Every picture tells a story  Taking pictures of owls in captivity is fun. They're fabulous-looking beasts, of course, but they're also very co-operative portrait subjects, staying perfectly still for long stretches, unlike most wild birds.

I shot this guy in York, England on one of our visits to Caitlin when she was there working on her PhD. This was in 2014. One day when she was working, Karen and I went into the city and ended up at the Museum Gardens, a lovely park with Roman ruins situated on the River Ouse, one of two rivers running through the city.

A birds-of-prey attraction had brought some of its charges into the city to show them off. Parents could pay £5 to let their kiddies wear a falconer's glove and pose holding one of the birds. While they were waiting for the punters, the birds sat tethered on their perches, looking bored and skeptical. The keepers had no objection to my taking pictures and I could get quite close. This one is a great horned, I think.

Fast-forward to spring 2019. Louis, a one-year-old at the time, developed an obsession with owls, which he initially called "ah-yels." I believe it was the first recognizable word he said, certainly one of the first. 

When we were there in the fall of 2019, he was still mad-keen on owls, and figured out that I had some of these pictures from York on my tablet. He would demand to be shown Papa's owls. "Owl! Owl, Papa!" - pointing at the tablet. In the end, I went into town and got a quick-print place to print and plasticize a few of the pictures, including this one. I think he still has them around somewhere, although his ardour for owls has cooled some. 

Streaming video recommendation  American network television in the 1970s, at least in retrospect, and when put up against the stellar TV available today, was a bit of a wasteland. Sure, there was All in the Family, which was supposed to be ground-breaking and progressive. But I always thought it was overrated and too broad.

I'm sure there were others that we genuinely enjoyed back then, but there's really only one show from that period that I remember with fondness, and that's Barney Miller, a gem of a half-hour situation comedy. 

From l to r: Ron Glass as Harris, Max Gail as 'Wojo', Abe Vigoda as Fish, Hal Linden as Barney, Jack Soo as Nick and James Gregory as Deputy Inspector Frank Luger

It's set in the detectives squad room in an East Village precinct in New York. Each episode has something the feel of a chiseled little stage play. It observes all the classic theatrical unities of action, time and place - there was really only one set, the squad room, with its jammed-in desks and the single jail cell where miscreants are sometimes temporarily "caged." 

The characters are eccentric and very human, starting with Barney himself, the kindly captain of the precinct, played by the ridiculously handsome Hal Linden, a 1950s big band singer-turned-actor. The comedy was always gentle, sly, self-deprecatory. It sprang mainly from the personalities of the characters. Barney Miller ran from 1975 to 1982 on ABC. 

I've gone looking for it online a couple of times in recent years, most recently earlier this evening. At one point, several seasons were available on a free streaming video service called Crackle, but they're not available on Crackle in Canada anymore (although they apparently are still on the U.S. service.) There are some complete episodes available on YouTube, though not full seasons. 

The square picture - this was long before HD - and low-res video take some getting used to again, as do the moustaches, and wide lapels and ties. But Barney Miller stands up. It stands up very well.

Travel Story

Every picture tells a story  But sometimes you actually have to read it.

In the summer of 2012, Caitlin came home from England where she was working on her PhD at the University of York. She had an invitation, and grant, to spend a week doing research at a Yale Centre for British Art facility in Connecticut. Wouldn't it be cool, she suggested, if we all - all including then boy friend Aaron, who was living in our basement at the time - drove to New York and spent some time in Manhattan before dropping her off in Connecticut. She could fly home to England from New York. 

Karen and I, never averse to visiting the Apple, agreed. We stayed in a flat in Brooklyn. On some days, Caitlin and Aaron went off and did their thing, and Karen and I did ours. On this day, we were on our own, tramping around Manhattan, when I spotted this kid on the bench. I got a few steps past before I realized what I was seeing. The building, if you read the plaque on the pillar and the sign on the wall, is the  headquarters of the American Bible Society, a fundamentalist Christian ministry, and home to its Museum of Biblical Art.  

The kid, evidently orthodox Jewish, possibly Hasidic - note the side curls and yarmulke - is having a moment with a bronze statue of a Christian missionary (whose name I've just learned, was Jeremiah Lanphier.) Why? And what exactly is he about to do to old Jeremiah? Smack him in the head? Mess up his hair maybe? It was only afterwards I noticed that Jeremiah appeared to be copping a feel while this was going on. Maybe the kid was telling him not to get fresh. Dirty pedo!

The American Bible Society and Museum of Biblical Art upped sticks in 2015, and took Jeremy, known locally as "the contemplative man," when they left. He'd been a fixture at the corner of Broadway and 61st for eight years. I doubt anyone's missed him that much. The kid? Probably now a heavily bearded man in a long black coat and homburg hat stalking the streets of Manhattan.

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Eagle-eyed readers might notice that I've switched fonts for this blog. Blogger offers a limited number of fonts, but did add some new ones recently. You have to know where to look to find them though. This one is called Merriweather, a serif typeface, which should be easier to read than the sans serif face I was using before.

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The Trudeau government's new travel bans and rules around enforced testing and self-isolation are, on balance, a good thing, I think. But you have to ask yourself, why these particular rules, and why were they necessary now?

