Irie - Nice Place

Great Blogs you never Read

2011-11-06T08:20:00.000-08:00

Health considerations unexpectedly ended our stay in Jamaica so this blog will end too - except for in our hearts where it will go on.

Unpredictable events throw off the best made plans. History abounds with examples where tragic figures with iPads and laptops were ready to record incredible blogs for posterity. Sadly, bolts from the blue struck and derailed their best-laid plans. After that, the world had to wait centuries for third parties to recreate fictionalized, and usually not as good, versions of what happened.

For all we know, just before Juliet's sleeping potion took effect she smiled happily to herself that she would fool the Capulets and Montagues and be able to stay married to Romeo even though her family treated him as an accursed Montague.

Here is Juliet marrying Romeo at the start of her short-lived marriage, even by modern reality TV standards.

Later on in Jamaica, Nanny of the Maroons could have produced a great blog on guerrilla tactics for posterity - she was one of the few to beat the British army. Unfortunately the Blue Mountains were out of Wi-Fi range so we will never know how what her tactics were. Although she died of old age she never bequeathed a blog. I would suspect that she was too tough a character to ever have tweeted.

Men can write great blogs too, given a chance. The main roadblock is that they procrastinate and miss their deadlines. Jack on the left in the poster below could have composed an enthralling blog about Rose.

We are all the losers because he chose to hold off for just one day. If he could have, I am sure he would have told us that the fog over the water meant that he could not take the digital photograph up to the standards he wanted and he hoped for better lighting conditions tomorrow.

Tragically, the next day the Titanic struck an iceberg and passengers and crew had to abandon the ship and chance their souls to the icy cold ocean. As he succumbed to hypothermia, his last view could have been of his laptop lazily zig-zagging down into the abyss of the two mile deep Atlantic ahead of him like a Swedish cod jigging lure.

However, there is an exception that proves the rule. I had no in-law problems, at least none that anyone told me about, I did not operate out of a rugged internet-free Blue Mountain location and I did not sink down to the bottom of the North Atlantic 99 years ago. So here is the end of my blog - not a grand finale, but business as usual, or so I thought.

First a few sample photos from my CUSO-VSO farewell dinner.

Practically all the volunteers attended so it wasn't possible to include everyone, unfortunately.

Here is Arthur the wicker man, and yours truly without fancy headgear.

We all know that the blog unlike the heart in the Titanic song will not go on, but Jamaican dispute resolutions will. Here's how.

The first stage in dispute resolutions is for the aspiring mediators to embark on the basic mediation course. Here are a few photos from the course I attended just before I left. Not as Hollywood or as epic as the previous images, but more real and reality is what counts in the real world.

Our trainer.

Most, if not all, of the group.

One of the graduates graduating.

Later on back in Canada by the Niagara Escarpment. Note how you can escape the crowds by going to Canada in November and dressing warmly. Actually it wasn't that cold by Canadian standards - we may have had our hands in our pockets but we were not wearing gloves.

Thanks for reading. Goodbye.

Colbeck Castle

2011-10-10T12:11:00.001-07:00

The weekend's hash harrier run took us to the fascinating Colbeck Castle. An excellent little spot just 20 minutes west of Spanish Town. So quiet and peaceful after my first few days back in noisy Kingston. I was so happy in the peacefulness of the castle I stayed behind and let George and the rest of the harriers get their exercise.

The castle was built as a defense against the Spanish and as an opulent home in an Italian style red brick construction. It felt more like being in Scotland than Jamaica.

It's good to be back home in Jamaica.

DRF Basic Mediation Course

2011-10-10T05:17:00.000-07:00

Please use the official source if any of the following information does not agree with Dispute Resolution Foundation (DRF) web site. You may apply on-line for the training and find the information in the services tab of http://www.disputeresolutionfoundation.com/

Here are notes on the DRF's Basic Mediation course in September/October 2011.

For trainee mediators, the mediations initially are at the resident magistrate level before one can apply to be on the Supreme Court roster. This is how the course complements the other practical components necessary to become a certified mediator, and later a Supreme Court mediator.

1. Take this course
2. Observe 5 mediations, preferably conducted by different mediators.
3. Do 3 mentored mediations and receive feedback.
4. Eligible to receive Certified mediator certificate assuming satisfactory progress.
5. Do 10 mediations on your own.
6. Do the 4 day advanced mediation training course
7. Eligible to apply to be on the Supreme Court roster.

The following photos give you a partial picture of what the 40 hour course entails. These photos in this blog were taken by Kriss Crassweller.

Terry, the DRF training manager along with the participation of other Supreme Court mediators conducted the training.

Megan and Sheryl participated with a role play.

Rhonda reciting her poem on dispute resolution.

Monique Edwards, the course valedictorian, delivering her speech.

Ellory Taylor receiving her diploma from Lorna Vassell-Walker one of the Supreme Court mediators.

George getting his one.

This photo shows most of the participants at the closing ceremonies. Participants included one or more law students, criminologists, quantity surveyors, trainers, industrial relations specialists, post-grad social work studies, etc.

Fay Williams reading the Vote of Thanks.

Part of Ellory's rough notes written on a napkin - inventive and economical.

At the final student's party on the last afternoon, we had a dispute resolution type cake. It contained both vanilla and chocolate to prevent disputes. Sorry - there is no photo because it did not last long.

Because I am an amateur poet, here is a quick mediation poem in case nobody else publishes it.

PRE-MEDIATION

Him bad.
I'm mad.
That lad
Will be sad.

MEDIATION

Mediate.
Don't him hate.
Communicate.
Negotiate.

POST-MEDIATION

Reach a deal.
How good it feel.
Bad opinion heal.
Resolve with zeal.

Reflecting on George and Going Nuts

2011-10-05T18:58:00.001-07:00

This blog title summarizes two photos and is accurate in a photographic sense.

At Kingston's airport I experimented to see if I could line up this window frame neatly instead of at a noticeable angle.

Then after Bunty arrived she took a photo of this new small shop that wasn't there the last time she was at the airport.

San San Beach

2011-10-02T19:26:00.000-07:00

Here we are before the coaster trip starting at Odeon Street next to the Half Way Tree JUTC bus terminal - Erin and Del (blue shirt) two rows from the back, and Kim, Samar and Julia in the back row.

Wendy was out taking photos on the sidewalk and appears in the distance in the second photo. Hint - she is the only one in this photo who might get sun burned on a sunny day.

Wendy suggested we make a quick day trip to San San Beach using a local means of transport. This necessitated a coaster to Port Antonio followed by a route taxi for the 10 minutes remaining past Port Antonio to get to San San beach.

I quite often jump to conclusions and I did this a lot today. Often the vehicles we were in at the time was crammed to the rafters and slowed down on the road. I felt that this would be good to ease the load on the suspension, but all that happened was that one or two more passengers would be loaded up.

The fee to get onto the private beach ended up being $400J each after a bit of negotiation. This is about half the price you would pay for a movie ticket in Canada.

The restaurant building was not operating but the attendants went off and brought lunch to those of us who ordered from somewhere else at a bit of a markup price. If you go to San San on a budget it's best to bring your own food with you.

The San San people were very helpful and arranged local taxis to pick us up when we discovered after 3 o'clock that the coaster buses back to Kingston stopped running at 5PM from Port Antonio. We worried that we could not guarantee that any passing route taxi would have enough room for seven extra passengers. That was an unnecessary worry because looking back any route taxi worth the name would have fitted us all in, whatever might have to be done.

Here is a photo of the water. My photo with swimmers was blurry so did not make the cut. Talking about cuts, it's good to be in safe Jamaica. Del reported that three little fish were nibbling at his toes which sounds a better deal than Paul Hine's anecdote from Guyana where a piranha reputedly bit off a bather's toe. The locals advised that person there was no blood in the water that it was OK to swim among piranhas.

Other fishy but non-piranha news from San San was that Wendy reported that when she went snorkeling and saw large striped fish and blue fish over near the reef on the west side of bay.

At the end of the day one of the San San employees took a group photo. The group from left to right George, Erin, Del, Wendy, Julia, Samar and Kim.

The island behind the group is Monkey Island. The monkeys apparently weren't Jamaican ones and were released there by a resident who lived on shore close to the island. The monkeys are no longer there.

On the way back towards Port Antonio we passed an interesting looking large procession with dancers followed by a band.

This was actually a funeral procession as a hearse followed close behind them attested. It makes you think, some days one person's mind is on the beach while for another's is thinking of a funeral.

Here is some sundry information to close off.

1) There are many nearby beaches and attractions with the Blue Lagoon being just round the corner to the east, and Frenchman's Cove within 10 minutes walking distance to the west in the Port Antonio direction.

2) If four or more of you are going it might be cheaper to share the cost of a rental car to get more flexibility, but then you would miss the local flavor that a coaster can provide more authentically than a Toyota Yaris. The Grande River rafters do not actively market to coaster buses when you stop at the Grand River bridge with its traffic light system.

Their business may be affected soon when the new larger bridge is completed and traffic no longer needs to slow down or stop.

With our mud we are all the same colour

2011-09-26T18:39:00.000-07:00

Finding mud and dirt was a challenge for an Internet browser, however in real life they just come to you , no questions asked.

This special Spring Vale red Jamaican mud on my shirt was on its way to a fate worse than death. Without my intervention, it would probably be roughly handled by heavy excavation and mining equipment. Then poured together with tons of other indistinguishable bauxite ore. Next shipped off thousands of miles away from their home and native Jamaica in a dark hold. Then free from the tossing and turning of the ship, taken bewildered ashore and finally incinerated by foreigners at thousands of degrees centigrade. All this, just to be made into boring aluminum. Luckily, I intercepted the mud and saved it.

Here's a photo of my shirt that may or may not come clean ever. From Wendy Lee's blog: http://wendyinjamaica.blogspot.com/

To get photos of muddy clothes, I thought that I only needed to pull up a photo of the English international rugby team who used to wear a completely white outfit and play in a country with really bad rainy weather. And there I would easily get mud-spattered clothing. (I should have been patriotic and picked the Scottish rugby team because Scotland has worse weather than England. Unfortunately, mud would not show up as well against their darker colored rugby clothing. Geezeabrek lads, but I couldna' find anything suitable).

I had no luck for at least two good reasons - the English rugby team would always pose before they started playing so would be spotlessly clean. And even if they did not, the people who looked after the grass playing surface performed such excellent work that it was 100% turf with no bare patches that could turn into useful mud sources for the blog.

Muddy pictures are becoming fewer and further between because at the highest sports levels the games tend play in huge covered stadiums with artificial turf.

Baseball players have great fun diving into the mud and dirt - they call it sliding, but we know they are having fun.

Ty Cobb arriving safely at 3rd base. An old photo, that's why there's real dirt.

Children in India enjoying rain and mud.

More muddy waters, but of a human type, "Muddy Waters", born as McKinley Morganfield, an American blues musician, and ranked by Rolling Stone as #17 in the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. (Source Wikipedia).

Jamaica can have its muddy days too, especially after hurricanes.

With our mud we are all of the same ethnicity. Who wants to clean off the mud and return to being different?

Some corporations might want to clean you off for their own selfish vested interests.

But there will always be work for them to do. So we should just relax and enjoy it as in the old English song "Mud, mud, glorious mud, there's nothing quite like it for cooling the blood." Well my blood certainly got cooled that afternoon in Spring Vale with all that rain and mud.

I narrowly escaped catching a cold, and was saved by the warming cups of soup dished out by the Hash House Harrier executive to us all.

The day that will live in ennui

2011-09-24T15:34:00.000-07:00

It's sometimes difficult to experience ennui when you live in an English-speaking Caribbean tropical paradise, but you might have better luck in francophone* Martinique or Guadeloupe.

Luckily ennui quietly faded away as the day progressed and by tomorrow it will be completely gone. At that time it will be replaced by the Hash House Harrier event. No ennui there, just the potential for blisters.

Ennui first moved across my horizon when I caught myself photographing a recently purchased kettle. My previous one had an accident but that's not an exciting story so we'll skip it.

Taking a photo of the kettle was done for tax reasons so more ennui lurks in the wings waiting to waylay us. That tax discussion is best avoided too. Even the newspaper the kettle was sitting on was filled with average and unexciting news. The exception was the tragic news (score-wise) if you were a West Indies Twenty20 cricket supporter.

But then ennui can be good. For example a 300 pound piece of metal, part of a dead NASA satellite, per the New York Times, did not land on my head today. It sounds less dangerous in metric where 125 kilograms was quoted, so we'll stick with metric.

It's a good thing it didn't land on me anyway because the newspaper warned that it remained the property of NASA and you were not supposed to touch it.

That's a more exciting photo than of a kettle. Maybe I'll go into space one day? Hope my rocket does not crash into an asteroid with traces of Ennui life forms coming from the distant galaxy of Boredom-Un3

Green vegetables were bought at Sovereign Supermarket across the street - maybe a world record for a male purchaser, but that would not excite a female shopper.

During my initial research into the blog title I learned that the correct historic quotation was "A day that" instead of the popularly misquoted "A day which". Posterity just had to tone the ennui down a tad. Or am I being cruel and just keeping the ennui level ratcheted up high for no good reason?

Coffee grounds and tea was dug into the plants as part of my recycling program. Yes it's true. You are lucky I did not have a movie camera to record the event; but then you could have gone out into the foyer at the intermission for a pop-corn break. (Jamaican movie theaters have intermissions, but if you were watching in Canada you would just have to grit your teeth).

I then updated my JUTC bus SmartCard, (photo not included in this blog), at the Half Way Tree terminal. In my defense, I wasn't too ennui-overwhelmed because I was en route to go swimming at the Pegasus Hotel. At the pool I met Audrey, Helen, Rafael and Delphine so I was un-ennuied for the remainder of the day.

*But still, taking once last kick at the ennui. It's a French word and that reminded me of an undefined French-related word above - francophone - you know, the type of phone they have in France. So here is a francophone.

Unfortunately the French fooled us all. While ennui is a French word, they don't even have ennui in France. Maybe they exported it all to the rest of the world, and just continue on their merry way in a happy, exciting, ennui-free country? This francophone was created for the 2009 Lyons Light Festival by Benoit Deseilles and Benedeto Bufalino.

A Plait Sand an' Stone Breeze

2011-09-22T18:00:00.000-07:00

Even if you are not an accountant you will be used to seeing simply enormous numbers when you search the Internet for information.

Big numbers indicate ordinary and commonplace, while small numbers mean special and collectors' items. So I present to you the blog title that was a gift from Sharon Scott at the Dispute Resolution Foundation (DRF). It is undoubtedly special

She wrote it down for me on a sticky note compliments of a pharmaceutical company making "Rhinocort". Rhinocort was unknown to me, but my Google search found 2,260,000 hits in only 0.14 seconds.

"No, I'm not a rhinocort, I'm a cross rhino".

There just must be a terrible lot of data stored on the Internet and there would be no space left on planet earth if we were still using punched cards to store information. But think of all the jobs created for those who had to move the punched cards around. Picture all the tractor trailer loads of punched cards all containing the word Rhinocort that drove up to Google's computer and would be needed to answer the question I posed on a whim.

There are fewer hits when you search for special phrase like this blog title - just the first one I found on the Internet, and the second one on this blog. So it was unique, and now it's as close to unique as makes no difference. http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20010920/star/star2.html

You may be able to use it to change your life. No guarantees, but read on anyway.

No plait sand an' stone breeze in this picture if you just imagine all the paperwork involved for dispute hearings starting in less than two hours time that are lying on Sharon's desk, and out of the camera's line of vision.

No plait sand an' stone breeze is visible here. Maybe Vivienne has hid them in her plastic garbage bag? She can breeze around the office pretty fast though. Maybe that's 1/4th of the solution to the puzzle.

Ironically the person closest to the answer to the blog title's meaning remains off camera and hides the secret; and maybe even more so when he writes the blog in the evenings. But end of unknowings about plait sand an' stone breeze soon come.

So without further ado, here is a way you can solve the meaning of the phrase in a step-by-step approach.

1) Identify the terms you know and don't worry about the others.
2) Conclude where you might find all those terms together - hint, it's at a beach.
3) Go the beach, sit down, and wonder what you will do next.
4) Feel the breeze in your face and on a whim chuck a small nearby stone into it.
5) Your other hand has unconsciously been running through the sand making little patterns, like plaiting or braiding your hair.
6) Relax and do this for a few hours without a care in the world.
7) You have successfully "plait sand" in (5) and "stone breeze" in (4).
8) Apart from the help in (1) to (3) everything else will come naturally if you're in the right frame of mind

Goofing off.

Bees at Valencia Apartments

2011-09-20T19:06:00.000-07:00

Valencia Apartments had lots of visitors today.

Here's a braver picture.

The shortest blog for a while. Whew!

The Time is the Crime

2011-09-18T09:54:00.000-07:00

I read the two Jamaican crime stories below, and it was like I went charging into the arena after a red cape.

Unexpectedly the target I eventually hit was not the one I originally pursued, but something more important. A misinterpreted word had sent me on my Quixotic quest.

Being Canadian I think of igloos as looking like this one below the Northern Lights.

So naturally I was intrigued by this following Jamaican news article. It was the first of two crime stories that grabbed my attention that day.

"A Maroon Town, St James, resident (name withheld to protect the innocent) accused of stealing an igloo valued at US$5,000 was offered bail in the Montego Bay Resident Magistrate's Court on Monday. The accused man, a juice vendor, was offered $50,000 bail with up to two sureties. He pleaded not guilty to simple larceny and receiving stolen property and was also instructed to submit his fingerprints to the police. http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20110917/lead/lead8.html

My first thoughts after reading it was "Wow that's incredible. He was able to steal the igloo and get it home before it melted away into a pool of water in sunny, hot Jamaica. Similarly, the police must have showed up really quickly while there was still some solid evidence remaining".

Unknown to me there were more types of Jamaican igloos than in an arctic subdivision. The next picture is also an igloo, but its price and weight means it couldn't possibly be the type of igloo that was stolen.

This is the J$70,000,000 (roughly US$80,000) igloo being built . http://www.first-magazine.net/2008/06/building-your-dream-caribbean-home-make-it-an-igloo/

I had the feeling that neither of the above two were correct so I went to the local equivalent of Home Depot or Rona. I was directed to this more plausible object that is a Jamaican igloo and it costs about J$5,000.

That made more sense for something that a juice vendor might want to steal. My thoughts of an igloo being a cooled-down sofa-sized thing you could escape into in order to cool off in an un-air conditioned apartment in the tropics were not to be.

And here's the other story really blew me away at the time.

"Vanished! - 3,000 chairs missing from MBCC

PM requests police probe

BY INGRID BROWN Senior Staff Reporter browni@jamaicaobserver.com

Friday, September 16, 2011

PRIME Minister Bruce Golding has ordered that the police be called in to investigate the disappearance of 3,000 chairs and 70,000 square feet of carpeting which were in the custody of the Urban Development Corporation (UDC) at the newly constructed Montego Bay Convention Centre in St James.

The US$62,000 worth of items were leased from a supplier in Puerto Rico by the Jamaica Hotel and Tourist Association (JHTA) in January for use at Caribbean Marketplace -- the first event to be held at the facility".

http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/VANISHED--3-000-chairs-missing-from-MoBay-Convention-Centre_9720386

Three thousand chairs, or over 300 stacks the size of the above, went missing into thin air. Now in China or India with hundreds of thousands of square miles of land and populations in the hundreds of million that might be understandable, but in the small island of Jamaica that has 5,000,000 people, is mainly empty countryside, and is only 140 miles long, where could the chairs have possibly gone?

The only places I recall I seeing big piles of stackable chairs were in the outdoor Jamaican churches I sometimes drive by going to the Fort Clarence beach. But it would have been un-Christian to accuse the churches without proof.

The only other thought I had was that for inexplicable reasons somebody threw them into a deep remote sinkhole? Here's an example of a sink hole at the Blue Hole mineral springs.

My first guess proved more accurate. Soon after the PM's request to the police, a church at the other end of Jamaica notified the authorities that it had some of the chairs. The carpets had not strayed as far and seemingly were mislaid around the convention centre itself.

That's excellent. The Prime Minister's intervention fixed the problem in under two days.

However, in the big scheme of things you can't get too excited about this success, because, after all, an igloo is just an igloo, and a chair is just a chair even though it comes with 2,999 of its buddies.

