So, did everyone see Mars? We were out to Charleston Lake Provincial Park last evening visiting Wally and Laura who have been there all week and on the drive home there is was...[turn on your copy of Holst's The Planets...riiiight..now!]...Mars! I suppose in the days before flashing antenna tower lights what went on in the sky was more a impressive thing. One web writer notes of Holst's tone poem on Mars:
The full horror of mechanised warfare confronts us face to face in this bleakest of all tone poems. Its face is unrepentent, unrelenting and merciless and it offers us no hope of redemption. Thousands of pairs of jackbooted feet parade across the landscape, scurrying to their graves. Tanks pound cities into rubble. Bullets fly and bombs fall. Airplanes swoop low overhead. How surprising it is, then, to learn that Holst completed this piece long before the opening of the First World War, before the invention of the tank, before any plane had ever been fitted out to carry bombs, before the slaughter in the trenches, before the use of poison gas.
For me Mars, his war god, stood out in the sky more closely resembling a big automated safety indicator than it has for 60,000 years. The coolest sky phenomena - among those not able to sweep away trailer parks - was the night in January 2001 when the moon was closer than ever. I read a book on the front lawn of our house in the country by moonlight [cue the
theremin]...by the light...of the moon.
While at the park, I had occassion for the first time in at least five years to make Jiffy Pop. This guy has it right. It is not jiffy and rarely pops. In the making you have to stay stooped over a campfire with your face in the heat. You also usually have to maintain a posture which wreaks havoc on the back. Wally and I figured 35 years ago our fathers swore under their breath in the same positions. Most jiffy pop moment? Taking off the cardboard cover and holding up a small part of the cardboard to read, squinting by the campfire light, "do not remove this cardboard tab". Do they think people make this stuff in full daylight or read instructions before setting out? The children fell upon the jiffified stuff as if a truck from the Mint had driven through a casino parking lot, its loads pouring out from open back doors.
Mike Campbell has written a very good recollection of back to school as happy. I guess I had more problems with school so the first thing his post reminded me of is that I have yet to have my annual "back to school" dream.
Every late August for years it comes. I am in a class room, usually Mr. Foster's at CEC, my old high school, in Truro, NS, but I am in my 30's and am supposed to be taking a grade 12 math test. I have no idea what a friggin' cosign of anything is. Or I am at work and I am told that my records now are showing I really didn't pass grade 10 biology and must go study plant lifecycles or dissect a worm if I am to keep my job, feed the kids and make my mortgage payments. Or I am just ten again and am putting up with the minefield of dangers and humiliations posed by the playground scene at Kingston Elementary, ingratiating myself to the unwise bullies Zane Morse and the now long dead Pete Van Tassle.
You'd think the Crown would get this sooner or later.
As my old law prof, Bruce Wildsmith, has pointed out one more time, we recognized the rights of First Nations in 1761, did deals with them (especially in the Maritimes) as we dealt with other nations, we continued the recognition in theory until the time of the Charter, we locked them in section 35 of the Constitution in 1981 and now we have to recognize them as having practical and - hey - even commercial value.
Bring it on. Earning your living from your own assets. Imagine.
Finally... my first conspiracy theory post.
This morning, listening to NPR on WRVO out of Oswego, New York, I heard an interview on the Diane Rehm Show of an author who has written about a city destroyed by a massive explosion in Texas in 1947:
In his book City on Fire (HarperCollins) Journalist Bill Minutaglio writes about the massive explosion that ripped through the thriving port of Texas City, Texas, in 1947, killing hundreds of people and injuring thousands. The tragedy prompted landmark legal battles against the U.S. government.
