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.

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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.

=;]

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.

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’.

By an ex-Google staffer, whose software they bought to improve theirs, but she flew the coop…

I dunno. It’s… different.

Just about here:

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It was taken by Reid, total serendipity. I get hit in the head repeatedly (every time somebody watches the damn thing) and I still think it’s funny. Maybe that’s why…

I had a great, relaxing time, with frisbees, thunderstorms, standing in the lake up to my neck for an hour at a time, and an engineering project at the mouth of the Saint David’s River, which flows mightily into Nottawasaga Bay somewhat north of the villa.

After returning from the Wasagas, Anneli took me, as a somewhat belated birthday present to see the “Facing Mars” exhibit at the Ontario Science Centre. While I had some issues with the interface for some of the exhibits, and some just didn’t work, it was still highly cool. Then we went to see the IMAX film “Roving Mars“, which was so kick ass I can’t tell you. It was basically about the Spirit and Opportunity rovers and their missions on Mars, a combination of live shots and splendid CG. One hypothetical shot showed an ancient Martian desert of rolling dunes dotted with saline lakes, and was quite spectacular, stirring in fact.

We had lunch, wandered around the other exhibits a bit and then we went to the tiny planetarium to see a show about Toronto’s night sky, although we also went out into intergalactic space for a quick peek. Beside the line-up, there was a sign telling us that if we were past it, we might not get in because space was limited. I pointed out that space was in fact infinite, got a general laugh except from a snotty 10 year old girl who said “I think they mean that seating in the planetarium is limited.” I couldn’t let her get away with that so I kidnapped her and sold to the greys from Zeta Reticuli for scientific experiments said “I don’t think so!”

Yes sirree, had me some fun.

In that time, I’ve lost my glasses. No, they’re not on top of my head, as they have often been when I’ve thought I misplaced them, even at home. First place I check when I lose them; top of my head. Not today. Not in someone else’s house. I’m typing this by luck and squinting.

I”ve also misplaced this family’s cable remote and my own cellphone I don’t know how many times in the last week. Can’t find their cable remote right now, too, either. I’ve had to watch judge shows. Bad ones.

How do you people live in such a big home? Three floors? Four? Really. How do any of you manage? Oh, it must be nice.

“Oh, we’ve twenty pairs of glasses. Each. We just pick them up on any of our floors when we need them.”

“Oh, I’ve got all my many remote controls velcro’ed to a board so I can always find them.”

“Oh, we have ten universal remote controls. Doesn’t everyone? You never know when you might need one.”

“Oh, my man Geoffrey knows where all my glasses and remote controls are. So I never give him a day off.”

Yes, well. I don’t have a universal remote or a board or Geoffrey.

I still don’t know where my glasses are. Or the cable remote.

But wait, there’s a complete “Vicar of Dibley” DVD set sitting right there. And the DVD remote. I’ll just move back a bit.

Never mind.

But my people do not go easy into that good night. And this was in the afternoon.

I didn’t run around too much with the general ruck and rumble of the water-gun fight itself, although I wanted to. Luisa came to be, with water balloons, in the upstairs john which is always a target as it is overlooking the backyard wetting-fields, and I went up to tag her, but I got suborned to her side. We got Jeff R. and a couple of young people who I’d just met that day, (and bravo for the next generation, God bless’ em), and we won the day. We did. We did so.

Reid, with a high-powered water-rifle, employed a ladder to climb up to the bathroom window, in spite of the absence of one of our dear family of friends, partly, in part I’m sure, due to a ladder accident a few weeks back, with a head thing. And Baby H. Jesus, Reid, what were you thinking? But since he didn’t fall. it was genius, and hilarious. And he pulled open the window nearest me and I took the brunt of his humid and humorous assault.

This was Simon’s first Wetstock, and he needs experience, God love’im, he’ll be three in November.

Later, in the round backyard pool, we did the traditional whirlpool, with two reversals. K. A.

As always, the company was great, the food was great and I look forward to several next years.

What’s hilarious, seriously, is, that right now, two days later, when I was expecting one or both hips to be almost literally killing me, WTF and NGOOHA, it’s my thirty year old chronic back condition that’s bugging me, not my hippage.

At this same age, my parents did not have this suite of experiences or concomitant consequences. But they didn’t have waterguns.

Mandela has turned that number around (not literally, c’mon) and created an HIV/AIDS charity organization for which this concert was a fundraiser/benefit.

Himself is 90, and when he came out on stage, he needed a cane, and an arm from (I assume) his wife. He looked great, for an actual, true, real superhero, even though his frailty was heartbreaking.

(FY yer I and just so’s ya know, I don’t follow a lot of modern popular music…)

Peter Gabriel was there. Amy Winehouse made it. And Queen showed up; with Doctor May, and the new lead singer is no Freddie Mercury, but he’s really good. There was a children’s choir called Agape (three syllables, the Greek word, not the English), and lots of African singers and performers. I think I might like (not African that I know of) Josh Groban. What a voice.

What got me was this. At one point early in the concert - I had the sound off between numbers - this middle-aged white woman came out on stage. I thought maybe she was like a housewife from like Slough who’d won a contest to introduce an act or something. She’s kinda ordinary looking, but pretty, and very earnest and enthusiastic, which I could tell even with the sound off. I wonder why a housewife from Slough gets to introduce an act at the 46664 concert. Enh, the English. Who’s like’em?

So I turn the sound up to hear this woman. She’s got that light, delightful Scottish accent that I like (and can do), and I’m thinking she now looks maybe familiar, and sounds familiar too.

She introduces the Agape Children’s Choir and starts to hum along with them and a tag jumps up on the screen; my middle-aged housewife from Slough is Annie Freekin’ Lennox!

I know.