Sherri Ryan of Sonic 102.9 does a countdown show every Tuesday night where she picks a random thing and plays the top ten songs in that category. Sadly, I am either busy coalmining or, uh, watching House at that time so I have yet to actually hear her show. Luckily she posts her list every week on her blog. Remember my top seven six songs about vampires? Compiled when I was trapped in the Crypt.
The reason I bring it up is I have been trying to come up with a top ten list about coal mines, or heavy equipment, but pretty much stalled out at "Coal Mine" by Armchair Cynics. And that song isn't even about coal mining! But just tonight someone told me about this really cool song and video out there that fits the bill as far as being about machinery, and has the added bonus of having that wistful/reminiscent/childhood whimsy vibe I dig so much. Check it out: JCB Song, by Nizlobi.
Also, you should really check out House. He makes me laugh, with all his childlike whimsy!

Wow, here's something I started back in July of 2004 and completley forgot all about. I don't really know where I was going with it, though it likely was anticipating gabrielle's and my trip. Anyways, I found it in my drafts archive and I just finished it off in a few minutes for something to do, taking it in a completely different direction, I guess. No real clever wordplay that I like to think is my forte. Just a quick bit of silliness. 

Homie and the Sea Turtle

 Homie Bear in polar mode 

 Decided to see the antipode 

 He went to where the icebergs flowed 

 Caught a current and off he goed 

 He promised a postcard to the coastguard 

 Waved byebye to his whale friend Blubbalard

And settled back to enjoy the trip 

 But he was intercepted by a pirate ship 

 They wanted swag and booty and gold 

 But all Homie had was ice and cold 

 So they went away but first they say 

"Watch out for sharks when you get to the bay" 

Homie said, "Sharks! That sounds pretty cool!" 

He decided to see them, like a big fool 

He went to Shark Island and clambered ashore 

He didn't see sharks, they don't live there no more 

But he saw a green turtle, laying eggs in the sand 

And got her some water, to help lend a hand 

The turtle said "Thanks, my name is Ferg 

"And I can't help but notice that your little iceberg 

"Is melting too fast in the tropical heat 

"You're sweating so much you smell like old sheet 

"So hop on my shell and I'll take you home 

"I've always wanted to see where polar bears roam" 

So Homie said sure and he went back to the Arctic 

Leaving his iceberg right there where he parked it 

And Ferg liked it so much in the great white old north 

That she became a polar turtle from that time henceforth 

Which is why when you time travel a million years from last week 

You see white sea turtles with white shells and white beaks! 

 There. Hope you like it. I better go make supper for Michelle. Speaking of my beautiful wife, tomorrow is her birthday, so please all send her some love! And maybe for a gift you can suggest a nice romantic song (but not dumb, okay?) and I can make the compilation!

6:56 AM
It's early, it's dark, I'm still bleary, and I know I have a very long day ahead of me. I do my start-of-shift checks on the shovel, and all the oil and grease levels are good. I go up to the cab for a few minutes before my day begins in earnest. The shovel operator is in his chair, contemplating his own day. He's a nice old fellow named Vic, about 57 or so.
"They told me this is really called a gooey," he says.
"What's gooey?"
"This. The computer. It's really called a gooey."
"Oh, yeah, I know what you mean- a graphical user interface." (GUI)
"Sounds like your dad will be in the pit hauling some coal."
"Yeah I heard that." The sudden change in topic change doesn't faze me.
"Oh so it's a computer term, eh?"
"Yep."
"Gooey."
"Gooey," I agree.
"Well, I think I'll turn to my right here, where the bucket is pointing, and widen out. They'll likely tell me to keep going right to expose more coal, but I have to widen out."
"Yeah, guaranteed they'll be hollering at ya."
"Yep. Gooey!" And with that he plunged the bucket into the face, hoisting more than 80 tons of rock to begin his day.
7:02 AM
My foreman is here to pick me up. The rest of the day is spent by myself outside in the wind, lifting and pulling and wishing the day was over.
But every time I think of gooey, I smile.

Everyone say congratulations to my wife who started her new job today! Congratulations wife! Now I can quit my job!

Today was one of those "you really feel like a coal miner" days. Being open pit miners, we are far removed from the black faces and canaries of undergrounders (and thankfully far removed from their dangers as well) so though we get dirty every day, it is not usually too bad. Today the wind was howling off the mountains something fierce, gusting upwards of 60 km/hr, blowing coal dust in my eyes and face all day as I was down on the ground doing various things, not least of which was help one of these get unstuck. Even through my goggles and other protective gear I was completely black. I had Trent Reznor eyeliner, and cried tears of coal. In fact, I sneezed snot of coal, too! And I pooed . . . well, it doesn't quite get THAT deep. Though I can't really explain how my kneecaps and feet even get coaly.

Dinosaurs make me happy. I was spending a lazy Saturday afternoon down by the fireplace reading a National Geographic article on the mighty saurians. Here in Alberta we have one of the finest dinosaur fossil beds in the world, and an excellent museum to go with it, the Royal Tyrrell. If you are an Albertan student, you can enter their poster contest, though you will have some stiff competition from Weremagnus, who is her own worst enemy it seems, as she was disqualified from a previous year's contest because the judges didn't believe she had actually drawn her entry herself.
Lucky for everybody else, I am not eligible to enter.

Behold my terrifying Triceratops of triumph!

