The Accidental Weblog

Yeah, been quiet. Busy March. Something about March, and just around the kids’ break: it usually is.

I’m in Tremblant, mostly coaching and working. Working because, well, March, and such is the rhythm of the business, I guess…

Coaching: yeah, well, my daughter asked if I could teach her to snowboard.

She’s doing really well. Managed some four blue runs down the mountain today, the last group from peak to base, no falls. Which is saying something for someone who’s been on the board some four days total, and it’s one of those hard-pack days, bits of ice. Not easy when you’ve only two edges, and can only ever use one (and the correct one, at any given time, if you wish to continue to live), and you’re new at this. So: I’m impressed..

Anyway. And then this evening rolled around and in the adjacent place there were partying college-age types. Not really obnoxious, but there was dance music, playing quiet but just loud enough—at that low, subsonic thumpa thumpa—that Yours Insomniac Truly really couldn’t practically sleep, and never mind everyone else seemed to be managing. Guess I can’t so much blame them, it being Saint Drinking Weekend and all, but y’know: if you can’t sleep, you can’t…

And hey. It had been a long week, and me with little me time over its course. So I figured, hell, let’s give up on the lying here trying not to notice the bass for a bit, go out, just have a brew at my favourite place, see if when I come back in an hour or two if it’s still thumpa thumpa next door. So I put a few logs on the fire, do the dishes quietly enough to avoid waking those sleeping, slip out into the minus fifteen…

Yes, minus fifteen. Weird March break it’s been, up and down, but at least less downright bizarre than last year’s plus twenty, and now, at least, it’s back down to something approaching seasonal…

So I get through that kinda welcomely, familiarly frigid air, get to the place, sit at the bar, have an ale, read some Ingersoll for a bit…

Good for the sanity, Ingersoll, I find, especially with papal conclaves all over the news and the usual froth of silliness from the usual suspects making headlines with sporadic outbursts of what the hell is that anyway. Was Chavez the twelfth imam? Or did they merely have one another’s business cards? It isn’t quite clear (or no more so than is most theology) but still, we are… amused. I think the word is amused, here. Other words are less fit to print. Not, I suppose, that this ever really stopped me.

Good for the sanity indeed…

They found that the ghosts knew nothing of benefit to man; that they were utterly ignorant of geology—of astronomy—of geography;—that they knew nothing of history;—that they were poor doctors and worse surgeons;—that they knew nothing of law and less of justice; that they were without brains, and utterly destitute of hearts; that they knew nothing of the rights of men; that they were despisers of women, the haters of progress, the enemies of science, and the destroyers of liberty.

Tell it, brother. That’s from Ghosts, for the record. Happened to be on my phone, at the time…

Bar was a weird scene, tho’. Turns out there’s this Ultimate Fighting thing on this eve, and the heavier than usual Y-chromosome dominance in the place is probably due this event. It’s up on all the flatscreens: two guys pounding the hell out of each other. Or more the one, pounding the hell out of the other… As I left, the local favourite (thing was in Montréal, apparently, and it was a US and Canadian fighter behind the chain link mesh that apparently marks the ring in these things) was dominating… And in the place, this is no sideshow: they turn up the volume, and everyone’s watching, intently.

And it’s a bit… Bizarre, watching this. Not so much the bout as the audience…

They’re into it. Intensely. With focus. With passion. At one point the local boy’s got the hated enemy on the mat, gets a knee into the poor bastard’s abdomen and all this crowd natty in high-end alpine outerwear are nothing short of wild with a delight that seems heavily underscored with an almost celebratory viciousness. There’s this tint of something pheromonal in the air. And hell, I can feel my own nostrils flaring… Even getting slightly edgy about the flavour of all this… Like geez, sure, this is a pretty well-heeled crowd, and sure, I guess I get this is all sublimation and living vicariously, in this company… Pretty damned unlikely anyone here is gonna throw a punch of their own.

But still, man, that bloodlust, you can practically taste it. It’s like it smells like a brawl in here.

It’s not so much a revelation or nothing. I mean, I guess it’s something I always knew about us slightly more hairless-than-other-chimps: we’re never that far from the edge of claws and teeth and blows, and these are ubiquitous human passions. Watch any crowd at a hockey game, you see the same undisguised hunger for bruising and pain…

Still. A mite alarming, when it’s a room full of that stuff.

