Total Dismay

I was surprised to see peat being a commonplace heating fuel in urban and suburban areas of Ireland. We made it out to the kind of land that produces peat.

Peat occupies an interesting gray area in that people debate whether or not it is a renewable resource.

Peat can catch fire in the bogs where it was formed and burn indefinitely. Some scientists believe that peat fires in Borneo and elsewhere are big causes of C02 pollution. There are bogs in Siberia that are thawing after having been frozen for 11,000 years and they are releasing huge amounts of methane.

Enjoy

After watching the following video, I decided to check out the address of the Orlando scientology office on Google Maps.

When I saw that there was Street Level available for the location, I had to click on it. While I was checking out the area, something wonky happened. I blame scientology. Here is a screen cap…

I have never had this happen to me before. Ok, so I have never used Firefox with Street Level before, but that is BESIDE THE POINT!!!

The video gets a little old after awhile, I would suggest playing this one at the same time to make it less boring.

I like to think that I Google my full name less frequently than a lot of people. The various little efforts to boycott Google may have skewed the statistics to the point that I am above the median level of self absorption. Anyway, I was very surprised to find out that Martin Higgins was doing something very subversive and somewhat entertaining. He has apparently been infiltrating Fat Acceptance groups and directing them to protest against Anti-Gym a company that uses advertising that is designed to offend fat people. The catch is that he is working for Anti-Gym.

This kind of guerrilla marketing is an invention born of necessity to some degree because the face of Anti-Gym, Michael Karolchyk, is finding that many media outlets are responding to public outrage by pulling his commercials. It’s interesting to note that with the guerrilla marketing, the same media companies that shy away from selling him advertising space will probably give him free publicity by covering the protests. Michael Karolchyk regularly comes out of his gym and addresses the protesters using a bull horn.

Here is a short and very bizarre video, I think the older guy is Martin Higgins…

I did a shoddy job of photochopping out the license plate on the picture below, I will do a better job some other time. I took the camera along on my errands because of carnival, which is just starting to get rolling.

I had a fender bender on Friday, so I could use some bumper ointment

My headlight was smashed and my fender was, in fact, bent a bit. The other driver was an elderly man who was coming out of a grocery store parking lot. The sun was in his eyes and I saw that he was making his turn too wide. I was completely stopped when he hit me and in retrospect I may have been able to hit reverse to avoid this accident. At least I was able to use one of the few Maltese words that I know. Xemx (pronounced shemsh) means sun.

According to most sources, a Doppelgänger is a sinister form of bi location. I always suspected that Tom Cruise was at the very least bi, but SINISTER?

No, the guy with the eyes of Tom Cruise and that weird, confident, smiley expression that offered me a free personality test on O’Connell Street in Dublin on Monday evening was not at all sinister. I pleaded with my wife to let me take him up on his offer as we waited at the crosswalk for the little green man to light up. We had a bus to catch so she was not very amenable to the idea.

He didn’t look EXACTLY like Tom Cruise. He looked like Tom Cruise with strawberry blond hair, which in retrospect does seem a bit sinister.

I was born 13 months after the death of Martin Luther King. Jr.

We did not walk this Earth together.

My first significant exposure to MLK happened when I was browsing books in the library at college and I found a collection of the speeches that he had made on CBC radio. The public radio system in Canada was accessible to millions of Americans, notably those living in Detroit, and the corporation provided Doctor King with a platform when various methods were being used to try to shut him up in his own country. It was the right thing to do, but it was also some very good content.

I sometimes like to say that I was named after him, but I don’t know how true that is.

A very much unexpected sighting of Martin Luther King, Jr. is on this Tragically Hip Video.

I do not know if Rob Wells considers MLK to be one of his idols, it could just be a wardrobe decision made by the director.

Outsider art has been a lucrative commodity in North America. People who are not exposed to or influenced by the world of fine art because of geographic isolation or mental illness are sometimes driven to create an improvident amount of visual art.

I am hoping to be recognized as an outsider digital artist. I don’t know if never using photoshop is enough of a qualification. I don’t know if anybody is developing a market for outsider digital art. The biggest obstacle with this is the fact that we tend to put most of our naive art on teh internets for free.

My blog has been a little lean on photos for the last day or two. This was taken from the roof. I really like this picture. When I was a kid, my dad drove a FARGO. I used to spend an hour or two sitting in the truck listening to the AM radio every now and then. It was the worst time in history for music. Starship was really popular, and since the Canadian laws required Canadian content, Loverboy was also popular. Hmmm, can you call somebody popular when the law requires the stations to play your crap? I suppose it’s just two categories of popular. Starship was more popular than everybody, but Loverboy was more popular than Luba. This doesn’t have much relationship to my nice picture, but whenever I see funky old trucks, I think of bad music on AM radio.