Barkerburgh

I was always a big Inspector Morse fan, both the books and the series, and was sad when all ended as all human things must end.

Now, Kevin Whateley, who played Endeavour Morse’s faithful sidekick, Sergeant Lewis, has returned to PBS’ Masterpiece as Inspector Lewis, and is welcome. There was one episode (as far as I know) a few years ago, but with last night’s episode and next week’s promised one, there are least two more. The ads for DVDs during the show suggest there’s an entire series; whether PBS will carry it all, I don’t know yet.

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.
 

Late the other night/early the other morning on TVO, I saw this National Geographic produced show about Greece’s Rion-Antirion bridge, the longest cable-stayed bridge in the world. And it crosses a fault line beneath the sea.

It links the two towns across the Gulf of Corinth, replacing an old ferry.

The construction techniques to earthquake-proof the bridge (as far as that’s ever possible) are fascinating and the progress of the construction is amazing to watch.

One of the coolest aspects of the whole plan is that the foundations of the piers on the bottom of the Gulf are not secured in bedrock (or even to bedrock) at all. They sit on many meters of sediment stabilized with huge steel posts driven deep into the muck, and then topped with several meters of gravel.

It’s a beautiful structure, too and looks very good and fitting in this, the Future.

So Tracy Barlow, after several months living with neighbourhood jerk Charlie Stubbs, the local builder, finally bashed his brains in with a bookshelf sculpture - he lingered for a while in hospital - and got arrested, all the time proclaiming her guilt but her love for him, even though we all know that she’s hated his guts ever since she found out about his fling with Maria from Audrey’s beauty shop down the street, which was convenient for both of them since Maria moved into Charlie’s old flat when Charlie moved in with Tracy in the Harris’s old house (which Charlie bought just to piss off Craig’s grandfather who was living there to look after Craig after his mother went to jail and his sister committed suicide after killing their father) , but after Tracy found out about the affair she started this long term plot/plan to make Charlie’s reputation among the neighbours even worse than it was after what he did to Shelley - who’s having his baby, but she moved away without telling him - by faking domestic disturbances and burning herself with an iron and letting neighbourhood good-heart and goody-two-shoes Claire think was done by Charlie, all the while denying he did it but smirking to herself every time, and of course Tracy’s family are supporting her, even her unrelated brother, Peter (her stepfather Ken’s son by a late ex-wife) and her usually fairly sensible mother, Deirdre and harridan gran Blanche, but not so much by her unrelated nephew Adam (Ken’s grandson through his late daughter, Peter’s sister, and Ken’s recently deceased arch-enemy, Mike Baldwin) and, of course, Claire totally believes that Tracy was suffering from battered woman syndrome - even though she wasn’t - and she’s starting a petition to get the charges against Tracy reduced to manslaughter and get her bail because she was denied bail due to the violence of her attack on Charlie (and maybe a flight risk too) , which pleases Tracy no end because everybody likes Claire and Tracy has no qualms about manipulating everybody and everything around her any way she can to get what she wants and has been doing so for the last few years ever since she came back to Weatherfield and Coronation Street.

Damn, it takes your breath away.

Okay, so I have this totally legal, ethical and moral copy of Microsoft Encarta 2001. It has a reasonably good encyclopaedia, a reasonably good dictionary (non-etymological, but that’s okay since I know where all words come from anyway), and a reasonably good atlas.

I like the package because the encyclopaedia helps me cheat at Final Jeopardy (as if I really needed to) and when I’m watching some ‘true crime’ show, I can use the atlas to look up the little town in Kansas where the atrocious crime occured.

Here’s the thing of it. After I got my new (old) computer, I did what I did before which was to create image files of the four critical CDs that came with the Encarta package and mount them as virtual SCSI drives using one of a couple of packages I have that can do that. There were issues with the encyclopaedia but I resolved them. However, the atlas issues (the image file would mount but the system kept telling me to insert the correct CD) seemed insoluble.

Turns out that when I installed the atlas the first time, the drive letter for the virtual drive was added to the atlas’ registry entry and it wouldn’t recognize the new one when I remounted it with a new (automatically assigned) drive letter.

