The fat lady (most likely today a guy in drag) has sung

Pride is over for another year. Time to rest.

Pride & Remembrance Run -- Highs and Lows

High: 10th annual run and I've participated in all of them.

Low: I WALKED again this year (as I did last year; and did partially the year before)

High: I finished with JUST under 39 minutes on the clock.

Low: Standing alone at the starting line nearly weeping at the thought of having to walk, not run. (not helped by the fact that with each sighting of me by former running cronies, each assumed I was there 'cause I could run again -- "Steve, great to see you're back at it!")

High: Either I walked much faster than last year, or there were more walkers -- I think mostly the latter, which helped me avoid the 3rd LAST finish I put in last year.

High: Minister of Defence for Canada walked/ran (and cheated by only doing one lap as he always does) the race -- this is a high for two reasons. One, given this is Canada, the man in charge of our military was totally without security escort of any sort, unless you count the Twinky that was running with him (whom, I guess could bitch slap a terrorist or offer the terrorist "E," rendering the terrorist bent on love rather than violence); two, I got my annual, big-nelly kiss, accompanied by a squealed "Steeeeeeven!" from a senior minister of the Crown. [Imagine Rumsfeld in either scenario]

High: Lots of cute baby toes sticking out of those strollers that allow running moms and moms, or dads and dads or even moms and dads take the wee'uns along with them.

Low: Did I mention I can't run.

High: I beat Barbara Hall who ran the whole way :)

Happy Pride

HAPPY PRIDE!

irony recognized

Okay, sometimes the irony gets so thick...

Berlin's new Holocaust memorial is coated with a chemical that repels, or makes easy the cleaning off of, graffiti. The company which manufactures the chemical is the same company that produced Zyklon B gas -- the gas of holocaust gas chamber infamy.

kids

I was going to blog about children and pain, but it all just became too overwhelming.

Consider:

Two young brothers (and damn nearly a third) drowned this past week on a birthday outing. The news coverage of the grief of friends and family is enough to tear your heart out; not to mention the pictures of the boys themselves. We had a mud hole in our home town -- a conservation area "lake" that I suspect by the sounds of it was the sort in which these boys got in trouble in three/four feet of water. Two boys (Carl and Jimmy) drowned (in separate incidents) in the mud hole in my town when I was growing up before someone was smart enough to fill it in with gravel and add a levy to the taxes in order to build a swimming pool.

Then there's the wee 2 year old lad in Cambodia, kidnapped with others at his school. But he got shot in the head, deliberately, because, well, he was sobbing. Monsters. The world is full of fucking monsters.

As well I read personal accounts in the paper by a 12 year old girl -- she the Internet paedophile victim tracked down and found to be safe with new mother after Toronto cops used digital photo technology to show where the abuse took place but not show her--as she does what she can to make sure her adoptive father stays behind bars forever. The particularly horrible detail was that she was fed plain pasta and, she specified, no milk -- a starvation diet to delay puberty and keep her childishly thin. My god, one can only hope her convicted abuser wanders into the general prison population real soon. The monster adopted the girl from Russia and abused her the very first night she was his daughter.

But, like I say, I can't adequately convert my anger to a blog on these harms come to kids -- accident, murder, monstrosities.

~ ~ ~ ~

The Royal Ontario Museum is getting a, well, major facelift. I wandered by today. Didn't have a short enough lens with me to get a broad view of the steel framework that will be the new face of the museum, but the lines of the ironwork were intriguing. [I'm also too tired to resize this properly.]

Life under the sea (and in front of my couch)

Here are some pictures from my aquarium. None at all technically well done, or even artistically close to good photography, but the subjects make up for it.

First, a short polyped stony coral -- a rock builder. (For those interested: phylum Cnidaria, class Anthoxoa, subclass Scleractinia, family Acropora, god knows what specific type of acropora.)

Using calcium (they are prodigious users -- my aquarium is maintained at 420 ppm CA), magnesium and alkalinity, corals build skeletons of calcium carbonate (limestone) -- we've all seen the bleached skeletons of coral. This fellow is alive and has "flesh" over top of that skeleton. You can see some of his polyps opened for feeding. There is a mouth in each of those polyps which in this coral tend to extend more widely at night.

The colour is pretty rare in GTA circles, at least. How I got this guy, I don't know -- a store was tearing down their display tank where this guy was lusted after. The owner likes me, I watched him tell people it wasn't for sale and then I offered to buy the large rock it and another coral had grown onto and he and his partner played "good cop/bad cop" over wanting the coral for themselves and then they just agreed I could have it.

I know people who would break into my apartment to steal it, quite literally! Sheesh. This guy has grown from a fragment (frag), so was aquacultured, not taken directly from the ocean, although his original colony would have been. This coral about maybe 4 inches tall and 1.5 wide will grow quite fast. Each of those nubs will become branches and it will laterally encrust the rocks outward from the base, sending up more vertical stems and then more branches.

One has to farm the coral as they literally fill the tank. That entails simply snapping branches off, creating the frags. I've broken coral affixing them to the rocks and the shards I've found growing elsewhere in the tank, where they came to rest. The key is the proper type of light and that calcium mix I mentioned earlier. Oh and pristine water and a lot of food -- zooplankton and phytoplankton and other organic bits floating in the water -- like fresh fish ground up in the blender until almost liquid. Yup, the smell is as you might guess when doing that.




