* Michelle interrupts your regularly scheduled poo . . .*

EEW! EEW! EEK! EEW!



This spider was perched rather precariously above our veranda, here in suburbia. Does this look like a suburbanite to you??

What the f#@% is something like that doing here?? This is the kind of spider that created Spiderman - not the kind that a handful of Kleenex and a sturdy shoe could take care of . . .

Vampirenomad?? Rubber ducky?? Cass?? Selkie?? Ladybug & Nomi?? Digger?? Lydia?? Susa?? haley-o?? I know you have my back on this one!
EEW!! EEW!! EEW!!

But alas, my burly bear was able to quickly dispose of it before it procreated and attempted a hostage takeover of The Woods.

I just know I'm going to have creep-crawly nightmares tonight . . .

*Homie Bear here again*

Yeah so, it was Ursis Subursis versus Shelob's great-great-granddaughter. And the bear won. Bears ALWAYS win. We now leave you with this passage from Professor Tolkien:

Great horns she had, and behind her short stalklike neck was her huge swollen body, a vast bloated bag, swaying and sagging between her legs; its great bulk was black, blotched with livid marks, but the belly underneath was pale and luminous and gave forth a stench. Her legs were bent, with great knobbed joints high above her back, and hairs that stuck out like steel spines, and at each leg's end there was a claw.
-The Two Towers

Ursis Subursis
After six months, I think I've adjusted rather well to the suburbanite life. And perhaps more importantly, the neighbours haven't yet complained about having a bear for a neighbour. Although Michelle and I spend a lot of time talking with friends about such things as the real estate market and planned home improvement projects, we still have our heads firmly floating in the clouds. We are often found reading children's books to each other, busting silly moves in the kitchen to our diverse music library, and even performing Crimestoppers Reenactments (when I was Falsely Accused of Using Her Toothbrush).
This morning Michelle asked me if I wanted anything from the mall. "Like what?" I asked, and she replied, "Something that starts with a 'B'."
"And ends with illy Talent? Yes please!" So I am happy to report to you that Billy Talent II is chock full of kickass. They're Canadian, so I don't know if you non-Canucks know of them, but they really are amazing. Kinda punky buzzsaw rock, hooks aplenty, with vocals reminiscent of Jello Biafra stripped of sarcastic whininess. (Sorry, I know he's a legend and I respect that but I have never really been a fan of Biafra.) Plus they get bonus points for taking their name from Hard Core Logo, a legendary Canadian road film about a fictional punk band, starring the Headstones' Hugh Dillon.
And I am also very happy to hear that right here in Southwest Edmonton there is a fossil bed full of Edmontosauruses and possibly their predators, Albertasaurus. How many suburbanite bears have dinosaurs for neighbours?

Does anyone remember Mighty Man and Monster Maker? I had it when I was a kid, but I forgot all about it until I read Andrew's blog. How could someone forget something as cool as that? Must be all the other great things crammed into my memory. Like, I knew someone who had this toy sand quarry. It was just a piece of cardboard covered with bubble plastic, and inside was a bunch of sand and some dumptrucks. Then you used a magnet to drive the dumptrucks around. Something like that, anyways. That's a little foggy too, partly because I would never want to forget the Master Blaster. It was an electronic game where you shot missiles at little UFO blips that shimmied their way down to earth. PSPs? PShaw!
I also really liked my little Battlestar Galactica ships that had little red plastic bits that would pop out when you shot them. Mostly, of course, I played with all my Star Wars figures. Still do!

Lakes on Titan
Interesting news coming out of the Cassini-Huygens mission- it seems the space probe is finding evidence of rivers and lakes on the Saturnine moon's surface. Obviously not bodies of water, the liquids inhabiting the basins and channels would almost certainly be methane or ethane. Scientists and sci-fi writers have speculated for years that the surface of Titan might have liquid methane present.
And from there, the obvious leap to make is to question whether life could arise in such an environment. There are copious amounts of organic chemicals on Titan, but no water or gaseous oxygen. And it's colder than death there. But as we see here on Earth, life has evolved pretty much everywhere, sometimes in places we thought anathema to life, such as oceanic vents that spew H2S. Any life on Titan would be both very simple, and very bizarre, requiring the ability to metabolize hydrocarbons.
Although, looking at the Cassini pictures, I think I see evidence of great hordes of Titan Bears fishing the methane rivers for Saturn Salmon.

My wife ran her first half-marathon today! Yay for Michelle! In the midst of the craziest hot spell ever, and on a wounded knee, she finished the race in 2 hours and 31 minutes. That's really amazing. During that same 2 hours and 31 minutes I waited in Hawrelak Park and acquainted myself with the Tim Horton's Community Van lady who was giving away Timbits and coffee for free. Yum!
Update: I went for my first run in many years tonight (Monday). I ran for seven minutes, which is 2 hours and 24 minutes short of a half marathon. But it's a start!

