Large Fierce Mammal

Revenge. It’s among the top ten of my favourite topics and our society likes to pretend it’s fallen out of favour. Bullshit. (more…)

The Gentlemen

Here’s an uplifting little bit of rhyme for you. Not sure who wrote it, but I find it catchy.

Can’t even shout, can’t even cry.
The Gentlemen are coming by.
Looking in windows, knocking on doors.
They need to take seven
And they might take yours.
Can’t call to mom, can’t say a word.
You’re gonna die screaming but you won’t be heard. (more…)

I am privileged to know a policeman with whom I have shared many a working and non-working hour, occasionally whilst quaffing an ale or ten. Our man is a retired member of the now disbanded Whynacht Security & Survival/Lunenburg – Mahone Bay Police Expeditionary Force who now plies his trade as a crime scene investigator for the esteemed Royal Canadian Mounted Police. A better man to draw a chalk line around you you’ll never meet. All this, and his family is famed for the quality of its moonshine. What’s not to love?

He’s told me stories and I’ve witnessed him doing things his wife will never hear from my lips, but I digress. Come to think of it I’ve known her longer than him and a few of the skeletons in her closet know me by my first name (Large) … but I’m still digressing. Anyway, today is his birthday and his very own wife has defined that date to me as “Dark Sentiments – Day 3”. Marilyn Munroe said, “If you can make a girl laugh you can make her do anything.” I rest my case. Today’s post is dedicated to my crime scene investigator friend, and actually also to his wife for having married him, thereby saving all other women from such a fate. (more…)

Mrs. LFM and I were recently asked to dinner at the residence of the kind of friends that don’t require the services of a food and drink taster before anything passes one’s lips. In the course of the evening I had cause to mention our preferences for dark, even black, humour. I further recounted how much of what I hold dear in life fits within the scope of the description I once heard of how the Tuareg tribesmen like their coffee:

Black as the Devil,
Strong as Death,
Sweet as Love,
And Hot as Hell. (more…)

Throughout human history and up to an amazingly short time ago, people lived in more intimate contact with Nature. The reality of what constituted a “work week” was driven by whether or not the sun was up, the current weather trends, the time of the month, and the season of the year.  Self-sufficiency of the individual, of families, and of communities was essential to survival, as was the ability to outlast hardship in the hope that better times were coming, always with the certainty that all things must come to an end. (more…)

My parents, Evelyn and Lawrence Whynacht, on their wedding day.

My mother was born and raised into her mid-teens in Montreal, Quebec. Her parents separated shortly after the end of World War II with her mother remaining in Montreal while her father moved back to his birthplace in East Chester, Nova Scotia.

When she was fifteen years old, and against her own mother’s wishes, my mother moved to Nova Scotia where she lived with her father and worked in his lumber company. It was because of this move that, a few years later, she met my father. A native of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, my father was the front man and lead singer for a Lunenburg based country band called Slim Major and his Ranch Boys. You guessed it – he was Slim Major.

Well, ol’ Slim and his posse were playing a dance gig in Chester that my mother attended. My father took one look at her and immediately started down a path that previously had never failed to get all the parts of him that mattered into a girl’s pants. Except it didn’t work this time.

And so it came to pass that, as the saying goes, he chased her until she caught him and each considered the other worth the chase.

After they married, my parents moved to Montreal where my father worked days as an elevator operator, my mother in a laundry and dry cleaning establishment, while he attended night school to learn the new and mysterious arts of radio and television repair. I was conceived in Montreal but missed being born there by three months.

I find it an endearing part of life in the middle part of the last century that the first thing my parents wanted to do when they realized I was on my way was celebrate by going out to their favourite night club to dance and drink a lot of booze.

They often told a story of how the bar’s piano player was engaging the audience by asking couples if they were there because they were celebrating a special occasion. When he learn their reason, he smiled and dedicated his next song to them. As the years went by, this became my mother’s favourite arrangement of that fine tune.

The finished product in a photo that captures how it looked mere seconds before I bit it.

The first time I read Lord of the Rings, I’m sure I was personally responsible for skyrocketing values of stocks for companies involved in the production of bacon, mushrooms, and dark, full bodied beers. I absolutely enjoy any literature that confronts me with a description of food consumed by the characters that leaves me wanting to devour whatever they’re having. Something like that happened recently while Mrs. LFM was reading The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, an espionage novel written by the late Stieg Larsson that is one of a trilogy set in Sweden. I haven’t yet read the book, but I have enjoyed watching the Swedish movie adaptation while snuggled with Mrs. LFM, and can tell you that it contains, what is for me, one of my top two attitude adjustment scenes. Go see it and let me know if you’re not sure which scene I mean. (more…)

“Morning in a Pine Forest” by Ivan Ivanovitch Shishkin

I’ve never been one to become bored by my own company. I was quite young when I realized that being alone wasn’t boring, and that to truly know boredom I had to be in the company of other people. For most of my childhood, and all of what has so far passed as my adult life, I have been able to get more out of an hour in the woods, or quietly paddling a canoe as far from human habitation as I can get in the time permitted, than I could ever find in a week in the kind of place most people usually regard as a vacation paradise. The wild restores me in a fundamental and primal way that experiencing the greatest of man’s achievements could never even come close to equaling. (more…)

If you presently own anything like this, and you obtained it for your dog's use, you really need to go fuck yourself.

In an article titled Mount Up! that appeared on the Golden Mountain Dog Solutions blog back on 2 August 2009, I wrote at length about a stupid invention that was then being marketed as the “Doggie Lover Doll”, touted as ” … the world’s first sex doll for dogs ….” I am happy to report that the manufacturer’s website has since disappeared, and like to think my article played some small role in making that happen. Alas though, there are plenty more of the same still out there. So many shitheads, so little time.

Lest it be thought that the depths of human stupidity as it impacts on the lives of dogs has been even partially explored, I must tell you that we haven’t even come close. I am here today to offer a few more shining examples. (more…)

Too many people with whom I’ve to do
Go through life with their reason askew.
When their answers arrive
Two plus two equals five
Using very large values of two.