Scholarship

Kalvin Clauer won the 2014 Dialog Scholarship for Excellence in Technical Incredibleness for his presentation on Interchange Design Selection for 127 Street and Yellowhead Freeway.

      I got this shot of Venus passing in front of the sun while my own Venus was trying not to pass out from boredom in the passenger seat of my truck on the side of Highway 2 an hour east of Edmonton. This was a lucky shot on a very cloudy afternoon.

       The image  was taken through my grandpa's old Pentax 210mm lens which performs at 1.5 X on my new Pentax K5. Interestingly it was taken with no filter other than just the right amount of clouds. I believe I'm one of very few Edmontonians to see this event. Venus is the large spot near rhe top while many sunspots are also visible. Each is about the size of Earth. Makes you feel small.

Matthew Good Review

November 15, 2011
  Matthew Good and company put on a really nice show at Edmonton's Jubilee Auditorium last night. A couple of over-sized lamps gave the stage a living-room feel. Soft piano started things off and the lights started us off on a visual journey; greens and golds, pinks and reds, and BAM white light and full scale rockshow punctuations. It was a beautiful show and well-suited to MGs imagery-packed lyrics.  The musicians were tight, a cone of white light drops down over the bassist and then the guitarist as they build off of one another creating a strong groove with the lights doing there thing.
   At times the sound was off, at full volume, the speakers were badly overdriven and very harsh. This isn't the incite of an audiophile: it was bad. I was surprised the Jube let this happen. But most of the show was at a level where this wasn't a major problem.
  Matt Good is a funny guy and right at home talking about whatever with the audience. He got us laughing pretty good and it made for a somewhat awkward transition to the coolest version of Apparitions I've ever heard: slide guitar and that slight country feel, slowed down a bit. It made me think of that slight country feel of early Counting Crows songs. It was fantastic.
  The opener Daniel Wesley did a great job; I really enjoyed his acoustic work after the screeching reggae riffs electro-style.
  Overall, the show was surprisingly good on a visual level, suffered a bit from disjointedness in the song progression but had some major highlights such as a few real quality rock and roll moments and a surprisingly refreshing version of his best loved song.

The Choices Our Lingo-padres Made

Linguistics is the study of language. Language is an incredible tool that allows every person on this planet to connect with eachother; to essentially take ideas from one's own mind and put them into the mind of another. Sure, we must suspect that those ideas don't come through too purely in many cases and its another story whether  it does one much good to guard their consciousness so fiercely as we often do (knowledge is power and I would argue that novel information is a source of potential knowledge, but hey if you have made up your mind about certain things then hold fast - don't be open, don't be flexible, fine!) But I majorly digress... But for some accident of creation or perhaps as a casualty of good ol' practicable reality, we often can only speak with a certain group of people that we belong to:  a very special club known as Speakers of Our Language. Of course there are some of us who are bilingual and can speak with two groups of people, but, at the risk of offending those people, from what I hear, they sometimes have troubles with one or both groups or their membership can involve much paperwork, or even childhood challenges. But I, again, digress. What I really want to talk about, more or less unintelligently since I mostly wish to pose some questions, is how the fancy club known as Our Language decides on the rules that the members will follow in order to achieve the groups primary objective, which is that aforementioned lofty jewel that can be titled Communication (this being the whole attempt to place one's own ideas in another's mind). (We won't even get into a description or questions related to the battle that seems to go own where two or more members attempt to defend the property of their minds and perhaps counter attack with related ideas of their own device.)
Let us take as an example two 2 clubs that are well known: English and Spanish. We could ask why it is that the Spanish members, let's call them los Matadores, have decided, or evolved, or been constrained, to speak in a way that flows like red wine on a Sunday night, while the English members, let's call them The Snowballs, sound like they are cutting crunchy vegetables when they talk. We could ask that but I don't know why anybody would wonder about how a language sounds when it seems so random and impertinent. (The latter am I too, I fear.) Note that sounds are far from random and actually work on analogy, so, for example, the 'sn' sound, which is shamelessly nasal, tends to start out words that refer to snout-like objects and actions. BREAK: time for a brief sound sidewhoe: Shamelessly nasal, namelessly stays still, lamely standstill, Shamus Lee McDaniels... but I kid, I kid... Anyhow, snout-like stuff starting with 'sn': sneer, snide, snicker, snub... etc. Hmmm more verbs than anything, but thats another question. Anyhow, this stuff is stolen from Steven Pinker's book The Stuff of Thought.

