Having proved last month during the Winter Olympics that February around here is as unpredictable as anywhere else in the world (Calgary also had to truck-in snow in 1988), let us put to rest the stereotype that Canada is nought but wind-swept tundra with today’s photos, preceded by a topical quotation from the Bard of Avon:

Daffodils
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty.

–“The Winter’s Tale” [1610 – 1611]; Act IV, sc iii, 118

I wonder what the people in the Canadian Maritimes are doing right now…?

Many of you reading this have suddenly encountered far more information about Vancouver than you’ve previously had available, and have heard all sorts of things that never cropped up here (due to my somewhat ‘unique’ viewpoint and particular passions shaping the contents thereof). The Winter Olympics have opened officially last night, proving once and for all that Canada has more than Mounties and Inuit making up the cultural mosaic.

Yes, we have fiddlers with wild tatto’oing and kids who can fly over fields of grain… but we have no snow, at least not here in Vancouver, which is why the Men’s Alpine Ski Competition has been postponed (they’re shipping snow from 150 miles away to several venues using dump trucks… no, honestly, they literally are doing that very thing).

Anyway, I may feel that building a transit corridor, re-building a highway, and constructing a convention centre collectively costing well over three billion dollars (for those of you in the UK, that’s $3,000 million, not $3 million million; the Canadian dollar hasn’t fallen that badly), yet the government responsible refusing to count the work required for the bid to be accepted as an Olympic Expense – all the while slashing arts, health, education, and community works funding, claiming “there’s no money” when asked for justification – is not only absurd but inhumane. I may resent the current PM, BC Premier, and a host of other politicians using the Olympic Games as photo opportunities for their ‘non-campaign’ for re-election (the party at both levels of power was different when the games were sought and awarded), and the fact that the PM has dissolved parliament at a time when it was politically wise to not be questioned in a public parliamentary forum about his every decision (and he refuses to engage in Q&A through press ‘scrums’). I resent a great deal of this nation’s attention, efforts, and volunteer labour being focused on a bunch of under-paid athletes doing something truly amazing that is held under the auspices of what amounts to a Multi-National Entertainment Corporation which claims to be altruistic about ‘the celebration of the pure sporting achievements’. Given the insane amount of cash that gets shovelled through the IOC from people like IBM, M^CDonalds, VISA, Omega, RBC-Dominion, NBC, Coca-Cola, and the rest, I’ve no idea how the IOC recently acquired an Observers Chair at the United Nations; especially given the UN’s stated policy that they do not engage with, represent the interests of, or liaise between corporations.

Anyway… beyond all that…

The Opening Ceremonies here in  town brought tears to my eyes more than once, and it was stunning (pity about only three of the legs for the cauldron working, though).

Meanwhile, outside…

Well, frankly, SmuttySteff covers the whole local protest issue far better than could be even imagined within my capabilities, frankly. For as start, I’d probably be more sweary. Read her take on the matter right here. Honesty do it: you’ll be glad you did.

Stunningly, the CNIB and other Braille-formatted books in Canada receive no financial support from governments at the Provincial or Federal levels as I had thought they did.

No, honestly, none. All they get is money from the generous individuals who send it in on their own.

Needless to say, making books in the format of little bumps is a tad pricey.

Doing something decent today will only take about one minute. Go here: http://righttoread.cnib.ca/default.aspx

Thank you.

So… what’s the deelio with me then? What have I been up to? What, if anything, have I been accomplishing lately? What do I want to / will be accomplishing?

Good questions, all.

Well, let’s see… Over at Atomic Fez, I’ve been happily prepping four books for release at the end of March / beginning of April! Read about that here.

That’s… pretty much it, actually. Books are consuming all my daily life, really. Well, waking life, certainly.

Other things have occasionally taken place. Sleep, for instance. That seems to be a once-every-twenty-four-hours pass-time. Food, also, seems to be recurring, but with more frequency than sleep.

The bathroom has finally been completed – hooray! – thanks to the fact we “got a man in”. The final stumbling block to me doing the job was when I realized that today’s tiles are made slightly different a dimension than yesterday’s tiles were, so the new tiles wouldn’t fit perfectly in the space the old tiles were in. The result of that was that all of the tiles needed to come off the wall, with the probable need of repairing yet more wall-board, plus having to trim a big whack of tiles to weird shapes around the window in the wall [image, left], aaaaaand who knows how much else in the way of complications. Merely trimming the tiles to fit around the window was enough of a complication to make my head spin, so we called a guy for an estimate, accepted it, and he started last Monday.

By the time yesterday arrived, he’d re-built some of the wall at both ends of the tub, removed the inner sliding window in the wall and tiled the inside of that hole, replaced all the wall-board, removed the shower doors with a curved rod and shower curtain, replaced the shower head, and repaired some of the wall outside of the existing tile area as well as extending the tiles so they better cover the area which gets wet. End result: what feels like a brand new bathroom!

So that’s excellent.

One of the oddest things discovered during the process of readying the wall for the new tiles was the fact that cardboard was used as a construction material.

You see – and this is starting to sound like an episode of Holmes on Homes, isn’t it – the wall surface of the gypsum board was a bit different than the surface of the wallboard behind the tiles might have been, were the shower wall-board attached directly to the studs. So, behind the thinner shower wall board some 1/4″ cardboard was placed to fill the gap to maintain a flat wall surface.

No, really. That’s what someone did [see image, left]. Probably it was my (now late) Father-in-Law, as this was the sort of “good enough without spending any money” approach his work around the house took on from the mid-1980s or so.

Anyway, it’s all done properly now.

Preparations are nearly complete for attending World HorrorCon in Brighton at the end of March, and then onwards to the SF-based Odyssey 2010 (aka: “EasterCon) the next week-end.  How the hell we’re going to pay for it is something we’ve not solved, but it’s nearly impossible to make a go of it selling books without proving to people they actually exist by having them on a table at a convention somewhere, so there we are. There’s a few days I don’t have to stand in a Dealers’ Room selling books, so I’m planning to hit the British Museum and the National Gallery again, plus possibly a pub or two. Look to see daily summaries here again covering that in all its glory.

So… that’s about it for me, I suppose.

What’s new with you, then?

My father sent me this just now. This is incomprehensible. It’s exciting, and suggests that the days of rapid rail travel are not over, as well as making possible environmentally responsible cross-continent travel without using æroplanes!

This is a high speed train built by the Alstom rail group in Belfort , France, which shares manufacturing facilities with the GE Energy Products Europe EPE Gas Turbine group. The video was provided by the GE EPE Chief Engineer in Belfort.

Here’s the video (sorry, I’ve not a good way of embedding it here, so click the link below if you’re not getting anything), with some statistical numbers beneath it for those who can absorb them in meaningful ways. Personally, it’s in the range past “really fast” in my mind.

World’s Fastest Rail Train (current)

The Chunnel Rail Link goes approx. 300 KMH
This train peaks at 574.8 KMH
which is 357.2 MPH
or, if you’re still not really impressed:
Mach 0.482, almost ½ the speed of sound!
…on the ground!
…without a jet engine behind you!
…and it’s a trolley!