Tag: Travels and Other Places

Friday Chatter

Just as with the child whose non-meal time symptoms passed within a day and a half, so it has come to pass with me. I credit the chanting and the placement of the gerbil statutettes. So it is Friday and it is a day off booked far in advance to coincide with an teachers’ in-service day and as we monitor the route south, it is interesting to note how useful the New York State road condition web pages are. One would be content to wait until tomorrow were Ithaca not the sort of place where you can curl with rutabagas…rutabagi?

So it is sunny and clear here, we have new winter tires and are likely wise to stay put and chat. Topics?:

  • VOTE EVERY DAY!!! The awards let you vote each day from yesterday to next Wednesday. We need you to make your mark as often as you can. And join the GX40 nation while you are at it. There is a rumour that you should vote in every category to make the web widget work. And look for both beer and here in best blog, best culture blog, best group blog and best blog post series. And remember…your idleness is the Flea’s best friend.
  • Now that the necessity of scrounging is done…are winter tires the best value for technology or what? $425.00 gets you a full set installed including taxes and they take away the old bald things you were driving on. Can an iPod do that? I have driven year round on winter tires to the amusement of others but been caught in tornado inducing downpours and stuck to the asphalt while all around me hydroplaned. Plus you have only one set of tires to buy every two years. I expect vigourous discourse on this topic. It’s a gem.

I need a coffee to consider other topics. But that one above is a winner. Go with that for a while.

Update: I took a look south and you can see Watertown. We are making a run. If we are stuck in Watertown, we will find a high school basketball game to watch tonight. You could even see a laker:

Click for a bigger view. I don’t know why it is blue. I must have had the camera set on something other than auto. The wall of cloud behind the laker in the big picture is the lake effect show machine.

Whaling And Me

Japan’s fleet sets sail to kill 1,000 whales off Antarctica. Do I care? I think that I do but why?

  • First, the excuse that this is science could only be accepted by those who could support intelligent design as science:

    The fleet sailed on Tuesday from Shimonoseki port for the first year of a “research” programme called JARPA-2. It envisages catching up to 935 minke whales and 10 fin whales during the southern hemisphere summer to “…monitor the Antarctic ecosystem, model competition among whale species… elucidate temporal and spatial changes in stock structure and improve the management procedure for the Antarctic minke whale stocks.”

    There is a high chance that the fleet of scientists will be successful in elucidating spatial changes in stock structure through killing 1,000 whales. That is pretty much a no brainer. High marks, scientists, high marks.

  • I grew up in Atlantic Canada in the anti-sealing times. Big news in 1979 in high school biology. I never bought it. Maybe I should of when the cod soon started to disappear after the sealing stopped. But if you think about where the seals and cod live and what is up river from their continental shelf home…maybe it was not the seals so much as the draino, the liquid plumber, the pharmacuticals and other stuff being flushed down into the great septic system of the eastern North America. Why is the killing of whales any less skewed by those not involved?
  • And it is not the animal rights aspect. I don’t mind the eating of any animal below a primate. I am Scottish and we’ll eat pretty much any thing. We push steaks aside to get to the stewed kidneys. But there is that lack of necessity. Why must half a world be crossed for the acquisition of a bun stuffing? Maybe it is gastronomic hegemony? The desire to have dominion over the world through consuming it all. I know I don’t get that.

So I am not against sealing or hunting with guns or arrows let alone fishing with a rod or a net. I eat meat. It comes from animals. I think about bossy over a pot roast – it’s only right. I’d probably chew on a muktuk or other rarer smaller sea mammal as well given a chance and the right dipping sauce. But when it is a whale and not a big harbour flipper-rat or the bleating little sheep, somehow it is different. It’s the Leviathan.

Have I bought into big media’s spin? Which big media’s spin – the pro or the con? Maybe I have just made sure I learned enough to feel guilt but just enough to learn a little less to feel a lot of guilt or actually do something. I do recall a time from before these little guilts mine and the world’s when I was very young and Dad mentioned that he had performed the burial of the guy or a kid of the guy who has invented the harpoon gun shown above.

Being Unhooked

It was very odd being dislocated from TV and the Internet even for four days. That in itself tells you what I loser I have become. When I think of what I was thinking over the last few days, when my concern was to ensure I had some idea of the hotels you could land at unexpectedly over the next five interstate turn-offs, there was plenty I found I did not need to care about – what a talk radio host said or what charges were laid against which politician.


