"What is War Like"

A friend posted this on a forum I frequent and he gave permission to share.

I've had this question asked of me by some friends and family back home. In the process of writing the reply it kind of started coming out as more than just an email. So I drafted it a couple times and ran it through my head a couple more. This is about the third version.

Imagine your worst nightmare,
Where a thousand things are happening all around you,
And you control none of it.
Imagine being in a room with hundreds of people,
Yet you know not one of them, you are alone.

Far away, your family, your friends, all think of you, wishing for your safe return.
But you can no longer see there faces, only the faces of the dead.
Your enemies, your comrads, the innocents caught in between.
Lifeless, staring at nothing. You can never forget.

Violence and death, pain and bloodshed.
These things surround you, cover you.
You can never seem to wash it all off.
You balance life and death on the edge of a knife,
And the reaper dances gleefully all around, asking you to join him.

You cling to hope, you cling to your weapon,
You cling to your brothers and sisters in arms.
These are all you have. You press on.

Double-Take

Playgrounds in Belgium seem to be more fun than those I remember in Canada...

Hat Tip: Andrew

Garage Cleanout 2007

Ah spring. The time of year when a young man's mind turns to thoughts of cleaning out that horrible collection of garbage, cardboard, and yardwaste from the garage.

Yep, this past Saturday was garage cleanout day and what a cleanout it was. Five trips to the yard waste depot:
- First the bagged leaves and branches from last fall and this spring,
- Then the cardboard pile and more bags of grass clippings.
- The scrap metal of an old file cabinet and the old BBQ (that I had to take apart to fit in the car,
- Followed by branches from the old maple tree that fell down in the front yard last summer.
- And another load of maple tree branches.

There is still some garbage in the garage to get rid of, I just don't know what to do with it yet. Scrap wood and drywall too big for the curb. Time to talk to Steve the Nieghbour and find out what he does. I also still have the large leafless branches of the maple tree I need to cut up with my new electric chainsaw. I'll make sure to do that some night when the Carleton Place hospital is not too busy.

Tagged!

Kim tagged me with a meme about 7-10 things you didn't know about me. Alright thenm here goes.

1. I dressed as Darth Vader for 3 Halloweens in a row as a kid and would have made it four had my parent's not stepped in and convinced me to go as Zorro one year.

2. Best Christmas present I got as a kid was my first computer, a Commodore Vic 20.

3. My parent's home in Greenbush, Ontario, where I lived from age 5-6 to 20 had a large in-ground kidney shaped pool and tennis court in the back yard. All my friends thought we were rich but truth we never had much money growing up. Family vacations were usually short road trips (excepting one year we drove to Myrtle Beach in South Carolina for March break) and eating out was rare and always a huge treat.

4. My first kiss since hitting puberty was just before I turned 20.

5. I played hockey as a kid but quit because my lower back hurt when I skated and I didn't enjoy it as a result. Plus I was not a very competitive child for a long time.

6. In my last year of high school I went from 210 lbs to 160 lbs over four months.

7. I worked at a Shell gas station for 2 years while in high school. It was full service including diesel and propane filling and some of the busiest days of the year I ran my feet off. As bad as the heat in summer was, winter with its icy freezing winds was far worse.

8. I was one of the smartest kids in my High School. One report card I had a 97%, 98% and a 99%. The courses that semester was Physics, Algebra, and Computer Science.

9. My favourite movie growing up was Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Great, now I have the urge to watch it again and I'll have to convince Kim to let me use the TV.

10. Sometimes I dream about being in gunfights. Last night for example I dreamt I was being pursued by government agents because I was part of a secret group of heros with special powers. My power was mind reading, not useful in a fight so I was shooting agents with two handguns. I got caught and taken to a cottage on an island in a bus full of people. Almost at the island a lady on a dock got struck by lightning and fell over, her head exploded. I wanted to help yet was afraid to since I was, you know, a prisoner. Then the lights went out in the cottage and all over the island. I woke up.

