Large Fierce Mammal

“Map-makers mark the unknown with a giant serpent and the words, “Here Be Dragons”. The unknown becomes the known in this exhibition – because the Dragons are now here…

“Here Be Dragons explores the myth of dragons through culture, literature, folklore, religion, paleontology, history, science, and live animals.

“Their allure is mythic, but they are real and are traced to serpents, dinosaurs, reptiles, and birds. Here Be Dragons exhibit is designed to delight, engage, and inspire young and old alike by making connections between living, breathing dragons and those of fanciful folklore, literature, mythology, and legend. Through interactive exhibits and immersive environments, these approachable creatures will spark creativity and imagination while serving as an informal learning environment for the husbandry and conservation of all types of dragons and related species.

“A variety of species from around the world are included in this comprehensive exhibit. The history and folklore of cultures—medieval, Asian, and ancient—are represented and fully explored alongside the animals providing context for the exhibition ….” ~ Museum of Natural History

No sooner had we received notification of the “Here Be Dragons” exhibit late last year than an LFM Family expedition became a sure thing — one that came to fruition just last week. Located in the city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, the Museum is a place we go at least annually, and it’s always a delightful adventure. During last year’s visit, SFM#1 Viktor met 90 year old Gopher Tortoise Gus, at which time Gus bestowed upon him the rare honour of a hand full of Tortoise poop, thus granting #1 Son with bragging rights that will no doubt serve him well throughout the rest of his own, most certainly, long life.

Viktor was watching me trimming my beard on the morning of, when I told him where we were going. Hearing of Dragons his excitement over-torqued into the red zone, sending him off at speed to regale his incomparable Mother with the news. Shortly afterward, he returned with furrowed brow to say, “Daddy … they’re not real Dragons … they’re just sculptures, right?”

I assured him that there would be sculptured Dragons, but Dad and Mum were quite ready, willing, and able to deal with any real ones that might appear.

With a huge grin and a resounding, “Yay!”, he was off to be dressed for the jaunt.

What follows is a pictorial essay of the day’s treasures. Clicking on a picture will enlarge it for better viewing. (more…)

The week just passed saw my part of Nova Scotia receive heavy snowfalls with high winds up to 110 km/h on Monday and overnight well into Tuesday, and another heavy snowfall with 80 km/h gusts on Thursday. We were ploughed out from the first one just before 06:00 Wednesday morning, just in time for the next burial.

Up until now, the Winter has been open and benign, and after a mere week of what would have been normal for late December while I was growing up, I have watched social media lighting up with cries of how sick people are of snow.

G. K. Chesterton wrote that, “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”

And sometimes the experience is a lesson for all concerned.

I invite you to relax on this Provincial holiday and revisit a piece I wrote in the 2013 expression of A Long Winter’s Night titled A Long Winter’s Night 2013 – Day 6: A Winter Lesson in Community. Click the title when you’ve filled your glass or cup/mug.

Denying the claims a Buckingham Palace spokesman told us, “All allegations in this matter are false, and records will clearly show these men were neither up nor down.”

Last year I shared an article to Facebook titled Duke of York strenuously denies he had ten thousand men, and the sharing caused no small amount of confusion. It’s possible, I suppose, that the title’s reference is to something that only those of us who grew up in nations that are part of the Commonwealth will remember from childhood. Whatever the reason, I’m here today to clear it all up, with a little help from Sharon, Lois, & Bram. (more…)

Ladies and Gentlemen — the Queen (Source: CBC News)

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II is the head of state for Commonwealth nations, including Canada, and now at 90, well past the finish line in the race for longest lived and still reigning British monarch (Queen Victoria died at 81). Now, at the end of this year of death and dishevelment, there is something that hasn’t escaped my notice I will waste no time bringing to yours — the Queen has a cold. A “heavy” cold no less, as described by Buckingham Palace, and so much so that it prevented her from attending the traditional Christmas day church service.

