Large Fierce Mammal

I enjoy dabbling in the creation of humourous poetry. Some day I will write a poem beginning with the line that is the title of this post.

Known only to my closest associates is that, when in my cups and sufficiently provoked, I’ve been known to throw one off the lip as it were, writing it down be damned. Alas, much has been lost because of this. I deal in limericks mostly, but I let the subject matter determine what format I use.

This comes up because Mrs. LFM and I have a friend named Stu Dunn who lives in a recycled church in Saskatchewan. Well, sort of part friend and part pet, and the percentages of which to which vary depending on mood, phase of the moon, blood alcohol content, time of day, and which way the salmon are swimming. I don’t think I do him disservice though by asserting without reservation that if he put his mind to it, Stu could make a half-assed living as a professional shit disturber. In his own words, “I don’t give a shit. Other priorities.” This doesn’t trouble us because those other priorities are parental - he’s father to two of the cutest kids either of us has ever laid eyes on. (more…)

Back when we was datin'.

Mrs. LFM and I work as a team in all our endeavours and hence, each of us rarely goes abroad in the land without the other. Well, today was an exception - she had some field work to do with a couple of our dogs while I got to do a fire alarm inspection in Chester. It failed.

Anyway, on the way home this jumped into my head.

He snickered at all the critiques
Espousing black magick techniques
Had won him the hunger
Of one so much younger
When she really just loves fine antiques.

Mrs. LFM was born in Poland during the Communist regime. She and her family, mother Izabella and father Ryszard, came to Canada by way of Italy in October 1986. Politically, this would be called a defection. On a human level, I’d call it nothing more or less than a family trying to build a better life than they could ever hope to find in cold war, Communist, eastern Europe.

Living in Italy for approximately a year as political refugees had its trials, but for a little girl it had its adventurous side as well, not least of which was hobnobbing with heads of state.

Only last week, Mrs. LFM excavated these pictures from our archives and I couldn’t resist sharing them here. Religion and politics mean nothing to children, and neither do they have anything to do with the point of this post. What strikes me here is little Diana’s excitement and grace in what had to be a supremely memorable and deeply moving moment for her parents. After all, while Catholic, they were first of all Polish, as was the man they are meeting here. (more…)

In my 27 June 2010 article titled “The End of the World” As We Know It, I mentioned the party I hosted on New Year’s Eve 1999, the night the world transitioned into 2000 and everything was supposed to go to shit. The party was held at my place of residence and business which I had named “Dog Hollow”, and was billed as “The Dog Hollow Year 2000 World Domination Party”. Mrs. LFM and I were not yet an item in those heady and dangerous days but, trust me dear readers, she was there! (more…)

Recommended reading for telecommunications utilities.

Not counting cellular and satellite providers, there are two options for telephone and internet service in Nova Scotia - Aliant and Eastlink. This article deals with the former company. Eastlink has so many issues I’ll be dealing with them in coming weeks.

As a heavy user of the services provided by both companies I would say that, as they stand today, Aliant is superior with respect to the technical competence and professionalism of its field technicians - in fact it’s a pleasure to work with them, but it wasn’t always that way.

Aliant grew out of what for many years was the Maritime Telephone and Telegraph Company, later Maritime Tel & Tel, still later MT&T, and later yet MTT. For a long time they were the only telecommunications act in town, and they acted like it. In my early days in the electronic security business it was a constant battle to get any respect out of them because they insisted on treating anyone who wanted to use their telephone lines for anything other than talking, and worse, wanted to use equipment that wasn’t supplied by MT&T, as an upstart, a threat, and possibly even  a menace capable of everything from bestiality to unsportsmanlike conduct. (more…)

Dusty - His mother looked about the same, only black with a white blaze on her chest.

Once upon a time my business included operation of the dispatch centre that handled calls for the Lunenburg-Mahone Bay Police Service and five Lunenburg County fire departments. A regular event was somebody losing track of their dog, or someone calling in to report that they had a stray in their possession. The logistics of these calls led me to the decision to have them brought to me for assessment and then, if the dog in question wasn’t unmanageably aggressive or in need of veterinary care, I would take them in and hold them for 24 hours pending the owner turning up. After 24 hours the plan was for the dog to be transported to the SHAID animal shelter but in the end that only ever happened once. In every other case the owner called, could positively ID their dog, and a reunion was orchestrated without delay.

