Snow, and more

Byoliveridley

Yikes, my last few posts have been, shall we say “bitter”? Enough of that, how about some boring pictures. Not that I take too many! But, it’s all pictures and no thinking/analysis in this post.

It’s been 4 weeks to the day I arrived in Victoria and the weather’s been completely and utterly whacked out. We had snow on Friday…

Snow

Snow

Of course, it was too warm for the snow to stick, just came down for about half an hour or so and cleared right away, followed by sun an hour later. Up in Nanaimo, they got 25cm of snow. Toronto, on the other hand, was in shorts, poetic justice, my local acquaintances tell me because us islanders usually rub our wonderful weather in every other Canadian’s face. But, it isn’t really that cold, just not warm. And the crazy instability has its pluses. Did I ever mention that 4 days in a row, I saw some spectacular rainbows on the way back from work, to the point that I was getting a little blase about it? This place is all about micro climates. It will be sunny in Victoria, and as I drive towards Sidney to work, passing Elk Lake, the temperature drops significantly and there’s always more cloud and rain. Then Sidney has it’s own thing going on, could be cloudy, never know. So, always pack a raincoat and a layer or two!

Anyway, went to Thetis Lake this Sunday for a leisurely hike around the lake with a few acquaintances. As usual, beautiful. Spring is here, and it was really interesting to see all the blooming flowers interspersed with patches of snow. Yep, snow and flowers, a little unusual (didn’t take any pictures of flowers, unfortunately).

It’s also the greenest time on the year because it’s been raining all winter and also getting warmer in the last few weeks, so everything’s alive and the evergreens are, well, very green. As it warms up more and the rain goes away, it apparently gets a lot browner. Also saw a bald eagle encircling the parking lot, that’s probably the fourth or fifth one I’ve seen here.

Some random pictures of the lake. The upper trail goes uphill immediately and leads to some beautiful vistas overlooking the lake. I don’t think my cellphone camera does it any justice, looks like I might have to invest in a real camera soon.

Thetis Lake

That’s it, I guess. Enough of the pictures. I am going to be hiking every weekend from now on, there are so many trails, This website actually rates quite a few of them by difficulty, ought to keep me busy for a year or two!

Back to bitter in a bit, and some environmental posts later. Meanwhile, looks like the the ol’ chief finally made it out of Gaul (if you don’t get it, click the link!)

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  • Tracking my mail

    Byoliveridley

    On the sidebar, you will find a new donut chart which is a simple cumulative count of the mail we get at home. The measurement started on the 19th of March, 2012, so not much data yet 🙂  Useful – Mail I will find useful (yes, including bills). Solicited – Mail I find marginally useful, but comes from organisations I support, so I guess it is okay? Junk – Well, you know it when you see it; RTS – Return to Sender, addressed to previous occupant. Canada Post charges quite a bit for mail forwarding, whereas the USPS does it free for a year, so people get better at updating addresses and not missing a couple. I have lived in my current place for 18 months now, still get mail for multiple different people.

    My Mail

    No particular reason to do this, I was just curious, and this article about the US postal service starting to solicit more direct mail (what most people regard as junk) customers just triggered me to post the results online. My perception is that the signal/noise ratio on my mail is very low, let’s see… The underlying data is in a simple google spreadsheet and the image is linked dynamically, so should always be current.

    Update: I don’t have a red dot on my mailbox, no particular reason, just supporting my economy and increasing the GDP, perhaps? More seriously, I would like a green dot campaign, where unsolicited mail is not welcome unless I place a green dot on my mail box for all unsolicited mail, and an amber dot for not-for profit, advocacy, political and generally non-commercial mail.

    Update:  Not tracking my mail any more, as you can see. It was remarkably stable at around 58-50% “junk”. Interesting…

    Featured image is of a letter box from Nepal, from flickr user manc72 used under a creative commons licence.

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    Old-School Music Snobbery

    Byoliveridley

    (Warning, fact-free reminiscences, no policy, science or anything resembling analysis, possibly of interest only to my indulgent friends)

    Obscure knowledge was once a kind of currency. To get it, you had to be in the loop. You had to know the right people to learn about the right bands. You had to know the right record stores to hear those bands.

    via Why the Old-School Music Snob Is the Least Cool Kid on Twitter – NYTimes.com.

