I hope it's a beautiful day in Vancouver because Bif Naked is getting married. She can sing this at her dance:

I love my spouse today
not like yesterday
back then
he was
just my fiance
uh huh

So my best fanboy wishes to her and her new hubby, Vancouver Sun sportswriter Ian Walker.
Update- Here's a brief and non-intrusive article from the CBC about the ceremony.

Of course the concert was amazing. In the program guide there was a quote from Loreena that says:

The education of self through travel can be a journey that knows no end. As I look at history and cultures through the prism of other eyes, it feels like a search, or even an excavation, for some connection between the past and present.

Growing up I was like any other kid in that history was something that just didn't penetrate my awareness- it wasn't even "there" enough to be boring. Especially growing up in small town Alberta, a town that only recently celebrated 50 years, there just wasn't any history around me to affect me.
Travel of course opens your eyes, but even then it can take a while for the message to totally sink in. I remember gazing at this incredible monument to all these old Hungarian kings in Budapest. I wish I could recall its name. It's called Heroes Square. All these kings on pillars, arrayed in a semicircle. The inscription was almost apologetic because it "only" went back to the 11th century. That kind of blew my mind a little.
It wasn't until after the first time I went up to the Yukon, my dad gave me a book by Pierre Berton called Klondike that I finally realized that just doing a little bit of reading about a place you're going to can enhance your experience tenfold. That book was so amazing I had to go back and hike the Chilkoot Trail, which I never would have known about without reading that book.
Luckily I learned my lesson and was able to stand in Tiananmen Square, whitewashed as it is, and think of the people who died there not so long ago. Or explore the Potala Palace and know exactly why the Dalai Lama no longer lives there.
Hell, I even learned some pretty interesting things about New Zealand- like, did you know there was a special Maori battalion (the 28th, 2nd NZEF) that fought in WWII? The Maori were exempt from fighting, so Sir Aspirana Ngati, a member of Parliament established the 28th, made up entirely of volunteers. The National Geographic article where I read this claims that they performed a haka before their first battle and that this caused the Nazi soldiers to flee. That part may be apocryphal but maybe not. Cool, huh?
Take my advice, next time you travel read up on the history of the place beforehand.

Tonight both Loreena McKennitt and KoRn are playing in Edmonton. Although normally the chance to see KoRn, even a KoRn with only three remaining kernels on the kob, is something I'd jump at, Loreena supersedes all others. In five hundred years they'll speak of her in the same breath as Beethoven. In fact, I'm pretty sure if Fieldy, Munky and Jonathan knew Loreena was here tonight they'd cancel their show to go see her. Ooh- can you imagine if they joined her onstage? That would be amazing! Jonathan could play bagpipes and Loreena would arrange Freak on a Leash all celtic-worldly, sort of how it was done on the Unplugged album. And then the guys would reciprocate by doing a super-heavy version of Marco Polo, which is already pretty heavy. I'm crossing my fingers for that!

Here's a video I took today when I was waiting to jump aboard my shovel- those tires are twice as tall as I am, to give you an idea of scale:



National Geographic has some stunning footage of an Orca attack on some California Grey Whales.
And how would you like it if someone just started using your Flickr photos in ads and other, even-less savoury uses?

These are the things that I am excited/learning about this week:
-Snmashing my car oh wait that's not one.
-the loonie hits parity with the US$. Now if only we could actually pay less for American goods. And I know it's a mixed blessing with our exports- I work for an exporting company after all.
-lobsters. Seriously, they're just so cool. But contrary to what I've heard, they don't actually mate for life. In fact the closest human analogy would be to wife beaters. Only, polygamous wife beaters. Anyways, you can learn more from Trevor Corson's Secret Life of Lobsters.
-Steve Biko. I've always loved that Peter Gabriel song, Biko, though I had no idea what he was saying. What's a biko? Turns out Biko is an anti-apartheid martyr who was killed thirty years ago this month. Maybe you've seen the biopic starring Denzel- Cry Freedom.
-Sébastien Chabal. I'm not much into rugby (though I'll cheer the All-Blacks when the chance arises, like that time in Waitomo drinking Tui beer) but when i saw this deviation portrait of a French Rugby player, I wanted to know more about him. Turns out he's a monster. An All-Black-crushing bipedal bulldozer.

I snmashed up my car on the way to work the other day. Hit the ditch after some loose gravel sent me fishtailing. It wasn't really damaged too badly- a couple of big dents and the tire ran off the rim, but nothing that cost money to fix. Some work buddies c came along and pulled me out. Now I just gotta listen to their smartass remarks for the next 25 years.
As if that wasn't bad enough, later in the night I snmashed a guy's truck with my bucket. Wasn't really my fault, my camera was showing a mirror image so it looked like there was no one there, but still, I felt pretty bad. He wasn't hurt badly enough to go to the hospital but he did go to the first aid room for a few hours. I know I've posted this video before, but it sort of shows how I can see to my right really well, but not so well to my left which is why we have cameras.



PS- Happy Talk Like A Pirate Day!

