No Shadow of a doubt

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We have a new addition to our family, an adorable little kitten that we’ve named Shadow. Considering that both Ryan and I are allergic to cats, I never thought this would happen, but it did and it’s been great so far. The story of how little Shadow came into our lives is fairly similar to the story of how our old cat Figaro came into our lives, which is amusing because the two cats couldn’t look more different.

In November 1992, Gail found a pure white cat roaming around outside her apartment on Hamilton mountain. It was starting to get cold outside and this little guy looked all alone. Gail took him in and when nobody claimed him after a while, she named him Figaro (after Geppetto’s cat in Pinocchio). Fig was with us until he died of liver cancer just before our tenth wedding anniversary in 2005. The boys barely remember him, but Gail and I miss him. He was such a people cat – he always wanted to be near us.

It wasn’t long after he passed that we discovered that Ryan was allergic to both cats and dogs, and so the idea of getting a new cat was scuttled. I was also allergic, even to Fig, but it really only showed up if I was petting him or playing with him and then rubbed my eyes afterwards. Then they got itchy and I got stuffy, but once I washed my hands and face it was fine.

Fast forward 8½ years. It’s February 17, 2014, and we’re visiting my sister Trudy for her daughter’s 2nd birthday, as well as my mom’s birthday. We park the van and step out, and there he is. A tiny little completely black kitten. He came over to us right away, and started rubbing around Ryan’s ankles purring all the while. He even took a couple of glances into the open van and I swear I could almost hear him thinking “I GO HOME WIF YOU?”

There was no collar, and we looked around for anyone looking for him, but there was nobody. As we walked across the street to Trudy’s place, he followed and we didn’t discourage him. Trudy has two cats already so rather than bring him into the house, we brought him into the garage and gave him some food and water. Trudy put some litter into a cardboard box and he knew right away what to do with it. That fact, and the fact that he was in good physical shape told us that he did have a home, and recently. Considering our frigid winter, he was lucky he wasn’t outside during one of the –35°C days. That day and the previous couple were in the –5°C range.

Trudy quickly made up some posters and posted them around her neighbourhood. We looked online for local places where people might report lost pets, but no black cats were reported missing. This was also Family Day, so the Humane Society didn’t open until next morning.

For the rest of the day, we took turns checking on him in the garage. Gail specifically told me to go rub my face against him and see what happened, just in case we couldn’t find the owner. I had no allergic reaction at all, nor did Ryan. Nicky was smitten and spent most of the afternoon sitting on a concrete step in a cold garage with the kitten. When I told him later that he was in the garage for at least two hours, he said “I was?” Honestly though, it was hard not to be smitten. Not only was he so tiny and adorable (I’m talking about the cat here, not Nicky), but he was just so loving. He was purring almost constantly, rubbing around your legs if you were standing, and jumping in your lap if you were sitting. Trudy already lives with two cats, two parents, and a two-year-old daughter, so their place was already full. I don’t know what the boys thought, but Gail and I quickly had a pretty good idea where this kitty was going to end up living if nobody claimed him.

Trudy couldn’t bring herself to leave him in the cold garage overnight so she brought him inside and put him in a downstairs bathroom with some food, water, and litter. A little cramped but warmer than the garage, and no attacks from Trudy’s other cats. The next morning, she took him into the humane society and found he was not microchipped. Nobody had called her asking about him, and there were still no lost cat postings that matched this little guy. She did get a phone call a couple of days later, but the lady was quite far away and was looking for a cat that didn’t match this one.

We found him on Monday. On Wednesday evening, Gail and Nicky drove back to Trudy’s place, picked him up, and brought him to our place. We figured that even if someone did claim him, at least he’d have a bigger place to hang out for a couple of days than Trudy’s bathroom. And if nobody claimed him, well, he was already home. That night, he hung out with me and Gail, sitting right by (and sometimes on) our heads, purring away, and occasionally head-butting us to try and get us to play with him. Eventually we had to put him outside the room and close the door so we could get some sleep. That only lasted a couple of days though, and then he figured out that he should leave us alone at night. He’s been really good since then.

By Saturday we had bought him a litterbox, food dishes, and toys. At that point we decide to name him. He was our kitten now. If someone else had lost him, they’d done a crappy job of trying to find him, and the statute of limitations (that we had arbitrarily imposed) had expired. We each came up with a few names and wrote down all the ones we liked. From that list of about 10 names, we each chose our top three by secret ballot. One name appeared second on all four ballots – Shadow. Some names we did not choose: Ninja, Shade (also Nightshade), Phantom, and Sir Purrs-a-lot, which I added jokingly but Nicky actually voted for. We also decided against Snowy, which Trudy had suggested. On Monday, Gail brought him to the vet for a check-up and unlike Figaro (who, when we got him, had fleas, worms, and various other things that were expensive to remove), Shadow Perrow was clean and healthy.

Shadow has been part of our family for over a month now and already we can’t imagine life without him. He still purrs and meows all the time and rubs around our legs and jumps in our laps. He loves to play with the toys we bought him but also things like pencils, straws, and Q-tips he digs out of the bathroom garbage. He loves his treats and the wet food he gets in the morning, but isn’t so crazy about the dry food he gets in the evening. He also likes to sit on the toilet seat and dip his paws in the water, then leave little wet footprints around the bathroom, so we always keep the lids down now.

