And some more pictures

Sunset beach. If I could load the f*cking sunset, I could show you how beautiful it was. Apparently it's too beautiful for my bandwidth here to load it up.


Sunset beachgoers.


Kids playing in the skate park near my hotel in Winnipeg.


A cool bridge in downtown Winnipeg, the "Eplanade Riel," a pedestrian bridge named for Louis Riel, one of the founding fathers of Manitoba. The cone-shaped kiosk at the base of the mast is a restaurant, owned by Burton Cummings, lead singer for the Guess Who, a Canadian hard rock band from the 1960s and 1970s ("American Woman" was one of their hits).



Here's a three-language sign at a memorial. English, French, and what I think is Inuit on the right. It looks really alien. Very cool.

I am having trouble uploading photos tonight. More tomorrow.

Trains, Front-End Loaders and Automobiles

Jason and Andre, two people at the plant, with their drivers. Golf is a big thing here.


A little Mazda next to a big Volvo front-end loader. You have to be careful where you park, here. You might get squished.




A little switch engine in the yard at the plant where I'm working. I love trains.

Springtime in Winnipeg

I spend all my time here.

We moved from a fairly run-down hotel last night to a nice hotel today, at the fork of the Red River and the Assiniboine River. They call this area "The Forks," but I only see one fork with two branches on the map. Unless they're referring to roads and bridges, of which there are many in this area. There's a nice skate park nearby. I like this bridge too.

Check out the carpet. And the Danish Modern decor. Very minimalist. I like it. I especially like the one-piece counter and sink in the bathroom. It's made of transparent ripply glass. You know those stupid Kohler commercials on TV? They can't hold a candle to this. I may sleep in the bathroom tonight, I'm so enamored of this sink.

A new little one

I acquired a new baby. Yes, it's...

...a baby Glock 36, in .45 ACP caliber. (None of that sissified Glock Auto Pistol crap. You'll always be able to find .45 ACP at the local shop. Not so with .45 GAP. Yes, the .45 GAP casing is stronger and you can reload it more times than a .45 ACP case. But I'm not one to pack my reloads to dangerously-high pressures, so I think I will not worry about the older, weaker .45 ACP case design. Any design that's lasted 100 years is certainly good enough in my book.)

I think I'll name my new baby Rosie, in dishonor of Rosie O'Donnell, who likes to prattle about banning guns, especially in the wake of the Virginia Tech murders. Like Rosie, the Glock 36 is brainless and has a big mouth. Unlike Rosie, the Glock 36 is lethal, whereas Rosie is merely offensive.

A Glock 36 in one student's pocket at Virginia Tech could have stopped Cho in his tracks, before he could have hurt anyone. But no, Virginia Tech (and many other universities) would rather see their students dead than to admit that it's a human right to protect oneself from attack, with lethal force.

Happy Birthday, little Rosie! May you never raise your voice in anger. But if you do, I know you will speak clearly and true.

Cats, fossils, and more cats.

It doesn't matter how big the cat is - a cat can't resist playing with a cardboard box. This is a mountain lion. With a BIG box.

Arrrrrrrrrrrrr! Cardboard confetti.

We went to the annual fossil show that comes to town. They have fossils from all over the world. Plus assorted carnival crap. And this time, they had what is quite possibly the loudest, most talent-less rock band I have ever heard in my life. I would have gladly paid these guys to shut up. As it was, we just kept a safe distance and ate our greasy carnival food.

A good example of Treveropyge, a bug-eyed Moroccan trilobite (Coltraenia oufatenensis) from the Middle Devonian epoch, 390 million years ago. (Eon, Era, Period, Epoch, Age. This one is Phanerazoic Eon, Paleozoic Era, Devonian Period, Middle Devonian Epoch, Givetian Age.) Trees at this time had grown enough to form forests, though they all reproduced via spores, like ferns, and had no real root systems. Fish had formed jaws with teeth, which meant that sea-dwelling trilobites had to be especially aware of their environment because toothy fish were after them.

Look at this guy's eye towers, with the compound eyes like an insect's. It's like a pair of wraparound periscopes, made out of calcite. Trilobites (arthropods) had heavy exoskeletons, but they could curl up for protection. Some swam, others crawled around on the bottom of the shallow seas. Their closest living relative today is the horseshoe crab. Trilobites began declining when sharks and fish with teeth appeared, and ate the trilobites. The last trilobites disappeared during the Great Dying, 251 million years ago, when 96 percent of all marine species and 70 percent of all land species became extinct.

