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Joanna Newsom
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Music
- Hits: 1430
"...
And the little white dove
Made with love, made with love:
Made with glue, and a glove, and some pliers
..."- YS - Sawdust and Diamonds
Absolutely amazing. Listening to her voice, frail, up and down, pursuing haunting melodies, her voice, childish, distant, as if from another time. 5 out of 5 stars. Her other albums are also well worth listening to.
Visit her website here: http://www.joanna-newsom.com/
It's an instinct...
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 2613
It's an instinct, this treasure hunting.
And the garage sale season having passed, a short season this year, hampered by finances and transportation, the instinct seeks its outlet.
I take the children to a riverside park in the neighborhood to look for stones for their rock tumbler.
And sorting through the gravels, the abundant pebbles, we're surprised to find an old indian bead.
Small, perhaps an inch and a half, with a perfectly bored hole straight through it.
And it triggers the instinct.
There are no buried treasures in Alberta, well, very few anyways. There's the Lost Lemon Mine, if you credit the legend, and undoubtedly more than a few mason jars filled with farmers life savings buried under fence posts, but there's none of the classic treasure hunting raw materials, gems, gold, sunken ships.
But there is history, in it's way a sort of treasure.
Before I go too much further I should note that it's illegal to look for archeological artifacts in Alberta. If you see or spot an archeological artifact you are supposed to call the provincial museum and leave the site undisturbed. All artifacts are property of the state.
Now, on paper this is ideal. It speaks to our highest and noblest selves, our shared history is our shared property to be preserved for future generations.
But like many laws that at first glance look good on examination we can discover that it lacks both teeth and foresight. We think nothing of building entire neighborhoods (In Calgary, think Bowness, Crescent Heights, Mount Royal, Hawkwood, and many, many more) over Native sites. We build highways over them, farmers rearrange the stones on their field, taking apart medicine wheels, teepee rings, burial grounds are buried beneath parks, golf courses and basements. The vast majority - over 99% of the paleo and archeological history of Calgary - lies buried under suburbs, or has been churned by bulldozers and ploughs destroying any contextual value the sites may have provided.
We turn a blind eye, or excuse it with "You can't stop progress".
Which is true, but laws that allow and encourage laypeople to collect, document and report finds and artifacts would would save much of this.
No government could ever afford to staff a province or even a country the size of Alberta with the number of archeologists we would need just to keep abreast of progress. Of the expanding highways, cities, suburbs, oil sands.
It is, upon examination, an idiotic law that is in its way far worse than having no laws at all. The kind of law that is intended to reassure the people that "we're protecting our history" when in fact we are systematically destroying it. Destroying it through ignorance, through "Let the experts handle it", through progress and neglect. Presumably countries that don't have similar laws have no valued history, you only need to look at countries like the US or Great Britain to see how their lack of competent legislation has destroyed their history....
I digress, but I will return to this theme again and again.
So we discover the bead, and search through the gravels but find nothing more, some fossils, other stones that might look good polished, but that is all.
But the seed is sown.
I've been admitted to the club...
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Conversations
- Hits: 1236
He has a friend he wants me to meet.
Finally a chance to wear my new helicopter pilots helmet! And so strapping it on I hope on my bike and cycle down to the cafe.
He's pleasant enough, older, maybe early seventies.
At first we talk about the weather, small talk, they're feeling me out.
Then it starts.
He's an expert in history. He knows the Declaration of Independance, the Magna Carta, every Papal Bull and edict ever issued off by heart, the succession of kings, everything.
His learning is formidable.
But somehow there's something lacking, or something added, to the interpretation.
They've faked Barak Obama's birth certificate. He was really born in Kenya.
I've heard this theory before, and seen it well and thoroughly debunked here.
"It doesn't matter, he's a walk-in anyways...."
My friend, his friend, our mutual friend, doesn't quite understand and so I explain.
"A walk in is when an alien entity takes over your body..."
He continues.
"Barak died when he was 15. That's when the Walk-In took over his body. We don't know what side he's on, he might in fact be helping to fight the gathering forces of evil..."
That's all the explanation it needs. We pass over the walk-in of Barak Obama as a fact, evidence accepted ad-priori, no need to question that as we're all reasonable people here.
I wish I was taping this. "The gathering forces of evil..."
The conversation continues. He explains to us how the process of getting birth certificates is a process of trading us like commodities. How we're born into slavery, and he explains it back to the Church of Rome. How the Pope is in fact the Antichrist, and the last three popes have been assasinated for attempting to reveal this.
How his attempt to secure the freedom of the people of the United States from their Illuminati overlords using a little known clause in the constitution that allows states to elect non-partisan members to review government policy was thwarted by spurious criminal charges.
He pauses for a minute to smile, somewhat proud at his deft and dazzling interpretation of the facts.
It continues, there's a break for a minute while they begin talking about creationism. Again, it's taken for granted that the world was created (how else did it get here?), and in a brilliant rapport both quote and laugh at a particular BC comic - that mostly unhumerous comic that places man living with dinosaurs, and I'm struck - it's as if they're believing that BC is some sort of absolute archeological proof, some ancient petroglyph discovered by Johnny Hart and presented to the naieve public as fun but really historical fact...a conspiracy of scientists to discredit it....
I'm glad I brought the helmet.
Chuck Palahniuk - Fight Club
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 1204
It's rare that they make a good film out of a book. Rarer still they make a great film out of a book.
Usually, they take a great book, and make a "Long and boring" film out of it. Or three of them. Think Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings.". Or Harry Potter.
Or, in the case of the "Titanic", they don't even use a book, just a scrap of toilet paper the director made some notes on, maybe an old Reader's Digest to do their fact checking....
"Fight Club" is a great book. And it was a great film. And, oddly enough, (perhaps because I saw the film first), the one didin't ruin the other. Yes, they were close enough, but there were enough differences that you didn't feel you were simply seeing the film again. There were twists, director's interpretations, things in the film that were changed to make it tighter....
But the book is good too. Great even. It's a wonderful rant, a spit and jab at the world of commerce and social expectation, an anarchist's Bible. A well reasoned, well written invective on the futility and emptiness of modern life. A sort of real life self help book.
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