Blackfly

The 1991 NFB of Canada animated film based on the song of the same title, written and sung by Canadian folk singer Wade Hemsworth about his personal experience surveying in Northern Ontario, with back-up vocals by Kate and Anna McGarrigle. Recently recounted to the field school peeps camping at St.Louis last week.


p.s. Turns out St.Louis has a pretty sweet free camp ground with water, power, and flushing toilets. They also have a giant statue of Bison antiquus (of questionable scale, but still cool).

Baldy Lake

Super fun camping times at Baldy Lake. Located in Narrow Hills Provincial Park, a lovely little lake with a very low smeatness ratio. Also, went on the challenging version of the Gem Lakes hike (apparently). Some nice lakes that were pretty (although not as trippy as advertised).

South Branch open house

Sunday, July 25, 2009 is the South Branch House open house day. All are welcome. Be there or be square! The summer excavations at the late 17oos fur trade post site of SBH are run by the SAS and go from June through July (volunteers welcome! Hint hint!) with the SBH Fieldschool to be held from July 23rd through 26th. Come and view the twisted archaeological riddles that dwell within! Marvel at the meandering southern excavation trench and the stockade wall to nowhere! And two, count 'em TWO, sets of cellar depression/chimney mounds! Amazing!

View south branch house in a larger map

p.s. There is also a SBH geocache (for the non-muggles among you).

We're Missing the Chile #17: Brasil Edition

Now for more Brasilian doings straight from the little Cp's brain to your eyes.

Sites seen and purchases purchased:
- Capoeira - in the streets. It was cool. The instruments are played in a row called the bateria. The rhythm of the bateria is set by the berimbaus (stringed percussion instruments that look like muscial bows). Other instruments in the bateria are: two pandeiros (tambourines), a reco-reco (rasp), and an agogô (double gong bell). The atabaque (conga-like drum), a common feature in most capoeira baterias, is considered an optional instrument, and is not required for a full bateria in some groups.
-Cuíca - "you know in the samba music that goes squicky-squickey-squickey, it is the instrument that does that"
- bought bikini at Bumbum (hahaha), a fancy bikini boutique.

Fruits tried:
-obvious ones include manga (mango), abacaxi (pineapple), passionfruit ("maracuja" is passionfruit), and guava ("goiba" is really good and it is a common pop flavour)
-dragon fruit (maybe) and possibly guanabana while in Bolivia (check this post for notes on guanabana)
-acai, it's a berry. ya i ate that. it is ok, not great but meh
-acerola, ya i ate that too, but i do not remember what it is, but i remember i liked it
-caju I haven't tried yet (it's where brazil nuts come from), but i have seen them (see photo) and they are cute
- caja is good
- mangaba
-pinha is one of my favouites...it reminds me of an alligator

The Art of Patrick Douglass Cox

Some of you may recognize the archaeologist depicted in this painting. I think we can all agree that MP has embiggened our culture with her cromulent archaeology modeling. The piece is called "The Archaeologist", (2008, egg tempera, 21x29in, $15,800). It is available through the Masters Gallery Ltd in Calgary, which specializes in historic and contemporary Canadian art. More of Patrick Douglass Cox's work can be seen on his website here (the interesting writeup about him/his family's history on the Masters Gallery site comes from his biography page).

Increase your wordiness:
Tempera (aka. egg tempera) refers to a type of paint (or paintings done using this type of paint) made from coloured pigment mixed with egg yolk (or maybe some other glutinous water soluble binder like glue, which is used to make the tempera called poster paint). Egg tempera is very resilient and was a primary method of painting until the 15thC, when oil paints were invented.

p.s. Click here for past posts defining "embiggen" and "cromulent".