Ten Years Ago...

This day, ten years ago, was the greatest of my life so far.

Of all the things I've done and not done, of all my accomplishments, marrying Kim was the smartest, coolest, and most perfect event in my memory.

The day was perfect from the weather, to the family, the reception, to finally going to sleep married to her.

Kim, I love you.
Bill

Can the Sens Fly Past the Ducks?

I wondered if the Sens were going to be able to come together to defeat the Penguins, and they did soundly.

I feared that the Sens would hit the wall that is Martin Brodeur and fall apart, but they found a way to make him look human.

I doubted that they would be able to ground the high-flying Sabres, the best team in the NHL during the regular season, a team that humiliated them last playoffs, but Saturday ended with the Sens going to the cup finals and Buffalo going nowhere.

Now they face the Anaheim Ducks (not Mighty anymore). My heart wants the Sens to win, but my head and gut agree: Ducks in 6.

Alive and Kicking

Long weekend indeed!

As is our custom, Kim and I spent the May long weekend celebrating our anniversary by doing something special. This year since it was our tenth anniversary, we took a trip to Toronto and did lots of touristy things.

It did not start well. Friday night as we were packing I felt sick to my stomach and come Saturday morning I was not improved. Nausea, lack of appetite, and concern I was coming down with the flu put a damper on the morning but I refused to give up and cancel the weekend. We hit the road and I popped some gravol.

We made it to Toronto and checked into our hotel by the early afternoon. Once safely unpacked, we got pack in the car and went downtown to check out the CN Tower. I normally get butterflies in my stomach when faced with heights so since I was already feeling ill a few times I wondered if I was pushing my luck too far. But I kept my lunch down and the view was quite inspiring if intimidating. Kim played on the glass floor at one point, but I took a pass.

From the main level we got in a long long line to go up to the skypod, the highest man-made observation platform in the world. The wait in the line was not only a long time, it was hot and stuffy too. But the view from on top of the world was amazing.

Next stop we walked over to the Hockey Hall of Fame and browsed there for a while. It was very well done and visually stimulating, and they had a sitting theatre set up with the Sens versus Sabres game on. We watched the overtime period and caught Alfie's game winner. Go Sens Go! We didn't stay long as we had to go back uptown for Kim's Allergy pills so she could watch the show at Medieval Times in peace.

I admit Medieval Times is an event more for kids than adults, but Kim and I are young at heart and enjoy a good time which we did. At this point in the day, my flip flopping tummy was more flopping than flipping, so I was able to enjoy the show with Kim without worry. The Knight of our section was the hero of the show and won the princess' heart. Yay us.

Sunday dawned cloudy and cold, and my stomach was settled but not hungry. We ate a quick breakfast and hit the road to the Metro Zoo. We've been to the zoo several times in the past and always enjoyed it, but I admit some disappointment this time. It was so cool a lot of the outside animals were hunkered down for the day out of the wind and it was very busy inside making it hard to see at times. Also, we've been very spoiled by visits to Parc Safari where the animals can come right up to your window to eat and the big cat enclosures have glass tunnels right through the middle allowing you to get face to face with the lions and tigers. At the Metro Zoo, the big animals were often far away behind wire fences and barricades.

Another sore point was that at the end of the day we still hadn't seen everything and our legs were exhausted. Perhaps paying extra for the zoomobile tour might have been advised.

On the upside, they had a new exhibit called Dinosaurs Alive that we thought was going to be corny and more for kids but I found to be quite enthralling and informative. I won't ruin it for anyone else that might see it, but it made the day for me.

Lastly, on Monday after checking out we went to the Royal Ontario Museum where we got our recommended dose of high culture for the year. I like history and learning about other cultures as much as the next nerd, but for the most part I found a lot of their displays and explanatory blurbs to be lacking in excitement or detail. A lot of sections seemed like disconnected bit of trivia with no unifying thrust. Sometimes there would be some cool areas, but they seemed to be the exception rather than the rule.