But there are crimes you can get excited about. I use a particular bus stop, located directly across the street from the Liguanea police station, on Old Hope Road usually five times a week. One day, a couple of blind people waiting there were run over and killed by a car that had swerved over from the other side of the road. Many others were injured by this upscale Toyota sedan. It seems that there is no rush to see justice done even after nine months. http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20110105/lead/lead2.html

More recently and somewhere else, Khajeel Mais took an ill-fated ride with the type of taxi I might have used. There was some sort of altercation with the owner of a BMW after a fender-bender, perhaps. As the taxi fled away at least one shot was fired. Khajeel Mais in the taxi's back seat was killed. The owner of the BMW had a police registered firearm . For non-Jamaicans, the relevance of registered firearms is that the police have approved the issue of the weapon to a law-abiding, stable, respectable citizen.

It may have been that coincidentally somebody else who had a grudge against the taxi driver was in the neighborhood at the time and pulled the trigger of a different gun. But whatever gun did the shooting, the killing bullet has disappeared. There's quite a story to all this and it gets curiouser and curiouser. For brevity's sake just read about it at this link. http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/Who-is-the-X6-killer-

While missing chairs and igloos can be found, you can't bring people back to life. Jamaica must put a stop to these avoidable deaths. Maybe criminal prosecutions might prevent some in future?

Jamaicans at all levels need to respect each other more and make Jamaica a safer place. The government needs to show that it is serious about prosecuting alleged criminals no matter their level in society.

You could say that I had stopped bulling around and hit the important target - although not the first one I had thought of - I missed the red cape.

It was strange the way this blog's topic changed from tangible objects to intangible ideas and values.

Toronto Portlands and some Jamaican Contrasts

2011-09-15T11:32:00.000-07:00

Executive summary: The Toronto mayor claims to for saving money, but the opposite will happen. Not only Toronto taxpayers, but also their peers right across Canada will pay more. Meanwhile the mayoral plan for the Portlands will enrich anonymous vested interests.

Who will keep me if you don't keep my Metro Toronto zookeeper?

What happened today, Thursday, was unexpected. One of them is this blog. I told Bunty yesterday that I was all blogged out, but it seems I am not.

I had headed to the bus stop on Old Hope Road next to the Saint Peter and Saint Paul church & school. I waited for any suitable bus, and waited and waited. Whether in Kingston or Toronto, the longer you wait for a bus the more crowded it will be when it arrives. After half an hour I gave up and started walking to work.

But while I waited I got a photo of a city bus loaded down with school children. Because of the windows reflection it was not as obvious as I had hoped. So I'll keep trying, but at least you can compare this with the images of Toronto street cars below.

Canadians brag about their wind chill factors. Jamaicans should brag with their distance heat factors - 3 kms walk to work at a comfortable twenty degrees Toronto temperature, feels like 5.2 kms walking at 35 degrees in Kingston, Jamaica. I guess not enough weather forecasters walk anymore.

Another reason for walking is that my Tuesday morning bus ride was still fresh in my memory. I boarded the bus that day and was wedged in like a sardine. I was a couple of rows back from the driver. If I had been a teenage boy or a gypsy pick pocket in Rome during Holy Week this might have been great, but I'm not. On the bright side, standing passengers would all have been safe if the bus had flipped over on its roof. After the crash we would still be wedged in, upside-down but defying gravity.

I had abandoned Tuesday's bus after 2 or 3 stops and strolled the remainder of the way to the Dispute Resolution Foundation (DRF). I had to step out of the bus along with a few school children to clear a path for people further back who would otherwise have been unable to get off.

Kingston is not the only place claiming crowded buses. Reading the on-line newspapers, I have seen how the commuters in Toronto are going to expect way more crowded conditions on their buses. Their average number of passengers per bus is going from the current 48 to 52 (I think what it used to be previously).

This is low by Jamaican standards because I believed that on Tuesday that I could have reached out and touched 52 of my closest commuter friends from where I was wedged. OK I exaggerate a bit. A sign on the bus referred to 40 seated and no more than 60 standing. But which Jamaicans follow rules? 52 people on a bus would just mean it was barely half full. Toronto's news article is at http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1052988

For the benefit of any readers who have not left the tropics, the white things in the photo above may be called "heat flakes". I don't think Jamaica will ever reach Canadian temperatures so unfortunately it will never experience them. The following photo is less Canadian and shows Torontonians getting onto a street car in more Jamaica-like temperatures.

Why is Toronto trying to squeeze more people onto its buses? Kingstonians would flatter ourselves if we thought that Torontonians wanted to be more like us. I expect there are other reasons. We are not even "twinned"cities.

I hate to introduce a conspiracy theory, but here it is anyway. Accountants often think that there's always a price to pay for things. In other words, every debit has a credit in their balanced way of looking at the world, every benefit has a cost and vice versa, and for every loser there's a winner.

I think that the real purpose for reducing Toronto's municipal services is to help fund the city mayor's vision for a Portlands development. Where is it? It's downtown at the foot of the Don Valley Parkway at Lake Ontario. Mind you, it's OK to have visions. As somebody living in Jamaica, I can safely say that many get visions relatively easily by inhaling medicinal plants. These plants grow both in Jamaica and much of Canada. Maybe Portlands could be converted into a large medicinal plants field?

Accountants however tend to not have too many visions because they worry about the visions' costs. So here's something for non-accountants to think about. Concerning any development at the Portlands, when you combine the effects of these factors, 1) Toronto, 2) 50 acres of land that's practically downtown, and 3) the waterfront you start to see very huge dollar amounts.

There is nothing bad in itself about huge dollar amounts. I would like some myself. The only trouble is that they tend to get associated with very expensive costs for no particularly valid reason. These expensive costs are overlooked because percentage-wise they appear tiny. Most of us are not rich and it's difficult for us to imagine staggering amounts of money. So here is a quick example of how I could get rich with staggering amounts of money very quickly if you let me get away with it.

Suppose you are a billionaire and we both agree that I will handle your investments for the tiny fee of 1%. Twice a year I look at the investment's value on the stock exchange and devote a couple of hours of my time to it. That's a good paying job as I will have earned $10,000,000 for two hours work each year. If I happened to be the mayor of a large Canadian city, I could have hired very many garbage workers, day care workers, zoo keepers, or librarians for that amount.

While as a city taxpayer you might get really upset and worked up about whether a day care teacher should get $16 or $17 hourly, for my completely unearned $10,000,000 you would not bat an eye lid. Or maybe you might be feeling a bit embarrassed and keep quiet about being fleeced like that.

Being fleeced might not be an enjoyable experience for the fleecee, however it is invariably profitable experience for the fleecer. Just remember that when we return to Portlands.

Unfortunately for me I won't be in the position to quite legally take $10,000,000 from you, however you should be aware that for a multi-billion dollar land down by the Toronto waterfront there will be all sorts of consultants' reports, architects and planners fees, developers profit margins that will make my $10,000,000 look like a pittance.

Confirming this, in one of the Toronto papers this morning I saw a projection that taxpayers would end up paying $270,000,000 for their mayor's idea. In the context of large construction projects, the eventual costs may be double or triple through over-runs. Because the actual costs will be split between a few hundred thousand taxpayers, it might be something the average person would barely notice, but overall this cost is costing Canadians

And there's even more good news if you have a mind to developing this property - you will probably acquire it for free. Practically all of the Portlands property being developed is government owned at one level or the other. One could foresee this prime real estate being quietly shuffled over into private hands for free or at a nominal amount as part of any funding deal.

Governments want to keep costs down in this age of deficits. Rather than them spending millions of dollars to fix up property themselves under the unfriendly scrutiny of the auditor general, opposition parties, argumentative councilors, complaining voters from other ridings, etc, it's much easier to slip it over to developers and avoid the flack.

After all, the property doesn't look like much right now and the developers need to be rewarded for their efforts to fix it up. Even considering how the property currently looks, try this. Walk into a Toronto realtor's office and casually ask what price you might have to pay for 50 acres of lakefront property within five kilometers of the Toronto Islands ferry terminal. Be prepared to hear quite a large number and the sound of the agent falling on the carpet in shock at the thought of huge anticipated commissions.

Of course, Kingston, Jamaica has some vacant properties near downtown too where there used to be commercial activities. These sites could benefit from being developed, however Kingston is Kingston and Toronto is Toronto as far as costs are concerned.

Canada isn't the former Soviet Union so there is no law against private land ownership. However the new ownership is probably something that will not be too widely announced. The end result will be that there will be big costs for not only Toronto taxpayers, but also for Ontario provincial and all provinces' federal taxpayers. Also assets will have fled from the public to the private domain.

Every debit has a credit. For those fortunate people on the other side of these financial transactions, they will do quite well. We are talking Toronto so think of the "quite well" as translating into millions of dollars for many investors. I can't visualize people with lakefront views in Toronto being mere tenants - it's not going to happen. Property is going to be bought and sold, money is going to be made.

With luck, the development could make this section of the Toronto waterfront classier in some people's opinion. However, I would not be surprised if this is going to be Toronto's equivalent of Montreal's Olympic stadium. Local taxpayers will be saddled with monstrous debts to pay for decades and decades, meanwhile the new property owners will see their investments steadily increase in value.

I think there was talk of a huge Ferris wheel for Portlands. From it on a clear day you could most likely see Port Dalhousie Beach in St Catharines on the other side of Lake Ontario, and maybe even further away to parts of flat northern New York State.

Raising again the cost over-run idea, what would happen if the Ferris wheel tilted a bit because it was constructed on boggy waterlogged ground in a flood plain? How much would it cost to make the land more stable?

Not being over pessimistic, it might turn out well. The Italian city of Pisa in Italy has profited over the centuries with its badly constructed tower. The tower is a magnet for tourists, It provides jobs for local construction workers who work behind the scenes to keep it from falling down.

The leaning Ferris Wheel of Toronto has a nice ring to it, but then there might be few people willing to pay to ride. Another possible name could be based on the one used for this building.

Here is Racton's Folly in the United Kingdom.

My guess is that this Ferris wheel going to be in the proportions of the London Eye - it's meant to be "gigantic". But this may just be a sales pitch and it will be barely noticeable, not.

Locals may not be happy, but visitors from outside Toronto like those from Newmarket, Oshawa and Milton would no doubt appreciate the view. From the viewpoint at the top of the Leaning Ferris wheel of Toronto visitors might see way down below them the TTC Queen Street streetcars inching along slowly. Sometimes the wait will take place in "heat flakes" too so the commuters will need to get onto the street cars to cool down.

The streetcars won't be moving fast because it will take passengers more time to edge their way past the driver collecting the increased fares. But no problem, they can take pride in their big new Leaning Ferris Wheel of Toronto as they try to see it looking past the other standing passengers. Also their ride will last longer so they will get more street car contact minutes for their money. It's win-win.

Thinking Outside the Box Section

There may be a third way out of this. For a small consulting fee I can be flown to Toronto to discuss it. My plan is guaranteed to cost less than $270,000,000 and even less than $10,000,000. Before I unilaterally negotiate my way to nothing, I'll settle for $5,000,000 and that's all I will say for now.

Hash Harriers at Section in the Blue Mountains

2011-09-12T10:04:00.000-07:00

I would like to thank Onyka, Ann and Tim for coming along in the rental car with me and sharing costs and providing company. How else can you have an adventure in the Jamaican Blue Mountains for just over $10 Canadian?

Bearing in mind this was going to be a day of photographs I practiced on the lobster claw plant in Onyka's garden while she packed her bag for the trip.

Without company, I might have done fun multi-tasking things like drive slowly along the mountain road, miss the pot holes, successfully make the hair pin turns and take photographs simultaneously, but Onyka saved me from having to do this. She took the next few scenery photographs. Thank you Onyka.

This is actually a typical Hash Harrier situation - a big pile of jeeps and SUV's heading off into the Jamaican wilderness with no other traffic in sight, luckily for them.

This is one of the wider bits of the road. Tim, new to Jamaica, found it amusing when we passed an occasional traffic sign warning of single lane traffic in specific places.

Below is a view getting closer to Section where the hash will be taking place. The white specks are normal sized houses way down below. Something was crossing my mind from time to time - a large number of us were heading to a small place on the top of a mountain with narrow roads. What might that mean?

My concern was whether there might not be enough flat space around for everyone to park safely. I thought it would be fair if the people with Jeeps and SUV's parked half way down cliffs leaving the flatter bits closer to the road to those with ordinary cars like us.

There was an unexpected, to me, large turnout for this hash with about twice the number of hashers as usual. As expected the parking was a problem but it could have been worse as parking on the cliffs was un-utilized.

Onyka's photo proves that the Hashers correctly arrived at Section instead of at Sub-Section or Sub-Clause by mistake. The bad joke in the previous sentence has been sanctioned by the High Blue Mountain Chapter of the Upper Jamaica Legislative Association. This association is not to be confused with the Upper Jamaica Bar Association, which is understandably just another name for the Hashers.

There are lots and lots of those SUV's and Jeeps out there.

In the next picture, the main road to Buff Bay is the larger road to the right of the picture and going downhill, quite rapidly, as you will see in the next picture. Sometimes in the Blue Mountains I hanker for a piece of flat ground to walk on, or a building without millions of steps outside.

The road to Buff Bay went downhill pretty fast, maybe about a couple of car lengths around the corner. It restarted just to the left of the hydro pole as you look at the picture below. The size of the road subsistence can be gauged by the group of hashers you can see walking along the edge of it on the far left of the photograph.

So how do you get to Buff Bay without a helicopter? The answer is two photos up where what appears to be a driveway going uphill to the left is really the diversion that takes you around the huge hole. I must check the definition of a pot hole - maybe this would be a world record?

Here is photo of a waterfall at the side of the road. Not large enough to swim in unfortunately.

The wrecked car was to the side of the road as we continued going down and down and down the Buff Bay Road for nearly an hour. Was this part of a road accident with the nearby red car, even more mashed up, or had they been taken there by a tow truck and dumped? That's Jamaica for you, sometimes there are more questions than answers.

Another unanswered question, this one raised by Tim, why was there a street light in the middle of nowhere? Sort of close to it was a large single rock near the side of the road. The rock was about half the size of the rented Yaris, but probably weighed quite a lot more. My guess, whether right or wrong, was that the light was there to stop unobservant drivers with non-working headlights drive into the rock during the night.

Tim's photo of the very large rock.

It looks like there's room for most cars to squeeze by and continue towards Buff Bay if they're heading northwards.

The real worry warts were thinking that after doing our down and down and down part of the hash that the only way back to the starting point was to go up and up and up again to return to the elevation we started from. Actually they were correct, but not completely correct. The only way back was to go up and up and up and up back to end up at a point even higher than our starting point. This brought you to a mystery paved road going downhill.

A quick personal diversion here from a previous trip to the Quebec Laurentian Mountains. I didn't know this beforehand, I was having a deja vu of my Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts experience. Note the plural Monts - I didn't at the time. There could be more than one mountain involved. I thought I was pretty smart when I went back to the hospital that I knew was at the summit, without a map. All I had to do was go uphill. Right?

Wrong. The key first step was to pick the correct mountain to drive up. At the summit of the wrong mountain I was able to see the hospital clearly on the summit of the right mountain. Only a half mile away as the crow flies, but then I'm not a crow.

Back to this weekend. There's a shortage of roads up in the Blue Mountains as it's very difficult to construct them. The road I was seeing could only be one of two roads - either the road to Buff Bay so I would be almost re-starting the loop for a second time, or else the road leading downhill to Section, the starting point.

I hadn't thought of the going down one mountain and coming back up a different mountain at the time. There wasn't as much shredded paper around (marking the hash trail) as I hoped for, but it turned out that this really was the latter road and not the former one. My legs were thankful for that. I'm not sure if any of the Buff Bay hotels accepted credit cards or allowed you to wear clothes.

There were the usual ceremonies after the race and with the large crowds. This one seemed to go on and on. It's pretty tough as the after-hash food only takes place once the ceremonies end. However re-hydation through Red Stripe beer and pop can start beforehand and is included in the $500J race fee.

Being conscious of my passengers I did not go overboard on the Red Stripe and maybe only managed half of one this time round. I wasn't being excessively virtuous, the reason for this was probably the apple I just eaten near the end of the hash had filled me up.

Still, I think I must have been in violation of the Hasher Constitution as I was meant to be a drinker with a running problem. I'll check the fine print, maybe. Hashers don't care. It's sort of like if you have to ask yourself if you're a hasher, then you probably aren't.

At the end of it all, it was time to zip downhill to Kingston passing Green Hill coffee plantation, Hollywell, through the Hardwar Gap, past Strawberry Hills, Newcastle army base (picture below), Mount Edge with its new EIT vegetarian restaurant, Irish Town and into Papine. All this had to be done before dark in case mountain mist compounded the lack of visibility, while dodging potholes and successfully making all the turns.

I tend to drive by this cannon without much thought. It was pulled up here by mules from Port Royal. Whatever road complaints we have about driving in vehicles along slightly pot-holed paved roads, we would not have undertaken quite the same ordeal as hauling up a large solid iron cannon that might at any moment skid off a gravel road and carry us over one of many cliffs along the way.

Meanwhile my hashing shoes are barely just hanging together. I must ask Bunty to bring out my boring navy blue well-made Canadian running shoes to replace my Jamaican ones instead of spending money. CUSO-VSO volunteers are poor.

The shoes I have now are on their last legs and are pretty plain by Jamaican standards. They lack lime green and gold coloring. Because I inflicted the visual pain of my Jamaica red shirt on people, I'll spare you with the shoes. I must confess I like my red shirt. If you put a Canadian flag on top of it, you can't see where the red of the shirt ends and the red of the flag begins. And it's not an old Canadian flag with faded red either.

Jamaican Folk Singers at Little Theatre

2011-09-11T04:54:00.000-07:00

This was just an awesome evening. You had to be there at the Little Theatre where the Phillippo Baptist Church Senior Choir performed Jamaican folk songs for the audience.

I wondered where Phillippo was in the map of Jamaica as I didn't remember seeing it anywhere. The web site says that the name was in honour of the Baptist missionary founder who arrived in the 1820's. He was James Phillipo - see http://www.phillippo.yolasite.com/. But enough history.

There was constant movement around the stage. As well as the singing, there was dancing, drumming, story, history, learning and pantomime as well. Even if you were deaf, there was something for you.

Arriving - just to prove I had been there in case the evening did not work out for me.

The buses (either 61 or 66 work) took me there much earlier than expected so here are some photos while I waited. The folk singers do their shows all over Jamaica so you don't have to be in Kingston to experience them.

This is a close up of one of the photos. It looks like it was taken down at the market area or on King Street.

A photo to check that the flash setting was indeed switched to off.

The folk singers at last. My photos gradually improved as I adjust the steadiness of my grip to the darkness of the room.

The blackboard writing is to be ignored for audience purposes. This is a night when you did not want to have golden silence. My conclusion is that most Jamaicans ignored these school days writings anyway. Probably school children all over the world do.

The singing was excellent right up to the soprano level where I could easily make out what the words were.
You can get an impression of the movement from the next picture. There is nothing frozen in time in Jamaica like there might be in Canada.

After the intermission it was a 100% Kumina drumming and singing session. This was the best drumming I remember hearing in Jamaica.

Seeing as I was one of the first people in the theatre my initial thought at the intermission was where had all these people come from. Then I remembered I was in Jamaica and the starting time was just a suggestion. Although the folk singers commenced bang on time.

You have to see Jamaican folk singing in Jamaica. It won't be as blurry as my movement-challenged still photos. Also, if you can't get to it, it will come to you.

Listen to the Rhythm of the Falling Rain

2011-09-09T18:00:00.000-07:00

Today's title was either as shown from the January 1963 song by the pop group, Cascades, or something gritty like:

Bipartite Infrastructure Challenges - General in-depth Study of Kingston Jamaica's Hydrogen Hydroxide Redistribution, juxtaposing the Old Gun Court Specificity.

I went with the former one of course. I'll never be a real scientist, I can understand most of the gritty words above, probably you can too. If not the photographs will lead you to an answer.

Th kitchen garbage can was diverted to flood control and that helped give it a good rinse out.

Meanwhile outside the front parking lot was starting to fill with water, but not as full as on heavier rain days when the falling torrents of rain sounded like hail on the tin roof.

A more expansive view of the parking lot lake:

The gutters were pretty full now too:

Inside the roof was not 100% leak proof so some preventative measures were necessary.

Recycled papers helped cut down on the water on the floor. No doubt a mess will meet my eyes on Monday morning. The cable is just an ISDN one so there was no danger of an electric shock.

These waste bins prevented the often slippery steps out of the office getting worse.

Going home it was worthwhile taking the taxi and not the bus. Otherwise I would have probably got soaked on the sidewalks on the way to the bus stop.

The police were heading to the left too. You can usually tell when a Jamaican vehicle is turning left because its left indicator is not flashing:

There was some advanced driving going on here, or else somebody taking an unnecessary chance on the road. You are not meant to go fast through a Jamaican puddle because you never know what size pothole might be lurking underneath.

