Large Fierce Mammal

Happy New Year Tinkerbell, you shapely minx. Today, part muse, part spirit animal.

It’s all over but the pyrotechnics and we are here at this singular point in what seems customarily and repetitiously perilous times with two bits of rhyme for your edification. I have kept both simple to facilitate ease of consumption notwithstanding the reader’s state of inebriation, and they will remain enshrined here for return visits from those who awaken wondering what the hell just happened.

I had intended to offer up an epic poetic treatment inspired by a scholarly tome I was recently made aware of that frames appreciation of a well turned female derriere as a racist act, and the dance move known as “twerking” as a gravely heinous variety of cultural appropriation. I soon learned that will have to wait until the bell has tolled twelve and a few suns have cycled through the heavens as, not unlike Tinkerbell’s hips arresting her passage through the keyhole, I have found the subject too broad to be rushed.

First, a toast!

Again here we stand on a kind of frontier,
Ere the twelfth ringing chime marks an end to the year,
Raise glasses and voices in sending it hence
In hope that the next makes a little more sense.

And the main course, presaging much in the year to come. Happy New Year.

Say What You Mean

By LFM

Explaining twenty twenty-two is quite a daunting chore,
All the words you need mean things they’ve never meant before.
A dictionary’s not much use, and even less your friend,
They’ve long abandoned lit’racy to follow every trend.

For good or ill, all languages will grow through common use,
It’s how we know that “masturbate” is also “self-abuse”,
And if you feel a burning need for looking up “compliance”,
You’ll find that common use defines you’re “following the science”.

To go and look up “woman” is particularly fraught,
That’s seven heavy volumes full of nothing like you thought.
It’s faster on the internet but first let me remind you,
You’ll need a VPN or else the thought police will find you.

A closing word from Overly Manly Man (Source here).

So here we are again, Goode Reader, a few days into the ascent to Spring. In a world that widely prefers wringing hands over the skilled use of them, this is a perilous time for everyone aboard ship, wanted on voyage or not. Never forget though that the thrill of being among the chosen is subject to changes in complexion depending on who’s doing the choosing.

Of all the sins committed against the True Arte of Intelligent Discourse, what I hate the worst is the usurpation of meaning for the most heretofore clear, unambiguous, and even innocuous terms. With that in mind, and the most heartfelt of thanks to all of you who made the trip to linger here with us on this Long Winter’s Night, here to sing us out is a bit of rhyme in the spirit of remedial pushback.

Climate Change

By LFM

I remember a time that when visitors spoke
Of “climate” where I live, we laughed at the joke.
We can’t make it fit and we really won’t choose to,
What we have here is “weather”, and it’s not to get used to.

Nature’s shown us her smile and lashed out with her worst,
So some years are boomers while others are cursed,
As all Nature’s things live and die by Her power,
If we don’t like the weather, we just wait an hour.

Greetings from Lulu, Loyal Feline Retainer, shown here while the mice were still stirring. (Mrs. LFM photo — click to enbiggen)

Here at the LFM household, Christmas Day 2022 has spiraled in a whirlwind of delights to a delicious and fragrant crescendo, leaving all concerned teetering on the brink of Glazed Ham fueled oblivion. The best of all this season has to offer to you and yours from the House of LFM, and please accept this ribald ditty to see out the day.

Here’s a Thought

By LFM

‘Twas the dark night of Christmas
And all through the house,
Not a creature was stirring,
Not even a mouse.

For Lulu the Barn Cat’s,
Curled up in a ball,
Digesting her dinner
From eating them all.

The Lads of the household,
Sons One, Two, and Three,
Fell asleep on the floor
Festooned ’round the Tree.

There to dream Boyful dreams
Of adventures untold,
Of boys turned to Men
Ever Trusty and Bold.

And I said to my Goode Wyfe,
“Let’s leave them to snore,
“Head up to the boudoir
“And start on ten more.”

Christmas themed art on a brown paper bag, perfect for festive swigging of the covert sort. Artist: Viktor, LFM Son #1, Whynacht (Click to enbiggen)

The picture that crowns today’s effort was done, as the caption states, by LFM Son #1, Viktor as a school art project to decorate a Christmas gift bag. It was when he explained to me that Santa and his departing reindeer are rendered in black due to their being silhouetted against a lighter starlit sky that tonight’s bit of verse started taking shape in my mind. While I asked and was granted permission from him to use his art at the top of this Christmas Eve episode, I will not, at present, be reciprocating with my own for him to read it.

Christmas Favours

By LFM

Milk and cookies here and there,
Get left as standard Santa fare,
Though hearty grogs to curl the beard,
Are more the way his tastes are veered.

What frigid drafts may fan your flames,
Santa braves for fun and games.
Not for sissies, Christmas Eve,
Whate’er you do or don’t believe.

And don’t forget though Santa’s sainted,
He’s still a Man howe’er he’s painted,
He’ll think no ill this dark December
Of thankful lipstick on his member.

“Hunters in the Snow” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, oil on wood, 1565.

Winter, in latitudes where sub-freezing temperatures can occur, brings with it harsh realities that only frantic and organized preparation in the months prior can meet with any hope of success, leading to the passing down of parables such as the story of the ant and the grasshopper, and the legend of the Wendigo. This is not hard to grasp, but the significance of the winter solstice is so profound that it has not gone unnoticed even by the inhabitants of lands with much more benign climates, where the season doesn’t ride in sharing a horse with the Angel of Death. ~ A Long Winter’s Night – The Winter Solstice is the Reason for the Season

We have now reached that point in the year once known as “mid-winter” when people far less sophisticated than nowadays were in charge of naming things sensibly. You sophisticated moderns, don’t try this at home.

