Got the spider!

Stop making fun of Uranus

My ancestry story

At some point a couple of years ago, Darlene and I talked about getting a DNA test through one of the genealogy services. I went with the Canadian Ancestry site as I had heard mostly good things about it. Well, let's rewind this story a bit first.

My sister had already gotten her DNA tested through Ancestry. She had always been curious (as was I for that matter) where our father had come from. As far as we knew, he had been adopted by our Oma and Opa (now deceased). But you know how it is with adoptions in the early 20th century - shrouded in secrecy. So my sister figured that the best and pretty much only way to determine where he came from was to get her DNA analyzed. The results pointed to a particular family in eastern Quebec. To respect their privacy, they shall remain nameless.

My sister also figured that since sometimes the data are a little off, especially when only dealing with one data point, a good way to lend validity to the results would be if I got my DNA checked too. Well, wouldn't you know it, same results.

Now for me, it was enough to know that we finally got to the bottom of the mystery. We now knew our blood heritage (Quebecois, not German or Slovenian) and family lineage. But my sister wanted to know more. So she began researching through Ancestry and met some cousins online. Then she went to visit the family graves and arranged a meet with living family members. They were surprised, but happy to be meeting some of the newly discovered family. I believe some of them got the test too and confirmed the link. My sister and her husband were surprised to discover that one cousin looked and had mannerisms shockingly similar to mine. We face timed while she was visiting them and they all agreed that I looked a lot like their male family members, especially the older generation.

There's a chance I will get to meet them the next time I go home to Quebec.

Meanwhile, Darlene finally decided to get her DNA analyzed as well. There were some questions about possible family connections that were never proven and lo and behold, the tests proved them once and for all.

She has been spending a lot of time researching her lineage and has traced it a long way back. She has found a lot of confirmed cousins who are now friends.

Ummmmm.... isn't that just ice?

Small things 5 Oct

• I actually witnessed the ice cream truck music being completely ignored by the local kids because they had no idea what it was.
• I am convinced that the official food of kids today is chicken fingers / nuggets and fries.
• Camouflage leg cast. You can hide but you can't run.....
• When a teen comes to your door this Halloween, the proper greeting is not "Aren't you a bit old for this?", it's "Make sure you share this with your parents...."
• A knife resting on the edge of the sink is the international symbol for "Maybe I'll make two sandwiches, I'm not sure yet."
• Never judge a book by its movie.
• You can't trade shoes with a barefoot monkey.
• Our society is more offended by swear words and rude gestures than it is by war, famine, and the destruction of the environment.
• Canadians: There's a grocery chain in the US called Trader Joe's. Just so you know, they do not let you pay with furs or Bay blankets or rum or live birds. Talk about false advertising.
• "Askhole": Someone who always asks for advice but does the opposite every time.

Deep dog thoughts

How do you like them beans?

When I suspected that the cleaners who work at night in my building were helping themselves to my jelly beans, I wish I had known about Bean Boozled jelly beans. They're basically a container of jelly beans where some of them taste good and some of them look almost identical but taste really bad.

How bad? How about flavours like Dirty Dishwasher, Stink Bug, Rotten Egg, Barf, Canned Dog Food, Stinky Socks, Moldy Cheese, Spoiled Milk, Dead Fish and Booger.

Yeah, I would have totally mixed some of those in.

Nextfix

Small things 20 Sep

• Is it just a matter of time before someone caters their wedding reception with 'Skip the Dishes'?
• My face lights up every time I open the fridge at night.
• A joke doesn't become a dad joke until it's full groan.
• If a cow doesn't produce milk, is it a milk dud, or an udder failure?
• There's no point calling the tinnitus help line. It just keeps ringing.
• Some puns make me numb, but math puns make me number.
• My friend David had his ID stolen. Now he's just Dav.
• I shot a man with a paintball gun just to watch him dye.
• The word queue is just the letter 'q' followed by 4 silent letters.
• Are mashed potatoes just Irish guacamole?
• Can we please stop calling coffee peddlers 'baristas'? Barista is Italian for 'bartender'.
• When a problem comes along, you must whip it.
• Isn't it odd that a lot of people who say they don't like too much drama in their lives excel at creating it?
• Fashion savvy people probably look at my clothing outfits the same way I look at someone who opens their browser and has the Yahoo! toolbar installed.
• The people in the car beside me are listening to some great music. Whether they want to or not.
• 9 out of 10 forest fires are caused by humans? So, there's a bear out there that knows how to use matches? 
• "More duck lips!" ~Said no photographer ever
• The pirate encyclopedia only had one volume. 'R'...

