Barkerburgh

There’s this cool show on Canada’s History Channel called “Cities of the Underworld“. It’s on Friday nights at 8:00pm, and repeated during the week.

The current host is an enthusiastic amateur name Dan Wildman, who keeps up a level of excitement as he crawls through 2,000 year old sewers or hangs in a sling over a 10 storey deep tufa mine.

Aimed at the armchair archaeologist or crypto-historian, it’s all about the simple fact that any city that’s old enough has layers. Sometimes those layers are caves or quarry-caverns, or once ground-level ruins that serve as the base or foundation for more recent or modern structures like churches or even just apartment buildings, whose tenants may know nothing about what exists only a few metres below their building. In Rome there’s Maecenas’ villa. In Naples there’s underground tufa quarries dating back to the city’s founding as a Greek colony (They’re not called Neapolitans fer nuthin’, ya know.) In Paris there’s ancient sewers. There’s tombs and cisterns, graves and catacombs, cult sites and strange (sometimes really strange) ossuaries.

And it’s not just ancient history. There’s subways and bomb shelters, secret labs and secret lairs, access tunnels and escape routes. Cool stuff often unknown today, and inaccessible to everyday tourists.

Lotsa, lotsa fun. It’s even got an IMDB entry, with discussions.

Leslie and Peter (and Simon)  invited me to join them for a Sunday afternoon on the Oak Ridges Moraine at the former Koffler estate known as Jokers Hill, now a U of T biological reserve.  It was a horse farm once and the outbuildings still stand.  There’s an overgrown race-track overlooking the Holland Marsh on one side of Dufferin and hectares and hectares of beautiful forest on the other

As you all probably know, Peter is an Indiana Jones biologist, (the Tibetan Plateau, the California coast, Western Australia…but just let him loose in Pellucidar or on Skull Island) and he’s worked a lot at Jokers Hill so he knows the ecology and biodiversity of the area.  And where to find newts, one of which Simon found fascinating.

(I have a picture of the newt he found that Wordpress won’t let me upload…)

What I got was an amazing natural history tour of the area, from the bedrock up, the moraine being about 100 metres of glacial sediment topped with that beautiful forest.

The day was warm but neither hot nor humid.  There was a light breeze even in the forest and, lots of sand.

We saw many patches of white trilliums ranging from one or two in number to a dozen or fifteen or more.  There were several lone red trilliums, patches of different kinds of violets, of little blue wildflowers, of yellow ones, a patch of dog-tooth violets (leaves only, no flowers) in a shaft of sunlight, small streams, swampy seeps, a lovely stand of quaking aspens demonstrating the reason for their name in a mild breeze, the scent of sun-warmed hay off a small feral meadow, a low stone wall made from glacial erratic boulders (probably from back in the olden days when settlers tried to farm the moraine), an old-fashioned stubby beer bottle which I snagged, many cool rocks which Simon found and carried around until we found a pond or a stream, and only one (that I noticed) patch of good old jack-in-the-pulpits, one of my favourites when I was a kid in Georgetown nearly forty years ago.

We must have walked about fifty kilometers - or like three or four

We had a nice French farmyard lunch of baguettes, cheeses, sausage, pate, oranges, and water - not local, from a water-cooler

When I got home, I napped like crazy.
 

The A&E Andromeda Strain Remake

If nothing else, it’s got a good cast. Updated, it nevertheless follows the general storyline of the original movie and book (which I think stands up better than a lot of science adventures from the same era), and of course, there’s iPhones and cellphones and references to WMDs, North Korea and Homeland Security (how 1984 / Brave New World / THX1138 / Sleeper is that name anyway?).

You probably know that the action starts in the isolated Utah town of Piedmont, where townspeople find a recently fallen satellite and take it to the firehall, where they open it, exposing the entire town to an immediately deadly pathogen, killing almost everyone. Soon there are vultures.

What got me was a Ford commercial about 20 minutes in during the first episode. A couple is driving a Ford vehicle through a town identified on-screen as Piedmont. They see a vulture right beside them and they hightail it outa Dodge (Piedmont). Struck me as real tasteless.

& Et Cetera.1

There’s this Cialis commercial with a bathtub overflowing, a turkey burning in the oven, a dog scratching to be let out and a lawn sprinkler flooding the front yard. There’s a nice little Spanish ditty playing as we see all this.

The husband and wife run around and turn off water and save the turkey, but don’t let the dog out.

Since they’ve been off carpe dieming thanks to Cialis, shouldn’t they have first turned off the sprinkler and the bath, and turned the oven down? Or is Cialis just that compelling?

And it’s just plain irresponsible not to have let the dog out first.

& Et Cetera.2

Egad! CBC will be carrying Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune in the fall. Rest easy, all, though. Coronation Street is safe.

Okay, so after a brief conversation with a neighbour just now, I realized something.

