https://ohsnail.tumblr.com/

SIGNAL BOOST >> Stop seismic airgun testing for oil and gas off the U.S. East Coast.

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 19:05:21 -0400

SIGNAL BOOST >> Stop seismic airgun testing for oil and gas off the U.S. East Coast.:

Here’s the deal, guys. Seismic air gun testing is this totally bullshit method of searching for oil reserves in the ocean floor or something. It’s not important, look it up on Wikipedia.

What IS important is that air guns are so bone-crushingly, pants-poopingly loud that in an underwater environment, they’re all you can hear. Bad news for whales and dolphins, who primarily communicate through sound. And the buck, unfortunately, does not stop there: the sound is so loud that it actually destroys the sensitive ear bones in most whales.

The Northern Atlantic Right Whale is on the recovery: there are over 400 individuals now, up from 200 or so in the 1990s. But air gun testing might mean a bad turn for the population. Environmental assessments conducted by the companies interested in air gun testing have estimated that almost 200,000 whales and dolphins, beautiful, happy, and intelligent creatures, could be injured by the air guns.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, SIGNAL BOOST THIS. It needs over 80,000 signatures by May 15th. Tumblr, we can do this!

Screw Binary; or, 52Hertz Shades of the Virtue of Grey

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 16:16:00 -0400

Ever here about gender binary? The fact you’re on Tumblr probably indicates yes, but let’s review.

My crappy understanding of it (don’t flame me) is that basically, while gender is a spectrum ranging from archetypal male to archetypal female with any number of possible permutations in between (or even, theoretically, genders that don't resemble traditional male and female concepts at all), society tries to pretend there are only the two genders most of us are familiar with and leave it at that. This leads to the assumption that the gender binary is normal and that anyone who doesn’t identify as male or female is abnormal. It’s a totally bullshit claim and science proves it every day. Thinking in rigid, B&W categories is no good for us, our minds, or our quality of life!

So ANYWAY, we hear a lot about the gender binary on Tumblr, but did you ever stop to think about how most things are binary in our society? I mean, we have to be male or female, but we also seem to have to be atheist or religious. On Tumblr, we’re POCs or white people. We’re radfems or we’re MRAs.

Why do I have to fit in a category?!

The Sufi poet Hafiz wrote this astonishing poem, “I Have Learned So Much,” and it’s just so good, I think it cuts to the very heart of everything that religion is about. I have to share it with you. Even if you’ve read it before, read it again. To quote St. Augustine of Hippo (who was talking about John 8:58, but that’s neither here nor there), “Weigh the words. Get a sense of the mystery.”

Ready? Okay, here we go:

I
Have
Learned
So much from God
That I can no longer
Call
Myself

A Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim
A Buddhist, a Jew.

The Truth has shared so much of itself
With me

That I can no longer call myself
A man, a woman, an angel
Or even pure
Soul.

Love has
Befriended Hafiz so completely
It has turned to ash
And freed
Me

Of every concept and image
My mind has ever known.

What we have here is a perfect retelling of one of the biggest truths that can ever be told: what looks like two things, or even a multitude of things, is really just one thing: the only thing: God, for lack of a better word. Hafiz even demolishes the gender binary here: he can no longer call himself man and woman, because he’s got too much love to not empathize completely with either.

To Tumblr teens that’s gonna seem bizonkers. I thought that religious people were the ones enforcing gender binary? You know, “marriage is between a man and a woman”? But in truth, a lot of that is add-on from very ordinary men in the centuries after the original texts were written. Consider Christianity. The Bible is chock-full of quotes undermining binarist thinking. When Jesus said in Luke 17:21, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you,” it’s quite possible he’s pointing you in the direction of stopping your search for Heaven outside of you. This corresponds pretty closely to a quote attributed to the Buddha, “Look inside: you’re the Buddha.” Elsewhere, in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says, “The Kingdom of Heaven is spread out on the earth, but men do not see it.”

Maybe the whole point of religion is to get rid of that categorical kind of thinking. To see past the bullshit to the core underneath it!