One of those calls marked the start of a lengthy relationship between me and a promiscuous mutt named Shadow. We met while I was working a shift as Duty Dispatcher, through a phone call to the police from an exasperated man who lived on the third floor of an apartment building in downtown Lunenburg. As soon as I picked up the phone, and before the caller even started speaking, I could hear a loud chorus of yowling that, as it turned out, was coming from a dog that had climbed the fire escape to his door, and was now demanding that she be let inside. The man told me that his prowler was a female black Labrador Retriever type dog that he believed had recently had puppies because her teats were quite prominently pendulous. He said he liked dogs but couldn’t let her in because he had two cats of his own. I dispatched a unit and, within ten minutes, met Shadow for the first time.

She smelled like low tide, was wearing a grungy leather collar with out of date Municipality of Lunenburg tags, and wanted me to wear her for a hat. Full body wagging coupled with excited, non-stop vocalization that ran the full range from howling to high pitched yipping - she was one excited girl! It took a while before she came to realize that I was not going to permit her to climb up one side of me and down the other, but even after she calmed down, any attention I gave her started her ramping up again. My own dogs, of which I had three at the time, thought she was nuts. (more…)

Our kitchen is equipped with a steadily growing library of books about food and drink. Add to that our voracious surfing of blogs and other websites on those subjects and it’s not surprising our diet is as rich and varied as it is.

But this article isn’t about anything so grand as a recipe that will rock your next dinner party. Instead, I’m going to reveal some very simple and tasty tricks Mrs. LFM uses to sex up two commonly encountered ingredients - water and ketchup. We like these ideas so much we decided they were too good to keep locked up in our fridge. (more…)

Bullshittery shot with my cel phone camera.

I was on a construction site last week. A historic old church in Mahone Bay is undergoing renovations and I was there to inspect the upgrades made to the fire alarm system. One of the structural changes involved the addition of a mezzanine above a portion of the Sunday School hall. Access to the mezzanine is by means of a pull down attic hatch with integral ladder. (more…)

Less expensive "waterfront" property.

Lately I’ve found it impossible to swing a dead politician without hitting something that refers to the 2012 apocalyptic deadline. Apparently there’s no point in hand wringing over rogue asteroids any more because it’s all pre-determined. If you’re diagnosed tomorrow with a condition that will make your life unbearable in three or four years, forget about it. Things are about to get a whole lot worse.

The term “end of the world” means different things to different people. Depending on your depth of character, it runs the gamut from the extinction of all life on earth to the announcement that Ricky Martin is gay. I’ve lost track of how many times the world was supposed to end in the over half a century that I’ve been alive, but I can say with certainty that my earliest realization that there was something out there big enough to scare my parents came to me at the age of five as I watched their reactions to the Cuban missile crisis in October of 1962. I remember them sitting hunched over pamphlets and plans for fallout shelters, agonizing over how they would afford the necessary supplies and modifications to our basement. (more…)

Unfortunately, there is no vaccine to cure or prevent human cluelessness, although a 200% "Not Paying Attention" tax is being considered.

J. Allen Boone said, “There’s facts about dogs, and then there’s opinions about them. The dogs have the facts, and the humans have the opinions. If you want the facts about the dog, always get them straight from the dog. If you want opinions, get them from humans.”

It’s an unfortunate fact that what a lot of dog owners “know” about dogs is actually an assemblage of loosely connected beliefs, absorbed more than actually learned, from a combination of childhood experiences, common misconceptions heard spoken so often, and for so many years, that they have assumed the mantle of truth, television programs, movies, and things the dog they have now is trying to tell them that they just don’t get, even though they think they do. Interestingly, a lot of these people have had a series of dogs over many years that they lived contented lives with. How did this happen in spite of clueless handling? Because dogs are incredibly perceptive, empathic, and adaptable, all of which gives them the ability to work around the crazy, delusional, and often stupid side of humans. (more…)