Barkerburgh

So I’m walking along Gerrard and a parked car I’m walking right past starts to back up. This really annoying voice starts to talk out of the rear bumper. It’s a woman’s voice, with a vaguely Japanese accent, with the pitch and timbre I usually associated with anime Japanese schoolgirls, like in ‘The Cat Returns.’ ^{[wikipedia] [imdb]}

“This car is backing up. This car is backing up. This car is backing up. This car is - ” you get the picture.

I actually thought it should have a New York accent like Rosie the Robot Maid ^{[wikipedia] [imdb]} (Jean Vander Pyl ^{[wikipedia] [imdb]}) on ‘The Jetsons.’ ^{[wikipedia] [imdb]}

Gratuitous wikipedia ^[imdb] and imdb ^[wikipedia]  entries.

I can haz Gryffindor scarf?

Yes, I canz.

(Knitted by Anneli.)

I could use some additions to this list. Whaddaya got?

1> Your teeth are white enough, your house smells fine, you’re tall enough, you don’t need a goddam Swiffer. Don’t believe anything - anything -you hear in a TV commercial, even the ones with grossly mistreated puppies or genuinely starving children. Everybody’s got an angle. You’re a rube and you’re the mark, one way or another.

2> Whatever it is that you don’t think you should try, but want to; don’t try it. Unless you really want to, you have excellent insurance that won’t be invalidated by doing it, and your loved ones understand your desire. You-know-or-like best two out of three.

3> Be persistent, but see #2.

4> I’ve worked in retail. The customer always thinks they’re right. The same goes for managing a telecommunications network. The same goes for your boss.

5> Bacon and eggs and coffee always smell better than they actually taste. So do a lot of things. But not everything. Fresh picked arugula, for example. You decide.

6> Snobs are nobs. But see #7.

7> If you don’t have a conscience - and you know who you are - pretend that you do. “The most important thing is sincerity, and once you learn to fake that…”

8> Learn where the bodies are buried early on, so you have leverage, but, mixing metaphors, don’t show your hand too soon. Cultivate a poker face.

9> Learn to cook well.

10> Learn to clean up after yourself.

11> Certain people may tell you you’re too fill-in-the-blank. Screw ‘em.

12> There’s winners and there’s losers, but everybody dies.

13> Carpe diem, and make lemonade when you have to.

14> When all else fails, pick yourself up, brush yourself off, and start all over again.

15> Mistakes = experience, but only if you’re paying attention. Remember that definition of insanity.

16> Always begin at the beginning and start as you mean to go on because well begun is half done. It’s called the Poppins Principle.

17> Listen to the experts, but they’re only experts, not God.

18> God is not an expert. He is a generalist.

18a> God does not exist, God luv ya.

19> Resort to base trickery when you have to, because the other guy almost certainly will.

20> Everybody’s an asshole except you and me and I ain’t too goddam sure about you.

21> If it ain’t broke, break it. Everything can be improved, to the limit of available technology and human imagination, so keep up with the current state of technology and use your imagination to the max. See #25.

22> Never be idle at work. There’s always something to learn, to review, to improve, to fix, to share, to steal, to integrate.

23> Choose your friends wisely. Even though sometimes you have no choice in the matter. Like practically everything, that last fact is a blessing and a curse. Sometimes you end up with great friends, sometimes you realize how close you’re keeping your enemies.

24> When you’re at the top of your game, you have nowhere to go but down. So stay on top. See #21.

25> You ain’t rustproof. You ain’t shatterproof. You ain’t even stain-resistant. You should strive to be like Caesar’s wife. But that’s idealistic rubbish; do your best, be honourable, don’t lie (unless you have to, and you feel you can defend the lie later), respect your co-workers, unless they’re assholes (so screw them before they screw you, because they will, I learned that one the hard way) and remember that Ann Landers was wrong when she said that Time Wounds All Heels; some absolute sunzabitches die at great age in their own beds with their families around them.

25> Do your best. But next time, do better.

26> Everybody else is an idiot. And so are you. Start at #1.

Taken earlier this year at Jokers Hill.

In 1814, the British ship Nancy was hiding up the Nottawasaga River, trying to avoid the American ships Niagara, Tigress and Scorpion. She was discovered and attacked.^[1] Being no match for the three together, she was burned to the waterline, sank and Nancy Island formed around her hulk^[2].

Each year the battle is re-enacted at Wasaga Beach^[3].

Sounds like fun.

Two things.

a> I’m very happy that Showcase (Rogers 39 in my neighbourhood) is now running the third season of the excellent hard science procedural drama ‘Regenesis’ ^{[wikipedia], [imdb]}.

2> I just finished a short story that I really like.

