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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Blog

Published: 18 July 2026

Hits: 77

Bandwidth restored at some point last night, free to doomscroll to my hearts content.

***

First off I have a few prospecting questions, which Gemini answers to my hearts content. And then I think of this missing person post I saw on Facebook, about some guy who went missing in the 70's from Edmonton with his van, supposedly on his way to Vancouver, vanished without a trace.

These questions always bother me, but then I've watched enough "Adventures with purpose" videos to know that almost invariably they went off the road and into deep water. So I think to ask AI - Gemini - about famous unsolved cases where the person disappeared along with their vehicle. And Gemini obliges with a few cases, notably the "Pemberton" cases - where the vehicle is later found burned out and suspicions immediately turn to the drug trade. They don't fuck around in Pemberton. So these aren't relevant. But, rephrase the question and I get a whole new set of answers. There is, of course, the recently "vanished" Mother/Newborn from Northern BC, as well as the parental abduction/amber alert for a family that's "disappeared" with their 2 kids - but - they're not what I'm looking for, they each have their own explanations that I don't need to go into here.

I'm looking for historical unsolved cases where the car likely left the road and ended up in a river/lake. 

Gemini obliges with 1 case - solved 27 years later by a kid dropping his go-pro into Griffin Lake and spotting a submerged vehicle - closing the case on Janet Farris. 

Then it regales me with 2 other people - Hank "" Stellmach and Daniel "Danny" Ferguson. It gives a brief description of each of them, missing with vehicles, and - this speculates where they may have gone into the water and disappeared. But here's the kicker - a quick and then lengthy Google search turns up nothing by way of missing people reports on either of these individuals. It's just making this shit up. The internet has become a vast AI hallucination in which nothing is true...

Oddly enough it makes no mention of Brian Guberman, the guy in Edmonton who went off to do some "travelling" and disappeared off the map. Or the disappearance of Ron Yakimchuk and Terry Pettit,  who disappeared en route Edmonton to Montreal. Brian Guberman, without a plan, could be anywhere, although it is suspected he was on his way to Vancouver. And Ron/Terry, they'll be somewhere in the Great Lakes, not found YET. But haunting anyways.

***

News, Donny prepping the US Elections for the inevitable, no comment here, Iran has finally come to it's senses and refuses to bargain further with the US unless there is a "regime change" (good for them, this "bargaining" with Donny has been entirely pointless and the US had done nothing in good faith, only bolster Donny's bank acct.). And really, that's all, there is no other news.

***

And pigeons, feeding them once a day, a spread of seed to preoccupy them, at first, maybe 6, then a dozen, and the other day a flock of 40 pigeons descends upon me like some scene from a Hitchcock film. There was a reddit thread that said you can't overfeed pigeons, you just get more pigeons, and this rather proved it. And there's something horrifying about watching them, a seething mass of grey, a fundamental evil, wings-up, a Cthulhic frenzy or mass of particles coming together as a flock to wrestle one another and furiously peck and feed, overlapped and jostling; I can't say I'm a fan... 

If they ate better we could eat them. I seem to recall Gordon Ramsay making up some squab once, but those were bred to the purpose and didn't live on garbage...

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Blog

Published: 16 July 2026

Hits: 87

And this, being out of bandwidth has forced me to realize how stupid I've become. It's like giving a man 2 penises, wasn't one getting them in to enough trouble? Bandwidth, it's the appendage that enforces stupidity, it's too easy to quickly Google answers to every inane question, fill your time with meaningless side-quests, get nothing done...

Mornings now, no more surfing the net, doom scrolling, I'm missing out on the news and my weather app refuses to update itself and tell me it's raining outside and - while it won't kill me to look out the window, I still would prefer to doggedly check my phone. 

And texts? Did somebody send me a text? I won't know until I pass by an internet connection where I've grabbed a password. I've been using the wi-fi of cafes to download movies; catch up on the world, it's not a bad thing, really, it enforces a schedule on my life.

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Blog

Published: 14 July 2026

Hits: 61

I'm out of data, 4 days before my end of cycle, 8 days in the hospital will do that to you. 

This is fine, I've been scrolling too much to little avail. Virgin - when you were out of data, let you keep online, just at a breathtakingly slow pace. Public Mobile, I've discovered, ends your internet entirely. You can top up your plan at rates which exceed your monthly bill for a few tiny gigabytes, I've learned my lesson. SO - texting is out, as is scrolling and email must be gotten from the library; but this being offline, I'll live, it'll be fine.

I'm unpacking boxes of books, more discoveries: a small box of cufflinks, one pair worth keeping (an Arc De Triomphe, but from where? gilt under glass domes...), a couple of ugly sets, a few strays. A box of vintage silver butterfly-wing jewelry - 2 pairs of screw in earrings, a brooch depicting a palm tree in front of a tropical sunset, a pine tree against the northern lights, a heart shaped pendant and bracelet. a soldering iron, a pile of how-to art books, "Walter Foster", how to make art you couldn’t bear to look at, draw faces you’d never stop kicking, landscapes you’d only see in hell, domiciles that promise an escape from all thought and emotion, art entirely devoid of emotion or intelligence just rote formulas for arranging the scene; a few books of art history (none of which mention Walter Foster), Jansen’s Art History, and an entire box of books that somehow were beneath a leaking roof in the storage locker, something about books warped and destroyed that breaks my heart; I try pressing warped-spines beneath towers of other books in an effort to reshape them into a saleable form, others are fit only for the rubbish. This is a shame, "Trilby" deserved another reader, as did "Lucien" in volumes I-III, and many others made non-saleable by a rubbish storage unit with a leaky roof.

So, now at the library making use of the free internet; then off to try and liquidate a few of my more recent discoveries and get my teeth back into a couple of paintings...

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Blog

Published: 13 July 2026

Hits: 67

Now if you know him you'll know he needs no recommendation. 

A proper BC legend for documenting it's history and gold rushes. Going through my books I'm tempted to sell them, these are collectable, highly sought after - but - also still filled with great information, and many a stream that wasn't worthwhile at 50 cents a day is worthwhile now that gold is at $5,000 per ounce.

Anyways, flipping through them and I still find value, and checking the library find they have none of him in stock, so it appears I won't be selling him off anytime soon...

I know, not Bill Barlee, but when I lived in Calgary I made do with what I could find...

Having recently replaced my (stolen) "Bounty Hunter" metal detector with a vintage Fisher "Gold Bug" (an infinitely better machine at a fraction of the price) these have me pulling at the reins to get out and detect some forgotten and unrecovered caches of my own, or merely scope out some abandoned homesteads and ghost towns for what treasures I may find. The exciting thing about Barlee is he reports on Caches that have been found, as well as detailing any number that haven't. Now - back to my current book on the go - Bruce Ramsey's "Ghost Towns of British Columbia", of which any number are related to the gold rush and a good many have been lost and forgotten in the 62 years since it's first printing. So far it's oddly lyrical and pays a poetic homage to all the vanished places (that are waiting for me to metal detect their remains...). A quote from a newspaper at the time describing a ball put on at a (now ghost) town: "I insist that the wines are not made of burnt sugar and lightening...". Like any great book it's putting me on to a whole pile of other contemporaneous authors from the gold rush, and as I'm a sucker for fist person history... 

I have the detector, I need wheels. Bad.