Shadow’s made his way into the garage a couple of times, and seems to really love it there. Who wouldn’t love a cold dirty concrete floor with a half-inch of water in the middle (where all the snow from the cars melts)? So now whenever we come home we park in the garage, then close the garage door (so he can’t get outside), then open the door into the house and catch him before he dives past us. Even when putting stuff in the blue boxes or green bin, we have to close the laundry room door, which had previously stayed open for the past 15 years.

We decided that if we were to go to the local pet shelter and a cat had behaved towards us the way this one did, we’d take him in a heartbeat. Just like Figaro, Shadow chose wisely when he found us.

Spending New Years with Harry, Captain Jack Sparrow, and the Hulk

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For the sixth straight year, Gail, the boys, and I were homebodies on New Years Eve. And it was awesome.

Friends of ours have New Years parties every year and we’re always invited. We used to go and always had fun, but they all live over an hour from us. We ended up driving home after midnight and so the boys didn’t get to bed until 1:30-2:00am. They’re 11 and 14 now so that isn’t really a big deal anymore, but when they were 6 and 9 it threw their sleep patterns off for days.

Five years ago (this would have been 2008-2009), we decided to skip the party and have a Harry Potter movie marathon (all 5 of them at the time) instead – we’d start in the afternoon of New Years Eve, watch HP movies until bedtime, then continue the next morning. Part of the fun of this event for the boys was staying up until midnight, although Ryan was unsuccessful in that endeavour. This picture was taken December 31, 2009 at 11:59 pm:

On a bit of a whim, Gail decided to make Harry Potter-themed treats for the occasion. She made some kind of fruit punch and called it “pumpkin juice”, and cut up fruits into unusual shapes and called it a “herbology experiment”. She also made “cauldron cakes”, which were two-bite brownies covered in melted chocolate, a few mini-marshmallows, and a licorice handle:

and the boys helped make magic wands – Twizzlers dipped in white chocolate and covered in star-shaped sprinkles:

The boys loved this, and the four of us had a lot of fun with it.

The next year, the boys asked weeks before New Years if we were going to do it again. We decided to make it a tradition, but pick a different movie series each time. The second time it was Star Trek, though we didn’t watch all of the movies. I think we started with Star Trek: The Motion Picture, then Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (with the whales), Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, then Star Trek: Generations and finally the reboot of Star Trek (with Chris Pine). I would have added Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan in there too, but Nicky was only 7 and Ryan 10, and I knew the scene with the bug-thing going into (and then coming out of) Chekov’s ear would freak them out. Our food selection that year included gagh (made from lo mein noodles), targ (chicken drumsticks), and Romulan ale (blue Gatorade). Inexplicably, we seem to have no pictures from this year.

For year 3 (Dec 31, 2010-Jan 1, 2011) we chose the Back to the Future series, and dined on burgers, fries, shakes, and sundaes (like in a 50’s diner), futuristic pancakes and fruit (the “food from the future” thing was tough, so Gail made pancakes in weird shapes and we bought some unusual fruits like starfruit and dragon fruit), and an old west lunch of wieners and beans.

The next year it was Pirates of the Carribbean, and Gail expanded things a little. Each of us had a name tag; we were Cap’n Dan Bloodbucket, “Sharkbait” Hubert Bones, Cap’n Isaac Slasher, and Eye-Gougin’ Alena Jones. We set up a scavenger hunt for the boys with pirate-themed clues, and their treasure at the end was a bag of “gold” (chocolate coins). We can’t remember the details of the food we prepared that year, but it definitely included some tropical fruits (pineapple and coconut), and apples for Captain Barbossa. I think we drank iced tea and called it rum. And once again, no pictures. I have no idea how that happened.

Last year (starting 2013) we picked the Indiana Jones series, though Gail thankfully skipped the eyeball soup and chilled monkey brains. Some of our food choices this year were Sallah’s salad (made with couscous), “snake on a stick” (chicken skewers), spicy cobra eyes (some kind of spicy chocolate covered cranberries), monkey toes (marshmallow candies), and to drink, the blood of Kali (pink lemonade). We all got name tags this year as well – I was Henry Jones Sr., Ryan was Mutt Williams, Nicky was Short Round, and Gail was Marion Ravenwood.

To welcome 2014, we picked a Superhero theme. The Avengers is one of our favourite movies, so we could easily have just chosen The Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, Captain America, and The Avengers, but Gail decided to mix things up a little. We started with The Incredibles. For dinner on New Year’s Eve we had super “hero” sandwiches, Elastigirl’s twisty salad (pasta salad made with rotini), Violet’s disappearing salad (Gail’s broccoli salad which we all love, hence “disappearing”), Cracker Jack-Jack (heh), and Underminer’s dirt cups (pudding with crushed Oreo “dirt” and gummy worms) for dessert.

Our next screening was Man of Steel, which none of us had seen. Coincidentally, the movie ended around 11:50pm, so we watched Dick Clark some Times Square show (starring a bunch of people I didn’t know – what a drag it is getting old) until the ball dropped.

