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musings of mark since 2001

It was a rainy, miserable day for the ‘Round Bowen Race this year, so just as well that I haven’t found a motor yet for the Illusion and wasn’t entered. Tomorrow should be a little nicer, and hopefully run into Pat somewhere and ask him about the little 2hp he’s got stored.

Didn’t get much of anything done today really, except to have a look around a new web site that I’m making up the templates for and a trip to the Building Centre to check out their specials. A decent nap in the afternoon and instead of being on the computer watched a movie with my house mates instead.

Brother John emailed, may be coming up for a visit next week but of course not holding my breath as his plans have been known to change pretty fast sometimes. He wants to go golfing of course, but the local course isn’t going to be ready until about August was the last I heard. With any luck, the sailboat will be ready and that will keep us busy. Have a feeling he’s starting to feel a little older now, as son number one is just sixteen and has the driver’s learning permit and all the worries that go along with that.

Father’s Day coming up next week, don’t forget to buy a card! And even more important, put it in the mail on time. Going to have to make a trip over there some time soon, the marina I work for counts on people not showing up by default, and vacation pay isn’t saved, so it’s pretty much up to when I have some extra $ around rather than when I have the time, got lots of time still.

Still working on getting the Illusion into the salt chuck and have yet to sail the girl. After so many years of Norma watching others go out without a motor, and having to call in the tug boat to bring them back, she’s not about to let me sail without a reliable source of mechanized power, which makes sense to moi as well.

Had the circa 1950’s British Seagull actually starting after a few pulls, and running(!), and it was looking like that was going to be the one, old or not. It’s age protested in the end tho’, as the motor mount broke while bench testing and another one is going to be a miracle to find.

Stopped by Earls for a smoke, and maybe salvation over there as Pat has a little 2hp thing that might be running okay and he would certainly be one to let the Dallas’s borrow, or maybe even buy it? The smaller the better, as once we’re out away from the cove the motor comes off and gets stored in the hull until it’s time to come to the dock again.

There’s a new link off to the right as of last night. I’m using the Google News customization to get all the stories related to Bowen Island, and xml-izing the results for an RSS feed. Styling the raw xml files too, for those that don’t yet understand how much less surfing and reading they have to do in their daily crawls over the internet with a feed reader.

A nice set-up for those that own, (yes, you own it, even though it cost you no money, you can do whatever you want with it except take credit for writing it), a Firefox browser is the Sage reader. Lightweight, does what it’s supposed to, which is about everything just right.

Haven’t determined the archive structure, or how to make it easy for me but intuitive for the person reading as well. Been doing a fair amount with history lately, period. Beyond the Bowen Island Historians, Norma is hankering for a history exhibit on The Pier which would be really cool.

Still reading a ‘Short History of the World’, edited by Prof. A.Z. Manfred, (1974) on behalf of the Institute of History, Academy of Sciences of the USSR. It’s a very proletariat view of the world, with more than just a nod to communal society and all the that, but if you read between the lines the same history is there.

Most interesting is the language that is used, words like ‘insurgents’, ‘empires’, and others of war are throughout, with the masses of population throughout history being the good guys and the Tsars, Kings, big commerce and money changers the ones responsible for the death and destruction. Of course all the while calling it progress, or patriotism, or whatever words that the populace would like to hear at the time in history to appease them.

As R.J. Rummel notably coined, “power kills, absolute power kills absolutely”.
The solution to controlling absolute power he says is democracy. The course of action is to foster freedom, which is why having the US opt out of the rest of the world and dumb down their population is so scary. You can’t have democracy without an educated public, and they are getting plain dumb and dumber.

Their Bill of Rights has been thrown out the window with thousands incarcerated sans representation, many of them without even charges laid, the amount of their GDP being spent on arms is nothing short of obscene, the debt load everyone in the country is carrying threatens to crash markets the world over when it decides to default, the leaders refuse to be accountable to the death they authorize, election practices are not allowed to be scrutinized by the world, and for more than four years the world has been clamoring upon seemingly deaf ears that something is wrong.

Looks like Iran is next in line for some empire molding as the scary stories about those terrorist Iranians coming out of the woodwork are popping up getting the Americans ready for the next boogie-man. The headlines are under the first header of ‘Homeland Insecurity’ and terrorist state is mentioned right away. At the bottom of the article, just before the links to Criminals, jihadists threaten U.S. border and Al-Qaida south of the border the last sentence reads, “FBI officials said they had no reason to believe there were any terrorist connections to the case.”