Wednesday, December 28, 2016 — 3.18 am — -3˚C / +27˚F clear and ‘dark’ in Atlantic Canada —
*** Post Script First — Thursday, December 29th — -1˚C / +30˚F @ 11:11 pm — Just to start this off with something extraordinarily positive — Wonderful Family Friend and Sister we all would have adopted if we had the choice — Lisa — got engaged to her friend Alan — & he seems to be somebody who loves and values her and will cherish her the way she deserves to be cherished. ((( Hey, the odds were tipped so far in the morbid direction in 2016 – something GOOD had to balance it out — 🙂 🙂 🙂 )))
— The ‘Holiday Spirit’ didn’t hit full blast until Christmas Eve, driving home from an emergency run to get a spark plug and 4 stroke oil for our non-starting snow-blower. It was raining on top of maybe six inches or more of semi-recent snow – made the snow look good – lots of houses were decorated with pretty LED lights. Neighbourhoods with a lot of kids had blow-up minions (snow minions?) in front of a couple houses. There were deer made of light (inspired by Harry Potter books?) here and there and with the rain coming down, we flipped to a rock and roll station on the car radio and got ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ to complete the inspiration. Greg Lake might have added a little with “They said it would snow for Christmas – They said there’d be Peace on Earth. But here it just kept on raining – while we wait for the Virgin Birth-” / “The Christmas you get you deserve”.
— Too many people gave up and left the planet this year. On Boxing Day (the 26th) we heard that 572 musicians died in 2016- as opposed to a more normal number, more like 50 in 2015. Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane and Greg Lake of Emerson Lake and Palmer hit me harder than most. Prince checked out when I was too rattled to totally embrace the depths of grieving. It was like you can only get hit in the head with a baseball bat so many times before you get so used to the jarring and the electric shock waves running up and down your spine that you can almost shrug off the next couple bashes with an attitude something like, “So what else is new? Hey, thou forces of Evil – Is that all ya got?”
— Sigh, and then Leonard Cohen? – ( Ouch! – Too many very personal memories of listening to his records with various people, and a friend who sang “Suzanne” in local church run coffee houses way back in the sixties – At least, that’s where my memory places it. And then the love of my life having a special thing for her country-man Leonard? And I think we tried to sing a couple things together? okay, so she sang and I croaked along? sigh. Well I have only one thing to say about Leonard checking out the way he did, “Well – Hey-ey, that’s no way-ay to say-ay goodbye”!
— And then Carrie Fisher? CBC has been pretty good about broadcasting highlights from her career. One of the other networks up here had to bash us in the soul with repetitions of how much she struggled with drug addiction issues. When you mention drug addiction three times in a two minute piece, that’s rubbing it in. I don’t remember if CBC news said anything about her struggle with her bi-polar ‘disorder’, but they did mention that she was a spokesperson for people with ‘mental health issues’.
— I’m going to quote my cousin here, “Hey, Carrie, Kick Ass in your next life!” and offer a nice friendly hug to who-ever she might be next time I see her- in whatever world, dimension, or state of being. — Ya did good, kid! —
— sigh –,
— Happy New Year, Happy New Life, Happy New Attitude —
— Hey, God, have we suffered enough yet? Can You just kind of move the bad guys into their own nasty dimension and let them believe they’re still here? And let the good ones move on up to a New Heaven, New Earth? — Are we there yet?
Monday, October 17, 2016 — +13˚C / +54˚F @ 6:46 am in the damp and dark in Atlantic Canada — Cousin Karen’s Birfday & Long Time WPKN – FM General Manager Harry Minot’s Birthday too —
— This is before I added the title and my name to the right of the avatar/’model’ there. There is more green ground cover below where I cropped it here, if I can figure out how to cover her ‘gear-axe’ I might think about using more of that – I love her expression, and the final touch that made this look really good to me happened when I moved the bar to make it look like the sun was shining from the lower right hand corner off-camera here. That happens if you select the correct setting and set the time to after midnight.
— Saturday I went browsing and searching for a photo of what one of the main characters described as a ‘Stone Lake’ in the novel I started writing in 1987, picked up a couple times, might have tried to re-write from the beginning half a dozen times and got pretty far, um, this would be the third time. The latest working title would be “The Stone Lake Revelations”. Several acres of forest land were blasted away to reveal nearly flat rock. The farmer who discovered this thought it was done by what was described as a massive tornado that touched down there in a freak storm and tossed whole trees miles away. But, um, not to give anything away, that is not what happened….
