A Soldier

Pte Robert Costall, 22, died serving his beliefs, his country, and his friends. Read here.

Seals

Seals are cute. Seals look cuddly. This year, Canadian fishermen will be authorized by the Canadian government to kill 325000 of them.

Well that sounds like a pretty big number. Must really be something, considering how much protest there is against it. Let us do a little comparison. How about fish - I mean, they are marine animals just like seals. Well, apparently 16kg of fish are caught in one year per person in the world. That's a lot of fish. 263 million kg per day according to my rough calculation, and more than ten times that weight in other marine life is sacrificed to catch these animals. But hey, I never see them swimming around here on the prairies. Besides, they have those freaky-looking eyeballs. How about something closer to home - how many chickens are killed? 23 million every day, just in the US. That's a lot. Well, chickens are just small and ugly anyway. Besides, they aren't mammals, like seals. How about a more common mammal - cows. Oh, 90 000 cows killed everyday?

If you are against the seal hunt, that is ok with me. But if you eat meat, you should take another look at what you're protesting. An animal, whose natural predators we have endangered, being killed in its natural environment. Is that worse than the chickens and cows living their lives in pens? Or fish being hauled in and dumped on the deck of a boat by the thousands? Is it because they are cute that you oppose the hunt? This doesn't make the hunt good, but maybe there is something more worthwhile to protest. And maybe you don't even have to protest, you just have to change yourself.

Masked man

Dwayne Roloson finally gets a new mask. Dwayne Roloson finally plays an outstanding game. Coincidence?

YOU BE THE JUDGE.

Nuts in your bedpost

Go HERE now to watch an awesome home music video for Fallout Boy.

If you have a really uptight boss, don't watch it at work. It might be too funny for him.

Squeaky Wheel

I'm a third wheel.

Not just any third wheel. I am a highly-experienced, well-skilled third wheel. I mean, I MUST be good at it, if I do it this much. Well, either that or I just get a lot of sympathy from couples (perhaps occasionally forced onto the male half by a sympathetic female). But I prefer to maintain my dignity and say I'm good at it.

I have been a 3W for tv shows. For movies at home and in the theatre. Breakfasts at restaurants, and beer & steak dinners. Wine and supper by candlelight. Hanging out on their bedroom floor while they are laying on the bed. Shopping at the mall. Snowboarding excursions to the mountains. Trips to the dump. 3W at the Home & Garden Show. 3W at the Sex Show.

And at the end of the day, they go home together. But hey, I know they're happier because of me. Because everyone likes a third wheel to rest on. Right?

Togas and Barbed Wire

Last Friday. Times are good. We went out for lunch for the occasion of a departure of one of my friends. Later, had some free dinner with friends, and we shared in a beer or five together. The plan for the night - Toga Party. Sweet.

After heading back to one of the guys' room, we partook in some more beer-drinking and tried to figure out how exactly to put together a Toga without any sort of training or fastening device. After accomplishing that (well enough), we had to put together some footwear. Apparently running shoes don't go with a toga, so I borrowed someone's Japanese-style bamboo flip-flops. Dressed in bedsheet and sandals, I was obviously ready to go out in the Winnipeg winter. What, we're not walking? Ok, I guess we can call a cab.

Into the cab, and off to the party. The driver had been waiting a while for us with one guy sitting in the back, so he had started the meter. It was already at $8 by the time everyone was ready to go. Some guys refused to get in if he didn't reset the meter. Which he didn't. So they went back inside. They didn't arrive at the party until about 2 hours later.

And what are you looking for at a good toga party? Why, girls in togas, of course. And what was at this party? Craploads of dudes in togas. As usual. What could one really expect?


Eventually some girls came. They wanted to talk to me, of course. And what did they have to say? They lived in my building, and they wanted to know why I never said hello to them. Sweet, I'm so smooth.


Time to go home. I call a taxi, and a few minutes later he pulls up outside. I run to the door and wave, and call back inside to the others. They don't hear me amid the dull roar in the house, so I go and grab them. I go back to the door and...the taxi is driving away. What the? Better go after it....

So I started walking after it. The other people going back to my building come too, seeing as I'm that natural leader and all. I bet they regretted that pretty quickly. It was soon apparent that the cab was long gone, so we thought we should continue walking. Unfortunately, there is a big fence with barbed wire all around it they we had to get past, so we headed for the gate. That would make a 30 or 40 min walk. In togas. And flip-flops. In Winnipeg. In the winter.

Upon approaching the gate, we were greeted by a very bad sight indeed - the gate was locked up. Fortunately, next to the brightly-lit gate there was a bit of a stone wall, the only break in the barbed wire. So I just hopped up and walked along the wall past the wire. Looking down, I saw a bit of snow, so I jumped down. CRAP. I sank in the snow up past my knees. CRAP. Trying to get out, I lost my footwear. CRAP. Soooooooo cold. I was able to help the others over without touching the snow. Now for the long part of the walk. Man, I was cold.


The others were saying, "How does nobody know we're here? Where are the cars? Why is it so cold?"

I said to them, "It is a good thing there are no cars. We don't want anyone around here."