If so, it’s just one more way that religion doesn’t contradict, but rather upholds, the teachings of science. If you have ever read Richard Dawkins's The Ancestor’s Tale (and I highly, highly recommend that you should! Amazon link here), there’s this great chapter called “The Salamander’s Tale.” The whole chapter lays out how some species of seagulls and salamanders are breeding with each other to make new species, and that evolution actually teaches us that categories (like Linnaean species) are more fluid and plastic than we’d believed. (We now know this to be true even of much higher organisms, like the loneliest whale, 52Hertz, a one-of-a-kind hybrid blue-fin whale.) The moral of the Salamander’s Tale is very much a non-binarist one…

Dawkins calls our tendency to avoid things that don’t fit into neat categories “the tyranny of the discontinuous mind.” Science blogger Chet Raymo called the ability to accept things that bend or escape traditional binarist thinking “the virtue of grey.”

Let’s all make like Hafiz, and try to remember the virtue, and forget the tyranny!

EXPLORE FURTHER

The Virtue of Grey.
The Ancestor’s Tale Book Review.

The Salamander’s Tale.

The Poetry of Hafiz.

So I have some thoughts on this image that’s been floating around the Internet: I understand...

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 15:18:45 -0400

So I have some thoughts on this image that’s been floating around the Internet:

I understand the visceral reaction to seeing an animal dead… I own a cat and a hedgehog myself and love them to bits. And I think that coyotes are pretty cool shit as a general rule. I’m glad people are warming up to urban coyotes in cities like Chicago. But we must remember that coyotes also kill people and that their population is remarkably elastic and stable.

It is hard to conceive of when you live in a community where trapping and hunting have been sidelined or are no longer a way of life, that in some communities, trapping, fishing, and hunting still constitute the primary way of life for most people. I live in a Cree community called Chisasibi, QC, in Northern Canada, and the majority of people own guns and participate in sustainable, managed hunts for caribou, seal, beaver, wolf, ptarmigan, goose, bear, martin, otter, sturgeon, and porcupine. There are defined hunting areas and even rigourously defined and monitored “traplines,” overseen since the days of the Hudson’s Bay Company by “tallymen,” who determine quotas for the seasons based on careful observation of current stocks.

In the community, many people rely on traditional food like goose for their meal. Many others, though, rely on trapping and hunting for their income. They belong to a professional organization akin to a union. The fur from their catches goes to companies in the garment industry like Canada Goose, as it has for hundreds of years. This is their livelihood and they respect nature and animals. Without them, they won’t have a job.

Every time I see something from Fur Bearer Defenders, they’re slagging on Canada Goose, but in reality, CG has one of the best records for animal cruelty and sustainability out there. There are other reasons to hate on them, I suppose (come on, do you really need a $400 bumfreezer jacket in Montreal?), but they don’t use farms, only buy fur from hunters in Canada’s North, pay those hunters directly, and source everything sustainably. Remarkably, all of this information is available on the company’s own website.

I think that the efforts of FBD and their followers would be better spent directed at Chinese fur farms that skin beloved family pets alive, rather than at Canada, a country with a relatively solid record on sustainable, humane hunting practice, and one of their most recognizable national brands.

tinyasiannympho: click Hey people, my Tumblr/Facebook friend...

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 22:38:19 -0400

tinyasiannympho:

click

Hey people, my Tumblr/Facebook friend Luu did up these snazzy duds. You would look awesome in one of these babies. Unless you’re really ugly to begin with, but, uh, if that’s the case you got nothin’ to lose, son.

So I just got back from Montreal and that’s always a good time, not so much because of the...

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 20:18:00 -0400

So I just got back from Montreal and that’s always a good time, not so much because of the strip clubs and the poutine (the former creeps me out and a little of the latter goes a long away after a week of eating junk), but because it’s just such a beautiful, world-class city.

It’s so bizarre to make the five-hour flight from Montreal, with its concrete and light pollution, to Chisasibi, with its boreal tree tufts and ubiquitous snow (rapidly turning to mud, FYI).

Looking up at gorgeous, 200-foot prisms of glass, I feel humble: they’re just so beautiful, the buildings. They’re way more special than they ought to be considering they’re just banks and offices and hotels, a lot of them. I feel really amazed that somebody designed and built them. But then I felt the same humility flying over the frozen James Bay, staring out the window down onto the expanse of ice and trees and huge swaths of deep blue river water.

The beauty of nature is sortof the same thing as the beauty that we create when we pave over it… obviously I’m kindof a leave it untouched sortof guy but you can never deny that everything is imbued with beauty.

I remember reading in a Tony Hawk book somewhere that skaters are positive people because where others see bland concrete they see opportunities. I think that’s what I’m talking about.

My wife’s in Montreal today, on the same day that I got...