The next morning, we continued our super-hero extravaganza with Spider Man (the one with Tobey Maguire), then had lunch with the Avengers. Gail had a lot of fun with this one. There was Iron Man’s chicken shwarma, Hulk’s spinach dip, Thor’s Hammer apps (cubes of cheese, pepperoni, and kielbasa with pretzel sticks as the handles), Black Widow’s spider bites (Oreos with four pieces of black licorice sticking out each side), Hawkeye wings, and Captain America’s power drink (cranberry juice, Sprite, and blue Gatorade layered in a glass).

Our final movie of the event was Green Lantern, and we went all green on this one. Green plates, cups, napkins, and cutlery, as well as green apples, grapes, and melon, and gummy frogs and sour green gummy… things.

If you know any of the four of us personally, you may wonder why we haven’t done the most obvious movie series for us to tackle: Star Wars. The answer is the food. What food do you see people eating in the Star Wars movies? There’s not much in the original trilogy (Aunt Beru’s blue milk is one possibility). Anakin, Qui-Gon, Jar Jar, and Shmi sit down to dinner in The Phantom Menace, but I don’t remember what they ate. We could always make stuff up though – a quick Google search shows things like Vader’s taters or Vader’s veggies, Yoda Soda and Qui-Gon Jinn-ger ale, Han Solo’s Rolos, light sabers (pretzel sticks with blue or red coloured icing), and Wookie’s cookies. Maybe we could revisit the chicken drumsticks from the Star Trek year and have “roasted Ewok” or something.

So what’s on the agenda for next year? We haven’t decided yet. Maybe it will be Star Wars, or maybe we’ll try Lord of the Rings. Maybe Twilight, though other than drinking “blood”, I’m not sure what we’d eat. Got any suggestions? Leave me a comment and let me know!

My favourite picture of myself

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This picture has been on the back of my bedroom door for almost a decade. Ryan drew it for me at his babysitter’s when he was 4 or 5. I believe the babysitter just told him “make a silly face” and this is what Ryan decided was a silly face. I absolutely love it.

There are a bunch of reasons why this is my favourite picture of myself. Obviously, the fact that my son made it for me makes it special. But it’s more than that.

It’s the goofy eyes, the curly hair, the tongue sticking out, the two-foot long neck. It’s the fact that he used a shiny silver marker but did the face in red. It’s the lowercase ‘r’ in his name and the fact that the ‘n’ looks like an ‘h’. It’s the backwards ‘s’ in silly and the misspelling. It’s the fact that he ran out of room writing ‘face’ and decided to finish the word by wrapping around to the left side and putting the ‘e’ there.

Everything about this picture is awesome and I smile every time I look at it.

Top 5 reasons why there is no global medical conspiracy

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If you look at websites, blogs, or Facebook pages about things like alternative medicines, organic/all-natural foods, or conspiracy theories you will almost undoubtedly find people talking about “the medical conspiracy”. The idea here is that there are natural cures for many (some say all) diseases, and the medical and pharmaceutical industries know about them but are suppressing the information. They do this because they make more money from treating but not curing diseases than they would from curing them. In some cases, the conspiracy also says that “Big Pharma” has created cures but they’re also being suppressed for the same reason. (Of course, nobody explains why Big Pharma would spend the time and money working on creating such cures if they’re going to suppress them.) The alternative medicine industry is all over this idea, because otherwise they have no good answer to “If <whatever> works, then why doesn’t every doctor advise their patients to use it?”

At first blush, this sounds like it could make sense – would you rather charge someone $25,000 once for a very expensive cure, or $1,000 a month for treatment that will be required for the rest of their life? You probably would make a lot more money keeping people sick and therefore dependent on your treatment. But we need to think deeper. What would be required for such a conspiracy to exist and succeed?

Here are five reasons why this idea is ludicrous. Throughout these answers, we’re going to assume that the conspiracy does exist, that natural cures for diseases do exist, that the people running it would like it to continue, and that they’d like to keep it quiet from the general public. Then we’ll examine the ramifications of those assumptions.

1. The number of people involved would be immense.

Surely there are some medical professionals out there who are more interested in the health of their patients than in making money. What would happen if one of them didn’t know about the conspiracy and unwittingly started telling their patients about the natural cures that really work, rather than giving them the expensive drugs and invasive surgeries that are part of the conspiracy? Even worse, what if they started telling their fellow doctors about the cures? It would spread like wildfire! But the whole conspiracy would then be exposed or unraveled. People would be cured and no longer have to pay for expensive medication! We can’t have that! So the conspiracy would have to include almost all doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners, pharmacists, medical researchers, professors, even dentists, dental hygienists, and veterinarians. We’re talking about the entire medical and pharmaceutical industries as well as every non-alternative medical school in the world.

Since this is a massive cover-up, there would have to be non-medical people involved as well. So not only would this include the medical professionals, scientists, and professors but also post-doc and graduate medical students, company executives, lawyers, actuaries, accountants, admin people, you name it.

The entire insurance industry would have to be part of the conspiracy as well since they’re footing the bill for lots of expensive medications for their customers. You’re delusional if you think they’re just going to take the word of doctors and scientists that this super-expensive medication (that they’re paying for!) is the best option – they’re going to do (or at least fund) their own research. What happens if they come up with a different conclusion than the corrupt medical researchers? The people running the conspiracy can’t take that chance.

