Here's where this is being seen, and by how many...

This is the 'top ten' of countries accessing this blog.

I see in The News......

I see in the news that our fearless leader, Justin Trudeau, wants to have a one-on-one with President Xi Jinping of China to talk about our problems. Isn't that a lot like a flea climbing up an elephant's hind leg with rape in mind?

When charming young Justin first got elected, he assured the unwashed masses that he was going to do government differently. No more of the absolute ruler tactics of old 'Crooked Mouth' Chretien, we were going to have 'transparent government'. Sure we are! And another pig flew by.

Justin's father, old 'Painful Pierre', would be very disappointed with junior, because the junior Trudeau seems, for all intents and purposes, to be all show and no go. And that 'transparent government'? Hah! We've got the same crooked dealings and under-the-table work-arounds, and corruption that we had under the previous administration, and possibly worse.

Another typical West Vancouver sunset... (Love it!)

Alaska is toward the right, and Trumpistan toward the left.

Healthy Eating.....

Yesterday, while Barb was counseling me on how us Old Farts need to act in order to survive in the 21st Century, she asked about my eating habits, because a lot of us solitary survivors of Flower Power and the early days of Banyen's Books & Sound, on West 4th Avenue in Vancouver, have evolved a very haphazard feeding routine. She wanted to know if I eat three meals a day. (No, I almost never do that. It's against my almost-religion!) And she asked if I ever cook anything substantial. (Yes! I actually do that!) And how often would that be? (Almost every evening, if I don't bring home something from the Deli Counter at Save-On-Foods.) ........So here's a little example of what I cook in the 1200-watt microwave. These hamburger patties and the fresh frozen spuds on that special microwave platter take about three minutes and forty seconds. I add a big glass of cold milk, or a cold cup of Ginger Ale, sometimes mixed 50-50 with Tropicana No Pulp Orange Juice, and there's supper. With sometimes a cereal bowl of ice cream, or bananas & milk & sugar, for dessert.

Now, I'm going to digress into a short rant about oldies & eating problems.  To wit, a lot of us suffer from fatigue caused by a variety of medical issues, and that is often compounded by a lack of appetite, partially related to our stomachs having shrunk a little with age and possible lack of interest. And then some of us have read that lighter eating in our old age tends, somewhat surprisingly, to prolong life. Perhaps because of its reduced demands on the digestive system.

But we do need nourishment, and Dr. B., my specialist, says "You should have some red meat about three times a week, because it contains iron of a kind that you can't get from vitamin pills. Synthetic iron in pill form doesn't have the same qualities for working with red blood cells which carry the oxygen around as does the real thing in your natural foods." I put that to the test, and he's right! There is a difference. And I could tell by how I feel after taking his advice and doing that for a while. Problem is, I don't like red meat of the kind sold these days. Compared to the undoctored variety of several decades back, this modern stuff tastes like shit. And if it looks like shit, and smells like shit, and tastes like shit, then it's probably shit ! And I can remember when you could buy a whole side of beef for the price of a couple of today's steaks. And you could enjoy eating the whole thing, if you stored it properly. (End of rant!)

Here's one of a plane, above 'Old Blue' at Vancouver Wharves...

I didn't even see that plane above & behind the big blue unloading crane at Vancouver Wharves when I took the picture. I was concentrating on other parts of the scene. So this one is purely serendipitous! And really cool !

Continuing with pictures from the previous posting.....more flowers.

These are in or near a community gardening spot beside a dance studio which is in between John Lawson Park and Ambleside Park, in the eastern parts of the waterfront park system. Ambleside is the easternmost of them, almost under the north end of Lions Gate Bridge, our famous suspension bridge from 1937/38. (Back when men were men, and the gals wore their 'falsies' on the outside!) And on that cheerful note....(remember those 'torpedo' brassieres, and some daring young thing in a colorful ad saying "I dreamed I climbed Mount Everest in my Maidenform Bra!") - Woof! Enjoy your day, Everyone...

Guess What? - I came back! Almost from the dead....

I'm getting tired of Facebook - how about you? How much mundane idiotic babble can anyone stand? Survey says: "Certainly not an endless supply!"

So lately, and this is doctor's orders, I get off nice old $3,000 computer here, and go to the park, and ride my new-last-year ladies' model cruiser bike, with my Nikon P510 strapped around my waist, handy for pictures, like this one...

