Our poor little deluded Prime Minister, Steven Harper, has just led us into some more war activity . Harper has volunteered 200 of our Service men and women to go in and train Ukrainian forces in a number of areas. Of course, there naturally will be people in the area who see this as a provocation , namely Putin, whether it is or not. My point is that Canada is taking sides in a dispute which is way out of our control.
Canada was in the Korean War. We were respected Peacekeepers from then until we became involved in the Afghan War. We have changed from being a peacekeeper and peace advocate to a very second rate aggressive force. We have a total force of about 70 000 men and women. Our equipment is limited and ancient. We should be the last country to enter a war. We could contribute much more to peace in other ways.
We foolishly joined in the Afghan War. Afghanistan has a long history of disagreement between various tribes and factions. England colonized Afghanistan. The Afghanis didn't like the colonizers and finally England left , but not on their own terms. The balance between tribes and tribal areas was upset and the groups wanted to even scores and get back tribal territories they had. My history is a little foggy here but the Russians went in to separate the fighting factions. After ten years they left and again it was not on their own terms. The U.S. decided to take a round out of Afghanistan as they thought this would end or control terrorism. Now most of the forces in Afghanistan have left and again not on their own terms.
Now guess what? We have many more bad guys than we had before. We have really made the former bad guys angry and got many new people angry with us. The bad guys have become much worse. The bad guys have now spread over a much larger area. A lesson we haven't learned is that we can't go into an area and beat the crap out of some people and think that we solved anything. We've just made more people very angry.
Last year we sent 6 jets and 90 ground support for advising Iraqi and Kurdish forces. Isis is a very nasty group. Much of it has an Afghan origin. We went in for 6 months and now after 6 months we have expanded our mission.
Many of the disputes in the Middle East are a direct result of Imperialism. The colonisers left and left the area with major problems as they tried to establish borders which artificially put together very different groups.
So here we are 150 or so years later trying to bring peace to groups that we disrupted. These disputes have been going on and now with better weapons and people on both sides supplying weapons, disputes can get very large. Our own country is an example as two different groups were put together and now every once in a while we have serious talk of separation.
From my point of view Canada would be much more effective if we stayed away from aggressive action and participated in promoting peace and providing assistance for displaced people. . There have got to be other solutions than the gun for settling disputes. There have to be better heads than we have now.
Guns don't solve anything. People just keep getting more guns and find other people to shoot at who will shoot back.
As I was listening to my favorite radio station the other day, I heard an interview about Record Store Day. Half way through the interview my ears perked up to find out what they were talking about. I was too late to find out what record Store Day was all about . So I went to plan B which is look on Wikipedia.
Record Store Day occurs on the third Saturday in April and is a day that independent music stores sponsor special events. Special record presses and releases are made on the day.There's lots of meet and greet with artists. Many promotional products are available. Each store has it's own agenda for the event so it ends up being a bit of a community event.
What caught my ear was "vinyl" and vinyl sound compared to other sound reproduction methods. Vinyl reproduction has been making somewhat of a comeback recently. In some ways vinyl has better sound than tapes, CDs or electronic reproduction. Now this is a debate which could go on forever. My ear doesn't really pick up much difference , but what I do pick up is the difference between high quality equipment and cheap stuff.
I listen to Randy's Vinyl Tap on CBC and Lionel's Vinyls on CKUA.com. These are two shows that play music from records.
I love music. No, I'm not a musician and I'm not the least bit musical. I just like listening to music. I listen to a very wide variety of music. The list of music I don't like listening to would be very short.
Now I haven't listened to vinyl for years because the only turntable I have in the house quit working a long time ago. I have lots of tapes from the time tapes were in their hey day. I have lots of CDs. And now with ipods I have all kinds of digital music.
Yes, I like "good" sound. At times I like to be able to hear the individual instruments. If the bassoon is playing , I want to be able to hear it. At other times I like to listen for the sound made by the complete combination of the instruments. I'm really surprised and pleased with what you can hear on an ipod.
So this weekend check out your local independent music store and see if they are participating in National Record Day.
I listened to a five minute documentary this morning on "Twin Names." Now apparently twin names are when people who have the same names like Bob Smith and Bob Smith.
The woman who produced the documentary had Googled her name. Haven't we all Googled our name. She found a number of people with the same name but found one person who was about the same age. She did some research and contacted the person who had her name and found some amazing information. There were many similarities. They were the same age. They were both artists. So they talked on the documentary and made other discoveries as they went along.
It used to be in the"olden days" that you rarely met anybody with the same name. With the Internet we just google and find all kinds of people with the same name. . We are usually just looking to find ourselves.
I have googled before and I find the page with all the photos of people with my name. I would look at the first page and I'm not there so I don't look any further. Today I discovered that I could find many pages with photos of people who have the same name as I have. And guess what? After about 500 photos, I found myself. The photo was a surprise as it was one where I presenting an award to someone.
Now there were some pretty scary dudes who have the same name as I have.