I usually try to put some in-depth thought into a blog post, but today I'll let the water provide the depth. I'll call it quits and let the Cascades fade this blog out into the distance:

Oh, listen to the falling rain
Pitter Patter Pitter Patter ohhhh...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQstQST1GiM

A slow news day, but read on.

2011-09-08T18:15:00.000-07:00

Well it was a slow news day here in Kingston, Jamaica. And that's not all bad. No really bad traffic accidents with fatalities, no really bad murders, etc. My only photos of the day involved taking a photo of somebody else taking a photo of a Pattie. In my defense, you have to photographically record Jamaican heritage for posterity before you leave.

Here is the picture of the Pattie - it was a beef one. It's cheaper than a cheese or a chicken one, so you have to wonder. No, that might not be a good idea. Stop wondering. The other photo had more human interest but seeing as I did not ask permission to upload it, it remains off the web.

Late - update. Here's Kris taking a photo of her Pattie. The original Pattie photo is gone now.

Things may have been slowly going uphill when I heard about tonight being Fashion Night in Kingston. I was picturing models walking along catwalks, well-dressed citizens promenading along the streets, and so on. But it was not to be.

Fashion night is basically a retail stores event where the shops sell their usual things but a discount, typically 20% off at the Sovereign Centre. It's sort of like a "Back to School","Spring into Spring", or similar sale. Because all stores do it on the same night that creates a lot of excitement and many Kingstonians go. Unfortunately I did not need any new clothes.

Still looking around for excitement I switched on the computer. Often it does not disappoint. Last night I watched Dr. Strangelove that by coincidence included Peter Sellers. Unknown to me he was the film star whose impression Bunty took a photo of in the courtyard of Grauman's Chinese Theatre off Hollywood Boulevard recently. The previous night I had watched Young Frankenstein, but it was too late at night to research whether any of its stars also appear in Californian concrete.

But first before moving along to select tonight's movie, I had a quick look at the local weather forecast. Jamaican summer weather can be more exciting than Canadian weather because it is often to be seen on the National Hurricane Centre's web site.

I had intended a quick look but my first thought on looking at the screen was along the lines "Holy mackerel look at all that red". I'm not fully Jamaicanised yet, I should have substituted Red Snapper, Wahoo or King Fish instead of mackerel. Be that as it may, as with traffic signals, red generally indicates dangerous situations. Red is something you pay attention to.

If you don't mind, here is a quick geography and hurricane lesson is case you're wondering why a person in Jamaica is getting excited over those red hurricane things on the Atlantic Ocean map below. Where is Jamaica anyway?

If you draw a straight line between Nate and Maria it will pretty well pass through Jamaica that is about twice as close to Nate as it is to Maria. Also look at the map title in the top left corner. If you go straight down the map from the "o" in the "Cyclone" then where it hits the Nate-Maria line is where I am.

Hurricanes are big too and they are pretty much to scale on the map. Jamaica fits comfortably into the space in the middle of Hurricane Maria because Jamaica's only about 150 miles long and hurricanes are often wider than that.

The three identified hurricanes seemed to be projected to miss Jamaica so I moved along to other thoughts.

I speculated that because I have a reasonably common name that there was bound to be a mighty hurricane that shared my name. Sadly, unexcitement continued as I learned that closest sounding hurricane to my name was the French-Canadian version Hurricane Georges. Here's a Wikipedia picture of it. Maybe one day they'll drop the "s"? Actually, the "s" is not pronounced by French speakers, so maybe after all it is a match?

That's the advantage of having a common name - you get hurricanes more or less named after you. The next challenge was to see if there was a Hurricane Bunty.

I tried, but Google search politely asked me if I really meant Hurricane Betty, Hurricane Booty or Hurricane Bondi. Well I didn't, but I had time on my hands so I looked them up. They weren't hurricanes at all, but just websites where the two words had both appeared, but not as neighbours.

The first two were night clubs, while the third one was a restaurant named Hurricanes on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia. Maybe one day? But in the meantime, maybe the Lorna, Dallas, Sarah or Suzie had been there?

Bunty gets a second shot at fame because on her passport she is a Josephine. Would Josephine be any luckier? The answer is yes. Every six years, a hurricane or tropical storm named Josephine comes along and blows and soaks everything in its path. Maybe six years is the interval for recycling hurricane names? Here's one of the Josephines:

It's from 2008, so we are half way to the next Josephine already. Haley's comet will sooner pass by again than there will ever be another Hurricane Georges.

But nobody should accuse us people in Caribbean of hogging all the best hurricanes and tropical storms for ourselves. The projection below shows that Hurricane Katia is going to blast across the Atlantic and it's remnants will impact the Scottish coastline somewhere near Dunoon on the west coast next week - so keep your umbrellas handy Sarah, Stewart and Deborah.

Even Hugh on the east coast of Scotland may be in luck too although hurricanes tend not to successfully travel over mountains. The Scottish Highlands half way across the country will mean he'll experience less rain and wind. That's a plus when you drive a bus for a living.

So that's it for today, or until the weekend. I'll be up in the Blue Mountains with the Hash Harriers. It's named after the British army cafeteria food and not a plant. I'll get exercise provided Tropical Storm Maria doesn't go off course and dump a whole pile of wind and rain on our parade, I mean hash.

Traffic Challenges once Schools Restart

2011-09-06T19:01:00.000-07:00

Well it was an eventful morning wait for the bus today. All sorts of things were moving apart from the traffic. Unfortunately a bus is a kind of traffic and it was going nowhere too. I think that it was somewhere out of sight around the corner in the Papine direction.

My mistake, the definition of traffic implies some sort of movement. The vehicles on the road were, strictly speaking just parked.

I took all my photos the next day when the traffic was not quite as bad. Here are parked cars going up the hill and away from downtown. This is pretty congested traffic when you consider how empty the Gardiner Expressway is in Toronto heading away from downtown on weekday mornings. All the Toronto drivers who live in suburbia are going downtown and so are heading in the opposite direction.

A closer up photo of the yellow city bus and the coaster that are in the background of the photo above. I always have difficulty finding sufficiently detailed coaster photos on the Internet. Now I have one for future reference.

Talking about sight, this was near the fatal bus stop where on January 4, 2011 a lady had driven into the people waiting for a bus on the opposite side of the road. Many were from the blind institution close by. She killed two, injured five others and demolished the bus stop. Any blind people may not even have seen the car speeding towards them from across the road - very tragic. Time flies, I’m surprised that was eight months ago.

In order to retain this blog's general viewer rating, cinema-style, I edited out a gory part from the bottom of the Gleaner picture.

I speculate also that too many people were getting killed and injured so close to the Matilda Corners police station. Because of this, the word had been passed to them down the command chain that this was not to happen in the future. So the local police had strategically placed traffic beacons down the middle of the busy road. The police watched attentively to ensure that no impatient drivers dangerously passed the queued school traffic. Also they monitored closely that the drivers did not run over and squash the beacons. The beacons effectively restricted traffic to one lane going in each direction.

This section is one of those scary stretches of road in Kingston that are tantalizingly not quite wide enough for three vehicles to safely drive side by side down the road. My estimate is that is its 2 ¾ vehicles wide.

When the magic number of three vehicles wide occurs, there are no alternatives but for one of the three drivers to brake, drive with one wheel on the sidewalk, reverse if going slowly and from out of town, or accelerate to pass quickly and sound the horn so that the magic number returns to two.

The last option depends on the driver coming the other way not having the same idea. If so, the magic number instantly goes back to three with results that require the presence of an ambulance. The middle of the road belongs to whichever driver staked the claim first. There are no lines to cramp anyone’s style, so to speak.

I made another mistake. Due to cultural differences between Canada and Jamaica. Braking and reversing may generally not be an option here.

This is quite a busy section of road as you can see the from the foot of the Jamaican Society for the Blind news article photo on the crash. (I had this photo in the blog before I took my own ones):

These foreign drivers in the photo that follows are lucky. They have more than three lanes to drive in, they have seat belts and a one way traffic system too. Possibly Old Hope Road on a morning when schools are back in operation again might be too challenging for them? The cheering on audience is not as large too, just us people at the bus stop.

To summarize:

1) In an ideal Jamaican world Old Hope Road can handle 2 ¾ vehicles going in either or both direction across its width.

2) The police traffic beacons reduced the maximum lanes down to two.

3) The St Peter and St Paul school has just opened for the new term in September. Traffic trying to get into it is backed up onto Old Hope Road and blocks one of the lanes so now we are down to one lane for traffic going in both directions.

Non-Jamaican drivers might erroneously think should not present a problem, but remember the Jamaican rules about no braking and no reversing.

Here's the church in front of the school. The school itself is quite large and is behind the trees in the background. The next photo shows cars lined up inside the school property almost making their way back solidly to the road - even today on a non-traffic problem day.

Meanwhile up the hill, a white van is in the process of trying to make a turn across the oncoming parked vehicles into the gas station and is now positioned at an angle a few inches in front of a brown car aiming up the hill. No problems? Wrong – problems. Remember the rule about no reversing mentioned above.

About 10 minutes later the white van situation catches the attention of the two police officers in front of the police station who were actively monitoring the traffic beacons. They amble the 5 chains (100 yards or meters) up the hill and intervene. An active discussion follows for a few minutes and the white van eventually backs up once to give itself enough room to turn in front of the brown car that never did reverse.

So here’s a late breaking traffic score – Brown Car 1, White Van Lost.

The driver of the white van will probably have to emigrate to somewhere less extreme than Jamaica. Alternatively, have the van painted another color so people do not recognize it in future. As a person who is semi in tune with the Jamaican way of thinking, I'm glad I did not take a photo of this, I would have felt embarrassed for the driver.

Sep 8, 2011 Here's a late thought and an observation. I was too far away to hear what the police were saying to the two drivers. If the white van's driver had been ordered to reverse by the police then that would be understandable - there would be no need to repaint the van or leave the country.

Strangely, there were no beacons on the road today. Maybe somebody in the Jamaican police reads this blog?

Bus ride to Port Royal to check out fishing prospects

2011-09-04T20:01:00.000-07:00

I did a quick trip out this afternoon to learn more about sea fishing in Jamaica so that when my brother Hugh comes later in the year he knows what's available.

Basically you can hire a boat that looks like the ones in this photograph at Morgan's Harbour Hotel for about $150 US hourly from Chris Williams of the Whynot. You stand a chance of catching King Fish, Wahoo and dolphins at the California Bank that's about an hour offshore. The first two types of fish have quite sharp teeth so they should be handled with care. They are like super-sized mackerel. The King Fish run from 5lbs to 30 lbs according to Wikipedia, while the scarcer Wahoo run double that size.

Or else you can strike a deal with one of the local fishermen and go out in their smaller boats. Likely you would have to bring your own fishing tackle, but it would be cheaper. Many of the commercial boats use fish traps, so possibly the most they might have for you to use would be a hand line. Here are typical fishing boats in a picture taken at Treasure Beach. There is no enclosed cabin so you should wear a hat and apply sunscreen.

You should be extra careful if you happen to catch a predatory Lion Fish because their fins are poisonous. Apart from that they are apparently good to eat.

Here are a few photos around the hotel and Port Royal.

And here are some photos mainly around the Parade area downtown, taken from the bus. To get to Port Royal by bus, you first make your way downtown to the Parade, and then you catch the Port Royal bus. In 2011 it is number 98, from there going past the airport. So it's an economical way to get to the airport if you do not have large suitcases.

The fishing part of this posting is all good hypothetical stuff but I should be able to report on actual fish being caught by the end of October.

It's a short blog as I need to ensure I am ready for work tomorrow.

A walk around Liguanea

2011-09-03T18:14:00.000-07:00

Here are some photos of my walk around Liguanea before it got dark.

It was a slow day here apart from the periodic cheers from around the apartment complex as a Jamaican athlete won a medal at Daegu. One set of cheers was for Usain Bolt winning the 200 metres gold medal sprint at 7:20AM Jamaican time.

For all of us rooted in the past, 200 metres is roughly equivalent to 10 chains. At the end of this posting I have a cricket game picture from the Internet helping you visualize a chain length.

This mop has been outside my door for a while - months. Maybe one day a hurricane will come and wash it away?

The cats have become bolder and stake out the garbage area in full view and don't run away when you pass by.

This is Hope Road just uphill from the apartment. The lady 1/2 way across the road is probably heading to the Sovereign shopping centre while the gentleman is likely discussing with a route taxi whether it's going in the direction he wants.

Simon Diamond's flowers for sale at the corner by the gas station. He mainly operates at the weekends.

Turning the corner to the right going down Old Hope Road I passed the local police station.

That reminded me of the time I went into the station to check if the Flat Bridge road to the north shore was open, or closed for a month as the Gleaner newspaper reported. The police said it was open and a month or two later I discovered they and not the newspaper were correct.

It seems that one government body had closed the Flat Bridge road, but that wasn't convenient for another government body so that plan was vetoed quietly and the road remained open without notifying the Gleaner.

When I saw this bus coming the display said City but by the time I clicked the camera the alternate destination was displayed. In previous days I would have cracked the joke that this bus was a month late as it should now be going to September Town.

Not everything is scenic in Kingston. Here is some garbage waiting to be picked up.

A couple of pretty scenic trees above.

The pet store on Old Hope road. There could be other ones further down the road, for all I know but this was the only one I passed.

Some ornamental grass.

Now heading along Retreat Avenue away from the busy main road. You can see the lower part of Beverly Hills in the background.

Another collection of scenic trees. You always have to remember though to periodically look down so you don't trip over obstacles on the sidewalk that could send you to hospital.

I took this photo mainly to get the hills in the background.

Turning onto Hopefield Avenue, about 3/4 of the way around the block I passed the Indian High Commission. It wasn't a very windy day as the flag shows.

I could tell by the sound of children's laughter and games coming over the wall, that there was a party going on at this apartment complex so I had to take this photo.

Taking photos does not come naturally to me - the top line really says "notice" but the orange balloon obscured the "ice" part so it looks like "not".

The neighbourhood is pretty central and has a good location. New developments are starting to replace old ruins that once were nice houses as a photo below illustrates.

Another nice tree.

One of the old building that has seen better days, however its trees are great. I think some squatters live there. You don't need working double glazed windows to squat comfortably in Jamaica. Close to here one of the older houses across the street from Campion College now has a sign up saying it was a furniture store.

I made it all the way back to the apartment and this map was meant to show where I had been, but it's too small to read and probably all you can make out is Ingston Harbour. The 25 cent coin represents where humble volunteers live, although in a perfectly fine neighbourhood, while the arrow fashioned from the $1,000J points at Beverly Hills where the richer people in a different snack bracket live. Usain Bolt resides in that neighborhood at the top of the hill.

The airport is down at the bottom of the map and a 20 km drive takes you round the large harbour and up into Liguanea, this is roughly 1,000 chains, but then who would have that many chains lying around? The next picture throws light on how long a chain is.

The lighter colored rectangle going across the width of this Internet picture is a cricket pitch and the distance between the two sets of three things sticking out of the ground near either end of the rectangle is exactly a chain - 22 yards.

I apologize to cricket enthusiasts, for the "things" however I was trying to avoid as much cricket jargon as possible.

I got Jamaica'd Today

2011-08-31T18:11:00.000-07:00

I had a feeling that I would get Jamaica'd today. To help enjoy the experience of being Jamaica'd, I put on my happy smile, relaxed and let all my cares drift away. Nothing was going to bother me. I was in a state of Irie.

At the beginning of the day I had no idea what this new verb "Jamaica'd" might mean although it had flitted across the back of my mind from time to time. Now I have the concrete examples, I can write about it although I did not have my camera for photos.

Being modest, I have quite a lot of room in the back of my mind where all sorts of things flit. But with luck the front of my mind is crowded out with a working brain - so there's no room for random flitting there.

Being Jamaica'd is getting the Jamaican experience - this is an nearly everyday experience you get in urban Jamaica, but not in the huge closed-off resorts on the north coast where you are isolated from Jamaican things

In the interests of accuracy, this was neither one of the fellow bus passengers, a person at the bus terminal, or later somebody on working at the bank. He is the Jamaican entertainer Bunny Wailer.

I had a quasi-Jamaican experience on the way down on the un-airconditioned bus. Its open window in front of me was good for letting in more diesel exhaust than fresh tropical air. Clearly, the bus had not been serviced properly. This might just have been the result of either a budgetary shortfall or spare parts challenge. I doubt that it was a personal vendetta against me by the bus mechanic. Come to think of it, to be Jamaica'd, you need a real live Jamaican to provide you with a direct personal Jamaican experience. You don't just get Jamaica'd in the passive sense, some Jamaican has to go actively out of his or her way to do it to you. But there's a positive side to this - it's "character building".

My Jamaica'd experience might have started with the young school girl at the Half Way Tree bus terminal. She attempted to butt into the ticket line in front of me. Later on I noticed that her mother was already in the line. The girl was merely meeting up with her. So there was no problem after all, Canadian girls would have done the same.

Then I walked uneventfully to the First Caribbean International Bank close to Half Way Tree. It's just a few blocks south. Arriving at the bank before it opened, I pretty well kept my own position in the line so I was not severely Jamaica'd outside it. Even inside, being Jamaica'd did not start immediately. Firstly I went to the wrong teller, but she redirected me within seconds, as a Canadian bank teller would have done, to the right one.

It turned out that it was the right one was who would Jamaica me. She was taking care of another customer while I first arrived, so I relaxed and read some of today's Gleaner. After about five minutes that customer left and nothing further happened. Remember that I'm still cool, happy, relaxed and in a state of Irie, so maybe she was making a follow up business phone call or two as a result of her previous customer/client interaction.

After about ten minutes I moved a little. Neither of us were making eye contact because a divider was in the way, although I felt she should have been able to see at least the ends of my legs and umbrella tip.

I was the only customer in the five available chairs in the area, so there were no problems. Nobody had zipped in the nearby bank's front door and went directly to the customer seat at the teller's work station ahead of me. I was fine and relaxed. There weren't any hammocks nearby, but then this wasn't a resort, it was just a bank.

Before I took the pledge not to insert jokes I might have claimed that this was a hammock in the first class or elite waiting area at the branch, and unfortunately I was only travelling volunteer-class. That latter class is similar to tourist class but not as elite or preferred.

But now I don't tell jokes anymore. Seriously, it's the lone hammock near the bar at Jake's at Treasure Beach. Treasure Beach is on the south west shore of Jamaica. If you visit Jakes grab the hammock before somebody else does. That does sound over-competitive for a Canadian to say. Sorry.

Then the teller beckoned me over with the ever so slight and subtle hand gesture that Jamaicans make. I didn't rush over because I did not want to give her the impression that she was more important to me than my Gleaner. I had waited 10 minutes, so what was 1/2 minute more? Happily at the thought of getting service, I headed over and civilly said good morning. Formalities are very important in Jamaica. I did a quick explanation of what services I would like - namely a transfer of some money from my Jamaican account to a Canadian account. Naturally I provided all the documentation I had in order to help move the process along.

This lady was no slouch and within a second or two she pounced. "You don't have the Swift code so you have to go away and get it", she happily announced. Obviously the wrong response was to ask what a Swift code was or to meekly go away. I lose!

Now I know what Swift codes are and specifically know the exact Swift code of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. It was just the Royal Bank of Canada's Swift code that was missing.

(This bird knows its Swift code).

So I politely suggested to her that because she worked in a bank, and indeed a bank with the word "International" in it, that she should easily find out from the bank's records what the Swift code was. She was a little bit nonplussed but headed off and five minutes later we were almost good to go.

She pottered away for a while with the bank's side of the documents and then she was joined by a younger person who was obviously the computer person in the office. He did the electronic transfer using the computer terminal at the teller's desk. Was she technologically challenged or was this simply good internal control on the part of the bank?

My only grief from him was to suffer the George Hamilton movie star joke. He must be pretty old now because I'm sure he was famous while I was still at school, and I'm, as Jamaicans could say, "youth-challenged". Internet research showed me that my namesake is only eight years older than me - it's just that he's started acting early in his life.

So when all the electronic stuff was done, I was still grooving along. Then the bank teller decided to throw a last curve ball that I found pretty hilarious. But I kept a straight face and never showed surprise or worry. Once again I was in the right but there was no need to be smug . It turns out that my second personal reference never made it to the file although I remember its existence very clearly. Did this mean I couldn't get my money transfer because I didn't legally exist as far as the bank was concerned?

Bunty's friend, Bernadette V, had prepared the second reference in Kingston because she worked here at the British High Commission. She had known Bunty and me for years in Ottawa. It turns out that in her glowing reference she omitted to write that I was of "good character" as required by the bank.

