Large Fierce Mammal

In the Universal scheme of things, your life will have the duration and meaning of a gnat’s fart, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t enjoy the view as long as it lasts.

Take a moment to share it from the vantage of Hew and Kew. Nolite te bastardes carborundorum Gentlerocks. (more…)

The ultimate “first world” problem, at least for the next few hours. Tempest in a beer mug or fart in a mitten? Source: Gasworld

As if the news hasn’t been serving up enough provocation for eyebrow raising, brow furrowing, and lip pursing to last us up to Yule, this Summer Solstice found us waking up to news out of Europe proclaiming CO2 shortage could leave beer drinkers flat — Supply in Europe runs thin just as World Cup boosts demand. Click the title for the whole sordid tale.

In a tone befitting reading of the daily funeral announcements, the article proclaims,

A British trade group says there’s a shortage of carbon dioxide in northern Europe, sparking fears that drinks may lack fizz just as thirsty soccer fans fill pubs for the World Cup.

Gavin Partington, director general of the British Soft Drinks Association, says the shortage is due to the closure of several production sites for various reasons, including seasonal maintenance. But industry publication Gasworld says the situation is worse this year because normal maintenance has coincided with technical issues at chemical plants that also produce carbon dioxide.

Yes, there is a publication called Gasworld, and if you learn nothing else from what you find here today, at least there’s that.

Yet I couldn’t help feeling we’ve been here before, and this problem may have already been solved a long time ago, in a shed in Tasmania … (more…)

Notwithstanding the presence of automotive AC, and casting all concerns of increased fuel consumption from aerodynamic drag aside, there is a place in my world for Hillbilly air conditioning. For you uninitiated to its joys, that’s driving fast with all the windows open.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the 44 of my 61 years that I have been operating motor vehicles, it’s this — with negligible exceptions, anything that bounces off the rear view mirror or window post and subsequently lands in the car with you will be:

1. Far from dead;
2. Pissed off as it can possibly get; and
3. Equipped with a stinger in its ass and a sense of having been sufficiently provoked to use it at the first opportunity.

On rare occasions, it will be a Blue Jay.

Safe travels Goode Reader.

I have just come out the other end, as it were, of a week of battle with an intestinal infection of surpassing vileness. Among other things, it spawned this.

Critic’s Notes on Maestro Whynacht’s Symphony, “A Week in Thirty-six Movements”

I attended the first performance of Maestro Whynacht’s daunting new symphony, “A Week in Thirty-six Movements”, at its opening last Monday night. The venue was small, intimate without feeling cramped, and made it easy to internalize the near full-body experience of the performance as though I were the only one there, notwithstanding the uncomfortable seating for a production of such length.

When the curtain opened, a breathless and at once feverish silence was abruptly blown away by the woodwinds and horns, whose delivery of the overture was as thunderous as it was long.

From there, each movement flowed with unbridled fluidity into the next in a primal rhythm rivaling the tides of a restless sea o’erblown by the raging gusts of a tempest. Held in their grip, I soon found myself lost in their midst so that, drained beyond caring, I realized I had lost sight of their onset, and all belief in their end.

And then, as quickly as they’d come, the raging torrents that had rushed through me seemingly a lifetime, abruptly and unapologetically gave way once again to the woodwinds alone as they opened the final movement. In this, hinting in a manner at once soothing and unsettling, that bright skies and light breezes, however seasoned with the hominess of low tide on a rocky beach, do not forfend the return of the storm.

The crescendo, when it came, crashed in with the solidity of a stone, and the finality of a thunderclap, leaving me feeling drained and hollow.

Coming to myself, I have realized that this piece is among Maestro Whynacht’s most commanding and disturbing performances. His Masterful use of the wind section to build anticipation demands full subjugation to the experience so that one would think twice of straying from the venue were it on fire.

Notwithstanding that, and Masterful though it was, this is an experience I neither recommend, nor wish to repeat.

“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.” ~ G. K. Chesterton (Image source: https://wirralleaks.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/this-is-a-bullshit-free-zone-we-do-not-apologize-for-any-inconvenience.jpg)

“In 1866, a book was published titled Readings for Young Men, Merchants, and Men of Business. Fortunately for the world, this tome has been unearthed and scanned by Google bringing it back just in time to prove my point.