They called it that because harvest time at Summer’s end, evening breezes tinged with just a hint of colder than usual, leaves turned to colour and falling from trees, and days marked by an end to long twilights in favour of night’s rapid onset, declared agriculture a non-starter and was rightly considered the start of Winter in earnest. After the Winter Solstice, and even though the worst weather normally associated with Winter was still to come, the nights grew shorter, the days longer, and all signs pointing to an eventual Spring raised hope of a restart to the cycle of rinse and repeat. All you had to do was not die in the meantime. (more…)

Blood Snow by Russian Roulette Studios.

The Winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere occurred today at 17:48 Atlantic Time, and so marked the first step in our march toward Spring by way of an uncertain road. And again it draws forth this annual event — A Long Winter’s Night — unleashed here this evening to dog your heels until Boxing Day, when there may or may not be actual boxing.

For the moment, I invite you to find what comfort you can amidst our uncouth rabble, and raise your cups to this darksome ditty as our welcome to you all.

 A Feast of Blood and Snow

By LFM

On this longest of nights in the year drawing closed
Let the Hunting Horn sound and awaken the dozed!
The cook fires are tended, their laden spits turning,
Draw nigh to the hearth, slake your savoury yearning!

Tomorrow’s sun burns just a little bit longer,
Though the cold breath of Winter blows ever the stronger,
May our vexatious foes learn too late what we know —
Blood’s easier followed when dripped upon snow.

Shit Storm (Source: Linkedin.com)

I long ago adopted the policy of placing gravity on observable outcomes and not on what people say about their involvement in them. I recommend you start doing that too.

Another thing I adopted long ago was a sensitivity to how often I’m provoked to say, “Welcome to Canada — The country where nothing is ever settled”

This season of Dark Sentiments finds us in the midst of some inquiries into assorted Federal Government shenanigans. The inquiry into the 2020 mass murder of 22 people here in Nova Scotia, another into what level of justification or legal authority the Federal Government had to invoke the Emergencies Act as a measure to clear elements of the Freedom Convoy out of Ottawa, and of course review and public testimony in the leadup to the vote on Bill C-21 (the Liberal government’s much hyped “update” to the nation’s firearms laws).

A Liberal preacher of doom
Took a gun owner up to her room.
They argued all night
As to who had the right,
To do what, and with which, and to whom.

By all appearances, the propensity of this Federal administration to act as though keeping the hooples in line is the primary purpose of government, leveraged by law enforcement both willingly and unwillingly, is at the root of all three processes, and runs the risk of not casting anyone involved in any official capacity in a particularly favourable light. A rolling buck gathers no blame. (more…)

Lunenburg Academy near sunset in Autumn 2012 (Mrs. LFM photo)

“I attended elementary school at Lunenburg Academy, a massive, brooding, castlesque pile completed in 1895 on a windswept hilltop in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. The school grounds are bordered on two sides by the Hillcrest Cemetery, and my walk to and from school passed first in front of the local funeral home before following another two blocks along the border of the oldest portion of the town’s largest burial ground. Once at school, for a child with a powerful imagination, a simple trip to the bathroom was an adventure rivaling anything Tolkien wrote about taking place in the Mines of Moria, the washrooms lying as they did deep in the lonely creaking bowels of the Academy’s basement so far from any hope of salvation.” ~ Musings as Hallowe’en Approaches

Lunenburg Academy retired from being an active school in 2012 to pursue other ambitions and generally spend more time with her family.

Lunenburg Academy

By LFM

The Lunenburg Academy
Stands tall on Gallows Hill,
And at its feet lie all the graves
The town has come to fill.

A solemn place as graveyards are,
But not a silent one,
For graves that watch the schoolyard field
Where children play and run.

A lovely balance, I believe,
To start and end a story,
Where children take their lessons by
Their own memento mori.

The concept of Armageddon isn’t an invention of nuclear armed modernity. For those of us whose formative years were incubated in the warmest parts of the Cold War, Armageddon in those days looked like a short, sharp, war not unlike the one so recently ended back then, but that played out not in the span of six long years but in hours. Here in Canada where no family was untouched by the horrors of World War 2, the man-made geography of bustling cities, limitless black ribbons of highway and railroad spanning the country coast to coast, pristine homes and gardens, had weathered the storm of the conflict unmolested by enemy action, even as the population swelled with returning soldiers, sailors, airmen, and assorted other Canadians called abroad who knew first hand what post-war Europe looked like. Sounded like. Smelled like. Felt like. Everybody knew what had happened twice in Japan. They also knew that the means to that end was in the sole possession of the Unites States of America.

Nobody in the game thought that imbalance of power would last forever, or even particularly long, and even after the Soviet Union got into the business, the general belief was that even a nuclear war would be winnable in the traditional sense of granting overarching supremacy to the victor. (more…)

Source: Tasting History with Max Miller

Cultures the world over have funeral customs involving food. Food for the dearly departed to take on his or her journey into “the afterlife’, and of course food for those left behind.

Relevant recipes abound and some funeral services will even provide suggestions for the menu.

In these parts, and setting aside the still uncommon but growing interest in wakes, a traditional funeral involves a viewing of the remains combined with personal extension of condolences to the bereaved, attendance at graveside for the interment which may or may not be restricted to immediate family and persons of special significance, and at the end of it all, a reception. More recently, this has undergone a slight change with the funeral attended only by family and invited guests, followed sometimes weeks later by a “celebration of life” where people talk to the assembled guests about how the deceased person affected their lives (always for the better in such a public venue) and otherwise tell entertaining tales about them. Both the traditional reception and the celebration of life share one commonality — That’s where the food comes in. (more…)