This deeply troubled the bank employee who called me on the phone at the time. After a bit of discussion, and an obvious behind-the-scenes decision by somebody who could make decisions properly, I was in cleared. The bank employees had subsequently lost this vital document and it was worrying yet another teller. Maybe an Obeah was involved? You don't mess with Obeahs.

Above are two Romare Bearden paintings of Obeahs. The first one is definitely pretty scary looking.

Fortunately a handful of new volunteers had just arrived and they were getting personal references from the CUSO-VSO office, so the bank employee kindly offered to let me use that reference provided I signed a blank reference form. Which I did. I kept my cool because there's that expression "It ain't over till the fat lady sings". The bank teller was not fat and I have no idea whether she could sing or not, although probably she could because Jamaicans as a whole are very musical.

But it was really all over and in a positive way. I got my funds transferred.

On the way out I saw new CUSO-VSO volunteer Tim who was in for his third shot at getting a debit card, and along the street I passed another volunteer Wendy heading towards the bank who referred to her life as being in a banking purgatory. I guess they are two more volunteers who are also getting Jamaica'd.

And that's enough for this blog. I had a not uneventful ride on the coaster going to the Dispute Resolution Foundation, but that's another story.

Hash Harrier run at Cockpit, Clarendon Parish, Jamaica

2011-08-28T18:07:00.000-07:00

There has been a slight change in direction in this blog in order to more closely align with its original intent. The words will comment on my Jamaican photos, whether good photos or bad.

The content will be shortened too. If you have any unanswered questions you can track down the answer on the Internet, or elsewhere. For example, a year ago I would only have known the meaning of "run","at" and "Jamaica" in the title. You may be in the same position today.

Anything that does not fit in with the new plan will have a price, a donation to CUSO-VSO to help with its volunteer work. If you really want me to write about a completely fictitious character in one of the blogs, then that can be arranged for a $100 Cdn donation to CUSO-VSO. Bad puns come cheaper at $10 Cdn each, while corny jokes carry a rock-bottom price of $5 Cdn. As the caveat at the foot of the blog explains, this is all the volunteer's idea and is not an official CUSO-VSO policy.

The first key element of the Hash Harriers are the people. Unfortunately because I was away for 2-3 months I have practically forgotten all their names. But I will be back in two weeks time, for sure, for the next hash up in the Blue Mountains just past the Old Tavern coffee plantation at Green Hill. Oh by the way Bunty, I heard today that the road through the mountains to Buff Bay has been re-opened.

Here is the check-in where they match you up with someone who has signed up, collect money and keep track of how often you attend so you can eventually become entitled to long service celebrations, etc.. They do a lot of administrative work, and we sometimes take it for granted.

Over on the left are Alex and Maja, a friend of Delphine's, who I gave lifts to.

Here are the mineral springs where water is piped out of the hillside. It is said to have a high mineral content and that is healthy for you. Notice how fairly empty the pool is, but it will fill up later.

This is a higher up view showing the hills near Kingston in the background, with the ocean too.

Here are some more photos of the car crew and Delphine as well. I'm not sure if this was taken before or after the run, but I'll be able to tell by the shape my legs are in. I'm in the second photo that Maja kindly took

No blood and dirt so it must have been taken before the run. Basically the thorn bushes got me from time to time, and I tripped over a rock near the end, but otherwise no harm was done.

Here's part of the trail. I wondered why I had taken this photo of the jungle, and now it comes back to me. It was where I had just come from. Fortunately the hash harriers place occasional piles of shredded paper on the ground so you know if you are still on the trail or not.

The pool had become busier in the 1 1/2 hours that we were enjoying the fresh air on the trail. It seems the pond is also used for adult baptisms, so we were treated to the multiple baptism spectacle and hymn singing too - an unexpected bonus for the day. The next two photos after this show more detail on the religious activities in the pool.

First there is the congregation and other to be baptized, and presumably family members at the edge of the pool.

Then we have the person being baptised and also various hash harriers are seated at the far end of the pool past the baptizers.

At the end of the days hash harriering there is a sum up of the days events and the Hash Constable ensures that the harrier's mandate etc has been adhered to. This is light-hearted stuff and not to be taken too seriously, I think, but I could pay the price at the next hash?

Theoretical hash crimes, felonies or misdemeanors might include:

1) Whistling a happy tune while being chased out of the jungle by an iguana
2) Taking too long to get around the hash trail when accompanied by your recently married spouse
3) Putting too much sun screen on for a cloudy day, etc.

These weren't bad jokes that incur a $5 Cdn price tag but simply an example of the mindset of the fun-loving hash harriers.

Here is the Hash Constable, black tee shirt and red cap facing away from the camera, addressing some of the miscreants.

Then after the Hash Constable had done his sacred constabulary duties, (Sort of like what you might see in the Gilbert & Sullivan "Pirates of Penzance") it was time to head on over to the food table to replace all those calories that had been lost on the trail.

You know. I like this new format. It says two things. This is Jamaica and this is what happened today.

Surprise! Live longer - the arithmetical truth

2011-08-26T06:57:00.000-07:00

I haven't heard from my Alter Ego, the Blog, lately. You may ask what an alter ego is. The answer is really quite simple - an alter ego is what you have with alter bacon or alter sausages. If you want to be really sophisticated, alter egos can come scrambled, easy over, poached or sunny side up. In Jamaica though, the proper breakfast is alter ackee and alter salt fish.

In the picture, the yellow is the alter ackee, the white is the alter saltfish, and you have some local alter tomatoes and alter onions to add pizzaz and give it alter colour appeal.

"What!" Blog came charging onto the scene. "Stop messing with me- I always keep an eye on you because you think you're too punny (his pun - not mine) for words!"

In my defence, I explained that basically I was concerned about his absence and that I was just checking to see if he was alive and well. "As alive as you, and more mentally well than you" he muttered.

Then I went on to propose that while calculus was necessary to be happy, statistics and arithmetic were necessary to live long. These would have a built-in margin of error, but we could head towards being statistically correct 19 times out of 20.

When you're talking about your life it's best to be as accurate as possible and not be over-optimistic. "You may or may not be right there," he scowled, "I think I can sort of recall your logic involving calculus, but I'm not sure if it was as I expected it to be. Be careful not to cross me".

Not everyone wants to live a long time. Even immortality has its drawbacks. Jonathan Swift described this in Gulliver's Travels. Being immortal is only fun if you are forever young. If you are forever old and forever a vegetable wholly dependant on the care of others, it's less fun.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struldbrug

So to get right to the point, there are 15.8 ways of living longer. I can also say this with certainty that the margin of error is plus or minus 3.8 ways.

Readers who are not arithmetically inclined will ask why 15.8 and why 3.8. It's my duty to explain my calculations. A quick Google search showed that the various options on living longer included 5, 10, 12, 14, 15, 25 and 30 ways. The average of these answers is 15.8. It might have been more conclusive if 15.8 was exactly divisible into 42. This magic number was what the HitchHikers Guide to the Galaxy stated was the ultimate answer to the ultimate questions of life, the universe and everything. But 15.8 isn't divisible into it, and there's nothing we can do about that.

We don't want to downgrade the quality of our lives by wasting time overanalyzing these answers so the average is quite acceptable for all practical purposes. My Google search for "number of ways to live longer"got 51,000,000 hits so I restricted my answers to those hits appearing on the first page.

The margin of error is also easy to calculate. I could only recall 10 ways to live longer. This means that I could therefore quite legitimately add the first two ways for a total of 12. How can I live longer if I couldn't again find the website that first interested me, or remember what the ways were if I wasn't methodical? So here are the top 12 reasons. Just do them to live long. Let the experts, somebody other than me, explain why numbers 3 to 12 are on the list.

1. Be organized and methodical so you don't lose things.
2. Have a good memory in case you fail the first way.
3. Have a positive attitude about life.
4. If it's not too late, ask your mother to have you before she is 25 years old.
5. Don't drink carbonated beverages. If you need caffeine, drink tea.
6. At least get as far as the first year in university.
7. Be careful not to have been a fat teenager.
8. Have close friends.
9. Your close friends have to be healthy too.
10. Walk at least 30 minutes daily.
11. Eat purple coloured fruit or foods. Be realistic - avoid grape flavoured Jello.
12. Have old relatives.

So that's it for this time. It's shorter and more easy to digest than the alter food and my other longer blogs. Even Mr. Blog is fairly happy. Thank you Walt Disney Studios.

I'll rant and I'll roar. Well maybe not, I'm Canadian.

2011-08-18T06:27:00.000-07:00

APOLOGY

Sorry. This blog is long but it has Jamaican content and discusses differences betweem the Canadian and Jamaican perspectives.

GENERAL STUFF

I might forget the meanings of this blog's Jamaican words once my brain is frozen again by the icy blasts back in Canada. So that's why I added some foot notes with definitions.

http://slideshare.net/Melanie.K/foot-notes

Yesterday I had some potential blog content but no camera so it counted for nothing. I even exited an un-air-conditioned coaster bus before it pulled away from Cross Roads. I did not want to cook inside it for an extended period until it was jammed full and ready to head off for Papine. Shunning a coaster ride and defying a doctor's wrath is not something I would have contemplated a few months ago.

MAYBE THERE'S A BLOG TOPIC COMING UP SOMETIME SOON?

But on Thursday I have my camera and by 8:30AM I have already taken six photos. I needed it because I had worked out a blog plan for today that could have cross-cultural implications. That's potentially controversial, however I am sure that Jamaicans and Canadians are pretty much the same, so if Canadians can take criticism then why not Jamaicans?

"Criticism" has a bad rap these days. You can criticize something both positively as well as negatively. People incorrectly only think negative comments when they hear the word criticism. Similarly the Newfoundland shows a positive take on the word "rant".

THE SPARK THAT TRIGGERED THE BLOG

Sometimes the meaning of word seems to be lost on both Canadians and Jamaicans. Here are some words from a DRF poster on one of the mediation area's filing cabinets. This particular poster appears a couple of pictures below.

Obviously, being in Jamaica, the poster has Jamaicans words and are not just imported out-of-context Canadian ones. That's important. As a local saying goes "Cock mout kill cock".

Guess who has an appointment with Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) or Scotchies soon?

That makes sense. Picture yourself in Jamaica wondering whether to have fish, goat, pork or pizza for supper. Unexpectedly you hear a rooster, the very one that woke you at 4 AM. You think "why not have chicken tonight?".

Back to the poster after that diversion. The first point is pretty obvious - you have to know the business. Then note the second point on keeping commitments and meeting deadlines to build credibility. To my mind I saw a huge example recently where I believe this did not happen.

But what if I am wrong? If so I am quite prepared to follow points 3 through 7 myself. If I am right, how may a third party, especially somebody from a different cultural background, help somebody else keep their commitments and meet the deadlines? Other team players may be relying on a person who does not meet deadlines or keep commitments.

What tools could be used to correct a breach of point 2? Do we have to do something really drastic like ranting ? Or is there some other solution that is less extreme?

But first here is a real-time diversion. Who says working in an office is uneventful? Two of the interns, Nalicia and Kerie, took pity on me photographing a mere poster so they insisted I take their photo.

Thank you young ladies.

But back to building credibility and discovering this blog's genesis. While trying to concentrate on my mediation department computer programming I was recently distracted for about a quarter of an hour by an animated discussion a few feet away between a CUSO-VSO volunteer and a local manager. Overhearing was unavoidable although my mind was otherwise trying to concentrate 100% on computer programming. I need quiet to program.

It seems that this volunteer had been unsuccessfully trying to arrange a meeting with the manager for two and a half months. The latter had been a no-show at all the hoped-for meetings.

Eventually the volunteer, who according to the American Psychological Association, may have lacked interpersonal cognitive problem-solving skills ( ICPS), asked the manager to pick the time that was most suitable. I'm just a humble retired auditor so I guess that I'm overwhelmed by the thought that the victim rather than the perpetrator can be made to sound bad. In the foot notes you can see the F word I avoided using in order to be politically correct.

However the volunteer's second approach of asking the manager to identify a suitable meeting time seemed like an approach that demonstrated a cognitive problem-solving skill at the personal level. So I would conclude that the volunteer did demonstrate ICPS. So any problem must lie elsewhere.

Leaving academics aside and returning to the real world. Again, nobody attended this last meeting except our non-ICPS volunteer. Five meetings in all had been scheduled for this same matter and nothing came of it.

Clearly, from a Canadian perspective, arranging another meeting would be a waste of time based on past history. Nobody is going to attend, whatever they say. What can be done? Various other techniques floated across my mind but their use tended to be restricted to police officers and the CIA so I discarded them, In any event, CUSO-VSO had not approved their use.

So what did that leave? Aha, there was at least one technique, ranting, left. It did not guarantee success but at least the aggrieved person could feel better at the end of it all. But what is ranting anyway?

RANTING

Ranting means venting your spleen or carrying on angrily for a period of time.

What's a spleen? I usually intersperse photographs to break up words, however squeamish readers probably do not want to see a real spleen. A spleen is a body part that looks worse than a small intestine. This is what the snail in the roller coaster blog was substituting for. Imagine being a snail and introduced at a party as a gastropod whose only claim to fame was that he or she did not look as ugly as a small intestine? Ouch.

What's a rant? You have to see and hear one to know one. What better person to rant than CBC Television's own Rick Mercer? He often includes rants in his TV shows . Here's a screen capture taken from his Jan 13, 2009 rant about people needing to be informed about the Canadian Parliament's activities. Politicians, whether Canadian or not, are usually appropriate targets for ranters.

Some may think that with or without training you can rant about anything - just go off the deep end and you're most of the way towards ranting successfully. But while there's a visceral level to ranting, it also requires much brainpower and spontaneous word crafting skills.

Unfortunately there is a niceness to Canadians. I had to work really hard to get a picture of RM looking really angry as he ranted. In spite of that, a RM's wide open mouth indicates a good rant in process. However I noted that he never once used the Jamaican swear word starting with "B" and ending with "T" during his ranting. We Canadians are so mild-mannered.

Below is a very much less nice person who also ranted. He appeared briefly in a news clip towards the end of the 2011 Oscar-winning movie "The King's Speech". Note the wide open mouth again. It's beginning to look like wide open mouths are fairly reliable indicators that a rant is going on.

And finally the Newfoundland people who not only rant, but they roar. Don't be alarmed. This is done in a musical sense and an unexpectedly friendly way. They are the same people who traded salt fish to Jamaica in the past. Jamaicans use the salt fish in the ackee and salt fish breakfasts that they love so much.

In return the Newfoundlanders acquired empty molasses-soaked rum barrels from Jamaicans. That does not sound like a good deal on the face of it, however the inventive Newfoundlanders extracted the molasses/rum sediment from the barrels on the way towards making a perfectly fine alcoholic beverage known as screech. Trust me, this is true. Would I lie to you? Have I let you down in the past? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newfoundland_Screech

I even lived in Newfoundland for almost two years. Would you doubt a Newfie, boy? ("Boy" rhymes with "my" or the Jamaican "bwoy"). Confession time - actually I'm not a real Newfie because my great grandparent's great grandparents were not Newfies so I can aspire no higher than ever being a CFA - a "Come From Away".

Looking at my watch, I see that the ranters, and ranters and roarers have had their 15 minutes of fame, so it's time to return our attention to criticism and people who may lack credibility.

CREDIBILITY

I think credibility is quite subjective. For all I know, the remainder of the staff believe that the manager in question is acceptably credible. However, if they are wrong and I am right, then it's our duty to help people who are credibility challenged. At least we should make them aware of their challenges.

I would like to think that if I ever accidentally forgot five appointments in a row that I would buy a diary and note important meetings in it. If I did not, I would expect that my boss, with a less than happy expression, might issue one for my use.

There's no point having criticism for its own sake, if it is possible to work a solution around the problem. You can get reminders in various forms these days. Thus reminders can be electronic like Winclock_Pro's program containing count downs.

But in case you are not always looking at your computer all day or carrying around a laptop, then why not go with something that looks pretty and has an appropriate message on its pen?

Image from homemadegorgeous.blogspot.com

AN ORGANIZATIONAL ALTERNATIVE TO RANTING

Before actively considering ranting and how to use it in this specific instance, here is an effective organizational technique that has worked for others. At the end of each work day, you can review what's coming up tomorrow, and think how you will meet your commitments, get your paperwork and files ready, communicate with others who will be impacted, etc.

In practice you would use some more heavy duty organization techniques further in advance, but this is just a simple example for illustration purposes, so please bear with me.

Ah organizational techniques! There's a lot of knowledge and information out there. You just need to cut it down in size to what you need in as far as possible. I saw this graphic in a Google search. The average person's brain just can't hold on to all the information in a large number of books - you have to summarize and prioritize.

http://www.turkishairlines.com/en-INT/skylife/2006/october/cityscope/a-quarter-century-in-the-world-of-books.aspx

So here's a brief organizational techniques example. Suppose I check my calendar, notes, personal assistant or whatever I use and discover that I have meetings tomorrow in Montego Bay, Jamaica and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

I don't panic . I just make sure I have the corporate jet reserved for me. If yes, I will next ensure that the people I am meeting know that I am coming. It would be embarrassing to burn thousands of liters of jet fuel to show up in Rio when the locals were all celebrating a public holiday. How would I explain that to my boss? Hmm, executive overview, there's another work-related tool.

But the strategy for being organized includes not being overburdened by books. To get organized you should only read something short and to the point, like this book that I have read. There may be other self-help books out there, but this one worked for me. I score 98% on management in-basket exercises.

But wait a minute, I volunteer at a public interest group that does not have a corporate jet. All I can do now is to see which, if any, of the two meetings I can attend, confirm I will be there for that meeting, and let the other attendees know that I will be present. For the meetings I can't attend I must immediately contact the other participants offering my sincere apologies.

No matter how sincere I sound, clearly I will have created a credibility gap with those who are going to be at the meeting. It is my responsibility to overcome that. Ah "responsibility" - another important word. I will have to be able to reassure people that I will in fact show up at the next one as opposed to leaving them hanging five times in a row, six times in a row, seven times in a row, etc.

CONCLUSION

Different cultures have different ways of looking at things or problems. Possibly the way to go is to have a three level approach. First analyze the problem to see if a non-threatening specific solution like a diary is possible. Second, if that does not work then try criticism in a positive, not negative manner, and third if all else fails then why not try a rant?

Deep down, I favor a rant instead of this rationalized level-headed stuff, but you know me - I'm Canadian. I am doomed to try and recommend the first two approaches, but if my partial Newfoundland side comes through then I will rant and I will even roar.

FURTHER STUDIES

If you are curious about rants you may see Internet videos of the ranters I identified . That's the best source because you have to see and hear rants - not just read about them.

I have an example worked up from the foot notes below where I have typed out a rant about a stepped on toe. Toe? Foot notes? There is a link. My best links are usually subconscious.

FOOT NOTES

Ackee - a Jamaican fruit that looks like scrambled egg when it is cooked, and is poisonous when picked at the wrong time -i.e. before it has burst open on the tree.

B********t -a very rude Jamaican word and is best left in a verbal context. By coincidence I heard the word used in public today feuding Camp Road street vendors. This was the first time I had ever heard it spoken angrily after being 16 months in Jamaica.

bwoy - is not an onomatopoeia because it is pronounced "by"- boy. I double checked the pronunciation by listening to this youtube video by Perfect (tadsrecords)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3GwsQvIggY

CBC - for non-Canadians it is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Cock- a rooster, think poultry.

"Cock mout kill cock" - the Jamaican equivalent of being hoisted by your own petard. Sharon Scott kindly provided me with this information.

Cod - see salt fish.

Doctor - a conductor who collects the fares on a coaster bus.

Gung-ho - enthusiastically positive about something. American slang.

Interpersonal cognitive problem-solving skills ( ICPS), lack thereof - frustrated. I was advised by Kristine in the youth department area that frustration is a word that the American Psychologists Association (APA) no longer uses. Strangely, when I searched for "frustration" in the APA's definitions I was referred to ICPS although the word "frustration" appears nowhere in it. Maybe it was hidden in a tag because the psychologists no longer want to be seen as using that "F" word?

Mout - mouth

Onomatopoeia (see rant below) - it sounds like some sort of large sea creature that gets confused with octopuses. Who knows? When did you last see one? But seriously it's a word that sounds like it is spelled. For example hiss, bang, splat.

Petard - a type of land mine used in the middle ages according to an on-line dictionary.