And this one was taken at the foot of 18th Street in West Vancouver, on the seaward side of the building where Denny Boyd, the famous Vancouver Sun columnist lived for years, prior to his leaving us in October of 2006. I'm actually trespassing here, by about fifty feet, into the 'pedestrians only' section of this scenic walkway along the waterfront, leading to its western termination at the Dundarave Pier, in (where else?) Dundarave Village, just outside the also-famous Beach House Restaurant, at the foot of 25th Street.

If I were writing a caption for this photo, it would be "Gee, Mom - Buy me one of those! - Don't wrap it up, I'll play with it here!" I am referring, of course, to that splendiferous creature in the black leggings, center-middle-distance. And I hear you thinking "This old geezer is a real Pervert!" Lewis Grizzard in 'Quotations With An Attitude' said, "Kinky sex involves the use of duck feathers. Perverted sex involves the whole duck." And I must hastily add here that my own sex life is still two-thirds as good as ever; I can still think about it, and I can still talk about it.

But I took thirty-some pictures yesterday afternoon, after leaving the West Vancouver Community Center, and a meeting with 'Barb' who does Respiratory Disease Educating for those of us who are slowly dying because we supported the tobacco industry for too many decades during our wild and crazy youth. And my wild and crazy youth lasted from 1945 until September 6th, 2006, so there's not a lot left of Old Ray's lungs. But there is a God, because they're still working, and my blood oxygen level as I write this is 92%. And that in itself is something of a miracle, because I spent almost ten days of April in East Two Cardiac at our local hospital, annoying the nurses with silly requests, like "Could I please have a snack of crackers & cheese?" - (and I got it too!) But I'm digressing again - (I'm too good at this!) - The hospital thing was because I'd caught pneumonia, for the second time in five years, in spite of having had one of those pneumonia shots two years ago. That earlier shot didn't work very well for anyone, so they went back to the drawing boards, and whomped up another one, and now that I'm out & loose in public again, I've got one of those too. They are $130.00 at your friendly local Pharmacist's, and the jury's still out on whether this new-fangled one works any better than that previous abortion. So don't get me started on the subject of 'Big Pharma', please.....

Anyway, to wrap my session with Barb, let me say she thinks I need "more human contact". She's a lovely young lady, very patient with babbling old idiots like me, so I didn't have the heart to argue with her about that. But the plain bare-faced truth is, It was human contact that got me this way!

So let's move on, shall we? Pictures! Yes! I do have more. How about some geese in the water?

Or maybe a big container ship at anchor in our watery 'parking lot' offshore from Spanish Banks, on the south side of Burrard Inlet? This shot is a composite, made using Microsoft Research's 'Image Composite Editor', which is just the world's best panorama-maker. It beats anything Canon ever had, and I really like Canon products. This is better. I give it five stars. Why? Because it does all the 'heavy lifting' for you. Dump your pix into it, select 'Splice', and 'Poof!' - it has done it, without you dragging & matching up anything. That's all automatic in 'ICE'.....

There's more of course, but I'm going to open a new posting for those, because I'm having difficulty with allotted space in this one.... so do come back!

It's the 30th anniversary of the Internet...

Today is the 30th anniversary of the Internet, and as someone said on Facebook, nobody is celebrating.
And it looks like blogging has come and gone already. It used to be fun. And now it seems to be ancient history. And that's too bad, because it's a lot safer than some other forms of social media, with better controls.

Winter is still with us...

Here it is almost half-past march, and the winter weather is still with us.

This isn't normal, for sure. Usually, the spring flowers are here by now.

Welcome to 2019 !

A belated Happy New Year to you, one and all...
Possibly, the whole three of us. I've just been mentioning this blog on Facebook, so I'm here to confirm it still works, and add something to keep it alive, mostly for 'old times sake'.

Here's a picture from my posting on Facebook this morning, showing the beach at Bahia Feliz, Gran Canaria, Spain, one of the Canary Islands, where I've never been. But my friend 'Monsieur Beep' has been there and loves it, which is how I know about it.  Enjoy your day, Everyone!

Updating this: A little this and that.....

This past summer, I got back on the old mountain bike again, (actually a new one!) to get some exercise, and I've still got the bike inside the back of the SUV.

And now that the ski season is approaching again, and I'm fighting off "Ski Fever", I gave in on that one last week, deciding that I really do want one more winter on my favorite local hills, with a good digital camera this time, so I can come home with nice pictures.