Or maybe its just that I'm more into science and hands on activities and someone else would appreciate the ROM more. To each their own I guess.

To summarize:

CN tower: must do at least once in your life.
Hockey Hall of Fame: Do it for any true hockey fan.
Medieval Times: Good show m'lord!
Metro Zoo: Ups and Downs, but mostly ups.
ROM: Give it a pass.

Jiu Jitsu Update

Martial Arts is an interesting sport activity. While their are tournaments, they are the rare exception for most participants and their is no league or playoff "games". There is no season. Instead their is progress from white to black and beyond, and the progress is not a steady climb but rather a jumpy increase with spikes and plateaus.

The first six months of training when you begin any martial art is the deer-in-the-headlights time when everything is new and strange. How to move, how to take down, how to be taken down, every class is an eye-opener to things you never considered about fighting and self defense. The first three months you work every class and its a steep climb to your white belt as your confidence grows and you start to feel a little more comfortable. The next three months as yellow you have a bit of confidence but you are still working on the basics from white while getting the next set of basics for yellow.

All of this training in the first six months comes to a head in your test for your orange belt and when you succeed in that test you hit the first plateau. You can step back, relax, and enjoy being an orange belt student, an indication that you are familiar with the martial art and got the basics at least familiarized if not memorized. Eventually you get to the first stripe review and the plateau comes to an end as you begin really working on the next belt level. Steady progress is made as you learn new techniques that seem familiar as they build on the basics learned in white and yellow. After a while you do your next two reviews and then you are back in intense training for your belt test just like your first six months when you started. You review all the material, doing everything several times over a few weeks (or months for higher belts) and then doing it again. Finally you go for your test and achieve the next belt colour and enter a new rest period, a new plateau.

Last night my plateau for achieving the green belt came to an end as I had my first stripe review. It went very well with the exception of me deciding against trying breakfall 14 which involves doing a handstand and then curling and falling on your feet and across your shoulders. My back was twinging and I opted not to aggravate it. Now I start to work harder on green belt material and get ready for that Blue belt test in the late summer.

Feel Good Story of the Day

Tiger triplets at Chinese zoo nursed by dog

BEIJING (AP) - It's a dog's life for three newborn tiger triplets in eastern China.

The cubs, who officials at the Jinan Paomaling Wild Animal World in Shandong province are so far just calling "One," "Two" and "Three," have been nursed by a dog since they were rejected by their tiger mother shortly after birth 10 days ago, said Paomaling manager Chen Yucai. The trio's adoptive mother, a mixed breed farm dog named "Huani," is expected to nurse the tigers for about a month or until their appetites outpace her supply, Chen said.

Hockey Talk

If you asked me at the beginning of the playoffs if I thought Ottawa would be up 3-0 on the Buffalo Sabres in the Eastern Conference finals, I would have one reply: "You're crazy!"

Yet here we are. Another win last night has put the Sens one win away from a sweep (their first) and one win from that elusive Stanley Cup Finals. They've been here before but the circumstances were far different.

In the spring of 2003 the Senators were humming. Names like Hossa, Havlat, Bonk along with Redden and Alfredson were battling the New Jersey Devils in the Eastern Conference finals. The Devils got into a 3-1 series lead but some gusty performances from the red and black including an overtime win tied the series up at 3 apiece. Game seven was a gritty affair (back before holding and interference was serisously called, you know, the days the piss-poor Leafs could smother a team into submission) and the game was tied 2-2 late into the third. Everyone could feel the next goal would be it, it would be enough. A turnover, a rush by the Devils. One sens defenceman was back but the drop pass to a trailing Devil and BAM! Goal scored with only minutes left. I remember watching the replay and seeing the Jersey goal scorer was being covered by Havlat and then Havlat stopped skating and let the play unfold while coasting in centre ice, perhaps waiting for the big save and lead pass. I never forgave him for that. New Jersey won the game and went on the dominate the Mighty Ducks to win their third Cup.

