25th Street Bridge Song

Yesterday was the first big snowstorm of the season. 10 cm fell like a mofo. Plflplflt! and there it was.
It came fast and it came hard and the city crews couldn't keep up and it was just warm enough for the first layer to come down as sleet, which quickly froze and turned the streets to ice. I had the pleasure of finishing work at 4:30 pm, the midpoint of rush hour. My route demanded that I pass through to downtown and across the Broadway Bridge, a daunting task on good roads.
It was made all the more horrible by the fact that my roaring behemoth 1981 Chevy Van (aka Black Thunder), turns into Elizabeth Manley on ice. Needless to say it was with a sense of dread and foreboding that I fought through the howling wind and driving snow to scrape the ice and snow off the windshield before what I imagined would be a harrowing journey. So I headed off into the crawling stream of traffic, moving like a Youtube progress bar on dial-up.
Soon the heat off of the big V8 kicked in however and Black Thunder warmed up and I realized that I had an hour and a half to make it to my destination. It occurred to me then that I was in my favorite place (my van) with all of my favorite music, and for the first time in a very long time it looked like I was going to have an hour completely to myself. Suddenly the drive home was looking really good.
So the traffic eased forward in the tiniest of increments, and occasionally I'd be in the faster of the lanes, occasionally the slower, and from my perch on high I got to people-watch everybody that went by. A lot of them were really pissed off, I mean REALLY pissed off, and when I'm in a good mood, there is nothing funnier than someone in a futile rage.
There were also a lot of them like myself. Eyes wide with wonder at beauty of the havoc, relaxed and meditative and given over pleasantly to circumstance and chaos.
At the 45 minute mark I'd reached downtown. Whenever I saw someone signalling helplessly for a lane change in the 10km/hr stream of trickling road rage I'd let them in and they'd give me a wave. But as I turned on to 4th ave, headed for the Broadway Bridge, I began to panic a little. From 25th street on it was a stationary line of brake lights blinking and fading like Christmas lights into the white blur of the snowstorm. After spending 15 minutes moving across the first block I began to realize there was no way I'd make it to my son's daycare on time on this route. A quick shoulder check and an icy fishtailing u-turn sent me back to 24th, where I turned towards Spadina. I'd have 2 choices there; roll along spadina to the Renaissance, and come out at the base of the Broadway Bridge ahead of the traffic, or hang a left and hit the University Bridge. At Spadina it became clear that the University Bridge was the best option, so to the left I went.
Now here's the thing and I've taken a long time getting to it but I just came off a really hard day and I'm beat like Tina Turner in the old Ike days so I may have rambled a bit, but thanks for sticking it out.
The thing is this: There is a feature of Saskatoon that for me is the ultimate expression of what makes those of us that live here different from anyone else in the world.
At the base of the University Bridge there are 2 intersections. One from the Spadina underpass on to Spadina Crescent, and one from Spadina on to the bridge itself. Both of these intersections are uncontrolled because there is an implicit understanding in this city of nearly 1/4 million that if we just take turns it works just fine.
So imagine, in the middle of a snowstorm that crippled a modern city, with 10 minute commutes suddenly lengthened to 1 and 2 hours, traffic lined up for miles in places, imagine how well this hokey and simplistic backwater system of taking turns would work. It worked beautifully! People who were jockeying for position all through rush hour, fighting for lane changes, swearing at tailgaters, suddenly paused when they were supposed to and let their neighbour go first, because it's the polite thing to do at these particular intersections. Maybe it's just me, but there is something to be said for human potential, for good will and selflessness and for the intrinsic communal nature of the human animal at the bottom of the 25th Street Bridge. Walt Whitman once said that "Life is not so short that there isn't time to be polite." Saskatoon demonstrates it.

What They Fought and Died to Fight Against

The following is an excerpt from one of Heinrich Himmler's speeches to SS officers in 1943. It captures in a nutshell the pure evil that the Nazis perpetrated, and their view that non-German lives were valueless. I've posted it on Remembrance Day in honor of my grandfather, who was killed fighting the Nazis at the Battle of El Alamein.

Heinrich Himmler's speech to Schutzstaffel (SS) officers at Poznan (4th October, 1943)



In the months that have gone by since we met in June 1942 many of our comrades were killed, giving their lives for Germany and the Fuhrer. In the first rank - and I ask you to rise in his honor and in honor of all our dead SS men, soldiers, men, and women - in the first rank our old comrade and friend from our ranks, SS Lieutenant General Eicke. [The SS Gruppenfiihrers have risen from their seats.] Please be seated.

