LONGEST ZOO BLOG EVER!

So last Saturday, we cracked out the stroller and took Master Baby for her first zoo trip. As usual, I make no pretense of having any background in biology, or even the remedial mental skills sufficient to read and remember anything from the signs, so I do not know the scientific or common names of half of these animals. Sue me. We stuck to the Australia exhibit, which is good, since I took far too many pictures as it was.

First up, a monkey. They swapped these guys out for the red pandas, who apparently occupy the outdoor exhibit in winter (assumedly due to their fur).



And beholding the monkey, is yet another little monkey (to say nothing of the shaved ape behind the camera).



The red panda, back indoors.



I call them toucans, you call them hornbills. We can compromise on "funny looking birds".



The binturong was kind enough to raise his head and acknowledge us, his greatest of great fans.



A great lot of kangaroo photos in this blog. Something about the overgrown field, they just looked very photogenic out there!



A pair of kangaroos had been on the opposite side of the pond and decided to move back over with the main group. Here they are on their way, stopping to look back:



One of my favorite shots, the camera managed to catch this one in mid-hop as it galloped/ran/hopped/etc. across the field towards the main group.



A bit fuzzy, but I liked the layout of this shot, with the kangaroo proceeding in towards the group in the background.



A pair of outliers:



Again, looking back at the weird human family:



...and bounding back in to join the group.



Now this was a lucky shot! Loud little bird it was, too.



This fellow reminds me distinctly of my budgerigar, Edmund (later Edwina following a gender confirmation).



The happy seagull family, there as always. Left to right, grousing mother-in-law, combative wife, and hen-pecked husband.



A pic of that earlier noisy bird with headgear in a slightly more modest positioning.



And the profile...



This seagull has rather piercing eyes.



Another weird bird. I'm sounding rather like Karl Pilkington.



One more weird bird.



And lastly a whole collection of weird birds on a stick nest. Weird, innut? [ceasing the Karl Pilkington voice now]



I took a whole bunch of photos of this next kangaroo, who was very sociable and stood right up next to the path.



I'm going to run out of captions.



A moose once bit my sister...



Mind you, moose bites can be pretty nasty...



Last one of this fellow:



Got some of my better pictures of the wallabies this time, which are decidedly NOT social and tend to congregate at the very back of their pen. Note the young one on the left.



Mother and baby here...the baby is quite cute (an old enough marsupial to not look like a cocktail shrimp, thank goodness).



I particularly liked this shot because of the way the trees perfectly wreathed the kangaroo mob.



Closer up from that same angle:



And one more shot before Baby decides to take us home.



On the way out, saying hello to the walking slab of BBQ:

The Prodigal Yesfan: Coming to Grips with 90125

I'm probably not divulging anything too earth-shattering in acknowledging that I am a consummate fan of the band Yes. I'm nearly a bass disciple of Chris Squire, and have equal admiration for Steve Howe's impeccable guitartistry, if that is a word. Same to be said for Bill Bruford and Rick Wakeman. I have a general affection for the first two albums which were more psychedelic folk-rock than true progressive, but I generally consider the golden age of Yes to span from 1971 with the release of The Yes Album to 1977 with the release of Going for the One. Later albums either fell apart into a messy, half-hearted shambles or dissolved into commercial 80s pop mush.

Thus my general resentment for that album for which Yes is so widely known....90125. It has a crisp, well-produced sound, catchy 4 minute pop tunes, and a wide general appeal. A far cry from anything Yes had done previously. But I've been listening to it more lately. When Chris Squire and Jon Anderson formed the group in the late 60s, they were huge fans of folk music, and started the band with the desired goal of combining great, technical musicianship with excellent harmonies and vocals. In a sense that is what they got back to on 90125. The music is still well written and technically interesting, but with a much greater emphasis on traditional vocal hooks and pop songs. Here is a great example:

Yes - Changes

While few things are quite as laughable as a pushing-middle-age Chris Squire dancing and preening about the stage, finally contented to find that he is a POP STAR!, the musicianship, even live, is very evident in that clip.