“This is a world of excuses where everybody needs to have one foot over the safety line and nobody can imagine any reason for ever working without a net. Achievers are looked on not so much as people to be celebrated as they are held in suspicion of rudely flaunting their gifts just to make the less motivated or adept feel bad about themselves. People aren’t responsible for what happens in their lives because it’s always someone else’s fault, and a person’s actions, no matter how vile and base, are reduced to unfortunate manifestations of some “syndrome” or “disorder”. The evil that men do has been supplanted by the sicknesses men have, and the unfortunate outcomes of bad choices cannot be spoken aloud lest one be adjudged a blamer of “victims”.

“So now, back from the void, comes this, on the subject of ‘ENERGETIC MEN’:

‘We love upright, energetic men. Pull them this way, and then that way, and the other, and they only bend, but never break. Trip them down, and in a trice they are on their feet. Bury them in the mud, and in an hour they will be out and bright. They are not ever yawning away existence, or walking about the world as if they had come into it with only half their soul; you cannot keep them down; you cannot destroy them. But for these the world would soon degenerate. They are the salt of the earth. Who but they start any noble project? They build our cities and rear our manufactories; they whiten the ocean with their sails, and they blacken the heavens with the smoke of their steam-vessels and furnace fires; they draw treasures from the mine; they plow the earth. Blessings on them! Look to them, young men, and take courage; imitate their example; catch the spirit of their energy and enterprise, and you will deserve, and no doubt command, success.’

“Bring this forward out of the day when men were thought to be doing most of the moving and shaking, look at the references to blackening the heavens and mining the earth as being what they actually represent; metaphors for the actions of people who will commit themselves passionately to a worthy enterprise, even in the face of ridicule, injury, death, financial ruin, or even, Gods forbid, getting dirty.” ~ What You Don’t Know

There’s an old saying — “Safe as houses” — usually spoken in reference to situations that were anything but safe, but not always. There have forever been people who lived their lives in a wide eyed and blissful belief there can be some place where pain and death won’t find you.

Enter the “safe space” which, interestingly, seems to be a phenomenon built by and for people of a vintage unaccustomed to the joys and perils to be found in working without a net.

The modern societal shift toward “safety first” represents another case wherein the utterance elicits a nodding of heads and stroking of chins as if it stands axiomatic for living a fulfilled life. If risk represents any impingement on safety, then it must be avoided at all costs.

Fie, I say.

Musashi quite wisely said, “Do nothing which is of no use,” and with that in mind, I prefer a return to first principles — the safety of an enterprise MUST have no bearing on the worthiness of its pursuit. Only upon the manner of its execution. Even then, this will be governed on a sliding scale running between proceed with caution and damn the torpedoes, depending on the urgency placed upon achieving the objective.

Any other mindset will see people peeing their pants in front of the door to the washroom labelled as most accommodating their genitalia while the one oppositely labeled stands vacant. Killed in a cross walk because the sign said “WALK”, so they did.

The mantra of “safety first” is the kind of bullshit that, blindly accepted, puts someone else in charge of your safety so you don’t have to own it. So you can be the “victim” who must never be blamed but always believed.

We teach our children to look both ways before crossing the street, not to avoid crossing streets altogether. Risk management is an industry term that, by its definition, represents a mindset recognizing that even though there are risks to life and limb inherent in an enterprise, they can be identified and if not circumvented, at least limited in scope or effect.

Here’s another old saying for you — the cowards never started, and the weaklings died along the way. If the framing of that sentiment confuses or offends, go back to the top and read it all again.

I’ll close with something I wrote just short of six years ago

When a person achieves what passes for success today, it is said that they have “arrived”, as though their journey has ended, and their status is to be admired. The yardstick that measures such success is made of treasure and property, and the power they represent is the power to consume, without fear of limitation or consequence. Few today are of the sort who pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps and never forget where they came from. Who continually strive to be a better creature of Nature than they were yesterday, and measure themselves against that one rather than anyone else. Who truly seek understanding of the Truths that lie outside the artificial constructs of men, and express them through their passions. Who bring those passions to everything they do.

