercise to raise my metabolism a bit.

With some sheepish embarrassment, I confess that I’m probably entering a state of denial about having to cope with this weather. For example, this morning after I brought in some firewood from the outside cradle on my balcony, I realized that I made the extra effort to shut the bug screen behind me as I was closing my deck windows after re-entering. Why? Like the place was going to be invaded by an onslaught of fucking mosquitoes right now? It could have been just a force of habit, maybe it stemmed from an unconscious wish that it would be so warm such that there would have been a need to do that. Whatever the case, it seemed like one of those odd stupid moments that just make me shake my head at myself.

I don’t write this for my Canadian audience, nor for those who know full well the rigours involved with enduring the season here at this time of the year. This is for the benefit of the readers of the rest of this planet’s population who don’t know, and are perhaps blissfully ignorant of what living in a what I would call a hard core winter zone is like. ** It sobers my senses when I do the calculations in my head when considering the geographical distribution of the world’s human population. The reality is that actually only about less than 3% of the planet’s people live in such zones, even with a very generous guess as to how many people live inside places like Siberia, Iceland/Greenland, Arctic Eurasia/North America, the Northern half of the Scandinavian peninsula, and Antarctica***. That makes 97% of you from everywhere else not very well acquainted with coping with these extremes in cold temperatures. Even here in Canada, because of the higher number of urban population centres situated near the southern border, less than 30% of this nation’s population qualify as living in my idea of a hard core winter zone. Sure, every Canadian knows what winter is, but when it comes to temperatures, more than 60% of our population can live and die without having ever experienced its greatest extremes. Now that I`ve crunched the numbers, it’s strange and shocking for me to realize now that there are that many people on Earth who have never actually experienced living through a day with a temperature below -20 Celsius. It is no wonder then that the rest of these people, the by far greater majority of this planet, think that we are crazy to be living in places like here. We definitely are the oddballs to them. It was hilarious to see the expressions of shock and bewilderment after going to a tropical country, and explaining to these people the truth about the reality of living through winter in Saskatchewan, when the coldest they`ve ever experienced in their lives is only something like plus 20 degrees Celsius. It was also intimidating to be looked at as some kind of freaky lunatic afterward once this reality about my life back at home was revealed to them.

Sure, there is lots to dislike on days like these: vehicle engines being stressed and uncooperative, cellphone batteries blanking out, eyeglasses frosting up, dry skin, frozen extremities, the wind feeling like it's trying to peel the skin off your exposed face with icy daggers are just a few things I can think of instantly off the top of my head. However, there are things I can appreciate about days like these too, especially when I don’t have go to work (like today).

So with the questions of why do I accept living here during winter, and how I can even appreciate days like these in mind, here are some of my easy answers for that:

• It rarely snows more when it gets this cold (and at least it's a dry cold).
• Between dealing with light and powdery snowfall we get here versus clearing the wet heavy snow or having the ice storms they get by the Great Lakes and in the Atlantic provinces, I'll take our stuff any day.
• There is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing.
• It makes you appreciate having a home to stay warm in more.
• The pleasure factor of stuff like soup, coffee, tea, hot chocolate, and blood-warming hard liquor increases tenfold after you’ve been accosted a bit by a frosty chill.
• It becomes easier to justify eating and enjoying delicious fatty food.
• It becomes perfectly alright to accept surrendering to a nap under a warm quilt, or losing yourself in a good story on page or screen.
• Solitude in general seems more acceptable. As the elements aren't making it easy for people to gather anyway, through reason, you feel like less of a weirdo for being alone.
• If you are fortunate enough to have intimate company, cuddling becomes more acceptable, maybe even necessary (it can feel gross on a hot summer/tropical day, no matter how much you love your partner).
• A good excuse to light a fire in the fireplace: it stirs some kind of primal comfort in us.

That’s all I have for now. Unlike for a lot of other people, even this weather doesn’t have me yearning for tropical climates. I suppose I’m weird that way. To be strong-willed and resourceful enough to find ways to be happy where you are, no matter what the weather is like outside, and to find people around who are cheerful despite inclemency is enough. Tropical holidays spent being corralled with tour groups, or confined to resorts, surrounded by idiotic people who are complaining about things “being not like they have it at home”, is my idea of hell. I’ll take the peace of an afternoon nap, or an evening by a fire, on a cold day instead.

*- For easy reference: -40 is the equal in coldness for both Celsius and Fahrenheit.

** - By “hard core” winter zone, I mean in a region which has 20 or more days of a year where winter temperatures can hover around -20 degrees Celsius, or lower. This part of Saskatchewan definitely meets that criteria.

***- The degree of error in my estimate isn’t just dependent on cold weather latitudes, but also on varying pockets of Alpine regions of higher elevations.

Loving The Alien (Remembering David Bowie)

I'm not the sort to ordinarily gush or dwell on the deaths of celebrities, but this time is different.The news of the death of David Bowie shocked me, and I have to admit that I feel a deep sense of loss, more so than I would have for any other artist's passing. I realize now that I'm more of a David Bowie fan than I thought I was. I suppose my own music collection is telling of that. My iTunes Genius app includes at least one or two of his songs for every random playlist of 50 songs generated out of the pool of my 6000 or so songs in my collection.