If you wanted to stop the new variants, which is what the government said was a large part of its motivation, given that the epicentres of those variants are supposedly the UK and South Africa, wouldn't it have made more sense to ban travel to and from those places? Why Mexico and the Caribbean?

According to Our World in Data, a non-profit that aggregates statistics from a variety of sources around the world, case rates per million of population have risen faster and are quite a bit higher in Mexico than in Canada. But in places like the Barbados and the Bahamas, they have risen at a more moderate rate since last March and absolute numbers are lower than in Canada, in some cases, substantially lower.

One reason for banning those destinations, of course, is that they're where Canadians are most tempted to go in the winter, and where the travel is pretty uniformly non-essential. It's also - not coincidentally, I suspect - where some elected officials and senior public servants went at Christmas, and then got in trouble for doing exactly what their governments had asked ordinary citizens not to do. 

So the travel ban sends a political message as well as delivering health benefits. Which is the more important, I wonder?

And the new regulations for arriving air travellers? I would have thought that, in the best of all possible worlds, the existing requirements, to prove you'd had a recent negative Covid test before flying and self-isolate for 14 days on arrival, would have been enough to contain any potential spread from air travel. 

Most expert commentary I've read suggests air travel, while it has brought some new cases into the country, is by no means a super-spreader. It's nothing like as dangerous as sitting in a poorly-ventilated restaurant, or in a church singing hymns, or gathering with family or friends indoors.

Of course, we don't live in the best of all possible worlds. The fairly draconian requirements for mandatory testing on arrival and a self-funded three-day quarantine at a government-run facility were needed, I'm guessing, because a) Covid test certificates from some places couldn't be trusted, and/or b) unscrupulous travellers were faking certificates (I don't think it would be that difficult to do) and c) arriving travellers were routinely flouting self-isolation rules.

All of this, of course, forces one to re-evaluate one's own travel behaviour. I know some people - guys I play hockey with, for example - thought it irresponsible of Karen and I to travel at Christmas. Nothing was said directly, but it was reported to me. I'm not sure, in retrospect, I entirely disagree with them. In our defense, the situation at the time we booked was nothing like as dire as it fairly quickly became, especially in the UK.

Our take on it at the time was that we were endangering nobody but ourselves and our immediate family by travelling. We drove ourselves to and from the airport at this end and were picked up and dropped off by our son-in-law at the other. We scrupulously followed the 14-day self-isolation, masking, social distancing and "bubbling" rules in force at both ends. And so far as we can tell, have not been infected.

The flaw in this line of argument is that if we had become infected or had infected family in England - always a possibility however careful and law-abiding we were - it could very well have resulted in a further burden being placed on already over-burdened health services. And that's ultimately what all this pain is about: ensuring that when people do get very sick with Covid, they can be properly cared for in hospital. 

I'm not going to apologize or anything, but we won't be travelling again soon.

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Amusing bird fact  Well, not that amusing maybe, but the South American oilbird is definitely one strange fowl. 

Oilbirds at home

It eats fruit, which it forages for at night, and lives in pitch-dark caves where absolutely no light penetrates. To accommodate this bizarre lifestyle, it has tiny hairs beside its beak that it can use to feel its way around in tight situations and it has the most light-sensitive eyes of any vertebrate. Strangest of all, it has an echolocation system which, unlike a bat's, uses human-audible sounds. It uses it to find its way around in the cave.

The bird was first observed by a European naturalist, one Alexander von Humboldt, at the end of the 18th century. Locals took Humboldt to an oilbird cave. As Jennifer Ackerman tells it in The Bird Way, "As the group moved into the darkness, hoarse screams, piercing shrieks and snarls, and grotesque retching sounds reverberated against the rocky vault and echoed in its depths."

That was the oilbird, aka diablotin ("little devil") or guácharo ("one who cries and laments") trying to find its way to the bathroom in the dark.  

So now you know.

Snow day!

As I start to write this at a little after 1:30, it has been snowing steadily most of the morning. It was snowing when we got up. Big, soft, fluffy flakes. It looks quite pretty. 

Earlier this morning I went out in it just to get some fresh air and stretch my legs. I walked in a big loop around downtown, ending at the central library where I was picking up books for Karen. It was lovely - no wind and it didn't feel very cold, although Environment Canada says it's only -6C now, with a wind chill of -10C. 

The only snag was the footing on the sidewalks. In lots of places, business owners have failed to clear any snow, so you're walking in a trench made by other pedestrians. And everywhere I went, whether there'd been any attempt to clear the path or not, it was slippery underfoot. The treads on my winter boots aren't very deep, but I don't think that was the issue. It's just what you get when you have fresh wet snow on packed snow underneath. Every step, you slip back a bit.

I think I'm in for the day now.

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Every picture tells a story  Another low-light photograph - with a story.

When we were staying in Lisbon in the winter of 2016, one of the things I wanted to be sure to do was take in some live fado music. Fado is the often melancholy-sounding folk music of Portugal, still very popular today. Shelley Boyes had come to visit, and it turned out fado was on her to-do list as well. There are many, many bars with live fado, all in the same Alfama district, which was about 20 or 25 minutes by foot down the hill from the flat where we were living.