Forty years ago there was a kid in the Middle School next to our school who had the same name as I have. He was a handsome popular kid. He had girls hanging on him all over the place. I was kind of popular too as girls looked up the wrong phone number and phoned me.
So I learned a new term ...twin names and found that I'm a way down in ranking as far as google is concerned. I didn't check to see how many names were after mine.
Now that I think about it could there be triplet names?
So do you google your name from time to time? Do you sometimes make some interesting discoveries?
Since today is National Sibling's Day I will take the opportunity to wish my three great siblings a Happy Sibling's Day.
National sibling's Day is an idea promoted by Claudia Evart. Claudia lost her only two siblings at a very early age. National Sibling's day would be a good way to remember them. National sibling's day is recognized in 39 states. Claudia is trying to have it recognized as a national day.
My surviving siblings (brothers) range in age from 60 to 75. We are quite different in looks and personalities. Our Mom was very short. Our Dad was very tall so our sizes range from short to tall. So we range in height from 5"6" to 6"4". I think. Things may have changed with age. Appearances are also very different. we would not pass as brothers as far as looks are concerned.
We range from very quiet to quiet!
We also had a sister who passed away at an early age in 1953. My youngest sibling was born after her death.
Since we were so far apart in age we were raised differently. Our parents became comfortable with parenting by the time the youngest appeared on the scene. I'm not saying the parenting was any better . It was just more laid back.
It's a good day to think about siblings and all the important things about them and how much they mean to our life.
So I hope that all readers take a few minutes and think about their sibling's on this special day.
Every climate zone has it's own characteristic spring seasons. Many elements go together to make spring weather in each area.
Here, spring is dependent on our fall weather. The ground freezes here. There are many variations in frost patterns. The ground can freeze to a depth of 8 ft. Other areas only have a few inches of frozen soil. If we get snow cover that stays , there is not much frozen ground. An exposed area that has lots of traffic over it will freeze to a depth of 7 or 8 feet. South facing slopes and sheltered areas will have less ground frost. From year to year the depth of soil frost varies.
So the soil frost that starts in Oct. - Nov determines our spring and the beginning of plant growth. Of course, winter and spring weather also determine the kind of spring activity we have. The soil has to warm up before there's much plant activity. The frost seems to come out of the ground rapidly and then we have a very muddy soggy mess. Roads break up as the soil becomes unstable. As a result there are road bans (limits on load weights)until the frost is out of the ground.
I find many blog posts very interesting when they show spring weather and blooms. If there's no frost in the ground , the grass usually remains green even if it is covered by snow. In some areas the grass begins to grow rapidly when warmer spring weather arrives.
So the other day along with photos of geese , I also took some landscape photos which show what spring looks like here. We have a few sheltered south facing areas where grass has turned green but it's not growing. Native crocuses are in bloom. So some plants are well adapted to grow early in the spring as soon as some frost is out of the ground. Buds are swelling on trees. However, for the most part there is very little plant activity.
You can see from the photos that there is very little color. The spruce trees are more black than green. As soon as the frost leaves the ground , spruce trees turn green.
I got out of the house for a while yesterday afternoon and visited a local watering hole for geese. The ponds in the photos were actually reclaimed gravel pits. Now they make a fairly good wetlands habitat.
The geese were quite willing to hang around and pose .
That's right. These geese are sitting out on the ice. They've been here about three weeks. There is open water about 200 m away on the river where they can feed. Many of these geese will continue north until they land on Arctic islands where they will finally nest.
There were some smaller geese further out which I think are another form of Canada geese. They have different markings.
So the ice is very solid and nothing has melted around the edge. I could still skate on this ice.
This large pond is the reclaimed gravel pit. Islands and points have been constructed to give some variety to the pond. a pair of loons spends each summer here.
I've started reading Gulp by Mary Roach. Mary Roach tells everything about the alimentary canal which is the body system that your food passes through from start to finish. Roach has done her research, asked questions and then writes a very humorous authentic account of what the digestive system is and how it works. She also gives a historical account of early research and how it was done.
I have only read 80 pages but I found something that I really have to tell you. She discusses taste which she describes as, "a sort of chemical touch. Taste cells are specialized skin cells."
We have taste receptors in four parts of our body: the gut, the voice box, the upper esophagus and the tongue. Wow! Who'd have ever thought we had all those taste buds? Only the tongue's receptors report to the brain. So with apologies to all oenophiles taste is only functional to act as a doorman to what we take in our mouth. So if stuff doesn't taste right we do not ingest the food.
"Intestinal taste receptors are thought to trigger hormonal responses to molecules such as salt and sugar -and defensive actions- such as vomiting and diarrhea to dangerous items." No need for this information to go to the brain as most of what we would get would be pretty itchy.
I like the way Mary Roach leads us to take a different look at how one part of the body works. We rarely think of the alimentary canal as one unit that has different parts to do the job of digestion of foods.
So in one short section I learned some very interesting things about taste.
I'm looking forward to the remainder of the book.
