Was having a piece of toast with cinnamon spread for breakfast. Tasty. Then having used up all the cinnamon spread I attempted to wash the container. It went through the dishwasher twice but the stuff just refused to disengage from the plastic.

This got me wondering what the heck is this made out of? Seemed to be some oil based product by the ingredients list on the side of the package.  Should wash off easily I thought. So I took it in hand and with the hottest water possible tried to get it clean. Not much luck.

Then I took a powdered cleanser with bleach to it and a dish brush. This also was to no avail. So I went with a big squirt of the grease removing dish soap. Some luck. It began to loosen from the plastic and…ick…stick to the dish brush and the bottom of the sink.  It took about a gallon of hot water and 20 minutes to get it to finally dissolve.

So my conjecture is that this stuff is made from some kind of silicone based life form that has been discovered by astronauts and is being produced on the international space station for human consumption. Ohhh shades of Soylent Green.

I’ll stay with peanut butter from now on.

There is this trend on blogs in the past 6 months or so that is rapidly increasing and is another somewhat disappointing thing that I think brings blogs increasingly into the trivial realm.

What I am talking about is video reposting. That means just adding a link to someone else’s video to a blog post, without commentary and considering it some kind of content.

I am not talking about video blogging with original content, which is great.

This blog laziness started some time back with individual bloggers just posting quote of the day type things interspersed with their own commentary. This soon became just blogs of irrelevent and out of context quotes. Now even words of others are being dispensed with and only random videos appear, sometimes even without titles or sources-though the sources are usually YouTube. And they are generally videos of people giving some kind of talk about something or music videos. They are not juxtaposed against some other content or even another video so there is no point of interface against which to ponder them.

It just reminds me of kids pulling faces at strangers when they drive by in a car. It is random and weird. And rather lazy.

Why are these things relevant to the blogs in question?  Without context they are just like a handful of photos strewn in the gutter-without meaning.

All I can do is keep putting the words out and try to buck this trend. Who knows maybe words will make a comeback on blogs some day.

So I’ve had a bunch of stuff to do on a friend’s computer and he’s got this Windows Vista which I refuse to put on my computer just on principle and based on the horrific reviews it got in the tech press.

What a nightmare that thing is. It’s like it was invented by a bunch of ultra-paranoid security agency freaks locked in a super secret facility smoking crystal meth 24 hours a day. Every 10 seconds a new popup appears asking for permission for this and that and then there’s all these warnings like the world is coming to an end or something.

For what should have taken about 20 minutes with an install and some tweaks (ha and I use the word tweaks knowingly you bunch of Frankensteining programmers!) took like 3 hours and stuff still didn’t work right.

I was just hooking up his new mobile phone so he could sync stuff and load music and that and every time the program had to go to the internet or access any system resources these lazy popups appeared. What I mean by lazy popups is they took forever to appear (and hey its quite a new computer so don’t blame the hardware).

All the fade-in and fade-out and fancy graphics took all the cpu time up and the programs hardly run. And those stupid widgets are such a waste of space on the desktop. I killed them all along with most of the crap in start up and any other cpu-hogging stuff I could find.

No wonder they are pushing Windows 7 up schedule-wise. I even read some quote in the paper today that Windows Vista was “wildly popular”. Of course this quote was from a corporate exec so what do you expect.

Give me back Windows 3.1. I could hack the whole thing the way I wanted and it was EASY. I shouldn’t have to have 14 university degrees in computer engineering to move a couple of songs from a computer to a mobile phone. Pullleeeez!

Is blogging like work? Does everyone take Saturday night off?  Is that social convention or is there some deeper reason? I guess it’s the only night many people have free and also have the following morning to sleep late.

Who agreed on Saturdays? What’s wrong with Tuesday?

Statistics start dropping off on Friday afternoon and start to pick up again Sunday afternoon.

Maybe I’m too obsessed with blogging. How would I know?

I have no great ending to this post. Well maybe that’s the answer to the Saturday night problem. Running out of words at the end of a week.

