Random Notes

Rabble.ca is a left-leaning web site that claims to be "News for the rest of us". Scroll to the bottom of the home page and you'll discover that most of their funding comes from various union organizations. They don't like free trade; they don't like globalization and they don't like big business. If the people at Rabble had their way, the NDP or the communists would be running the country and every business would be nationalized.

Rabble has a problem with those who don't agree with the majority there. They value freedom of speech and spirited discussion, but only to a point. And they have some jackboot moderators that really relish the power they have.

My favorite music video of all times. Street musicians from around the world performing a great song.

Dedicated to all the street people in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Bahrain, and Gaza. We stand by you.

We draw the year to an end today. It has been a remarkable year. A flurry of articles about the 'best of the decade' have appeared, and this last decade has even been given a name - the Aughties, which is a lame effort to make it sound as exciting or memorable as other decades. I suppose it all started with looking back at The Roaring Twenties and The Dirty Thirties. Some decades stand on their own - The Sixties were just so different from the others it defies attaching any defining adjective to it.

We returned home to Calgary for xmas again to find lots of snow but a little warmer than last year. It has been a white xmas for two years in a row now and much colder than average. It's as if Alberta set out to prove that global warming is a myth with a convincing demonstration that it is not getting any warmer and we need all the warmth we can muster from around the globe just to get our cars started.

Whoa, it'e been awhile since the last update here. Here are some excuses:

We went to Costa Rica and Guatamala for 3 weeks. We have also have had many visitors, which always makes for a busy time. Currently we have my youngest son staying with us and enjoying some fijn Holland hospitality.

Picking up where we left off, in our last episode, our reluctant traveller is thinking about packing for another trip…

Monday, Dec 15

Tomorrow I go for an MRI and the day after we leave for Calgary.

As I write this it is -28°C in Calgary, but this is set to improve. By the time we arrive, all things going as forecast, it should be a balmy -18°C. and sunny.

Pack the sun-screen honey, we're going home!

Tuesday, Dec 16

Had the MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) today, a weird experience. Forgot to remove my wedding ring but it wasn't a problem. There was this pump running in the background throughout the session that made me think of the car in the Disney movie "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang".

I was given a pair of ear muffs to deaden the sound and a rubber bulb to squeeze if something was wrong. They attendant tells me "No one can hear you if you yell".

It has been almost two months since the last update and I apologize. I was ill, among other distractions, and the hardest thing to do when you are ill is to be creative.

The picture on the left was actually taken on Feb 12th, in a little park on a boulevard not far from where we live. It was a beautiful day, 13°C. In Calgary, just a few days earlier, the high for the day was -23, the low was -29.

There are a number of new pages here.

Antwerp is a beautiful town in Belgium known for its diamond trade and ornate guild houses. So we did up picture page with a little story of our trip there.

So I have been working on the web site. There is a separate BLOG page now with 3+ entries, the default being the Lord Hairball page.

I'm also happy to report that if you search for sontag on google.ca, a link to this page appears near the top.

OK - maybe that's not exactly FaceBook or anything but we did replace one Susan Sontag link (no relation, unfortunately).

We have also bumped off the notorious Sontag brothers (again, no relation, at least none that my relatives will own up to).

The regular readers of this page, if there are any, have known for some time that we were off to Norway for a few days. One might ask why.

Some serious work needed to be done there, not by me, but by MLW. The company had an apartment in Stavanger, so I tagged along.

According to the Economist magazines highly acclaimed Big Mac Index, Norway one of the most expensive places in the world. They put the price of the venerable Big Mac at C$7.21 (using the prevailing Bank of Canada currency exchange).

I set out to test the theory you get what you pay for. Set the bar low enough, and you can prove (or disprove) anything.