Today marks the first day that I have filed a story on the Digital Journal. I read the report released by the World Wildlife Fund Canada and then wrote an article, similar to a newspaper report. You can find it under the headline, "Canadian Rivers at Risk."
The Digital Journal is attempt to operate an on-line digital newspaper with citizen journalists writing the stories and sharing in the profits of the operation.
Most of the stories seem to be re-writes of stories running in the MSM but some are not, and everyone is getting experience writing and learning to meet deadlines. In a few cases, the Digital Journal has scooped Sun Media, the main news chain that I follow.
I must note that I sorely missed having an editor. I wrote "to meet out" when I meant "to meet our." I put in words and phrases that I later edited out. And I didn't properly link my quotes to my sources.
Being a one man band means hitting some truly sour notes. (Then again, the newspapers have jettisoned a lot of their editors. Which is why we read stuff like, "Since my eye operation, I can sea very well." Unfortunately, the operation didn't improve the writer's spelling.)
*
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Update to Factory Farming Post
There has been an update and new link added to the post looking into factory farming and how it relates to health. They don't call it swine flu for nothing.
If you haven't read the post, please do. It has been popular around the world. Not sure if popular is the correct word but it attracts a steady stream of hits. Hit it soon, while all the links are still connected.
Cheers,
Rockinon
If you haven't read the post, please do. It has been popular around the world. Not sure if popular is the correct word but it attracts a steady stream of hits. Hit it soon, while all the links are still connected.
Cheers,
Rockinon
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Fuzzy Bears, Warm Memories, Cold Winters
I just have to learn to read the fine print. I am now submitting news stories to Digital Journal. One part of the contractual agreement stipulates that stories posted to their site must be digitally unique.
So, please click here to read my little piece on fuzzy bears, warm memories and cold winters. It is worth linking over. This piece has been popular.
Check out the Digital Journal site, while you are there. It is an interesting concept and I believe it is Canadian.
Cheers,
Rockinon.
_________________________________________________
I thank the Sault Ste. Marie Horticultural Society for the information used to write this post.
So, please click here to read my little piece on fuzzy bears, warm memories and cold winters. It is worth linking over. This piece has been popular.
Check out the Digital Journal site, while you are there. It is an interesting concept and I believe it is Canadian.
Cheers,
Rockinon.
_________________________________________________
I thank the Sault Ste. Marie Horticultural Society for the information used to write this post.
Friday, October 9, 2009
Evolution-devolution of cities
Kodachrome 64 is dead. It changed my photography career. - By Camilo Jose Vergara - Slate Magazine
Click on the above sentence and then click launch below the picture to observe the changes made to one, small nondescript building in Chicago over the passing of years. The building may be uninteresting but the changes certainly are not. The building's surface changes, a window appears (more likely reappears), the entry door changes and razor wire comes and razor wire goes.
If you look at the far left side of the earliest photos you will notice a small home. It appears to have burned and then to have been demolished. The home presents another story, a sidebar to the main story, you might say. It is a little story ending badly for the structure and, in the short term, for the neighbourhood.
Camilo Jose Vergara obviously loves cities. He has spent a great deal of his life documenting urban change in some of America's greatest cities. To be more accurate, he has carefully documented urban decay in America. I googled Vergara and found another interesting strip of photos. <= Note: you must click on the line "ENTER HARLEM, NY DATABASE."
Taken over a 4 year period, Vergara documents the transformation of a once beautiful building with stained glass, twin double door entries, and ornate woodwork into a building patiently awaiting the wrecking ball.
The way we treat our cities — towns and villages, too — is truly sad. There are some important lessons in these photos. These images may come from the States but Canadians should not feel too smug. Often, we have simply not documented the slow motion disaster remaking our urban world.
Click on the above sentence and then click launch below the picture to observe the changes made to one, small nondescript building in Chicago over the passing of years. The building may be uninteresting but the changes certainly are not. The building's surface changes, a window appears (more likely reappears), the entry door changes and razor wire comes and razor wire goes.
If you look at the far left side of the earliest photos you will notice a small home. It appears to have burned and then to have been demolished. The home presents another story, a sidebar to the main story, you might say. It is a little story ending badly for the structure and, in the short term, for the neighbourhood.
Camilo Jose Vergara obviously loves cities. He has spent a great deal of his life documenting urban change in some of America's greatest cities. To be more accurate, he has carefully documented urban decay in America. I googled Vergara and found another interesting strip of photos. <= Note: you must click on the line "ENTER HARLEM, NY DATABASE."
