Bobbin'

No, the video below is not an expression of Stacey & my medieval child-discipline strategies.

Happy Halloween.

YouTubeViews

I've been number-watching as the views of the most-played episode of Bridge Talk approaches 2000. But It's been awhile since I checked in on poor old Orvil.

So you can imagine my suprise when I checked the YouTube account I keep him locked up in and found that his halloween clip from last year is now approaching 10,000 views! Being a shameless cross-fertilizer, I changed the text that goes with the clip to mention the bridgetalk.ca site.

Uh, I suppose I should write something Orvilesque here. ... "Yo ugly Americans. Prepare to gum-gnash yo' pumpkin pie all you want; But come yankie-thanky day, I'll be eating pilgrim-pie. (How do you cook a pilgrim, anyway?)"

Here's the clip:

Huh?

Kaylee just came up to me and said, "I've got too much beer in my mouth from God." And then she walked away.

Toteenagers.

So far at preschool Kaylee & Emily have been mostly hanging out with two other little girls: named Kali and Emily! (and Emily has an older sister named Kaylee).
...

Then, at breakfast today, Kaylee began to tell me about her new friend, "Brandon," whom she wants to play soccer with.

Then Emily sat at the table singing dreamily, "Oh, Brandon ... Oh wonderful Brandon."

And so it begins.
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In other news, I'm considering beginning to process of acquiring a gun permit and building a front porch. Can anyone recommend any 'Angry Hillbilly" courses to me? I've only got 10 years left to perfect my grouchy, protective dad routine, and the girls are already knee deep in teenager practice.

Quotable Kensington

Alexander, a guy I was talking to down at the Roasterie and then again later at The House tossed out the following in our conversation:

"Religion is for people who don't want to go to hell. Spirituality is for people who've already been there."

Wowhmmmmmm....

Re-Posting is For Blogslackers

I'm re-posting this video because it seems like the girls have grown so much since I originally posted this clip. Plus it's a quick way to post something since I'm busy, I want to keep a valid blog presence going, but it's been two weeks since I touched this site.

Too Legit To Quit

Bridge Talk went legit this week. That is to say that this week's video is the first to be completely comprised of material I filmed or created myself and works that are in the public domain. And perhaps not coincidentally, it is the episode I'm most satisfied with to date. Here it is in all its legitimacy:

If You Were Satan ...


I can't promise I'll keep it legit in the future, especially when we're dealing with a new movie or television show as our weekly topic. I can tell you though what principles have governed my use of material that I didn't personally create or isn't obviously in the public domain. Apart from never using these materials to make money, using them in service of "education" and as part of the program of a registered charity, the following interview segment illustrates the principles I follow when using clips:

Leslie Moonves, president of CBS as interviewed in Wired Magazine, June 2007, pg 169:

Wired: " There's a lot of CBS material on YouTube. How does that work?"

Moonves: "You have to look at it in two different ways. One is content that you will get paid for directly, and the other is promotional content. Our attitude is, either pay us for it or give us promotional value that will eventually lead to our getting paid for it."

Wired: "How do you tell the difference?"

Moonves: "If there's a one-minute clip of CSI, or user generated clips like different shots of David Caruso taking off his glasses, that's great promtion. If they were showing a whole episode of CSI and we weren't getting paid, we'd object."

So there's your surprise for the week: There are voices of sanity in the entertainment industry.

Pre-school

Emily and Kaylee started pre-school this week. French emersion pre-school to be exact. They get quite flustered when I call it "play school" by mistake. This is serious business! (Mostly involving playing).

I was taken aback by how much their afternoon dragged some long-lost, difficult childhood memories out of me. It's been both stretching and healing to see them respond so positively this week.

On their first day they each went over to a young guy who was shyly clutching his mother and introduced themselves and smiled at him. They're a little shy themselves, so it was a little bit of effort for them to go up to him. Of course both Stacey and I were brimming with pride.

...

Then they smacked the kid down, stood on him and yelled out "who's next?!"

Harry Haters Haven't Humility

This short article on J. K. Rowling's faith is well worth reading (if you don't plan on reading the final Harry Potter book). It was printed in the Calgary Herald, but I'm linking to this other paper's printing of it because the Herald makes you pay to read it.

I'm kinda annoyed in recent days because I encountered a little over-the-top Rowling-bashing recently, which contributed to a growing overall feeling of alienation from the maintream church.

Despite being disowned by many a fundamentalist Christian, Rowling is not only a Christian herself, but the only one in history who has sold well over 12 million books with explicit Christian themes in a single day.

