Category: Uncategorized

Hogmanay Voodoo

I hope you all paid strict attention to the Scots pagan requirements of last evening’s ringing in of the New Year. These are a few of my grannie’s requirements:

  • replace all salt in the house,
  • change all bed sheets,
  • rotate all clocks forward 12 hours
  • kick the tallest darkest haired man out of the house before midnight and have him return with gifts immediately after midnight,
  • keep going until you drop – my grandfather fell asleep at a tee off on the 4th of January or so many years ago

Oh, yea, one more thing – don’t forget to burn something big.

Back / Juan

Timbaaaa!!!You would have noticed I was down. My servers sit happily on PEI where hurricane Juan tore through last night knocking out electricity. I am in Ontario, 1500 km to the west. If you click on my favoured bloggers to your right (my left) you will find some other bloggers there getting up over the afternoon – Kevo is already up but as he runs the ISP there (where my web email sits) you would expect he’d be first.

ELMA - ESS JUAN - WHERE ARE YOU????My folks in Rusticoville said it was like a truck hitting the cottage constantly for 2 hours at the worst of it. Lots of trees down and there is a ship in trouble off Anticosti Island in the Gulf. It is also election day....sad to see... Halifax got hit with even stronger winds up to 150 km per hour. I do not know the name the sailing ship which is shown here sunk at its wharf. On CBC’s Maritime Noon, I heard tales of trees older than 200 years being ripped apart and many of those at the Public Gardens being badly damaged. I am waiting for Mike Campbell’s blog to get up and updated to read his prespective from inside the city.

Big ups or props or… whatever the young folk are saying these days…to silverorange for getting this up so fast care of the hunking Honda generator. Gas powered inter-provincial blogging in addition to awards for usability. Lots of pictures from Charlottetown here. Here is another Juan related graphic for the hurricane nerds out there:

Juan's aim

Ottawa

neat-oWas up in Ottawa overnight last night at brother Dougie’s. Played a little 1980’s Coleco and a little 1960’s Munroe, if you know what I mean. The old sets are getting a little tired but I still smoked him. He and me are hockey junk nerds and I took the opportunity to scan a few things including this dandy Golden Seals patch just like the ones I wore on my jeans jacket in elementary school. Made at Voyageur Eblems, New Hamburg, Ontario between Kitchener and Stratford and sold at every Canadian Tire front counter in the mid-70’s.

Took the kiddlies to the Canadian Museum of Civilization – and again wondered why there are not regional Federal museum branches with this stuff moving across the land rather than playing to pretty empty houses in Ottawa. Up on the fourth floor there was a pretty neat-o exhibit on the 1570’s summer iron ore mining expeditions of Martin Frobisher, namesake of my cat, to Baffin Island. [Did anyone call Martin “Frobie” and scratch his belly?] Exactly the kind of small exhibit that could move from province to province every 4 months or so on a tour.

Bag of real bagels for lunch.

Rats: “See ya, Ship!”

From Brother Iain’s yellow press:

As Ontario’s Conservatives continued to trail in public opinion polls, dozens of Tory aides, including senior staff, have been shopping their resumes around ahead of the Oct. 2 election. Among them are members of the office of Premier Ernie Eves, senior members of Finance Minister Janet Ecker’s staff, and an administrative assistant in Education Minister Elizabeth Witmer’s office. Many of the resumes — posted electronically on workopolis.com or monster.ca — [Emphasis mine] have been updated in the past week or two, and several in just the past few days.

Good web savvy reporting.

Wine by Radio

I was listening to the AM dial yesterday as summer’s close leads [as you all say with one voice] to improved amplitude modulation broadcast propagation and caught the oddest show on WHAM 1180 Rochester, New York: The WHAM wine show. I thought I was listening to good college radio. It was unstructured, amateur and funny. During the show the host and guest were popping corks, comparing wines, comparing glassware and talking over music they liked. It must have been live as they were also giving running scores for the Buffalo Bills game being played on rival radio stations, perhaps to a 95% market share, given western NY tastes.

Given the medium, the show could not rely on long pans of vinyard vistas or uncious hosts puckering their lips approvingly. They actually had to describe what was happening in their noses and mouth.

Oor Wullie

Sae Help Ma Bob!Being a Scots immigrants’ kid in Canada who grew up in the Maritimes was in part about being unacknowledged. Folk assume you are some sort of cousins to the local Mcs or Macs. My buddy Mark of the Beeb told me after he came back to Canada engaged that he finally figured me and my family out after watching his to-be in-laws spend a day together in a room reading papers and not talking. I would think of my friends as Canadians – their families eating cornflakes or jam and toast while drinking coffee, while we would have Wheetabix, marmalade with tea. When you found someone whose family actually also came from Scotland, like my law school pals Neil or Graham, talk devolved into food: baps and square slice (or is it sliced square); mince and tatties; stovies; chip butty; Iron Brew.

After the comfort food and before the dissension caused by asking about your favorite fitba team, there was Oor Wullie, a comic strip from my Dad’s childhood before WWII which focused on Wullie and his pals, including Fat Bob, the smoker above. Comics often ended with kids with black eyes, spanked arses or, like the one you can find by clicking on the drawing above, Wullie barfing after smoking. Sort of a smarter Bart Simpson raised by sensible presbyterians which would likely put a greater fear into the “Zero Tolerance” set. Given the presence, however, of the utterly bastardly version of Dennis the Menace in the UK comic scene, Oor Wullie as your child’s choice would be welcome relief.