“Dang – shoulda napped”

Baseball, on the other hand, becomes central as AM radio is a perfect medium for that sport and baseball is a perfect sport for that medium. Before the game – for hours before the game – there is much to consider about how a baseball game may play out. For example, knuckleball pitcher Tim Wakefield did not play well yesterday in the Red Sox loss to the Yankees but I had a sense he would not before the game as he was pitching on short rest. I don’t think you can have information about a player like that in any other sport or at least the known is not so well known. It is also complex. Much turned in the early innings on Randy Johnson’s temper. When he was facing bases loaded and his catcher went to talk with him, he was livid. His arrogant confidence and their relationship were important factors in the game. Sadly, he regained his composure and got better as the game went on. Maybe that was also due to him warming up for only seven minutes. That’s a fact. Just seven. Usually starters warm up for twenty. Now I know.

Despite the joy of driving up I-81 with a belly full of hammy turnip greens and grilled haddock listening to A Prairie Home Companion, it was interesting to watch my listening generally move from NPR or talk radio to sports radio, to replace the sort of facts I usually feed myself with sports stats. There is something utterly unimportant about sports stats which are also immersive – maybe it’s their utter unimportance. I think if I was driving along dealing with what was being dealt with and listening to news my brain would have imploded with argument and anger at the vanity, stupidity and selfishness of what is at the core of what passes for news. You can’t argue with baseball. It just has to happen. OK, you can argue that in 2003 Timlin should have gone in an inning earlier. He should have, too, but I still have a point. It also happens at its own pace. A game can be two hours or three and a half. A pitcher’s duel or a slug fest. Despite all you know, you just never know.

A Serb In Austin

Elderly well dressed couples from Austin show up in the afternoon, strolling among the evacuees smiling broadly and kindly at all of us. When they asked me, with the air of Princess Diana, “How are you doing? We see you managed to get your computer out,” I didn’t have the heart to tell them that I was from Serbia, and that I am doing fine.”

These observations at an Austin Texas refugee center are very interesting.

My Day South

Up in the middle of the night with too much road head. We went into CNY for some Labour Day weekend treat gathering, flipping back and forth between sports radio and crisis news until the Prairie Home Companion took us around eastern Lake Ontario, through sunset and dusk, north along beautiful highway #3 from Oswego to Watertown.

Through our travels we got to give to the Sally Ann as well as the American Red Cross through folk making it easy to give while going about doing their job. Rudy’s in Owsego had big jugs on the counter on a very busy Saturday night pouring all tips and whatever else customers wanted, all to be given to the ARC. Good to see. Good also to see that they were happy to take Canadian as well both for the tip jar and their wonderful fish sandwiches and little crab cakes. $2.09 USD for a Genny Cream to go with that…except they let me pay in CND at par. What was that about – a tribute to Bangour Maine circa 1975? The tip jar got the difference and more.

Gas prices were everywhere from $3.15 USD in Clay, a suburb NW of Syracuse, to around $3.60 USD in the Watertown area another hour north. The same US gallon cost around $4.11 in USD in Canada – that’s at $1.30 CND a litre. portland reported $3.00 USD in southern Maine Friday. I took my own over out of some personal plan to micro-manage gas supply. Crossing back we got to witness four early twenties lassies make the error of trying to sneak a shopping spree past customs. Oh dear.

Best line of the day? NPR’s Car Guys:

Brother #1: what happened to all the drive-in movie places anyway?
Brother #2: global. warming.
[Brother #1 then has coffee come out his nose and laughs for the next five minutes.]

In a day almost entirely based on going to place already known and liked, we even got to have lunch at Ann’s in Cape Vincent, home of the nicest waitresses on the planet, right after being allowed to enter by the nicest US customs guard who, when we said we may go to the State Fair, looked right into the back seat at the kids and said with a big smile “you let get them to buy you lots of candy, lots of candy, you hear?”

Sadly…Out Of Business

Once upon a time I was going to collect “…a-rama” photos. I even saw a “Photo-a-rama” in Paris in 1986 but passed up the opportunity being the pre-digital world of pay per print. I feel for the creditors of Billy back there in Old Saybrook Connecticut but the concept was sweet and I was ready to buy when I pulled in the parking lot.

Beach Head

I have done something I have never done. I have beach bummed and will again today. Being albino between the freckles this requires SPF 50 or stronger taken with my tea and rubbed all over as well as a canny set of umbrellas and tarps to actually isolate myself from the slightest contact with any rouge ray of sunlight…but still I am bumming. We have been to three beaches on 4 of the 5 last days and will beach again today and likely tomorrow as well. It is like a week of being in and out of the sauna…over and over. I am appear to be losing contact with my muscular system and have started to forget things. Like what it is like to have dry pants on. Why is it OK to walk around with soaking pants only by the sea? It is like a great conspiracy with strangers. We will all look silly, damp and all be mostly naked but we will only do so when we lay down before Lord Poseidon.