SNIPPETS FROM SPACESHIP ORION

December 19, 2007

Christmas Day Bash at WW's!!!*

THERE'LL BE PLENTY OF SUPER SEXY GIRLS...and one boy...

AND CERTAINLY MORE FESTIVE AMBIANCE AND SPARKLING LIGHTS THAN YOU CAN FIND ANYWHERE ELSE...

I HAVE PLENTY OF MUSIC TO LISTEN TO AND VIDS TO WATCH...

AND LORDY, THERE'S NO SHORTAGE OF SNOW....

PLUS I HAVE PLENTY OF ROOM FOR YOU TO SLEEP, SHOULD YOU FIND THE NEED TO...

AND I'VE ACTUALLY CLEANED MY BATHTUB, REALLY...

Christmas Eve and Christmas Day can leave me with a lot of time on my hands as my kids do their thing...

SO THE ENTIRE BLOG WORLD IS HEREBY INVITED TO WW'S PLACE ON CHRISTMAS DAY, 2007, TO WILE AWAY THE AFTERNOON AND BEYOND, IF YOU LIKE.

We (the editorial we, that is) realize this might be considered late notice, especially for those in Australia, India, South Africa, the UK, the Phillippines and other locales in Canada and beyond the Great White North.

But you have a week. Get on the phone and book it, Dano. You have Airmiles. You have money you've been saving up just for this trip you were anticipating. You have nothing else to do, no one else to be with. Just do it.

Think of what you'll be missing...time with me and various bloggers instead of with family, friends and others...hor's doeuvres til the cows come home, rum and eggnog, Caesars to your heart's content, beer, jovial conversation...

And, to help you offset the cost of your trip, five Canadian cents for every comment you've ever posted on my blog, to be calculated by you. Wives, husbands and significant others are, of course, welcome.

RSVP to my email address. Homo Escapeons will provide comic relief.

(*This is just a joke, although if anyone actually shows up, knock yourselves out!)

December 18, 2007

WHERE ARE YOU, GEORGE DUBYA?

HAS ANYONE ELSE NOTICED DUBYA'S DISAPPEARANCE?

HE'S VIRTUALLY VANISHED FROM THE AIRWAVES.

HE'S LESS VISIBLE NOW THAN...OSAMA BIN LADEN!!!

Maybe they're hiding out together in Pakistan?

Maybe Bush has donned that silly military uniform like he did on the aircraft carrier after the U.S. conquered an overwhelmed Iraq -- where WMDs were never found -- and is sitting having tea with Bin Laden in the hills of Pakistan?

Maybe Bush has joined the Taliban. After all, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. If you can't find 'em, be 'em.

We'd like to see Bush in a head covering. Wouldn't Al Jazeera or whatever that Muslim TV network is called get a hoot out of that?

THE REPUBLICANS ARE HIDING HIM, AREN'T THEY?

HIM AND HIS IDIOTIC IRAQ INVASION AND WAR ON TERROR.

TWO TERMS WORTH OF GLOBAL GAFFES, AND HE'S GONE.

HE'S THERE, BUT HE'S HISTORY...UNDERGROUND.

THE SPIN DOCTORS ARE SILENCING HIS STUPIDITY.

THAT'S IT.

TRYING TO GLOSS OVER HIS GROSSNESS.

IN THE HOPE THEY CAN WIN AGAIN IN 2008.

Bush has been nothing but a 'Publican Puppet, a paper bag prince, the son of a president from Texas with kazillions in oil money, who avoided the military and was pampered into the post he has now because of voting irregularities in Florida.

He was improperly proclaimed president and is so dim and far right of centre he's off the map.

With the likes of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld holding his hand on behalf of corporate America, he enraged an entire Muslim world with a hyper-aggressive resolve that was misplaced from the beginning.

It was based on untruths and designed to further escalate, at whatever cost, the differences in ways of life. And it so succeeded, but it has so backfired.

Aggression results in aggression. Religious absurdity results in religious absurdity. The Muslim world isn't ready now, and may never be ready, for the Western World and its way of life. And now, those two cultures are clashing.

And the whole world, including Canada, is involved in a war Bush started as a reason to invade the Middle East. And 9-11, as horrible as it was, shouldn't be considered as the catalyst.

This was Bush and his corporate cronies.

And it's still ugly and it's still there.

It's just the Republicans are concealing Bush and the media is being ignorantly or maybe not so ignorantly complicit in its non-reporting or burying of what's still going on in Iraq and Iran and Afghanistan and Pakistan.

So the Republicans can actually spend the next 11 months campaigning, pretending that Bush hasn't existed and that the American government hasn't alienated the rest of the world for the past eight or nine years.

I don't know if the Democrats will be much better, if they get in.

But they couldn't possibly be worse.