— I should add the not-quite-so-tightly-cropped photo here later, but for now —
— And –
— I wonder what this looks like from space? [ Thank you, Yoko – ]
— This avatar is actually a builder character who’s been messed with using facial and body morphers and dressed up so she isn’t running around half naked.
Saturday, October 15, 2016 — +5˚C / +40˚F @7:36 pm in the dark in Atlantic Canada —
— I couldn’t get a decent screen shot of her face without a cloud overhead. Schnarr! –
— Only took me all freakin day to put the above together in a 3D game building application. But there it is – Something like this might end up being a book cover if I get the danged thing finished in time to ‘submit’ it to a contest.
Saturday, October 15th, 2016 — -2˚C / +28˚F Grey, chilly and ‘forlorn’ looking out there in Atlantic Canada @7:43 am —–
— I told my nephew I’d find this picture and send it to him. Only took me two full weeks?
— Um, let’s see, I was looking through some recent very beautiful photos that have come at me through the ‘Tweet-Us-Sphere’ – I wanted to pretty up the screen that pops up when I fire up the computer that doesn’t do much more than grab and keep most of my email. There’s some other stuff that goes into orbit, and I don’t even look at it. But anyway – I also wanted to work on this blog and see if I can pretty it up a bit – [ shrug ] I found this instead and here it is.
Friday, September 30th, 2016 — -1°C / +29°F foggy & frosty @ 7:07 am in Atlantic Canada — Kayla Yetman’s Birthday 🙂 —
— This looks more like a sunset than a sunrise to me, but –
— This morning’s foggy start didn’t look anything like the above – Of course, I was closer down in it than up at the point of view in the above shot or work of art or both.
— I have no idea where that is, but I think I would like to be there, relaxing to the sound of falling water.
— With the black rocks and their surface patterns, I don’t think that’s anywhere I’ve been.
— TTIP = TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. { I capitalized the A in Atlantic – they didn’t. }
— The above river and canyon might be in Portugal. { or maybe the tweeter is in Portugal? Or both? } But that looks like another wonderful place to go for a boat ride.
— A favourite local weather person is retiring, today would have been his final pre-retirement broadcast. I really liked his voice and his delivery. This guy sounded like a best friend and valued neighbour. He earned his retirement, but I’ll miss hearing his forecasts.
— Of course, even in a day filled with inspiring photographs, we are reminded that not everything is peaches and cream. And not all that peaches and cream isn’t poisoned with Genetically Modified Ingredients. –
— Nice sentiment, but with the epidemic of youthful suicides – especially in First Nations/Native American communities, too many tears don’t get a chance to teach anybody anything but intense pain. I believe it’s time to pray that all people in distress get enough loving attention to pick them up and pat them on the back and convince them way down deep that they are loved, that they are valued, that they mean a lot to all of us. Forget the hate-mongers.
— I wrote the ‘poem’ in quotes after reading about a form of Chinese or Zen poetry. The first line makes a statement. The second line expands on the first. The third line introduces something else entirely. And the fourth line ties it all together. I knew I scored with this poem when a serious musician friend read it and nearly fell on the floor laughing. That was before ‘rotfl’ entered our consciousness as a thing.
— Looks like somebody had fun with World Building Software. 🙂 Or they photo-shopped the heck out of the above…
— Um – okay, I’ll admit it, I sometimes have trouble seeing photos of this place without hearing strains from Led Zeppelin’s “Houses of the Holy” album. But this is one ‘cool’ photograph.
— Um, I don’t think the people living in Pompeii the day of the eruption thought Nature was all that wise. That statement may have had some kind of Karmic poetic justice behind it, or brought some really tough lessons for those who didn’t survive – But, other than that, yeah, Nature and Wisdom go hand in hand, 99% of the time, and human ‘consciousness’ will doubt that connection during the other 1%.
— Yeah, I’ll let nature and some busy photographers do most of my talking today. It’s a beautiful world, Don’t Frack it up. —
Tuesday, September 27th, 2016 — was 4°C / 38°F & still dark @ 6:51 am in this little corner of Atlantic Canada — Mary Ellen S.’s Birthday 🙂 { Heart Heart Heart } —
— Once again, I thought I’d check the ‘Tweet-Us-Sphere’ and found a lot to think about, a little bit to gag over, a lot of cute kitten and puppy photos and some really gorgeous – although possibly photo-shopped – landscapes and even city-scapes. This morning.