I think I get more exercise getting on and off the soapbox than doing anything else. There’s something about speaking up, once you do it for a while that gets to be a habit. So often people are just passively sitting by while the most horrific things happen and then they wonder why such things happen.

Part of the problem is the education system which, in the early years is geared towards putting out good, passive citizens who won’t raise too much hell about things. There are no critical thinking skills taught and when these are raised by students they are labelled unruly and given Ritalin or whatever for their “hyperactivity” or such things.

It’s appalling that kids are getting as medicated as adults these days. If people were taught to stop being so scared of each other and scared of themselves rather than being “cooperative” to such a degree that everyone becomes doormats to the more powerful maybe there would be some real change in the world.

But that’s not going to happen any time soon. So it’s just more of the same.

Here’s another one for the complaint department. No wonder this catagory has more entries than any other on this blog.

The past 8 months have been absolutely hellish in terms of travel. Back in August I was trying to get to India and ended up with a 14 hour stop in Hong Kong as well as having to stay up for 2 days straight just to get off the ground in Vancouver. I whined about this in my India blog back in Sept or something.

Then here’s what happened in terms of pains in the ass about travel. I’m not even going to describe it just put it in point form. Some are small and some are big. Seems like the longer the travel the bigger the problems. Some weird correlation there.

-landed in India late (12 hours) and could not sleep despite being more or less awake for 3 days.It was real hot.

-We went to Mussoorie (9 hours from Delhi), 3 days later back to Delhi to pick up a friend who was coming to visit, next day back to Mussoorie. The air conditioning conked out in the car in 40C degree heat(more than 100F) on the first trip.

-Went touring around in the car and were beset by CD problems, air conditioning problems, tire problems, closed roads for a couple of weeks.

-Trying to get back to Canada from India wasn’t bad except for the over the top security due to the bombings in Mumbai. Plane left a little late from Hong Kong but not bad.

-Trying to get from Vancouver to Saskatoon.Was asked to divert from Calgary to go visit Medicine Hat Alberta-this would have cost me excessively and turn a 5 hour trip into a 14 hour nightmare going on the bus across the frozen prairie in the middle of the night to arrive at about 4AM. No thanks. Some people were mad a little about this.

-Booked a flight on Christmas Eve. Huge snowstorm. Was told via email the first plane would be leaving late and I’d miss the connection. After being on hold for 55 minutes I just canceled the flight. Then I went online to reschedule. Nothing available as Air Canada had canceled about 80 percent of its flights so everyone was scrambling to get on West Jet (the only airline I fly with in Canada). Managed to secure a flight on boxing day (26th).

-Boxing day flight snowstorm. Flight left one hour late and I managed to run for the connection in Calgary. Barely made it. The Westjet counter person , in a very uncharacteristic way was rather nasty at the airport. She must have worked for Air Canada previously.

-Trying to get a bus from Saskatoon to Medicine Hat Alberta. Schedule got me into MH at 2AM-ended up traveling on the frozen prairie in the middle of the night anyways.

-Now trying to get from MH back to Saskatoon and I’ve discovered Greyhound has canceled one of its daily runs and that STC (the Saskatchewan bus company) has canceled the Sunday run from Swift Current (where I have to change buses) to S’toon. Now I have to wait til 5PM, spend the night in SC at a hotel to get a bus tomorrow morning from there.

-I changed  my flight reservation twice from S’toon to Van due to stuff coming up here that I was asked to help with. And I am so off put by all this travel crap that I didn’t want to go so soon again anyways. But this cost me 50 bucks each time I changed it. But it was an outstanding seat sale so even with that it’s still 30 percent less than full fare.

-now I have to get my visa for India in order(photos, paperwork, 2 trips to the consulate in Vancouver) as well as try to get a ticket for the first week of March (and not get ripped off by an 800$ commission on it like one travel agent charged me).

There’s way more stuff than this to it but it makes me tired just to think about it.

I am writing this while I am waiting 4 hours for the bus to go to SC and a night at a hotel. Expenses I can do without. And all the luggage handling. With my back and forth travel I’ve become like a freight company for family and friends so usually end up with at least one more suitcase than I can handle comfortably. But shipping and stuff is outrageously expensive so I understand their requests.