The art and meaning of truly striving is lost in a society that has managed to infuse the next generation of people, those who will be expected to do the work that needs doing, with an expectation of instant, easy success, mostly by permitting them to pass through the public education system on the basis of work that was “good enough”, if it was done at all. Likewise, “education” has been permitted to assume the mantle of a sentence one is forced to serve before the fun starts, rather than the lifelong, joyful process it’s supposed to be. Worst of all, in schools full of mediocrity, lacklustre has been rebranded and sold as the new excellent. ~ Art, Science, Life, and Reality – Certified Organic

“The Dead Mother and Child” (1897-1899), by Edvard Munch.

“A dragon lives forever but not so little boys.
Painted wings and giant’s rings make way for other toys.
One grey night it happened, Jackie Paper came no more,
And Puff that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar.

“His head was bent in sorrow, green scales fell like rain.
Puff no longer went to play along the cherry lane.
Without his life-long friend, Puff could not be brave.
So Puff that mighty dragon sadly slipped into his cave ….”

~ Puff the Magic Dragon, Leonard Lipton and Peter Yarrow

Puff the Magic Dragon was inspired by a poem written by Leonard Lipton in 1959, and it’s little known that there was a final verse in it that never made its way into the song — Puff’s period of mourning is soothed by the joy of finding another little boy.

I grew up in an atmosphere that was in no way evocative of apprehensions of abandonment, yet I remember an episode of heart wrenching fear that every meaningful adult in my life would die and I would be left to fend for myself. I don’t remember how long it lasted before I mentioned it to my Parents and ultimately came to terms, but I do know its genesis was the death of my Paternal Grandmother, Almeta Pauline (Eisenhauer) Whynacht, on 12 March 1962 at the age of 48 — just short of a month and a half before my 5th birthday.

There comes a time in the life of every child when the realization arrives that people and animals die, and nothing you feel, say, or do will change it.

Your Parents will die.

Every grownup who matters to you will die.

Your most beloved pets will die.

Everyone you know will die.

You will die.

For Life to be Truly meaningful, from that initial epiphany there must grow a relationship with Death as a perpetual and ever so reliable companion. An understanding that Death makes His presence felt every day in ways that have nothing to do with breath being stilled, or hearts ceasing to beat. Just as we accept beginnings, so must we accept endings, and while endings by their very definition are permanent, so too do they mark beginnings — from the death of the lamb, the feast begins.

Just yesterday, and for reasons yet to be determined, oldest LFM Son, Viktor who is just over three months shy of his fifth birthday, spoke aloud his first glimmerings of disquiet in this ever so important rite of passage. His line of inquiry implied that his meditations were anything but born of the moment — they had been simmering for a spell. My immediate thought was, “My Son, you have come to the right place.”

Today, his Wondrous Mother and I are both proud and mournful — proud this dawn broke upon a transcendent albeit still unsettled Viktor, even as we will forever mourn one incarnation of the innocently inquisitive little boy who is gone forever, now that Death has whispered His introduction into his ear.

Alimenti Formaggi (Cheese Making) from the 14th century Sanitatis Casanatense (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacuinum_Sanitatis). Some things are timeless — that may be a 14th century Dog, but I recognize the look on his face.

The production of cheese predates recorded history. It originated through the transportation of milk in bladders made of ruminants’ stomachs due to their inherent supply of rennet. There is no conclusive evidence indicating where cheese-making originated. However, it may have originated either in Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, or the Sahara. Cheese-making was known in Europe at the earliest level of Hellenic myth …. According to Pliny the Elder, cheese became a sophisticated enterprise at the start of the ancient Rome era …. During the ancient Rome era, valued foreign cheeses were transported to Rome to satisfy the tastes of the social elite. ~ History of Cheese

Discounting its unfortunate flirtations with pestilence, Human history has a glorious tradition of making microbial life its friend. Without it there’d be no wine, beer, or any other alcoholic beverage for that matter. No Sauerkraut. No yogourt, and no cheese, that being the subject today.

Every nation has its traditional and iconic kind of cheese. So much so that some (as with Champagne, Port, and Scotch Whisky in the booze world) cannot be made under the originating region’s name anywhere BUT the originating region, lest ye die. Or at least be sued..