So I got home, was able to feel my toes after about a half hour. The next day, I talked to one of the guys who was at the party. He had to get back here too. He, too, got to the locked gate. He walked up the wall. And the police were there.

Chalk up a third Superfriend of JC Brown that has been taken in by the police. Nice work.

Overstayed welcome

A war against oppression can't do it. Certainly no politician is capable. The men's hockey had a chance, but blew it. But if there is one thing, other than Roll Up the Rim, behind which Canadians can stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity and support, it is this decision.

Finally. Gosh.

On Flow

It seems that I wasn't totally out to lunch in my earlier post concerning exercise. Since that time I was told about a psychological theory called "Flow," first developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Yes, that's a real name. No, I don't know how to pronounce it.

So apparently this guy has been interested in experiences exactly like those I was writing about, and has been studying them for 25 years. This theory is generally well-accepted in psychology, and basically tries to answer the question, "What makes people happy?" I will give you and excerpt from introduction to his book entitled Flow: The psychology of the optimal experience which I have just begun to read:

Yet we all have experienced times when...we do feel in control of our actions, master of our own fate. On the rare occasions that is happens, we feel a sense of exhiliration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished and that becomes a landmark in memory for what life should be like.

This is what is meant by optimal experience. It is what the sailor holding a tight course feels when the wind whips through her hair, when the boat lunges through the waves like a colt - sails, hull, wind, and sea humming a harmony that vibrates in the sailor's veins. It is what a painter feels when the colors on the canvas begin to set up a mangnetic tension with each other, and a new thing, a living form, takes shape in front of the astonished creator. Or it is the feeling a father has when his child for the first time responds to his smile. Such events do not occur only when the external conditions are favorable, however: people who have survived concentration camps or who have lived through near-fatal physical dangers often recall that in the midst of their ordeal they experienced extraorinarily rich epiphanies in response to such simple events as hearing the song of a bird in the forest, completeing a hard task, or sharing a crust of bread with a friend.

Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times...the best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish somthing difficult and worthwhile...

Such experiences are not necessarily pleasant at the time they occur. The swimmer's muscles might have ached during his most memorable race, his lungs might have felt like exploding, and he might have been dizzy with fatigue - yet these could have been the best moments of his life...

Yeah. So this book, perhaps, will be a more articulate expression of my feeling. In 250 pages.

Fighting

I'm sure, as with all hockey fights, this will prevent chipiness, make skilled players feel more secure, and "equalize" what the referees don't call. Oh yeah, and it is part of the "culture," so that automatically makes it good, right?

It's also why you see 8 year-old players drop the gloves playing shinny. Only in hockey.

So stupid.

Fighting in sports is useless.

On exercise

I have always done some sort of exercise. In the beginning, as kids, it starts as running around before we even really knew what the word meant. To me, it was called "play." It wasn't long, however, until I started making this more organized. Then, it was a hockey coach explaining conditioning drills that I, a little 8 year-old with sphaghetti legs on skates, would be doing. Soon came the much-dreaded running of junior high basketball tryouts, followed eventually by a few seasons on the court, mixed in later with high school football and rugby. Around that time, I also started hitting the weights, and have been doing so ever since.

After high school I decided that I should study sport and exercise. Now instead of concentrating on something else when I was running, I would be thinking about the formation of acid, anaerobic threshold, and mitochondrial activity. That does a fairly good job of taking the fun out of it. However, I carried on and eventually (thankfully) managed to forget those things while running or biking or whatever.

I have given various reasons for continuing to exercise. Don't want be fat, need to be in shape for my work, good for my bones, blah blah blah. But there is a more important reason, and even I was not consciously aware of it for a long time. I think I just became aware of it today.

I exercise because of how it makes me feel. Not because of how it makes me look. Not because it allows me to lift more or run faster or have less back pain. This is a real feeling - to me, exercise itself is a feeling. It no longer means a room. It does not have the connotations of a treadmill, or a vinyl weight bench. Not even a sidewalk or a dirt bike path. Those are no more exercise to me than a few strings tightened over a piece of wood are music. That is just a guitar, not music. It is the forming of those callouses on the fingers that move over those strings, the anguish hidden behind words in the lyrics, and their connection to someone listening that make music. In a similar sense, it is not even feet pounding on pavement or a laboured breath that make up exercise. It is the pain running up the legs that soon goes numb; the pull of ribs on lungs starving for air; the fact that the only one in control of whether or not to take the next step is you.

They say that people who exercise regularly, then stop, get depressed. I can see why. Medically, maybe it is because the body stops producing certain chemicals. But I don't think the reason is because you don't see weights moving up and down in front of you, or another lamp post move past you. Maybe it is the effect of those chemicals that I call this "feeling," I don't know. But this feeling is something I need every once in a while. When my body is screaming to stop, I want to know that I can still go. In fact, I think that is my favourite place to be: When everyone is around me has had enough, and I have too. Faces are flushed red, hands are on knees and breath cannot be recovered. I have been in this situation so many times. And I think I can see the true make of a man when he like this. Will he stand up straight and carry on, or will he turn away? When everything is gone, does he still have more? And when I crack a smile, will he put his head back down and concentrate on his breathing? Or will he smile too?