Hi there haunters! (the small percentage of this blog’s readers who care about Halloween, anyway)

To be brief, I did a 3 part tutorial series on YouTube over the last few weeks, so I wanted to collect them in one place. If you’d like to know how to make something like the image above, have a watch!

First, a prelude.

And now, the tutorial itself.

Then we looked around the heavens, as a friendly gentleman named Sam brought out his 8″ Dobsonian telescope. I saw the four giant moons of Jupiter, along with very prominent bands on the gas giant itself. We looked at nebulae and star clusters, saw great clouds of interstellar dust and gas. Suddenly the cold didn’t seem so harsh. 

Did I see anything new tonight, or with greater clarity than I could have from my laptop? Of course not. This was amateur gear manipulated by shivering fingers, and I could have seen all this and an episode of Louie in the time I spent under the stars.

But ’twas the hunt, dear readers. The searching for that comet, the finding of it. I may have frozen my nether regions, but I think something deeper inside might have thawed.

*Comet tails are caused by the solar wind. Read more here.
**Of course you could see it all day, were the Sun not so overpowering. 

I believed this stuff was real, and yet being a young boy I just couldn’t help but continue sinning. I would promise God that one day I’d right the ship, and start living a flawless life; all the while terrified that I might not be up to the task.

What a bizarre concept: “Good people don’t go to heaven. Forgiven people do.” 

Here we’re told that being a considerate citizen of this planet, doing good things for yourself and others, refraining from causing harm and helping people where you can; none of this is as important as being forgiven for the times you messed up.

It’s a perfect example of the surrendered intellect, demanded by religion: your activities on this world are nowhere near as important as God’s recognition of them. Your own innate sense of right and wrong is insufficient. Don’t appraise your own life; capitulate that to an intellectual better in the sky; one that you have to take on faith is even paying attention.

Not much bothers me about religion anymore, but this does. The concept that we should surrender any portion of our thinking self; that there are intellectual avenues unavailable to be explored. That any institution should dare to tell me, or anyone, what and how to think.

Rant over. Let’s hope this blog isn’t.

So, apologize in advance for the brevity, but here it is! (a sample of it anyway)

Enjoy!

Leading up to December 21st, as the apocalypse seemed less likely, the jokes started bubbling to the surface on social media. As the day drew near, folks began to notice a sky conspicuously vacant of Nibiru. The volcanoes weren’t heating up, the sky wasn’t turning green, and people weren’t suffering from lethal cases of Montezuma’s revenge. (the instrument of destruction that I hoped the Mayans would use*)

With the apocalypse looking less imminent than previously feared, folks started to savagely mock the Mayan meme. I’m sure you saw the same thing in your newsfeeds. As my friend Steve Blacker put it: “Man… people are telling end-of-the-world jokes like there’s no tomorrow.”

https://twitter.com/baylay_/status/281986560256245760

So listen. I had friends who bought in to the whole Mayan thing. A number of them, in fact. And I don’t intend to rub their noses init, now that the
*Yes, Montezuma was Aztec… I know. Call it comedic license. 

The Butcher of Provincetown was meant to be a humble little art show; a local exhibition of the macabre—a spooky tour through both a deranged museum, and my own imagination. If you came out to see it, and waited in the rain to do so, I’m more than grateful.

And if you didn’t come for 2012′s show, we hope to see you next year. But in the meantime, I just have to ask; what’s the matter with you? Aren’t you a fan of high culture? 

Or are you just chicken?

*And another is a paintball mask that I heavily modified.

**A member of the Canadian Haunters Association, an organization to which I owe a debt of gratitude.

Tonight’s the night! At 8pm, tune in to CBC’s ‘The Nature of Things’. 

See my latest bit of animation, woven in to an engrossing story that might just change the history books.

THE NORSE: AN ARCTIC MYSTERY

A new documentary film reveals an archeological site that proves Europeans made contact with Native North Americans centuries before the arrival of Christopher Columbus.

Buried under the tundra on a windy cape of Baffin Island lies one of the most important archeological finds in Canada. An untrained eye would miss it—but not scientist Pat Sutherland. Her new work here at the place they call Nanook will likely change history.

Dr. Sutherland has been working on the archeology of the Arctic for more than 30 years. Her expertise is the ancient native people who lived there. But along the way she started finding artifacts that didn’t fit—pieces that weren’t made by indigenous hands, but by Norse traders, possibly as far back as a thousand years ago.

Is it possible that someone was here from the other side of the Atlantic, centuries before the arrival of Columbus or Cabot? Is it possible that this is the site of first contact between native North Americans and Europeans?

The new documentary film THE NORSE: AN ARCTIC MYSTERY, produced by Toronto’s 90th Parallel Productions for CBC’s The Nature of Things With David Suzuki, follows Sutherland on her journey to prove that the early history between North America and Europe did not unfold the way the history books say it did.

“The Norse were here over a long period of time, and they had business to do,” says Sutherland. The dig at the Nanook site has revealed signs of a structure—stone walls marking out the shape of an trading post—possibly the first European building this side of the Atlantic.

“It certainly substantiates that there were Europeans on the site,” says Sutherland, “no question about that.”

THE NORSE: AN ARCTIC MYSTERY follows Sutherland from the south shore Baffin Island to the Outer Hebrides in Scotland, the departure point for Norse sailing west, searching for trade goods like ivory and furs across the North Atlantic to Canada. In Denmark a crew of latter-day Vikings lifts the sails on a reproduction of an ocean-going ship. And in Ottawa Sutherland gets down to the hard science—using state of the art technology to unlock the hardest kept secrets of Norse arrival on Baffin Island.

“I think we’ve only just begun to delve into what the Norse were doing there,” says Sutherland, “and we’ve just got the beginning of the story.”

THE NORSE: AN ARCTIC MYSTERY is produced by 90th Parallel Productions in Toronto. Gordon Henderson is Executive Producer. THE NORSE: AN ARCTIC MYSTERY is produced, written and directed by Andrew Gregg.