Rat out..!

The buzz this week was hard to miss unless you've been living somewhere in a cave in Afghanistan for the last five years. Wikileaks and it's founder, Julian Assange were plastered all over the media for bringing to light official documents pertaining to misconduct during the war in...where else...Afghanistan. Snitches, informants, whistle-blowers and whatever you want to call them seem to be all over the place these days. Of course the grand daddy of the lot was none other than Judas Iscariot. According to the bible. he delivered a fellow by the name of Jesus to the Romans. How a Porto Rican found his way to Jerusalem I have no clue. Interesting story but the plot is a little weak. My first real encounter with a snitch happened during a test in first grade. I casually blurted out the answer to a question to the student sitting next to me who immediately pointed an accusing finger and calling the teacher said '' Miss, he said the answer out loud ''. This was also my first encounter with the yard stick, receiving a couple of blows to my bottom for my indiscretion.The teacher obviously did not question the snitch's credibility and this is unfortunately the case nowadays. The media often jumps on the bandwagon and a frenzy erupts before any informant credibility can be established. And, in some cases, with the new and improved security measures, contrary to our justice system, the accused have to establish their innocence, being presumed guilty from the get go.This has happened all so fast on numerous occasions, especially involving alleged cases of child abuse. A lot of families, lives, reputations have been ruined by hearsay and non credible witnesses. Also, some people's moral grounds are someone else's playground. I remember these two old ladies in British Colombia who complained to the police that their neighbor walked around naked in his house and they found this offensive. When the whole thing went to court, the judge inquired has to how the two spinsters could see the naked man in the house since he lived 300 feet away. '' We can see him with our binoculars '' they replied. The case was thrown out. With that being said, I don't doubt the validity of whistle-blowing one bit. We need brave individuals to come forth and report anomalies or misconduct from governments, multinationals, institutions and individuals. Often enough, these people seek some form of anonymity. I say No..! I f you want to point an accusing finger at anyone we should know who you are in order to establish your credibility. With technology today, it's way too easy to start the rumor mill going and inflict serious harm to people who are just going about their daily lives. Imagine for one second that you were in Toronto on business during the G8 summit. You're walking downtown thinking of arranging this important meeting when your foot hits a brick on the sidewalk. Finding this odd, you pick up because you don't want anybody else to hurt their big toe. At that moment a couple on vacation snaps a picture of you holding the brick. Unfortunately, there's an identifiable Mc Donald's window in the background and you're wearing a germ protective mask they gave you at the hospital in case your flue turns out to be contagious. They post their picture of you with brick in hand and masked on Facebook, thinking they've photographed a real life anarchist. The Toronto police find this while scouring the web for info and through some face recognition software, they id you, review your credit card transactions, find your address and pick you up at your hotel for questioning. Of course you deny the whole thing but they bring up your participation in a protest against the seal hunt during your college years in the 70's. They allow you one phone call, so in desperation you call your wife on her cellphone but it's buried somewhere between a chocolate bar and a dry cleaning bill deep inside the bowels of her purse. So you leave a message on her voice box hoping that she remembers the access code.
Basically you could rot in jail from anywhere between 48 hours to a month, whith-held on reasons of national security. We've all heard about the Stasi years in East Germany when even family and friends were snitching on each other, creating a wave of collective paranoia. Any idiot with a camera equipped cellphone is a potential snitch. Just look at how many people after 9/11 reported seeing Bin Laden either driving a taxi in Manhattan or buying fruit in a seven-eleven in Boca Raton. So, as my father always says...'' Don't believe everything you read and only half of what you see''.

Footnote: The video above is an hilarious SNL skit with Robert De Niro where college students have phoned in to report terrorists.