Rant - to continually shout and complain loudly. Angry amateurs might shout "You stood on my toe" and leave it at that. Professionals, however, embark on a loud rant. For example: "Clumsy idiots like you should not be allowed to wander unchecked through the streets without a leash! Medical care is expensive these days, you know! People who need glasses shouldn't be outside without them! Visits to hospital outpatients departments can take hours! Expensive new shoes shouldn't be wrecked by drunken, blind and clumsy fools like you! You couldn't tell an octopus from an onomatopoeia! We're going through a global recession and the recovery is not going to be helped if able members of the work force, like me, are crippled by drugged out, disoriented addicts like you!" And so on loudly for 5 to 10 minutes or until your vocabulary runs dry and your spleen is vented.

It's nothing personal of course - the rant is more for the benefit of the ranter letting off steam. If the rantee learns anything, then that's a bonus. That's why an organization skill technique is usually more effective. Although as a last resort, maybe all that will be left is the rant?

Salt fish - usually Newfoundland cod in Jamaica.

Scotchie's - a Jamaican jerk food restaurant specializing in meals like fried chicken, curried goat and stewed beef as well as side dishes that go with them like festival (donuts without sugar), yam, sweet potato, etc.

Screech - in Newfoundland you drink this alcoholic drink with a 40% alcohol content; elsewhere it's a type of scream.

Tautology - what an onomatopoeia would use to catch a repetition or a redundancy. But seriously they can slip into anybody's writing. For example I accidentally wrote "past history" in this blog. History is always in the past.

THE END - REALLY

Remember. Don't Forget.

Dragon Mountain Roller Coaster - Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada

2011-08-09T17:49:00.000-07:00

Jamaica blogging has been short-changed recently. Here's my excuse. I was back in Canada for a few weeks seeing the family, being useful and having adventures like the one below.

Before starting on about the adventure, I'll give examples of the three possible narrative approaches. It's all the same story, just different communication modes. But to break up the words here is a photo first.

You have to agree with me that the following picture looks serene and peaceful.

Here are three promised narrative approaches.

First there are my words where I try to be complicated and build up suspense. Next there are the interspersed pictures which convey a serene pastoral picture of a wonderful place that you could safely take your grandmother to. Finally there is a two minute long youtube video clip by silviomodolo that illustrates the adventure with moving pictures, clanging noises and screams. I think the clanging noises occur when the dragon monster's fillings banged together at the thought of chewing you up. But otherwise the video is just as serene and pastoral as the second approach.

After watching the video, probably your grandmother might politely decline your offer to share in the adventure. You might opt out too. For all I know your grandmother may be braver than you. Would I opt out? I don't know because I did not see the video until after my adventure. I had spent half an hour taking the occasional photo and watching the beast and trying to get a good photo angle. Me and the thing I looked at must have started bonding in a mechanical, serene, pastoral way. I would be good to it, and it would be good to me. All is well, as they say in JA.

This is the same picture but with a small brightly colored caterpillar clinging onto the top part of the loop. It's got to be a caterpillar, who in their right mind would be suspended upside down 50 feet off the ground?

And now the caterpillar is coming out of the loop. Hey wait - that's really people! Maybe somebody's grandmother was on it waving happily along with the other riders.

And a final point-and-shoot slightly zoomed photo as it passes by my vantage point.

It was time I felt to do it – something that I had procrastinated on for a number of years. Me and my mechanically bonded friend. The it that I was challenging was reputedly the largest steel one of its kind in the world. So right away that ruled out Moby Dick and King Kong who are not metallic. Because it was my first one, it was simply just an average-sized monster for me.

But I had a nagging suspicion about this it not really being the largest in the world. After all it wasn’t in California, the remainder of the USA, Europe or Japan. However it was nearly a mile long and about 185 feet high. That is big, if not gigantic. The size of the Loch Ness monster, "Nessie", pales in comparison. Later on, I calculated, as I am want to do,the whole circuit was about a mile long and took three minutes to complete, so on average the caterpillar was progressing along at a leisurely 20 mph (35 km/hr). No speeding tickets for it.

Nessie says "Och, I'm not that wee! This is just an old snap, we Scots could splurge on color photos too if we really wanted to."

Procrastination was actually advantageous for me. Some who had challenged much smaller monsters than mine in the 1980’s had died when the Flip Flap monster on Coney Island cracked their necks. There’s a time and place for everything. It is pointless to go adventuring and not return. My adventure was safe. I am here to write about it.

The Dragon Mountain roller coaster - the world's largest steel roller coaster, that also features more travel through tunnels - 1,163 feet - than any other coaster in the world. Here is the dragon head entrance on Dragon Mountain as photographed by SmugMug:

But back to original research. I took the ride with our daughter Nadine and her husband Eric. We were all cool in the underground station as we waited. Occasionally we would here screams from outside but that would obviously be from people on other rides, not caused by my friendly roller coaster buddy.

Then we were on after the previous riders had exited on the other side of cars. None of them looked particularly traumatized. Nor were there life jackets or parachutes under the seats which I also took to be a reassuring sign. There were no air sickness bags in the backs of the seats in front of you. The pull-over restraining devices seemed no worse than seat belts on an airplane. But I wasn't worried anyway because the roller coaster and I had already bonded.

Then the roller coaster slowly clanked its way up the incline. I thought to myself that it's not a crime to store potential energy - that's all it was doing. Up the incline, a snail blurred its way past the roller coaster. But me, my buddy and my human companions were still cool.

At the top of the incline there was a momentary lull. Then gravity took hold of my buddy the roller coaster. It started to roll downhill. Faster and faster of course, or should I say less slowly and less slowly for the benefit of nervous readers?

The initial interesting point along the route was at the first of the two pairs of inversions. An inversion is a fancy way of saying a vertical loop as seen in the blog's first photograph. The track moved up in front of our faces at a progressively slower rate as gravity tried unsuccessfully to stop us. For a brief instant the track was directly above us and out of sight and then it fell away in front of us as we gained speed again to leave the loop. And then we went almost immediately into the second inversion.

The other pair of inversions also came within the next two minutes. From time to time we passed through pitch black tunnels in between. The tunnels would have been good places to sneak in some Jamaican-style potholes. The jarring impact of potholes like that in the blackness would have been terrifying, but my friend is not into terror so there were none.

Fortunately this is not a Jamaican pothole, just a slightly bigger hole in a road:

After the four inversions, things were relatively calm as the roller coaster gradually coasted its way back to its starting point. A nice feature was the scenery along the track - lots of trees and greenery, very pastoral. It would not have been so pleasant staring downwards at concrete and crowds and looking across at another ride operating a few feet away. Now onto my third approach.

If words and static pictures are not as exciting as you'd like, then you can load silviomodolo's youtube link showing what this ride is like. It was uploaded to the Internet on Nov 2, 2008. Copy the link into your internet program's address bar.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uu3v0euBo9A

Only the sound track is slightly wrong, I never once heard the words "Is that all there is?", "Why are my feet higher than my head?", or "In Jamaica we have bigger potholes than this" and so on. Screams are part of a universal language and do not need comment. But this is a minor criticism - you watch videos mainly for the pictures, not for the sounds.

So that pretty well wrapped up my Canadian holiday adventure and Jamaica will start to feature again. Reasonably soon I will go on the new railway line in Jamaica where the cars are pretty similar in color to my friend the roller coaster's, however the tracks will be more horizontal, but that's their problem.

So to sum it up, it was fun, exciting and interesting. I would definitely go on a roller coaster again. Quite an experience - it was like an Imax movie but with the wind too. What more could you want?

Moneywise, if you plan to visit more than once, ask to obtain a photo ID card for $5 (2011 price) and then all your other trips on the roller coaster will be free for the remainder of the year. Later, when you arrive at the Dragon Mountain just tell my buddy that George sent you.

I used http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Mountain and Yahoo search as reference materials
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080417131704AAYS5Ca Thank you.

Blind Cricketers are for Real

2011-07-19T13:18:00.000-07:00

After the routine blog, except for me, I'm returning to dangerous territory again. Grumpy Blog will have to keep an eye on me.

I'm being deliberately vague on this particular anecdote. Sometime in the past my wife, her friend and I had a good laugh about blind cricketers applying for visas to visit another country. Obviously it was a scam and they were illegal immigrants in disguise. However it turns out that if those blind cricket players were the same blind cricketers as the ones as below, then it was quite legitimate.

Blind cricket does exist and it's alive and well in Jamaica as the article in today's Gleaner confirmed. How could I resist doing a blog on this when there is opportunity for cracking some jokes, but obviously not at the players' expense. At this stage I had not read the rules of blind cricket so I was still in the dark. Sorry, that was an unintentional joke.

Here comes the intentional joke after a tiny bit of scene setting for all those who have no idea what cricket is. I have left out a lot of details to save time and space so ardent cricket fans should go easy on me.

Essentially the wicket is to cricket what home base is to baseball. Similarly the bowler and the pitcher are one and the same. A divergence between cricket and baseball is that there's no three strikes in cricket and you're out. Cricket only has one strike and if you miss the ball and it hits the wicket then you are out.

But what happens if the ball would have hit the wicket but conveniently your legs got in the way? Can you escape being out - after all the ball did not hit the wicket? The answer is no because the bowler may seek confirmation from the umpire that the ball would have hit the wicket otherwise. The umpire is the person standing behind the bowler's wicket wearing the cap in the picture above.

Here is some potential business for the Dispute Resolution Foundation except that the cricket umpire's decision is meant to be final. But not always these days. Well after I stopped playing cricket, and only at the very highest level that I would never have reached, this is no longer true. There can be action replays captured by cameras.

Here's a situation that needs some dispute resolution although they are not wearing their regulation cricket clothing. The guy on the right is probably close enough for an informal cricket game, however the other one looks like he headed off to the cricket pitch but forgot to get completed dressed.

Sometimes there can be disputes between the bowler's opinion that the ball would have hypothetically hit the wicket if the legs had not been in the way, and the umpires view that it wouldn't have. In the normal sighted cricket the aggrieved bowler might rudely ask the umpire if he was blind or something. In a similar vein I thought it would be just as fair for a ripped-off blind bowler to ask the umpire whether the latter was sighted or something.

Unfortunately jokes that are a long time coming aren't as funny as the spontaneous ones. You may have missed that joke.

The rules of blind cricket are based on the standard cricket laws with some essential modifications. For example, some of the equipment is bigger to make it more visible, and the ball has bearings inside it to give it an audible feature for the completely blind blind player. On the audible side too, the bowler has to say "play" when he's throwing the ball - it would not be cricket (i.e. "proper") to sneakily send the ball through the air towards the wicket without warning.

Not all blind players are completely blind. Many blind people can see some things but presumably not as well as you or me - they are partially sighted.

This gentleman is blind too but probably does not play cricket.

I would like to thank my picture sources gleaner.com, activeplaces.com.au, http://www.transitgallery.ca/stevemazza.html, mossavi.wordsource.com

Steve Mazza is my nephew and created the disputing sculptures seen above. He is based in Hamilton, Ontario.

The Blog is good with my effort today - my jokes in a blind context must have been perfectly fine and not in bad taste.

A Weekend on Jamaican's North Shore

2011-07-18T17:17:00.000-07:00

On Saturday morning I traveled up with Delphine and Dominic to Jamaica’s north shore. Here are most of the places we visited either in words or pictures.

First we stopped at Harmony Hall just before Ocho Rios with its art gallery upstairs featuring local artists. Toscanini’s Restaurant is downstairs.

http://www.harmonyhall.com/Gallery/gallery.htm

After passing through some downpours we arrive at the Seville great house estate with its water wheel used for powering the machinery to grind sugar cane. The rain was still dripping a bit as we took photos.

The other side of the wheel showing the building that no longer had a roof, but had interesting Jamaican plants:

Photo from the Internet - the Great House was being renovated when we were there so we did not get in.

The Green Grotto Caves was the next stop. Underground disco parties were held there until recently. Now you get a well-lit passageway through two of the caves with handrails too. This is at Discovery Bay/Runaway Bay area and was used as a hiding place by escaping slaves. The trees at the entrance were huge and very interesting.

Dominic and Delphine at the helmet issue point at the start of the tour:

The disco area. The vibrations from the parties were starting to affect the stability of the limestone, so they were stopped.

The guide advised that this hole in the caves was pretty well in the same shape as Jamaica. True enough.

Next stop was Columbus Park right by the side of the main road to the west and within sight of the bauxite plant. It contains various old interesting machines that are a bit rusty as they are in the open air. A new restaurant is in the process of being built.

I'm not 100% sure - the next picture may be an old astrolabe.

After much sightseeing along the way we arrived at Montego Bay where we met up with Delphine’s friend Danielle in Montego Bay. Then we went to see the luminescent lagoon just to the east of Falmouth once it was dark. The luminescence is caused by microscopic sea creatures called dinoflagellates that shine when they are aggravated or disturbed. It's a good thing they are microscopic if they have this power to shoot out light.

They weren't shining brightly enough for my point and shoot camera, so all that remained after uploading to the computer was one photo of Delphine and Danielle.

http://www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/what-causes-bioluminescence--0863/

The above explains bio-luminescence that is a form of energy. Most creatures emit heat energy like the types of things human eat to acquire the energy, but some emit light energy instead. Seeing as none of my photos worked, I took one from the Rio Mar destination website at www.rmdestinationservices.com. It's in Puerto Rico that is not all that far from Jamaica and clearly has the same type of water favourable to the dinoflagellates.

The captain of the sightseeing boat encourages the adventurous passengers to jump overboard to stir up the shallow water. This causes the luminescence from the dinoflagellates to start in the disturbed area of the water although it fades away after a few seconds.

The luminescence was not as bright as some people remembered. For example, Delphine mentioned that once when she had water on her after a swim that she could see shiny points of light on her wet skin. As the boat was heading out you could see that the wake was glowing slightly. And at times when the boat had stopped in the darkness, I thought that somebody was playing a flashlight over the surface of the water. Based on some consultation with Varun and my own observations, the best viewing occurs as follows.

1) At least the previous day needs to have been sunny so that in a way the little creatures can, so to speak, recharge their batteries.

2) It is preferable that there is no recent rain that would affect the balance between the fresh and salt water boundary line. Also rain decreases the temperature of the water and may affect the creatures who prefer warm water

3) Pick a dark night with no moon for maximum visual effect from the water

4) See the luminescence before pollution eliminates it, for example Varun was concerned that dredging the harbour at nearby Falmouth - about a mile away, might affect the water quality and endanger the luminescent creatures that live in it.

We closed off the day with a delicious supper at the Montego Bay Yacht Club – Danielle is a member.

Next day went to the Doctors’ Cave beach in Montego Bay. It certainly had the softest nicest sand I recall for a long time and it is right in the middle of the Hip Strip. You wouldn’t expect so nice a beach right in the middle of a town. Currently admission is $450 Jamaican - about $5 Canadian.

After our swims at Doctors Cave beach it was about lunchtime so we headed towards a funky beach-side restaurant past the airport. But it was closed for a funeral, however I took a photo of the interestingly decorated outside wall before we headed off to the close-by Scotchies instead.

Don't worry, be happy

2011-07-12T18:27:00.000-07:00

I’m happy to say that I am around today although slightly tired on Monday from editing the blog very late on Sunday night. There’s no sign at all of the grumpy Blog yet so I can slip in some controversial thinking.

But first a late-breaking development on the happiness front. Bunty has steered me again in the right direction - you don't read or write happiness, you do it. This was the missing link for me. I had notes on a practical guide to happiness without realizing why the practical side was so important. Here are two yachts doing happiness at the Royal Hamilton Yacht Club where Bunty was on Wednesday:

Now I'll return to my previous notes that should lead back towards Bunty's revelation.

We can explore together various approaches to happiness. At least one will work for you. Also more importantly, we will see practical tools to make other people happy. As I mentioned on Sunday, Jamaica has rather a lot of murders each year. Possibly that number would be lower if there were more people here who were happier.

So let's start on our journey towards happiness. The United States Declaration of Independence provides clues. Happiness is not a "slam-dunk", in other words, not a sure thing. USA citizens may have certain inalienable rights such as life and liberty however there are no guarantees on happiness. They only have the inalienable right to pursue it. We will do better. We will achieve happiness.

Unfortunately there is a problem with happiness. Not everyone can be happy even if trying very, very hard. The Harvard academics did not tell you everything about its Happiness course. It's this. You cannot enroll unless you have a minor in calculus – not just high school calculus, not even college level calculus, but three challenging Ivy League university maths department calculus courses. Sorry. That’s the only way to understand happiness properly. You cannot have happiness without pain.

I emerged unscathed from that last paragraph. Undoubtedly Blog is still sound asleep or has his mind elsewhere. Here is some calculus in case you have escaped it in your life so far. If you truly want to continue your quest for happiness, you will have to learn calculus, whatever the odds are against you:

Do not feel smug if you think you can handle this little fellow. You should be aware that if you can beat this little guy, that he has many older and larger siblings that will come to his rescue, gang up on you, and make you sorry.

But good news readers. You can relax. I was only kidding about the calculus courses. Some more good news is that as a numbers person I don't relate that well to words, so what I write will be to the point and brief. I also do not handle numbers all that well, so not many of them either. That's enough confessions for one paragraph. No words, no numbers, no literacy?

For happiness, as with anything else, we should simultaneously think about both the big and the small picture. Galileo expressed this well when he said that the sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do. It should make you happy to know that. In the big scheme of things we are all small, like grapes, so good things can come our way to make us happy.

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/g/galileogal106899.html

Happiness can be real in total although unreal in its parts, although that's no problem. Neils Bohr, who provided fundamental thinking on the atomic structure and quantum mechanics, tells us that everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. But do not worry about that. You can let happiness be real for you and enjoy it without over-analyzing it. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/n/niels_bohr.html

For a paragraph, we can try an alternative non-scientific approach to find happiness. Sit in a comfortable chair or lie down. Read these instructions first and then close your eyes. Let your arms and legs go limp. Relax and say to yourself "Wow, am I am ever so lucky". This should cause a warm glow of happiness to engulf you and you will feel good because you are happy.

More of us should consider ourselves lucky. Lou Gehrig, the famous New York Yankees baseball player, should inspire us. He had an incurable fatal disease while he was still playing baseball. At his retirement celebration that filled the 60,000 seat Yankee Stadium he still said that he was the luckiest man on the face of this earth. We are all luckier than him, so be happy.

Being happy does not necessarily mean that you have to suspend disbelief and look at the world through Pollyanna glasses. I was not convinced by “authentic happiness” in http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/Default.aspx . To me, the "authentic" in the "authentic happiness" added no more meaning to happiness than adding the adjective "wet" to "water".

Happiness has been extensively studied scientifically in the monumental Harvard study directed by George Vaillant. It is currently in its 70th year. It's technique was to document the major life milestones of its 200+ subjects and later correlate them to a series of surveys conducted over a period of time.

Essentially the surveys asked the subjects whether if they could live their lives all over again, to whom would they turn for advice on doing things differently. The really happy people of course would respond that they would not need to do so. Over time as the subjects passed through their major life milestones, the study accumulated information that could be matched up to the happiness answers.

This old English milestone came from Brian Murless. It was in Ilchester. Would there be milestones on the road to happiness?

Here's a hypothetical example on the study's methodology . Instead of survey question asking if their pets made them happy, the study would count up the number of happy subjects and then compare that to how many had pets to see if there was a correlation - whether pets contributed to happiness, or not.

If absolutely everybody who had a pet was happy, then you could possibly say that you needed a pet to be happy. Then change possibly to probably if all the non-pet owners were unhappy.

The hypothesis about pets might not be true if you had a pet as shown in the picture below who hung around all day, smoked, drank liquor and lost money at cards.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/06/what-makes-us-happy/7439/

The study concluded that there are seven factors for a happy life. They are mature adaptations, education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, and healthy weight.

Mature adaptions are the fourth and final stage in the key adaptions process. Essentially you can look at adaptions like your way to play better at cards.

Sometimes you are dealt a bad hand - you were given cards you didn't want if you needed to win. However,depending on your technique, which is basically your adaptions process that evolved over time, you could minimize your problems, and possibly even reach a happy outcome.

Above, you saw the CUSO-VSO amateurs playing, France, George, Alan and Delphine in a photo taken by Dominic Ali. And now here are the professionals.

Interestingly, I had inadvertently zeroed right in on the key adaptability factor when I hypothesized the skiing on the Jamaican Blue Mountain example in the first happiness blog.

To encourage you to read the full article referred to in the link above, there were some quite unexpected findings. For example, physical exercise at college paid back in mental health, not physical health, at a later age. Mental concerns at an earlier age had a dramatic effect on physical health in later life. This occurred because depressed people would be less likely to take care of themselves, get help or advice from friends and family, or go to see a doctor.