After a moment of inspiration, I started searching the registry for the atlas entry, saw the old drive letter, changed it to the new one, and, as you’ve probably guessed by now, it worked. And it gives me something to look out for in similar situations in the future, if there is one.

That’s why I don’t like Macs. No similar challenges. Plus they scare me.

Examples of True Mac Experiences:

“I’m not questioning your word, Dave, but it’s just not possible. I’m not capable of being wrong.”

“Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.”

There ya go.

Woohoo! I finally figured out how to do something very cool in regards to MySQL and PHP! It involves dynamic SQL strings, commas, single quotes and common sense, but it took me a week to figure it out!

You are all happy for me.

As I am for each and every one of you.

As some of you may know, I will be turning 50 on June 26, 2007, three months from now. Which is to say I will have completed my 50th year of life.

With greatest respect to my dear friends, I don’t want a surprise party, or presents, or anything like that.

Please make a donation of any size to a children’s charity of your choice or a literacy charity of your choice. I’ve included the Google strings below for your perusal.

My preferences would be The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children who do great work (here’s their donations page), and ProLiteracy Worldwide who I discovered at the first Gathering of the Fellowship back in 2003 (here’s their donations page).

Once you’ve made the donation, have them send me a note that says something like ‘ A Donation Has Been Made In Your Name To…” just so’s I know. And can feel validated.

Of course, feel free to send me a card too. But no Star Wars pyjamas for grown-ups.

Children’s Charities Google String

Literacy Charities Google String

So a while back when I was coming home from dinner at Tim and Anneli’s, I found a Dell Dimension Pentium III on the curb on the Danforth. The case was open and the hard-drive was gone but everything else, including 128M of RAM was still there. It was very heavy, so although I normally walk home from the Wright/Pekkonen household (on a good day it’s only a 25 minute walk) , I decided to take the subway, and of course, take the risk of the machine not working at all after I hauled it halfway across the frakkin’ city. It took me a while to make room for it but I finally got it working with one of my own hard-drives and Windows 2000. And it has two working USB ports so now I can use my data-spud, (as Peter K. calls my USB jump-drive and I think it’s funny…)

I’m very relieved to have two computers again that I can waste time playing games on and not working on my PHP or writing a great F or SF novel- or series of intricately inter-related short stories.

Hurray for me. And hurray for you, too, whoever you are and whatever you’ve recently accomplished.

PS, if you haven’t seen this on Reid’s blog, take a look. It’s hilarious.

What are you and your family doing Monday night at 8:00pm with the TV tuned to CBC?

It’s a live-action UK/Canada co-production (filmed in Romania) of the great classic, fairly faithful to the tale as far as I can tell from the casting, ( and the articles I’ve just seen), but with the characters as almost completely humanoid, without fancy prosthetics. Matt Lucas, of the excellent English sketch comedy series ‘Little Britain‘ (which is narrated by Tom Baker) stars as Toad, with Bob Hoskins as Badger, and our own Mary Walsh as the Washerwoman.

Here’s the BBC press pack for the production.

Why this post, you may be asking yourself?

I’m a big fan of the book, and I even wrote two short stories a few years ago inspired by my first re-reading of the book in decades.

I saw the cover picture on this week’s Toronto Star TV magazine, beamed in delight and went straight to the article.

It’s 5:01am Friday, August 11, 2006. I’m house-sitting. I’m in a mood and I don’t have my classic Pogues or The Clash (”London Calling”).

Other people’s homes. Jeezes.

Cats, customs, neighbours, neighbourhoods, the life.

At home, I’d still be asleep.

I woke up. I’m going to watch the rest of “The Aristocrats”. I’ve never seen the whole thing. I almost typed “The Aristocats.” If you’ve already seen “The Aristocrats”, that might be funny. If you’ve already seen “The Aristocats” and that’s not funny, you might already be a redneck. Joking.

Seriously.

(I’m on a Mac. I’m a PC guy. I’m not a dancing-magic-crazy-ass-jeezes-boy for Microsoft, but once y’all click on something, shouldn’t y’all get what y’all click on? Macheads: no, y’all don’t!)

Still and all, writing my novel.

(Whoa, how almost properly punctuated stream-0f-consciousness was all of that?)