The Great Dying formed the boundary between the Permian and the Triassic periods. There is evidence to suggest that a period of sudden global warming, possibly caused by a meteor impact, brought oxygen-poor water from the depths to the surface of the oceans. This disrupted the thermohaline circulation of ocean water, where dense, cool water sinks to the bottom of the oceans, and lighter, warmer water rises. This caused a bloom of algae in the oceans, which further depleted the oxygen in the oceans, which helped kill all of the sea life.

A bunch of trilobites in a "death assemblage." Isn't that a strange name? These have eye stalks. The oceans were thick with them. And all of a sudden, all the trilobites who remained died at the same time. Relatively, in less than a million years. But this bunch died all together, which is why they're all next to each other in the same strata of rock. Humans will probably die the same way, as a race, probably from a meteor impact, against which there is no defense. But their skeletons are much more fragile, and won't be preserved nicely like these trilobites were.

A platter ground from rock containing a death assemblage of ammonoids. These were squid-like animals that lived in straight, pointed, chambered shells. The closest living relative of these are octopi, squids and cuttlefish. They appeared around the time that the trilobites died, and in turn died out at the end of the Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago, during a dying probably caused by the impact of the Chicxulub meteorite off the coast of modern-day Yucatan. (See, it's always a meteorite that kills everyone.)

Eh, enough death. Here's some cats.

Blackie is in the foreground. He has gold eyes that are rounder, and his right ear has a notch in it. Jesse is in the background. He has green eyes that are slittier. He also tends to cock his head to one side.

Check it out - my odoometer hit 111,111 miles. I love it when odometers show all the same number.

Wolfman, 1989 - 2007

Our oldest cat, Wolfman, died this past Friday. He was 18, which is pretty old for a cat. He was a 16-pound Maine Coon, which happens to be the official "state cat" of Maine. In the last year, he stopped metabolizing his food, and dropped to 7 pounds (a bag of bones, really) in the last few months. We let him die at home. He hated the veterinarian, and we couldn't find a vet in our area who would do house calls to come and euthanize him. He wasn't in any particular pain; he was just stiff, and growing weaker every day. Eventually he became incontinent, which was especially annoying to my darling wife, who tirelessly cared for him and cleaned up after him, because she couldn't bear to put him to sleep when he wasn't in pain. It made me appreciate the depth of my wife's love for her pets, and it also made me very glad that we have linoleum floors.

I got home Friday at 1 AM, petted him in his towel-lined cardboard box in the bathroom, and although his eyes were open, he was unresponsive, comatose. I went to bed, and he died a few hours later. We buried him later that morning in our kitty cemetery next to our house. We put a cat-shaped wire sculpture on the fence over his grave.

Thanks for being such a good cat, Wolfman. You were annoying, sure, with your endless meowing and clawing us for attention, but you were also Mr. Personality, and fun to be with. There won't be another cat like you.

Yo ho ho, a pilot's life for me...

I've been playing "Star Wars: Battlefront 2." I seem to have a knack for piloting a starfighter. Three-dimensional combat, especially in close quarters amid a pack of battleships blasting away at each other, is especially exhilarating.

A parked Rebel X-wing starfighter.

Rebel X-wing taking off out of my ship's hangar.

Hunting Imperial TIE fighters. It's dangerous to get this close to an Imperial Star Destroyer. I really enjoy the three-dimensionality of space combat. There is no "up," only "around" and "how far away" from other objects. If you're quick, you can use big ships as cover, even if they're enemy ships who are trying to blow you out of the sky.

An Imperial frigate (small Star Destroyer) succumbs to a relentless barrage of proton torpedoes. This game really does smoke and flame VERY well, and it's already two years old.

Rebel A-wing fighters have great firepower, and are small and fast, but it only takes one or two lucky hits to vaporize one. My A-wing is on fire after a single hit.

You can even fight your way into enemy battleships and sabotage them. A fellow Rebel Marine provides cover while I plant explosives on an Imperial Star Destroyer's engine coolant system.

My teammates left me behind on the Imperial ship, so I stole a TIE interceptor to get home. On the way, I took some potshots at Imperial TIE bombers in my stolen TIE interceptor.

Okay, tired of playing Rebel. Now I'll fly Imperial. Which ride to choose? Here are three TIE (Twin Ion Engine) craft - a regular fighter, an interceptor, and a bomber. Darth Vader flew a bent-winged variant of the TIE fighter in "Star Wars: Episode Four."