Deep Field: The impossible magnitude of our universe

I completely stumbled across this astounding video by accident. I made it 60 seconds in before I called my granddaughter (who is a space nut) to come watch it with me.

If you can, don't let YouTube decide what resolution to show this at - go for the highest (4K). It's necessary. Trust me. 30 minutes that will boggle your mind.

Now, they did take some artistic liberties with the imagery of the deep field images from Hubble, but the effect is mesmerizing.

Captain Canada

Things I learned lately 20 Sep

• A one dollar investment in solar power will yield six to seven times as much useful energy as a one dollar investment in oil, over the course of the investment’s lifetime.
• The "diesel-gate" controversy seems to have motivated Volkswagen to accelerate their electric vehicle transformation plans. VW aims to launch almost 70 new electric models in the next decade, and hopes to build 22 million electric cars over this same period. 
• "'i' before 'e', except after 'c'." One of the biggest myths propagated by English schools in my time.
• The top 4 banks in the world, based on Tier 1 capital, are Chinese.
• At dozens of American KFC locations, they're serving fried chicken sandwiched between two glazed doughnuts. 'Merica!
• I wonder how the first person to heat corn in hot oil reacted when those kernels exploded.
• The biggest factor contributing to US Army recruiting success this year was the student loan crisis.
• The 40 prisoners left in Guantanamo Bay prison cost the US half a billion dollars per year.
• There are around 100,000 fully electric vehicles in Canada in autumn 2019.
• The beginnings of Switzerland’s famous neutrality dates all the way back to a peace treaty the nation signed with France on November 12, 1516.
• The Harlem Globetrotters are not actually from Harlem, but from Chicago; they didn’t actually play a game in Harlem until 40 years after the team was formed.

Come and discuss the common obstacles to getting stuff done at work

http://chinooklearningservices.com/ContEd/AdultCourses/Jobstacles-Eliminating-Obstacles-Workplace.html

"I'm not a scientist, but......"

Small things 7 Sep

• How much does a hipster weigh? An instagram... 
• People who don't get sarcasm are very, very, very lucky.
• We'll believe anything that's prefaced with "A new study shows..."
• Money doesn't buy happiness, but it does pay for my internet, so.... close enough.
• Give 100%. Unless you're giving blood. Or money.
• When I was a boy, all I got for an allowance was a quarter. So I'd go to the store and get two chocolate bars, a bag of chips and a Coke. Can't do that now. Too many security cameras.
• Irony: Drawing trees on a piece of paper.
• Anarchy in the UK: Q: Would you like some tea? A: NO!

It's tough to find room for a starship

Houses from plastic bottles?

A new home in rural Nova Scotia was built from 612,000 recycled plastic bottles, shredded and melted and injected with gas to become a new type of foam panel 6 inches thick.

JD Composites is the startup that built the prototype house. The recycled-plastic panels provide more insulation than typical walls, so homeowners can save energy in heating and cooling.

This type of panel being used to build a house isn't new, but they chose to use a fully recycled material to tackle the problem of plastic pollution. JD Composites partnered with Armacell, a Belgian company that uses bottles rejected by the recycling industry to build a foam core from 100% recycled plastic. The material is trimmed and laminated to create the panels.

The walls are lightweight and engineered to be strong. In testing, the wall withstood 326 mph wind speeds, twice as strong as a Category 5 hurricane. The testing facility had never loaded a panel in the test chamber that they couldn’t break, ever.

The main structure was built in two days. It eliminates the need for framing, separate insulation, siding, shingles on the roof, and nails; the panels are chemically bonded together, helping make the whole structure stronger. The cost for the prototype home was comparable to conventional construction and would save money long term because of the energy efficiency.

"Unlimited" data phone plans in Canada

Things I learned lately 7 Sep

• Stewart Resnick, the biggest farmer in the US, owns 180,000 acres in California's San Joaquin valley. His 15 million fruit and nut trees use 400,000 acre-feet of water every year. As a reference, Los Angeles uses 587,000 acre-feet of water.
• You no longer need to pay a license fee to use the Happy Birthday song. The company that claimed rights (Warner/Chappell) does not in fact have the rights that it originally claimed. If you paid a fee, you are entitled to get it back as well.
• The Iraqi Army was the 4th largest until the US laid it to waste in 100 hours during the Gulf War.
• In 1963, Albert Heineken created two different sized beer bottles called WOBO (World bottle) that could function as bricks to build sustainable housing.
• Type O blood was meant to be Type Zero blood, due to the absence of glycoproteins in the red blood cells. It was misread and is now called Type "O". So, you could call it a typo..........

Africa!!

