A little note for Monsieur Beep! ......

I've just read your blog entry of Sunday, November 20, about 'Parents' and I really wish you'd enable comments on that blog. I know you probably have your reasons for not doing so, but I wish you'd reconsider. I really wanted to add a comment on there, to say "God Bless You" and wish you well.


I think I know what you may be feeling by having parents who haven't been communicating with each other very well if at all for many years. I am one of those kind of parents, along with my first wife, who by her own admission, has only made one mistake in her whole life, and that was marrying me. It was my distinct pleasure to help her correct that mistake with a divorce, but it wasn't one of the happy kind. She has only spoken about a dozen words to me since that became final several decades ago, and I had better not repeat those words here. Suffice it to say, I don't call her 'Old Fang' for nothing. She's worked hard to achieve that title, and she deserves it.

But I'm digressing again - forgive me, please. My youngest son, from my second happily-divorced wife, was asking me recently for information about the family, because he hasn't had a lot of contact with his missing father's side of the family, and would like to know something about them. I was pleased to be able to say that none of us is in jail, but some of us are already departed from here into the hereafter. That's something the nature of which has never been adequately spelled out by anyone, even though there have been many hawkers of various religions who have tried valiantly.

Truth is, there's simply no reliable information available to the religious or the others among us. One day, I should do a good rant about religions of various stripes and how those came about, beginning with being afraid of the dark, or afraid of the 'boogie-man', and attributing spiritual values to things like rocks and trees, and elevating good story-tellers to positions of power in the tribe by giving them the task of being a shaman, skilled in all sorts of mumbo-jumbo - and it progressed from there. Ancient Egypt makes a fascinating study if you're interested in early religions, and the roots of our modern ones. Our present-day Popes have a lot in common with those ancient Pharaohs who were thought of as gods, and also doubled as the Chief High Priest of the principal or ruling temple of the land. And for a while there, that richest temple of the land controlled 55% of the gross national product of Egypt, so we aren't talking peanuts and bananas here. Monkey See, Monkey Do? You be the judge. I have my own conclusions drawn already.


There's no accurate count of the number of various religions in the world today, partly because any damned fool can start his own if he can get enough other fools to follow him. Sort of like political parties, come to think of it. But none of that should be taken as permission to assume that there isn't a God, or a Divine Creator. We just haven't adequately identified one yet. We're still in that "afraid of the dark" stage. But logically, there must be one - all of this material universe didn't suddenly materialize on its own from nothing. It takes something to make something, and it takes a Someone to put it all together. I'd better wrap this up for now, or I'll spoil the real rant I'm planning for some day about all this. But keep praying - The Collective Consciousness is listening, and in very quiet moments, if you're sufficiently sincere and humble, answers do come back. There is a Something out there. Or "in here" perhaps, depending on how you see it.


* Note: Added on Wednesday, November 23, 2011 =


Here's what is wrong with allowing any garden-variety idiot to form his own religious organization. Please read this article from Google News.

One of my favorites sung by one of my favorites

Winter wonderland

Just after sunrise this morning.

 

That time of year again...

The hills are white,

It's a chilly night,

Feels like snow -

So here we go....

'The Green Thing' - Maybe not so new....

The  Green Thing

Checking  out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the older woman that she  should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren't good for  the environment.

The woman apologized and explained, "We didn't  have this green thing back in my earlier days."

The clerk  responded, "That's our problem today. Your generation did not care enough  to save our environment for future generations."

She was right --  our generation didn't have the green thing in its day.

Back then,  we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The  store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and  refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really  were recycled. But we didn't have the green thing back in our  day.

We walked up stairs, because we didn't have an escalator in  every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn't  climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks.  But she was right. We didn't have the green thing in our day.

Back  then, we washed the baby's diapers because we didn't have the throw-away  kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine  burning up 220 volts -- wind and solar power really did dry our clothes  back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers  or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that young lady is right.  We didn't have the green thing back in our day.

Back then, we had  one TV, or radio, in the house -- not a TV in every room. And the TV had a  small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the  size of the state of Montana. In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by  hand because we didn't have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old  newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap.  Back then,  we didn't fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We  used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we  didn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on  electricity. But she's right.  We didn't have the green thing back  then.

We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of  using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We  refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we  replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole  razor just because the blade got dull. But we didn't have the green thing  back then.

Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus, and kids  rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a  24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an  entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn't need a  computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles  out in space in order to find the nearest pizza joint.

But isn't it  sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn't have the green thing back then?

Please forward  this on to another selfish old person who needs a lesson in conservation from a smart-ass young person.

 

Our vertical climate....

In British Properties, they drive all-wheel-drives because....

...Because sometimes, they have to leave home

on days like this when it gets exciting.

Us poor folks live down in the bottom land,

where the grass is green and the beer cold.

B.C. Hydro has been getting hell lately, because.....