But of course, it’s all about the Benjamins. If the conspiracy is true then the insurance companies have undoubtedly figured out what would happen if the public found out about the natural cures for everything. First, they’d save a ton of money by not having to pay for expensive medication. Second, they’d lose a ton of money because a lot of people wouldn’t bother paying for health insurance anymore. They’ve done the math. I don’t know which but one of these must be true:

They’d lose more money through lost revenue than they’d save by not paying for expensive medication. This wouldn’t benefit them at all, so they can’t let the public find out. It’s in their best interest to be in on the conspiracy. Or…
They’d save more money than than they’d lose in revenue. This would cost them millions, and so they’d waste no time in exposing the conspiracy.

Since #2 hasn’t happened, we know that the insurance companies must be in on it.

And don’t forget the FDA in the US, and its equivalents in all other countries. They absolutely must be involved – what if the expensive drugs don’t get approved for use and the cheap natural ones do?

With all the medical, pharmaceutical, educational, insurance, and government people involved, this would have to involve at the very least millions of people, possibly tens or even hundreds of millions, in every country in the world. This would be by far the most massive and complicated conspiracy in human history. And yet with those millions of people involved, there’s no concrete evidence of it.

2. Success in corrupting the people involved would have to be near 100%.

Most of the people involved in the conspiracy would be doctors, nurses, pharmacists, etc. But none of these people knew about the conspiracy before they got into those professions. Almost all of them are people who originally chose to get into the medical profession because they wanted to spend their lives helping sick people. For the conspiracy to succeed, all of them must have:

been informed of the conspiracy, and
abandoned their ethics and their reasons for getting into medicine in the first place, and
been corrupted to the point of either joining the conspiracy and saying nothing, or not joining the conspiracy but somehow keeping quiet about it.

The number of people who were informed of the conspiracy and were outraged and immediately went public is near zero. I can’t say it is zero because I have seen people on various alternative medicine sites claim that they were in the medical profession but got out because it was, in their opinion, ineffective or corrupt. But the number of people who were outraged and went public with compelling evidence of the conspiracy is zero. None. Nobody.

3. Most of the people who would have to be involved in the conspiracy have no incentive.

Obviously, for this conspiracy to be successful, all of the people involved in it must be willing to sacrifice their ethics – letting patients die, allowing them to suffer in pain and discomfort for years, allowing their friends and family members to suffer both emotionally and financially, and all for the promise of big money. There are certainly leading medical professors and doctors that make boatloads of money. But what about your average nurse in a hospital? She’d have to be involved, or she’d be curing people left and right instead of keeping them sick. But how many nurses do you know that are rich? According to this survey, the median annual wage for a nurse is about $65,000 in the US. That’s pretty decent money, but would every nurse sacrifice their ethics for only $65k a year?

Maybe the $65k is just their salary, and they get other secret kickbacks from the conspiracy. In that case, not only would all the nurses need to be involved, but their families as well. Otherwise the nurse’s spouse might wonder where that extra few million dollars or the Porsche in the driveway came from. If that’s the case, then it’s true for most of the other people involved as well, and we just doubled the number of people who’d have to be complicit in the conspiracy.

4. The whistleblowers are still alive.

According to the conspiracy, all medical professionals are willing to let patients suffer and die needlessly. So why are the whistleblowers still alive? Mike Adams from NaturalNews.com talks about the conspiracy every day, as do people on hundreds of other web sites. There are many people running natural medicine practices that by their very existence threaten to expose the conspiracy. If doctors are willing to let millions of people die from already-cured diseases, it stands to reason that they wouldn’t be above killing people who are exposing the conspiracy and threatening their substantial profits. But this isn’t happening.

5. There’s more money to be made in providing cures than in suppressing them.

Say you’re a medical researcher and you discover something (natural or otherwise) that kills only cancer cells, or stimulates the pancreas to continuously produce more insulin, or cures Alzheimer’s or AIDS or something else. (Let’s just gloss over the huge question of why your job even exists – again, why Big Pharma would spend tons of money and time researching for such cures only to suppress them. It’s not like the first person to find a cure prevents others from finding it.) In your job, you obviously know about the conspiracy to keep it suppressed, so you’d have to report your findings to your superiors and not tell anybody about it.

But say you don’t.

Say you know a few other researchers and you have them replicate your tests and then you all go public and create a company to sell this new found cure. You tell the world “We have a cure for cancer, and we’ll sell a dose to anyone who wants it. For $1000, you can be free of cancer forever.” Such a company would be swimming in money and the discoverers would be world famous – the Nobel Prize, cover of Time, money for nothing, chicks for free, all that good stuff.

Could this company make more money by having people pay them $1000 a month for life rather than $1000 once? Yes, but once again that assumes that every medical researcher would sacrifice their ethics for even bigger money. Would many sacrifice their ethics for $10 million? Sure. But would they sacrifice their ethics and $10 million for $50 million? $100 million? Maybe but I’m sure there are a few who would take the $10 million and keep their ethics intact.

To avoid their researchers going public, the overseers of the conspiracy would have to bribe them with immense amounts of money that would keep them from going public. They’d have to make sure they do this before the big breakthroughs are made and somehow guarantee the researchers’ loyalty. The researchers would then have to explain to their friends and family members why they are multi-gazillionaires but none of their research has even been published.