Okay, I'll take... THIS one! I like the TIE interceptor's spiky look. But really, I just like its rapid-fire guns.

Rebel X-wing fighters fragment satisfyingly into a cloud of debris when pounded by a TIE interceptor's guns.

Rebel Y-wing bombers are annoying in that they stick close to the battleships that they are attacking, and they have a habit of reversing direction quite suddenly, sometimes right back into you.

Rebel assault craft are big, slow, and heavily-armed. They are VERY hard to kill. A good defense tactic of an assault craft pilot is to run right over whoever's attacking them. It seems to work well, especially against fragile interceptors.

As a fighter pilot, you have to "live every day as if your ass is on fire." Like today.

It could have gone so differently...

When Cho Seung-Hui came into the lecture hall at Virginia Tech on Monday, chained the doors shut, and began killing people, one student, or one professor, armed with their own weapon, could have shot him dead in two seconds, ending the massacre almost before it began.

But no. Schools, and the media, insist that a place is "safe" if guns are forbidden there.

Thirty-two victims are proof that this is not true. Thirty-two victims bear silent witness to the lie that on school grounds, you should surrender your right to self-defense, to your right to live, to use a weapon to fight back against an attacker who is intent on killing you.

In January 2006, Virginia Tech administrators applauded the defeat of Virginia House Bill 1572, sponsored by Todd Gilbert, R-Shenandoah County, which would have prohibited state university campuses from banning legally-carried firearms on campus. The bill was brought when a law-abiding student who had a Virginia concealed weapons permit was prosecuted for possessing a handgun on campus.

"I'm sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly's actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus," said Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker at the time.

Cho Seung-Hui's thirty-two victims felt safe. They weren't. Now they're dead.

Who's to blame? Cho Seung-Hui, of course, because he murdered thirty-two people. Unfortunately, he's dead too, so we can't prosecute him, convict him, and execute him. However, we can and should hold the university and its administration responsible for failing to protect those students and faculty who were wounded and killed, not to mention the hundreds of others who will be forever scarred by the experience. This is because if a school or an employer insists on banning weapons on campus or in the workplace in the interest of "safety," then that school or employer should assume the responsibility to protect you.

However, who IS responsible for your safety? Who IS responsible for preserving your life? Not us, says the university. Not us, says your employer. They say this, even while they tell you that you are not allowed to protect yourself.

We're not responsible either, say the police. They may respond within five minutes, as they did at Virginia Tech. And you, and everyone around you, will still be dead. In fact, the police are NOT REQUIRED to protect you. They are only required to protect the public in general, which means (a.) eventually show up at the scene of the crime, (b.) write up a report, and (c.) zip up your body in a neat bag for disposal. Oh, and apprehend the criminal if possible. If not, oh well, wait until he or she kills some more people. Case in point - Cho Seung-Hui's first two victims, whom he killed in a dormitory before walking across campus to the scene of his larger slaughter. The police showed up, wrote up a report, and then got word that another series of murders was in progress across campus.

The police eventually found Cho Seung-Hui's body among those of his victims. Now he is in a neat bag awaiting disposal as well.

YOU are responsible for your own safety. YOU are responsible for preserving your life. Just because you are in a place that is deemed to be "safe," or a "weapon-free zone" doesn't mean a thing. Schools and employers and the government ban weapons from all sorts of places. Unfortunately, the only people who will comply with such bans are the people who aren't a threat anyway: law-abiding citizens. Criminals will bring their weapons into a "weapon-free zone" any time they want to. They will kill. Any time they want to. That is why they are called "criminals." Duh.

Why do you think Cho Seung-Hui chose to attack defenseless students? Why didn't he attack, say, a police station, or an army base? Because he knew that THEY have guns. Where would he be relatively safe in committing murder, without being hurt or killed himself? A "weapon-free zone," of course. His school.

There are many Cho Seung-Huis in the world. If they can't find a gun, they'll use a knife or a sword. If they can't find a blade, they'll use a blunt object. Or their hands. They are out there. And someday they may come through your door, chain it shut behind them, and move toward you. What will you do?

I know what I will do. I have the training and a permit to carry weapons because I choose to take responsibility for my own life. No one else can protect me, and I legally cannot (and should not) expect them to. No one around me knows whether or not I have a weapon. It's none of their business, and I'm certainly not going to advertise it. But I know that I have the capacity to defend myself if I need to. If someone tries to hurt me or kill me, I can do something about it. I will exercise my human (or alien) right of self-defense to ensure that I survive.

Isn't YOUR life worth that much, to you?