This series against Buffalo is nothing like that one in 2003. Buffalo looks positively bewildered. If I had to pick a reason why, I'd go with this: they are a fast team used to winning by beating their opponents to pucks and moving it through the centre ice quickly and generating scoring chances on the rush. But this Ottawa team is just as fast and perhaps a bit bigger, breaking up the rush and moving the puck just as well. Where Ottawa's speed is most evident is the Buffalo powerplay which can't get set up or move the puck fast enough to avoid the pressure and often seem to be on the defensive against odd man shorthanded rushes. Another point where Ottawa's speed is unexpected by Buffalo is when Ottawa chips it into the offensive zone and proceeds to retrieve it from shell-shocked Sabre defencemen.

If it wasn't for the goalie Miller, Buffalo would have been run completely over last night, but the fact is they still lost. Now facing elimination at the hands of an Ottawa team just humming like a well-oiled machine, I can't see them climbing back into this series.

Green, Everywhere its Green!

I went to bed Saturday night but had a little trouble sleeping. Everytime I closed my eyes I would see this wall of dandelions. Not the flowers, but just the green leaves. Except it wasn't a wall it was the ground and my head was bent over looking down at them. Green everywhere, as far as my mind's eye could see...

Let's go back to Wednesday evening when I was out back cooking dinner on the BBQ. My neighbour Steve comes out of his garage and we make some small talk. Then he says, "hey I've something for you to try." He goes into his garage and returns with a contraption used to pull weeds (especially dandelions) out of the ground. It has six spikes that come out of holes in the bottom and are angeled inwards to form a point. You place it over the centre of a weed, press down with your foot on a pedal, and the spikes surround the root of the weed and you pull it out.

I had a bumper crop of dandelions in the back yard, and the front yard was well taken over by the weeds. I tried out Steve's tool and it worked pretty good, the one downside being you needed to bang on the knob on the top to get it to let go of the weed once you had it out of the ground.

Realizing I had a serious weed issue, and feeling a little guilty that I had one of the worst lawns in the neighbourhood, I resolved to seriously think about getting one of those weeders. Maybe. If, you know, I feel like it.

Fast forward to Saturday morning. I look out the window across the street and to my horror I see Neil using Steve's tool to getting the dandelions in his front yard. Why the horror you ask? Well, there are five houses that are my immediate neighbours. Steve on one side of us, Art on the other, and directly across the street is Neil with Tom beside him across from Steve's place and The Bald Guy We Don't Know the Name Of (aka BGWDKTNO, or BG for short) across from Art. Of the six front lawns, Tom's, Steve's, and BG's lawns are immaculate seas of green grass cut to perfection. Art's lawn is very nice with only a few dandelions here and there. My lawn and Neil's were both peppered with yellow. Ok, more than peppered. Saturated.

And there was Neil, out changing the balance of power. If he got rid of the dandelions on his lawn then my place would be That Place, the one the neighbours snort and shake their head in disgust at our obvious lack of pride and work ethic. When we weren't alone it was ok, but I couldn't stand to be the lone slacker.

I quickly grabbed my wallet and walked up to Home Hardware where I laid out some cash not only for the weed tool, but also for some grass seed and turf builder with weed control. When I compete, I leave it all on the mat. I got home and got to work.

I think it was around 10:30 or 11:00 when I started, its hard to remember. The day seemed to blend together after that. I know there was lunch, and a birthday party for Mikaela, but the rest of the time I was in that front yard repeating the same motion over and over and over again. My hand on the handle would cramp up from gripping it and the other hand would get sore on the palm from whacking the knob to drop the weed, so I switched hands to give them each a break and hurt them in a different manner. My upper back became sore from bending over to look at the ground where I aimed, and later that night my right shoulder was so sore from hefting the tool around all day I needed to take some medication and heat pad.