And also, continuing on the vein of 90125 apologetics, compare it to the previous two Yes albums. While Going for the One represented one of the high points, with the hugely epic and ethereal "Awaken" closing the album as well as that period of the band's history, the next album, Tormato, had a few standout tracks but generally felt listless, drab, and uncreative. It should be noted that the album still retained the classic Yes lineup: Howe, Anderson, Squire, Wakeman, and White. This lineup recorded Going for the One and Tales from Topographic Oceans, and Relayer, Close to the Edge, and Fragile were all recorded with just one personnel change (Patrick Moraz for Wakeman in Relayer, and Bill Bruford for Alan White in the latter two). But Tormato was uninspired and flat-sounding on the whole. "Release, Release" and "Arriving UFO" had some interesting moments, particularly at the end of the latter song, as the keys continue an ascending pattern of chords, with Squire continuing his interesting pattern of root-fifth-root-fifth in the background, Anderson's "look out!" admonition layered above. "On the Silent Wings of Freedom" is a wonderful song and probably the best on the album, with the scattered, busy intro coming together in a very cool way with Howe's somewhat victorious sounding guitar riff pulls it all together right before the vocals start. But even the sound of Tormato is rough and unvarnished. Wakeman sounds like he's playing a Casio, and it feels like you are listening to an old worn out tape of demo recordings, nothing like the glistening airiness of Going for the One, the sparse alien wildness of Relayer and Tales, or the earthy, warm presence of Fragile and Close to the Edge.

Then things got even worse. Apparently disillusioned by the band's musical faltering along with the fall of prog rock to the musical blights of punk and disco, Anderson and Wakeman left. Things got a bit strange here...Squire, who is the only musician to appear on every Yes album, kept the group going. Do you remember a group called Buggles? I don't. But apparently they are the ones we have to blame for the song "Video Killed the Radio Star". Wait for it. And so Squire invites the two main members, Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes, to join Yes as singer and keyboardist respectively. The resulting album was Drama. There were a few interesting bits on the album; "Tempus Fugit" and "Machine Messiah" were both complex and musical songs, but in comparison, this was the sound of prog rock dying a slow and painful death. The band broke up.

So when 1983 rolled around, they reformed without Steve Howe, and the lineup was White-Squire-Anderson-Kaye-Rabin, with Trevor Rabin being the fresh blood in the group (Tony Kaye reemerging, being the group's original keyboardist before being dumped for the more virtuosic Wakeman). Realistically speaking, I have to confess, the resulting album 90125 was the right and best album for the group to make at that point. Continuing to attempt to produce progressive rock in the vein of their 70s material would have just produced another (likely worse) version of Tormato/Drama. Evidence of this can be seen when looking at the later albums Yes has done recently, such as The Ladder and Magnification. I bought both of these albums and tried to like them. They were obviously trying to revisit their prog roots (having given up on pop in the early 90s, thank God), but it just came out awful, bland, and forced. For one thing, Jon Anderson is likely off of the herbal recreation nowadays, and it is apparent from his lyrics. In the 70s he would write strange, seemingly meaningless lyrics that were interesting and exotic, but ostensibly lacking the layer of obscurity and randomness provided by the drugs, his lyrics became clearer, and revealed a silly, artless sort of mystic New Age feel-the-love gibberish.

I draw the line at later Yes attempts at pop though. Big Generator was crap, with songs like "Rhythm of Love" and "Love Will Find a Way". To those songs, I say PHHHHBBBBSSSSSHHHH.

Cyclist Rage.

Yes, my biking amigos (there are a surprisingly numerous lot of you), let's talk about it. It is a strange phenomenon. Stories like the following, for example:

Car/Cyclist Conflicts

Indeed it would appear that there is something uniquely enraging about a cyclist on the road. You don't hear much about Motorcycle Rage, perhaps because of the still pervasive notion that people on motorcycles (especially Harleys) are tough biker-types (when in fact most of them are 50 year old accountants finally letting their "wild side" out). So what causes cyclist rage? Let's examine this objectively; I am not justifying this rage, just examining some possible causes.