Wake up call

This week I'd like to talk to you about the worst torture instrument ever concocted in history by human intelligence. Yes folks....the alarm clock. WikipediA describes it as a clock that is designed to make a loud noise at a specific time which means too early and too loud in the morning for most of us. Actually the concept is not new. It is rumored that the Greek philosopher Plato had a similar device to signal the start of his lectures. Jumping ahead a bit,the production of the infamous alarm clock was halted in 1942 as factories were converted to aid in the war effort. However, the geniuses in power at the time, ordered production resumed because of a high rate of absenteeism in the work force . This appears to be why we all get shaken out of our peaceful sleep mode, a hyper production schedule during the second world war. Where would the world be without wars...? Somewhere between Eden and Paradise I suspect. But that's another subject just down the road.
Anyway, this ode to the ingenuity of capitalism which has been ensconced in practically every bedroom in North America continues to prod us without mercy on a daily basis. The loud repeated beeps are especially irritating and reminiscent of sirens that sent people running for shelter during air raids . Most of them now have the radio option so instead of being jarred with incoherent decibels, you can wake up to Led Zeppelin's Black Dog or a newscaster describing an horrific crime seen. Tried it..didn't like it. I remember in my salad days not having an alarm clock. I did have a tv in my bedroom so, always the tinkerer, I decided to purchase a plug-in timer to turn on the set at the time of my choosing. Proudly, I enabled the whole system on a Saturday, activating the timer to 9 am the next day for a test and proceeded with my day and evening. In those days my roommate and I often went out to clubs and indulged in alcohol and nature's best, coming home in the wee hours to crash. Sunday morning I awoke in a total sweat from a apocalyptic nightmare. I dreamed I was being poked by a horde of terrifying blood thirsty demons in a fiery pit with no possible escape. Turns out that my tv had been turned on as planned but that I unknowingly had selected a channel that featured one of those evangelical Sunday preachers. He was sermonizing his flock on the perils of sin. Obviously this dogmatic lecture had pervaded my unconscious dream state, prompting the aforementioned nightmare. Too bad I wasn't tuned in to a porn channel...I would've never wanted to get up. I often wonder why nobody thought of using the sound of washing waves on the seashore or the melodic daybreak chirping of small birds in lieu of that cataclysmic beep. My wife says that we need a strong wake up sound. I think it's just conditioning. It would be nice to have a radio channel that would be entirely devoted to softly waking people with a soothing voice, prompting you to cheerfully rise and shine. A lot of people use their cellphones as alarm clocks these days. My wife does and believe me it's also annoying. When she first started doing this without telling me, I would quickly jump from bed and scramble in the dark to get the phone, thinking that at that early time in the morning, it had to be an emergency.
We do have an internal biological clock not unlike the one in our computers. The problem is we have forgotten how to use it. And even if we did, I don't think it would be compatible with today's hectic pace. So we'll continue to suffer at the hands of these dreaded machines which are a constant reminder of how little sleep we get. According to recent studies, our current lifestyle is listed as the number one culprit in sleep loss and the side effects are..well....alarming (no pun intended...). So much so that you''ll want to use public transportation instead of facing off in the frantic morning rush hour, battling for your share of the road with a multitude of sleep deprived drivers. http://www.sleep-deprivation.com/ is where you wan to go to find out more.
Finally, if you find yourself or someone you care for missing out on valuable sleep time like I once did, consider this a friendly wake up call.

Footnote: The picture, "Running out" was done in Adobe Photoshop with the "Liquify" filter. It's a fun tool to use and it's most often used for face reconstruction. An Omni light filter was added for a more dramatic effect as was the drop shadow on the melted clock dial. And of course, having forgotten to wipe my night table, a lot of retouching was done.

Hip to be round

It seems to me that we humans never quite decided which of these two forms we should have adopted in our daily lives, the square or the circle. We have round wine glasses that are neatly stored in square cabinets, round lighting fixtures for rectangular rooms, round clocks on walls with four corners and we serve square meals on round plates.If you're a cowboy, after a roundup you go to a square dance Most of us live in square boxes we call homes, travel to work in smaller mobile boxes with wheels and earn our pay in cubicles.
No wonder we feel boxed in. This brings me to R.Buckminster Fuller or Bucky as he was affectionately called. Bucky was a strange kind of genius and set out to prove that we had it all wrong. Why was housing square..? There are no squares in nature with the possible exception of the weekend bird watchers. The people who are closest to nature because they depend on it for their basic sustenance live in round shelters. The North American indian had the teepee or wigwam and the Eskimos had igloos. So Bucky started to experiment with spheres and soon came up with the geodesic dome. His idea was to mass produce these half globes so that everybody, even people in third world countries, could afford a nearly indestructible, weather resistant dwelling. His plan almost made it to fruition but his greedy investors who were evidently not as altruistic, pulled the plug on the project when they couldn't see eye to eye. Bucky went on with his experiments and soon found other venues for his domes, notably the US pavilion for Expo 67 in Montreal.
He also went on to produce a fantastic weird looking car that was reminiscent of an airplane fuselage, the dymaxion car. This car was so futuristic that he was barred from driving it into the city, causing a scene each time he would take it for a spin.