Her husband, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, is suffering likewise but was able to represent the royal couple by attending the service for both of them, and of him it was said that he, “… was driven to church in Sandringham on Sunday and walked in unaided.” A thing that doesn’t surprise me in the least because I happen to know a number of Canadian military officers who have been present when the Duke has paid a Royal visit to their base officer’s mess, and each of them have expressed their admiration that he was able to walk out of the mess unaided. But I digress.

This poem was inspired both by the past year’s voracity for human flesh, and Her Majesty’s cold in the face of it. Happy new year.

Ode to Twenty Sixteen

By LFM

For twelve straight months this dying year
Left corpses in its wake,
A shockingly macabre who’s who,
Of notables to take.

Perhaps it lost its joie de vivre,
Or maybe lost its gall,
We know it missed one winning shot
And really dropped the ball.

The Queen’s lived four score years and ten
Upon this earth of ours,
So romance doesn’t come to mind
As cause for sending flowers.

But even at her tender age
Whilst death was being doled,
When twenty sixteen looked her way,
It gave her but a cold.

“Haakon Haakonsson (c. March/April 1204 – 16 December 1263) (Old Norse: Hákon Hákonarson; Norwegian: Håkon Håkonsson), sometimes called Haakon the Old in contrast to his son with the same name, and known in modern regnal lists as Haakon IV, was the King of Norway from 1217 to 1263. His reign lasted for 46 years, longer than any Norwegian king since Harald I.[2] Haakon was born into the troubled civil war era in Norway, but his reign eventually managed to put an end to the internal conflicts ….

“Under Haakon’s rule, medieval Norway is considered to have reached its zenith or golden age. His reputation and formidable naval fleet allowed him to maintain friendships with both the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, despite their conflict. He was at different points offered the Imperial Crown by the Pope, the Irish High Kingship by a delegation of Irish kings, and the command of the French crusader fleet by the French king. He amplified the influence of European culture in Norway by importing and translating contemporary European literature into Old Norse, and by constructing monumental European-style stone buildings. In conjunction with this he employed an active and aggressive foreign policy, and at the end of his rule added Iceland and the Norse Greenland community to his kingdom, leaving Norway at its territorial height. Although he for the moment managed to secure Norwegian control of the islands off the northern and western shores of Great Britain, he fell ill and died when wintering in Orkney following some military engagements with the expanding Scottish kingdom.” ~ Haakon IV of Norway

Not a bad CV for someone who, at the tender age of 2, was being headhunted across a frozen wilderness in the dead of a Norwegian Winter —

“According to legend, the top two Birkebeiner skiers, Torstein Skjevla and Skjervald Skrukka, took Håkon Håkonsson (the king’s son) to safety with King Inge II at Christmas. To avoid the expected Bagler opposition, they avoided the normal way through Gudbrandsdalen, but instead moved in frost, snow, and bad weather on Østerdalen into the mountains. In memory of this particular act, in 1932 the Birkebeinerlauf was lifted from the baptism. (“Birkebeiner” called themselves rebels in the time of the Norwegian Civil War in the 13th century. The name comes from the propaganda of their political opponents, the Bagler, because the rebels had fled after an initial defeat in the woods and had wrapped their calves with birch bark as protection from the cold. The Bagler sought the king’s son Håkon Håkonsson, who later as King Håkon IV of Norway would govern from 1217 to 1263, for life.)” ~Source here.

The 2016 Norwegian film Birkebeinerne, released in North America as The Last King, is a dramatization of this tumultuous period, complete with many a gripping ski borne death race. Readers familiar with Game of Thrones will recognize one of the intrepid Birkbeinerne as Kristofer Hivju, bearer of one of the finest manes in all the seven kingdoms, in the role of Torstein. (more…)

Study of life reveals how powerfully energetic it is, and how it comes with its own sort of momentum.