The advice from travel experts was to go late and look for a place with no service charge that didn't insist you buy an expensive and - according to most reports - usually mediocre meal. So that's what we did, setting out after our usual bed time. It didn't take us long to find this place. It was a real down-home bar where local amateurs often came to belt out a few numbers. We're not sure whether this woman was a professional or an amateur, but she was good.

We were amused by the antics of a middle-aged Dutch couple there. The woman had apparently downed two bottles of wine on her own, and was drunkenly irate because she thought she and her husband had been billed a cover charge - it was only €3 - after the maitresse 'd had assured them there was none. It was a bread charge, not a charge for the music, but she wasn't having it. At one point she came and sat at the table behind ours and loudly voiced her discontent. Finally, her husband came back into the restaurant, told her, 'Stop!', paid the bill, and they left. Cringe worthy.

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Music recommendation: Murmúrios by Cristina Branco. It's modern-day fado by a wildly popular (in Portugal) artist, not quite the down-and-dirty version we heard in that Lisbon bar, but not that far removed. She has a fabulous voice and great accompanists. Sample track available with free Spotify account here - or, I'm sure, at any of the streaming services if you have a premium account.

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Sorry, no amusing bird fact today, although I am still reading and enjoying Jennifer Ackerman's The Bird Way. 

The last chapter I was reading about bird vocalizations and mimicry reminded me of a bird Karen and I heard in Tucson the winter we stayed there in 2013. It would sit in a tree or on the peak of the roof next door and sing its heart out, especially in the morning. I had never heard a bird with such a varied and melodious song. When we got back home to Canada, I tried to figure out which species it was,  but I was never entirely satisfied with my identification. Today, however, I found it for sure.

The little fellow we heard was the northern mockingbird. He appears in a list I found on the Web of backyard birds specifically in Tucson and area. And when I found a recording of his song, I was in no doubt. This is our guy, and it's a beautiful song. Here's what he looks like in full spate:

And here is what he sounds like. As I suspected after reading Ackerman and remembering the song, the mockingbird is a great mimic, often parroting the sounds of other birds - and animals, including frogs. That's part of the reason his song sounded different every time.

Running for my life

Day Two of freedom. I celebrated by going out for a run. 

The Weather Channel said it was -8C, and I dressed accordingly: cotton joggers over insulated cold-weather joggers, fleece turtle neck over cotton turtle neck, nylon shell, light woolen hat over fleece lined ear muffs, thinsulate-lined mittens, scarf. 

I might have been over-dressed but, hey, it's good to sweat.

I ran a hybrid route that combined parts of my regular running and fast-walk routes: 3.6 K, with some ups and downs and a good stair climb near the end - not bad for a first time out in three weeks. I'll build it back up to 5 K. My quarantine regime included jogging around the apartment for 30 minutes at a time or riding my bike on an exercise stand for 25. It was evidently enough that I wasn't horribly out of shape. 

As I was coming out of the building and walking along Talbot St. to start the route, a car driven by a pretty thirty-something woman came towards me. The woman did a little double take when she saw me, then looked away and smiled to herself. It's a response I've had before when out exercising. It's almost always young or middle-aged women, and it feels a teensy bit condescending: 'Ah, isn't he cute, the old guy out getting his exercise!' 

I don't really mind. If I'm honest, I'm charmed in a way. I remember when I was in my thirties and hadn't yet quite got myself into the habit of exercising regularly, I'd see guys in their forties and fifties, not necessarily out exercising, but obviously very fit and vigorous. I didn't smile to myself at the sight of them or anything, but I did think, 'Yeah, that's what I want to be like when I get to his age.' 

I'm not sure that's quite the same response as my smiling young women, but if those women went home and egged on their couch-potato fathers or husbands to get out and exercise more like the old duffer they saw on the street today, it would be worth the slight sting of condescension in their smiles. 

I was a bit disappointed in how little has been done to clear the paths. Eighty-five percent of my route is on riverside walking/biking trails and most of that way, I was running on packed snow. It's not really dangerous, but it slows you down a bit. And it could get dangerous if thaw and refreezing turns it to ice. 

I know walkways can't be as high priority as roadways for snow clearance, but unsafe walking conditions provide one more disincentive for people, especially older people, to get out for fresh air and exercise in the winter.

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I find it ironic as a Canadian that we, who were vilified as selfish first-worlders for buying way more Covid vaccine doses than we have people, are now having our vaccine shipments cut, future supply threatened and inoculation program disrupted, while the Europeans who were prominent among our critics are trying to make it difficult for vaccine producers based there to export product out of the Union. 

And more than half the population of France doesn't even want a jab! We do.

The Canadian government strategy of over-buying from multiple suppliers was never about hording - I didn't think. It was about insuring that if some of the vaccines failed to pan out, we'd have a reasonable chance of at least getting some from somewhere. If we do end up with a surplus and we just sit on it while poorer countries go begging, then we'd deserve all the criticism, but not otherwise.

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Every picture tells a story: If you take enough photographs, occasionally you catch a break. Here's an example.

The picture was taken in Córdoba, Spain. (Which we incorrectly call Cor-DO-ba, but which is properly pronounced COR-do-ba - that's what the accent over the first 'o' indicates.) It was shot at the Mezquita the fabulous mosque-cum-cathedral in the city's centre. Southern Spain was ruled by Muslim North African rulers until the Reconquista - the reconquest - by Christian kings in the 13th century. Córdoba, a major power centre in Al-andalus, the Muslim state, fell in 1236.