He also wanted to mass produce his vehicle and this certainly would have changed the history of the automobile if it hadn't been for a tragic accident involving one of his potential investors who died in a crash on a test drive. So Fuller was a visionary. He spent most of his time lecturing and underlying the need for us to conserve our precious unrenewable resources.
It was during one such lecture that he came up with the name spaceship earth, alluding to our limited resources. His dome dwellings never caught on except for a few companies strewn across the states who still produce them on demand.
However, If you've gone camping with a tent in your lifetime, you'll have experienced the transition between the square tents with the inordinate amount of ground spikes and the dome tent which seems more spacious when it's actually smaller and can easily be moved, even when set up, thanks to Bucky's ideas.
The basic idea behind all of this is that we need more efficient, climate change ready houses capable of riding out the worst of storms. Unless we want roof flying to become the national past time for the mid west during the tornado season. They also need to be on higher ground. Too much water is already a problem in some parts of the world. There is a tendency to build energy efficient partially buried houses called burmed housing. But unless it's as waterproofed as a submarine and can float out of harm's way in short notice, I woundn't consider it an option. There is a company in Japan called International Dome Design who built a whole village of domes. It's quite a sight to behold and unlike their american counterparts ( talk about bad design, some look like a hybrid between a colonial house and a dome) they have a flair for good taste and some of their products are simply outstanding. You can see them with floor plans at http://www.i-domehouse.com/case.html
So we might have to live like hobbits in a not too distant future. As for the more distant generations, I suspect their houses will be mobile, having to revert to the hunter gatherer style of life, looking for resources like water or simply escaping the wrath of a furious mother nature. Odd that we seem to be going around in circles after years of cutting corners.

Zoom in

Thank God this week has ended..! It wasn't bad enough that the whole province of Quebec was blanketed by a humidity tsunami, but also that my 83 year old mother was urgently rushed to the hospital while my 85 year old dad was left to fend for himself at home. Thankfully every thing's back to normal for now.
This week's blog might not interest everybody. So what else is new...!
I write off the cuff, meaning I really don't prepare or give it much thought until the deadline looms. This particular blog is the perfect example.
I've always been interested in photography at large but especially the outer rims of the process. Macro photography is one such area. The name can be a tad confusing. Basically it implies that your using a macro lens to zoom in to a specific subject or part of it. It is sort of between regular photography and micro photography which uses a microscope. It falls in a universe all by itself sort of like Pee Wee Herman.
Most digital SLR (single lens reflex) lenses can't focus close enough to give you a macro image. You either need a special macro lens or either a bellows extension device or as in my case a tube extension. This is where the whole thing becomes a bit dicey. A bellows or tube extension will render your camera electronics like focus metering virtually useless. However on the good side, auto exposure will work and you'll be able to review your shot immediately and readjust if necessary.
This first shot is just to show how far into a subject you can go with an extension device. On the left you'll see how close I got to the ruler with my macro lens.On the left is the same ruler but using an extension tube between my lens and the camera.

Pretty powerful..!
Let's put this to work. Obviously I was going to need a lot of light. This is one of the major drawbacks of macro photography. The closer you are to your subject the more light you need. A lot of people use flash for this purpose but to me it looks a bit unnatural. I prefer working in natural light but since I'm getting really close, the slightest movement of either the camera or the subject can result in a total blur.
Just like Lindsay Lohan about to go back into rehab.
This picture is of a flower bud. Don't ask me what flower, I simply don't know not being a very flower knowledgeable kind of guy. You can observe that not to much is in focus what we refer to as depth of field. This can be a plus in macro simply because you can isolate the subject against a mysterious looking background.

This next picture is of a stamen. As you can see, it can easily become an abstraction if it were not for the bare hint of reality showing.

This next one is a shot of the rust on an antique stove we kept in the yard near the stream. Flat and steady surfaces are a great way to get into macro photography. They are abundant and easy to capture. The only thing you have to look out for is not casting a shadow on the subject with the camera or the lens since you're only an inch or two away. A steady tripod and an integrated timer to trip the shutter will help immensely. Or if you prefer, a six pack of Heinekens will steady your nerves.

This pic is of the interior of a computer hard disk. I took it apart to see what it looked like inside, something that got me in trouble on numerous occasions when I was a kid, taking apart all sorts of things, a lot of times, aggravating my parents. The phone incident didn't wash down too well.

Basically, you can have a lot of fun doing this and any subject is fair game. Sometimes it will be frustrating, other times you'll rejoice with amazement at your results. There are a lot of sites on the web devoted to macro. I was somewhat disappointed looking it up because to me, a lot of them are only satisfied with using a standard macro lens which will not zoom in enough to totally immerse you in a place of unseen wonders and awe.