First of course, there is the gear. Ludicrous looking (albeit practical) bike shorts and the rest of the gear might induce some mockery, but this should produce no actual rage in all but the most unbalanced of individuals. It does however play a cumulative role in the larger rage-provoker of pretentiousness: the perception of cyclists as a smug, insular, self-righteous group like Prius drivers, which can exacerbate other forms of rage. Cycling has some loose connections to environmental tree-hugging smugness, which does nothing to temper the perception of pretentiousness, unfortunately.

Then of course, the obvious speed factor. Let's face it, except for the really physically fit specimens like myself, most cyclists cannot pedal fast enough to keep up with the flow of traffic. This is probably the core of the rage that is produced. To understand the mind of these enraged individuals, consider other similar scenarios:

• Driving a car at 40mph on a runway in front of a plane wanting to take off
• Groups of pedestrians walking slowly on a bicycle trail, impeding the flow of bike traffic
• Pedestrians walking in the middle of a lane on a busy street

These are not identical comparisons, of course, but they serve to hint at one of the causes of anti-cyclist rage. To the enraged motorist, the roads were designed and built for motor vehicles. Not for pedestrians, not for Radio Flyer wagons, not for Power Wheels, not for wheelchairs, and not for bicycles...only for vehicles that can maintain an acceptable rate of speed. This is not true in a legal sense of course, as it is perfectly legal to travel via bicycle on our municipal roads, but the enraged individual is not considering this, they are only feeling wrath and indignation that you are impeding their travel, with a vehicle that in their mind does not belong there.

Another potential cause is the "bad eggs" of cycling. Allow me to relate a personal example. On Volker Boulevard, down by UMKC, a cyclist was in the lane, moving slowly. As a mild-mannered and wrath-free "Share the Road" sort of motorist, I gave him a nice wide berth, and due to flow of traffic could not drive around him. We reached a stoplight, and he tooled around in a circle, up onto the sidewalk and back down into the road, and then decided to mosey on, running the red light. I watched him do this twice, and when he turned, he did not use the hand gestures motorists would be required to do were their turn signals not functional.

That is one of the other sources of friction between the cyclist and motorist communities; when cyclists (surely a minority of them) ride their bicycles like the laws of the road do not apply to them. The attitude that cyclists are owed equal treatment on the road, and have as much right to be on the road as motorists, clashes jarringly with the occasionally witnessed attitude that they don't have to stop at red lights and signal their turns. Granted, logical and rational folks like myself understand that a few bad cyclists don't spoil the bunch any more than the numerous bad motorists do, but for those with eyes dimmed with "hard-favour'd rage", it could engender further resentment and indignation.

Lastly, it could simply be that cyclists present the easiest target on the road, and thus become frequent victims of road rage. Compared to another motor vehicle, it is harder to effect egress on a bicycle, there is no way to roll up the windows and lock the doors, so to speak, and there is unlikely to be a group of four unseen homies in the backseat to back up the cyclist in case of an altercation. So they present a target of opportunity, unfortunately.

With all that in mind, I'd be keen to hear from the cycling members of the Reading Audience. Are there other causes that I may have missed? It is indeed a strange phenomenon.

It's time again for another installment of the Snotty Art Film Hour's Foreign Cinema Roundtable Snootfest!

If you missed our last episode, chronicling my opinions on what I would say are the more common and well-known Akira Kurosawa movies, click here to get caught up. Now on to the new Kurosawa movies, in order of production!

Ikiru - 1952 - Ikiru was a sad, somber movie. A pathetic main character facing a terminal illness realizes how meaningless and mundane his life (centered around the drudgery of an bureaucratic office job) has been up to that point, making his impending death that much more awful. Not really a fun movie, but a well made one. The scene at the end where Takashi Shimura (playing the lead) sings a song while sitting on a swingset is eery and creepy, probably due to Kurosawa's love for slowing down the pitch of recorded singing for effect (also used in the witch scene in Throne of Blood).