Because their 'smart meters' are basically spyware, for starters, but also because they've been claiming to make a profit while all the while, for the past nine years or so, they've been losing money consistently, but hiding that fact from the general public by using some tricky and highly unorthodox 'creative accounting' with which they've been converting present losses into future debt on some kind of deferred payment scheme. A scheme that we are told has no definite repayment schedule and seems to be very vague about details.  Like I said, 'creative accounting' - not letting the right hand know what the left hand is doing.

And it's the 'same old, same old' when it comes to Hydro's top brass and the provincial government's political bosses. Hydro's income is still being milked by its government masters and converted into 'General Revenues' on the government's books, to cover the government's own fiscal follies using money that should rightly go towards maintenance and renewal and expansion of our province-wide electrical grid and the generation facilities which provide its power. There's really nothing new under the sun, Folks. I worked for those bastards for 20 years, and I know where the skeletons are buried, but there's nothing much I can do about it, so please don't ask. But if you're playing ball with those guys, keep your eye on the bat, and keep your butt towards the wall.

And of course they aren't gaining any popularity by having their contracted tree-trimmers commencing operations in your neighborhood at 14 minutes after seven in the morning when it's not even fully daylight yet, and you maybe haven't had your first cuppa of the day. That also puzzles me, because as one of those contractors told me recently, they don't usually rush into jobs for Hydro, because it usually takes Hydro three months or so to get around to paying them for their work. Maybe they have to go back to their provincial masters and get the money back out of 'General Revenues' do you suppose? It's a terrible tangled web out there, I kid you not.

And this is what they get for raising hell in my neighborhood at the crack of dawn for no good goddamned reason on an otherwise half-decent morning. No wonder they aren't wildly popular among the unwashed masses. They seem to think 'public relations' means having sex in the city park, and if brains were dynamite, there's a few of them that would find blowing their noses to be a formidable challenge.  
 

My latest 'freebie' find - and it's a dandy!

Get yours now, by clicking this link, and have yourself some fun!
 

This morning around here....

Very popular spot today....

The bird feeder is getting a real workout

with the fresh snow in the hills lately.

Would you believe? I can 'Frisbee'

slices of bread almost that far away

from my 16th floor balcony, and the

larger local birds airlift it all over the

neighborhood. It's almost like having

my own air force.

It's winter up there today -

This started out as color, 

but it was mostly black and white,

so I converted it to that, 

and gave it a little sharpening.

It's that kind of day.

 

The greatest dance band of the 60s and 70s....

Don't step on the cat!

And don't knock over the furniture...

Otherwise, Go For It !

Not-so-little-known-fact:

James Last and Roberto Delgado

and Bert Kaempfert all used

the same pool of studio musicians

for their great arrangements.

Да, товарищ!

Today's weather was a little of everything -

After lunch, the wind came up, it began to rain, then lightning, then hail about the size of peas bringing down a lot of leaves from the trees, and then a few minutes later that cleared off, and the sun came out, to reveal fresh snow on the nearby mountains.

Then later on, we had a nice sunset with a few clouds over Georgia Strait and Vancouver Island. All in all, not a bad day as it turned out.
 

The neighborhood this morning.....

...looks like this - just like it should.

 

Prognosticationally Speaking.......

I decided to have a look at this today, because at 10:58 a.m. Eastern Standard Time ( 07:58 Pacific) seventy-nine years ago today, I first arrived on this warlike and disgustingly backward little planet in a primitively equipped little hospital in a small town in northern Ontario, where they get nine months of winter, two months of bad skiing, and one month's summer.

It was snowing lightly at the time, and the wind was blowing out of the north at about 15 miles per hour, and I was the talk of the hospital that morning for disturbing the peace and quiet of the two-minutes silence at 11:00 a.m. on that Armistice Day, 1932. I've been a shit-disturber ever since, and it's a job I do quite naturally and rather well if I do say so myself. It's my way of getting back at the world for handing me a birthday on a day such as this, with all its doom and gloom and military salutes and horseshit and gunpowder and nasty weather and boring flowers. In my next life, I'm going to try a lot harder to arrive in the middle of July or August when it's a lot more civilized in most populated places, and even some which aren't. 

A dedication to Jimmy, our resident billionaire -

From all of us who enjoy your lights

every year visible for many miles,

and reminding us it's Christmas.

And a special thanks for that new

Emergency Ward at Lions Gate Hospital.

I've used it, and it is a wonderful improvement

over the one it replaces.

Merry Christmas to you and yours!

Mr. P, our resident billionaire, is already testing his Christmas lights!

The top one is at a normal ISO,

and the bottom one is at ISO 3200.

The bottom one looks a bit overexposed

but it's a lot brighter.

There's other parts to this light display

which aren't on yet, such as the star

which is above the right-hand end

(east end) of the roof with its

streamers of light coming down

onto the rooftop.

That requires a local crane which 

evidently hasn't arrived yet.

So "stay tuned, Folks!"

We still have flies and wasps flying around outdoors

And it's 59 F on the balcony.

And almost half-past November!

Meanwhile, back to the music....

"The Mosquito"

"Brasil"