— I have spiritual connections with both J.L. and Donovan – Used to calm crying babies down by playing some of Donovan’s riffs on my Ovation guitar – “Don’t let appearances fool you -“
— If today had a ‘Tweet-Us-Theme’ it was “Stop worrying about how others see you/ Don’t measure yourself by what you see/think you see others achieving/being-“
— I get conflicting opinions about what Steve Jobs was all about. He is portrayed as a person who liked to shock people, who ‘outed’ people who didn’t share his style of doing things, [ shamed a guy as a ‘virgin’ for wearing a suit to a meeting at Apple when Jobs showed up barefoot and ultra casual —> in a TeeVee movie about the development of the personal computer – ] A close friend had her brother bring Steve Wozniak home to a suburb of Los Angeles with a version of one of the earliest Apple computers which he was bringing to a science fair in La La land – from photos, I guessed that Steve Wozniak would be a lot easier to get along with than Steve Jobs. But then somebody told me that Steve Jobs was a Yogi and handed out books on Yoga philosophy to lots of people. & studied the same school of Yoga as George Harrison & other notables — famous people in this group did not go on television singing the praises of their Guru or anything like that. If you didn’t know Who they followed or what they believed, you wouldn’t learn from the media.
— Wow? – Inspiring, hey? But then a Yogi friend told me I lived in Paris in a recent life. I was an Artist who supported my serious endeavors by doing pencil sketches on the streets for paying customers. At first I thought that was a bit off, then, come to think of it, I was super frustrated in high school when 99% of my drawings did not come anywhere near to measuring up to what I thought they should be. & Later, I discovered that when I told my ego to shut the bleep up and let go and let my hands do their thing – I was surprised at the results. And, when I was in my late 30’s I dreamed that my middle sister lived with or near me in Paris in that life time and she was quite taken by the charisma of a guy who was the center of attention at a lot of parties. She married that guy in this life and learned that he was an egocentric jerk – heck, he tried to pick up the woman I brought to their wedding – but she didn’t see that — That was her first marriage — The second one turned out a lot better.
— If this guy [ Clif ] told me to head for higher ground, I would grab what I could and beat it in a hurry – climb the highest mountain I could reach.
— Um, in the 1939 World’s Fair { Before my time – but I saw black and white television memories of it – } and even the 1964 World’s Fair { I did not go to that one either, a friend took me to the park that might still be at the site of that one. } There was lots of talk about how wonderful the future would be – we’d have flying cars and smart highways that we could hook our non-flying cars up to and sit back and relax, be pulled along and warned before the connection would drop us off at our exit – And we would have loads of free time to pursue higher education and creative hobbies because robots would be doing a lot of the repetitive mind numbing work we all had to do before this new age of enlightenment would dawn on us. Then greedy people began busting unions and implementing third world economic warfare on the middle class and creating a climate of constant fear and anxiety so they could manipulate all of us into the state of mind where some of us actually think Hitler’s rhetoric recycled through Donald J Trump’s mouth makes sense and his ideology just might save us from the monsters under our beds and in our kids’ closets. { Do Not Believe That! } {{{ Read “The Energy Non-Crisis” by Lindsey Williams }}}
— I know the feeling. Before my fifth birthday, one night when I was having difficulty getting to sleep, lying there in the dark, watching ghosts float across the room toward me in quite the stately procession – I did finally start to drift off and then heard a voice I thought was my grandfather talking to me through the wonders of a magic telephone enabled by the springs in my bed? “Do you know who I am?” – Me: “Yeah, you’re my grandfather-” “I have a message for you, Somebody ‘Important’ over here believes you could be quite a good writer if you want to be…” some things would be changed in this life, rearranged to develop and accent my writing abilities — not everything would be ‘easy street’ but I’d get a lot out of this, if I said ‘Yes’ — I said, “Yes.” And while still young, like before sixth grade? I quite often felt drawn to pads of blank paper, and really liked the feel of some books when I picked them up and held them. I felt compelled to write stuff and then often felt awful because I had taken these beautiful blank pages and filled them with very sloppy handwriting and stories that went nowhere. My first story? A dog and a rabbit were best friends – that’s all I remember now. I knew dogs and rabbits were natural enemies, so I wanted them to be best friends. I figured I had to start with kids stories, right? {{{ & Aimee Richardson and other young actors impressed me when twitter suggested I check them out. REALLY impressed me. I used to think anybody who looked as good as some of them do would never need to use their minds or their ‘higher sensibilities’ if all they had to do was smile just right at some ‘eligible rich guy’ and have anything they needed or wanted delivered to them on a virtual silver platter – but too may of these kids { who are young enough to be my grandchildren, shhhhh don’t tell anybody I admitted to that…. } really do have beautiful ‘old souls’ and that shines through – 🙂
— Looks like Newfoundland – or northern Scotland or Scandinavia or Russia or —–
— I did go out of my way to copy and save a tweet underlining in red a lot of things that were not asked during last night’s debate. That tweet was posted by somebody who obviously has it in for Hillary. I am not a Hillary fan. & I have a sneaking suspicion some more ‘Fit’ will hit the ‘Shan’ before the election. But ‘we don’t need no stinkin recycled third reich bull chips!’ either. How far do you think we could get with a write in campaign? Or wait a minute —-
— I have no idea whether tons of Republicans found out about this ‘Vote’ and heavily ‘stuffed the ballot box’ – but – look how well the third and fourth party candidates are received in the real world beyond US borders. { the ‘republican’ results smell too much like A ‘Newt Gingritch Clone’ got every man woman and child card carryin’ republican with a twitter account to hurry up and vote here ]
— I told you we get more than our share of cuter than bleep kittens and puppies and even bears and other scary things within the expanding microverse that is twitter — & If I know anything about orange cats — this guy might have just pooped in there or brought a bloody dead mouse in with him — { or her } —
— I might add another smallish bit liberated from twitter pages the other day —
Saturday, January 9th, 2016 -(-3˚C / +27˚F — Dark and hopeful @9:45 pm in this little corner of Atlantic Canada )-
There is a lot of -“#ResistCapitalism”- on Twitter this evening.