Taken over a 4 year period, Vergara documents the transformation of a once beautiful building with stained glass, twin double door entries, and ornate woodwork into a building patiently awaiting the wrecking ball.
The way we treat our cities — towns and villages, too — is truly sad. There are some important lessons in these photos. These images may come from the States but Canadians should not feel too smug. Often, we have simply not documented the slow motion disaster remaking our urban world.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
My genes made me do it!
This post is going to be about a common sexual myth but maybe it should be about intelligence, the intelligence needed to get through a modern day. This morning I wanted to scream, "Bring back the horse and buggy era!" This is the third time I have written and posted this piece. The third! I have just got to learn to think "back-up." Even better, I should simply learn to think.
________________________________________________________
Whenever I hear someone blame their actions on their genes, I cringe. I have an especially strong reaction when I hear someone, but often a woman, supposedly resorting to science in excusing the actions of a cheating man. "Men are natural Don Juans, " these people say. "It's in their genes." Nature intended men to be lovers, to go forth and multiply.
I cringe, but I cringe silently. I have no comeback. I think these people are way off base but they are espousing an evolutionary position taught even in high schools. The discussion adds levity to science classes struggling to hold student interest.
Then I read Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice To All Creation. The good doctor, actually Olivia Judson, an evolutionary biologist who writes for many well known publications, goes to great lengths to show how this is a law of nature that isn't. To be blunt, this notion is nonsense.
Judson tell us, "The man who first lent scientific respectability to this notion was named A.J. Bateman. In 1948, he published a paper . . . in which he claimed to have proved that males have evolved to make love and females to make babies."
Bateman "proclaimed with a flourish, males (including humans) are natural philanderers while females (again including humans) are naturally chaste."
Judson says Bateman's position when it came to sex was that "males produce lots of tiny, cheap sperm whereas females produce a few large, expensive eggs . . . one man could easily fertilize all the eggs of many females." Men who have many women are just following a genetic imperative.
Bateman's principal, as it is known, has been all the rage for decades. Feminists invoke it, scientists expound on it, and many a silver tongued Lothario has sought shelter in its core belief: men are cads, women are saints. It is just the way of the world.
Unfortunately, according to Judson, "Bateman's principal has a fundamental flaw: it's wrong. In most species, girls are more strumpet than saint. Rather than mating once, they'll mate with several fellows, and often with far, far more than necessary just to fertilize their eggs."
Take a deep breath, guys, it gets worse. When my wife read the first post, she had daggers in her eyes when she glanced from the computer monitor to me: "Woman are not, are not . . . I'm not even going to dignify this with a response. Harrumph!"
Never "harrumph" me. It sends me googling, researching. And this is where this whole discussions takes a nasty turn.
I discovered the following: In Stuttgart, Germany, a man hired his neighbour to get his wife pregnant.
It seems a 29-year-old husband and his former beauty queen wife wanted a child badly, but the husband was told by a doctor that he was sterile. So, he hired his neighbour to impregnate the queen. Since the neighbour was already married and the father of two children, plus looked very much like our cuckold-husband-to-be, the plan seemed good. The neighbourhood stud was paid $2,500 for the job and for three evenings a week for the next six months, he tried desperately, a total of 72 different times, to deliver on his promise.
However, when the young wife failed to get pregnant after six months, the husband was not understanding and insisted that his neighbour have a medical examination, which he did. The doctor's announcement was that the neighbour was also sterile. This news shocked everyone except the neighbour's wife, who was forced to confess that the stud was not the real father of their two children.
At last report, the husband is suing for breach of contract in an effort to get his money back. (From the post 10 Most Bizarre Paternity Stories.)
Funny? Yes. Uncommon? Not as uncommon as you might think. It is a frequent enough occurrence that it even has a couple of names: The children's rights movement calls it "child identity fraud", while the father's rights movement calls it "paternity fraud".
Beginning in the 1980s, the development of sophisticated genetic techniques enabled biologists to investigate paternity and what they discovered was something astonishing, something no one had predicted - namely that, from stick insects to chimpanzees, females are hardly ever faithful.
I'm going to give the last word on paternity fraud to Heather Draper who wrote in the Journal of Medical Ethics: "Paternity testing might be an effective test of genetic relatedness and infidelity, but it is an ineffective test of fatherhood." Scissors cut paper, paper wraps stone, and compassion, love, humanity trumps genes.
So men, take the advice of Dr. Tatiana (Olivia Judson) and don't be a lazy partner, give your woman a hand with the child care, be a loving supporter, give of yourself.