What inspired today’s poem was the gift of a singular cheese that came (briefly) to my mouth just before the turn of the century by way of acquaintance with a Nova Scotian woman who went on a toot to the Island of Saint-Pierre and ended up living there in a relationship with a French gent lasting several years. Saint-Pierre and its companion Miquelon, are two islands located off the southwest coast of Newfoundland, at the entrance to Fortune Bay. Officially the Collectivité d’Outre-mer de Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon (Overseas Collectivity of Saint Pierre and Miquelon), the islands are a part of France. Yes, that France.

Ownership is a legacy of the fight for supremacy over North America between two colonial superpowers that ended in what I enjoy half-jokingly describing as the ultimate proof of just how much the English hated the French — after a lengthy pretense of wanting them, they let France keep Saint Pierre and Miquelon.

If anything, the history of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon has been tumultuous. They have long been a territory that has been exchanged, sometimes violently so, between the French and the English as they waged conflicts in the larger world. Originally a French settlement, the British took control of the islands in 1713, 1778, 1794, 1803, and 1815, with the French taking back possession between each of these occupations. Eventually, the French took control of the islands once again in 1816, this time permanently. ~ 5 really cool things about Saint-Pierre and Miquelon

It was when she was back in Nova Scotia on one occasion for a family visit that the Cheese Bearer was invited to a dinner event at my home, then in Lunenburg, and contributed a type of cheese she said was considered a delicacy on the French islands.

I don’t remember what it was called, but in short, it looked like Brie at first glance, had a fudgy texture, an unhealthy beige colouration, smelled like a shit filled diaper and tasted like the contents. In truth, it could have been one of those practical jokes people pull just to see who’ll take a bite, but knowing the person involved I doubt it. I can’t tell you how high in my estimation the culinary culture of St. Pierre soared at her revelation that the people there would consider what I sampled as being too “young” to be eaten just yet. (more…)

Katherine (Kat) Finck — She’s not letting go any time soon. If you have art, art has you. (Photo credit Eric Obery, West Side Graphics)

I first met Katherine (Kat) Finck back before the turn of the century in my capacity as an épée coach with the South Shore Duellists Fencing Club where I had the great pleasure both of fencing her, and contributing in my own small way to cultivation of her innate killer instincts. Of all the firsts in my life, it delights me to tell you that she is the first, and only, person I’ve ever met who literally ran off to join the circus.

Now an accomplished aerialist, juggler, co-founder of Circus Maine and the Maine Circus Academy, in actuality, her path to circus wasn’t quite so linear as that. You can gain insight into the Esteemed Katherine by way of the excellent article Always Circus written by Anna E. Jordan, and published by Maine Women Magazine in March of this year. Even with the flaw due to a misconception that Katherine is a native of Montreal (she’s from the almost equally glamorous Barss Corner, Nova Scotia), the piece otherwise transcends that to beautifully illustrate what it means to be an Artist, which brings me to my reason for calling this to your attention today.

Katherine providing spousal support to husband Joshua Oliver. (Photo credit: Casey Jacques)

To embrace any creative endeavour is to become intimate with a fundamental force of Nature. In parts compulsion, calling, hunger, need, done properly and well the act of Creation is aimed at producing the ultimate act of deception, for in the eyes and mind of the beholder, the audience, the reader, the listener, it must be what it is not — effortless.

In one of the most perfect descriptions of this Truth I have ever witnessed, the article quotes Katherine:

“When you are so busy, sometimes it’s easy to forget that art is more important than air. So you prioritize everything before the thing that’s more important than air … Creation looks like rolling around on the floor. Creation looks like staring at the wall. Creation looks like absolutely bullshit. It looks nothing. It looks like garbage. It looks like a waste of time. So if there are other things that need to get done ….”

Whatever the Art, it will always come down to this, and I believe it to be more a part of the process than it is an impediment to it. Whatever the Art, as she also says, “There’s no hours where you are a circus artist and hours that you aren’t a circus artist. You just always are circus.”

If you are serious about your Art Goode Reader, take the Esteemed Katherine’s advice and always be circus.