Ten years ago today I embarked on a Cross-Canada hitch-hiking trip just for the helluvit. I sometimes think that was the most extraordinary thing I ever did, at least in the sense of being both hardy and foolhardy, but on the other hand all it took was a thumb. Heh get it? A thumb on the other hand? Never mind.
I headed east- from Edmonton to Saskatoon the first day, to spend a few days with friends there. Then to Winnipeg to visit more friends, and from there across the huge Canadian Shield where I eventually made my way to Kingston, again to visit friends. Eventually I made it all the way to Cape Spear, Newfoundland, the Easternmost point in North America- it's really considered that even though Newfoundland is an island. That felt pretty good. Heading home I got as far as Ontario when I gave in to the November cold and bought a VIA Rail pass, using it to go up to Churchill to look for polar bears. I only saw one, from the train, but that was just as well since I did most of my polar bear hunting on foot. Remember what I said about foolhardy?



Well, I suffered no harm on that entire trip, though there were some interesting moments for sure- then and on subsequent hitches I did. I'm retired from hitch-hiking now, though. Marriage (surely the ACTUAL most extraordinary thing I ever did) will do that, but obviously hiking of the non-hitch variety is still an option. But I'm glad I did it- and proud. It takes guts to do something like that, and when you're a suburbanite with a mortgage it can be easy to forget that you ever had guts.
Well, thanks for indulging me in my self-aggrandizing reminiscences. I'm off to my sister's wedding to celebrate with her as she embarks on her extraordinary adventure.
I leave you with this- what is the most extraordinary thing you ever did?

As it happens, today is Jasper's 100th anniversary. Jasper National Park was founded on September 14, 1907. It forms part of an extensive UNESCO World Heritage Site of 22,900 square kilometers, along with Banff, Kootenay and Yoho National Parks, and Mount Robson, Assiniboine and Hamber Provincial Parks in BC.
There is no finer place in the world to poo in the woods- they even provide these loos with a view:



they come complete with Lumpy, a pooey mascot who provides helpful instructions for changing toilet bowls:

I told ya you should've come with! What a great hike- perfect weather, amazing scenery, and the fish were even biting:



We met some fellow hikers who saw a grizz on the trail where we were headed but we never ran into him. It rained/snowed the second night but we stayed nice and dry in the tent. So really, it was el tiempo bueno the whole time.



I made a couple of quick video blogs, in which you get the distinct impression that I was making Robin do all the work. That's cause I have him all trained up from the coal mine.
Anyways, here's the Flickr Photo set of the whole trip.

I'm heading off to Jasper to hike the Tonquin Valley with a buddy, so I should be back on Wednesday unless we get eaten by bears. But I am a bear so I doubt that will be a problem. Snow might be a problem, though, it's been snowing off and on all week at work.
In the meantime, here are some beautiful recent deviations I have been drooling over.
Also, a two-headed tortoise celebrated its tenth birthday last week. Almost as impressive as my own impending 33rd. Though if I had been born with two noggins I doubt I would have reached my tenth birthday.

Here's a vessel, probably the only one in the world, that is actually cooler than the Jaguar Shark: the Proteus.

And here's some video I took at work- you might want to turn the volume down- that loud noise is actually the pump I was standing next to and not the backhoe which is relatively quiet.

The Invasion of Canada by Nazis in 1943
An armed German Unterseeboot landed on Canadian soil to install a weather station back in WWII. You didn't know? That's alright, neither did anyone else until 1981 when some historians, acting on information from diaries and photographs, were able to locate an old weather station on the coast of Labrador (60.4N 64.23W if you want to go there in Google Earth). U-537 made the excursion on October 22, 1943 to install the station.
You can read more about it here.
And don't worry- I have a retaliatory mission planned- I'm going to crew the Jaguar Shark with water bears, and send them over to Germany so they can poo in the black Forest.

The Voyage of the Jaguar Shark
I built a submarine today- I named it the Jaguar Shark in honor of Owen Wilson making a speedy recovery.


You can make one too- here's how.

I took it down to the nearby pond- I didn't really christen it since I figured breaking a bottle over the bow of a bottle probably wouldn't work that well. Anyways, the maiden voyage was not quite what I hoped for- it didn't exactly submerge, even though I played with its buoyancy a bit by adding varying amounts of water.




And actually the propeller system, though brilliant, didn't work as well as I had hoped. Oh well, it was still fun.
Thanks to Craig at Deep Sea News for the link.

First of all, do yourself a favour and immediately go get Loreena McKennit's Nights from the Alhambra concert DVD/CD. It's beautiful- I'm almost in tears from it. Seriously.
Michelle and I have tickets to her concert later this month- at the Jube, not exactly as pretty as the Palace of Charles V but that's okay. Anywhere she sings is automatically heaven.
Would you think you were in hell if you saw a bunch of chupacabras running around sucking blood from chickens and cows? That's what they're saying in Texas- and one woman even has a severed head to prove it. Though to me the head looks kind of like a pitbull/bullshit cross.
Also in Texas, you might have heard about the social spiders who cooperated to spin a massive web. I never knew some species of spiders exhibited social behaviour- in fact, I thought it was an invention of Vernor Vinge in his excellent book, Marooned in Realtime- he has massive colonies of social spiders who live atop jungle canopies, harvesting silkworms and pooing green mycotoxins. The spiders actually are just an interesting detail- the book itself is a sci-fi murder mystery. Vinge just won a Hugo or his latest book, Rainbow's End.