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 19:58:50 -0400

My wife’s in Montreal today, on the same day that I got back from Montreal… after being there for more than a week. I made a playlist of acoustic Incubus rarities, guys. It’s that much of a low point.

So forgive me the spamming you with her gorgeousness… this is one of those days where this blog has to be for me I guess.

50 followers and I barely even post stuff!

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 17:45:29 -0400

Thanks, guys, I’ll get rolling here, I swear. Just as soon as I finish watching Season 7 of Supernatural… if I stop watching, they’ll die, guys.

Esteemed filmmaker Ernest Webb talking to my Sec 2 class about...

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 21:03:00 -0400

Esteemed filmmaker Ernest Webb talking to my Sec 2 class about the creative life. He worked on Reel Injun and Indians & Aliens, as well as directing the APTN series Down the Mighty River.

If you have Netflix, watch Reel Injun, highly recommended!

Me in my mess of a classroom. Because every English classroom...

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 20:56:00 -0400

Me in my mess of a classroom. Because every English classroom needs multiple guitars. Today I’m thankful for being a teacher.

Taken by a student.

GUYS… this is it. My audition tape for The Amazing Race...

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 01:20:00 -0500

GUYS… this is it.

My audition tape for The Amazing Race Canada.

You heard right, now reblog this and go LIKE, COMMENT, and SHARE the motherfrakkin’ crap outta that thing! The tape says it all.

SIGNAL BOOST ME PEOPLE

Shane Koyczan - To This Day Shane Koyczan is an amazing guy. A...

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 23:17:07 -0500

Shane Koyczan - To This Day

Shane Koyczan is an amazing guy. A huge figure in Canadian folk music and CanRock whose attracted the interest of Gordon Downie and similar scene luminaries, he’s never had a “real job,” relying only on his own poetry to make a living. With this latest poem, “To This Day,” he’s making waves outside of Canada, too.

The song is a call to arms for kids who’ve been bullied and it’s one of the most powerful anti-bullying videos I’ve ever seen. It, like all of his work, will make you cry. As a teacher I’m going to be trying to book Shane at my school. Already sent the request for estimates!

More info at http://www.shanekoyczan.com/.

If you’re interested, Shane’s work inspired my wife to create a pretty cool t-shirt design, sold exclusively in our Society6 shop here. All proceeds will support us being able to adopt a child from a Ukrainian orphanage.

So how's the adoption coming? (Short version)

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 22:12:00 -0500

The other day, my wife and I put in our preliminary agreement with a Québec agency that works with Honduras, Vietnam, and Ukraine. Ukraine is the only one currently accepting registries, so we went for it! And we got some pretty nice surprises.

We were trying to get pregnant for a long time, and we finally just gave up the ghost after my wife was forced to undergo surgery to remove a grapefruit-sized mass of scarring from her uterus. Endometriosis is something many women live with, and my wife has it bad. I may be impotent, too, for all I know; I’ve never been tested. But after a short phase of hopelessness we arose from the ashes knowing adoption was the option for us.

We read a lot of material culled from the Internet, most of which had a whiff of “outdated” to it, but it was better than nothing. And so far as we could tell, adoption in Québec was going to take a while, like, three to five years a while. We were sortof looking the five- or ten-year plan.

So imagine our unbridled shock when the woman on the other end of the phone line told us we’d have a family within six months!

Well, we were taken aback, but after we shook our heads a few times, ridiculously excited. Nay, ridonkulously excited. Of course, we’re going to need a few extra months for financial reasons. But we’ve already got the contract filled out and ready to go, and the initial $3800 saved (plus more). We’re going to apply within another month or so.

My beautiful future children are out there… somewhere… RIGHT NOW. I’m thinking about that 24/7.

The future is a scary thing… for someone admittedly such a Slow Climber, this is fast. I’m 26. I was barely functioning as a human being a mere eight years ago, when my bumbling, kvetching 18-year-old self first stumbled into the goddess I’m married to today. And now I’m going to be a parent?! To be in my shoes right now is stranger than anything Beckett or Ionesco ever wrote.

I really hope this “God” guy knows what he’s doing.

"All through life people treat you bad Disrespect you, make you mad Let God deal with the things they..."

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 21:50:00 -0500

“All through life people treat you bad
Disrespect you, make you mad
Let God deal with the things they do
Cos hate in your heart will consume you, too”

- Will Smith, “Just the Two of Us”

Mock as you will. But those are words that have gotten me through a lot of stuff. Getting me through some stuff right now.