Oh wait, I know how this could be explained! And it explains the nurse problem described in #3 above!

Theory: Lotteries like Powerball are actually run by the people running the medical conspiracy. It’s their way of bribing people involved in the conspiracy to keep quiet in such a way that it’s easy to explain to their friends and families why they’re suddenly rich.

So basically, if we assume the conspiracy exists, then we find a number of inconsistencies with what we’d expect and what we see in the real world. If the conclusions are wrong (that all doctors and nurses in the world are rich and corrupt, and everyone who tries to expose the conspiracy is silenced), then our initial assumption must be wrong. There is no conspiracy. Reductio ad absurdum.

Some of the people who believe in this supposed conspiracy do so because they’ve had a bad experience of some kind. Perhaps they or a loved one was misdiagnosed and got sicker instead of better. Perhaps someone they know even died from such a misdiagnosis. Are there incompetent doctors who prescribe the wrong medication or the wrong dosage, misdiagnose patients, and so on? Of course there are. Remember the old joke: what do you call the person who finished last in his medical school graduating class? You call him “doctor”. But it’s a huge stretch to assume that all doctors are this bad and also to assume that any errors that are made are actually part of the conspiracy and not simply mistakes made by fallible human beings.

Are there unscrupulous doctors, nurses, etc. who would take place in such a conspiracy? Almost certainly. But again, it’s a massive stretch to extend this to all or even most doctors.

None of this addresses whether these natural cures exist or if alternative medicine actually works (better than placebo). If not, then the idea of the conspiracy is moot since there’d be no point. But we can see that the likelihood of the conspiracy existing is virtually nil, and so if alternative medicine really is the cure-all miracle that it claims to be, we come back to the question I mentioned at the top: why don’t the majority of doctors recommend reiki, homeopathy, faith healing, or other naturopathic techniques to their patients?

Now, what’s more likely? That this incredibly complex and vast conspiracy actually exists and is functioning perfectly (and yet they are doing nothing about the people trying to expose it), or that the medical community really does have humanity’s health as their primary goal and it’s just a very difficult and expensive process?

Shout out to my brother-in-law Stephen, who’s currently at Sunnybrook hospital in Toronto fighting liver cancer. He asked me to post something interesting for him to read – I hope this will suffice. Hang in there, buddy. We’re all thinking about you.

New and improved!

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In the first major change to this blog since… a long time ago, I have moved the hosting of Cut the Chatter from Blogger to WordPress. The URL hasn’t changed, nor has the RSS feed, or anything else in terms of reading the blog so you, dear reader, shouldn’t really notice a huge difference. The blog itself will look different, particularly if I get off my butt and actually try to make it look nice, but that should be it. But because it’s on WordPress, I may have the ability to do cool things that I couldn’t do before. Not that I have any ideas what those might be, but there are a million WordPress plug-ins out there so I’ll have to peruse what’s available and maybe play around with them.

The initial reason I made this switch was basically because Twitter changed their API a year or two ago. Because of that change, the Twitter plug-in for Windows Live Writer (which I use to write all my articles) no longer worked, so when I published an article, I had to manually tweet the link, and then I’d manually post the link to Facebook. I got tired of that, so I looked for services to do it for me. Surely this is simple – check an RSS feed once every hour and when a new article shows up, tweet / post the title of the article along with a link to it. How hard can that be?

Well, I tried about four of them. In every case, it sometimes worked fine while other times the auto-tweets / postings would take many hours or even days to show up, if they showed up at all. After losing patience with the fourth one, I asked for help on Facebook and Twitter. Marisa said that if I used WordPress I got that ability for free, and a bunch of other things as well. I was hesitant about WordPress because when I looked into switching a few years ago, I discovered I had to pay to use cutthechatter.com (instead of cutthechatter.wordpress.com), while Blogger let me change my domain name for free. I’m not going to pay for something I can get for free, am I? Well, when enough people tell you “yes, it’s worth it”, then you start to think about it. From what I’ve seen so far, $26 per year (for both this blog and my lacrosse blog) is indeed worth it.

Let me know what you think! Not only will it give me some welcome feedback but it will allow me to test out WordPress comments!

Update: Unfortunately, the twitter thing didn’t work. No tweet, no Facebook post, no Google+ post when this article was published. I think it’s because I use Windows Live Writer rather than publishing from the web site. It’d be awfully ironic if the very reason I switched was to get a feature that I can’t use anyway.
Update 2: The Twitter/Facebook/Google+ thing works fine, as long as you publish the article from the web site. If I publish it from Windows Live Writer, I get nothing. So now I post the article to the blog as a draft, then go go the web site and publish it from there. I can also choose to publish it at a future date/time as well.

TSN vs. Sportsnet

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TSN debuted in Canada in 1984, and I was immediately hooked. Suddenly we could see Blue Jays games on TV on more than just Wednesday nights and weekends, and Sportsdesk (later SportsCentre) showed highlights of the previous day’s games in just about every sport. Could TV get any better than that?