When I started I didn't think I would do it all in one go, but as the lawn slowly turned from yellow saturation to green perfection, I could not stop. I am a boulder, hard to get moving but an unstoppable force once I am rolling. And roll I did. After a while my hands went numb and I simply became a robot of weed destruction. Some parts of the lawn were horribly overrun where I didn't bother aiming the tool, I just put it down, stomped the pedal, and withdrew a weed. The sun beat down and gave me a sunburn, but I didn't notice as the air was cool and I was in the zone. The zone of weed destruction.

I finished around 4 or 5, not sure when and the front lawn was pristine in its greenness. There were still some unflowered dandelions hiding but I knew they could be dealt with over the summer as they showed their yellow faces. The war was won, and the lawn was mine.

A quick mow and rake and watering before calling it quits that evening, and the next morning I
went out and applied the turf builder using Steve's spreader* and worked a little on the smaller dandelion population in the back yard. Never again shall I allow the foul yellow weed to take over my property. Fear me, for I am Bill, the destroyer of Dandelions.

* Steve lets me borrow lots of tools from him because I think he wants me to keep my lawn clear of weeds so that they don't send dandelion seeds over on his pristine lawn.

Mexico? Oh No!

Whenever Kim talks about going south on vacation, I immediately get nervous thinking about it. How much it would cost, having to fly there, get some tropical disease, etc.

But when she mentions Mexico, I get even more nervous. And then I read something like this:

EDMONTON (Sun Media) - A Grande Prairie man rejects Mexican cops' claims that it was an "accident" that left his vacationing brother hovering near death in a Cancun hospital.

[...]

"He was beaten up bad. But in this country, everything is always an accident, right? It's all about keeping the tourist dollars."

Murray Toews says Jeff was savagely beaten early Monday in an attack on the grounds of Cancun's Moon Palace Golf and Spa resort, between the nightclub and the hotel.

[...]

But the top prosecutor for the state of Quintana Roo says the incident was an accident and there's no evidence of foul play.

"He wasn't beaten. He fell from a second storey of the hotel where he was staying," said Rodriguez y Carrillo.

"That's the report that we have from the security guard from the hotel, and the report we're getting from the hospital, too."

The prosecutor later said that Jeff was "running to a second floor, lost control and fell."

But Murray Toews slammed that explanation as a "coverup."

"They (Mexican authorities) keep you on the outside here.

"It's like a Third World country, how you're treated."

Storied like this make me want to avoid Mexico like the plague. I realize bad things can happen no matter where you go, and heck, even last week a convenience store clerk was stabbed here in Ottawa. But for some reason Mexico has always seemed rather threatening to me.

Human Cattle

Nothing makes me more angry than people being close minded idiots and then trying to enforce their close mindedness upon others. So this column on Canoe by Mindelle Jacobs really ticked me off:

Saudi Arabia treats women like cattle but, looking on the bright side — if there is such a thing in the supposed cradle of Muslim civilization — it likes its cattle educated.

There are more female university grads than male grads in Saudi Arabia but all that education pretty much goes to waste, since only about 5% of Saudi women are permitted to work.

From puberty on, females become invisible, forced to cover their bodies from head to toe, banned from driving, told who to marry and forbidden from appearing in public without a male relative.

Web of mores

“Women in Saudi Arabia live in a web of mores, rules and fatwas defining and limiting the extent to which they can move,” Amnesty International reported several years ago in a study of human rights abuses against women in one of the world’s most misogynistic countries.

So Saudi women grab onto what little freedom they’re allowed, hoping it will one day be a life raft to better things. Every year, for instance, thousands of young women descend on education exhibitions looking for information about studying abroad.

The Canadian Education Network (CEN), based in Vancouver, has been organizing Canada’s participation in such education fairs for a decade and 10,000 Saudi students, half of them women, attended the latest one in Jeddah last week.