After almost a week of living in our new house, we are settling in quite nicely. Maybe even too nicely, since I accidentally chased off the guy who was shovelling my sidewalk for free. Well, I didn't chase him off so much as tell him that he didn't need to do it anymore, since the house had occupants now. And then a few seconds later I realized how utterly foolish that was. D'oh! Come back, free snowshoveller guy! Come baaaaack!
Oh well. I bought a fancy ergonomically sensitive snowshovel at the hardware store the other day so I might as well make use of it. Before it gets stolen. And speaking of hardware stores, I have been to the Home Depot more times this week than ever before in the rest of my life put together. Weird.
Anyways, the picture you see at the top is my new work area, replete with many bears and General Grievouses to make me happy and unproductive. What do I need to be productive for anyways? I'm on holidays. Heck, I'm still in my Pyjama Power™!

The Last Batgirl
(starring Tom Cruise as Batgirl and Ken Watanabe as Ra's al Ghul?)
Okay, after this I will move on, but how could I not link to Sarah How's fantastic rendition? She of course is the kickass artist who drew my two blogbears for me.

Just for Selkie
I scoured DeviantArt for some Wonder Woman pictures, since Batgirl is getting all the attention these days. So here are:
A vectorized version. A colored comic illo. A digitally painted piece. A B&W WW. Same spiffed up with colors. An Amazon avatar. And an updated Underwoman. I mean, Wonderwoman.

Batgirl!!

Wanna see more? Most of them are much better than mine, I promise.
Here are some of my fav orite ites ites ites . Yay for Batgirl ! ! ! !

And make sure you check out Gotthammer Mike's new redesign- colder picture, warmer feel.

All moved in to our new house! Yay! It's hard to believe we own a little piece of Edmonton. Not a very big piece, but still. It's mine! I can't wait to get a rocking chair so I can sit out on our veranda with a shotgun on my lap, telling everyone who walks by, "Quit walking on my sidewalk!" Or maybe I could just set up a tollbooth, and charge a toonie to pass. That might help with our mortgage payments. Hmmm. That's a pretty good idea. Though Michelle and I seem to have very different philosophies concerning what makes a good idea.


Big bear hugs to everyone who helped us move: Ma and Pa Z, Alex, Crogdor, Erika, SuperDrew (who came directly from the airport!), Dave, and Papa Bear. Thank you all very much! You helped make it the easiest move ever.

George RR Martin was in Edmonton today, doing a book signing for A Feast for Crows. Luckily he didn't do a reading since I am a few hundred pages short of finishing A Storm of Swords, which comes after A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings. I kind of expected the signing to be A Herd of Nerds but there was a good cross-section of society there. Martin himself is the epitome of what you would expect a fantasy writer to look like- kind of hobbity and a little wizardy too. He spoke for a bit and then answered questions. He was engaging, funny and generous with his time. His main writerly advice was that you must write, and you must finish what you write. Also he recommended you hone your craft with short stories. Oddly, he never said anything about the importance of writing many poetic odes to bears, but I know he would've had he remembered to- his own bear poem turns up repeatedly, though in fragments, in Swords:

The Bear and the Maiden Fair

A bear there was, a bear, a BEAR!
All black and brown and covered with hair

It goes on from there. It's very good. I forget what the rest of the book is about.

Sort of related, the trailer for Beowulf and Grendel is online now.

I was injured at work today. Oh no! Was I run over by a 260 ton haultruck and squashed flat as a pancake? No! Was I caught in a blast and blown into a billion little pieces? No! Did one of the resident grizzly bears, jealous of my superior literary skills, decide to eat me and poo me out into the woods? No! In fact, I was just putting some orange cones into my foreman's truck and I strained a back muscle. Coned! So I guess in light of what could have happened I was pretty lucky. But it still hurt.

One thing I'm going to miss about this little basement suite is the low cost of living. One thing I won't miss is the cramped quarters. It is physically not possible to stand in front of the bathroom sink, since the shower is in the way. You have to brush your teeth and do other hygienic stuff at an angle. And just doing laundry is literally a hazardous undertaking. Today I burned my hand on the stupid furnace pipe that is right in the way, and a month ago or so I accidentally brushed against that pipe with my back, leaving a six inch welt that still hasn't faded completely away. Ouch!
But on the plus side, there are very few orcs.

PS- Go Canada!!

By a Strange coincidence, I finished reading Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell today, and the other day, I finished off Moving Mars, by Greg Bear (no relation). How is that a coincidence? The two books could not be more different! Turns out Moving Mars won the 1995 Nebula Award, and JS & MN won 2005's Hugo! Both are prestigious sci-fi/fantasy awards (or as my coworker who looked at Moving Mars when I set it down called the genre, "Far-fetched"). And the more I thought about it, the more in common the two books had. One postulates a universe in which everything you see is the result of quantum 'descriptors' which can be tweaked in almost any way imaginable- such that you could move Mars to a whole other solar system if you wanted to. The other is about magicians who just tweak everything by magic to relocate such things as Brussels to somewhere in America. Practically the same book! Though of course both could have been improved by the addition of a polar bear or two.

We got the house! Yay! Here is an artist's rendition of what it looks like, pretty much- even the colors are right. Trees not included. And there will be way more bears hanging out on the veranda in real life*.
It was cool, because Michelle and I basically went to the house store a few weeks ago and bought a house. It was that easy. Maybe even a little too easy- we just went to look. Now we move in in two weeks. You can help us move! Won't that be fun?

* Here is an artist's rendition of the same house, but with the bear quotient turned up a notch.