A score of four out of the seven factors is the pass mark and gives you good odds on a well-lived, presumably happy, life that will see you become an octogenarian. How many of the dogs above would reach the canine equivalent of 80 years? Maybe one might squeak through if he or she went to obedience school?

I learn every day. Did you know for example that there is no such thing as happiness in psychology? It's elaborately named "subjective well-being".

And the overall number one piece of advice from the study's director: “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.” Not only is it a good-feeling correct answer, but also a conclusion backed up by 70 years of exhaustive study. Remember this, and be on your way to happiness.

Above is a photo from the Port Dalhousie, Ontario beach.

Here is some more input on happiness from a different source - not a scientist, but the French romantic novel author Aurore Dupin, later baronne Dudevant, more commonly known as George Sand.

http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1464.George_Sand

"One is happy as a result of one's own efforts once one knows the necessary ingredients of happiness: simple tastes, a certain degree of courage, self denial to a point, love of work, and above all, a clear conscience."

Hers was another view on happiness, and there very many from other people to. George Sand's theory indirectly said that you have to "do" happiness and not passively wait for it to find you.

Before cutting back on research, I succumbed to temptation and looked at an Internet page stating that the Danes were the happiest people in the world. The Danes were quite inventive in achieving happiness, although I don't recommend following their three step technique unless you are also Danish.

Step 1 - Be the world's worst pessimist.
Step 2 - Review what happened later to you to see that it wasn't anywhere as bad as you feared.
Step 3 - Be so relieved you become the world's happiest person.

Other happy country news was that two Caribbean countries with the letter "a" in their names were in the top 20 happy countries. I won't say who they were so that by mistake you become unhappy if you don't live in one of them.

Logically it should have no effect on your own happiness level because happiness is an individual quality. However possibly negatively, I for one could find it extremely annoying, irritating, etc if the whole country except for me was deliriously happy. I would be quite unhappy. My only satisfaction would be knowing that at least I brought down the unbearably happy country's average happiness ratio. Am I right? Unfortunately deeper thought shows not so.

You can't fight happiness. Realistically if I lived in a very happy country then many of the Harvard study's seven factors would work against me. Ouch! 1) My wife would likely be happy and that would rub off on me in a stable relationship, 2) There would be few bars and pubs because everyone was already happy and didn't need booze, so I couldn't abuse alcohol all that easily, 3) I would have no need to smoke to relax because everyone would be pretty laid back anyway, and so on. I would be well on the way to the score of 4 to get a pass mark. So realistically, I would likely be happy too. You can't escape happiness.

Another thought, my latest blog title reminded me about a very happy song. So go out and buy the Cocktail movie soundtrack and listen to "Bobby" McFerrin's song "Don't Worry be happy" a few times in a row. You are guaranteed to become happy.

Here's a final thought. I had difficulty writing this blog when I was not in a happy mood - it was like the happiness reached outwards from the words and into real life. Happiness has more power than you expect. Don't fight it - you can't win.

I trust I have given you practical tools to help you move towards happiness. Go out and do happiness. Perhaps the singer Cat Steven's words will remind you that "you're only dancing on this earth for a short while". There's no point being unhappy.

http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Oh-Very-Young-lyrics-Cat-Stevens/BE96C316CEC02DAD482569BA000E09E5

Readers may be interested in Blog and me. Now you can visualize us better.

Here's a Blog look-alike on the left .

A George image on the right.

No severe reactions from Blog today, so maybe my thoughts were not that far off the mark.

To close this off. In a way the internet is like Isaac Newton's vast ocean of knowledge. I have picked up an occasional smoother pebble here or a prettier looking shell there. This was purely to suit my own purposes. Land lubbers may say that they couldn't see the forest for the trees, but I perfectly exemplify the nautical types who can't see the ocean for the shells and pebbles.

Scarily, I even subconsciously followed my own advice today.

Don't be afraid to be happy.

Afraid of Happiness? You're not alone.

2011-07-11T11:38:00.000-07:00

"Afraid of happiness? You're not alone". caught my attention in the Globe and Mail this morning. I see the Blog, defender of the blog's integrity, stirring restively in the corner, I better be careful about what I write. I know this is leading into a definition of happiness because if you don't know what happiness is, then how can you be afraid of it.

I should stop reading the newspapers as I keep getting side-tracked by non-Jamaican topics. However possibly there could be a Jamaican angle here. The Jamaican murder rate is high and we cannot blame happy people for all of them.

This is a more relevant thought than my original one that you would not be happy if you come to Jamaica for winter sports. For example, don't waste your time going to the 7000 feet high Blue Mountain peak even in December and waiting for snow to ski on. It's not going to happen. Adapt and move on.

Or, if you cannot adapt all on your own then maybe Jamaicans might need a university course on how to be happy. This is what they do at Harvard University in the USA, Most Jamaicans would read this news in complete disbelief. As I slowly get immersed in the Jamaican culture I start to wonder a lot too.

Who knew you had to take classes to be happy, and at an expensive ivy league university as well. I had heard the expression that school days are the happiest days of your life. But a course from a heavy hitting major university might make this unusual claim seem more close to the truth than I expected it would be.

Let's see what the paper reported in Sarah Hampson's article in this Monday's Globe and Mail

"Mr. Achor, who helped teach and design the famed happiness course at Harvard, acknowledges that many people feel they don’t deserve to be happy when there’s so much suffering in the world. But shrewdly, he changes the logic. It’s not that you have to serve the poor to be happy. It’s that you have to allow yourself to be happy first, because that’s how you can be of most help.

“You’re not making their (the poor people's) lives any better by being unhappy,” he explains in an interview. “In fact, you’re decreasing your ability to create a more positive world, which would help them as well. It actually dishonours other people’s suffering when we don’t celebrate the meaningful and happy parts of our lives, because that’s the part that gives us hope – that, in the midst of suffering, we can make a better world. But if the people experiencing a better world are not cognizant of it, then it eliminates hope.”

Welcome to the revolution, she concluded.

This makes sense, I guess, but taking a course and being happy are not necessarily the same thing. So I researched more. I am not 100% sure if the courses below and above are the same. The one below is "Positive Psychology" reported in the Boston Globe in March 2006 and had 855 students. I am not sure but the "how to be happy" information may have been a component of this course; not a complete course on its own.

If you can achieve happiness without external aids, then you need read no further. But if you do need help, then it could be as worthwhile using scientific methods than not. If so far in your life you have not achieved happiness, then why not try a different approach?

Surprisingly enough, famous scientists who have shaped the way we look at the world, made learned comments primarily about happiness rather than quantum theory, planetary rotation, evolution of the species and the concept of atoms to name a few subjects that have scared non-scientifically minded students.

Who knew? Take this quote from Sir Isaac Newton that he might have made if he had visited the Time 'n' Place resort at Falmouth, Jamaica, but instead he had to settle for somewhere less scenic, and probably colder too if he was in Britain at the time.

"I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

A shadow appeared over the computer screen. Without looking around I knew it was Blog come to tell me something. Our communication is a two way street - it tells and I listen. "You would be thinking of winding this blog up now for the day? Surely, you can't define the whole gamut of human happiness in one evening's work? You know too how grumpy I will be tomorrow if I don't get a good night's sleep".

I looked at my watch. It was time to go to bed.

Future Planning

2011-07-09T19:57:00.000-07:00

Sometimes everything planned falls through and nothing is accomplished. This is the time to revise plans and think about the future.

I thought I'd go swimming today, but a thunderstorm or two came along and nixed that idea. Staying indoors and doing something on the computer was always a possibility but the Internet service tends to be down on Saturday afternoons, like it was today. Oh well, a movie in the evening, the latest Transformers, could be good, but it was sold out before I got there. I should have planned that better.

There are a number of possible blog articles in the pipeline that need just a little bit of upfront planning, and help from other people, to turn them into reality. I've listed them not in any particular order but just as an aide-memoir for me. I think aide-memoir is the French word for a handkerchief with a knot. The knot acts as reminder that something needs to be done. In the Kleenex or paper tissue age, I guess we just don't remember things anymore.

1)

The luminescent lagoon east of Falmouth on Jamaica's north shore along with its many heritage buildings. I need help in identifying reasonably priced accommodation close by and hope to travel up on July 17th & 18th. One of these pictures I got from the Gleaner and one from the Glistening Waters tour site itself.

2)

The newly re-opened Jamaican railway line that Wikipedia does not yet say is running again. It gives you a one hour train ride for about $1 Canadian. This is a commuter train heading towards Kingston so its direction of travel is not helpful to me because I live in Kingston. It only runs on weekdays.

This train runs between Charlemont and Spanish Town and I have a feeling that there is an unidentified train that runs from Charlemont just after 4:30PM. Any information on this would be much appreciated. I would hate to get the 3:30 PM train out from Spanish Town and get stranded in Charlemont with nothing to do until the 5:30 AM train the next day. I've never actually been to Charlemont so it could be a very fine place near the bauxite plant in Ewarton. I suspect there would be route taxis available though, so there would be no need for me to panic.

Here is the Jamaican train before it had a nice exterior paint job, had the interiors fixed up a little bit, and got new wheels. It looks very presentable now and is painted in Jamaican flag colors.

3)

My dentist is a Jamaican army soldier who practices dentistry in the evenings and weekends. I am sure there is an interesting story here once I ask her permission and so some research. How many full-time Canadian soldiers also work as dentists outside the military?

4)

Bluefields Bay just came to my attention this evening. It's quite a distance from Kingston on the south shore past Black River. It has a fine beach and close by is the Peter Tosh mausoleum that apparently is worth visiting. You are less likely to be pressured as a visitor than at other similar places; maybe because it is fairly remote. I've driven by it on the rush back to Kingston, however there is no doubt that it is pretty as the photo below taken by a Bluefields Bay resort indicates.

5)

MountAmbrim, Westmoreland, classical music concerts by established concert musicians from outside Jamaica and arranged by a Doctor Gruhlke. He is an ophthalmologist and gave free glaucoma tests to Jamaicans back in the 1960's. The location is likely to be somewhere close to BlueFields Bay so I might be able to combine them into one trip.

6)

Tin grinners - people who have had orthodontal work done here. I saw the mobile clinic bus drive by me once and wonder just what on earth a tin grinner was.

7)

International Cricket game - just down the road from my work at Sabina Park but they tend to play sporadically and during the working week. My motivation is low because I played cricket at school. George Bernard Shaw also once said something to the effect that cricket was a game invented to give the English, a race of heathen non-believers, some idea of what eternity was like.

8)

Edit the recent office photos blog and makes helpful suggestions on cutting down the paper burden and increasing productivity. This falls directly into the building organizational capacity mandate that CUSO-VSO volunteers have.

Astute readers will note that today there was no confrontation between me and my alter-ego, the Blog. I often need the Blog to fine-tune or provide creativity. Today was simply an accountant's style to-do list. Therefore it was reasonably boring and I could not mess up. I was able to complete it without troubling the Blog's sensitivities.

The Blog remained outwardly sleeping, but inwardly it is perpetually alert in case my thinking ends in a ditch or over a Blue Mountain precipice, figuratively speaking.

An afternoon at Dispute Resolution Foundation (DRF)

2011-07-07T14:18:00.000-07:00

Here is the Dispute Resolution Foundation (DRF) headquarters at 5 Camp Road in Kingston.

This is mainly a pictorial blog taken on a Thursday afternoon showing a cross-section of the staff. Because photos were taken during office hours the comments will be more work-related than social.

Note that the building is called the Peace Centre, but because the sign is parallel to Camp Road it is easy to miss, unlike the Lay Magistrates Association sign.

This second picture shows less of the building, but you see an old guard tower for the adjoining prisons and detention centres.

Devon ('Wall) is at his computer working on the mediation and alternative dispute resolution database.

Conroy Daley, one of the Supreme Court mediators, after he had finished a mediation at Camp Road.

Lloyd who keeps the parking lot from becoming too dusty.

George (me), CUSO-VSO volunteer, in a photo taken by Sasheika. Thank you Sasheika.

Terry of knowledge management:

Traceann in the youth department.

Leon, ditto.Jerome and the just-passing-by Jodean.

Jerome (before Jodean
appeared on the scene)
next to the machine
That is always serene.

Janice doing finances.

Helen, CUSO-VSO volunteer in Human Resources, and Mike closest to the camera. Furthest from the camera you can see part of CUSO-VSO Finance volunteer Keith Forsythe's head.

Karen, the CEO's executive administrative assistant.

Noreth and Kristen-Kae in Noreth's office in the mediation department.

Montana and Vivienne at Jodean's desk that she had temporarily vacated to be on a photo shoot with Jerome (see above).

Abdi, CUSO-VSO volunteer in Monitoring & Evaluation, at his desk with the interesting posters behind him.

Carol, CUSO-VSO volunteer, in knowledge management.

Sasheika and Dimitri helping Terry in the knowledge management area.

Vivienne passing through, Kadine and Lydia in the youth department.

Not everyone is in this posting, however some of the other people can be found in the soccer blogs and Dispute Resolution Day blog.

Please let me know if you work at DRF and would like a photo of you at Camp Road to be added over the next few days. I need to have my camera on me for this offer to be binding.

Stop giving numbers a bad name

2011-07-06T18:49:00.000-07:00

People are giving numbers a bad name.

As a numbers guy I was completely shocked to read that Toronto’s Bathurst subway station was the third most romantic subway stop in Canada - according to a Craig's List survey reported in the Toronto Star newspaper on July 5, 2011. An interviewed subway user, Jason Palmer pictured below, essentially agrees with my point of view.

I have been through Bathurst subway station by train. I have even got on or off trains there in the past. Maybe it’s a defect in my character that I never once gushed “How romantic”, or “Stop the train I want to get married”.

http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1019545--bathurst-ttc-station-3rd-most-romantic-in-country-craigslist

Numbers guys by definition have brains. You have to give us credit. You would never hear us saying to our better halves.

Dear, you may pick one of these two destinations for our summer holidays.

1) A municipality called Venice in Italy that has a water problem,

Call in the plumbers! Photo from Beanland-Glenn.

2) Toronto's Bathurst subway station, one of the top three most romantic subway stops in Canada.

Other guys may note that I spun the station ranking a little bit without saying anything untrue. I downplayed Venice a bit for a numbers reason because the number of dollars to get to Venice from Toronto is very much greater than the number of dollars needed to get to the Bathurst subway station, especially if you already live in Toronto.

That's numbers for you - very utilitarian. Romance and beauty are elsewhere. A quick look at travel guides would let you know that sensible people do not make their decisions based on numbers.

Not using numbers in the right places would have resulted in what might have been eminently forgettable poems. Fortunately the poets in question edited out the numbers before publishing and the rest is history.

First from Great Britain we have this draft poem.

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills

When all at once I saw 9, 126,

Actually more probably 9,874 golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

http://www.reelyredd.com/1107ww-daffodils.htm

Later on William Wordsworth suggested that he may have seen 10,000 daffodils at a glance, but then he was a poet. I can’t write poetry, so what could he know about numbers?

Or closer to home in Canada we never read:

On a Christmas Day we were mushing away over the Dawson Trail

Talk of your cold! It felt like -70, or -80 with the wind chill factor.

(It was a dry cold; so in a way it did not feel all that bad for Canadians.)

If our eyes we’d close, then the lashes froze till sometimes we couldn’t see;

It wasn’t much fun, but the only one to whimper was Sam McGee.

http://thewanderinghermit.com/x-poetry/sammcgee.htm

But Robert Service later saw the light and changed the wording. He chose to write poetry and not a weather report.

So really, people, numbers have their place and words have theirs. Even though with multimedia presentations we can assist the words by bringing in graphics as well. The ancient Egyptians went the graphics route a long, long time ago and we are catching up a few thousand years later.

Here are some sample photos where you can decide for yourself if numbers are the appropriate yardstick.

Just yesterday six blurry Jamaican policemen told my bus driver to take another route. Was this photo brought to you by the number six?

Trust me on this that there are 3,174,438 Lignum Vitae blooms (the bluer ones) in this picture and only 47,661 Poinciana blooms (the redder ones). I like big numbers so that's why I took this photo. True or false?

There’s a place for numbers and utilitarianism and a place for words, beauty and romance. I never took a photo of the Bathurst subway station, although others have. It really destroys numbers people's credibility when those who do not know attribute romance to mere numbers. They implicitly make fun of us numbers people. Numbers people are people too. We know when, and when not to, use numbers.

However, let's not knock the Bathurst subway station. If it weren't there we would have to either get off the subway at Christie station to the west or Spadina station to the east. Then we would have to walk back along Bloor to get to Bathurst Street. That's at least an extra 924 paces that we'd have to make. Not that it would matter if our hearts were lightly traipsing free of care to meet our special person.

Diverted on the JUTC 66 bus

2011-07-05T20:00:00.001-07:00

Today the 66 bus was diverted by a police roadblock on Old Hope Road just before Windsor Road. I took two photographs from the trip that were not blurry or had specks on them. Here they are.

The first photo is of a really beautify Poinciana tree that the bus drove past on a residential street that is not on the regular 66 route.

The other is of the inside of the bus with its air conditioning and impressive stereo system. One day I will experiment with sound bites and incorporate them in a blog.

The purple Lignum Vitae blossoms are back out again and they will be photo'd another day when there isn't dirt on the camera lens. The police who sent us on our diversion were a bit blurry so they do not appear either.

In case of confusion, I was on the JUTC bus route 66 and not on Route 66 that is something else.

But one day Bunty and I will be on route 66 that passes close to or goes through Claremont, California where Andrew and Vivien are. Now my cell phone has a 909 area code in it! Does yours?

Running with chopped meat, potatoes and sometimes vegetables

2011-07-04T17:34:00.000-07:00

Jamaica is an exciting place. Both James Bond and George Hamilton had been on assignment there. One of the two was moving carefully around a Liguanea apartment. All of a sudden there was a muffled thud. Quite close by. Where nobody was meant to be.

George recalled that shortly before he had put a 1/2 gallon plastic bottle of grapefruit juice on top of the fridge. It had dislodged the ice in the roof of the icebox. A few pounds of ice fell a few inches in the icebox and created the intriguing noise, muffled by the fridge door.

"Cut, cut, cut" screamed the blog as it jumped out from its director's chair. "It's time for me to take over again. Readers want travel and facts, not fiction and housework".

"As a concession I will let you keep the title, but the rest is mine. You can put that in your alternative dispute resolution pipe and smoke it. Don't bother trying to mediate your way out of this one." I had never heard such an angry blog before.

The facts and nothing but the facts so help me God.

The Hash House Harriers originated in Kuala Lumpur, Malaya, in 1938. Its first members were British colonial officers and expatriates and they did their "hashing", basically running or whatever they could manage, on Mondays to work off the excesses of the previous weekend.

So we all know roughly what it looks like, the "Hash House" is the small building in the middle next to the large field; it's really old so more properly it should have been in a black and white photo.

So this first hashers group got off to a promising start. The point form constitution below will tell you more about them and their values. All of a sudden, after a few months, a sleeping bureaucrat woke up. He ruled that they were a group and as such had to follow certain legal requirements.

Two requirements in particular proved very challenging to the original hashers who were unaccustomed to complex legalities and deep thought. In spite of that they were "good sports" and model citizens, so they complied.

The group needed a name and a constitution. Most of the original hashers were bachelors and were billeted in the Selangor Club Annex, You might have expected a name like the Selangor Club Annex Amateur Athletic Association - the SCAAAA. But they could have been teased for that, so they didn't - for example, imagine the shame if your friends taunted you with "Ha! Ha! You're a Scaaaa!".

So they picked on an attribute of the said Selangor Club Annex and went with that instead. It seems that this club had really boring and monotonous food. You could visualize the food's quality from this imaginary conversation at its probably greasy-spoon-like cafeteria.

"Excuse me cook, is this stew?"
"No soldier. Run of the mill army scum like you don't deserve real stew. That's hash."

I guess they got hash almost everyday and that's why they called the Selangor Club Annex, the "Hash House". The Harrier part of the name came from an old English cross country hounds and hares events. The unlucky hare got chased by the hounds and harriers across the English fields and meadows.

The Hash House people must have liked the sound of stringing three "H" nouns together so they settled on "harriers". How they proceeded through the countryside probably did not bear much resemblance to real harriers chasing real hares.

And here is the constitution that is a worthy rebuttal to beer & spirit killers and officious officials everywhere:

- To promote physical fitness among our members.

- To get rid of weekend hangovers.

- To acquire a good thirst and to satisfy it in beer.

- To persuade the older members that they are not as old as they feel.

You patient readers have absorbed enough history for today, so back to Jamaica in the here and now.