Footnote: Most digital cameras have a macro mode that you can enable in the settings. It won't (depending on the manufacturer) be state of the art macro, but it can get you started.

More than heights

If you remember my first attempt at blogging, you will recall that we settled up north in the Quebec Laurentians in the town of Morin Heights. This quaint little town is a cozy blend of old english sods, artsy fartsy artists, stuck-in-the-sixties hippy like off-the-grid anarchists mixed in with a dash of nouveaux riches for good measure. So for this blog,I decided to take a walk and give you a small glimpse of our fair town with a few snapshots.
MH has it's own municipal beach, right at the entrance of downtown Although I dare anybody to find one grain of sand there. It's more of a swimming hole than anything else, but it seems quite popular even with all the the restrictions.



Of course some people prefer the privacy of their own pool. Especially if you have a thing for huge inflatable dogs and the town is already abuzz with rumors of you and your plastic best friend.


The downtown core itself is extremely minimalistic with one sidewalk and three churches a few meters apart on the same side.


Which leads me to believe there must be a massive pile up on Sunday mornings. The Methodists, the Catholics and the Anglicans all bumping in to one another in their Sunday best. Judging by the cemetery, it would seem there are more people buried than living in town. Also, they seem to be anticipating a deadly plague of some sorts by the look of the numerous unoccupied graves.




We also have our fair share of restaurants. You have to remember that Morin Heights is crossed by the 329, the scenic route from Lachute to Mont Tremblant. Very popular with motorcyclists, RVs and the occasional lone cyclist with a cause.


In the centre of it all is Mickey's. Mickey's is an institution here. They have a weird combo business consisting of a diner, a laundromat and a shoe store. They also sell BBQs and propane gas and the owner drives the town's only taxi vehicle when he's not selling mukluks or fireworks.



There's a local bar where all the yokels hang out. This place has probably seen more assholes than a proctologist. When I took the picture I was immediately summoned by a beer soaked regular to take his picture in not so many words. I declined....of course. Don't have enough film I yelled. Thinking that numeric photography was at that moment, light years away from his alcohol reduced brain.



If you take a walk around away from hustle and bustle of the city core onto the side streets, you'll find amazing little old style wooden houses on hill sides, ripe with flowery gardens, huge trees and birds galore.



We even have our own Crescent street (see pic).But you won't be seeing any Porsche bunnies or cigar smoking sugar daddies ogling the huge breasted, stiletto heeled thrill seeker.



Morin Heights is very quiet and sleepy. It's also the perfect outdoor recreational small town year round. It has a community feeling to it that beckons the heart and soul and frees the mind. I often laugh at it's shortcomings having lived in a metropolis for a long time. On rare occasions, I do miss the adrenaline filled rush of a teaming big city with bright lights and endless nights. The anonymity of the faceless crowd and the abundance of man made temptations. But truthfully, I'm glad we landed here and wouldn't live anywhere else on this planet... for now.

Bad bag

Boy it's a great day today. Not too warm here in the mountains but with an abundance of sunshine and a pleasing lack of bugs of the blood sucking kind.
This week was again more relaxed partly due to our glorious Fête Nationale which fell on the 24th and is a mandatory holiday here in Quebec.

I don't go to the supermarket that often. My wife handles the grocery shopping mainly because we've decided that it's not my domain. I can find my way around a hardware store but supermarkets are boring to me. I couldn't care less about a yogurt going on sale but it somehow excites my wife. Recently, the mega supermarket chains have started a trend that really pisses me off. They've decided to not give anymore plastic bags to their customers at the check out counter to apparently save the environment. Actually, if you want one to put your groceries in, they'll sell you one for five cents. More idiotic corporate PR bullshit... Throwing the ball in the consumer's yard to make him feel like he's actively doing his part to rid the world of this terrible bane we call the plastic bag. This makes as much an impact on the environment than a pimple would on Oprah's ass. ( By the way Tim Wilson has an excellent song about overexposed celebrities at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-5d5IfdYK4).