One basic principle must be the absolute rule for the SS men - we must be honest, decent, loyal, and comradely to members of our own blood and to nobody else. What happens to a Russian or to a Czech does not interest me in the slightest. What the nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type we will take, if necessary by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only so far as we need them as slaves for our culture; otherwise, it is of no interest to me. Whether ten thousand Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an antitank ditch interests me only so far as the antitank ditch for Germany is finished. We shall never be rough and heartless when it is not necessary, that is clear. We Germans, who are the only people in the world who have a decent attitude toward animals, will also assume a decent attitude toward these human animals.

I also want to talk to you, quite frankly, on a very grave matter. Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and we will never speak of it publicly. Just as we did not hesitate on 30 June 1934 to do the duty we were bidden and stand comrades who had lapsed up against the wall and shoot them, so we have never spoken about it and will never speak of it. It was that tact which is a matter of course and which I am glad to say, inherent in us, that made us never discuss it among ourselves, nor speak of it. It appalled everyone, and yet everyone was certain that he would do it the next time if such orders are issued and if it is necessary.

I mean the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race. It's one of those things it is easy to talk about, "The Jewish race is being exterminated," says one party member, "that's quite clear, it's in our program-elimination of the Jews and we're doing it, exterminating them" And then they come to me, eighty million worthy Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. Of course the others are vermin, but this one is an A-1 Jew. Not one of all those who talk this way has watched it, not one of them has gone through it. Most of you must know what it means when one hundred corpses are lying side by side, or five hundred, or one thousand. To have stuck it out and at the same time - apart from exceptions caused by human weakness - to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written, for we know how difficult we should have made it for ourselves, if with the bombing raids, the burdens and the deprivations of war we still had Jews today in every town as secret saboteurs, agitators, and troublemakers. We would now probably have reached the 1916-1917 stage when the Jews were still in the German national body.

I've got a Yuan for Some US cheddar.