The Catholic church runs the place today. It's a fascinating amalgam of mosque and church architecture and decoration, beautifully restored and maintained. The day Karen and I visited, in 2011, I noticed that many of the other visitors appeared to be of North African or Middle Eastern origin, and presumably Muslim. These little boys, there with their parents who had let them explore on their own for awhile, were among them. 

It was difficult taking pictures inside because the lighting is deliberately kept very low to help preserve the ancient paintwork. I shot this one at a very high ISO and slow shutter speed to get enough light, which is why it's a bit grainy (the ISO) and why people in motion, like big brother taking the picture, appear blurred (the slow shutter speed). I was incredibly lucky, though, that I clicked the shutter at the exact moment the boy snapped his picture and his flash was illuminating his brothers. 

Using flash was supposed to be strictly forbidden in the Mezquita, but hey, they're just little boys. Or they were in 2011, they're teenagers now.

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Amusing bird fact of the day: The Bird Way author Jennifer Ackerman devotes a chapter of the book to bird mimicry - not parrots mimicking human speech, but birds very accurately mimicking the calls of other bird species. Why do they do it? Some can perfectly mimic dozens of species and do it constantly. There are a bunch of reasons, it turns out, among them impressing prospective mates with their cleverness. But sometimes it's about deceiving other birds or other animals. 

Scientists were long mystified by Australian superb lyrebirds, champion mimics, emitting the alarm calls of other birds while they were in the midst of mating. 

Australian superb lyrebird

Lyrebirds lure their lady loves to a special private place they've prepared by clearing and raking a patch of ground. Researchers now believe the male's object in mimicking alarm calls is to fool its mate into believing other birds in the neighbourhood are sounding the alarm about a nearby predator so she'll freeze in fear and won't be tempted to leave before he's had his way with her and ensured his genes are passed on.

Sneaky bastards!

 

Free and fresh

Our 14-day quarantine ended today. Yay!

Karen celebrated by going grocery shopping - for about three hours! I don't know how many different stores she went to, but a few. It took a long time to sanitize all the food when she finally got it home.

The upside: we had a salad and fresh green beans for dinner, the first fresh vegetables we've had - other than carrot and onion - since we left England. The salad tasted particularly fine.

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In the afternoon, I drove out to Henry's to pick up some photo prints I'd ordered before we left at the end of November. Sister Pat had very sweetly given Karen and I a lovely picture frame for our 50th anniversary, with instructions that we should put one of our wedding photos in it. We're not crazy keen on displaying pictures of ourselves in the house, but thought we should honour her gift. Here's the one we chose, taken by JHB (my dad, our official wedding photographer.) 

As you can see, we were quite young. I was 14, Karen 13. What I can't figure out is how our parents could have let us go through with it when we were such children? But all's well that ends well, I guess.

The cost to print just the one picture at Henry's was some paltry amount, but there was a minimum charge, so I added a couple of other pictures to the order, of Caitlin and Bob's wedding. I thought we could get frames for them as well. Here they are.

That wedding took place on a restored 19th century river barge that sits in the Chelmer River at Maldon in Essex. The boat is used for sight-seeing cruises and as an event venue. The weather that day was perfect: sunny and mild. The bride and groom looked fabulous. It was a lot of fun.

The total cost for the three pictures - the one of us was a 4x6, the two of the kids' wedding were 5x7s - was $3.55. And they all look great. Pretty good deal.

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At the risk of overdoing it with pictures, here's one I had meant to post yesterday when I took it from our living room window. 

Ain't it grand to be home again in Canada!

Today, I have to admit, it was pretty nice here in Londonville, cold but sunny.

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Poop Bomb! I'm starting a new regular feature in my blog: amusing bird facts. 

I'm reading a great book called The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think, by Jennifer Ackerman. In the chapter I read last night, she talked about how birds communicate to warn each other about nearby predators. There are basically two types of alarm calls: flee and mob. Mob calls rally nearby prey birds to come and harass a predator. 

Mobbing is apparently quite common in the bird world. It usually involves a bunch of smaller birds - safety in numbers - swooping down on a bigger bird such as a hawk from above or behind, harrying them until they give up. 

"Gulls," Ackerman writes, "often resort to the practice...with an unusual twist: vomiting on the predator with keen aim. Colonies of fieldfares fire from a different orifice, ejecting feces on a predator in such volume and with such accuracy that the threatening creature is literally grounded or stopped in its tracks. If enough of these droppings-bombs hit their target, they can soak a bird's wings so it can't fly."

So there you have it, today's amusing bird fact. Stay tuned for more.

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Every picture tells a story My other regular feature, which to this point, I've referred to as my memory-bank photo of the day, I'm re-titling. Henceforth it shall be known as, "Every picture tells a story." 

That old cliché could be interpreted in a number of different ways. As a photographer, you ideally want your pictures to tell a story all on their own. The best do. But to me, it's just as important that pictures trigger a story, or have a story lurking within them. It could be, usually is, just a personal memory. But it could be more than that. Here's an illustration.