Five reasons I don't really reblog things.

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 21:12:00 -0500

Everything I say just gets flamed by SJWs anyway.
Politics is the single least important thing in life.
Realizing this does make you a better person than people who don’t!
It’s more fun to write original content.
In the long run, you make more enemies by reblogging, and more friends by producing original content.

Today I’m thankful for homemade pumpkin bread courtesy of...

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 21:08:30 -0500

Today I’m thankful for homemade pumpkin bread courtesy of my wife. Lucky man to have such an adept baker as my better half… at this point I feel the same way about pumpkin bread as WaffleBot does about waffles. Banana bread? Surely you jest.

The 50 Book Challenge continues! 5. An Unfinished Conversation:...

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 20:58:54 -0500

The 50 Book Challenge continues!

5. An Unfinished Conversation: The Life and Music of Stan Rogers, Chris Gudgeon — This is an astonishing look at the man I consider Canada’s greatest songwriter, and simply necessary to read if you want a well-rounded look at the Canadian folk scene of the 1960s and ‘70s. It assumes no prior knowledge of peripheral “characters” in Stan’s life, so short bios are actually given of many Canadian folk scene figures along the way (Valdy, Ian & Sylvia, Leon Redbone, to name a few). A word of caution, though: this book will break your heart. Rogers burned to death in an aviation accident at the age of 33. The accounts of his death and the aftermath amongst his friends and family are chilling. As well, from a musical standpoint, we learn that Rogers was never able to complete the five-album cycle that would have seen one album devoted to each geographical region of Canada. Albums about Québec and the Far North were both forthcoming at the time of his death. That I will never hear them is just soul-crushing.

6. The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories, HitRecord, Joseph Gordon-Levitt — I liked the second volume so much that I was inspired to give the first one a go. It’s good, but not as good. Which with any luck means that the third volume is going to hit out of the park!

7. The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float, Farley Mowat — A touching ode to Canada’s Maritime provinces (and, as such, a pretty good companion to the Stan Rogers book). This book covers Mowat’s experiences in the late 1960s, at the same time that the events covered in A Whale for the Killing took place. Perhaps this is markedly less substantial than Whale? But I wouldn’t really make that argument. The second half of the book, on the St. Pierre and Miquelon Islands south of Newfoundland, is really beautiful, with some of Mowat’s most evocative descriptions of nature I’ve ever read. And the first half, on some of the more isolated Newfoundland outports, manages to be warm and lighthearted at the same time that it is harrowing.

Onward…

I have always seen it as a mark of our privilege to complain about the information age… and...

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 19:13:28 -0500

I have always seen it as a mark of our privilege to complain about the information age… and indeed it is.

Our ancestors had to pay the sheer, hard cost for information. The Vikings had the choice of getting into wooden boats and heading out into the black unknown, the dark corners of the map labelled only “Here be monsters,” in search of information, or staying put in their fjords, none the wiser.

I get no fewer than five newspapers on my iPhone. When they arrive, full of new facts and opinions about everything that happened on earth over the last 24 hours, a little blue ribbon tells me they'e ready for download. And even though I am doing little other than sitting around the house, I find myself unable to find the time to open and peruse these things that I pay money for, however cursorily.

I am suffering from that condition that marks the modern consumer… information fatigue. It’s just too much. I barely finish contemplating that the last issue of The Economist has arrived when the new issue arrives, and I’m left to wonder, how can a person possibly consume, archive, synthesize this information in a timely and meaningful way?

The Wall Street Journal, Monocle, The New York Times, Al Jazeera, MacLean’s, Sports Illustrated, The Globe and Mail… with each new installment my guilt over how much I don’t know grows, when in reality, I know more than my predecessors ever could have. I complain about this on a forum of communication with people the globe over, once commonly referred to as “the information superhighway.”

Leif Ericson would have been distinctly unimpressed.

“I’ll take ‘What The Cat Did While You Were Out’ for five...

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 12:42:00 -0500

“I’ll take ‘What The Cat Did While You Were Out’ for five hundred, Alex.” Today, I’m thankful for my rascally Gatsby… keepin’ me on my toes.

26-Year-Old Man Tells Tumblr SJWs To Go "Have Sex" with Themselves.