The US/China currency war explained in a catchy animated rap video, click here

A Study in Gray

I went to pick up my son at daycare and the hallway was filled with boys from 4-12 all suiting up in snowpants and mittens and toques and there was a chaos and an energy that could only be described as jubilant and they were all going out to play.
"C'mon son, time to go!" I said to him and his shoulders dropped and his arms dropped and he threw his head back hopelessly and gave me a "But Daaaaaad! and I said "We have to go buddy." and he said "Can't I just play outside for a little while?"
I had been outside, first at 4:30 a.m. scraping my windshield, and now at 4pm after spending half an hour in a vehicle that just wasn't getting warm enough. It was cold outside, crisp and clear see your breath and hear things clearer cold. Outside was not on my radar, but then it occurred to me that I could get a hot coffee in a warm coffee shop and let the day seep out of me and the heat seep in to me so I said "Okay, I'll be back in half an hour." and he said "Yay!" and I zipped my jacket up all the way and crossed my arms across my chest, tucked hands in under my arms and turtled my head into my trapezoids. I hunched quick steps in a quick-stepped hunch to a new place that had just opened, just up the block.
Il Secondo is new and it's a hip urban coffee shop pizzeria and bakery all in one. I walked in and ordered 'a coffee to go but I'm going to have most of it in' and I got my coffee and loaded with a head turning amount of sugar and headed to a corner seat. I sat quiet, which is something I don't do or can't do depending on who you ask. They had slow jazz playing, old Billie Holliday or young Ella Fitzgerald and it put me in a peaceful space, a romantic space even and I sat with my wrists around the coffee cup to warm my blood and as had been my intent, let the warm seep into me.
Above me the ceiling was open-concept and black, lined with fat round heating ducts all painted black to match in that style popularized by the 'premium casual' dining industry. In the far corner, a wood fired pizza oven glowed orange and flickering and the walls were painted milky coffee colored and the chairs and tables were painted dark coffee color. It felt urban and felt metropolitan until I noticed the blue and yellow and flowery country crockery placed at intervals on high corner shelves. Imagine Grandma Lee circa 1974 stumbling drunk into a Starbucks in the West End of Vancouver circa 1994 and puking in the corners. That would about describe it.
Granny china or not I was in a drifting and dreaming state of mind and I was happier than I usually am at the onset of winter when I can't get warm and happily I soaked in my surroundings. At a counter along the window one of those 21st century hippie girls (siwash sweater, spandex pants and a tie-dyed shirt) sat studying, and her book was flat on the table and she had her head resting on her hand parallel to the pages. She had clean, free, product free hair and it fell fine and flowing and flipped over her shoulder and she wrote at the page from a position off to the side. Her neck was bent at a nearly 90 degree angle and it looked like an uncomfortable position, but it looked like it was her favorite and her most comfortable position and she was young and pretty and had a look in her eye like she was writing poetry or songs or something romantic and firelit, a look that was soft and filtered like old silent movies or 70s sunshine pics. The heating ducts put out a quiet hushing gray noise and the music kept padding and purring away like something you'd been thinking about and forgot and the pretty girl's aurora (no I didn't mean aura) had me feeling romantic and poetic too and I fell in love with the moment and I was looking around at everything with my groove on, which you either get or you don't.
Looking out the window I saw the street and cars and the brick building across the road and parking meters and power poles and power lines and leafless skeletal trees and an overcast sky that must have been open cast somewhere out of eyeshot because there was sunlight there too and in cast long shadows on the ground. I was grooving on the crazy angles all the straight lines of the man made things made against the unstraight lines of the unmade things and it was then that I noticed everything was gray. I mean EVERYTHING man! Now gray usually makes me want to fucking hang myself, honest to God. It's always been the thing I hate most about Saskatchewan winters, the whole monochrome 2 dimensionality of everything. Yet here I was managing to get lost in just how many shades of gray there were in front of me, and finding one of those rare transcendent moments where you realize that there is nothing on this planet that is not beautiful! The old mottled gray pot-holed street, a decade or so from it's last resurfacing, oil-stained almost black here, darker gray with the wet silhouette of an old puddle there, and shadows falling at crazy crisscrossing intervals contained an entire pallet of gray in the space of an empty parking space. Stretch it up, onto the clean, bright concrete of the cool crisp crumbling sidewalk and spill up into the fluid form of an old parking meter and there were a dozen more grays. The skeletal tree-a gray as white as sun bleached bone, it's furrows and fissures shaded charcoal and deep, it's immaculate imperfection humbling the perfect gray power pole beside it. Give me a pencil and a millenia and I'd struggle to sketch it for you, a little less pressure where the shadows fade, a smudge where the ice just melted. A thousand shades of gray, contrasts as deep as moon and sky and so freaking gorgeous and complex and simple at the same time and it just screams illusion at you. I knew in an instant that like the song says it's all too beautiful, and whatever it is; love, hate, birth, death, water and ice, blood and feces, war and peace- it's all exactly the way it's supposed to be and all any of it takes is just a moment of peace and the right vantage point and there's beauty in all of it.
Look. I've been up too long already. This is one of those posts that I'll regret making public because it's a little too visceral, and by that I mean that I've given you my viscera in this one, for you to do with as you please. Generally that's an open license to kill or maim, at the very least cripple, so I'm hesitant to put it out there. But at the same time, it's one of those things that only a few of us with more senses than just eyes and ears and orifices will get, and I think that if you know I'm resonating on that same wavelength, that I've got it too, well the world is a little bit bigger and better for us, isn't it?

Peace, Harmony, the Indomitable Beauty of the Human Spirit and Advertising.

Struck by how well advertisers have tapped into the most wonderful traits of the human animal; joy, spontaneity, creativity and wonder. This is brilliant and moving. Wish it could be for something more than a mobile network. Or maybe I wish networks could be more.

New directions.

There are days when plflflflft!, I just don't feel like writing anything. Today is one of those days. I'd rather just surf and google drift until I get tired enough to sleep. I was doing just that when it occurred to me that I could increase the appeal of my dusty old blog, if I were to post the occassional link or two that I find interesting in my travels. So while searching around for mustache pics to help me with styling my own Movember 'stache for prostate cancer awareness I came across this pic of Hitler without the mustache. He looks strangely British to me. A bit like Alec Guinness.

zen and the art of cooking.