I went home. Gonna have to get to sleep, now. Aerials to attempt in the morning…

I’m guessing from the noises the neighbours were making when I returned, however, the local boy prevailed.

(Cue swanky/schmaltzy theatre intermission organ music…)

As the blogger is currently in the Laurentians, and there’s been an absurd amount of very welcome snow falling, this blog has been somewhat quiet for the past several days, and is likely to remain this way for several more.

World, I hereby request you hold off doing anything particularly interesting/bloggable/etc., for the duration. Thank you for your cooperation in this matter.

(/Fade out intermission music.)

The CBC’s Living Out Loud will be airing tape from interviews done with Canadians who fought in the Spanish Civil War tomorrow.

(ETA 2012 Nov 16: they did air it, and as of today both episodes are up there.)

(And see also the ‘pedia article on the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion.)

They were teasing the material tonight on another program (As It Happens), and someone pointed out that these people—who actually had to sneak away to fight—the Canadian government at the time had actually made it illegal to go—had it in their heads, among other things, that fascism was going to be big trouble for Europe, and they were right. And yet this brought them no end of hardships. Including some courtesy their own government.

Well, see, the only folk who insisted on still organizing troops from Canada after the law was passed were the local Communists.

But, yeah, they sure as hell were right about fascism. And they fought, and died, generally unsupported by Western governments. And on returning home, faced arrest, investigations, harassment, got themselves on various political shit lists.

‘Premature antifascists’, see. And, apparently, that’s a bad thing.

Heroes. The lot of them. And of a rare kind, y’ask me.

Rushdie, as interviewed by Carol Off, on As It Happens.

… it’s about his new memoir: Joseph Anton. And, more generally, about that decade in hiding.

It’s… kind of an incredible interview, actually. I guess I’m going to be reading that book.

Well, not that I suppose it was ever much in doubt.

There’s an intriguing dynamic that comes to light therein, tho’, that I guess makes sense but which still kinda took me by surprise on my first unexpected listen in the car—Rushdie seems a mite miffed at certain folk in the publishing industry in particular—and in government—who he seems to feel were rather quick to throw him under the bus—and rather grateful to those who, against this, said nuh uh, no you don’t…

My deep thoughts ‘n all on this may have to wait a bit. Like I just said, busy.

But it’s engrossing. The bit about ‘The Mistake’, especially…

I feel some empathy, there, let’s just say.

Anyway: do listen, if you’ve missed it as yet.

The thing is, Septembers get like this at the best of times. Kids back in school, running around, getting used to new chauffering schedules, attending to school supplies, clothes, supplies and gear for extracurricular stuff, so on. It’s normally a mite mad. Balancing all that with making sure everyone eats and the house doesn’t collapse into a pile of dust and dust mites, it’s always a little silly anyway…

And this year, since I was a) out of town and b) away from work for two weeks just prior to this happening, I’m also catching up to the yard work (drought had done some serious damage; leaving everything entirely two weeks while the rain came back means lots of weeds and not much grass in some places) and getting back into gear at work.

Oh, and I’m also trying to keep a reasonable exercise schedule going since having got into some nice shape prior to leaving, it’d be nice not to ruin it, nice to keep it together for the upcoming boarding season…

… and I’m trying to have some discipline about instrument practice and ear training for a change instead of just going ad hoc all over the place and picking things up when I feel like it. I’ve always had these odd little gaps in capability that would take long essays to explain, and so I’m now trying to get properly organized about filling in a few things in particular, and it’s all the kind of stuff (like a lot of stuff) really only focused and cumulative practice and exercises are at all likely to address. How I convinced myself now would be a good time to deal with this, I really don’t know…

… so, anyway: busy… So… Um…

Y’know, a lot of bloggers would just put a cute picture of a cat up here and be done with it. But it bothers me somehow that the whole of the internet might eventually be cat pictures, if people keep at that kinda thing.

So I’m passing. No cats for you. Thus endeth the keepalive.

I dunno. It’s not like this song even needs one.

But anyway: Hell Broke Luce.

I generally haven’t done ‘em. Why, I dunno…

Partly just never got ‘round to it, y’know? Other priorities, mostly. And partly just I’m not much for humidity. Hell, I’m not much for heat of any kind.

And, also honestly, the tropics always made me a little nervous. Sure, the actual environment in the part of the world to which I’m more accustomed regularly kills people who don’t dress warmly enough, but we also have way fewer poisonous snakes and tropical storms, lets remember.