Meanwhile in these oversized markets, everything is either wrapped in plastic, or comes in plastic and by the facial expression I get from the store employees, I suspect their faces are also made of plastic. You have boxes with plastic inside, boxes with plastic outside, eggs now come in plastic, cheese is often wrapped in plastic (some of it might even be plastic) and the vast majority of containers for water, juices, spices, you name it, are now plastic made. Am I missing anything here..? It goes as far as putting plastic in plastic. Garbage bags come in a plastic bag. It would make more sense to me if they used one of the bags to package the others.I made good use of those grocery bags, mainly disposing of my doggies poop in a responsible manner. And why couldn't they have adopted degradable plastic bags..? They are abundant nowadays but I suspect that they cost just a little more to produce. This trend as also contaminated our government run liquor board, the S.A.Q. and it's outlets. They used to put your purchases, wine, beer or spirits in paper or plastic bags. But they don't do that anymore. They want you to buy a nifty designer like reusable bag, which they sell on the premises, so you think you're saving a tree, a tire or something. More fuckin' hypocrisy bullshit from a corporate minded government. Why...? Well because they don't have a bottle consignment policy for any of their products including beer. You're expected to clean them out and put them in your little recycling blue bin so that the glass will maybe find it's way to a mash up facility and then be resold to you in another fashion or product along the way. Recycling glass is much more energy consuming and wasteful than a proper
consignment policy.

I'm not against recycling but I am against the propagandist illusion maintained by our governments and big corporations that we are individually saving the planet by tossing a few bottles and some plastic containers in a separate containment unit each week. It takes much more than that I'm afraid. Michael Moore whom I equate to a social shock jock, wrote a great piece on the subject on his blog at
http://greenyes.grrn.org/2003/04/msg00052.html if you care to read it.

So the next time you bring your conscience saving reusable bag to go grocery shopping,take a good look at all the wasteful plastic wrappings and containers. If you're doing your part, why shouldn't they..?

Footnote: The green you see in the picture is not of rolling hills of grass. I stumbled upon this site of broken glass by chance one day in an industrial part of town. The white paper mixed in seems like labels which is odd. I couldn't find out anything there because I was immediately escorted to the entrance by an angry foreman who didn't appreciate the fact that I was taking pictures of this top secret installation.

Have some mesc..!

Thank God for an uneventful week after the porcupine incident. We've started to go walking in the woods with the dogs again now that the prickly little beasts have departed to higher grounds.During the week I often peruse the net for news and other tidbits of interest. I came upon this headline by accident while going about my daily routine.
People not smart enough to understand universe: scientist.
This comes from an interview with Lord Martin Rees the president of the Royal Society of Astronomy in England. Surely anyone who's ever seen a live parliamentary debate or the Doctor Phil Show will agree without question. Lord Rees states that the idea of multiple parallel universes, human consciousness and the very idea of reality may be simply beyond our understanding.'' Just as a fish may be barely aware of he medium in which it lives and swims, so the microstructure of empty space could be far too complex for unaided human brains." The idea of parallel universes or dimensions is not new. If you've ever heard of the string theory it's worth looking into. I won't dwell on this but you can get a brief intro on it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtdE662eY_M
This immediately made me think of Aldous Huxley who wrote '' Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful." According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large''. This is most probably identical to the One Mind philosophy in Zen Buddhism. He concludes ''But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this Particular planet''.He also believed that this so called reduction valve could be dilated by the use of drugs, especially mescaline the main active ingredient in peyote. Aboriginal peoples in south america have been using the drug in rituals for thousands of years to alter their state of consciousness and get closer to the gods which could be interpreted as transcending their unilateral dimension. We have somehow forgotten how these so called primitives had a much better understanding of the universe and it's fragile equilibrium. Even when we send our high tech toys to explore the space frontier, in effect, we're still playing in our own backyard. Some people resort to meditation or yoga with the same objective in mind, supraconsciousness . Others have used drugs to accelerate the process of understanding the universe and our place in the whole scheme of things. Unsatisfied with the unilateral vision of the world they lived in, Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna, Hunter S.Thompson, Beaudelaire and a horde of other creative individuals embarked on psychedelic journeys to ascend to a different plane of thought and consciousness. I don't advocate the use of drugs for kids, since they are most often used as a means of recreation and escape and getting totally fucked up during spring break. But I think our world leaders would do well to have a mescaline party when they meet . They would quickly realize the mess they continue to unilaterally perpetuate and hopefully they would immerse themselves in a larger vision of what could be a better world for future generations. Plus, it would make for funnier and more interesting G8 summits.Of course they would have to be under strict surveillance just in case Angela Merkel decided to run naked through the gardens singing I am the walrus since the whole drug fueled get together would be televised. Great entertainment and maybe for once, some genuine and original ideas would take shape.