I've lost more than a few cooks to the heavily structured environment of my corporate kitchen. Most of the truly passionate ones are in the game as an outlet for their creativity. They turn every mound of mashed potatoes into a rosemary masted galleon, no protein is complete without some overthought (and usually over-reduced) reduction and if the vegetables in house somehow survived beyond baby years to childhood they're too old. Most of these guys haven't mastered the basics, and few can see beyond their aspirations to the skill level required to do what we do well on a daily basis. It took a long time for me to notice it as well, because most of it had become unconscious for me. I started noticing when I took on more of a coaching role.
It starts with the way a cook holds a knife. Invariably they all cut wrong, every slice taking them one blood gushing heartbeat closer to a severed digit. So I'll gently correct them, show them the grip that for me has become so comfortable and watch them struggle with the awkwardness of it. I'll watch them tear into a pepper or an onion like a TV chef, then pass by their waste buckets and show them that they're throwing away half the usable product. I'll show them that the best parts of most vegetables are what they're habitually discarding, show them that in some cases one quarter of an item's size can amount to three quarters of it's mass and most of our usage. It moves on to everything; cooking temps, the color of a protein as it moves through different stages, the sound it makes in a pan when it's ready to turn or finish.
Then, on the days when I'm finally able to step back from coaching, step back from the paperwork and the cooler checks and the inventory counting and the hiring and firing, on days when I'm able to cook again I get my zen on.
The back of the knife blade slips easily into the the calloused path between thumb and forefinger, you can feel the life still resonating in a pepper or a mushroom, turning it and considering how best to maximize the potential for it. Gas flames burn a soft blue, occassionally flickering orange and the heat is no different than the heat off the first fires of the first men gathered around a fire for survival and fellowship. Soon the knife is chopping, and other knives are chopping and there's a stillness and a calmness that settles over me, and it's all stuff that I've done so many times that I slide into an almost meditative state, concentrating on improving knife skills on every stroke.
There were days working in the sewer when I'd daydream wistfully about being back in the kitchen. Freezing cold, rain/sleet coming down, 12 hours into your day with another 12 to go and never seeing the horizon until the end of the day, and all I could think of was how nice it would be to have those gas fires at my back, a knife in hand, chopping away quietly and quickly, my only purpose to make each slice as perfect as the stillness. Stayed up too late again...

endless ramblings

That's the visual that's been keeping me up at night. I don't have a lot of energy left to explain it right now, but here are my notes so far.

Between 1 and -1 there are infinite decimal points on each side, therefore, 0 is actually an expression of infinity as opposed to a value of nothing. Nothing doesn't exist.
Rather than counting up to infinity as on a number line, in this model, we count points away from infinity. At the standard starting point of 0, 1 is represented as 0+1. In this case infinity plus one. Conversely on the negative side, we have 0-1, or infinity -1. At the upper end of the standard positive number line, rather than some astronomically high number, what we have is Infinity -1. On the negative side instead of some astronomical negative number, we have infinity +1. It becomes painfully obvious that the sum of all numbers creates an endless, ever expanding singularity, and a perfect model of the universe.
Here are some more notes. It becomes possible to divide by 0 when it's equal to infinity. Whole numbers are simply fractions of infinity. 1/0 =1, 2/0 =2, etc.
50+infinity=infinity. -50+infinity=infinity. 50+(-50)=infinity. I can't find a problem with this concept, and this is why I can't sleep at night, because it's not supposed to be this simple.

Que Onda

Can't sleep. Here's why. I read this article tonight about a new gravity wave detector. This passage in particular got me wound up.
"In general relativity, changes in mass at a location cause space and time to stretch and compress. Rather like sound waves, compressing space-time causes stretching in neighboring regions and vise versa. In this way, a moving distortion in space-time is created. We can detect these by measuring the response of a mass to the distortions in space-time."
The mention of changes in mass and location causing stretches in space time got me thinking of the wave particle duality of light.
So for those of you that have no idea what I'm talking about, here's some oversimplified layman's terms for you.
The Wave Particle Duality of Light


and here's a little primer on gravitational waves;


So you fire some electrons at the speed of light, and the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle states that you can know one of 2 things. You can know how fast they're going, or where they are, but not both.
You'll notice when they did the Wave Particle Duality of light experiments they were able to 'see' only one electron at the slits, but when they watched from afar they found the interference patterns.
I'm proposing that what's causing the wave phenomenon is a gravitational wave caused by electrons moving at near light speed. It doesn't appear in a single slit experiment because the electrons are caught in a gravitational 'slipstream' of sorts. It occurs in the dual slit experiment because the gravitational slipstream is split by the slits and collides with and upsets the time-space the electrons are passing through. This creates the interference patterns that are so recognizable as gravitational waves on a macro-cosmic scale, but so mysterious in the lab. That is all.
Watch the videos again, read everything you can on it, and you'll see it makes perfect sense. Unfortunately I don't have the math to back it up, but I guarantee you that somebody will 'discover' this in the next decade. Then you'll be able to tell them your crazy insomniac Rev. Dr. Andy knew this 10 years ago :)