Saturday, February 28, 2009

Life's a beach

Still winters day down in the Narrows this afternoon after a good mornings work. Dog and I went to stretch our legs down by the cold clear waters. Me to watch the Grebes. Buffleheads and occasional Blue Heron, and Dog to find any old bone he fancied crunching.

I often think that a Beach is the charnel house of the sea. It's where all the odds and ends cast into the deep tend to wind up. We get a lot of logs because they escape from the daily log boom traffic. The whole foreshore is made up of pulverised shells and larger rocks, periodically resculpted by a stormy night. No analogy, just an observation.

Still plenty of snow lying about closer towards town. Just when you think you're about to get rid of the last batch, down comes another. Fortunately the new all weather tyres on the van cope very nicely thankyou.

An Austrian researcher thinks he has found the cause of belly button fluff; but quite frankly I'm not shaving my belly, which he claims is the 'cure'. It's like all this anthropogenic climate change' nonsense that keeps on popping up in the news. Fluff. Fluffy news about fluff all.

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Day at home

Worked up until ten last night, and find this morning that I've done everything I should. No meetings to attend today, and I'm told that town (Nanaimo) is a bit chaotic right now with last nights snowfall.

Wife is road testing new all weather tyres on the van and just phoned home to let me know that she got to work safely. Dog and I have been for a walk in the three or so inches of snow lying on the ground. I've read the online papers, had breakfast but right now I'm not in the mood for anything serious.

Outside, the Narrows are a steely blue and the trees and hedges lumpy whiteness. No more snow is falling.

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Snow falling on Cedars

The sound of snow falling on Cedars makes is a crackling, pattering sound like rain on high voltage lines, but less harsh and with a pattering as the flakes dust down onto the fragile leaf litter from last fall. That is what I learned today. It has a calming effect.

Busy day. Finally got my correspondence and notes organised. Which as Wife might be heard to remark; "Blood and sand Jones?! You, organised?" Such is life.

There's fish out there

Walking Dog this morning, I cast my eyes down to the waterfront at the choppy tidal vortex that forms every high tide half way down Dodd Narrows opposite Mudge Island. Flecks of white scum, like petals, floated in five or six metre long stringy slicks up the channel. The shallows were a particular shade of turquoise.

Could all be a trick of the light of course, but conditions do seem to mimic the early stages of last years Herring run. May be worth getting my fishing kit out.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Standin' in the rain


A bit of musical nostalgia from the days I used to do 150 mile commutes in the deep damp deadness of an English Winter. Headlights framed by pitch darkness and lots of late lonely nights driving to and from jobs all over the country (and sometimes out of it). "Out of the Blue" blasting out of the cheap cassette recorder in the dash of whatever pile of junk I was driving, that leaden feeling in the gut from too much Red Bull and junk food. Sometimes I miss those times, but then my sanity returns.......

Monday, February 16, 2009

How do they get away with this....


The UK Daily Telegraph goes downhill even further with this piece of pseudoscientific bullshit.

As global warming worsens, the idea of vast projects to alter the Earth's environment is moving from fantasy to necessity.

When are the media going to concede that the Earth isn't really warming, and all the calls from the alarmist faction are just that; alarmist. Oh well, what the hell, they wouldn't sell so many newspapers then would they? My pet peeve is that they actually paid someone to write this.

Sunday, February 15, 2009

To paraphrase the bard...


I see the zealots are at it again on the BBC with more dogma driven drivel. We're all going to die the heat death of the universe blah-de blah ad nauseum. With a solar minima shaping up, and Earth's global temperature dropping (Although not by that much, but it is unseasonably chilly outside) you'd think the 'climate change' guilt-trip mob would give it up. Little or no correlation with rising CO2 (Should be good for the plants when things finally get round to warming up), Polar Bears fine; coral reefs in fine fettle; currently a bit too much arctic ice, but then that's just me. So where's the warming? Apart from inside incomplete computer models and the heads of the 'true believers'?

To paraphrase William Shakespeare in his Scottish play;
"And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: man made climate change is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.."