In 1963, Sir Henry d'Avigdor-Goldsmid, a decorated World War II veteran turned politician and banker, and his wife, Lady Rosemary, lost their 21-year-old daughter, Sarah, to a sailing accident off the south coast of England near Rye. To memorialize their daughter's life, the d'Avigdor-Goldsmids commissioned Marc Chagall, the great French-Russian expressionist artist, to create a stained glass for the parish church at Tudely, Kent, near where they lived. 

Chagall accepted the commission and, in 1967, when it was completed, he came to England to oversee the installation and unveiling. The story is that, on seeing the unassuming little church - to my eyes, nothing exceptional by English village church standards - he said, "It's magnificent. I will do them all." He meant, I will make stained glass for all the windows in the church. And he did. 

Today, all 12 windows have glass designed by Chagall. Most are abstract, but some show elements of the familiar magic realist style of his mature paintings. Chagall lived on until 1985, the year our Caitlin was born. He was just shy of 100. Sir Henry died in 1977. The windows remain. 

In 2019, when Caitlin and Bob were briefly living in Kent, Caitlin, Karen and I and Louis drove over to Tudely to see the windows. They were, are, spectacular. The day we visited, nobody else was in the church. We had it entirely to ourselves. Louis was the only one not impressed.

And that's my story.

What the heck, it deserves a couple more pictures.

Down the rabbit hole

It seemed a simple enough project, although I've thought that before and been wrong. I went ahead anyway. It was a frustrating morning.

In our house, I'm the director of technology services. Karen is my client. I'm often called on to solve problems she's having with her devices, or show her how to do things. She finds my teaching irksome, though, and complains she later has no way to review what she's supposed to have learned. 

Fair enough. I can be impatient and...brisk, if not brusque, in these situations.

When I need to figure out how to do something on the computer, I go searching on the Web. I often end up watching a "video" produced by some nerd in Scotland or Bangladesh or Arkansas in which they show the screens and the mouse movements and actions I need to emulate in order to do whatever it is I'm trying to do.

Okay then, I thought, perhaps I could make this kind of instructional video for Karen. Then she'd have something to look at later as a refresher. I'd been planning to show her some new tricks I'd learned for cleaning up her Gmail mailbox - she'd been complaining about unwanted advertising messages. This could be my first simple instructional video.

First, I went looking for a free app that would give me the tools I needed. I was pretty sure there'd be some out there, and I was right. I found a dandy almost immediately. 

OBS Studio (Open Broadcaster Studio) is a video production app that can do everything I wanted plus a lot more. It's also open source, meaning it's produced by a group of volunteer programmers, and it's absolutely free. Plus, it gets consistently glowing reviews. I downloaded it and started the install. 

That's when I should have realized I was letting myself in for something not quite as simple as I'd bargained for. The installation stopped almost immediately because I didn't have a necessary "run-time component" installed on my laptop, something related to the C++ programming language in which the application was evidently written. 

Did I want to download and install the component? Sure, okay. It's not like it was dodgy code from some never-heard-of developer: it came from Microsoft, so it was safe as houses.

Fifteen minutes later, after a necessary restart of my computer, I was able to go back and successfully install OBS Studio on the second try. 

Next I went and looked for a tutorial or primer on how to use it - because the application's home screen when it opened was, to be honest, a little daunting, not exactly intuitive. I found a good one, though, learned the basics of how to set the program up and start a project, and began experimenting.

I'm an hour into my simple project now.

Right away there are problems - not, as it turns out, problems with the app, but it takes me awhile to figure that out. I tell it to capture - record - everything on the screen, plus my audio input. And I record a brief test video.

It doesn't work: there's no audio in the playback - despite the fact that I've got the microphone turned on. 

A half hour or so later, after consulting the oracle and trying several  possible solutions without success, I decide it must be that the built-in microphone in the computer isn't working, so I switch over to using my Bluetooth headset for both sound recording and playback. And I try another test video.

No dice: same result. Back to the oracle for more advice.

A little later, a voice in my head reminds me of something I should have thought of straightaway: the audio playback on my PC occasionally cuts out entirely - something to do with Windows or the audio driver software that controls the sound system. Or something. I'd momentarily forgotten this because I don't often use sound on my PC. 

I email one of the test videos to myself, open it on my tablet, and it works fine, there is sound. I had been recording the audio all along, the PC just wasn't playing it.

Back to the oracle. It tells me that to solve the problem with my laptop's audio system, I need to update the driver software. This turns out to be a slower-than-usual - 20-minute - process.

Well, it goes on and on like that. On and on. I work on the project for almost three hours, and at the end of that time have nothing concrete to show for it. 

I do, however, now have the tools in place to do what I want to do, and I know, more or less, how to use them. It's just that after three hours, enough is enough. It'll wait till another day.

So I thought I'd write this blog post instead.

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When I started posting these daily memory-bank photos, I was thinking that the archive I was drawing from - the pictures cycling on my laptop's screen saver - only went back to the beginning of the time I started using digital SLR cameras, about 12 years ago. But in fact, they go back quite a bit further. I've also scanned old negatives and slides, some of which came out reasonably well, despite my using mediocre scanning gear. This is one I particularly like.

It was taken at Chichén Itzá, the Mayan ruin in central Mexico, in the mid- to late 1990s. It was a spring-break getaway. Caitlin was 12 or so, I think. We were staying in a rented flat on the beach near Mérida, the capital of Yucatan State, but we drove to Chichén Itzá, a couple of hours away, and stayed overnight at a Club Med resort attached to the archaeological site. 