Red Harvest

2009 is the 80th anniversary year of the first publishing of the book "Red Harvest". This was author Dashiell Hammett's first novel and arguably one of the most influential works of American literature of the 20th century. Hammett was also the author of such books as "The Maltese Falcon", which gave rise to the character of Sam Spade the hard-boiled private eye - sometimes confused with his contemporary Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe character, which is understandable because they were both played by Humphrey Bogart ("The Big Sleep" is also considered a seminal work of American 20th century fiction). Anyway, Red Harvest started the gangster novel genre and blurred the lines of mystery and detective/crime fiction. While employing Western elements, he painted his characters in shades of grey, which contrasted sharply with the stereotypical white hat/black hat western mentality. And it was the originator of the pervasive "man with no name" antihero archetype and the plot device of the hero playing both sides to achieve his ends (and coming out victorious, but a little the worse for wear). This book gave rise to many influential movies including Akira Kurosawa's "Yojimbo", Sergio' Leone's "Fistful of Dollars", and the 1996 Prohibition era period film "Last Man Standing" (to which Kurosawa contributed his writing talents).

Name related ramblin's:
Red Harvest is also a decent Norwegian heavy/industrial metal band. And it's the title of the second album by the alternative metal band Bloodsimple (who clearly read the book because "blood simple" is a quote from the last line). I like them, they're vaguely Metallica-y and Godsmack-ish. "Blood Simple" is also the title of the neo-noir crime thriller that was the Coen brothers' directorial debut. The term describes the addled mindset in which people find themselves after periods of prolonged immersion in violent situations. The film is lesser known but it did make Bravo's list of film's 100 scariest moments.

Six degrees of Bruce Campbell:
Did you know Joel Coen also worked as an editor on Evil Dead? It's true. He also worked on Spies Like Us (1985) with James Daughton who was in Animal House with Kevin Bacon! Hahaha! Bacon number of 2! Click here for the Bacon Oracle, which can be used to connect anyone to anyone in the movies. It's default setting is Kevin Bacon but I think I'm going to start connecting people to Bruce Campbell just because mentioning Evil Dead just now reminded me of him (in fact I may make this into a sub-section called Six degrees of Bruce Campbell...there I did it). Let's see... Dashiell Hammett wrote The Maltese Falcon, which was made into a movie starring Humphrey Bogart who was in Deadline - U.S.A. (1952) with Dabbs Greer who was in Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat (1990) with Bruce Campbell! Booyah!

Wake Up and Smile

Nostalgic hilarity courtesy of LP. The Order of the Hand will rule!

p.s. This sketch first aired in 1995 and appears on the SNL DVD "Best of Will Ferrell, Vol.2"

Meep meep meep

Bok bok bok

What's the Worst that Could Happen?

A Rational Response to the Climate Change Debate.

p.s. See past posts about Greg Craven's "The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See" and "How it All Ends" videos.

Mind of Pi (#3)

Hey did you hear the one about the nudist colony? They used Windex to prevent streaking! Ahhhahahaha...ha...ha...weeee. Classic Dad.

We're Missing the Chile #16: Brasil Edition

Saludos from Brasil to all the "Chicken!" readers out there!

So this will be the first "Missing the Chile" post written by little CP herself! I am constantly reminded by big CP that the fans need their Chile, and all the spicy details (ha ha ha...chili joke... moving on). So, I am sorry for the lack of Chile postings... but i am here for the Brasil edition.

My latest adventure has been to Salvador de Bahia also known as the Capital of happiness! Salvador is the Capital of the Northeast state of Bahia. Also, an interesting little tidbit, Salvador is the third most populated Brasilian city (after Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro).

Salvador is very mountainous and whatever is not mountain is deep blue coastline. So beautiful! I loved it so much! One of my favorite things about the city was how it was built; how the houses and buildings were built in the mountains. It is an interesting mix of old and new, and when we drove down some of the narrow streets I could imagine the history and the start of this beautiful city.