If you want to get into the lady's genes, maybe you should take your cue from the black vultures which apparently have a strong social convention supporting monogamy. These birds insist that sex be conducted in the privacy of the nest and they won't tolerate lewd behaviour in public. Who'd have thought?
________________________________________________________
For an interesting read, check out Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice To All Creation by Olivia Judson. It is bawdy, ribald and extremely funny --- and educational to boot.
Addendum: I'm a bit of a romantic, maybe it's genetic, but I must be fair and mention that Judson on page 164 addresses the question of monogamy in humans. "Do individual humans, just like individual crickets and fruit flies, differ in their genetic predisposition toward monogamy?"
"Perhaps it will turn out," she continues, "that men with large testicles (anticipating a high risk of sperm competition) are prone to seducing other men's wives and have difficulty forming lasting bonds whereas men with small testicles (anticipating a low risk of sperm competition) are prone to sexual fidelity . . . But for now, this is all conjecture . . . "
Lastly, an aside to my wife, "Which ever way this goes, honey, I'm one of those fellows whose genetics indicate that I came into the world anticipating a low risk of competition. You can relax."
________________________________________________________
Whenever I hear someone blame their actions on their genes, I cringe. I have an especially strong reaction when I hear someone, but often a woman, supposedly resorting to science in excusing the actions of a cheating man. "Men are natural Don Juans, " these people say. "It's in their genes." Nature intended men to be lovers, to go forth and multiply.
I cringe, but I cringe silently. I have no comeback. I think these people are way off base but they are espousing an evolutionary position taught even in high schools. The discussion adds levity to science classes struggling to hold student interest.
Then I read Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice To All Creation. The good doctor, actually Olivia Judson, an evolutionary biologist who writes for many well known publications, goes to great lengths to show how this is a law of nature that isn't. To be blunt, this notion is nonsense.
Judson tell us, "The man who first lent scientific respectability to this notion was named A.J. Bateman. In 1948, he published a paper . . . in which he claimed to have proved that males have evolved to make love and females to make babies."
Bateman "proclaimed with a flourish, males (including humans) are natural philanderers while females (again including humans) are naturally chaste."
Judson says Bateman's position when it came to sex was that "males produce lots of tiny, cheap sperm whereas females produce a few large, expensive eggs . . . one man could easily fertilize all the eggs of many females." Men who have many women are just following a genetic imperative.
Bateman's principal, as it is known, has been all the rage for decades. Feminists invoke it, scientists expound on it, and many a silver tongued Lothario has sought shelter in its core belief: men are cads, women are saints. It is just the way of the world.
Unfortunately, according to Judson, "Bateman's principal has a fundamental flaw: it's wrong. In most species, girls are more strumpet than saint. Rather than mating once, they'll mate with several fellows, and often with far, far more than necessary just to fertilize their eggs."
Take a deep breath, guys, it gets worse. When my wife read the first post, she had daggers in her eyes when she glanced from the computer monitor to me: "Woman are not, are not . . . I'm not even going to dignify this with a response. Harrumph!"
Never "harrumph" me. It sends me googling, researching. And this is where this whole discussions takes a nasty turn.
I discovered the following: In Stuttgart, Germany, a man hired his neighbour to get his wife pregnant.
It seems a 29-year-old husband and his former beauty queen wife wanted a child badly, but the husband was told by a doctor that he was sterile. So, he hired his neighbour to impregnate the queen. Since the neighbour was already married and the father of two children, plus looked very much like our cuckold-husband-to-be, the plan seemed good. The neighbourhood stud was paid $2,500 for the job and for three evenings a week for the next six months, he tried desperately, a total of 72 different times, to deliver on his promise.
However, when the young wife failed to get pregnant after six months, the husband was not understanding and insisted that his neighbour have a medical examination, which he did. The doctor's announcement was that the neighbour was also sterile. This news shocked everyone except the neighbour's wife, who was forced to confess that the stud was not the real father of their two children.
At last report, the husband is suing for breach of contract in an effort to get his money back. (From the post 10 Most Bizarre Paternity Stories.)
Funny? Yes. Uncommon? Not as uncommon as you might think. It is a frequent enough occurrence that it even has a couple of names: The children's rights movement calls it "child identity fraud", while the father's rights movement calls it "paternity fraud".
Beginning in the 1980s, the development of sophisticated genetic techniques enabled biologists to investigate paternity and what they discovered was something astonishing, something no one had predicted - namely that, from stick insects to chimpanzees, females are hardly ever faithful.