It was a great place to visit and learn about ancient Mayan culture. We climbed the steepest pyramid on a very hot day. They provide chains bolted into the steps to hang on to while you're climbing. The steps are so steep and shallow, you feel you're in danger of falling backwards at any moment and tumbling down them. Caitlin was done in by the time we got to the top, and very dry - and she looks it in the picture. In retrospect, I've wondered if she might have had a mild bout of mononucleosis on that trip. She didn't seem to have a lot of energy, although she did enjoy the Chichén Itzá visit, ruins being one of her things. 

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I tried out Google Arts and Culture, a website and mobile app, when it first came out a few years ago, and wasn't that impressed. Recently, though, The Guardian's weekly arts newsletter has recommended some virtual museum exhibits that I think are pretty good. Several I've found do what I think my art historian daughter would call "close readings" of a painting. Two I enjoyed were Vermeer's "The Milkmaid" at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam,  and Degas' "Waiting" at the J.P. Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

They both work the same way. You start with the title page (the Degas example, above) and just scroll down the page. As you scroll down, the page displays bits of text, drawing your attention to parts of the picture, and at the same time, zooms in on what they're talking about. They're quite informative and interesting. I would have liked an even more detailed analysis. And I don't understand why they don't include audio of the curator who wrote the texts reading it.

Still, it's a way to look at and learn about famous pictures. It's no substitute for standing in front of them, but in the midst of a pandemic, it's the next best thing. 

There are also virtual walk-throughs of some famous museums and galleries using Google Street View, including the British Museum. I found them a bit frustrating, though, because it's often difficult or impossible to zoom in on the plaque describing the exhibit you're looking at.

Tweet, tweet, tweedle-lee-dee-dee

Counting down the hours till freedom . (It's roughly 32 as I write this.) In the meantime, here's my memory-bank photo of the day.

Malaga, Spain, Easter 2017

We spent the first part of winter 2017 on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, then spent six weeks in Malaga on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. As with other parts of Roman Catholic southern Europe, Easter is still a huge deal here. Many local parishes invest countless thousands of Euros building and maintaining floats, some decades or even centuries old, on which they carry elaborate, richly robed effigies of the Virgin Mary or Jesus through the streets at Easter. 

These things weigh tons, so it takes a small battalion of able-bodied men - and some women - to carry them. They walk very slowly with a kind of swaying motion, accompanied by a marching band playing eerily sombre music. The swaying gait is meant to make the figure on the float appear alive. Luckily for the carriers, there are frequent rest stops - the parades take hours to go a relatively short distance. There were two or three parades on our street over a couple of days during Easter week that year. These guys were just up around the corner from us, about to turn on to our street, about three blocks from the apartment. Note the people hanging out of windows and balconies at either edge of the frame. 

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I opened a Twitter account last night. Will I tweet? I don't know yet. 

I did it because of an opinion piece I read in the Saturday Globe & Mail by novelist and former journalist Tom Rachman. (It's here, but if you don't have a Globe online account, you have to sign up, for free, before you can read it.) Rachman was a reluctant tweeter and, judging by his tweets, still fairly tentative. I have been and probably will continue to be similarly reluctant, and may never dip my toe in.

Part of what Rachman was talking about in the article was the notion of intellectual courage, which to him entails "offending mainstream opinion in a way that mainstream opinion will eventually endorse" - as opposed, he means, to just spouting offensive opinions. He cites Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Mary Wollstonecraft, the early 19th century feminist, as examples of the intellectually courageous, people who "got there first."

He asks whether it is possible to show intellectual courage in the Twitter universe. It's not, he suggests, or it's difficult because, first, there is no longer any such thing as "mainstream opinion." There are only two armed camps. And the intolerance on both sides means if you dissent from the mainstream opinion in your own tribe, you simply get thrown over the wall to the other. 

It's also extremely risky to try because, as Rachman says, tweets are all but indelible. Among friends, we might state an opinion, sincerely hold it for a time, but then allow ourselves to be persuaded by hearing other, better reasoned, points of view, and recant. With Twitter, any briefly-held, and tweeted, position can be used against you later, even if you delete the original tweet.

There has been so much in the media lately decrying this rigidification of political opinion and discourse. I don't see how it can be all down to social media, but it has happened over the period in which Facebook and Twitter have come to play such a huge role in the discourse. Ten or fifteen years ago, I rememer regularly talking politics with work friends who held markedly different views from my own way-left-of-centre positions. The discussions were always conducted with good humour and mutual respect and ended with either some grudging shift in opinion on one side, or an amicable agreement to disagree. 

I know I'm not the first to lament the loss of that kind of civility and mutual respect in political discourse. And I'm not suggesting that the opinions of the people in the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol should be respected or tolerated, but the fact is, those people were among an astonishing 74 million who voted for Donald Trump's Republicans. (And as my brother Tom laid out in an article in the National Post a few days ago, Trumpism is not just a U.S. phenomenon, there are Trumpites, and Qanon conspiracists right here in Canada.) One hopes - and there is some evidence to suggest this - that some of those voters have had their minds changed by Trumps antics. But liberals like me, and most of my friends and family, can't just hope they go away. They won't.