And all that's costing me is $2,136.00. Why so much? Because I can't drive up to the main lodge, twenty-five minutes up the road, without proper winter tires installed on the vehicle. I didn't want just two snow tires on the driving wheels because nobody recommends that with radial tires like we're all using now. And so I bought a whole new set of four new rims with Goodyear snow tires installed, and new tire pressure sensors for those, and wheel-balancing and then the installation on to the vehicle. Along with that I opted for their storage plan for my summer set of wheels, for an additional hundred dollars plus tax, and so that whole thing came to $1,677.59. The seniors season pass was $250. with tax, and the other $208.89 is for the full season rental of Head skis & boots and liability insurance to cover those in case of loss or damage.

And now, I'm ready for winter 2018/19. All I want now is about 400 cm of base.
So I can't hit the rocks if I fall down acting stupid.... 

Lawrence Martin today in Washington...

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-showdown-between-brett-kavanaugh-and-christine-blasey-ford-is-the/

Your followers numbers drop off if you don't write for weeks....

And nobody's a prophet in his own land, obviously. But I've never had a lot people in Canada reading my stuff. Maybe my computer talk, or my comments on American politics turns them off.  No matter, I'm not aiming this at any one specific tribe or culture or linguistic group. Есть дни, когда я делаю некоторые из них на русском языке. It is a global village, friends.

I came back! ..... Never mind why....Just go with it....

Everyone's still in a fuss over the most bizarre President that America has had in living memory. Or dead memory. Or any memory. The guy's a nut. A nut like the kind that would get you and I quietly salted away in a well-supervised rehab center for the discombobulated. Those divorced from reality as us unwashed masses think of it, whenever we have time.

But as Margaret Wente wrote in her periodic column in the Globe And Mail, yesterday, it's unlikely any recent cataclysms with him in the center may result in his early departure from the tawdry reality show called The White House.  And Margaret should know. She's semi retired now, but for many years was the Managing Editor of that Globe And Mail daily newspaper, billed not entirely pretentiously as 'Canada's National Newspaper', with local bureaus strategically located from coast to coast. It goes without saying she's extremely well connected in the media community. She's a delightful wordsmith, too. When she gets in the mood, ideas fly right at you. I wish I wrote like Margaret. Provocatively, but with a calculated message even her critics can grab in both hands. Margaret says Trump's here until 2020, come hell or high water. Upon reflection, I think she's likely right. She's right more often than wrong, because she knows people who know where the skeletons are buried, and she talks to them often.

Older versions of Windows...

I'm using Windows 8.1 on one computer, and today, in my User's folder, I found a file identified by only its extension, and one that I didn't recognize. It wouldn't open directly, but did open in Notepad. It was written in Chinese. When I tried using Google Translate to read the Chinese, Google couldn't translate it.
I'm assuming it was something that shouldn't be there, so I deleted it, and then changed my password. The file was listed only as .obs32 with no other title.

Short update....

I've just re-visited here after a rather long absence, and I see that Google is making some changes. I'm not sure of the details, but that will come.

For now, I'm mostly aware that my former contacts on here have either died or lost interest in blogging. That may be because we've found better interactions on other sites like Facebook.

So today's "Question Everything" would be "Has blogging lost its relevance in today's world of cyberspace?" My answer to that would most likely be "Yes!". It seems that way from where I'm sitting. And I would like to be wrong about that. I've enjoyed this in the past. But it's not much fun when I don't have others responding or doing their own like in the old days.

That new theme set for Linux....

Here's the image that I used for making the others. The others were colored and manipulated using an old program in Windows, called PhotoStudio 5.5, which dates back to about 2003. It still works like a charm. They did good work.

 

Linux Mint 18.2

Made a new background theme for Linux Mint 18.2, and it will also work in Windows. It's set to change the background once a minute... This has my desktop background changing these pictures in Linux the way Windows Themes changes its backgrounds in Windows. (I love messing around with this stuff...especially when it works!)

Has the world gone crazy?

Sometimes, I think it has.

Looking at the news, there's every reason to wonder about that. Trump has gone nuts in the USA, and Netanyahu has gone nuts in Israel. Kim Jong-un has gone nuts in North Korea. The loonies are taking over.

From today's Globe And Mail paper...