In the movie Dogma, Bethany was the last descendant of Mary and Joseph, and shared what was probably the mitochondrial DNA of the earthly body of Christ, hence her role in the movie’s quest.

At the end, of course, God made her pregnant, even though she had been barren, as they say.

So, in a way, since she was married to Jesus, that would make Mary Magdalene the  Auntie Christ, being as Jesus himself was the Uncle Christ.

Yer welcome and PTL.

Over the last two nights, on Space (Rogers Cable 50, downtown) they showed a two-parter that took place entirely in the ‘Mirror, Mirror’ universe from the classic series.

There was the usual duplication of people in nearly identical capacities or roles (but working for the Empire not the Federation), and the link to our universe was the Defiant, which had been lured through a transverse spatio-temporal discontinuity (I made that term up) by the Tholians.  They captured the Defiant, killed the crew and began to dismantle the ship which was technologically advanced.

Mirror Archer (no evil Cartman beard) and his crew captured the ship from the Tholians (no beards), and so on.

Scott Bakula’s acting was horrendous, but the show was good.  Grim and sad, even the ending, but much more satisfying than the other episodes that I saw before I just stopped watching it.

Okay, score one (and only one) for Braga and Berman.  Lucky dummies.

…while I was housesitting for Peter and Leslie. Go on. Guess! (more…)

Peter and Leslie heard this (or a version of it) on the BBC in France a few years ago.

I googled a few key terms that they remembered but all I found was this transcription from an English girl’s blog on Bebo. It’s the right bit, but no attribution or credit…

Does anyone know who originally recorded and/or wrote it?

Welcome to Hufflepuff

You’ll just have heard the Sorting Hat mention, in his curiously insensitive song, how Gryffindor is for the Brave, Slytherin for the Cunning, Ravenclaw for the Wise, and Hufflepuff for… The Rest. And I realise that to hear that, and then almost immediately to find yourself sorted into Hufflepuff, well, it’s not quite the ego boost one hopes for on one’s first day at school.

You are one of “The Rest”. The Sorting hat has looked deep into your very soul, and what it saw there evidently didn’t impress. Oh, I’m aware that the hat has, in the past, occasionally described you as “kind”. Yes, and I’m sure that you also have lovely hair.

Some of you may be wondering about the thinking behind the school’s decision to put all the appalling duffers into one house, call it “Hufflepuff”, and give it the symbol of a Badger. A little harsh, you may feel. You may even, who knows, be questioning the wisdom of trusting the school’s entire admissions procedure to a Hat.

These are not, alas, questions I can answer. All I can do is urge you to look on the bright side. At least you’re not in Slytherin! (Another curious decision from the school there. To dedicate an entire house to the children in its care who are Evil. Surely a recipe for trouble.)

Anyway, being in Hufflepuff isn’t all bad. We have our moments of excitement and achievement. Last year, one of us was killed! That was exciting! And it’s something we can all aspire towards.

Oh! Lyde thinks that Vorenus had her husband killed because of his affair with Niobe, but she doesn’t actually want her nieces and nephew to hate him forever, only just as long as the television series lasts.

I never had to do this at Tim and Anneli’s because the cats were always around.  And God knows at one other house where I sometimes house-sit, petless, I don’t need to fake-purr.  Here, it’s major negotiation.

Thank God I don’t have to bark.  And I’m a Barker!  FY yer LOL!

I posted this a few years ago.

A Modest Proposal

It has long been established that bigots and the blindly prejudiced are detrimental to a society, to our society. Everyone knows this and the reasons are self-evident.

I propose that in order to lessen their effect on our children and institutions, bigots be stripped of their civil rights, eg voting, public assembly, and, in some cases, their right to procreate. It is known that unreasoned bigotry can be handed down from one generation to the next, so if the confirmed bigot already has children, then those offspring should be removed from the home.

If they are not allowed to vote, or to express themselves publicly, or to pass on their distorted views of reality to posterity, the rest of civilization will be better off.

How do we determine just who is a bigot? Quite easily. One need only apply a reasonable test to the opinion expressed by a suspected bigot. If the suspect would, for reasons of skin colour, sexuality, religion, area of origin, or other reasons, deny another individual or group the same basic human or civil right that the suspect would otherwise adamantly advocate for himself, that person is a bigot.

If we choose not to limit their civil or procreative rights, I would then propose that they, as a group, be segregated in some area that would allow them no contact with the rest of humanity, physically or in any virtual sense provided by technology. Their bigotry is insidious; given the chance it will spread among the unwary, uninformed and ill-prepared.

If society does not choose to segregate bigots, and does not choose to limit their reproductive rights, then I propose, since they will only breed more bigots, to help offset the social costs of tolerating their idiocies, and the cost of merely keeping them, that we eat them.

Thus the vile race of bigots, while ineradicable, will at last provide a fundamental and eternal benefit to society, and be enjoyable with perhaps a nice bearnaise sauce and an unassuming Niagara chardonnay.