And the saga of travel woes continues.

Was just looking at a world map and thinking about how political boundaries are constantly being reshuffled. Greenland is seeking independence from Denmark is something I read in the news recently. I think that’s a good idea. People on continental Europe have little idea what it is like to live in the cold places (except Nordic countries of course) so governance is not the easiest thing from a distance.

I hope Greenland can make it on its own but with a sparse population that can be difficult.

I’d be pleased if Greenland sought an alliance of some sort with Canada. Canada is mostly Arctic and sub-Arctic to the challenges faced by Greenlanders are the same as those faced by many Canadians. And we have some sort of army in case some “southern” nation decides it wants oil resources by force. Well not a big army but enough of an army to put up some resistance until Russia comes to our aid. You think they’d let some “southerners” grab that much territory! Ha!

Anyways I’m just speculating and pondering world affairs. Speculative future history might be the thought category.

There’s a little quiz that tells you what section of the library you belong in.
So I played around with it and got the following

Is there anything that isn’t in a quiz these days? I’ve checked the IQ of one of my blogs, and its gender, have subjected myself to religious check ups and even seen what mythological god or goddess I would be. A faux self-analysis that doesn’t really answer anything and is only for entertainment purposes. But its kind of fun.

Just had a 24 hour journey from India to Canada. I thought I had left the food pushers behind me but my roommates have cooked–lots. By food pushers I mean the overly hospitable who insist one has just one more spoonful even though the stomach is about to burst.

Travel and food don’t mix well. I ate on the plane but not all of it. And I am just not hungry right now. Nonetheless my roommates believe that I must be starving-maybe because I’ve just come from India-if they only knew how much I eat there.

My request. Please don’t feed the travellers.

It is unfortunate that so many of the editors of television and film today have little appreciation for the art of editing any more. They just get out of whatever film school and take a job at the local station or production house and then seem to do their worst in terms of editing.

Cheesy effects such as melting letters and Swiss cheese holes as transitions in titles I ( just saw that one yesterday) make the productions look both amateur and cheap.The latter was like a 60’s style go-go title with polka dots leading into the next title. And it was a nature show! What’s the connection.

In movies and television series its all about the jump cut from one action shot to another. And they are so often put together in such a sloppy way that they just give a headache rather than enhancing the speed or whatever effect they are supposed to be doing.

Quality editing is rarely noticeable. It smoothly moves the action along and doesn’t get in the way and make a show of its own. Where are the directors that let this stuff get into their work. Where are the film aesthetics? Who teaches this crap? It’s like kids with new toys and they have to bend and twist them in every direction.

To all aspiring editors Please Please watch some of the classic films and those that have won awards for editing. They don’t include polka dots.

Don’t travel with friends. That’s my big advice. As I live in a different country friends sometimes come to visit. And I have friends here that I know well. Mix the two and take three weeks together and its like trying to balance on the head of a pin.

The foreigners don’t like anything including food, transportation, accommodation, toilets, the fit of the clothes, weather, other people’s personal habits, doing anything without having their hand held, making even the simplest decisions.

Local people don’t like the dithering while foreign people “just can’t make up their minds”, the perceived insult to food, country, hygiene, language difficulties, western arrogance, high level dependency about everything.

Put those two together and have it acted out in a veritable passive aggressive festival since neither wants to get me upset, me being in the middle, and I walk around with my teeth gritted all day and have nightmares of being locked in my room while the two of them whine it out and pout in the corridor. Arrrrrggggghhhhhh!  

Only 3 more days, I tell myself. Then the foreigners go and I get back to something like normalcy around here. And as with all passive-aggressive stuff it will pass. In the meantime I have shut myself in the hotel room, left each to their own devices, separately, and with mobile phones in case of emergency, and I do my own whining and pouting here.

I’d better write about something constructive to get myself out of this fuck-em-all kind of feeling.

Every place you are is someone’s destination.