Colleges and universities from Canada and other countries send representatives to these events to recruit foreign students. This year, though, the much-reviled Saudi religious police closed down a section containing the Canadian Embassy booth and a booth from Montreal’s LaSalle College because there were three women present.

The other booths in the Canadian pavilion were allowed to remain open because their delegates were male.

These women weren't immodestly dressed, nor were passing out literature or discussing female rights. They were simply there, and that was enough for the religious police to descend and rule them unworthy. Bastards.

I want to be tolerant and accommodating of other cultures, but the oppressiveness of this brand of religious fundamentalism makes me sick.

Weekend Wrapup

Kim and I had the kids up for the weekend and we had a good time in the nice weather.

On Saturday we went into Ottawa and had a picnic at Strathcona park which has some cool "ruins" for kids to run around in. The sun was nice but the wind was cold and we had to hunker behind a hill and bushes to get warm enough to eat.

On Sunday we checked out the movie Meet the Robinsons which everyone enjoyed. It was a typical good kids movie but there were a couple parts that Kim and I cracked up at and were still laughing about at bedtime hours later. Heh, fun stuff.

Ack, My Eyes!

Alternative title: Sticky Bear is VERY Pleased to See You

Bee Crisis

I've heard a couple stories about this recently:

What is killing the honeybee?

BELTSVILLE, Md. (AP) — Unless someone or something stops it soon, the mysterious killer that is wiping out many of the nation’s honeybees could have a devastating effect on America’s dinner plate, perhaps even reducing us to a glorified bread-and-water diet.

Honeybees don’t just make honey; they pollinate more than 90 of the tastiest flowering crops we have. Among them: apples, nuts, avocados, soybeans, asparagus, broccoli, celery, squash and cucumbers. And lots of the really sweet and tart stuff, too, including citrus fruit, peaches, kiwi, cherries, blueberries, cranberries, strawberries, cantaloupe and other melons.

I remember reading a science blog post a while back (can't find the link) in which a study about the effects of a certain pesticide on bees found that bees grown in the lab without a certain parasite showed no ill effects from the pesticide, but wild bees infected with a harmless parasite started to die when exposed to the pesticide. This finding was discovered accidentally when some wild bees were used instead of the lab bees.

The world is a complex place and the interactions between species of all sizes are often only partially known, sometimes until it is too late. I hope the bee colonies survive this dying off or that investigators determine the cause and fix it, but part of me worries it is only the tail end of an effect building in the environment for too long already.

Want to Buy: One Goal

It was the start of the third period, the score still 0-0 after a game of many Ottawa chances but no luck, and I turned to Terry and said, "Next goal wins it."

That was the feeling everyone in the building had after two scoreless periods. Either the patience of the Devils was going to pay off in game three and one mistake by the Sens would give them the lead and probably the victory, or the onslaught of the Senators was finally going to get one past Brodeur. Fortunately for us fans, it was the latter.

After some of the edge of your seat moments when it looked like the Sens might get one earlier, the actual game winning goal came unexpectedly from a far shot off the boards. Brodeur complained about getting bumped by Mike Fisher, but Terry thought it was too long before the play to have made any interference call. Still, the way the refs were hard on the Sens last night I'm surprised the goal stood.

Now everyone is faced with a pressure cooker of a game four. The Devils know that going home down 3-1 would be a death knell as winning three straight games against this team is well nigh impossible, while the Sens would really like to avoid going back to New Jersey in a tied series to play a best of three .

By and by, without Martin Brodeur this New Jersey team is not of the same calibre as the Sens in this series. They need to play the same game and get that next win on Wednesday.

This and that:
- Mike Fisher played an awesome if unsung game. Hitting, moving fast, dangerous with the puck, he is my vote for most underrated Senator.
- Jason Spezza makes me so nervous with the puck in the offensive zone. He tries to be fancy sometimes and causes deadly turnovers.
- Man, Phillips IS playing awesome right now.
- And that one ref really really sucked.