    This article took me back to my 15 year old self. I grew up in pre-cable, pre-“liberalized” India where access to “Western” popular music was very limited, and class and income segregated. The top 40 stuff of the time was available as cassette tapes. Finding albums was almost impossible, most of the time, you got “Now this is what I call music” type compilations. The music popular and available as LPs was a mix of big names like The Beatles, ABBA,  and an eclectic mix of  Boney M, Osibisa, The Ventures, Uriah Heep? (don’t even ask). The popularity of these more off-the-wall choices was probably linked to their willingness to tour India and bring their records.

    My mom was a huge Beatles and Cliff Richard fan growing up, catching it on Indian and Sri Lankan radio in the early to mid 1960s. As I cast my mind back to my parents’ collection, I see a bunch of Beatles LPs (The Red, Blue and Rock’n’Roll Double LP compilations), some ABBA, Boney M, Uriah Heep, The Ventures 🙂 I didn’t have money to buy my own, and we didn’t really have too much money to spend on records anyway.

    Which brings me to 15, my music tastes have stagnated, I’m occasionally listening to random mixes of music, done with ABBA, still liking the Beatles (I still like the Beatles!), but need more. Where can I find music that will move me? Well, there’s no internet, and no radio/TV playing anything other than Top 40 stuff (very rarely) or the Beatles. I don’t have rich relatives in the US to send me music either. In hindsight, I guess I could have tried short wave radio (which we definitely used a lot for sports), but how do you know what’s cool?

    I was “rescued” by a friend, with whom I listened to a very scratchy recording one day. This friend was lucky enough to have an older brother who had access to music. The first minute of Black Dog changed my life! I “discovered” Led Zeppelin in 1988(9), and all the usual suspects soon after. I can’t even begin to express how I felt the first time I heard Bohemian Rhapsody. I know, right, what a lot of my friends from when I was older and living in the US and Canada  think of as the most clichéd over-exposed, un-cool songs set the cool kids of Madras apart from the rest.

    Finding full albums of music of decent audio quality was another matter. We soon heard through word of mouth (probably the brother) of this magical small store in Anna Nagar, on the other side of the city. So, we took the bus out one day. Anna Nagar was a gridded sub-division, which for some reason confused people like me who lived in older parts of the city. We had an address, which led us to a house on a mundanely residential street, with a small sign board for the “shop”, only open evenings. We walk in, and, magic, it was many rows of LPs stacked and arranged alphabetically by band. You told the guy at the store what albums you wanted, gave him blank cassettes and money, and a week later (a long week later), you went back and picked up your magical tape. A 90 minute cassette could fit two albums, of course, so I always associate Led Zeppelin II with The Best of Cream (back to back).

    Wow, clear LP transfers of music, I still remember all those little discoveries like the bass pedal response of Mitch Mitchell to Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze riff, and scratching “Excuse me, while I kiss the sky” on every desk I sat in for a couple of years.

    I was also part of a crack school quiz team at a time when these quizzes were basically wank fests for people like us. We got quiz “masters” asking us obscure music trivia and playing songs from the 60s and 70s for us to identify and win the quiz shows. Looking back, our smug superiority was probably unwarranted 🙂 This period was the peak of musical snobbery, limited access meet obscure knowledge! I hoarded, I judged, I laughed at people who listened to the wrong music, not a very nice 19 year old at all. We had no internet, but I had “discovered” that libraries were a great source of music books and my obscure minutiae quotient was off the charts. That strange intersection of my “discovery” of music and its scarcity was a magical and intense place.

    Things changed. MTV hit India in 1993, and grunge showed up in Madras at about the same time it took  over the US. I could also hit up my US based sister for music, band shirts, merch. Stores started bringing tapes in (and CDs, though those were some shiny unaffordable jewels). But there was still that class-based division, and access was limited, though every year made the music more accessible.

    Moving to North Carolina hipster heaven brought the rather unwelcome news that classic rock (oh, so my music has a genre?) was associated with middle aged white folk, and as uncool as it got. Oh well, it didn’t stop me from listening, but parties became a bit less fun. My music tastes expanded into the roots of all that rock, into blues, jazz, and funk.

    As I understood the politics of appropriation and where all that music really came from, my attitudes changed, and I listen less. But those riffs still have a direct connection to a very emotional part of my brain. I will always be that uncool kid who knows every Jimmy Page solo in my head even as I cringe at the misogyny and racism of the lyrics and laugh at the bombast and obvious masculine posturing.