That’s all there was for sports TV in Canada for 14 years. In 1998, Sportsnet came along, and I basically thought of it as the poor man’s TSN. They did show NHL games, but I found the sports news / highlight show was less polished than the guys over at TSN. For years, Sportsnet remained, in my mind, a distant second to TSN in terms of quality. A year later, a third station, The Score, was created, but it was mostly highlights and a score ticker. They were a distant third.

Fast forward fifteen years. Despite the fact that I tend to watch more baseball than hockey and Sportsnet definitely shows more baseball, I still preferred TSN. If I’m looking for sports highlights, I still instinctively head to TSN. In my mind, they’re the seasoned veterans and these Sportsnet guys are just TSN wannabe’s.

But are they really? Let’s compare.

TV	Radio	Other
TSN TSN2 Habs regional Jets regional	Toronto Ottawa Montreal Winnipeg Edmonton
Sportsnet East Sportsnet Ontario Sportsnet West Sportsnet Pacific Sportsnet One Sportsnet 360 Sportsnet World	Toronto Calgary	Sportsnet Magazine

TSN has five radio stations while Sportsnet only has two. But until I began researching this article, I forgot that TSN Radio even existed. Meanwhile, I’ve listened to The Fan in Toronto for years. I’ve subscribed to Sportsnet Magazine since it debuted in 2011; TSN has no print media at all.

TSN rarely shows baseball anymore, while the majority of Blue Jays games are on one of the Sportsnet channels. TSN has more hockey, though not for much longer (but I’ll get to that later). TSN shows the CFL and the occasional NFL game, Sportsnet shows more NFL. TSN has basketball, Sportsnet doesn’t. Sportsnet has tennis, TSN has golf. TSN has the advantage of being partially owned by ESPN, so they sometimes simulcast (or rebroadcast) ESPN programming. TSN and TSN2 showed some lacrosse last year, though I know the Toronto Rock paid for their games to be shown. Sportsnet used to show the Rock home games until a few years ago, and last year they showed a couple of Calgary / Edmonton lacrosse games but I don’t know who paid for that.

Both stations have daily news / highlight shows. Sportsnet’s version might have lacked polish in the first year or two, but that’s long since been cleaned up. And of course, each one occasionally shows things like wrestling, and even dog shows and spelling bees.

For the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver and the 2012 games in London, Bell Media (owners of TSN) and Rogers (owners of Sportsnet) teamed up to show as much of the games as possible. I have to admit it was pretty weird seeing TSN people talking about what was coming up on Sportsnet, and Sportsnet people telling you to go to TSN to watch a particular event. Both networks did an excellent job and it became clear at that point that Sportsnet was no longer “that other sports network”. If they were still second to TSN (and even that wasn’t clear), it wasn’t by much.

And now Rogers has signed a deal with the NHL for sole rights to broadcast games in Canada. TSN will still show a few and Hockey Night in Canada will still exist on CBC for at least a few years (though Rogers will produce it), but the vast majority of games will be on the Sportsnet channels, likely with multiple games on each night. What’s more, Rogers is a telecommunications company and so the NHL will be counting on them to bring the NHL to tablets and phones, and there will likely be some easy way to watch games live over the internet.

With this deal, Sportsnet has proven that they are major players in Canadian sports broadcasting, perhaps even supplanting the mighty TSN as top dog. I almost want to apologize to Sportsnet for not giving them enough credit over the last few years.

10 things you don’t know about me

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This is all the rage on Facebook these days, so I’ll play along.

I used to be an accomplished ski jumper. I started jumping in my teens and won a few competitions while in my 20’s before hurting my ankle. It’s fine now and I don’t limp or anything, but it was enough to end my jumping career.
In the mid-90’s, I worked for a software company that produced software for law enforcement agencies including the Metro Toronto Police, the Boston Police Department, and the Rochester Police Department, and I also dealt with the FBI and US Secret Service. It was interesting enough that I applied to the Ontario Provincial Police to become a police officer but was rejected.
I’ve been hunting a few times but not for years. I once brought down a deer but felt bad about it for weeks. The venison was good though.
I worked as a waiter at a few restaurants while in high school. I was terrible at it and got fired twice after complaints from customers.
My favourite vacation ever was Cancun, Mexico. The place we stayed was very nice, the food was great, and the diving was spectacular.
I love historical fiction. I’ve read Les Misérables a dozen times and will read any novel about 16th-17th century Europe that I can get my hands on.
A girl I briefly dated in high school went on to an acting career in Hollywood, including 3 years on All My Children and movies with Sean Penn, Al Pacino, and John Travolta.
When I went to Western, my landlord was a professor who had previously debated David Suzuki on national television. And won.
I went para-sailing during my honeymoon in Cuba. It was exhilarating and terrifying at the same time, but I’d do it again in a heartbeat.
I love to make shit up. Not one of the above “facts” is true.

Only three of them are even partially true:

#2 is true except that I never applied to be a police officer
#7 – I did go to high school with Ingrid Rogers, who did appear in those TV shows and movies. But we never dated. In fact, I barely knew her.
#8 – I did go to Western and my landlord was a psychology professor, but not the one that debated Suzuki.

I did this whole exercise a bunch of years ago, but with actual facts.