In raising a child, from the moment of birth the child’s life energy, bestowed by its parents, is literally a force of Nature. This force grows as the child grows, and as physicality outstrips understanding, will inevitably come to be expressed in ways that are counterproductive to safety and demanding of good management. The same can be said of raising a puppy to the full flower of Doghood.

Today’s short verse deals with a pair of siblings, and is in no way based on the two Small Fierce Mammals of my own Fathering. Before anyone runs off with the idea that my references to dark and fairer have anything to do with race, calm your gonads and settle your strife right now. It’s actually a reference to the hair colour of two puppies I’m aware of, and their ill advised adoption.

I suppose it could just as easily have been inspired by simply observing the fine human specimens one sees abroad in the land, now coming to sexual maturity if not actual adulthood, and who seem to represent the culmination of some noble yet horribly wrong headed experiment in child rearing. It wasn’t, but that works too.

Offspring

By LFM

One sibling was dark,
The other one fairer.
The first was a trial,
The other an error.

Source: Library of Congress

If you’ve heard of the Napoleonic Wars and World War II, you’ll have heard how anyone who invades Russia and doesn’t wrap up business before the snow falls is asking to have their ass handed to them. The Russians, we’re told, are the masters of Winter, but today we’re going to look at an engagement that strongly suggests otherwise.

The Winter War (Finnish: Talvisota, Swedish: Vinterkriget ….) was a military conflict between the Soviet Union and Finland in 1939–1940. It began with the Soviet invasion of Finland on 30 November 1939 (three months after the outbreak of World War II), and ended with the Moscow Peace Treaty on 13 March 1940. The League of Nations deemed the attack illegal and expelled the Soviet Union from the League on 14 December 1939.

The 2006 documentary Fire and Ice : The Winter War of Finland and Russia is more than a chronicle of historic events, and isn’t offered here with any political motive whatsoever. Watch it all the way through and you’ll learn what I mean. (more…)

“There’s an old joke about a Boy Scout who, one bright Saturday morning, puts on his uniform and declares to his Mother that he’s off to do good deeds all day long. When he returns a few hours later, with a black eye and looking like he just escaped from a dude ranch by being dragged through a hedge backwards, his Mother asks him what happened.

“He says, ‘I helped an old lady across the street.’

“‘But what happened to you?’ his Mother asks.

“‘She didn’t want to go.'” ~ I’m Not a Sheepdog – I Have Sheepdogs for That (Part 2 of 2)

On a Winter way back before the turn of the century, there came an olde fashioned “cold snap” of such depth and duration that it froze the entirety of Lunenburg’s front harbour, so for a spell it was possible to safely traverse its width  afoot absent fear of aquatic consequences.  The onset of Spring brought about a slow breakup, and when the wind was right, the outgoing tides launched thick rafts of ice that sailed majestically out to sea.

I was on duty in the emergency dispatch centre one quiet and blindingly sunny Sunday afternoon  that Spring, doing my best to be the very personification of our company motto – “We doze, but we never close.” But not for long, as I was interrupted in my reverie by a call from a woman beside herself with concern for the welfare of an animal she described as not only stranded on an ice floe, but doomed to a terrible death by being swept out to sea.

On further inquiry, I learned the poor threatened thing to be, in fact, a Seal that my caller informed me she had observed being “washed up” on a free floating sheet of ice, and that had since then just laid there, to her mind frozen in fear as much as by the moderate northerly wind that was even now pushing the ice and its helpless cargo inexorably toward the harbour mouth. I learned my distraught witness had first attempted to report the incident to both the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the Whale Stranding Network, neither of which had been particularly helpful beyond telling her to call her local police.

My Grade 6 Teacher, Pauline M. Veinot, was a lady of such fearsome aspect as belied her diminutive stature. She was also a fount of rustic anecdotes and once told the class of a time tested practice for being rid of meddlesome children called “send the fool farther”. Quite simple in practice, it consists of entrusting the target with the important mission of delivering a written message to another person across town. The message, sealed in an envelope and delivered to its recipient, inevitably led to its being resealed and returned to the messenger on the grounds that the matter needed to be dealt with by someone else, again on the other side of town. This sequence was repeated until the exhausted messenger grew sufficiently suspicious to read the message themselves, only to learn that it read, “Send the fool farther.”