    I am very glad that the internet has mostly erased the boundaries. The ability to listen to a song just by searching for it is life-changing. Yes, people will still judge, but it is harder and harder to hoard, and use scarcity as a filter. I love it. My relationship with the music has not changed. When I hear something I like, it is still such an intense emotional experience, especially when it links back to memories, the people I first heard it with, the things I did when the music was playing in the background, it’s lovely.

    To end, another quote from the article…

    Populism is the new model of cool; elitists, rather than teeny-boppers or bandwagon-jumpers, are the new squares. There are now artists who sell out concerts while rarely getting played on commercial radio

     

  • |

    War?

    Byoliveridley

    Way off topic, but war’s been on everyone’s mind of late, and the horribly devastating oil spill in Lebanon is but one example of the crazy devastation caused by war. An event that would be an international emergency by itself is only a footnote in the death of many innocent people, destruction of the happiness of entire communities and populations, not to mention all those blown up bridges, power plants and homes.

    Los Angeles Times: Why Good Countries Fight Dirty Wars

    The citizen-soldiers sent into the field by the United States or any other Western popular government are expected, by virtue of not so long ago having been free civilians themselves, to be more empathetic with the plight of the noncombatants with whom they come into contact. Certainly, brutal incidents like the My Lai massacre or the Abu Ghraib scandal occur from time to time, but they are widely viewed as cultural aberrations. This interpretation, however, is as simplistic as it is misleading. All too often the armies of modern democracies have tolerated and even initiated outrages against civilians, in manners uneasily close to those of their totalitarian and terrorist enemies. Israeli troops are currently demonstrating this fact in their response to the Hezbollah rocket offensive — a response most of the world community, according to recent polls, believes is taking an unacceptably disproportionate toll on Lebanese civilians. And there have been times when democratic leaders have been even more open about their brutal intentions: Speaking of the Allied bombing campaign during World War II that culminated in that consummate act of state terrorism, the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, Winston Churchill flatly stated that the objective was “to make the enemy burn and bleed in every way.”

    Excellent article, there really is no moral war, no just war, no holy war, no noble war, no happy war, no easy war, and there really should be no war other than a reluctantly fought, and limited war. There are no noble warriors, no heros, only real people doing things to their fellow human beings that are for the most part, unspeakable horrors. Anyone who tries to argue with me that their war is somehow different because of a host of reasons is not going to convince me.

    While history books can be cleansed to blind future generations to the actual costs of war on the people fighting it, and the damage that ensues, fighting affects everyone who fights significantly, and rarely for the better. Eventually, it dehumanizes you, how can you kill someone (except in close combat where there’s a clear survival motivation) except by dehumanizing them? You’d have to think that a whole neighborhood is somehow inhuman to drop a bomb on them that kills maybe one terrorist and 15 innocent humans.

    The history we learn has a lot to do with our willingness to tolerate this much war. The science lessons we get in school are a culmination of centuries of accumulated knowledge, the mathematics we learn goes back 10-15 centuries, we are taught to be self-critical, to learn from our mistakes, to think, yet the history we learn is pure propaganda, none of these edicts seem to apply. Being a “pacifist” has gone from normal to “loony coward fringe element” in a few years. Oh well…

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    BC Bicycle Helmet Law – NC Connections

    Byoliveridley

    (b.1) that a person operating or riding as a passenger on a cycle on a path or way designated under paragraph (b.3) must properly wear a bicycle safety helmet

    British Columbia Helmet Law

    I got my bike on Thursday and finally, the vile flu that laid me low for a week has decided to sink slowly back into a tuberculotic cough. Blogging should get back to normal speed and topics as I unpack, start biking, and can live life again without being racked by chills and bad dreams.

    Figured I should get back on my bike ASAP, but I decided to first check if BC had any bicycle helmet laws, because we’re like that, we have a lot of what would be considered “paternalistic” laws south of the border. And, it does, and guess what, the project evaluating the law was performed by UNC’s Highway Safety Research Center, small world, ai!

    Apropos nothing, here’s the US list of states and their various bicycle/motorbike laws. Note that only 20 states (and DC) require the use of helmets for motorcyclists, quite insane. Fall on your bare head at 50 miles an hour and you are dead, vegetable, or both. In contrast, All of Canada is under universal motorbike helmet laws. Of course, no U.S state has bicycle helmet laws that cover adults. In contrast, four Canadian provinces have mandatory bicycle helmet laws.