December 16, 2007

The Glob(logging)al Village

IT STILL AMAZES ME, THE SCOPE AND REACH OF THE WORLD WIDE WEB...

AND, BY EXTENSION AND DEFINITION, THE DIVERSE WORLD OF BLOGGING.

As the map above shows -- all those red dots represent people who have visited my blog, the bigger the dot the more often they visit -- it brings me THIS CLOSE to people all across the planet.

It brings me a touch of a key away from Angel in South Africa, from Stace and Lee and Keshi in Australia, from Ziggi and Cherrypie in the UK, from Gautami in India.

And so many more in the most far-flung of places. And I'll get back to a specific point about that later.

(Except before you scroll down, note, if you can see it, the solitary little dot to the east of southern Africa, east of the island of Madagascar; keep that in your head. OK, now continue, if you're not asleep yet).

Another amazing webtool, however, is Google Earth. I have used it in the past to find my own house and fellow blogger buddy, Winnipegger and Doppelganger-finder Homo Escapeons and other places.

It's fun. It's neat.

And here it is in action.

These images didn't display as well or as large as I'd hoped, so sue me.

The first pic above is the view of Winnipeg from a satellite high above the planet. The blue parts are Lake Winnipeg on the right, Lake Manitoba on the left.

The yellow areas you see are markers for my house and HE's house.

The pic right below it is just a closer view of south Winnipeg, with those yellow markers indicating HE's general area and mine to the south of him.

Both of us, as you can see, are very close to the Red River.

Above is the Google Earth image of my apartment complex, with the little yellow marker roughly where my place is.

I sometimes throw a basketball around or kick a football around in the field to the south.

This is a closer view still, and I could go quite a bit closer...hey, can you see me waving?

Just for the fun of it, here are a few Google Earth pix of cities where I know other bloggers live. Like the Vancouver area (above, MJ and Andrea)...

Like Sydney, Australia (Keshi? Or is that Stace? Aidan? Lee?)

How about beautiful Montreal (Anna, you're down there somewhere)...

This is Melbourne above (Stace or Keshi? Lee? Oh, I give up.)

And here's Johannesburg, South Africa (I THINK that's where Angels tread)

And somewhere down there in Delhi lives Gautami Tripathy.

So OK, now back to the reach and breadth of blogging and the World Wide Web, and how being thousands of kilometres away means absolutely nothing.

In fact, it means nothing because it can mean everything. Let me explain.

There's that one lonely little red dot up there on that ClustrMap, the first pic in this post.

You probably can't even see it, but it's there. The little dot is located east of Madagascar, which is east of southern Africa.

With the help of Google Earth, I found that speck on a map. And here's where it is.

The visitor to my blog lives in one of these two small islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean, both of them founded by the French in the 1700's, maybe 700 miles east of Madagascar.

A best guess is my visitor would live in Port Louis, the capital of the tiny island country of Mauritius (to the right, above).

The population of Port Louis, according to Wikipedia, was 147,688 in 2003. A pic is below.

The other best possibility is that the visitor is from Saint-Denis, what's called a prefecture or the administrative capital of the French overseas "region" of Reunion (on the left, above).

Its population was 158,139 in 1999, according to Wikipedia.

Here's a pic:

So. What does this all mean? Probably nothing in the larger scheme of things. Many more familiar with the Web than me might say I'm just pointing out the obvious, and, well, who cares?

Well, I care. And I wonder.

It just blows me away that somewhere in Mauritius or Azerbajan or on the southernmost tip of South America or in some desert wasteland or in some shack in northern Finland, someone can find me.

And that I can do the same.

And hear what I have to say, or even leave a comment if they want, or debate with me about bad jokes or religion or politics...

...Or simply by a Google search learn how NOT to clean a fridge or a bath tub or that I've written about sex and socks or that I have a daughter and a son and three sisters and two brothers.

Little red dots, indeed. It's fascinating.

December 12, 2007

Playlists on a Winter Night...

MUSIC LAUNCHES ME INTO ORBIT AND BEYOND.

IT MOVES ME TO DO SILLY THINGS AND TO FEEL GOOD DOING THEM.

OK, maybe music doesn't exactly equal life, but it surely enhances it unlike anything else. If you let it, it flows through every part of your existence. It's like a best friend or lover that's always there.

You can tap on whatever part of its wide-ranging personality or moods you want, at any time, and with one click or press of a button you can hear it speak to you about whatever you desire.

It can tease your ears and brain and plays on your own mood, brightening your day or enriching or magnifying whatever you're feeling into a sensual arousal of the brain that revives memories or whatever you wish.

Music makes me think. And feel. It helps to put me into a rythym and in tune with my thoughts.

I was going to take pix last night of a considerable snowfall here in the Great White North, on a relatively mild night.

But I got busy with blogging and driving my son to his band practice and back and never got around to it.

Nonetheless, I had music playing all night. And here was my playlist.