Looks like that silliness at work pretty much blew over. It helped that yesterday a loader caught on fire so they have something new to investigate.
Never a dull moment at a coal mine, I'll tell ya. Seriously. If it's not things blowing up or flipping over, it's the escapades of the colorful characters I work with. The stories I could tell you . . . too bad they're not really very wholesome, for the most part.
Though I did find out that one of my coworkers once raised three orphan black bear cubs, back when he was a kid in Manitoba. I asked him about them, and he told me, in a wistfully nostalgic tone of voice, "dey're just like 'umans, dem fuckin' t'ings."

Yesterday, this topheavy, poorly designed service truck

wound up upside down. Luckily, the untrained guy who was driving it was unhurt.
Today, they came and tried to blame me for the incident, since I was driving this water truck:

This unit exists for dust control- it lays down water on our 23 km haul road to keep the dust at bay. It's a laughably impossible job on a hot summer day, but we at least make the attempt. Anyways, their thought process went something like this:
"Service truck upside down! Must be slippery! Must be Homie Bear's fault!"
They asked me to fill out a statement, and although I used all the details and technical jargon that won't mean anything to you, my statement basically said "I was doing my job, I was 15 kms away at the time of the incident, therefore it wasn't my fault you dumbasses." We'll see what happens tomorrow.

Pirate Month: The Kraken Strikes Back!

Dead Man's Chest was good fun, a great middle chapter of a trilogy. So long as Pirates 3 doesn't have ewoks, we should be okay! But to tell the truth, ole Homie Bear likes ewoks. Little forest cousins, I call them. Did you know that Lucas was once sued by someone who claimed he stole the Ewok idea? If I recall correctly, that guy was from Calgary but I could be wrong. The internet is strangely silent on the subject. Lucas' defense was that ewoks were simply half-wookies, and he even took the name by rearranging the word wookie. More cynical observers may have remarked that he should have pled guilty just so he could saddle the blame on someone else! Sadly, no one has yet claimed that Lucas stole JarJar Binks.
You may think I am indulging in some weird, non-piratical digression here but actually it segues into this item about how the producers of POTC are being sued for allegedly stealing the idea for everything from supernatural pirates to the name "Black Pearl". I have no idea how much merit there is to this suit, but I think it would be so sweet if Bruckheimer et al's defense consisted of just one word:
Pirate!

At work, I have the option of listening to:

a) Classic rock from Edmonton
b) Classic rock from Vancouver
c) Hot country from Edmonton
d) Classic country from Calgary

I have lobbied repeatedly to get one of the stations changed to Sonic (since we pipe them in via satellite to our remote wilderness location), but I have been told this is "impossible". No one has been able to clarify whether this means:

a) It is physically impossible, due to obscure technical reasons pertaining to kilohertzes and megawatts.
b) It is legally impossible, due to the CRTC's draconian rules
c) It is simply impossible, where "impossible" is defined as "I don't really feel like changing it."

Last night I had occasion to make the following observations about country music:

a) Surely there are more than four classic country songs????
b) Convoy may be the strangest song ever written
c) Country covers of rock songs are, excepting Johnny Cash, generally very terrible. The slogan of the Discount Country Cover Warehouse is "We take tired old classic rock songs and render them even more limpid through the application of liberal amounts of twang, autoharp and group harmonies, and then removing the melody!"
d) Country music is still better than Howard Stern

The solution to this woeful musical situation is to come home to your wife and find that she has loaded the CD player with:

a) Bif Naked
b) Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil Soundtrack (lovely jazz from the gabrielle collection!)
c) Selkie's Non-Country Cover Mix
d) KoRn

Anyways, here is a fun, musical meme started by Rolling Stone- Terrible Songs on Great Albums. Mine are:

a) The Tragically Hip's Day For Night actually has three terrible songs (IMO), that ruin the beautiful diad of "Scared" and "Titanic Terrarium". Those songs are, um, tracks 11,12 and 14. But the rest of the CD is beyond exceptional.
b) Metallica, Reload- "Attitude". Ruining the amazingly atmospheric diad of "Low Man's Lyric" and "Fixxxer" by sticking a generic rocker in between.
c) KoRn, Follow the Leader, "All in the Family". It's a sorta funny battle song, but it gets a little too over the top for me, and again, disrupts the mood of the disc. And it has Fred Durst, so . . .
d) Beck, from Guero- "Missing". Not really terrible, but I tend to skip it to get to all the other fantastic tracks. It lacks the genius of the other tracks.

We're back from our First Year Anniversary Moon! We went on a road trip, driving down the Rockies to Southern Alberta. We camped in Jasper where we stoically endured a crazy booming thunderstorm all night. Michelle was a little worried, but I kept thinking about how Karen Ellis would render such an adventure. Here is my attempt at a Planet Karen homage- which taxed my drawing skills pretty much to their limit. Plus I took some artistic licence, which probably means my licence should be revoked:




You see why I leave cartooning to people like Karen.
Anyway, we had a pretty nice time, we survived the deluge. And we saw a black bear with two cubs! So cute. But dangerous, always remember that, kids. Some more pics here if you're interested.
Now I have to go work nightshift. Pirates will have to wait till next week.

Celebrating One Year!



And looking forward to many many more.