Far more interesting are the rules:grammar. What do los Matadores do with their rules that the Crunchy-Cutters, er uh, The Snowballs, decided not to do, or , perhaps, failed to consider the merits of doing [awk]. And why? One example that intrigues me is los Matadores, decision, or, at least, happenstance occurence, to have different sounds to signal the victim, er uh, listener as to not one, but two, distinctive types of events tat happened in the past. Okay. Los Carrot-Crunchers do this thing where if they mean to say that something happened in the past they take the thing that happened and they put this sound on it: they end the word by putting their tongue against the flesh behind their teeth and pop a tiny bit of air betwixt the obstructions created. This is the sound that is represented by either a written letter 'T' or a 'D' (the choice between the two is really not a choice but a matter of neighbor sounds being bullies). So it goes that we have sentences like I builT a house, You lifteD my finger. Never-you-mind the many irregular ones that change a vowel sound (ran away), the truth is there are probably rules for everything its just a matter of finding them. Some such rules have indeed been discovered like why one says longER and not MORE long versus MORE interesting and not interestingER (the latter is a great method of sounding hillbilly). And the larger latter is a matter of magger No err uh a matter of the number of significant syllables in the word determining the fate of the sentence. But i digressed so disgracefully just now.
But, those loco Matadores, they have sounds not only for the very same thing but also a-whole-nother set of sounds for a special type of event that happened in the past also, but that have an aspect (the technical term for you wikipedians) of ongoingness. So they slap on these funny sounds like 'aba' or 'ia' to go ahead and alert you: the patient, trustworthy, listener, that the Thing that Happened not only happened in the past but, happened in the past, and, and and and, had a certain ongoingness to the way it was happening in the past. The Salad Chefs, on the other hand, have to do a bunch of fancy and rather trying maneuvers to do the same thing: they have to use entire phrases, that never wanted to be borrowed anyhow, to do the same thing. They have to say something like 'I -USED TO-eat iced cream when I was a child' or 'I -WAS talkING- to my friend when he came in'. Los Killers on the other hand look sn-idely over and let out a casual ' I eatIA iced cream when I was a kid' and then go in for the kill with a flash of red and a ' I talkABA to my friend  when he came in'. Blast Them!!!
So, what I really want to know is why? Why did they decide that this was so important that they must assign a special agent sound to this concept. Was it to save time, to emphasize, as a debt to a long dead king. Was it for a good reason, a bad reason, a reason that changed. Will we ever know? Did the Engleberries not think to try that move, or was their history so different as to call for different strategies? Do the two groups think in ways that are totally different and incompatible, or is this just in the representation of the ideas and not in the ideas themselves. And what of all of the other clubs? I propose a meeting of many minded mammals: the leaders of each group, or perhaps just a victim from each (with a cute name) in order that we may analyze the key differences between these clubs and consider uniting together in mental harmony. Oh wait, didn't that happen in some old book?

Everything is Missing

Cast away socks, winding belts and worse,
Collude in leathery caverns of purse,
Somewhere a topographical map shows,
Shadowy terrain laid out by these cloths.

At daybreak I rise and call the search,
But my floodlight is weak and dispersed,
It clashes against the window's glass,
As I hit the switch fearing the crash.

Outside the trees quietly line the street,
The sidewalk lays gray, ready for feet,
The houses stand squarely undisturbed,
Their cars stationed alongside the curb.

Outside's all organized by order of the moon,
But what changed places inside of this room?
When the clock says 'go' to-day knows where...
My car's wrenched away, startled and unaware.

Materialistic Yes but Nostalgic Too

     It was love at first sight: Saturday afternoon at the flea market, leisurely ambling through a labyrinth of sights and sounds, enjoying  the little bit of hustle-bustle around me, and slightly lost in a pleasant sort of way. I made a good turn and we came face to face. She was only ten or twelve dollars, "as-is", and she was going home with me. I'm speaking of a vintage alarm clock: faded nickle plating, a leathery black face, and spooky, glow-in-the-dark numerals; it had the look, a true relic. Finding your own vintage items is a great way to surround yourself with objects that speak to the past, and, more importantly, that speak to you

     I'm not saying that my alarm clock secretly tells me to do things, in fact it doesn't even tell me the proper time. But when I look at it I see an object with a history, a mysterious past. I see something that carries the weight of many years, that seems to resonate with my eyes, invested already with a thousand glances before mine. But more concretely, it takes me to another time (and not just because the hands are stuck at five past three!) In seriousness, it takes me to a time when alarm clocks were an entirely  different breed. They had no plug-ins but were filled with gears for the winding, they were round and attractive, not square and sterile. One could argue the past will always be a simpler time and I see the beauty in that. I believe my antiques shape my surroundings, my home, and to some degree, then, even the context of my life. These relics also have a way of diverting my mind from the hypnosis of too many modern devices (please read a double entendre here with the connotation of hidden schemes suggested...) Fact is, it is a good idea to surround yourself with pieces of the past.