So am adding something to that effect to my Photography Manifesto on RealityMontage site. Am trying to develop something of a photographic style/philosophy or more aptly trying to refine what I’ve always done.

Asking people what they want in a focused blog brings responses. A lot of people lurk but never indicate, except by the uptick of the stats, that they are present. In one of my blogs I asked what related to Buddhism should I focus on. The comments all related to karma.

Karma seems like the magic solution to so many mysteries in life. It has replaced superstition as the explanation of “Why things go wrong?” It has become a toss off phrase for any and every situation. It’s short and simple and seems to cover all bases but in that context it means exactly nothing. To say a situation is just someone’s good or bad karma is a dismissal and an easy excuse for not bothering to think too deeply about the answer or to take personal responsibility for actions that caused the situation.

Media doesn’t help matters with the glib sound bites. Simple answers like that give a temporary sense of false security but that doesn’t give any real help to those that are looking for real answers. Karma is intricately complicated in every situation but simple in principle. It is the action or mechanism of interdependence at work.

This entry will be the focus of a series of posts on The Enlightenment Ward blog

Going to a media site, newspaper, television etc. and looking for information gets more profit driven every day. Media sites charge to access archives and look up our collective modern history. As gatekeepers this opens up huge opportunities for abuse and revisionism. Certainly media are biased. This is inevitable. But restricting access to past information to only those with ability to pay for it reinforces the status quo and limits opportunities for those without means.

Institutions such as libraries and schools can purchase subscriptions to these databases and afford access to everyone. But this depends on available infrastructure and funds to pay for that access.

What bothers me the most about the media, particularly newspapers offering only a paid archive service is that print editions, with ads and subscriptions, have already provided the material and paid the funding for its production. Transformation of it into digital form does cost money but it is a one time cost. Current news websites are running and maintaining archives is merely an adjunct to that. Many older archives have been put onto microfilm that is freely searchable in public libraries-this takes some time but has always been free.

The point is, history is being recorded by modern media. The powerful mass media have a responsibility to maintain that history and make it available to all. Media does not own history though the media giants act as though they do. History is not a commodity.

Was in a blog forum today and a group decided to put all their comments in Japanese. These are not Japanese people but a few who had spent some time in Japan and/or taken language lessons.

Apparently the idea was to pass on comments amongst themselves that others in the forum couldn’t understand.

Now with the advent of Google Translate, Yahoo Babelfish and other translation software, no matter how inexact one needs merely to copy the text, slap it into the translator and push a button to get the gist of what’s being said.

So that’s exactly what happened. And someone else posted the translations directly below the Japanese. So what was the point?

There are very few languages that can be used as a privacy shield any more. As translators become more efficient and more common, language barriers will be a thing of the past.

Gone are the days when obscure aboriginal dialects can be used to code orders on the battlefield or one can take what they’ve learned in their 2nd year German courses to  encode their diaries so snoopy siblings can’t understand them.

So in that vein

मैं आप सलामी

(clue-Hindi)

There’s a site I used to visit regularly where people discussed Buddhism in a fairly open and sometimes even antagonistic way. It was pretty good for quite a while. Some guys then decided to discuss how their philosophy was so much superior to that of the blogger and every commenter. I engaged with these for a while but it just tired me out. A lot of it was puffed up nonsense and trying to get past that to find a point was feeling like more and more work. So now I don’t bother to comment there and likely won’t visit it much any more.

Similarly I saw this photo site which had really good stuff on it and read the blurbs and so forth and left a comment wondering about copyright as all of the photos were from others on Flickr. This person with an incredible haughtiness informed me that of course they checked and got permission to put them on the page etc. Its really nothing more than a deluxe scraper blog. And badly designed for someone who has such pretensions of art snobbery.

It will be good to be away from this 24hr. high speed internet when I go back to India. I don’t have the time or opportunity to waste in comments sections and only concentrate on my own work and life there

I made this one into a longer entry for Monsoon Diary

Have started up a 7th blog called Reality Montage. Its not going to contain any words beyond what is on the template of the site. Right now its private until I get a post or two into it and figure out how its all going to work.