Downloaded the camera

We did easter eggs! The darling wife tells me we do this every year. I'm not sure we do. But every time we decorate them, it's a new thing for me, really, since we only did it a couple times when I was a kid.


We also poured gravel paths through the yard, to use up the gravel that we didn't use in the shed's foundation. It looks very nice, and it helps keep us from tracking more dirt in the house.


Our float tree, decorated with lobster-trap floats. They come in all different colors. We just find them on the beach and bring them home.


This is just one brush pile that we've collected. Each weekend that we do yard work, we collect about eight of these. They're full of sharp cat's claw vine. Napalm won't kill this stuff - you have to dig it out.


We've cleared out a huge chunk of dead brush and such. Now the palmettos and palm trees that were buried under it are free to grow. That will look MUCH nicer.


I've never seen a twin-masted boat like this, so small. It's not a sloop or a yawl....technically, I think it's a ketch... I will have to look it up. I think it's home-built.


A quiet day at the beach.


A yellow-crowned night heron (Nyctanassa violacea).


The birds have been busy... I like their footprints. This pattern looks almost fractal.

The Farce is with me

I've been playing "Star Wars: Battlefront 2." Particularly the battle on the ice planet Hoth, from "The Empire Strikes Back." I like this one because it's relatively easy to pick out targets against the snow. Plus it's a wide-open battlefield - you can shoot a long way, depending on the weapon.

The view through my Imperial sniper rifle of the oncoming AT-AT walkers.

Rebel snowspeeders attacking the Imperial AT-ATs. They even try to wind cables around their legs (without much success).

I just love these walkers. They're the coolest. Totally impractical, to be sure, but cool all the same.

I get to drive a walker! FOOM goes a Rebel dish gun emplacement.
Walkers have two heavy lasers and two turbolasers. The turbolasers have a rocket-like concussion. It flings people every which way.

If you score enough points (capturing checkpoints, or killing the enemy), you get to play as a Jedi hero. Since I'm playing the Empire side, I get to play Darth Vader.

I've captured the checkpoint in the Rebel hangar where the Millennium Falcon is parked.

Okay, tired of playing Empire. Now I'm blasting AT-ATs from the Falcon's hangar, clear across the map (about 4 kilometers, game-scale).

Invasive plants

We just spent an icky day pulling down and digging up the roots of Macfadyena unguis-cati, also known as cat's claw vine. It is a nasty thing, growing across the floor of the jungle in matted clumps of tubers that look like turnips, and scaling trees up to 100 feet tall, enveloping them in a thick cocoon of thorny vines. It is truly horrible stuff. I asked the wife if I could buy a flamethrower, and she said no. Instead, we put on the thickest gloves we had (not thick enough, unfortunately), slashed the vines at the base and as high as we could reach with the pole chainsaw, and then pulled them down and wound them up into thick thorny bundles. Then we proceeded to dig out as many tubers as we could find. It took nearly all day. Horrible work. We both were clawed viciously on our arms and legs, and we bled profusely. My leg looks like I was attacked by a bobcat. It hurts a bit, too.

Maybe she'll let me buy the flamethrower NOW.

Submission

I'm sure that U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi thinks that while visiting terrorists in Syria, she's showing respect by wearing the hijab headscarf. It's actually a symbol of submission, not respect. I'm also sure that she probably doesn't realize that the hulking Syrian security guard behind her is there not so much to ensure her safety, but to ensure that she behaves "appropriately" (i.e., wearing the hijab).

Poor Nancy. Ignorance is indeed bliss, I suppose.

Update: The Wall Street Journal weighed in on Friday April 6, suggesting that Ms. Pelosi is in violation of the Logan Act of 1799, updated in 1994. Says Robert F. Turner, "House Speaker Nancy Pelosi may well have committed a felony in traveling to Damascus this week, against the wishes of the president, to communicate on foreign-policy issues with Syrian President Bashar Assad . . . The Logan Act makes it a felony and provides for a prison sentence of up to three years for any American, "without authority of the United States," to communicate with a foreign government in an effort to influence that government's behavior on any "disputes or controversies with the United States." "

Music

I'm making inching strides in figuring out how to put a jukebox on this page so I can inflict my music on you (of course, you have your volume control) ;-). Blogger.com is not especially friendly to such things, but I've seen other folks do it, so obviously it can be done. Unfortunately my knowledge of HTML is fairly limited, but I can copy and paste with the best of them.