Ooops, boring stories about the aquarium, and there's more!

The next is a member of the large group of ocean fish known as surgeon or tang fish. So called because just in front of the caudal (tail) fin they have modified bones which are outside of the skin and are scalpel shaped and sharp. These spines face forward and can be made erect by the fish.

I've been sliced by a yellow tang's "knife" and as most are poison tipped to some degree my hand swolled up real good in a few hours and it continued to swell up my arm. Just as I was fearing I had blood poisoning after a couple of days, the swelling went away. I've often thought of dangling my... never mind, I digress.

In this picture you can see the peduncular spine. It is in the yellowish bit approaching the tail and appears as a horizontal bar. If the picture was in focus you'd see it clearly. A note on this picture. These are exceedingly fast fish. The pic was taken with my telephoto lens about 8 feet from the tank. I "chased" the fish with the lens and snapped away. I cropped the picture to remove a 2/3rds of the frame of nothing in front of the fish, as I got ahead of him with my pan.

Anyway, this guy, is among the most beautiful of the tang fish. Common name is Powder Blue Tang (Acanthurus leucosternon). Very prone to a disease called ich. White spots -- kinda fish measles. This tang had a few spots showing tonight. Inevitable -- the parasite is always present in the water; stressed fish become susceptible. Copper kills the parasite, but it also kills invertebrates and corals... The fish either fights it and lives forever (years and years) or it succumbs. Depends on the quality of the environment and as his new home is of superb water quality and there are parasite eating ("cleaner") shrimp in the tank (ich is a parasite), I have grand hopes for the survivability of this guy. He ate after being in my tank for 15 minutes. A very good sign.





Finally, a pair of yasha gobies (Stonogobiops yasha). This mated pair live in a wee tunnel (a series of them actually) dug by a nearly blind pistol shrimp (is lobster shaped and is named for its ability to snap a claw and produce a very loud retort for a very tiny creature -- I heard him early this evening). The shrimp is not in this picture. The lighting is bad, but they're living in behind a coral (those green lumps are lobes of a "brain" coral) and hard to get a good shot of. I put these guys in the tank weeks ago and saw nothing of them, but did see piles of sand where the shrimp was doing his thing.

Then just last week there they were sticking their heads out of a tunnel, the shrimp between them! These guys are very hardy and are said to readily breed in aquariums. The fry will be microscopic, of course, so survival is impossible but the hatchings will make nice natural feedings for the coral. They eat everything I put in the tank.






You may wake up now and return to your normal blog reading about angst and self actualization -- where this blog will soon return.

s.

Six Months

Six months ago today (10th day of the month) I was about to leave a bar in Toronto when I did something I have done very rarely in my life -- I initiated a conversation with a stranger. After a brief moment of thinking my initial sarcastic/ironic comment--about there being no better way to spend an exciting evening than standing in the bar we were in--was received like a lead balloon, so much so any interest in me by this person evaporated, I realized there might be a language problem and I started again. I was no less ironic but I announced it and an evening of nice conversation (in which I introduced someone to several bad English words) and a warm hug good bye at the subway to end it ensued.

After a whirlwind romance of a few short weeks, he that is not here now, returned home to Korea.

On Wednesay despite the many and varied attemps I'm sure by the Korean post office, Canada Post, the VAT people in Korea and customs and excise folks here, a parcel arrived for me at work.

It's a lousy picture taken under such yellow flourescent light that it looks gold, not silver, but the ring in the picture was what was in that package. A 6th month anniversary gift from he that's over there.

Sigh, how nice. How damn, cut-through-my-cynacism, and make my heart sing NICE. Ain't love grand.

Whooohoooo!

PS -- the ring is silver with ever so sublte facets I guess you'd call them, with mother-of-pearl inlays. One of the inlays is lighter than the rest and finely etched in the mother of pearl is the word "favorite."

A new lens

I'm truly loving having a good camera again. Okay, so it's been, oh, 30-plus years since I last owned an SLR camera -- an old Ricoh that was at the end of it's life when my brother sold it to me for what was, I'm sure, more than he paid for it new. Ah, sibling love and trust. On about the fourth use the light meter button flew across the room instead of simply clicking a mm or two into the on position.

Digital is just so much better. I took 100 pics the other night with a new lens I bought. Just like that. Trashed most of them before I even bothered downloading to the computer. Most of the rest went then. Not a sheet of photo paper or developing solution to be found.

And, oh wait, I used a 33 mm SLR when I was doing the MA at j-school -- 'cause we had to develop our own prints, the talk of that reminded me. Mind, I didn't own that camera.

Here's a shot, I just love. It's not as crisp as it could be, but I didn't use a tripod using a telephoto lens and the light was low... but the result is still very, very pleasing. This is particularly pleasing to me as it was not taken on the camera's amazing auto function, but was the result of me playing with exposure as I tested the lens' capabilities.

Tomorrow I'm shooting a team building exercise at work -- thanks to my knee I get to be sidelined while our department goes through a mock military basic training competition. I'll see how I and the camera and new lens do with moving targets.