Here are two random photos of members waiting for the hash circle prior to the start of the hash at the Golden River Inn - Farm and Apiary. It's about an hour from Kingston, Jamaica. Hashers are dedicated athletes and are not scared off by a little rain.

And not to forget the source of nutrition to reward them on their return from the jungle. I must remember to take photos of all the beer coolers on my next trip. This means I must bring along my wide angle lens. This photo will prove that the particular hash club is strictly adhering to the mandates of the third article in the Hasher's constitution.

Not that far down the trail we came to the bees, but they were all sleeping or doing other important bee things so they did not bother us. And vice versa, on the bothering angle.

You can see the wetness on the leaves. I had no photos of the slippery wetness of the trail as I was trying diligently not to fall forward flat on my nose, or backwards onto my rear end. Basically one hand held my umbrella and one held the walking stick. There was no hand left over to hold a camera or prevent falls.

Pineapples in Jamaica do not grow in cans or in supermarkets like in Canada.

Impatiens grows naturally in Jamaica.

It's all very lush and green in Jamaica as you can see, and the rain has something to do with that up in the hills. It probably does not rain on the beaches, especially in Hellshire. I must check with the tourist bureau on that one.

Now it's time to wind things up for the day. You get thirsty in the tropical heat so I cracked and had two cups of icebox ice dislodger to keep me from being dehydrated.

Observant readers may ask about the title. This is meant to be a crossword puzzle type clue avoiding the implication that there was anything in this blog to do with hallucinogenic plants. It combines the harrier component "running" with the hash part "chopped meat, potatoes and sometimes vegetables" component. The blog let me retain it so I would have to explain my way out of it. And I did, I think.

Research
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_House_Harriers and http://www.thefreedictionary.com/hash

Does your bleug bite?

2011-07-02T18:26:00.000-07:00

Sometimes blogs don't write themselves, so it's up to me to string some letters and maybe even words, together. If really desperate I have to use the letters to create new words. Somebody has to do it because otherwise our language would have no words. Words have not existed for ever and the language needs to evolve. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

I trust that "bleug" is not an incredibly rude word in French or German, because in reality it's just an Inspector Clouseau-ism. You are reading a bleug right now. If you are still at a loss, bleug is to blog, what deug is to dog.

Once again my better half Bunty was right, you can just see too many caterpillars. I only saw this one particular caterpillar in real life, but in an attempt to identify it I looked at dozens of pictures of Jamaican caterpillars on-line. I did not find it, but after a while I did start to feel myself getting grossed out. It's not an excuse that caterpillars evolve into beautiful butterflies.

Yellow and black is meant to be a danger sign in bugs. True enough, no birds chose to zero in on this easily visible one. Also, a cat walked by and showed not an ounce of curiosity.

Fortunately the picture is slightly blurry which eases the visual impact.

Now to get as far away as possible from the previous image, here is the flower of the day. I bet if I researched what its real name was I would be quite comfortable scanning through dozens of non-buggy Jamaican plants on line.

I bet you did not think that tax offices are interesting, and this one on Old Hope Road does not have great curb appeal. Interestingly though, you can pay your speeding tickets at the Jamaican Inland Revenue offices. But the really most interesting thing that I heard the other night was that you get the best deal if you pay your traffic tickets in court.

It seems to be something like the way the legislation is drafted, the courts may legally charge you up to the amount of the ticket but generally they don't, so you get about a 10% to 15% discount. Now, if only your lawyer's fees were less than this discount, then you would be ahead of the game.

This is all academic. Most Jamaicans don't pay their tickets anywhere, whatever the deal. The Gleaner reported not that long ago that there are currently about 400,000 outstanding Jamaican tickets.

You can see my theme. I was desperately short of ideas so I took some photos, not as many as I should have, and hoped I could use them later.

This Internet photo below from the Lascaux Caves in France is my personal reminder to always take my camera with me. In retrospect, the blog could have created a really meaningful blog out of it and the crowds of graduating primary school children on Camp Road. Unfortunately, this was one of the days that I did not have my camera. The children wore really cute little red triangles around their necks that I assume symbolized graduation gowns. The triangles were about the size of normal linen napkins that you might see at a fancy restaurants in Canada.

Here is my personal reminder for me to always take my camera. Nobody expects the unexpected.

The theme of the blog, that did not happen, was going to be as follows. Electronic age children who could not put their thoughts into language on a writing medium would have a real problem the day their batteries died or the electricity ran out. Far fetched maybe, but not impossible.

Then I would say that they would have been less advanced than early humans who drew pictures on cave walls. However, whoever drew these pictures thousands of years ago was an incredibly gifted artist. Not many of us could draw like this. In a world with no electricity we would not be able to side-step the issue by going the cut-and-paste route on our computers.

So the bleug is coming near to its end. The star of the Pink Panther series with his immaculately clean rain coat and "deug" fame, as contrasted to Columbo's immaculately unclean coat and no noticeable accent, would agree on this. The latter's actor, Peter Falk, passed away recently.

They obviously do not use the same dry cleaner. You can see Inspector Clousseau's coat if you Google-search "Does your blog bite". Sorry, a typo occurred, blog should of course be dog. Or if you choose not to, it's below.

Thanks to these two sites for the use of their photos - Superslice.com and Pictorialpress.com.

You would be too hot wearing a raincoat in Jamaica so here are some coat-less CUSO-VSO volunteers - Helen Schneiderman and Carol Leung, along with Varun Baker (to the right as you look at the photo) at the local office on Ruthven Street.

So now I am at the stage of wondering if my alter-ego, the blog, will come roaring in from stage-right and painlessly work out a great closing paragraph for me. No sign of it yet. It's letting me down. If I were Prince William I could afford to pay for a full time assistant. I wonder if at some time in the future the prince's outerwear will become a reigncoat. But I'm not rich so the blog and I will remain fairly inseparable, except when I need it.

I almost forgot. It was a major public holiday in Canada but not in Jamaica yesterday. Luckily it was business as usual in Jamaica. Otherwise, I might not have been able to buy this super red shirt at the last moment to wear at the Canada Day celebration supper at the Chez Maria restaurant. Uncharitable readers might think that it was a good thing it was dark, however that is not being sensitive to Canadian feelings of nationalism.

Time for shut eye, or as I could more formally and longly say "Good not-eyes-open-time". Or, how about more shortly announcing "Good n-eyes-0-t"? That still a bit lengthy so I will chop it down to "Good n-eye-t", or drop those hyphens to arrive at "Good neyt", and that's my final offer. I really do need to go to sleeep, a long one.

Jamaican School Crossing Guards

2011-06-23T18:47:00.000-07:00

Speaking for myself, I think it's very unlikely that I would have written a blog about school crossing guards. But you know how it works, often the blog takes over and writes itself.

I can head down to my work at DRF on Camp Road using four different bus routes, so I rarely am on Marescaux Road. Going that route would have meant two things. Firstly I would have been on a number 78 bus and have had to stand the whole way down Old Hope Road to Cross Roads; and secondly, I would have had to walk the furthest distance down Caledonia Road and Camp Road to get to work once I got off the bus.

Being on a city bus in Kingston is a pretty safe way to travel because you tend to be in a large vehicle, like one of the big yellow guys above. If there is a collision, unless you run into a cement truck or vice versa, you're pretty secure on a JUTC (I believe it stands for Jamaican Urban Transit Commission, so you can see why people prefer to say JUTC) bus.

The world becomes unsafer and unsafer as you travel on smaller vehicles like coasters, or the even smaller route taxis. This is just a generalization of course, because one friendly route taxi driver, whose name I forgot to ask, can only be classified as the safest driver you would ever meet whose hands never touched the steering wheel. I forget how he made the 90 degree turn from North Street onto Camp Road, but maybe he used his hands for those few seconds.

We can conclude that being in a vehicle is relatively safe, and the bigger the better. But then if you are a pedestrian, you are not quite as safe, so you must take very much more care. Pedestrians increase their chances of living longer by staying completely off the roads. They must remain on the sidewalks as much as possible. Even being on the sidewalks is no sure guarantee of personal health and long life. In Canada you are meant to walk facing traffic if there are no sidewalks, whereas in Jamaica you are recommended to face the traffic whether there is a sidewalk or not.

Therefore you can only have the greatest admiration and respect for those who deliberately go out into traffic. They do not timidly cling to the sidewalks furthest away from vehicles. Erroll Vassell, school crossing guard, is one such hero.

Cultural differences play a big part in the comparison between Jamaica and Canada. With all due respect to Canadian school crossing guards, theirs is an easy life. If you are driving a vehicle in Canada, the law is that you have to stop at school crossings, while in Jamaica, as far as I can tell (I'm not joking but simply reporting what I have heard) pedestrians only have the right of way on a crossing if the vehicles are stopped. Talk about a Catch-22 situation if the vehicles are still moving.

And moving vehicles usually have a dangerous component - the driver. I know because I have had experience with them. Three times in my first year in Jamaica I was a passenger in vehicles on the wrong side of the road with oncoming traffic. An interesting Jamaican saying is "The left side is the right side. The right side is suicide." It is an improvement on the Jamaican legislation that boringly tells vehicle drivers to drive on the left side of the road.

Since yesterday I have reflected why the potentially fatal oncoming traffic trend no longer continues for me. I think it's simply that I subconsciously choose to travel on the largest possible vehicle. Because I don't hitchhike on cement trucks, I tend to travel on JUTC buses.

As you can tell the oncoming traffic all missed the vehicles that I was traveling in, but I have felt relieved in the second half of my volunteering experience that this pattern has not continued. The drivers here tend to have attitudes, or more so than Canadian drivers. So this leads to the big question of why Jamaican drivers with attitude bother slowing down at a school crossings.

The answer hinges on who is out there on the road in front of them. Is it a sixty year old plus Canadian volunteer who would love the challenge of leaping for dear life back onto the sidewalk, or is it somebody with authority that you do not mess with?

It's not the greatest photo above, but Erroll is to the left of the motor cyclist, wearing his white crossing guard hat, and pointing authoritatively at the traffic.

Erroll makes friendly but meaningful eye contact with the drivers and points directly at them. This is in case they have notes from their doctors saying that they were deaf and could not hear his loud whistles. Loud whistles is a relative term - in Canada they can invite the attentions of the noise abatement officers, while in Jamaica it is simply a matter of overwhelming the normal run-of-the-mill honking from the traffic.

Overwhelm is the right verb to use, but it is done in a friendly way. Then once he has established ear and eye contact Erroll boldly goes with his authoritative sign where no Canadian volunteer would go. Yes, out into what would be the oncoming traffic for me, but not for him.

Concerning friendliness, during the minute or two I was in the vicinity of the crossing Erroll Jamaican hand-shook two drivers who were obviously his friends. He must know a lot of the drivers as he has been a crossing guard on that part of Marescaux Road for nine years.

Closer up we can see that it is school children crossing the road.

They are on the way to St Hugh's High School, it's on FaceBook and also has a school emblem as shown below. The school's emblem is well designed with its dark blue color and white accents and has tasteful but simple graphics.

Ah ha, I see that the blog has fallen asleep so I can slip in my own brand of humor. (The blogs don't always write themselves).

I wonder what the emblem means? Maybe once swans lived near here, but over time the Jamaican drivers accidentally ran over them all?
I'm new to Jamaica so I may have misinterpreted things, but perhaps the school emblem's initials SH SH mean "Please be quiet, students at work".

Or possibly we should zero in on the Patois word Fidelitas meaning faithfulness. If I recall correctly, Julius Caesar spoke the same language, so he was probably Jamaican too.

The blog has returned and wrested control back from me. Jokes are over, sensibleness returns.

As the blog, I will put the record right on the swan. Wikipedia notes that Saint Hugh (Hugh of Lincoln) was born at Avallon, Burgundy, France c1140.^[3] After becoming a priest he was invited by Henry II of England to work in England and in 1186 was elected Bishop of Lincoln.^[3] He was noted for his kindness to both people and animals and kept a pet swan. Swans are generally very fierce but this one had a special relationship with him.^[3] To sum up, the swan was faithful and loyal to St Hugh. That is how the Latin word "Fidelitas" came to appear on St. Hugh's emblem.

Returning from the 12th back to the 21st century, school crossing are a serious business and whenever we read of high scoring Jamaican students who pass their GSATs (Grade Six Achievement Test) with flying colors, we should not forget to thank the Jamaican school crossing guards, like Erroll Vassell, who played their part too.

Soccer game or other worldly experience?

2011-06-21T18:53:00.000-07:00

This was to be a routine follow with just photos of DRF's second soccer game of the season, but something went inter-gallactically astray.

The photographic intent of this blog was to diverge from the first one and try new things. For example, the group photo at the beginning was perfectly light and in focus so it does not appear. Otherwise its only value would be to see how the team had aged during the course of a week, and young guys don't noticeably age in that short a period.

So right off I started the ball rolling with an action photograph of the type that was noticeably missing last week. I must subconsciously walk into these corny metaphors because my last blog referred to Julie Andrews as an unsung philosopher. I do not do this deliberately.

And here's another action shot, but notice how the light is getting worse and worse although the field had floodlights.

There should have been cause for concern but the team with grittiness kept on playing.

And the supportive DRF fans kept on supporting unaware of the big moment that was approaching in the sky above their heads. Helen should have known what to expect because she hails from South Africa. That country had a similar experience not that long ago.

Things started to go pretty crazy but the players played on and the fans fanned on - it was a warm evening so they had to keep fanning.

Intermittently the lighting reaching the camera came and went for no discernible reason.

I guess we'll never know what caused the short white bolt in the sky.

Or maybe we will. I think the spaceship came to the Mona playing fields to investigate the vuvuzula sonic weapon that Janice was wielding so expertly and blasting skywards. The spaceship was so big that it blocked out the moon and star light and made photography difficult.

Janice's vuvuzula probably pierced through the solar system for at least two light years . This call inadvertently summoned the visitor from afar. Will they take soccer back to their world?

In the interest of full disclosure I must thank the movie "District 9" for this still photo.

Or maybe this is for real because something inexplicable was sucking the power out of my camera batteries. A huge spaceship like that can't stay up in the air forever without replenishing its power so every little double A battery has got to help.

The soccer game result was unfortunately that DRF scored as many goals as last time, but the opposition scored twice as many. DRF scored first and that was hugely exciting for the loyal fans.

Less ado about less than nothing

2011-06-18T15:20:00.000-07:00

Where did this blog title come from?

At one time I seriously thought about trashing my photos and words. They seemed so inconsequential and would not lead to anyone wanting to visit Kingston, Jamaica. I didn't think there was a hope that my blog was going to be as weighty as "Much Ado about Nothing" so I changed it to the humbler "Less ado about less than nothing". I felt better about that, but it raised questions.

We all can work out that "less" is less than "much", but what is less than nothing? Google search turned up some possible leads and I even worked out a theory of my own. One writer, who will be nameless for reasons of potential law suits, put forward the idea that quantum information can be negative, and in that way be less than nothing.

Here's a flower picture to break up the heavy stuff. I wonder why stuff is not spelled stough? After all tough is spelled tough.

I have a sometimes empty but always open mind (at least I think do) so I thought I would give the quantum text a read. I swallowed my pride at certain suggestions that there was no way that readers who weren't into quantum stuff, could understand what was being written. I got through a few inconclusive sentences, and lo and behold, I saw a link to an executive summary.

Guess what? I clicked on the executive summary link. And guess where it took me? Nowhere. So I thought to myself. This guy knows nothing. Not less than nothing, but nothing. I had arrived at nowhere, so I thought it was time to board the train to somewhere.

Being a former accountant, I looked sequentially at the second offering from Google. This one was interesting even for somebody from the wrong generation. "Less than nothing" is the name of a song from the heavy metal group Demon Hunter. They are from the west coast of North America and their material on the Internet describes them as Christian heavy metal:

There was great poetry in this song although the words read like an anthem to negativity. The title came from the chorus which went like this:

We all live in fear of something.
We all disappear like nothing.
We all live in fear of something.
We all equal less than nothing.

There was no explanation of the last line, but I decided to listen to the music anyway in case there were clues. I could hardly make out one word of that was sung, even though I knew the words. Truly, I am from the wrong generation. Either that or I am going deaf.

What generation owns me? If I am not an time traveler for eternity, like a Dr. Who, then I am a child of the sixties. One of its great unsung philosophers, Julie Andrews in the "Sound of Music" summed up nothing succinctly:

Nothing comes from nothing.
Nothing ever could
So somewhere in my youth and childhood
I must have done something good.

So nothing contains something. Therefore nothing is at least something. Therefore there is no nothing, so there can be nothing less than nothing. Ow, my brain hurts!

But if we can't define things then maybe we may at least see them and try imagining. Possibly my little walk around Kingston could come close to less than nothing, but then we can always extract something out of it.

Here are some busier-than me-workers on the roof of the Holy Cross church on Half Way Tree road. Theirs is a hot job but at least the roof is not black for maximum heat absorption, but the waterproofing below it is pretty black. Hot feet!

My digital photo reference book told me to take photos of the signs so I would know where the places were, so I did.

The front of the church and the more usual subject of a photo.

A reminder that I have a dental appointment coming up next weekend, although not at this dentist.

Almost at the Pegasus Hotel now where I planned to go for a swim. This photo was taken from in Emancipation Park across the street. Strangely I forgot to take a picture of the swimming pool, however I got a photo the next day (see below) as I keep working to get fitter. The swim was the whole point of the long hot walk.

And here's the hotel through the trees.

Here's a self-photo to build up a case for a hot person deserving a swim. There was a distressing lack of perspiration on my forehead, although I did conclude I do look a lot like my brother Hugh from certain angles.

The Pegasus pool photo taken the next day.

After the swim I journeyed on northward and saw this Ackee tree along the way. The fruit was not yet open so it's poisonous to eat.

A photography tip for me - photographers shouldn't aim towards the sun and get washed out pictures.

So all that's left now is to close off. I will delete the cut and pasted lyrics from the Demon Hunter's song. I don't want people to think I am becoming suicidal. Although, come to think of it, some of the wording is no worse than what some of Shakespeare's wackier monarchs were prone to utter. This would mean that in a few hundred years our heavy metal group Demon Hunter will receive the recognition it truly deserves.

I have nothing but praise for JA's philosophy, but for the quantum guy I have adapted the heavy metal closing chorus to suit quantum philosophy. You've got to hand it to those heavy metal songwriters, they can be as economical with words as the best of them.

I'm not quite sure why their second chorus was not the same as the first one. But maybe I'm not as imaginative or as musical. Anyway, here is their second chorus with a quantum slant.

Quantum
Hokum
It's nonsense.
Bunkum

Malheureusement (I used "unfortunately" already), if you're a quantum sort of person then you won't get this quantum slanted chorus.

The Soccer Game

2011-06-14T20:59:00.000-07:00

The Dispute Resolution Foundation (DRF) fielded its finest players in the recent 5-a-side soccer game at the Mona hockey fields. There will be no disputing that at the end of the season we will be the champions. The only hope the other teams will have would be if hurricanes stop play and the games are deemed to be draws.

I took this photo because there was a picturesque little hedge archway leading into the fields. In the distance you can see the hills at the edge of the Blue Mountains.

Gradually the players started arriving and also DRF's finest spectators. Our coach is at the end of the bench, and the players from left to right are Devon and Michael. The yellow and blue are the official DRF colors for this tournament. Karen is behind the bench.

The brave person with the sling is the referee. We politely declined the referee with the eye patch. The photo also shows Clifford with his back to us, and Varun over to the right.

Still the spectators were outnumbering the players. This small group has the three Canadian facing the camera - John, Helen and Rafael, while DRF's executive admin assistant Karen has her back to it, but we see her face in the next photo and in one of the previous ones too. She was our major spectator.

This picture was from behind the goal netting - a safe place if you are staring into the camera viewfinder and not watching the ball 100% of the time.

The ceremonial hand shake at the beginning of the game to show the two opposing teams are friends. I did have a blurry picture of one the the DRF players later prone on the ground -friends can do this to you. Our player recovered.

Here is a team photo before the game even started. Maybe this is a sensible precaution in case not everybody survives the friendly game. Players not identified from before from left to right are Jerome, Shawn and Orlando, with Montana the goalie at the front.

Spectators gradually increased as the game continued. New to this picture are Mel, reading, and Noreth, standing. During the game, Noreth provided lots of motivation for the players as she went up and down the line.

Here are some of the players having a well-earned rest at half time. I just noticed that I did not get any action photos of the game. Maybe next time.

Another DRF spectator is Terrie standing behind Mel. An invisible spectator is our CEO Donna Parchment Brown who was around to organize the team photo at the end but did not turn up on any of the photos.