Still, I’ll acknowledge it is pretty down here in the… umm…

… well, right here in the track for Tropical Storm (but not yet Hurricane, and everyone cross yer fingers for all of us down here, could you, please?) Isaac, apparently…

Oh, I’m not worried. It’ll still be a whole day away and probably headed not exactly in our direction when we actually head out onto the ocean in a few more days, now. What could possibly go wrong?

There’s something strangely poetic about this. There really is.

Oh, other than that: yeah, we’re having fun, actually. And my cunning plan to get in decent shape prior to even going near this particular latitude seems to have worked out okay. Between that (maybe) and it being the rainy season here, I could even call myself reasonably comfortable, most of the time.

This is just another of those keepalive things.

It’s the usual deal. Very busy. Kids. Work. Home.

Brief notes:

1) ATSC terrestrial signals are something to behold when you get them working. Over-the-air line-of-sight transmissions have come a long way since your father’s TV set.

The occasion of my mentioning: I set up an antenna for the local signals a week or so back.

How that happened: we’d ditched our cable TV package several months back now. Got to thinking—like I think a lot of people are now noticing—that paying the kinda money it now costs to have a 24-hour tap with a hundred channels of junk you mostly don’t watch when you can get pretty much anything you might really want to see and have time for on a pay-per-program basis via the net is just kinda silly. It was my lovely wife’s idea—I’m not really much a TV guy at all anyway. I might veg for an hour in front of Colbert or a Simpsons rerun maybe for an hour like every eight months at most, these days, I’m not kidding.

(Not that I’m saying I don’t veg—it’s just now that I do it reading the web.)

Anyway, having ditched the cable, and the per-program thing working pretty okay apparently, my lovely wife got to thinking it would still be nice to have the local channels around, especially given that one of ‘em would be carrying the Olympics pretty much wall to wall. So I looked into it.

It turned out to be non-trivial in our case. The standard interior antennae available, amplified or no, however much I was willing to spend on top-of-the-line just weren’t cutting it. Tried a few variations, and got, generally, one or two channels at once, from various locations in and around the ground floor. And much fiddling was necessary if you wanted to get some of ‘em to tune versus others. Too much artificial relief (read: buildings) I’d guess.

So my eventual solution turned out to be: a big ole’ directional Channel Master (current descendant of the big spindly aluminum things you may well remember from forty foot towers, in the day) in the attic pointed carefully at the local tower, a fair bit of coax dragged neatly through walls and ceilings on the fish tape, and a signal preamp in the wiring closet.

But all that together does, as I mentioned above, make for one hell of a picture. I managed to arrange for 13 local channels, 12 of those steady as a rock, which is pretty much the best you’re going to do in Ottawa without far more extreme measures still. (And slightly less of half of those don’t even come from the tower I was pointing at, which was just nice.) And surveying those: ATSC is generally hi-def and gorgeous: 720p or 1080i, and generally, apparently, less compressed than you’re likely to get per-channel via cable. So it looks pretty damned amazing on a nice big flatscreen, actually. Once I’d got it working, I spent some time watching the summer Olympics, and I’m not really a sports watcher, and especially not for summer sports. But it was just so durned pretty, y’know?

2) Stieg Larsson’s stuff is pretty much as good as you may have heard. Just FYI if, y’know, you are, like I was until yesterday, one of the last six people in the world who haven’t got ‘round to reading any of it yet.

Occasion of my mentioning this: I’d been packing e-texts onto my Nexus in anticipation of upcoming travel. The first Larsson, however, will not be helping me kill time on planes or departure lounges, as, it turns out, I’ve already read it. In hours I probably should have been sleeping. It’s that kinda stuff, I’m afraid.

… and that’ll have to do for now. As, apparently, I should be working. Later, I guess.

The Love Machine.

Turns out I know one of their guitarists (Allan Gauthier), through a coffee shop I kinda rely upon to keep me alive. Anyway, do go listen. A lot of it is that solid, steady, crunchy, guitar-driven stuff. Textures, y’know? I’m recommending JC and the Gamblers and Width Eyes right now.

… okay, so I asked for rain, got trees down, lightning shows, so on.

It did pour tho’, and pretty heavily for a bit. I figure at this rate the grass may actually develop a faint green tinge, anyway.

Well, okay, prolly briefly, at best, honestly. Guess it’ll have to do. tho’.

(/Is it time to abandon the farm and head to California? It is gettin’ kinda Steinbeckian around here.)