Volunteering has always been an important part of the alternative school system in Toronto, and, what with our daughter in her fourth year in a Toronto alternative school, my wife and I finally decided it was time to pick up the slack and make a contribution. We’d both been feeling guilty that our professional lives kept us out of the classroom, but luckily we were able to find something we could do on our own timetable that has made a big difference at the school.
There’s alway been this big old aquarium, 72″ x 18″ x 24″, that you see as you come in the front door of the school, but in recent years it’s been looking a little sad. It hasn’t had proper lighting for months, for starters, and I don’t think it’s ever had a proper cover. So I approached the Parent’s Council and begged to be allowed to fix it up. Luckily, they gave me the green light.
Two dutiful and beautiful angelfish stand guard outside the
castle, liar of the ridiculously humongous plecko.
Sometimes I forget things - little things, like where I put my keys and stuff like that. I always feel like an idiot when I do this, but I guess I shouldn’t feel so bad, considering it was recently discovered that Toronto’s own Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) had misplaced the skeletal remains of a Barosaurus, an 85 foot long, 150 million year old long-necked herbivore from the Jurassic Period.
Last night, I had a very bad dream. Not a nightmare, just a dream that sucked, a total waste of my subconscious mind.
Sometimes I dream in movies or TV shows, which is likely a reflection of how much the media controls my day to day existence. But usually the dreams are playfully imaginative with decent twists and strange scene morphs that end up with really bizarro juxtapositions that involve things like Tom Selleck playing the saxophone while wearing snowshoes in my grandmother’s washroom. Read the rest of this entry »
As a relatively new blogger, I found it odd when I started having articles showing up into news aggregators, sites that automatically pull in blogs related to a certain subject based on keywords they look for. The odd thing is that I’m showing up aggregators that have absolutely nothing to with I’m writing about. It’s a flaw in the system, I guess. The first time it happened to me, I wrote about the day my car broke down on Pottery Road in Toronto. Picking up on the word “pottery,” the article got listed into an aggregator that seemed to grab articles related to pottery and gardening. Read the rest of this entry »
Have you ever read/listened to/watched an interview and wondered to yourself why the interviewer asks such bloody asinine questions? I have, on many occassions, so I decided that when I started putting interviews into my blog I’d open things up and let people have a say in what gets asked by providing a form where they can submit their own questions. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m often irked by TV shows that’ll mention a silly website name just for a cheap laugh but fail to go the extra mile for those that bother to follow up online. Being a work-from-home internet geek, I often have my WIFI laptop on hand, if not in hand, when the TV is on, and I have to say I’m happy to see that some folks in show business seem to be catching on. Read the rest of this entry »
Just when I thought I was done discussing the pagan roots of Christmas I stumbled across this really interesting documentary, The Pagan Christ, on the CBC last night. The film dealt mainly with the issues raised by Tom Harpur’s book The Pagan Christ: Recovering The Lost Light. The book examines the strange correlations between the Gospels of the New Testament and the ancient Egyptian myth of Horus. Apparently, according to all these ancient rolls of papyrus decoded using the Rosetta Stone, there are about 180 elements of Horus’ story that end up in the New Testament, including divine conception, being born in a hovel, the visit of the 3 mystic sages, the gathering of 12 disciples, rubbing the authorities the wrong way, being crucified (evidently not a Roman invention), and the resurrection. Apparently his birth was also celebrated around December 25th, and even terms such as the “son of man” and the “lamb of God” have their roots in the Horus myth. I thought it a strange coincidence that when I start coming to terms with the fact that the biggest Christian holiday is really borrowed from the ancient celebrations of pagan sun gods (most notably Mithra & Saturn) I find out that Christ himself might simply be an embellishment of another ancient sun god. Evidentally, even names like Christ and Mary have roots in ancient Egyptian.
Samarah is a talented electronic producer from Madison, Wisconson. She’s currently locked away working on a new full-length release, but wants to show her gratitude to anyone who’s ever supported her in the past or may support her in the future. So, she’s made her entire back catalog, including Robots Smile Too (Belladonna), Falling Away (Zod, Belladonna), and These Things (Nishi), available for download for free. Read the rest of this entry »
Fredo Viola is one of the cooler musicians I’ve ever met online, and now, at long last, his tracks are being released by a proper label and everyone is going to know how wicked he is and I’ll get to be all laid back and cool and say, “Oh yeah, Fredo - we’ve been emailing back and forth for a few years now,” and I’ll finally be vindicated. By the way, dig the Sad Song video, shot entirely in Motion Jpeg mode in 15-second chunks on a digital camera. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m spiritually torn – I’m decidedly not a Christian (no offence intended if you are), but I’m absolutely in love with Christmas. I wouldn’t necessarily say I’m an atheist - I just don’t like any of the options I’ve been presented with so far. I’ve witnessed, for lack of a better term, the “miracle” of birth twice, and with each new arrival I’ve slowly come around to the notion that maybe there’s something, maybe even a “higher intelligence,” behind the intricate wonder of creation. Let’s face it - if homo sapiens is the most powerful intellect ever, the universe has thus far been a terrible waste of space.
Sometimes I feel like a bit of a hypocrite to be riding on the coattails of a religious celebration when I don’t subscribe to that particular religion, but recent research has shown me that, if anything, what we know today as a Christian holiday is pretty much a hodge-podge of icons and symbols borrowed from several pagan traditions, some of which could possibly predate Christ himself. According to the Wikipedia Christmas page, just about everything comes from somewhere else. For instance, the Christmas tree was borrowed from an ancient Germanic pagan ritual. When the Romans decided it was time to start listening to Christians (as opposed their previous tradition of feeding them to the lions) and decided Jesus was the way and the light, they decided to take what was already a well established celebration of the winter solstice turned it into a birthday party for their newfound savior. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m spiritually torn – I’m decidedly not a Christian (no offence intended if you are), but I’m absolutely in love with Christmas. I wouldn’t necessarily say I’m an atheist - I just don’t like any of the options I’ve been presented with so far. I’ve witnessed, for lack of a better term, the “miracle” of birth twice, and with each new arrival I’ve slowly come around to the notion that maybe there’s something, maybe even a “higher intelligence,” behind the intricate wonder of creation. Let’s face it - if homo sapiens is the most powerful intellect ever, the universe has thus far been a terrible waste of space.