If you’ve ever called tech support for anything, or tried to get help from a government department, you’ll know that this game is still in vogue. My well meaning caller, however ill advised her reasons may have been, had arrived in my ear by the same means, and while I could have passed her off to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on the grounds that the harbour waters were under federal jurisdiction, I chose to be helpful instead. After sending my compliments by wireless to the esteemed Constable J. D. (Jay) Bragg, and begging his indulgence to inspect the scene for confirmation that the animal in question was in fact taking its ease, and not in some form of obvious distress, I learned that the Seal was reclining happily in the head and tail raised rocking chair configuration that tribe is known to doze in. With that in mind, I returned to my restive caller.

“With all due respect ma’am, that Seal is not stranded,” I said.

“But it is!”, she replied, “I saw it get washed up on the ice!”

“I’m afraid it didn’t wash up. It swam there and climbed onto the ice.”

This seemed to inflame her. “Why would it do that?” she demanded.

“Well considering it’s sleeping right now, I’d say that it was tired and decided to take a nap.”

At this, she’d reached her limit I suppose, and started to cry.

“If that poor thing freezes to death,” she sobbed, “It will be your fault!”

After a pause, I said, “You’re obviously upset and you are quite right. I wouldn’t want that on my conscience, and come to think of it, there’s not much more I can do because the harbour waters are RCMP jurisdiction. Grab a pen and paper, and I’ll give you their dispatch number.”

Source: https://imgur.com/gallery/KUJKy

“Think of your death now. It is at arm’s length. It may tap you any moment, so really you have no time for crappy thoughts and moods. None of us have time for that. The only thing that counts is action, acting instead of talking.

“Our death is waiting and this very act we’re performing now may well be our last battle on earth. I call it a battle because it is a struggle. Most people move from act to act without any struggle or thought. A hunter, on the contrary, assesses every act; and since he has an intimate knowledge of his death, he proceeds judiciously, as if every act were his last battle. Only a fool would fail to notice the advantage a hunter has over his fellow men. A hunter gives his last battle its due respect. It’s only natural that his last act on earth should be the best of himself ….” ~ Master At Arms James A. Keating, Hermitage – The Power of Solitude

My Esteemed Friend Jim’s words remind me that the end of another calendar year approaches, bringing with it the annual expression of procrastination generally referred to as the “new year’s resolution”. A thing of which I once wrote:

“One may have grown dissatisfied with one’s appearance as it has changed over time, and become caught up in  squandering time, thought, and treasure in a fruitless battle to recapture a fondly remembered moment of perfection, and hold it in stasis forever. A moment of perfection that never existed; for perfection, for each of us, is not a thing that existed once upon a time, but in the moment that is now, and if you can’t find it there, you won’t find it anywhere …

“All ‘new year’s resolutions’ will fail because they are born of procrastination, and those self-deluding sods who proclaim and embrace the concept trumpet their lack of resolve by the simple act of putting off all their life changing actions for one magical day. A magical day that, like tomorrow, never comes, because in the end there’s always another New Year, right?

“Wrong. Find the moment and your perfection in it.” ~ A Long Winter’s Night 2014 – Day 11: Perfection

You don’t get to pick when the fat lady sings, and so as with Jim’s hunter who, “… gives his last battle its due respect,”  start treating your every act as your last, so it can Truly be said of you that your last act on earth was the best of yourself.

As you might expect, the LFM Household is somewhat engaged today, but not so much as to stop me from reminding you of this snippet of wisdom from the lips of Major Sidney Freedman, sporadically appearing psychiatrist to the 4077th MASH. According to my late Mother, this was a popular toast for any time of the day or year way back when, but being a traditionalist, for me it’s Winter all the way. (more…)