Saturday, February 14, 2009

Demonstration of failure

I'm not normally a combative sort, and generally speaking would walk ten miles rather than pick a fight, but there are some people who just sit up and beg to be taken down a notch. Today's stressor were a bunch of noisy people who marched into the Bay store at the Woodgrove Mall, North Nanaimo shouting "Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey! How many animals died today!" loudly and repeatedly as they paraded around the ground floor waving lurid placards of skinned animal carcases (Yes I did see, and no, they didn't impress me) amusing the staff, and giving security the runaround.

This was a demonstration by supporters of PETA, generally referred to by those who know what goes on at one of their 'animal shelters' as People for the Elimination and Termination of Animals. I think because the Bay store occasionally sells a fur coat, the six or seven people who marched around the store with one person yelling the same tired slogan over and over thought they were justified in doing so.

Now I'm a keen supporter of free speech and the unfettered (Within reason) right to make your point publicly, but quite frankly these few people made the organisation and cause they purported to hold dear look like a bunch of right unwashed wallies. They startled around a dozen shoppers, because that's all there were in the store at that time. As demonstrations go, it was pathetic, both in numbers and effect. Had there been a hundred people outside the store protesting, now that would have made their point far better. However, knowing Nanaimo, with it's relatively high proportion of hunting and fishing types isn't quite ready to be included in the confused muddle of modern metropolitan thinking. Did the demonstrators wish to end the wanton slaughter of animals? If certain web sites are to be believed, then the members of PETA would be better off visibly demonstrating that their own house was in order before further campaigning devalues their cause further.

However, these demonstrators did succeed in one aspect; they made me want to go all Clint Eastwood on them with a 12-guage.
"Get off my lawn!" Great line. Must go see Gran Torino.

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Old tech, but good tech

Steve Winwood always was a genius with that old electric piano. Two of my all-time favourite songs, 'Valerie' and 'While you still see a chance' . Utter, unadulterated brilliance.

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Other times, other places

This afternoon, after progress chasing a couple of things, I visited a blog I used to write for when Ilived and worked in the UK. Although there have been no new entries for the last year, it still receives over sixty specific visits minimum, per day. Go figure, as they say.

Mind you, I did used to spend over three hours a day on it in addition to the day job which inspired the blog. This blog, by way of a contrast, gets less than half an hour a day on average. The thing both blogs have in common is that they are simply brain dumps of my febrile ravings.

Am also getting mildly teed off with the pop up adverts that say "Barack Obama / Stephen Harper / Paris Hilton's IQ is 120+; how about you?" For the record; my IQ was once 'officially' measured at 147. More generally my usual spatial / language / mathematical object handling ability runs around the 136 marker. Reading rate measured at 1250-1700 words per minute with 70% recall. That and a memory which Elephants can be heard commenting on as follows "Watch what you say around that Jones character - he remembers every word". Which often makes me ask the question; "If I'm so smart, why ain't I rich?" Which I am not very (Although definitely not poor). Yet I would concede that most of my own lack of millionaire status boils down to a lack of confidence. Ergo, one is drawn to the conclusion that when it comes to smarts, IQ is not the only measure.

Back to work.

Monday, February 2, 2009

New MSS

Have begun work on a new MSS while the interminable wait for Agents and Publishers to actually read what I've sent them goes on. Frankly I've gotten past the point where I'm worried about how good any of the MSS samples and screenplay I despatched are; that's all old news as they say. I'm busy on the next one in the series.

In 'Falling through the stars' I'm busy outlining a post apocalypse northern Europe and the survival of one of the novel's key characters; this time it's the younger sister of the lead character in 'A Sky full of stars' and her journey out of the remains of the Gaian European prison-state to find her elder brother, a now publicly disgraced North American Space Corps pilot. There is another sister in the story arc, but I won't bring her into the tale until the demands of narrative warrant her appearance. Tell the story, and let the characters play their parts.

Back in the outside world, I see that the eco-insanity proceeds despite the climate and weather naysaying every argument the Warmista's put forward. Face it guys, the Earth isn't doomed, but humanity might be if the media keep regurgitating the statist soviet-like agenda of the boneheaded greenies. How many times does humanity have to try the 'top down' approach and find it failing? Idiots.