Here's the Bridge Talk Harry Potter link if you want to see what other folks are saying and sound off a little on this:
Harry Potter's Hamstrung Pedantics

Oldness, Sadness & Wonder.

I had an old, sad & wonder-filled day.

Old: I realized as I listened to "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on the radio that Nirvana was breaking that song out around 17 years ago; So for the main consumers of music these days, it's "one of those songs written before we were born." It's probably even been musaced by now.

Sad (& old): I attended a pre-school parents meeting in preparation for E & K's first venture into institutional education. Because the pre-school is hosted in an elementary school, my kids will experience fire drills .... and lock-down drills. In a post Columbine world, kid's need to practice sitting quietly with teachers under tables behind locked doors. **sigh**

Wonder (& old but not sad): It just freakin' amazes me that thirty years ago we (humanity) sent out two little low-tech probes that took first-hand pictures of the wonders of our solar system countless millions of miles away. The girls & I sat and looked at pictures and talked about planets & moons & millions of miles & God & science & just wondered together.

Wired, Voyager 30 year anniversary album.

Deciduous Trees of the World Unite!

I don't want summer to end. I never want summer to end. I consider trees whose leaves start changing colours to be traitors. There's a tree across the street from me that's already 1/3 of the way to fall colours. I'm considering a plan to cut it down while the elderly people who live in the house are sleeping.

For those of you who live in the suburbs, I'll explain what a "tree" is later.

Carrotsicle

I took Emily and Kaylee out for lunch yesterday. In order to reaffirm my status as an uncool dad, I told Emily she had to eat one more carrot before finishing. Heavy negotiations lauched at this point. Emily's earnest contention was that her carrot had pepper on it (she does'nt like pepper). She was right ... it had precisely one grain of pepper on it. I told her I would wipe it off; she balked; I re-iterated; she protested; and then Kaylee reached over, licked off the carrot and handed it to Emily.


Emily happily ate the now pepper free carrot.

PS: The guinea pigs have nothing to do with this story. Although I'm sure they too would eat a licked carrot over a peppered one. And no, we don't now own these gentle, marijuana-eating rodents. These were loaners from Stacey's cousin's family.

Inaccessable

I returned to Calgary for one night a few days ago and sent out an email declaring that both Stacey & I would be blogging all sorts of wonderfully weird stuff while on holidays. Then I went back out to Rosen Lake and discovered that we had somehow failed to put in a cable conduit when we had our telephone and electricity put in. So in order to get internet access I would have to dig a 175 foot long, 18 inch deep trench in rocky ground.

I'm not going to do that and you can't make me, no matter how much you want to me to annoy you with useless drivel.

So now I'm sitting in an internet cafe in Cranbrook with Stacey, busily typing this single blog entry. It may be my only one before returning to Calgary (or maybe not ... oooo suspense).

The picture of Emily on the dock was taken a moment before she stuck her foot in the bucket full of minnows she had just caught. She was putting pancakes in between her toes and feeding them to the fish (Stacey taught her this ... she's a talented lady).

The Santa pics are from Nicole's famous annual Christmas in July bbq at our place a few weeks ago.

The link between the pictures can be discovered only through intense meditation, hickups and running around in circles with baloney on your head.

I haven't seen a single cran in Cranbrook (nor a brook for that matter). But I have witnessed a great communal distain for razors-on-the-male-face. I would viciously mock this … if I had shaved in the last week.

Porcelain Pugilism

Here are the highlights of this year's Canada Day toilet attack. It was a good day: 49 people, 60 burgers and hotdogs, 1000 child-size happy squeals, 10,000 toilet fragments and one big mess.

Ripples

I sat on the dock early this morning, undisturbed, until the neighbour’s dog sidled up beside me and began to lap at the lake. The calm, glassy water broke in concentric circles. For several minutes, ripples continued to flow out from where he drank. Out and out they went until, on the edge of my vision, I could still see them almost a third of the way across the lake. And he kept on lapping until hundreds and hundreds of waveforms occupied all the water around me.

Perhaps you’ve seen infrared images of the heat signatures humans emit, or the more exotic images of the air turbulence we create simply by breathing and moving. We have a tremendous, yet barely visible influence. Simply by being alive, we impact our immediate environment in a profound, and far reaching way. What would otherwise be dormant is filled with motion and engraved with the signature of life.