In the interview it was explained how the US government had ensured post-WWII continuation of production of an explosive chemical through facilitating its secondary use as a fertilizer. The chemical was ammonium nitrate and was moving through Texas City by the shipload when it blew in 1947. Sound familiar? This is the same chemical which was used to blow up the Oklahoma federal building in 1995 and, two years earlier, in the first World Trade Centre bombing. At the time of the Oklahoma bombing, all I heard was this was a matter of
a common fertilizer being used for evil purposes. Similarly, you can find comments like this on web conspiracy sites:
Some of the terrible fertilizer explosions -- Oklahoma City and the World Trade Center -- were intentional. But I finished high school in the logging town of Roseburg, Oregon the same year Texas City burned. Twelve years later, in 1959, a truck delivering six tons of fertilizer parked overnight in downtown Roseburg. Loggers needed it to blow up large stumps. Lay a sack of fertilizer and a quarter stick of dynamite on a stump -- good-bye stump! This time, someone dropped a cigarette into a trash barrel next to the truck. The fire detonated the truck at 2:00 AM. Luckily the downtown was almost empty. Thirteen people died nevertheless, and the devastation was total over an area six blocks in diameter.
As the Eisenhower government - to ensure a supply of explosives for the Cold War - now seems to have maintained wartime production levels by creating a large but previously non-existent peacetime market for the chemical as fertilizer, didn't they not also hand out the tools used later by terrorists knowing full well what it could do? Apparently the stuff is so pervasive that to now retract what is really an armament from public use would undermine US industrial agriculture.
I caught this item on CBC PEI today about "aggressive" Newfs selling us west-of-Edmonstonians their mussels. Bring it on. What the world needs now is more cheap sustainable seafood. Gotta love the reaction of the little monopolist now faced with competition:
I wish (there) was more cooperation between everybody...go out as one generic brand of Atlantic mussels instead of different provinces fighting against one another.
Would that be acceptable if we were taking Ontario's cars, Quebec's textiles or any other consumer item? I look forward to the tasty 29 cent per pound mussels of yesteryear. Now - if the Newfs could only find some scallops to sell.
Note to world: it's a "ship'slog" from now on, too.
*[etym.: Mid.Web "web (log) english" (1994(7)-2003), "webenglish" (Aug. 2003), "weblinglish" (26 Aug. 2003), "blinglish" (4:37 pm, 26 Aug. 2003); alt.: Hip-Hop usage - see: www.blinglish.com]
While I do not run a blogroll to the side of this page, I do like to read the writings of others and have been happily directed to Discount Blogger, a New Brunswicker in Georgia, and note his noting of another good reason why the oppostion to gay marriage hasn't got its story straight...as it were.
It's a sad day when you realize both your cars suck. The VW has been in the family for ten and a half years. Friends point out that no one I know has owned the same new car for over a decade. From the lot to the wrecker. The van, also a 93, makes new expensive noises every month. Both are to go.
Laura Carr is what "little red car" sounds like when you are half asleep. A city car. 2003 Ford Focus SE wagon. Motor like a hairdryer but space to throw a dish washer in back. BBC's car show Top Gear gave it a very high rating for safety showing very graphically the results of various small cars in crashed. The doors of the Focus opened despite the front end imploding.
Horror stories? Speak now or forever hold your peace.
Two interesting announcements from the BBC made at the Edinburgh International Television(?) Festival. First, they are reviewing their website operations which already has 2,000,000 pages and is used by 43% of Britons a month. It cost £72m to run in 2002. [By that price the nine million buck Virtual Charlottetown must be up to about 100,000 pages. I'll check later and do a page count.] Second, the Beeb is planning to release their entire TV archive online...for free personal use. It's too bad the whole of the CBC, whose web presence front page is a nice looking news ticker tape and programme guide for other media, wasn't structured more closely to the British model, whose web front page is an index of everything. I'd pay for that.
Later: Steve at AOV has more on the second BBC announcement discussed above. The first reply points out CBC does have a small archive but, in true Canadian fashion, it is of "important moments in Canada". It does not let the individual decide what is important or of interest to him or her. Put it all up, please.
Later still: Aaron Swartz has some great quotes on the implications and reasons for the release of the full BBC archive on his site.