Making music with gloves

Tiny Desk concerts are usually pretty cool anyway, but this particular one turns the cool up past 11 with Imogen Heap.

After performing 2 songs, she puts on the Mi.Mu Gloves and puts on an amazing performance using only her voice, her hands and a Macbook Pro.

Powerful stuff.

Small things 30 Aug

• Norway's Navy has bar codes so when they return home they can Scandanavian...........
• What did the pirate say on his 80th birthday? AYE MATEY
• If you see a robbery at an Apple Store does that make you an iWitness?
• If a child refuses to sleep during nap time, are they guilty of resisting a rest?
• Password recovery security questions are easy enough to guess, or research. They shouldn't be asking things like 'city of birth' or pet's name'. They should ask things like 'reason your mother left your father', or 'secret celebrity crush'.
• Now that pay phones are gone, how the heck are we supposed to escape from the Matrix?
• Imagine that your government was replaced by idiots on purpose, because you're all on a reality TV show, to see how long you tolerate them before you do something.

Classic paintings re-imagined

designcrowd.fr has some pretty amazing contests and the first one I ever saw was one where classic painting had celebrities inserted into them.




Here are 2 of my faves from that contest.

This is the ribbon I'm thinking of putting on my car

Things I learned lately 30 Aug

• Movie extras are generally required to sign an NDA, barring them from talking about what they saw on set. Ironically, that means this was almost literally the first rule on the set of Fight Club.
• What is supposed to happen when you land on 'free parking' in Monopoly is.... nothing.
• In the official Monopoly rules, if someone lands on your property and you don't notice and demand the rent before the next player rolls the dice, they don't have to pay you.
• If you land on an unowned property in Monopoly and choose not to buy it, it's supposed to get sold to the highest bidder.
• The actual Monopoly rules don't state that you can't earn money from your properties while you're in jail.
• The Ontario government is forcing gas stations to display anti-carbon tax stickers on every gas pump, or face up to $10,000 fines.

Small things 23 Aug

• Fossil fuels are made from dead dinosaurs and plastic is made from fossil fuels, ergo plastic dinosaurs are made from dead dinosaurs.
• When the Clinton, Trump and British Royal Family assassins all ran into each other at Jeffery Epstein's prison cell. That must have been awkward, yah?
• When the security question on the web site asks "What's the name of your favourite pet?", your pets watch to see what you answer. Oh yes, they do.....
• Bottled water companies don't produce water. They produce plastic bottles.
• Things you can't say to grandma: "I'm not hungry."
• Next time you're in the meat department, grab a steak, 'accidentally' drop it on the floor and say "Whoops, now it's ground beef!"
• Computers were once a huge scientific breakthrough. Now we use them to look at cats.
• Lasers were once a huge scientific breakthrough. Now we use them to play with cats.

Stay calm!!

Stay classy

I don't keep it a secret how I feel about politicians whose policies I don't agree with, or whose values don't align with mine. But I stop myself short of using insulting, degrading or disrespectful language. I don't do it myself and I don't tolerate it from my friends.

The next time you think about using colourful language to label someone you don't like, ask yourself this question: Would you call them out like that in person, face to face? How about in front of their kids and their mother? If the answer is 'no', and you damned well know it is, then don't say it. If you do, you'll either be hearing from me, or if it's a repeat offence, I disconnect.

It is perfectly fine to disagree with people, but you don't have to stoop to back alley gang slang to prove it. Everyone deserves to be treated like a human being.

OK, but not really.....

Things I learned lately 23 Aug

• Researchers calculated that if the entire US stopped eating meat, it'd be like taking 60 million cars off the road (re: greenhouse gas emissions).
• In Indiana it is illegal to attend a public event or use public transport within 4 hours of eating an onion or garlic.
• In Oak Bay, BC, you can be fined $100 if your parrot talks too loud.
• Some Canadian freight trains are as long as 4.3 km (14,000 ft).
• Of the 7 major freight train companies in North America, Union Pacific, BNSF, CSX, Norfolk Southern, Canadian National (CN), Canadian Pacific (CP) and Kansas City Southern, only CN can service coast to coast.
• More than 250,000 people have signed a petition renaming the stretch of 5th Avenue from 56th to 57th Street renamed. If it is successful, Trump Tower's new street address will be '725 President Barack H Obama Avenue'.
• The Frigidaire appliance brand is owned by AB Electrolux.
• The 2013 Chevy Impala was the last passenger car sold in North America to feature a front bench seat, a feature once commonplace in automobiles.
• There are several long 10 letter words that you can spell using only the top row of a QWERTY format keyboard such as proprietor, repertoire, and—fittingly enough—typewriter.