As many of your know by now, and those that don’t will in a moment, I have been a security consultant for 37 years. 35 with the LFM family firm Whynacht Security Solutions.

As with most successful businesses, the schedule is demanding and can get unruly if you don’t keep your saddle cinched tight and don’t spare the spurs! Even then, an outfit that’s been solving other peoples’ problems for more than three and a half decades can find itself fielding the curviest of curve balls.

Our business model is tried and tested, as you might expect after all these years, and generally pretty bulletproof against surprises because, like any good bar stool, it’s built on these Three Legs of Reality:

1. Murphy’s Law — “If anything can go wrong, it will, and at the worst possible time”;
2. Speaking your plans aloud is the best way to hear the Gods laugh; and
3. No good deed goes unpunished.

Naturally there are other influences that one must be ready to accommodate — the fact that, as the saying goes, “You will generally find that the enemy has two courses of action open to him, and of these he will choose the third,” and that anything worth shooting is worth shooting twice, to name a few — and these one must be ever ready to navigate as swells upon the sea, but they are not absolutes like the Big Three.

All to the good, because back at the turn of the year we launched a new invoicing system here at HQ that as of yesterday was well on the way to automating the process of issuing recurring billings and statements to clients carrying an open balance past the end of a month. Heretofore, for clients set up for electronic delivery, we have created the invoice or statement as a pdf and then attached it to an email for sending. Considering the volume of invoices that go out of here in a year, automating as much of that process as possible will save a lot of time … when it works. (more…)

“How much do you trust your government?

“It’s the eternal American question, but one Canadians should be asking themselves, too.

“Because in a few months, we will presumably all wake up free — for the first time in any of our lives — to legally possess recreational cannabis.

“And with that new freedom will come a new relationship with government. Government, which has for generations policed and prosecuted cannabis use, now wants become (sic) our dealer, too, with tools to learn and record every detail of our consumption habits.

“Legalization is only sensible. It was good to hear former Toronto police chief Bill Blair, now a Liberal MP and Justin Trudeau’s point man on the file, tell me flatly that there is no evidence cannabis is a “gateway drug,” the canard authorities have used for so long to justify ruining so many people’s lives.”

What you just read is an excerpt from an article published yesterday to CBC News under the title Can you trust a government pot dealer?: Neil Macdonald. He’s talking about Canada’s impending Cannabis Act brought to you by the same government that is at once working to push through Bill C-71, An Act to amend certain Acts and Regulations in relation to firearms that passed first reading in the House of Commons on 20 March 2018. It’s being sold to the non-gun owning public as a solution to the rising problem of gang violence described in another CBC piece posted 7 March 2018 titled Gang murders bucking trend toward a less violent Canada, summit told, Fewer Canadians are shooting each other than a generation ago — but gang life is as violent as ever.

As quoted above in the matter of marijuana, “Legalization is only sensible. It was good to hear former Toronto police chief Bill Blair, now a Liberal MP and Justin Trudeau’s point man on the file, tell me flatly that there is no evidence cannabis is a “gateway drug,” the canard authorities have used for so long to justify ruining so many people’s lives.”

That’s a pretty clear statement that as far as the Government of Canada is concerned, consumers of marijuana will no longer be viewed or treated as users, possessors, or purveyors of heavier drugs, whether by intent, act, or potentiality, unless they actually are found to be users, possessors, or purveyors of heavier drugs. You see, we already have laws on the books for that, and the fact that they, not unlike those that brought us the noble experiment of Prohibition, have no real influence on stopping use of, and trafficking in, hard drugs is beside the point.

In application though, we see a template being applied to the legalization of marijuana that has parallels with the way the measures of Bill C-71 are being described  — the legal activities of law abiding citizens come wrapped in a heavy dose of furrowed brow and wagging finger because, without that, we’d all go off the rez at the drop of a hat. Wouldn’t we?

Nevertheless, quite an enlightened move to admit that smoking a joint doesn’t make one a junky. Any more, I might add, than having a firearm makes you a mass murderer, having a penis makes you a rapist, a vagina makes you understanding and nurturing, having a driver’s license and a motor vehicle makes you a speeder, buying or possessing alcohol makes you an impaired driver, or having a child makers you a parent. (more…)