So how do we bridge the divide? That's the challenge Uncle Joe Biden faces now in the U.S. But it's one we should all be working on when the opportunity arises. To that end, the good folks at Pocket have put together a portfolio of articles, entitled "How to Talk to People You Disagree With." The articles cover a bunch of topics, from how to really listen, finding common ground, how to avoid being defensive and, perhaps most importantly, how to change someone's mind. I haven't read them all yet, but I will.

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A quick nod to a quirky British dramedy series that we like very much: The Good Karma Hospital, which we get on Acorn ($7.49 a month, but with a free week-long trial.) I'm not sure if it's available anywhere else. It's about English doctors at a small private hospital in small-town southern India. 

The cast is mostly Indian - or maybe some of them are Indo-Brits, but they speak with Indian accents. The name actor, who plays the hospital's de facto head doctor, Lydia Fonseca, is Amanda Redman. She played the detective chief inspector in New Tricks, a long-running British cop show about a bunch of eccentric old gumshoes who come out of retirement to join a squad set up to reinvestigate cold cases.

Some might find Good Karma a bit...squishy. It can be sentimental and cliched, but the acting and writing are pretty good and the setting is spectacular. It's possible the picture of life in southern India has been sanitized somewhat for English audiences. The series works pretty well as an ad for tourism in Kerala State where it's set (although the series is actually shot in Sri Lanka). 

We Shall Be Released

Two more days to go after today. 

Karen has said she'll be going out first thing Wednesday to shop for fresh food, mainly vegetables and fruit, and has threatened to go out again Thursday if there are attractive deals in the next week's flyers. I'm not crazy about her spending a lot of time in shops with other people, but we do need to replenish stocks. 

We've been subsisting since we came home on frozen meat (which, to be clear, we thaw and cook before eating), frozen vegetables (rarely satisfactory) and some fresh fruit and veg we left behind. The onion, garlic, carrot, squash, celery and apples were fine, which is perhaps not surprising. The oranges were a surprise. They looked a bit decrepit after six weeks in the fridge, but they tasted good. 

We've been missing salads and fresh cooking veg, but on the whole, we've eaten quite well.

We could have ordered food to be delivered, of course, but our condo community has asked residents not to let delivery people into the building - as a way of reducing Covid spread. We're supposed to go down to the front door to accept deliveries. But as we're in quarantine, we're not supposed to go into public areas. So, catch-22. We could have asked neighbours to help, but...well, we didn't. 

The upshot is, we basically haven't been out of our unit in almost two weeks, not even to go to the garbage chute. The kitchen garbage is piled outside on the balcony. That may sound gross, but it does freeze out there, and the stuff certainly doesn't smell - even when I'm out there taking the air.

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Today's memory bank shot comes from our first winter in Valencia, 2012. We stayed in an apartment down near the beach and marina. It wasn't a great spot, not a particularly attractive part of town and the building was on a four-lane-wide thoroughfare. There were occasional hot water problems, shower drain problems, and an outrageous amount of noise in the middle of the night every Friday and Saturday from an after-hours nightclub a couple of blocks away. But we fell in love with the city.

The picture was taken at the parade of flowers in the middle of Fallas, the fortnight-long end-of-winter festival in March. Neighbourhood associations across the city organize groups of mostly girls and women, but some men, decked out in these beautifully embroidered costumes inspired by 18th century fashions. They march, carrying bouquets of flowers, to a square in front of the basilica, the Square of the Virgin, where the city has erected a giant statue of Mary. The bottom part of the statue, the Virgin's robe, is open wooden scaffolding. As each group arrives in the square with its floral tribute, helpers take it from them and climb the scaffold to place the flowers. At the end of the day, the robe is a riot of colour.

This group, I'm assuming a family, was a long way from the square. The parade lasts hours, stopping and starting as each group has its moment with the Virgin. The parade was in one of its momentary pauses, and these folks were posing for a friend to take a picture. I just piggybacked on the shoot. They look very patrician, I think, and very handsome. In truth, he's probably a dentist and his wife the hygienist. The women's hairdos, with the circular coils of hair on either side, are a traditional Valencian style.

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When we were in England last September, son-in-law Bob added me to his Apple Music family account. Fair play: they piggyback on our Netflix in the same way. It was a real revelation, having access to all that music. Apple offers something like 50 million tracks, which must translate to at least four million albums. And new stuff gets added all the time.

It was the new stuff that particularly caught my attention. For each category of music, there is a periodically updated listing of recently released albums. I went straight to the classical section and scrolled through the new releases, auditioning any that looked appealing. A few made the cut. My recommendation for today is one of them, although it might be difficult to access if you don't have Apple Music, or something similar. It's not exactly mainstream music.

The composer, Luys Milan, a renaissance-era Spaniard, from Valencia, is one I'd not heard of before. Ditto for the player, Sébastian Llinares on guitar. (I should have mentioned: it's an album of solo guitar music, not perhaps everybody's cup of tea.) His name sounds Spanish and he plays in the Spanish style, but Llinares, a guy in his early 40, was actually born and trained in France.

I'm not sure why this recording of fairly obscure music is so appealing to me. I think it just comes down to excellence, in the playing - he has amazing technique and musicality - and in the recording. It really sings. Even the album cover design is pretty cool. If you're interested, you can sample the music here.