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 00:08:00 -0500

There’s a post going around Tumblr that you must’ve seen by now if you’re following SJ blogs and it’s relevant to my life. The header runs “15-Year-Old African Kid Tells Madonna To Go ‘Have Sex’ with Herself" and it was (apparently) originally posted on the Nigerian tabloid site Naijamayor (original post). This is a Nigerian site equivalent to People, Us Weekly, or something along those lines. (Or an American site reporting on Nigerian pop culture? It’s unclear.)

The post describes an encounter between celebrity Madonna and an African child named Dakarai Molokomme. Dakarai, a fifteen-year-old boy, tells Madonna to go fuck herself. When asked why, he says that people like Madonna use charity in Africa as PR, and even adopt starving children to use a trophies to parade around to their friends. If they really wanted to help Africa they’d arrange for vaccines to be flown in. (I’m paraphrasing thus far, the real quotes are all in the article.)

But then "Dakarai,” who, as we’ll see, does not actually exist, says something very hurtful:

Transracial international adoptions are part of the white savior industrial complex.

The good news? There is no way that this post is real, and here is the bulletin breakdown as to why, after a frantic hour of Googling.

First, there’s the legitimacy of the website. At best, it’s an actual Nigerian tabloid, on a journalistic par with People or Sun. At worst, it’s an American tabloid devoted to Nollywood and similar pop culture.
Argument in favour of it being an American paper: why would a Nigerian paper, for Nigerians, refer to an “African” child? They don’t call English muffins “English muffins” in England. They call them “muffins.”
The article refers to “the local media” but never names a source. It says Dakarai spoke further to “journalists in the media." Sounds legit.
A quick Google search for "tells madonna to go fuck herself” yielded… extremely little other than the Tumblr reblogs of the article itself.
Variant stories claim that Dakarai was a girl; others that he was seven years old. Ah, Urban Legend, the new fragrance from Tumblr SJ.
Ever heard of Abraham Maslow? Short story, he was a psychiatrist who said if you’re starving, you can’t do higher-level thinking. How is a fifteen-year-old who’s starving pontificating like an SJW? No fifteen-year-old is this eloquent. (For proof, see the stupid-ass fifteen-year-olds who reblogged this post.)
Finally, the tone of the article is satirical. “‘Bono’s efforts to save the African savage from itself prove that the colonial imperative is alive and well,’ Dakarai said as he walked with other village children collecting sticks to build a tree fort.” How can anyone not see the hilariousness in the satire? Ha ha ha? Anyone? It’s aimed at SJWs. The point is, no African child would actually refuse being adopted by a rich person with candy and shit, no matter how imperialist. It shows how detached, unlikely, and counterproductive the SJW rhetoric is.

The real danger is that when the Tumblr SJ community grabs ahold of something, it really does. And now a whole bunch of SJWs are going to go around harassing adopters of African children on Tumblr who are sincere and kind and loving and hopeful as “Western imperialists fucks” or whatever. How stupid are these people, to think that they can define what is and isn’t racist? liberal? politically correct? productive? good? holy? SOCIAL JUSTICE?

Most of them are sad or let down that this heinous article wasn’t real. And, to boot, so lacking in media analysis to have fallen for an article hook, line, and sinker, that I detected as false from the first read-through.

The funny thing is, I wouldn’t blame Dakarai for holding this sentiment. If I was starving and all-too aware of the fact that nobody gave a shit about me or my country’s condition, I’d be pissed off at the privileged white folk, too.

But this is atypical of the average white, first-world adopter of a black, third-world child. People who wish to adopt are motivated by many things: a desire to have a family denied them by biology; a desire to help a child by giving him or her a better life; a desire to share the love they have pent up inside them like champagne shaken hours on end, the cork still tightly wired to the cold, tense bottle.

To Dakarai I would say, I have no idea what it is like to live in the third-world, to not know where my next meal is coming from or if I’ll have one at all, or to be paraded around by Western media like a prop. And you don’t know the pain, futility, and hopelessness of infertility, of trying a dozen diets and even undergoing surgery, knowing in your heart it’s all for nothing.

And then be told that a God-given and blessed way out of both situations is part of the “white saviour complex.”

Today I’m thankful for my hedgehog. Mad props to this hog....

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 00:34:00 -0500

Today I’m thankful for my hedgehog. Mad props to this hog. There’s no cuter animal on the face of the earth. I named her Little Tenzing Norgay because she climbs mountains… think she’s a Slow Climber?