Homeopathy: Much ado about nothing

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I visited a doctor a little while ago and he suggested three different treatments for me. The first was expensive and not covered by insurance. The second was a strong drug that could be hard on the liver, and given my medical history he said it was not a good idea for me. The third was what he called a “homeopathic” remedy. The description did not sound remotely homeopathic, so I questioned him on it. He admitted it was actually a naturopathic remedy, and that he didn’t know the difference between “naturopathic” and “homeopathic”. I informed him.

For what it’s worth, I chose the natural remedy and it is working nicely, thank you.

Homeopathy is one of the most hilariously silly alternative medicine systems. I decided to write this article because it seems that many people don’t know what homeopathy is, and confuse it with herbal remedies or naturopathic medicine in general (as the doctor did). Herbal remedies and homeopathic remedies are quite different. While some herbal remedies are pseudoscientific, having no evidence of their efficacy, many others really do work and many of the drugs and medicines we all use are based on herbal remedies. Homeopathy, on the other hand, is based on outdated knowledge, bad science, and magic.

What is homeopathy?

A homeopathic remedy is one in which you take something that may cause an illness and make a strongly diluted solution of it in order to cure the illness. The idea is termed “like cures like”, meaning that the thing that makes you sick can also cure you. This is not the outrageous part – that’s (kind of) the idea that vaccines are based on. The outrageous part is the dilution.

It’s very easy to make a homeopathic solution. Take 1 mL of whatever the original substance is and mix it in 100 mL of water. In an actual homeopathic remedy, you’d need to shake or bang the container a few times after each dilution. Then take 1 mL of the resulting solution (not all of it, just 1 mL – you can throw the rest away) and mix it in a different 100 mL of water. Then take 1 mL of that solution and mix it in a different 100 mL of water. We’ve now diluted the original substance in a ratio of 1:100 three times. This is the same as 1:100³, or 1:1,000,000, termed 3C. It should be obvious that there isn’t much of the original substance in the resulting mixture.

Now repeat that procedure twenty-seven more times. This is now 30C, which is what’s typically used in homeopathic remedies. (Note that some homeopathic remedies use a dilution of up to 200C.) The odds of there being a single molecule of the original substance in the final mixture are infinitesimal. Here’s a frequently-used comparison. If the entire Atlantic Ocean was fresh water and you added a pinch of salt and mixed it up, the resulting solution would be about 12C. Each number you go up (i.e. from 12C to 13C) results in a solution 100 times weaker than the previous one. You have to do this 18 times to get from 12C to 30C, so the solution is 100¹⁸ times weaker. A standard homeopathic solution is a billion billion billion billion billion billion times weaker than that pinch of salt in the ocean. When you pay $10 for a little vial of a homeopathic remedy, that’s what you’re spending your money on. Pure water. Homeopaths will confirm this.

(Note that sometimes it’s not a liquid solution that you’re buying, it’s sometimes a sugar pill that has been treated with the 30C solution. Homeopaths will also confirm that the pill itself does nothing, it’s just a delivery mechanism for the solution.)

One other rule of homeopathy: the more the substance is diluted, the stronger it is. You want an extra-strength version? Mix it in more water. This leads to all kinds of homeopathy jokes:

I accidentally overdosed on my homeopathic medicine the other day. I didn’t take it.

Why would anyone ever buy a homeopathic remedy twice? When you’re about to run out, just dilute it some more.

There’s even a homeopathic webcomic.

So if the stuff you’re buying doesn’t have any of the original substance left in it, how do homeopaths claim it works? This is where it gets really silly. The water remembers. Homeopathy posits that you can dilute the solution to the point that there isn’t any of the original substance left and the water contains some memory of the substance and that is what cures the disease. Actually it’s not – that’s what triggers your body’s “vital life force” to cure the disease. Note that this “life force” is the same one that chiropractors claim to influence when they make spinal adjustments, and it’s the same one acupuncturists claim to influence when they insert their needles. There is no evidence that such a force exists.

Not only is water memory implausible, scientific tests have shown that any artificial ordering of water molecules (i.e. what might pass for “memory”) breaks down after roughly 50 femtoseconds, which is 50 millionths of a nanosecond. And I’m not talking about a nanosecond meaning “a very small amount of time”, I’m talking about an actual nanosecond, i.e. a billionth of a second.

None of this matters

Having said all that, none of it matters. When it’s all said and done, who cares how something works as long as it works? There are lots of different types of medicines out there, and I have no idea how most of them work. There are even some that modern medical science can’t fully explain. But that doesn’t mean they don’t work.

Homeopaths will argue that “you can’t say homeopathy doesn’t work just because you think it’s silly.” They’re absolutely right. They’ll say “you can’t say homeopathy doesn’t work just because you don’t know how it could work” and they’re right again. The reason we know it doesn’t work is from the thousands of studies and trials that have been done over the past hundred years that show it doesn’t work. There’s no need to explain why it doesn’t work, and there’s no need to come up with an explanation of how it could work if it did. The studies prove that it just doesn’t.

