The grace of God

Thirty years or so since it was first on the air, do you know what I love (second) best about WKRP in Cincinnati?

That it says it's okay, even cool, to be 40 years old. (Thank you, Johnny Fever!)

Do you know what I love best about it?

Evenings when I was 10, and my Mom was off taking a business course in downtown Halifax, and my Dad and I would make chili and watch the show and laugh together. There's no dollar, no euro, no pound, no gold worth that to me. WKRP, laughter, and chili with my Dad was a defining moment of my childhood.

This show is family, even now.

Chapters in a Bullshit Story

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about wanting to buy a book on camera RAW processing at Chapters, and the issues I had with the price. Well, I did something about it. I ordered the book from Amazon instead.

I ordered the book on Monday. It arrived today (Wednesday). Just two days to get here. Okay, it's not the instant gratification of snagging something off the shelf, but given that I waited two weeks to order anyway, two days' delivery time is just fine with me. Better than I hoped for, in fact.

Here's the big punch, though. Chapters wanted $47.99 for the book. Amazon wanted $30.23. That's less than the US price (more on that in a second). We're expected to pay Chapters an extra 18 bucks — nearly a 60% premium — just to stick this thing on a shelf? So I ordered it, and with the savings, I ordered another book, this one about photographic composition. With tax, buying the book at Chapters would have cost me just over $50. Buying two books from Amazon, shipped for free in two days, cost me just $5 more. I got the second book for five bucks... effectively, for free.

When I was in Chapters that day, really, I just wanted my money's worth. I wanted to pay the US price, $39.99. The Canadian dollar right now is worth 99.15¢ US. That's essentially par. And it has been more or less at par with the US dollar for around a year now, when it started routinely hitting over 95¢ US last May. So all this garbage the bookstores are giving us about old copies having old prices is wearing real, real fucking thin at this point. In fact, it's out and out bullshit: the book I bought about camera RAW... I checked; it has a copyright date of 2008. So this is not an old copy. This out outright gouging. Why, with a Canadian dollar worth 99% or more of a US dollar, am I being expected to pay a 20% premium as though my dollar were worth 83¢? Who pockets that difference?

Well, you know what? Maybe Chapters doesn't value the Canadian dollar, but as a guy who gets paid in them, buys with them, lives by them, I sure the hell do. And that's why Chapters ain't gettin' any more of mine.

I'd say "Wake me up when it's over..."

...but even Rip Van Winkle doesn't sleep that long.

I've probably said this somewhere before, but I'm not following the US primaries very closely. It's for a few reasons... one, it's not my country, and in the abstract, I don't care that much. Two, to me, it largely looks like just more of the same. Bush wants to nuke Iran. Cheney wants to nuke Iran. McCain sings about nuking Iran. Hillary just said she'd nuke Iran. What's the difference which of these inhuman talking heads actually fronts the global hegemon-factory when the product is always the same? Three, they drag this shit out for so colossally long every four years that's it pretty much boring before it's even really under way. Jesus, it doesn't take this long to elect a pope, and he gets the job of God's (ostensible) representative on Earth, for life. Come on, folks. Pick a town, hold a fucking convention, and get it over with in six weeks, not eighteen months.

Anyway, I notice that whenever I think the news is good, it's bad, and vice versa. Obama won a state last night, lost a state last night, but apparently it's such good news he's taking the day off. From what I read, even if he wins every single remaining delegate, he still can't win without the "superdelegates". Oh, that's democracy, alright. A year and a half of giving the same speech, mud-slinging, disavowing old friends, billions spent on basically nothing... and it comes down to the hands of a few dozen tenured plutocrats anyway. Why the fuck are they letting it drag on? Why don't they get it over with so the Democrats can cobble together some kind of united front before the election rather than bombing their own bridges and saving the Republicans the effort? Why, if they must have these 50 needless primaries, don't they have them all at the same time so I don't hear stuff like "ordinarily, the people of North Carolina's votes don't count for much because the candidacy has already been decided by the time of their primaries..." Who the fuck considers THAT a shot in the arm for democracy?

And let's not forget, all this pointless, mind-numbing, wasteful lunacy is just the lead-up to an election that, itself, is not decided by a nation of equal men and women each casting an identical vote for the one office in their nation they all share, but by that gigantic Cuisinart of democracy called the Electoral College in which the vote of a Wyomingite carries four times the weight of that of a Californian (and that's taking population into account, too)... unless, of course, the Wyomingite votes for the losing party in his state, in which case his vote counts for... nothing.