Clifford ran interference on one of the group photos so he ended up with a good photo of himself - maybe that was his plan.

And finally the team photo at the end.

And for all of you who had bets on this game. The final score was a draw 1-1. Great game guys!

Readers will be relieved to note that there are no fewer team members in this photo compared to the original one - everyone survived.

Strawberry Hill, Gap Cafe and the Old Tavern coffee estate

2011-06-12T15:35:00.000-07:00

This was a short day trip with Kim and John up into the Blue Mountains for a few hours. The loosely defined objective was to get to Cinchona Gardens. This did not happen, but we dropped by the Strawberry Hill, the Gap Cafe, and The Old Tavern Coffee estate. When I write all this it sounds like we were terribly busy, but we just sauntered up casually and took our time.

There's a hummingbird tucked away in this tree if you look closely.

The photos follow in chronological order so you can get an idea of what the trip looked like. Here's John taking a photo at Strawberry Hill.

No guarantees if there's a humming bird in this picture:

A lobster claw plant:

The roof of one of the cottages at Strawberry Hill:

Kim and John relaxing with their cameras.

The swimming pool at Strawberry Hill with the glass side and overlooking Kingston way down below in the distance:

Photos of various famous visitors to Strawberry Hill. Mick Jagger and Bob Marley are in the right hand photograph, also Chris Blackwell the founder of Island Records; Sting is probably in the middle one.

(I should have checked the labels on the photos or asked for information from one of the staff).

Another humming bird or two:

One of the hundreds of pretty blue flowers growing along the edge of the road that weren't there the last time I drove along it.
We passed this small waterfall, also new and probably the result of five days of steady rain between last Friday morning and the following Tuesday evening:

We have arrived at the Gap Cafe with great pumpkin soup. The cafe's feeders made it easier to spot hummingbirds and photo them before they zipped off. This is a rare photo of two birds at a feeder at one time, usually one would drive another off.

A doctor bird with its long tail:

Scenery along the way to the Old Tavern Coffee estate:

The old land rover parked next to the coffee estate - a sure fire way of identifying that you have arrived at the Old Tavern coffee estate. The name Old Tavern came from a very old map that identified a location called Old Tavern just up the road from here.

Maybe this vehicle had once parked outside the original Old Tavern location , but maybe in those days it was just horses and mules? Many places in Jamaica go back hundreds of years.

Three roses growing in front of a coffee plant in the garden.

Machines used to grind the coffee. The lady to the left of the picture picks out the reject coffee beans that are broken or have chips out of them.

We enjoyed ourselves at the Old Tavern coffee estate, Mrs Twyman welcomes visitors with a relaxing coffee and cookies break in her sun porch overlooking the valley below with its rows of coffee bushes far below the house on the steep hills. You may buy bags of Blue Mountain coffee directly from her too. An interesting part of the visit is into the coffee production area where Mrs Twyman offers you different types of coffee beans to breath in the aroma and then crunch and and compare flavors.

It was that sort of relaxing day but a little on the hot side. At the end of it all we had ice cream cones at Devon House to finish the trip off in an unhurried manner.

Say what you mean and mean what you say

2011-06-09T21:28:00.000-07:00

Today’s blog was brought to me by a convergence of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party from Alice in Wonderland (https://www.cs.indiana.edu/metastuff/wonder/ch7.html), a signature line from one of the other CUSO-VSO volunteers, and a computer software company.

The Mad Hatter’s tea party contains an admirable discussion on saying what you mean and meaning what you say. But in a conversation how do you deal with somebody who does not say what is meant, nor mean what is said? You can see that poor old Alice at the head of the table is having a hard time with it - she essentially got the wrong answer while the mad hatter and the rabbit got the correct solution.

I was innocently going about my business yesterday when I fell victim to a non-meaner and non-sayer. It took me a little while to work out what was going on, but I eventually did, but I lost an evening of time. So this blog is aimed towards saving others from this frustration.

I pursued an interesting little journey in pursuit of the solution.

I am fortunate enough to have a computer that is two computers. I did say that and I do mean that. On one side, counting as one computer, I have the Mac programs that were able to connect to the Internet. On the other side, counting as the second computer, I have my PC side that used the same modem as the Mac side, and until two days ago could also connect to the Internet.

All of a sudden my PC side could no longer connect while my Mac side continued on, business as usual. What had happened? Who could say to me what had happened? Given my knowledge of computers, could I count on knowing the meaning of what was said to me?

The really irritating discovery was that I later learned that I could work out the meaning of words, but not by reading what I had read. I could only work out the meaning by pretending to be the other person and thinking what they meant, which was not the same as what they said.

Being a former auditor, I decided to follow through the steps logically and carefully note what happened at each roadblock. I started up my Internet browser and within a second or two my screen displayed the message “can’t find server at search.avg.com”. Many thoughts crossed my mind including:

Why are we looking for this weird file anyway?

Well try looking harder you lazy ##!!!?%% browser!

Oh my gosh, some evil computer hacker has wiped out my AVG anti-virus program’s website, so what hope is there for my little computer that mistakenly relied on this free on-line anti-virus program?

So to cut a longish story short, I looked at an on-line help forum using the Mac side of the computer. (I was lucky I had two computers in my one computer). The forum contained gobbledygook. Not because I did not know computerese, but because it was just meandering garbage that conveyed no message.

Usually computerese follows this format – hace frio your horno-tostador, and if that doesn’t work do this, etc - very specific instructions. And the beauty of the Internet is that if you have absolutely no idea what a horno-tostador is, you can Google search it and learn, and you’re another step closer to solving your problem.

And then there was this flash from above and it all made sense.

Putting myself in AVG’s position, AVG was saying to me that I had used their anti-virus protection for free for six whole months and there was no way I was going to continue getting it free for ever. This was the case even though the on-line information marketed them as having unlimited duration free protection for the limited virus protection program I was using.

This lead to the thought that AVG wanted cash from me, so I upgraded to one of their non-free programs and sent them some money using my credit card.

Miraculously, the server at search.avg.com could be found again. I had guessed correctly. My $34.99 US was used to pay the janitor to search around in the AVG factory and by astute searching he found the server that couldn’t be found before. Thanks bud!

I didn’t grudge them the money – the janitor couldn’t work for free and they had provided a service that protected my computer, but why couldn’t they have specifically just said what they meant? But at least now, my PC side is no longer

Rainy Day Thoughts

2011-06-07T16:48:00.001-07:00

It was a rainy day around Kingston. Actually it has been raining since Friday morning when I first got soaked and got sent over the brink towards getting a cold, but enough self-pity, it's time to think outside the box again.

Rain is not all that bad. With Kingston's great collection of coastal hills and mountains it was possible to hear a single clap of thunder walking it's way around the hills this afternoon - fascinating.

People do not appreciate Kingston as much as they should. Where else might one go visiting somebody (June's brother) and have the opportunity to go hang-gliding off a front lawn? We need to put things into perspective.

In a perfect world, here are two of Kingston's competitors. There's Rio de Janeiro. It would have looked fairly boring and empty before the 1920's when the Christ the Redeemer statue was erected at the top of Corcovado Mountain, a mountain that's only about 800 meters high and Kingston has lots of hills that can beat that. Why doesn't Jamaica erect a 40 or more meter statue on top of one of its mountains to rival Rio's?

Maybe one day aircraft pilots will say "Well I missed Christ the Redeemer statue and Sugar Loaf mountain near Rio but it sure was difficult navigating by the 50 meter statues of the Jamaican 4 x 100 meter gold medal Olympic relay team just outside Kingston"

Rio de Janeiro photo per wildreed.blogspot.com

The keen eyed observer may see the Ipanema Beach in front of Rio, but in no time Kingston may have its own large beach along the Palisadoes using these environmentally friendly workers.

Jamaica has parrot fish and each one of them can produce 90 kilograms of sand annually. In no time the Palisadoes will be sandy.

Capetown is another so-called rival, but it only has one mountain, and where are the pointy bits at the top? This is a no contest for Kingston although Table Mountain is about 1,100 meters high which is more impressive than Rio's offering.

Capetown photo per travel-funda.blogspot.com

But returning to the safety of the box, boring as it may be.

Sometime soon I plan to go to Cinchona Gardens. The fussy people say the gardens aren't much to look at but the views are incredible. It's even higher up than the Hollywell Recreational Park that had an amazing view overlooking Kingston. Theoretically it should be easy to get to - head along the road into the Blue Mountains, go past the Newcastle army barracks, come to the community of Section, turn right, proceed through Silver then turn left, and the gardens are half an inch away on the map. I'm good at 3 point or 4 point or 5 point turns in case the straight road is more tricky than it looks, and there are big cliffs at its edge.

I'd cut and pasted some thoughts here earlier, but they're not the greatest so I'll head directly towards the photos.

Examples of rain at Valencia Apartments where I live in formerly sunny Liguanea:

Interesting things can happen when you are a learner photographer. This one was shot at the other side of the apartment with exactly the same lighting as the previous two, but it looks like a solar eclipse quickly passed by.

Some nameless gremlin has stuck in the banned photo from yesterday while my back was turned, and I can't find the computer's delete key.

Well that's ending on a low note, but you did get a photo of Rio today. In November a number of South American airlines will be flying out of Jamaica apparently so we can go down south and explore. Also Nigerian Airlines is flying out of Kingston soon to Lagos (presumably) so Jamaica is on its way to being a world crossroads.

Flying to Africa and other points in the southern hemisphere will be at least 4,000 kms closer than by going through North America and Europe. So the interesting thing is that you can head towards your holiday in South America, Africa or Australia and have a relatively free Jamaican holiday on the way.

Good night everyone. It's still raining here but the apartment remains dry.

Blogs writing themselves

2011-06-04T19:05:00.000-07:00

Life has become a breeze now that I am a full-fledged believer that you don’t write blogs because blogs write themselves.

Initially I was going to write about all the rain we have been having in Kingston. My mind wandered over to rain related songs, so I was going to treat readers with this snippet of information from a 1970’s song that I remembered, and also found in Wikipedia:

"It Never Rains in Southern California", written by Albert Hammond and Mike Hazlewood, is the title of a song first released by Hammond, a British born singer-songwriter, in 1972. Hammond's version peaked at number five on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 that year.

The song concerns the struggles of a singer who moves out to California to pursue a career in Hollywood but does not have any success and deteriorates in the process. In the chorus, Hammond sings, "It never rains in California, but girl don't they warn ya. It pours, man it pours."

I had some original words of my own to add, I thought about writing that it wasn’t the average sized puddles or huge puddles that bothered me on the way down Camp Road to the Dispute Resolution Foundation on Friday, but the more troubling aspects were the unexpected lakes and rivers that weren’t there the day before.

There even was a recent Air Canada contest that gave you a chance to win an all-inclusive trip for two to wherever it flew. All you needed to do was to write a good sales pitch on one of the cities that Air Canada flew to. One of those cities was Kingston, Jamaica (not Ontario) so this was going to be so easy for me. I thought that I could help my chances with nifty content like where but in Kingston could you river raft down Old Hope Road, scuba dive at Cross Roads and then whale watch at the Parade. Why go anywhere else?

But it was not to be. The great god Blog demands photos to augment any words it receives. Any meal it devours must have a words course and a graphics course. I went hunting for photos on line. I looked and I searched and I scanned and I fine tooth-combed and then the awful truth hit me. I eventually only found myself – I had already written about Jamaican floods. I found myself when I didn’t even know that I was missing.

No more floods from now on, although a liquidy medium awaits – my supper that was something that I had never written about before. Also, because it was close by it was amenable to being photographed. I could chuck in a Jamaican visual joke, track down a religious parallel with a bad pun, and finally rest my case on the all imposing philosophy of the (Canadian) Red Green TV show. In my brain this all took place in but a split second. It was not as tedious as this paragraph – but you made it to the end. Congratulations.

So here is a bachelor type supper. When other volunteers remarked that I was living a bachelor life I thought that deep down once you’re married you’re married, so anything they said would not apply to me. But maybe they were right after all, or not.

My supper was based on a former secret recipe, handed down by me from day to day. But now that it’s in the blog it’s not a secret recipe anymore, so I’ll have to try something different tomorrow, or non-secret.

Actually my invention was quite handy and practical. Red Green of the television show fame would have approved based on his thoughts that ” If the women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy." But he might have disapproved because no duct tape was sacrificed for my meal.

Step 1 – take a pre-cooked cut-up chicken piece that tastes very much like the chicken pieces I had last week and the week before. Nothing new so far.

Step 2 – add some organic soup so I can pretend I am being good to myself, and not using stuff from a soup mass-producer that was approved of by Andy Warhol.

Step 3 – here is the stroke of genius – add some Jamaican Kalaloo (a.k.a. “leftovers”) into the mixture from steps I and 2. It's green so it has to be good for me.

Cook precisely for as long as it takes for hunger to overtake you. Enjoy.

So now it’s time for photographs and this is where the rest of the blog change of direction kicks in. My supper photographed 1) with flash, 2) without flash, and finally 3) with lid - yes, I am the first person to use a lid to take photographs,

I later planned to photo the dirty dishes left over at the end of the meal that randomly were juxtaposed three-dimensionally in the sink. Quite a good photo I thought. But I consulted the Geneva Convention that pointed out that this was a forbidden type of photo.

As you can see, my supper was definitely very male. It goes to the essence of maleness. Maybe even all the way back to the biblical beginning at Genesis 2:18. You can imagine God looking down from the clouds and seeing Adam eating something like George's soup and saying “Oh my Me. That poor Adam character needs help. I will send him down a Help Eat to help him eat better things and stay healthier”.

Various old bible sources had mistranslated the original Hebrew words and thought that God was sending Adam a Help Mate, but learned authorities advised me that he was really sending a Help Eat - Adam needed help eating. It was a mistranslation and not a typo, because typewriters hadn’t been invented at the time.

There may be some readers who might disagree with what I have written, but keeping my high moral ground I will rely on prayer. If you are male, you can imagine Adam saying (in a Red-Greeny turn of phrase) before God sent him his Help Eat: “I'm a man, but I can change, if I have to, I guess”.

Then you can jump to God’s response: “Whoah. Enough bad eating already! Can Adam change? This is getting too risky. Plan B is necessary”. And the rest is history.

There is an unhelpful rumor circulating that this was one of the inhabitants out of sight in my murky soup, but I vehemently deny this.

It's just not true, alligators are allergic to soup.

And that wraps it up for the day, and I should head off and do the dental hygiene things my dentist recommended between 1PM and 3PM today.

I could still have been typing this blog at 9:30PM, but thanks to the great god Blog it is all done.

What the health! Pequod.

2011-05-29T16:25:00.000-07:00

Nothing much new happened, but many thoughts crossed my mind today.

The title suggests that I stubbed my toe on something and swore. You are only half right. Health is the swear word as illustrated by this incorrect map and correctly spelled Kingston bus ticket below it.

We're talking Hellshire near Kingston, not Healthshire.

And Pequod? It's just the name of the boat in Moby Dick. I'm curious though. What could the word mean? It sounds a bit Latin. Maybe Julius Cesar may have once said "A pequod for your thoughts". Wrong again. Moby Dick's author ventured that the Pequods were a celebrated tribe of Massachusetts Indians, now extinct; but there are academic doubts on this. To my legal mind, it sounds like a good way to get off a speeding ticket in Massachusetts. "Me speeding officer? Why, I'm a Pequod and I am extinct, so it couldn't possibly have been me speeding that you saw."

Moby Dick is boring in places – the lesson is that if you write about an interesting topic you can get away with less than perfect words. Maybe I should learn from this and raise my subject matter bar.

You can look high and low for things that you already have. A Donald Duck example in the comic strip today recommended looking in the last place you would think of first and then go backwards - "Ludwig's law of looking for something". Usually, where something is will be the last place you look, so by reversing the order of your search you find what you are looking for quicker. Actually my experience would disprove that formula, because nothing for me was in fact lost.

I've been looking for weeks for a waterproof container for when I go swimming, but I had something that would work all along. All I had to do was put my money inside Glad zipper bags inside my money belt. I left it submerged in the sink while I was away at Fort Clarence beach and there was no water damage over a period of four hours when I came back. Here's proof.

You can read my un-smudged writing at the bottom, so it worked.

You are sometimes defined by what you are not – the ticket issuer at Fort Clarence beach asked about my other half. Everyone remembers you Bunty.

My surprise ending for Moby Dick: the good ship Pequod sailed into MD’s snarge, was overwhelmed by the weight of it and sank to the bottom of the Antarctic Ocean. But maybe MD would have preferred a robust fight instead and envisaged this ending for me?

Towards the end of the day, I took photos of flowers trying to get them without the leviathan of constructed objects appearing unwanted in the photographs, It was good practice for me. I concentrated not only on the subject matter, but also controlled what was in the foreground and background.

Here's another thing I learned. Archeological pancake dig. Piled pancakes tell the story of my world today, Four levels with more recently made pancakes being plunked/placed on top of the earlier ones. At the deepest level, the one that suffered from the pan not being hot enough and that was torn to shreds as I tried to loosen it - it stuck to the pan surface and then the spatula like a soccer ball attaching itself to Barcelona's Messi's boot. The next least ancient panchook, was over-greasy as I determined in advance that there was no way it would cling limpet-like to my pan. The penultimate product was quite OK but nothing to write home about, so I didn't. At the pinnacle, a loosely defined term for the top of four pancakes hillock, a quite good breakfast feast but gone too soon. 100% Canadian maple syrup helped my breakfast down perfectly adequately. There was no cause to have cretaceous bacon-like strips as a side.

For the linguistic purists among you, a panchook is the name for a Lenzie or Prestwick type of pancake made by my dad's cousin Sheila.

The Relentless Pursuit of Good Taste.

2011-05-26T12:25:00.001-07:00

Everything has to go uphill from yesterday although with the severe attitude shock it’s not always possible to make rapid changes. Rather, they must be made in easy installments.

Yesterday’s blog included whales going to the bathroom, so I thought that I might raise the tone today. We shouldn’t begrudge whales for doing what they have to do, but why write about it? Below are two whale sized toilet rolls already to be shipped off to the Bay of Fundy.

Don't worry! On second thoughts, whales do not have arms and the sea water would play havoc with the toilet rolls even before the whales used them. Also, even if by a miracle they were successful, where would all the used toilet paper end up? Drifting disgustingly on the surface?

So let’s leave number two’s alone and progress up to number ones. This thought invited itself into my brain this morning when I received a forwarded email on the men’s urinals at the Schiphol Airport near Amsterdam.

It seems like some observant scientist has got us men all figured out. When we need to go, we will direct our flow towards flies or other insect life in the urinal in a subconscious effort to flush them down the drain. Urinals are disgusting and smelly enough without flies, so why not raise the tone for the next user? Whether they are real or just painted onto the porcelain, we aim accurately away at the insects. Schiphol spillage has gone down by 80% apparently.

That’s certainly information that needs to be reported on and distributed widely; and I got it from a usually reliable source. If I am reliable, then my better half has got to be more reliable.

It will take a while to leave the bad taste topics, but I'm working on it gradually.

I saw more examples of number one issues on my walk down Camp Road today. Usually things smell perfectly fine because the rain flushes odors away. Any time there is a uncleaned bathroom smell along Camp Road one tends to think that it’s the unfortunate homeless people being forced to use the outdoors as a toilet. By definition, they do not have homes, and so they have no toilets to call their own. But in reality it is the taxi drivers that are the visible problem; they are confined to their vehicles all day, so when they have to urinate they choose that pretty private spot on Camp Road as their bathroom of choice.

Homeless people have to go too – but I guess that this is during the hours of darkness when CUSO-VSO volunteers are not walking along the Camp Road.

So now I am just about to take my mind out of the gutter, but unfortunately I read a newspaper. Here is a local MP, Mr. Thwaites pointing out a gutter problem downtown near the harbour in an article by the Gleaner's senior staff reporter Arthur Hall on May 24, 2011.

You ordinarily cannot get too excited about gutters. This gutter would not be on any tourist's all inclusive guided tour of Kingston. Drainage in Kingston is always a problem because the ground is so hard, if not solid rock. Already in the past couple of days I've walked in ankle deep water on Hope Road in Liguanea. Liguanea is way higher up than the downtown area near the parade, so any water that soaked my sandals is heading downhill fast to drain like Mr. Thwaite's above.

And in one final step, and I will be out of the gutter looking at a San Juan Hibiscus in Jamaica taken by an anonymous photographer on the Internet. I will try dilligently to track the name down and give credit where it is due, or at least identify the website.

Ah, here's the website - http://photos.igougo.com/pictures-photos-p332783-Hibiscus_%28Jamaica%

29_Flower.html