I don’t have many interesting stories about my parents or my ancestors. But you probably do. More than just a few of you have one or more immigrant grandparents, or one or more immigrant parents; you might even be an immigrant yourself.^[1] You may have heard stories all your life about what it was like back in the Olde Countrye before they came here, or what it was like here after they arrived. You may have heard stories of successes and failures back home, and sorrows and joys, of terrible things like riots or pogroms or wars, or of great things like boat-lifts and war-brides (or war-bridegrooms). Once they got here, on whatever coast, did they know the language? Was there confusion about everyday customs and manners? Did they happily adjust or did they murmur about how ‘that’s not that way we did things, but alright, let’s try it and see…’

Since the World Wide Web will probably only fail if Humanity does, you should take a video camera, or a digital audio recorder, or even a good old fashioned tape recorder and ask your family members about their lives, then put it all online. Don’t let them forget anything, or, being gentle, don’t let them gloss over anything either. Their stories are not only their stories, and not stories just for you, but they’re all our stories as well, even if we don’t share common ancestors for ten thousand years. Their meme’s the thing in which we’ll catch the conscious of your kin. Yeah, it’s a stretched metaphor but gimme a break; it works and it’s context appropriate.

Even if a line of your relatives weren’t immigrants. What if they were here for two hundred years. Or ten thousand. There could still be a kick-ass story there. Get it in binary and post it.

Get recording. Aunts and uncles too, by the way, and cousins back home, and even neighbours from the same village or the same block who ended up here, wherever here is. Oshawa is the same as Suzuka. Prague is the same as Vancouver. Don’t let anything get forgotten, always remembering that even though it’s all subjective, it’s still worth more to humanity than leaves of gold on a tombstone.

So here’s the highlights of my family history that I know of, a bit from each side.

There was a family legend that my mother’s father had come to Canada shortly after the Partition of Ireland to escape a murder charge. I don’t remember who I heard this from, but it was probably one of my two young adult male Peterborough cousins, the father a Scottish immigrant Plenderleith masquerading as Dunn (his mother’s maiden name because it was easier to spell when he came here), when I was a young teenager. I found out several years ago, from an online genealogical website that my grandfather’s line of my family had been in Canada for a couple of generations before the Partition and were just farmers and ne’er-do-wells up around Huntsville. Can’t find that reference now but I remember reading it quite clearly. I believe the website I can’t substantiate before the family legend.

My mother once told us of an event in her one room school house in or near a village near Huntsville called Ravenscliffe. It was Valentine’s Day, probably around 1940 or so; Ruthie Sinclair’s mother had made her a red and white crepe-paper dress for the school party. Yes, people used to do this, at least well into the Sixties. Lillian (my mother), a boy named something like Podie Robertson (or Robinson) and some other students took Ruthie into the bathroom and splashed water all over her to make the red crepe paper colour run into the white. I don’t know what the consequences were, but I’m sure you can imagine. Lines, cleaning the brushes, emptying the woodstove, or even worse.

Now, my father, Norm (yeah, I know, I still laugh) was the youngest of his Raft of the Medusa of siblings. He was born and raised most of his childhood in a company house on the property of a gravel quarry right near the Trent Canal. The quarry has long since flooded and is now (and only fairly recently been) called Lake Kirkfield. At least in the early Seventies, the flooded quarry was mysterious, and coolly primal, for me and my local relatives when we were kids.

View Larger Map

The big blue body is that flooded quarry. The long, curved, obviously artificial blue line in the bottom left of this image is the Trent Canal. I’ve posted a different version of this image once before.

He was born in 1930 (obit 1993), and when he was young, the only way to get into the village of Kirkfield was by a horse-and-cart in the summer and a horse-and-sleigh in the winter. Whenever my grandfather didn’t come home from the hotel in town (where he’d been drinking all afternoon; this was during the Depression) at a reasonable hour (no streetlights, no motorcars, no GPS, and what they used to call miles of desolation), my grandmother (the old harridan, the old termagant, the old virago; I shouldn’t have to point this out but, while she wasn’t actually a gangster, she, a maiden Stewart or Wilson, I don’t remember, was by marriage,a, but not the Ma Barker) would send Norm in the cart, or worse, the sleigh. He was the baby of the family, by many years, and he hated having to do it. But he told me this story decades later like it was a fond memory. I’m really glad he never had any access to Usenet, or, God help us all, what Usenet would become; shared porn and mutual misery, angst,and blame the parents.

=;]

The Roller Coaster Database entry on Canada’s Wonderland.

Wikipedia Category of Roller Coasters by manufacturer.

Wikipedia Category of Amusement ride makers

Wikipedia Category of Amusement Parks

Wikipedia list of amusement parks by continent

Wikipedia’s portal to ‘Amusement Parks‘

Wikipedia article on the American Coaster Enthusiasts

This was fun just browsing for this stuff.

I obviously have amnesia about all these, but one of you might have reminded me.

Go to YouTube and enter ‘Planet of the Apes’ in the search box. Browse.

Enter ‘Terminator’ in the search box. Browse.

Type in ‘Land of the Lost’. Larf.

Go to retrojunk.com and waste time.

Go to Google and type in something like ‘24.5 kilometres in miles’ or ‘1 hogshead in litres’.