The Lower Depths - 1957 - A depressing little vignette of Japanese poverty, based on a Russian play of the same name by Maxim Gorky. Very Shakespearean, and remains comic in tone in spite of the worst of circumstances. Not a favourite, but not that bad.

The Hidden Fortress - 1958 - This should be called Star Wars, Episode 3.9, The Original Hope. There are so many overt influences on Lucas in this, as well as a number of subtle, stylistic influences. This is a good action/adventure film, at least for Japanese movies, and it does fairly well in that regard. But this is the film that inspired Star Wars, and for that it gets a bit of extra distinction.

The Bad Sleep Well - 1960 - Ahh, the corporate subterfuge movies. This is "Hamlet" updated to post-war industrial Japan, with the main character seeking to discover and expose his father's murderers.

Red Beard - 1965 - A young, ambitious doctor gets a very poor assignment working under a wise but harsh older doctor in a rural hospital. This is an amalgam of many smaller stories (of individual patients) held together by the central story, which worked fairly well, but its a bit long at three hours.

Ran - 1985 - Strange to see these movies in colour; this is a good adaptation of King Lear to feudal Japan, but honestly doesn't have the (for lack of a better word) punch of some of the earlier movies. It seems a bit stilted and forced, and wearying to the viewer after a while. Still, what it does, it does well.

There is a silly South Park joke about how Canadians argue, from one of their recent episodes...in short, the arguments go like this:

Person A: [Says something argumentative], friend!
Person B: I'm not your friend, buddy!
Person A: I'm not your buddy, guy!
Person B: I'm not your guy, friend!
Person A: I'm not your friend, buddy!
Et cetera.

Feeling a bit on the tired side, my mind is prone to strange ideas, and so as a bit of an exercise I thought I'd replicate the above in some sort of computer language.

Say you start with a simple string array. I'm going to do the string() class instead of the character array approach just to keep it simple. Say you have n number of epiphets:

string epithet[ n ];
epithet[ 1 ] = "friend";
epithet[ 2 ] = "buddy";
epithet[ 3 ] = "guy";
epithet[ 4 ] = "mister";
....
epithet[ n ] = "man";

Then after they are declared as above, you enter into a loop:

int i;
//n is total number of epithets in array epithet[]
while (true)
{
 for (i = 1; i <= n; i++)
 {
  if (i == n)
  {
   cout << "I'm not your " << epithet[i] << ", " << epithet[1] << "." << endl;
  }
  else
  {  
   cout << "I'm not your " << epithet[i] << ", " << epithet[i+1] << "." << endl;
  }
 }
}

I'd wager not many people have given that much thought. Digital Canadianity.

The Heller case ruling was announced today.

Needless to say I am elated.

If I had a Third World understanding (or lack thereof) of gravitational pull on projectiles, I'd go out and rattle off a 30 round magazine into the air to celebrate.

COME AND TAKE IT.

First, as promised, the Heil Baby photo. Gretchen has a peculiar habit of extending her arm outward in the fashion of the old Roman (later Nazi) salute. Please forgive the moustache.


And on the subject of the Hitlerian brush moustache, I feel rather like posting a video clip of another person that sported the style, long before a bloody world war made it symbolic of maniacal evil. Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in Way Out West, singing "The Trail of the Lonesome Pine"...their comedy was a favourite of mine growing up, and remains so.

The Duet

You know sometimes, when you start to think things in this country are going really well, and the ways of prejudice and ignorance are dying out, finally? When you start to become genuinely hopeful and optimistic that a brighter, more tolerant day is dawning, and that Dr. King's dream may have been more a prophetic vision than transient dream? When you begin to let yourself believe that the old ways of intolerance have moved aside and that people can finally start to coexist?

Then it hits you in the face. Intolerance alive and well. See below.

Sometime in the last several weeks, my wife was taken off bedrest for a period of three days...after which she was abruptly (perhaps a poor choice of words) put back on. But we did manage to take a trip to the zoo, thanks to a wheelchair we borrowed. Owing to my huffing and puffing behind said wheelchair, I didn't take as many pictures, but here are a handful.