Binged on season two of “Manhattan” last night. Watched all ten episodes. That was one heck of a television series. I betcha the guy who first described television as ‘the wasteland’ would have been positively impressed-
But then I woke up with a wicked headache this morning, and after a little bit of coffee and pleasant distraction later and I was fine.
I did let Jassper drag me up and down the street around sunset, he needed to sniff ever inch of both sides of our cul-de-sac here. & he only needed to roll around and bond with the snow and ice twice, but he did need to stick his nose deeply into snow banks in several spots, had to be reminded to, “Easy- Take it easy!” several times and only nearly yanked me off my feet once.
Re: Mercury Retrograde: I seem to be deeply introspective about my writing this time. & Deeply concerned about what I ‘put out there’ and/or leave behind when I graduate to the next level of existence – I would much rather leave behind a positively inspiring legacy than be rolling in riches. Now where do I concentrate my efforts? Hmmmmm-
Friday, January 8, 2016 -( 25˚F / -4˚C & “clear” @ 9:00 am in Ithaca )-
It’s been a while since I’ve been able to even attempt this. Maybe Mercury Retrograde is trying to tell me I should be keeping up with goals I sort of set myself when I was silly enough to believe I had enough time to follow through with them.
Okay- My Canadian Friends have a new Prime Minister and a new “Government” that can’t be as bad and can’t be as mean-spirited as the ex Prime Minister or his ‘Conservative Government’. One friend told me he used to have a ‘protest button’ that said “Part of the way with LBJ” when a lot of misled Democrats were wearing “All the way with LBJ” and others were wearing buttons that said, “The Great Society / Bullets Bombs and Bullshit” I was a little bit young back then and thought it would cool to be old enough to get away with wearing a button that spelled out “B.S.” for everybody to see.
And now I’m sitting here wondering if the Justin Trudeau ‘government’ can possibly live up to the hopes and dreams of anybody who voted him (and ‘them’) in- I suppose dreams just might come true-
-Okay, I’m almost ready to hit the ‘Publish’ button, I should probably run this through the spelling checker first and see if I can keep this going at least until Mercury stops moon walking backward across the sky-
Sunday, Father’s Day, June 21, 2015 -( 12°C / 54°F & raining @ 11:11 am in our soggy corner of Atlantic Canada )-
— We thought we lost all the content on a blog that was hosted on another server. But we knocked ourselves out and learned how to fix problems that shut down the other server and then learned how to export content from the ‘infected’ blog to this one.
— And it looked like the process worked. At least, so far-
— We may have lost some photos and images, but I can’t tell for certain yet.
— & right now I’m trying hard to remember what the header image on the old site looked like.
— But anyway, Doug Otterson did a lot of work on the original blog and much of what we managed to import was work he had done, including quite a few pages copied from Indigo Night Eagle’s older blog.
— Um we hope you enjoy or at least find this interesting.