I'm going to give the last word on paternity fraud to Heather Draper who wrote in the Journal of Medical Ethics: "Paternity testing might be an effective test of genetic relatedness and infidelity, but it is an ineffective test of fatherhood." Scissors cut paper, paper wraps stone, and compassion, love, humanity trumps genes.
So men, take the advice of Dr. Tatiana (Olivia Judson) and don't be a lazy partner, give your woman a hand with the child care, be a loving supporter, give of yourself.
If you want to get into the lady's genes, maybe you should take your cue from the black vultures which apparently have a strong social convention supporting monogamy. These birds insist that sex be conducted in the privacy of the nest and they won't tolerate lewd behaviour in public. Who'd have thought?
________________________________________________________
Addendum: I'm a bit of a romantic, maybe it's genetic, but I must be fair and mention that Judson on page 164 addresses the question of monogamy in humans. "Do individual humans, just like individual crickets and fruit flies, differ in their genetic predisposition toward monogamy?"
"Perhaps it will turn out," she continues, "that men with large testicles (anticipating a high risk of sperm competition) are prone to seducing other men's wives and have difficulty forming lasting bonds whereas men with small testicles (anticipating a low risk of sperm competition) are prone to sexual fidelity . . . But for now, this is all conjecture . . . "
Lastly, an aside to my wife, "Which ever way this goes, honey, I'm one of those fellows whose genetics indicate that I came into the world anticipating a low risk of competition. You can relax."
Monday, October 5, 2009
...there'll be one child born and a world to carry on...
You may not realize this but when you visit an Internet site, you leave certain information. You leave your I.P. address. At the very least I have a good idea of where you live - at least, the town and the country.
Often I know the Internet site you visited before mine, and sometime I know the Internet site that you head off to after hitting me. If you hit more than one item on my blog, I have a vague idea of how long you stayed.
Recently, one visitor to my blog was cruising the Web searching references to Laura Nyro and stumbled upon this post. They stayed awhile. They must have liked what they found. When they left, they went to YouTube and watched the following video.
They unwittingly shared their search with me. Now I am going to share what they found with you. My wife thinks this song is a bit morbid. I don't. I think it is uplifting - filled with mature hope, a positive take on this adventure we call life - living.
The post that inspired all of this follows the embedded song.
Cheers,
Rockinon
________________________________________________________
I just have to learn to read the fine print. I am now submitting news stories to Digital Journal. One part of the contractual agreement stipulates that stories posted to their site must be digitally unique.
So, please click here to read my little piece inspired by my new granddaughter and memories of Laura Nyro. It is worth linking over. This piece has been popular.
Check out the Digital Journal site, while you are there. It is an interesting concept and I believe it is Canadian.
Cheers,
Rockinon.
Often I know the Internet site you visited before mine, and sometime I know the Internet site that you head off to after hitting me. If you hit more than one item on my blog, I have a vague idea of how long you stayed.
Recently, one visitor to my blog was cruising the Web searching references to Laura Nyro and stumbled upon this post. They stayed awhile. They must have liked what they found. When they left, they went to YouTube and watched the following video.
They unwittingly shared their search with me. Now I am going to share what they found with you. My wife thinks this song is a bit morbid. I don't. I think it is uplifting - filled with mature hope, a positive take on this adventure we call life - living.
The post that inspired all of this follows the embedded song.
Cheers,
Rockinon
________________________________________________________
So, please click here to read my little piece inspired by my new granddaughter and memories of Laura Nyro. It is worth linking over. This piece has been popular.
Check out the Digital Journal site, while you are there. It is an interesting concept and I believe it is Canadian.
Cheers,
Rockinon.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
This is food?
The story in the New York Times about ground beef is shocking and disgusting.
After eating hamburger contaminated by a potent strain of E. coli, a young woman is left paralysed. The Times takes an in-depth look at ground beef production in the United States.
Living in Canada,it is easy to read this as a story about conditions in the meat industry to the south. Yet just a few months ago, we had our own meat contamination story centred around a plant in Toronto, and a few years back we had a story about lax meat plant procedures in an Aylmer operation.
I wouldn't be too smug.
After eating hamburger contaminated by a potent strain of E. coli, a young woman is left paralysed. The Times takes an in-depth look at ground beef production in the United States.
Living in Canada,it is easy to read this as a story about conditions in the meat industry to the south. Yet just a few months ago, we had our own meat contamination story centred around a plant in Toronto, and a few years back we had a story about lax meat plant procedures in an Aylmer operation.
I wouldn't be too smug.
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