The architecture is so beautiful! There are many sculptures, statues, and the really big elevator ! The fountain statue in the picture to the right is the "Fonte da Rampa do Mercado" ("Fountain of the Market Ramp"), which occupies the site of the old Mercado Modelo. The elevator in the left picture below is called Elevador Lacerda. It is like an elevator for a mountain that overlooked the ocean. It was huge and so interesting and it just goes top to bottom, it does not stop in the middle (and where would you go if it did?). The elevator is the first to ever be installed in Brazil (in 1873). It links the upper (Cidade Alta) and the lower (Cidade Baixa) parts of the city, which are divided by a huge escarpment some 85m high (with the cathedral and most of the buildings on the high ground and the Northwest region of the city on the lower ground near the shore). It was really, really huge!


That's all for now. Thank you Chicken! readers.

-Little CP

p.s. Archaeology nerd note (by big CP):

The Historic Centre of Salvador da Bahia was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1985. It was the city's centre during the Portuguese Colonial Period, and was named for the pillory (Pelourinho) that stood in the marketplace for almost 30 years in the early 1800s. According to UNESCO: "As the first capital of Brazil, from 1549 to 1763, Salvador de Bahia witnessed the blending of European, African and Amerindian cultures. It was also, from 1558, the first slave market in the New World, with slaves arriving to work on the sugar plantations. The city has managed to preserve many outstanding Renaissance buildings. A special feature of the old town are the brightly coloured houses, often decorated with fine stucco-work" (as shown in little CP's picture).

This blog for adults only? What the?!

Go figure! Apparently I'm harder core than I thought. The rating works by searching for random key words like "dead", "sex", etc. and must compare it to total word count or something. I assume it's something like this because if I just rate the recent posts, the blog is rated R (the Evil Dead post puts me over the edge there I think) and flags "sexy" as a bad word and if I rate the entire blog it doesn't. Anyway, click the image to rate your own blog (just change the address in the box). It's set to my blog now and will update every time you click it (because I used the method below) so my bad word counts are only going to go up. Woohoo!

Here's a compiled bad word list (from the few searches I did to see if the results would differ). Ironically this post upped my bad word counts so this list is invalid now (there's at least 4 bad words in the first paragraph alone!). In my defense all of those cocks were referring to roosters (oh wait there's another one):

* dead (33x)
* death (25x)
* zombie (14x)
* hurt (12x)
* kill (9x)
* sex (8x)
* hell (6x)
* corpse (4x)
* shit (3x)
* cock (3x)
* murder (2x)
* pain (2x)
* shoot (1x)
* dangerous (1x)

A Chickens! How to: display all blog posts

Like I said, I set it up so it would rate the entire blog including archives (not just the recent displayed posts). To display all of your posts (for Blogger) just type in your http address followed by:
/search?max-results=N
where "N" is the number of posts you want displayed. So mine might look like:
http://chickensinsaskatoon.blogspot.com/search?max-results=1000
This works for backing up your blog too, just type that in and save the webpage (this might take a while if your blog is big). You can find out how many posts you have from the Dashboard (F.Y.I. I have 339 as of today).

p.s. Hell! Damn! Fart!

Oh Canada!

The British North America Act of 1867 was proclaimed on July 1, now celebrated as Canada Day. It stated that the new Dominion of Canada would include the provinces of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia at it's outset (and that others could join later...One of us! One of us!). It established the provincial (each province would have its own seat of government, lawmaking body, and lieutenant governor) and the federal (stationed in Ottawa, composed of an elected House of Commons, an appointed Senate, and a governor-general) governing bodies. This act remained in force until the Constitution Act of 1982). Canada's first federal election was held in September of 1867 with 73% voter turn out (of course eligible voters comprised only 11% of the population, being white property owning men). Sir John A. McDonald's conservatives won 101 of the 181 seats. Also on July 1st: Oh Canada was proclaimed our national anthem in 1980, 100 years after the tune was first written by Canada's national musician Calixa Lavallée (although the lyrics went through several drafts during that century).

Some Canadian History links to help with learn-ding:
- The Canadian Encyclopedia from Histor!ca
- Canada Info Link
- Map from Canadian Geographic's Historical maps section.
- Play the Canadian History Game and nerd it up hard core! Woohoo! (unfortunately you must have Civ3 or Conquests 1.22)