Monday, 23 February, 2015 -( -44˚F / -20˚C & clear @ 10:00 pm near Ithaca )- -( -8˚F / -22°C & clear & windy @11:00 pm Closer to Halifax —jim w—)- — { Headlines compiled by douglas j otterson & jim wellington, with help from —jda— } { Some things change, some articles remain. Do you know where your survival kit is? —djo— } { 7,002 new tweets since 10:00 pm last night – aaaaaaaaa! —djo— }
February 23rd: 1633 – Samuel Pepys, navy expert/composer (Diary, Memoirs), born in London, England. 1646 – Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, Japanese shogun (d. 1709). 1685 – George Frederic Handel, Halle Germany, baroque composer and (Messiah, Water Music). 1734 (or 1743?) – Mayer Amschel Rothschild, Frankfurt, founder (House of Rothschild). 1868 – William E B Du Bois, Great Barrington Massachusetts, civil rights activist and writer (Souls of Black Folk). 1889 – Victor Fleming, American film director (“Wizard of Oz”, “Gone with the Wind”), (d. 1949). 1904 – William L Shirer, historian (Rise & Fall of 3rd Reich). 1915 – Paul Tibbets, US Air Force retired Brigadier General and Pilot of B-29 “Enola Gay” over Hiroshima (d. 2007). 1929 – Elston Howard, Yankee catcher (1st African American NY Yankee/1963 AL MVP). 1938 – Sylvia Chase, St Paul Minn, newscaster (ABC Weekend News, 20/20). 1939 – Majel Barrett, Columbus Ohio, actress (Christine Chapel-Star Trek). 1940 – Peter Fonda, actor (Easy Rider, Lilith, Wild Angels, Trip). 1944 – Johnny Winter, [John Dawson], American blues guitarist (Silver Train), born in Leland Miss, (d. 2014). 1949 – Marc Garneau, Quebec City Quebec, Canadian astronaut (STS 13, 77). 1951 – Patricia Richardson, Bethesada Md, actress (Double Trouble, Home Improvement). 1963 – Bobby Bonilla, outfielder (NY Mets, Balt Orioles, Marlins), born in NYC, New York. 1964 – Dana Katherine Scully, fictional character (X-Files). 1994 – Dakota Fanning, American Actress. (& I won’t tell because I don’t know) – Binnie Klein, Poet, Performance Artist and WPKN programmer. }
Eating peanut products early in life can reduce allergy risk, study suggests { }
CN Railway, Unifor avoid lockout with tentative deal { }
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Offbeat News:
Canadian Sniper in the film parody we’ve all been waiting for { }
‘I just totally collapsed,’ says man after 168-hour Nickleback marathon for charity { }
Nonchalant dog shovels backyard hockey rink, wins winter { }
Moose on the loose gets police escort in Ontario { }
Blowtorches being used to melt sidewalk ice in Windsor { * I think I remember a really old issue of Mad Magazine suggesting various ways snow cleanup could be made much more effective and easier – one of them involved flame throwers, but the ‘after’ frame showed an entire city under about 20 feet of water. * —djo— }
Nestlé and Hershey pledge to make their candy bars healthier { * If G.M.O. ingredients are involved, don’t buy it. * —djo— }
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Local / New Brunswick / Maritime News:
Larry’s Gulch junket alternatives in Fredericton come with cheaper price tags { }
Flu-like illness forces closeures at two N.B. hospitals { }
Poverty group prefers income tax increase, not HST { }
Irving pipeline gets retroactive approval fro EUB { * New Brunswick’s Energy and Utilities Board has granted an Irving Oil company retroactive permission to build an oil pipeline that the company already built without permission last year. * —“Not Good,” —djo— }
Larry’s Gulch review findings will ‘absolutely’ be made public { * This is a New Brunswick ‘scandal’ that sounds way too much like a slight of hand distraction to take your attention away from something else. The Province owns a multi-million dollar fishing lodge where they entertained visiting politicians and invited newspaper reporters who were fired for conflict of interest violations. There also seems to be some confusion over when the lodge went from being ‘private’ to ‘publicly owned’ & where the line between private and public functions was drawn. The new Liberal government has decided that the lodge can only be used for functions designed to bring jobs to New Brunswick. *** “Any time I hear a politician utter words like ‘jobs’ or ‘Leadership’ I know my ears are about to be assaulted by pure and utter b.s.” — Douglas Jay Otterson *** * —djo— }
Energy East Pipeline construction training premature, David Coon says. { * The Energy East Pipeline is a project that is being bitterly contested in Quebec. Activists cite dangers to wildlife, and say the claims of loads of jobs for local people is highly over-estimated and point out that New Brunswick will lose money in this deal unless they re-write the agreement with the corporations that will own the pipeline. And instead of refining and distributing the gas/oil the pipeline is supposed to deliver, here, they claim the resources would be exported, benefiting foreign interests at our expense. Oh, and Irving Oil stands to save and reap loads of money if this goes through. * —djo— }
— We should quit here and publish this fiasco before we look at the clock and realize it’s next week already and we haven’t gotten anything done in our ‘real lives’ —djo—