Hard to get really excited about a contest with this many handicaps.

Rain, rain... we went away

Well, if I wanted some rain for the hike on Kirby Road and didn't get it, I got it in spades this Saturday. It would have been nice if we could have averaged out the two.

My friend Larry, who also likes to hike lost places, got in touch with me and said he was game to explore this weekend. As it turned out, the unseen but world champion of finding lost places, Bassmentbeats, had sent me a new assignment just days earlier. It was in Halton, north of Milton, just up on the escarpment in the vicinity of a quarry. In fact, from the looks of things, the reason the place has been so extensively abandoned in recent years is that the quarry plans to devour the place. Exploring it in the short term looks to be the only option... soon, it won't be there to explore, it seems to me.

Bassmentbeats said he'd traveled the road before, back when people were still living in the homes at the southern end. Today, half the road's blocked off and the houses that once were there are gone (there are still some nice ones being lived in at the north end of the road, however). We parked the car and set out, in what was initially a light rain, to explore what BB figures was probably a campgrounds.

The temperature was in the mid-teens; comfortable enough, even with the light rain. The uncomfortable element, really, was the wind. If it hadn't been for that, we probably could have persisted longer, even when the rain really kicked in. But at least initially, it wasn't so bad. We turned off the road and onto the driveway leading into the grounds. We noticed some fresh truck tracks entering from a south turn, and assumed they must have been affiliated with the quarry since there's no other way to get to that end of the road. We followed them along, leaving tracks of our own in the mud as we explored.

It wasn't long before we came to some hints of what had been... some plastic chairs, a desk, and a ruined canoe. The former items were neither here nor there, but the canoe strongly suggested some kind of camping activity. There were no rivers or major lakes handy, just a couple of ponds BB had seen and shown us using GoogleMaps.

We came to a fork in the road and followed the left fork down to a concrete-bottomed artificial lake. It was full of algae blooms and its central drainage system had seen better days. The place has probably been abandoned for 15 or 20 years at this point. As we stood looking it over, Larry spotted headlights through the trees. It was the truck coming back from whatever mission it had been on. We were either hidden by the copse of trees or they just didn't care; they drove on without stopping.

It was right around then, though, that the rain began to pick up. I usually carry an old outer shower curtain with me for times I want to sit back for a while in the forest without getting all covered in leaves and dirt. We found a couple of trees and attached the curtain to the branches and stood under it. It was fine at first, but the rain quickly became semi-torrential, and eventually soaked through the fabric. It wasn't doing us any good just standing there, so we elected to do an Apollo 13 and abandon the mission to get back to base. It pretty much rained on us the whole twenty minute walk back to the car. We both remarked to one another that it really wasn't the rain, or even the saturated clothes, that bothered us. Even the ground water and the mud were comfortably warm enough as we made our way through them. No, it was the wind, blowing over our sodden shirts that was the downer. Larry even said that, had there been no wind, he probably would have be in favour of continuing exploring in the rain. But it was just unpleasant enough to chase us back to shelter.

We had to sit naked in the car for about half an hour while things dried out, at least a little. We listened to the radio tell us about the rain and watched a couple of other lost cars come to the end of the road and turn around. Eventually, we got back into our clammy things and headed into town to get something to eat.

Above is a beautiful Anglican church in Milton. Larry liked the church so I took the shot for him.

Incredibly, we found Breyden's in Milton. Breyden's is a place I've been a number of times with P-Doug down at Jane and Bloor. I had no idea it was a chain. We ordered the nachos and a couple of sandwiches; it was more than enough to satisfy us. I did manage to dump my pop on the table and partly onto Larry at one point, which only added insult to injury, but we both found the irony pretty humourous. The young waitress must have wondered what she'd done to have a couple of wet, bumbling assholes visited upon her. We tipped apologetically.

And that was it. Come more favourable weather, we're intending to go back and extend the mission.

Iron Mountain Man

Iron Mountain Man, originally uploaded by Lone Primate.

Max, sat in a box, caught in side light. Been waiting days for him to do this again. Did it up as a faux silver print.

Well... yeah. :)

Homeschooling. Your bullet train to Oxford.