My thought at this point is that it will be like photo montages and mashups from current images that evoke particular reactions. Maybe I can do my video projects in there too as I have some great footage of atomic bombs exploding that I want to use for something. That sounds rather nasty. Maybe I can put some kind of juxtaposed commentary over it or something.

Just a nascent idea that’s been planted for a while. Sometimes one gets tired of words.

Here’s where it’s at: Reality Montage

Just ran into an interesting blog by a guy who does executive security in the hot spots of the world. He is also an accomplished photographer and a Zen Buddhist with a sense of humor.

Illustrated and well written it presents a very unique viewpoint on Zen, the security industry and war.

Check it out at

Zen Traveler

Sometimes some of these idiotically smiling New Agers can be a real self-righteous holier-than-thou pain. Their eyes half closed due to incense coma, (See my post on New Buddhist Jargon on my blog Enlightenment Ward) they wander into a place and proceed to pound out erratic and apparently random rhythms on their homemade drums and lecture about chakras all night while everyone stands there with the feeling of a deer in the headlights hoping they won’t make their way over to one’s comfortable sitting place.

But no they gotta preach it to everyone. And most profess to being “closer to being a Buddhist” than any other religion. Give me a break. This dancing-on-lotuses airy ridiculousness is just too much to take.

There ought to be a new set of categories in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of th American Psych. Assoc.)

It would be called New Age Dysfunction and Related Disorders. Since some of these folks are highly resistant to the suggestion that maybe their views could do with some questioning rehab could be made available.

Rehab is conducted at the Common-Sense facilities. These are staffed by volunteer local grandmothers who will dispense their wisdom for a 2 week period. For more intensive therapy mothers-in-law are on standby.

Related disorders:

New Age Identity Disorder:Buddhist-Lite, Touch of Sufi, Wicca Wonderland, What’s it going to be? Every week a new religious or philosophical profession without knowing too much about what any of them are really about.

Crystal Fetishism The shinier the better is the view here and tons of cut rock are displayed throughout their home. Some travel as far as India to have jewelry specially made according to their Vedic horoscopes.

Incense-Induced Psychotic Disorder, With Hallucinations of floating lotuses and auras around the Simpsons characters on television. Consequently they shield their eyes from any sort of display screens.

Drummer’s Twitch- Disorganized Type-the above-mentioned type of drumming is the principal manifestation

Selective Mutism regarding common-sense. This can also be conversely become violent argument when the subject is confronted with disbelief with regard to their cherished notions about Angel Children and the utility of dowsing rods.

Chi or Pranayama Substance Withdrawal. When the energy isn’t flowing the results can be extreme.

Note:This one is definitely getting written up in my Enlightenment Ward blog after the incident I witnessed today involving a bag-piping busker and a merry band of idiots. Just wanted to get the gist of it down here.

Went to the drugstore today and came upon a strange and interesting product. Silicon nipple covers. At least I think they were covers. Maybe they were called smoothers. They looked like those gel filled bandages one puts on one’s feet for blisters.

A long time ago they used to be called pasties and strippers wore them because they could show the whole breast but not the nipple. Like a tiny dot of adhesive stuff made much difference!

I remember Elaine on Seinfeld having a hysterical fit because her nipples showed through her blouse in some photograph or something. What’s the deal with nipple phobia? Everybody, even men, has them. This paranoid over focus on particular body parts is another kind of cultural myopia.

In India and other places out in the countryside no one takes much notice of such things. In India women never used to wear the sari blouse and only draped the anchal over their shoulder. In some parts of rural India they still do that. And there is no shame in pulling out a boob to give a suck to a small child. Children often aren’t weaned until they are 3 or more. Which is a good thing as it gives them protein that the diet often lacks. It is very hard on the women though since many are malnourished and also lack protein and have anemia.

Anyways these products were pretty expensive but could be used a few times. I didn’t really look at them too carefully but they were a strange thing to see.

Note:Have turned this short piece into a longer one on Monsoon Diary blog about living in India.