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Mushroom Painting...
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Creative
- Hits: 69
I saw one of my colleagues had a thing for Mushrooms, trying to sell off her mushroom related art.
And so I took it upon myself to take a break from painting flowers (badly, not even flowers) to paint a mushroom for her:
I added a few other details, but of course I had to...the matt cuts off a lot of the picture, like you can no longer see the astronauts helmet or the grim reaper's hand holding the scythe...but you get the idea. And Mr. Wippets sure looks happy...
The Klondike Stampede - Tappan Adney
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 84
This thick volume was a quick and engaging read. Written by Tappan Adney, a journalist sent to report back on the Klondike in the rush of 1897-1898, it's filled with first hand observations, names of creek, and various details in all departments of life in the Yukon and Dawson City.
Leaving via Victoria, through Juneau and Skagway, deciding in favour of Dyea, over the Chilkoot Pass and then the remaining 500+ miles to Dawson City via a boat of their own building, the whole comprises a rollicking adventure - the tens of thousands of gold seekers, many, if not most, completely unprepared for the trials that await, and - remarkably few misadventures.
The whole thing makes one want to hike (and metal detect) the Chilkoot Pass - of the tens of thousands that set forth, thousands turned back and left it all behind. And somewhere up and over the pass it all remains...
Anyways, arrive at Dawson, realize - that for 2 years - the population of Dawson was greater than the entirety of the Yukon is at present - then, rumors of other gold bearing creeks lured the miners off to other destinations, in Alaska (Nome), and other creeks.
So - lots to metal detect up there, which you wouldn't suspect, given how unpopulated the place is currently.
As for the Klondike gold, estimates (his, and others) that there were millions of ounces - tens of millions of dollars - taken from the goldfields in just a couple of short years - this, with gold at $17.00 per ounce (and all expenses roughly the same as now, if not greater!!!), a short window of work (4 months, although they could dig and work in the thawed underground to a small extent) and you have some idea. Add to this the fact that the bulk of the miners were American, and didn't wish to pay the Canadian Government the royalties they expected, and you would rightly guess immense fortunes made their way back over the border undeclared...
This has greatly inspired me, for there are fortunes and millions up there still...and I've rather mastered the art of misadventure...
Saltburn
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Film
- Hits: 92
Despite considerably more divisive reviews I preferred this to "Poor Things". Great cinematography, direction, subtly nuance roles, familiar, in the sense that every book or film you've ever read that involves an English public school is invariably fraught with homeo-erotic undertones, and the film pleasingly (and surprisingly) diverges from a very predictable "Class War" into something else entirely.
In any event, it underlines the point that "Universal Acclaim" is often no acclaim at all, it merely means you made something so mediocre that no one was challenged to think. Which is why I skipped "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer" and probably should have skipped "Poor Things", but - this, with lower reviews, did not in the least disappoint.
Wing Nuts and Nut Jobs
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: People
- Hits: 139
I found this on a wing nut I "unofficially" follow on Facebook.
A video from a local nut-job, whom I previously described - he makes his living (??) selling quack medicine & spiritual devices. Staff's as antennae to contact the gods, for a few thousand dollars apiece. His website, filled with video courses he offers (on nonsense, at ridiculous prices), T-Shirts of his own design, bargain priced at $88.00 apiece, other ridiculous items, priced into the thousands, ways to adjust you're "frequency", his tag-line is "My work exists at the frontiers of science, spirituality and art..." which is as well bullshit, "art" is a bit heavy handed, the science is invariably out of context, wrong or misquoted, and the spirituality, well, just because someone is telling you they're "enlightened" doesn't mean they are. Usually, in fact, it means the opposite.
Anyways, I was curious to see what the local nut job was up to, the post, an hour and a half long interview done by the fringes of the new-age wing-nut crazies.
So I listen. You'll recall that a couple of years ago (almost 3) his wife committed by jumping off of Pulpit Rock, his wife, one of the town beauties, a tragedy all round. He described it as "Her Leap to Freedom". Well, apparently she's been in contact, he had to wait a while but he figured it out - she's on Venus, contact is limited to the rotation of the earth and the conjunction of the planets, the heavenly spheres, she's in the nth heaven, yes, it's all easily explainable when you understand Dante and Feynman and Einstein and Bohr, the Gospels of ... and the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, the antimatter-positronic fofuf-a-tron postulated by ....
...measured, of course, in cubits, the underlying numerical harmony...
...because quantum...
...vibrations oscillating at a frequency of...
...epigenetics ensure the mitochondria will naturally...
...pituitary glands having regulated the chakras...
The nonsense is unending, and I'm trying to figure out if he's pretending, or if he actually believes this shit...
How is he not a doctor? I mean, he should just take the title, teach at a university, a psych college, make him a lecturer, allow him to explain his theories, then have the students explain just what the fuck is going on...
He quotes heavily from the Venutian Science Book - and yes, apparently it's a thing, and there's not just one: Link to Google Search Results.
You know the old saw, "don't judge a book by it's cover"....I can't help it.
It goes on, it's really a pitch for him to get funding, a go-fund-me, find sponsors, for a movie he wants to make about the afterlife, obviously he'll need a big budget, CGI, he's got a friend in California that can do it, $5,000,000 should cover it, his ex-wife has made all sorts of mathematical discoveries on the other side, from Venus, he's been doing horoscopes, can tell you, for a fee, where you'll go based upon your earthly existence, where and when you die, your own path of ascension...
He's building a website that will calculate the horoscopes for free, if only he can find patrons...
And so it goes, I skip through it, I'm missing nothing, it does seem to me that he's somehow found a way to capitalize on his wife's death, a new grift with which to plague the unwary and gullible.
This town, full of searchers and grifters, and god-damn I'm worried about finding a job?
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