I wonder at the spiritual significance of this physical process. I don’t believe we are divided beings. I don’t believe we are imprisoned in an evil material world, with a virtuous spiritual world separately clicking along underneath it. We live as part of an integrated whole. Body, mind, spirit: where one leaves off and the next begins is beyond our discernment. And enshrined in the centre of this integration is the dogged assertion of ancient Christians that their Savior was raised from the dead … physically. A spiritual mystery, that they will not permit us to ghettoize into the unseen realm. And so in a world where physical realities exist among, and mirror spiritual realities, the idea of far reaching ripples consumed my morning.

An insect hit the lake shortly after the dog had left. It made a ripple. The ripple flowed out across the lake. But it was a singular act; One circle radiating out. It lacked the consistent pattern created by the dog’s thirst; a pattern that covered an immense area without break; a pattern that made me think of the consistent efforts of so many people of faith that I’ve encountered over the years. They’ve thirsted. They’ve rippled the waters. And most people paid no attention. But for those few who stopped and looked, a massive area was patterned in perfect, consistent waves by their efforts.

The fifteen minutes of fame that so many of us long for is a bug hitting the water. The sudden rippling of the mirror stands out for a shot time, radiates out, and is gone. Even while it can still be seen it’s almost impossible to trace back to its origin.

Consistent, faithful, thirsty lapping at the water radiates out just as far, but also focuses us on the centre. The act in the middle of the waves can still be seen because it is still being enacted. To be washed over by the large circles compels us to seek out the smaller ones, the ones with higher, less diffused waveforms, until we find the point of impact from where they arose.

And so I sit here contemplating, looking out at the low, wide circles that have washed over me, searching out the centre. And in those places where I can track all the way back, I see thirsting people. I see living water. I see small acts of faith, service … love. And I see consistency.

And as a weary man with little impact, and not even fifteen seconds of fame, I’m comforted. Perhaps my thirst, my tiny, weak, but consistent lapping, radiates out. Perhaps, if someone stops and is quiet and watchful, the waves may even compel them to seek out the centre and quench their thirst as well.

Mind Meld

Stacey & I were travelling back to Calgary yesterday, listening to music. "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" by Bob Dylan came on and she said, "Bob Dylan is U2 for old people." I thought that was a great line and told her I was going to use it. She then told me that I had coined the line and blurted it out to her a week earlier.

It's strange in a comfortable sort of way how after ten years of marriage, I can no longer tell which thougths in my head are my own and which are Stacey's (But I'm pretty sure the thoughts that have kept me out of prison are Stacey's).

The Secret (When Pantyhose Become Books).

Here's a hilarious Macleans review of the popular self-help, new age book "The Secret" that someone on the Resonate discussion shared the link to:The Secret Revealed.

(Warning: It's a little junior high locker-roomy).

Trading My Blog for a Log

I'm heading out to Rosen Lake with the dare-to-dream hope of achieving internet access out there this week. Of course, for a variety of tech vs. middle-of-nowhere issues, it may not happen, and all my leisure-time moronicisms will never be given life as blog entries. So stay tuned, cross your fingers, intercede on our behalf, get jiggy with it, eat a Joe's, don't take any wooden nickles & fight the power (what was I writing about anyways? ... Oh, yeah ... mixing drugs, whiskey, Cheetos & salad for breakfast has no affect on my coherence ... none at alllllllll lalalalalala - lapidary has nothing to do with dairy or laps ... I'm gonna eat a bug, and become bug-man. Hey, you, get into my car! Why do bird's suddenly appear, every time you are near? I have another thought coming, it' sz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz).

Go fo Pho!

I'm still smarting from a big, violent backyard debate tonight over how to pronounce "Pho" and what exactly it is. I argued for the pronounciation "Pee-hoe", but was proven wrong (see below). The good news is that "pee-hoe" is now free to be used anyway I want to:

"Yo! Yo! Pee-Ho. Pass da Pho 'for I wup yo fro!"

If I had only argued more effectively I would have been able to witness Nicole & Stacey walking into a Vietnamese restaurant and asking for "Pee-hoe."

"Phở (pronounced "fuh" in English) is a traditional Vietnamese noodle dish. It is composed of a thin white rice noodle in a clear beef broth, with thin cuts of beef (steak, fatty flank, lean flank, brisket), tendon, tripe, meatballs, or other ingredients such as green onions, white onions, cilantro, basil leaves, lemon or lime, bean sprouts, or chiles. ..." (Wikipedia: Now with 50% less moronic drivel).

Good Egg Contest

Ok. It's finally here. The contest I promised months ago is online at Bridge Talk. So go check it out, enter & wait for your life to be forever altered!