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And once again, I'll end with Louis, who we saw briefly today in a Portal call, grinning at us, but not having much to say for himself. I took the picture earlier this month.

Bird Brains

My memory bank shot today is one from not so long ago, just this past autumn. It was taken in the back garden at Caitlin's and Bob's rented house in Corbridge. Caitlin and Louis are sitting on the steps of their garden shed, a favourite hangout of Louis'.

They're engaged in what we thought of as "parallel reading." Louis would demand a book be read to him by an adult, but he also wanted to read another book himself at the same time. Reading for him meant pointing out and naming the characters and other interesting features in the illustrations, and sometimes recounting remembered bits of the story. Was he also listening out of one ear to the other story? Don't know. In any case, he's mostly past that behaviour now. We saw hardly any of it at Christmas. There were, of course, lots of distractions at Christmas, and lots of new toys.

I love his little leg cocked up to hold open the big book he's "reading." Caitlin is reading The Smeds and the Smoos by Julia Donaldson, a favourite of the whole family. Louis' book is another Donaldson title, The Gruffalo's Child.

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I find I'm drawn more and more lately to books about nature, books whose authors write about the wonder they feel and the personal insights they gain from directly engaging with and studying the natural world. It's not a new genre - Gerald Durrell's books pop to mind as an example from an earlier generation - but nature writing has been revitalized in the last 20 years or so, and some say, raised to a new level. It has become a sub-genre of what is now known as "literary non-fiction."

The first author I found that I liked was Robert Macfarlane, a British naturalist, adventurer and poet, and the author of several award-winning and critically-acclaimed books. He started off writing about mountaineering, but more recently his adventures have been slightly less arduous, but still involving considerable risk and danger at times. 

Robert MacFarlane

I've just finished The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot. It's about way-finding and wayfaring. In each chapter, he goes to a different wild, or relatively wild, place to explore "ways" - walking routes - that have existed for centuries, in some cases, since ancient times: on the peat bogs of the Outer Hebrides, the Cairngorm mountains in the Scottish highlands, foothills of the Himalayas, etc. He almost always meets up with a local expert or guide - usually another naturalist, sometimes another nature writer - whom he profiles while describing the experience of walking with them. Woven through it is a discussion of the symbolic importance and history of these ancient foot ways.

The other title of MacFarlane's I've read, his most recent and best received, is Underland. It's structured similarly to The Old Ways, but each chapter explores a different underground world: catacombs in Paris, salt mines in eastern England that reach out under the North Sea, inside glaciers in Greenland, in the deep tunnels in Norway where nuclear waste is stored and, of course, caves in several places. He writes about the allure and cultural meaning of these underground worlds. In Underland, MacFarlane has taken the profiling of his local hosts and guides to a new level. They are often eccentric, romantic figures and come alive like fully-realized characters in a good novel.

The other book in something the same vein that I enjoyed is H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald She's a British naturalist, falconer and academic philosopher of science. The book, which won two major awards in Britain, is a memoir of her experience successfully training a Northern Goshawk, a bird supposedly almost impossible to train for falconry. The decision to undertake the project was made as, and partly because, she was grieving the unexpected early death of her father. It might be hard to imagine how this could make for compelling reading, but it does. Also highly recommended.

All of this is just a lead-in to the book I really wanted to mention, which I've just started, but can already unreservedly recommend. It's called The Bird Way by Jennifer Ackerman, an American who has been writing about science and nature for 30 years and has won a few awards for it. This is her ninth book. It was published last year to rave reviews. I can see why.

It's subtitled A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think. She writes about new science, often using entirely new methods, and the new understandings that have emerged around the incredible diversity in bird populations and, in particular, the incredible variety of behaviours. A central thesis is that the new science shows birds are far more intelligent than was ever realized or acknowledged, but with a different kind of intelligence from humans, achieved by different physiological strategies.

It might sound too science-y - I admit I had some reservations on that score myself before I started it - and it might sound like more than you ever really wanted to know about the subject. But the writing is very accessible, and it's quite entertaining. 

A footnote: If you haven't seen the PBS Masterpiece Theatre series, The Durrells in Corfu, keep an eye out for reruns. It's delightful. (You can also buy it at Amazon or any of the other streaming content providers.) It's about the Durrell family's sojourn on the Greek island of Corfu in the 1930s. Gerald was just a boy but already a mad-keen student and collector of animal life, and big brother Laurence was just starting his career as a slightly outré literary novelist. It stars the wonderful Keeley Hawes as the widowed mother. The actor who plays Prince Charles in the latest season of The Crown, Josh O'Connor, is Laurence.

Durrells in Corfu cast

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I took Michael Ondaatje out to the balcony again this afternoon (-5C, -11 with wind chill). His 1998 poetry collection, Handwriting, which I mentioned yesterday, begins to come into focus a little. It's clearly about the upheavals of the civil war in Sri Lanka, especially how it affected poor rural people, but also about the national history of upheaval and conflict. It's a kind of prequel to his novel Anil's Ghost which came two years later.

I even begin to like, if not fully understand, it. I will have to look up some of the Sri Lankan historical and Hindu and Bhuddist religious references. Funny, I have no memory of buying it, but it would have been over 20 years ago so perhaps not surprising.