First, the red panda, with a somewhat amusing amount of fur sticking through the bars.



Another one curled up on the ground below.



The orangutan adult, nearly as interested in the exhibit of humans clustering about as the humans were in him or her.



And a juvenile orangutan.



Some sort of Asian deer...



"...I don't want to be binturight."



The kangaroos seem to "park" at a distance away from the paths and viewing areas that is directly proportional to how many visitors are at the zoo that day.



And some geese and ducks in the Australia exhibit, assumedly visiting from the Africa/Canada exhibit.



I believe this is a monitor lizard. First time I've ever seen him out.



One from the top angle:



And lastly, some specimen of African barbeque:

I was struck with a thought as I went to get my final cup of coffee of the day, at 3:30PM. Would I quit my job if they took away the coffee maker?

Frightening thought. The answer of course is no, but the intermittent cups of coffee throughout the day are quite the benefit. Sometimes I feel like I am working for the coffee, like an elephant for peanuts.

Hmmm. Peanut coffee?

No, never mind. Back to the drawing board.

Just watched the requisite "NEVER SHAKE A BABY!" video here at the hospital. While the subject matter is serious and warranted, the cheese factor was through the roof. My favourite part? When the narrator solemnly intones:

Most experts agree that a person does not wake up in the morning and plan to shake a baby.

Most experts? Meaning a consensus or majority? I'd like to hear from the minority opinion. Who are these "experts" anyway? Baby shaker experts? Apparently some of those experts actually do believe that baby shakers wake up in the morning, brush their teeth, gaze at themselves in the mirror, and with a gleam in the eye they lustily exclaim, "today is a great day for shaking a baby!"

Future marksmanship champion Gretchen Jane Neufeld is with us! Now I have to find a good "Daughter's First .22".

This morning I listened to this song on the way to work:

Yes - Time and a Word

Not the greatest Yes song...a decent late 60s pop song with a catchy chorus. Anderson's vocals are surprisingly soulful compared to his later elf-pop style.

But the reason I am blogging about such a non-interesting topic is Chris Squire's bass playing. On the chorus ("There's a time...") the song follows a really basic chord progression, something like the following:

| C * G/B * | Am * * * | F * G# * | C * * * |

But the bass line Squire invented over this very simple chord pattern (I say simple, but some of that little G# turnaround gives it great character) is the sort of stuff that inspires me as a musician. Driving, melodic, and musical. It's that sort of musical genius that makes me forgive his 1980s "I'm a pop star!" phase, preening around the stage and the like.

It's time to butcher another Sacred Cow! I call the short ribs and brisket!

This time Apple will be the subject of my ire. Not so much Apple themselves, as I have a hearty respect for their marketing staff which has succeeded in making highly desirable products merely by sticking a lowercase letter in front a noun (any noun) and encasing them in fancy white plastic.

But let's get down to it, shall we?

1. Using a MacBook Makes You Nothing More Than a Technology Consumer
Mark that. Owning an iBook/MacBook/iMac or whatever does not make you, inherently, any of the following:

• Intelligent
• Creative
• Discerning
• Stylish
• Ahead of the curve
• Environmentally friendly
• Quirky or unique
• Productive
• Attractive to the opposite (or same) sex

2. A Linux Distribution You Have To Pay For
Apple ditched 17 years of its old operating system, Mac OS, to create a Unix based operating system in OS X. You want Unix? Get it for free in one of hundreds, maybe thousands of different Linux distributions. There's nothing particularly special about Mac OS X versus other Unix-based operating systems other than a few bundled freebie apps with clever "i" based names. And with base PC laptops for only a few hundred dollars with a free Linux OS, how much was it you paid for that MacBook Pro?