Off to work. I am NOT sleeping well in this hotel. I think it's just too close to the airport - subsonics from the jet engines, or radar harmonics, are poking and prodding me as I sleep, making sure that's never a good, deep sleep. Oh well. I will just be snappish and irritable to my co-workers.

A NEW CAR!!!

I am the proud deflower-er of a virgin rental car this week. Forty-one kilometers on the odometer. Hertz claims I am the first renter to drive it. Bahahahahaha! BAHAHAHAHA! BAHAHAHAHA! I HAVE THE POWER!!!!!

Actually, it doesn't have power ANYTHING. Manual door locks. Manual crank windows. Manual mirror adjustments. No cruise control. I'm lucky it has an automatic transmission.

I don't think I have seen a rental car that wasn't power-everything, in the past seven or eight years. This is a first, in a very long time. But, it IS a Chevy Cobalt (the sad-sack replacement for the benighted Chevy Cavalier). Only rental fleets and poor liberal-arts college graduates would buy such a thing.





Nevertheless, I am happy to have a car. My Canadian boss was very kind to rent it for me. She has to rent it using her corporate card, or else I, as a heathen American, get charged three times the normal rate because I am required to buy the insurance. Sigh. So I will take what I can get, without complaint. Or at least without much complaining.

Meet The Robinsons

The Robinson family of the future. Recognizable voices in the film include Angela Bassett as the orphanage's house mother (not pictured), Adam West (Batman) as the pizza deliveryman (center, back row, in red), and Tom Selleck as Mr. Robinson (not pictured).

The evil Bowler Hat Guy, who is a dead ringer for Snidely Whiplash, the arch-enemy of Royal Canadian Mounted Police Officer Dudley Do-Right in "The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show." He is very stupid, and very funny. His evil bowler hat, Doris, does all the thinking for both of them.

There's a very funny exchange in the film, where our hero Lewis claims that he's from Canada, to explain away his weirdness. "Oh, you must mean North Montana!" responds one of the Robinson family. "No one's called it 'Canada' in years!" I thought that was VERY funny. Most Canadians probably won't.

A good film, not a great film, but very watchable and entertaining. Three-and-a-half stars out of five. Marvin says "check it out."

More pictures

After the 50th picture, Becky finally told me to put the camera away.

This is not an artifact of the lens - there really was a perfect halo around the sun that day. We were impressed.

Halo-in-sunglasses.

A swarm of birds coming in to roost at dusk.

A cluster of clams in the bay where we were canoeing. The water's only a few inches deep there.

Dave with a whiting (Menticirrhus littoralis). I thought they were juvenile redfish (Sciaenops ocellatus), but I think he's right, it's a whiting. Both of them are drums (so-called because they "drum" or purr in the water with a buzzing sound). We caught bunches of these things. They're not keen on artifical lures, but generally from about 9:00 AM until 1:00 PM, they are insatiable for shrimp.

Dave bleeding from a crab's pinch. That'll larn 'im.

Dave with another whiting.

It's very difficult to hold onto a slimy fish when he's determined to get loose.

A week's vacation

Back from a week of vacation with my wonderful wife and her niece and nephew, who are about to turn 18 and are ready to graduate from high school. We had a nice week together.

Fishing...

Dave with a ladyfish (Elops affinis).

Dave with a crab, which if you look closely, has a hold on him as well, enough to make him bleed.

Dave fishing at sunset.

Lying around on the beach with friends...

Becky, Dave, the darling wife, and friends Rosemarie and Ed

Canoeing....

Enjoying nature...

some type of crab that seems to be hanging out all over docks in our area

a great blue heron (Ardea herodias)

moon next to a dead tree. I thought it was cool.

An anhinga (Anhinga anhinga, isn't that easy). Remember, anhingas are freshwater and have straight beaks. Cormorants (Phalacrocorax floridanus) are saltwater, and have hooked beaks. Otherwise they look very similar. Anhingas have no oil in their feathers (unlike other water birds like ducks), and so after getting wet, they stand around like this for hours, drying out their wings.

Great egrets (Ardea alba) in mating displays.

Watching an offshore boat race (large colorful noisy watercraft piloted by wealthy small-dicked men in mating displays)

Picking up sponges and fossil bones on the beach...

Watching trawlers puttering around...

...etcetera.

It was a nice week, but kids are a lot of work. I enjoy having my time to myself. I'm ready for another vacation, this time for myself.

Here also, finally, are pictures of our garden shed, which we finally built in early March.

We also recycled more than 150 boxes from our two successive moves.

There are many more projects on the to-do list. You will see them here eventually.