I don't know exactly why he appealed to me so much as an artist. I think that he was favoured by those who themselves didn't readily belong to, or weren't grounded in any one conventional or specific place, time, vocation, or social group; harmless people, who are kind and loving sorts, yet regarded as oddballs and misfits by the rest of the world. That is, those who are left to feel like they were aliens walking on their own Earth and wandering and exploring it alone. It is a feeling I have struggled with for most of my life, and Bowie for the most part found the right imagery, words, and musical notes to explain it accordingly and exactly.

He did much to pave the way to bring social conventions that were seen as too taboo and abhorrent and softened them to more of a view and place of normalcy and acceptance, even though he used shock and awe to get our attention first, and thus made it a richer world for all of us. He was a hero to people who don't follow or conform to a set accepted script of gender or sexuality. He made it safe people for people to live within their own skin if they had eccentricities, instead of suffering for and from them. He was an inspiration to so many artists of other genres, from punk to hip hop, from metal to even country.

He was a master of sound and vision. He was a true artist right until the bitter end. Even though cancer was winnowing away the rest of his life energy from him, his creative spirit stayed strong until his very last breath.

Thank you David for all of your genius and greatness that you shared with us. I wish we could have had you cloned. I will miss you. Indeed, the stars look very different today.

My Favourite David Bowie Songs (in no ranked order)

• The Man Who Sold the World
• Ziggy Stardust
• The Jean Genie
• Ashes to Ashes*
• Modern Love
• Let's Dance
• China Girl*
• Space Oddity*
• Sound and Vision
• Slow Burn
• Changes
• Heroes
• Absolute Beginners
• Loving the Alien
• Rebel Rebel*
• Golden Years*
• Fame
• Queen Bitch
• Without You
• Station to Station
• This Is Not America
• I'm Afraid of Americans
• Lazarus

*- If the list was ranked, these songs would be in the top five.

5Q5A: Lit Trek

It is cool to see that even professional bloggers and authors are using the five-point format now for current and topical stuff: like for instance, Tim Ferriss with his 5 Bullet Friday posts. After last night, and the past week, I need to make things simple.  Here it goes with my version . . .

Q1. You were in McNally Robinson last night. What was there that piqued some interest?

A1. It wasn’t so much about any one book, or even one genre. It was formats of some books that caught my attention and fascinated me (I swear, sometimes I have moments where I have bloody Asperger syndrome). More specifically, I was roaming around the foreign book section, and catching sight of books that were in dual language format, One language on one page, and the translated English text on the side on the opposing page. I thought that this would accelerate my learning and retention of the bits of grammar and vocabulary of my other learned languages. There was Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis there in the original German and in English in the same book, another collection of Russian short stories formatted the same way. I’m not so keen as to learn more Russian, but if I had to that would help (I’d still be kind of hopeless speaking it though). I also wanted to collect the French translation of 1984. I can recite lines and passages from that work from memory, and having that copy would probably be helpful in improving my comprehension of at least written French. I also looked around for the title in Spanish, El Señor de las Moscas, for a likewise translation of The Lord of the Flies, but I couldn’t find one.

Q2. Did you end up buying anything?

A2. No, I resorted to my dirty little Jason Bourne-esque espionage sort of trick of mnemonically processing the ISBN numbers of other books, and walking out of there to plug into library searches later for free. If that doesn’t work, I’ll tour around and hopefully find the same things in the used book stores at a better discount.

Q3. Last favourite read?

A3. It was The Bat, by Jo Nesbø, a Norwegian author. The first book in a series about the exploits of a Norwegian police detective, Harry Hole (and yes, I know some of you are snickering right now). I’ve been impressed by both the quantity and quality of the crime and detective friction that has been coming out of Scandinavia lately. That’s both interesting and puzzling, because it’s inspired and created in such an idyllic place to live in this world.

Q4. Next Canadian fiction read?

A4. After thinking about it, I should maybe hope to get my hands on The Mountains of Portugal, by Yann Martel. I would collect that one . . . and by honest means.

Q5. What are your greatest negative/positive issues or experiences at a bookstore?

A5. Firstly, I have no mental filter for handling all the interesting titles and subjects. Not many subjects are boring or off-limits. It gets to be too much for my brain after even a short while, because it is like it is trying to download and absorb everything I see on the shelves. That gives me option paralysis too easily. The titles and subjects too often get burned into my neurons, only to be stored as useless information. That might be OK for a trivia contest, but it doesn’t serve me well when I’m trying to focus on a finding a practical reference or interest. I often get headaches when I walk out of such stores like that. The positive I guess is perhaps being around follow customers with perhaps similar interests, or at least interests . . . period. At least I know most of them won’t be boorish hellraisers. However, it’s typically a 95% population of introverts in a book shop, and thus those there usually have neither the courage nor the social intelligence in knowing how to get to some point of trying to even greet each other as strangers.