3. Get Over It, Apple Is Not Ahead of the Curve
Apple has done the about-face a number of times, and each time they move further away from their own independent path and closer to the mainstream of Microsoft and other companies. Examples include:

• The final inclusion of right mouse buttons
• Ditching Apple's PowerPC processor for mainstream PC Intel chips
• Again, the dumping of Mac OS for an OEM-branded version of Unix
• AppleTalk to TCP/IP

4. Don't Be Evil
Apple consumers tend to feel that Apple is a much more peaceful, friendly, and non-evil corporation than the Dark Lord Gates and his MS Empire. I'm not sure where this impression comes from...perhaps the friendly looking Happy Mac icon on boot-up:



But seriously, Happy Mac notwithstanding, you're talking about a company that mass-produces electronics in China, and is more restrictive than any other consumer software company in existence about what hardware you can use. They've relaxed their stance on this slightly in recent years (see Point 3) but Microsoft simply provides an operating system and allows you to install on any system you want, with generally open standards on what parts are inside the computer. Apple is much more restrictive about you buying their parts. Forcing consumers to pay out the nose for Apple authorized accessories sounds a bit like a greedy evil faceless corporation doesn't it?

5. Apples Don't Get Viruses?
Well, neither do these:

Behold the mystery meat!



So I had a frozen 2lb pack of what were labelled "St. Louis Style Ribs" in the freezer. To a BBQ fiend, St. Louis style ribs mean only one thing, a rack of pork spare ribs trimmed substantially into a much more palatable rack of ribs. I unthawed these and unfolded (yes, unfolded!) them into some very thin racks of "mini ribs". Rather confusing! Nonetheless I smoked them for 3 hours, followed with an hour in the oven in some liquid, covered with foil. When they came out, the meat had shrunk an enormous amount, as you can see above. After posting the items on a grilling forum, I was informed that what I most likely had was beef short ribs, trimmed Korean style.

Still, it was good. Shown with a cherry mead (the acid of the Montmorency cherries and the overall sweetness of the mead pair wonderfully with rich, fatty meats like ribs) and a bottle of LC's hot BBQ sauce. The beans are plain old canned beans with some BBQ sauce, smoked with the ribs and finished up in the oven. Strange stuff though...likely a labelling mishap with the meat packing company.

Yes, another zoo post ("don't you judge me!"). This one after I had splurged for a larger memory card, so yes, it's a bit longer.

First up, a quick stop on the way to Africa at the well hidden "Poultry Section" to see a rather friendly turkey. No wonder he's friendly. What a great gig for a turkey, comparatively speaking.



Now a few pictures of the warthog in all his glory:



Would you say dry rub, or marinade?



I think the tougher meat would benefit from a marinade, something acidic to tenderize it.



Certainly a prime candidate for a low and slow hickory smoke.



Back on track. This bird was doing such a strange trick I had to get a picture of it. It looks like one of those strange distorted perspective tricks, but he is really sitting down on the lower half of his legs, with his "knees" bent 90 degrees THE OTHER WAY. Looked really strange, I tell you.



A yawning duiker.



Now onto the African birds exhibit. Forgive the blurriness but this was an interesting enough bird to include anyway.



A pair of brightly coloured...oh who am I kidding, "birds" is as specific as I am going to get.



I remember this hairstyle from the 80s.



Ahhh! The Mister Burns bird!



Seriously, how can you not love a bird that looks like Mister Burns?



Strange sort of duck. Hey, at least that's more specific than "bird". Don't-you-judge-me!



I used to have the inexpensive version of this bird, mine was a budgerigar. This is a parrot or parakeet of some variety.



I think that is a bird...



Blue billed ducks. No, that is not their name. That I know of...maybe it is!



Another shot...



...and we're out of the aviary. Next up, the ever-fierce sausage roll of a rodent, the comically neck-less Rock Hyrax, striking a "I will feed on the entrails of your progeny!" pose.



The rhinoceros.



A pair of zebras:



A pair of zebras: (wait didn't I already do this caption?)



A pair of zeb....*ahem* I mean here's the weird velociraptor bird over by the zebra/giraffe area:



A closeup...he appears to share the same interest in ascertaining the colour of my insides as the Rock Hyrax.



Asleep maybe?



Nope!



Finally an unusually modest photo of our favourite exhibitionist primates. No, I am not referring to _______ [fill in the blank to make your own popular culture joke].