     Now, I didn't always believe this. In my younger years I much preferred a modern aesthetic, fresh as it was with an uncluttered appearance to match its barren personality. In fact, what happened was that I inherited my taste for vintage items. It was a gift in the form of a black iron Underwood typewriter that belonged to my grandfather. This is my centerpiece, it has influenced my taste so much that almost everything I bring home is in harmony with it. It's like a heavy iron heart. Just look at it and you can hear it beating with the slap of its keys. I mean, we're talking about something that represents the genius of language, the magic of combining symbols in infinite ways to create meaning in another human being! This is one of many items that came down to me in good fortune from ancestors. My grandfather's tool chest that sailed with him in the navy, a drop leaf table that belonged to my great grandmother, and dozens of other items, came from family and will always mean the most to me.
   This brings me to a suggestion. If you are inspired to go hunting for treasured items, take a bit of advice that happens to work for pretty well any problem you'll ever encounter: start in your own backyard. See if you can unearth any childhood items that have been neglected or forgotten over the years. If nothing has stood the test of time, here's the next best thing to do: go looking at flea markets, antique dealers, and junk shops.You're going to find things you had around when you were younger. I've seen items I was convinced only existed in my home growing up, but, of course, were produced in number and can be spotted kicking around in cities all over the country. The appeal of these childhood objects is that they are rooted into your mind, they share your history. They are, really, a part of you.
     One last concern I address here. Isn't it materialistic to care so much about mere objects? After all, Buddhism says attachment is the cause of  all suffering.  I guess there is some truth to this. Heck, if my house were ever to burn down I'd probably put it out with nothing more than my tears. But if you're afraid to love and lose than I'd suggest you'd better not love at all. I say it's only natural to want to surround yourself with beauty. I say it's a gift. I inherited a book from my grandfather. David Copperfield. It was part of library of books published in the first decades of the last century. And it is like a seed. I have been searching for its siblings and so slowly the collection has grown to a half dozen or so. If you open the decorated covers of these books you'll find the mark of man. One says Xmas 1920, another belonged to an architect, another to Dr.Barker who had a nice address near the river. One liked Shakespeare while another preferred Plato. These men, I'm sure, are long gone, as are the authors. But the history in those books reminds me: we can't escape death, we can only live our life as we choose and when our time comes, the world will keep on without us, just as it should.

Powerless Beneath the Stars: Atacama, Peru

   I arrived in the town of Nazca by night, with a few days of travel under my belt and feeling ready for anything. As the bus rolled to a stop we were greeted by processions of locals. My guide's face glows in the darkness. "Its the 'Apagón'", I was told. My best translation? The Big Lights Out. Apparently it happens with some regularity: the power fails and the townsfolk surrender to the darkness armed with nothing more than candlesticks.

   The town of Nazca is smack dab in the middle of the Atacama Desert: the driest place on Earth, which is why the famous Nazca lines have been so well preserved. I would look down on these the next afternoon, by daylight, from a tiny 8 passenger plane: the monkey, the spider, the humming bird, and a dozen or so other figures cut into the sand centuries ago for mysterious purposes. A German woman, Maria Reiche, studied these lines all her life only to come up with a debunked theory relating the lines to the stars: a nice thought. She built a home, the only building anywhere near the lines, that is now a museum displaying unusual maps, precariously displayed bits of priceless earthenware and the odd mummified corpse. I would also visit a planetarium and see a show about the lines, and afterward join a lineup for a turn at a telescope aimed at Saturn. My first view but its nothing more than a tiny yellow plus sign. They could have upped the magnification so much more.
   It turns out that the Atacama desert is the ideal place to stargaze. Because of its almost total lack of humidity the atmosphere is very still and the air (superbly) unperturbed. I've just arrived at my hotel. I'm standing in the courtyard supplied with nothing more than a candle to acquaint myself to my surroundings, but its not on my mind. In the open air of the clearest night I've ever seen, I'm staring at a thick canvas of stars over Peru, shooting stars streak through the sky in every direction, dazzling my eyes with a spectacle I will never forget.
   Months or years later in Canada I am developing an interest in astronomy. Among other things I learn about meteor showers: regular shows put on when Earth barrels through debris left hanging in space by long passed comets and asteroids. The specks of dust ignite on entry into the atmosphere and burn up, putting on a display worth watching from any venue. But from Canada this austral meteor shower would scarcely send a streak of light above the horizon; from Peru it is the show of a lifetime. July, 2009, South Delta Aquarid Shower. Nazca, Peru. Lights out in the city.