Full disclosure: while researching this article, I ran across lots of published studies that concluded that homeopathic remedies worked better than placebo. Some of them didn’t have proper blinding or randomization or things like that, and so they can be dismissed out of hand. But many cannot. I am not a scientist so I cannot look at a study and determine whether it was done properly or whether the data supports the conclusions, so I must read other people’s interpretations and decide if I trust them. Scientists and skeptics believe the data is clear – homeopathy doesn’t work. Homeopaths believe the data is clear – homeopathy works. I could simply trust the skeptics because I’m a skeptic, but that could be looked at as a personal bias. But I do trust the skeptics, and here’s why.

Homeopaths point to certain trials that show homeopathy’s effectiveness as proof that it works. But they also say “It has been established beyond doubt and accepted by many researchers, that the placebo-controlled randomised controlled trial is not a fitting research tool with which to test homeopathy.” So they use the studies that show their results as proof, and dismiss the ones that show different results as “these types of tests aren’t appropriate”. Note that they’re not claiming that there was a problem with the studies themselves, it’s the entire concept of the randomized trial that they disagree with. There are two logical fallacies here: cherry picking (picking only data that agrees with you) and special pleading (saying that it’s impossible to test this claim but not saying why). There’s also no reasoning for why the generally accepted science of a randomized trial is not “fitting”.

Conclusion

Homeopathy was invented in the early 1800’s, during a time when almost everything known about healthcare and the human body was wrong. Medical science has changed almost entirely in that time, with innumerable advances and breakthroughs over the decades. And yet homeopaths have clung to the same concepts despite there being no non-anecdotal evidence that it works and no theoretical way that it could. There have been no advancements in homeopathy in 200 years – all of the original theories are still in use today. Homeopaths have had 200 years to prove to everyone that it’s effective and they’ve utterly failed. If it was truly effective, there’d be no need to convince anyone of anything and it wouldn’t be alternative medicine, it would just be medicine.

But what if it did work? What if water actually did retain a memory of a substance diluted in it, and could be used to cure some illness caused by that substance? How would the water know which substance to remember – the one you just diluted beyond existence, or other substances the water has been in contact with? As I read on one site, “One wonders in vain how water remembers only the molecules the homeopath has introduced at some point in the water’s history and forgets all those trips down the toilet”.

If water truly had memory, there would be no need to mix anything. All the water on Earth would have some memory of all the substances it’s been in contact with over however many millions of years, and since it’s been diluted many thousands of times, it’d be pretty potent. All the water on Earth would be a homeopathic remedy for everything. Every time you drink water, you’d be triggering your body’s immune reaction against every disease, even if you didn’t have it. Everyone would be healthy all the time.

And we’d all be drinking dinosaur pee.

Land of lakes

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Canada has more lakes than the rest of the world combined. As far as I know, each and every one of these lakes has a name and naming so many lakes is bound to result in some pretty interesting ones. On our trip north this past summer, we drove a long way and passed a lot of lakes. Here are some of the more interesting names.

We passed Baby Lake, right across the highway from Mom Lake. About a kilometer up the road, we found Dad Lake.
Desolation Lake, right next to Lonely Lake. Sounds like a delightful place for a cottage, doesn’t it?
Tons of lakes named for people: Cathy’s Lake, Jason Lake, Sammy’s Lake, etc.
Near the town of Rossport is Little Lake. Little Lake? That’s the best you could come up with? Though perhaps it’s named after Mr. Little.
The most original goes to Parkinson’s Pothole
According to Google Maps, near Terrace Bay we have Lake A and Lake B
About 25 km east of Terrace Bay, there’s Echo Lake. This is the same name as the lake my parents’ cottage is on, a little over 1000 km to the south east (near Bracebridge). About 30 km further east of the first Echo Lake, there’s another Echo Lake.
On either side of Marathon there are Two Finger Lake and Three Finger Lake
Near Wawa, we have Rod and Gun Lake
It’s not a lake, but there’s Old Woman Bay (and nearby Old Woman River)
Not far from Old Woman Bay is Rabbit Blanket Lake
South of there is Dead Otter Lake
South of Agawa Bay were Beta Lake and Gamma Lake. Alpha Lake is nearby but not on the highway.
There’s a town we didn’t go to called Eliot Lake (which is near a lake called Eliot Lake), but that’s not that exciting a name. Near there, however, is Crotch Lake. This sounds to me like a place you don’t want to go swimming.

Northern Ontario 2013 – Part 2: Manitouwadge and Pancake Bay

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This is part two in the two-part miniseries of our trip to Northern Ontario in the summer of 2013. Part one is here. When we last left our heroes, they we getting ready to leave Sleeping Giant for Manitouwadge.

Aug 23

Driving Day Three, though there was far less driving on this day than most of the other driving days. In fact, Driving Day Three and Driving Day Four combined were less than either of Driving Days Two or Five. We were on the road by 9am and about three hours later, we arrived in Marathon and did the same thing we did for lunch last year in Marathon – stopped at Pizza Hut, picked up a pizza to go, and drove down to a place called Pebble Beach. We enjoyed our pizza on the top of a cliff overlooking the beach, and then went down to the beach itself. There’s a ton of driftwood on the beach – and we’re talking about 20-30 foot logs here, not just a bunch of sticks. Rolly says they regularly remove it, but there was a pile that looked like a “fort” (which must have been arranged by hand, with enough room inside that a few people could semi-comfortably sit) which looked exactly like one that was there last year. After climbing around on the rocks and logs for a while, we were back in the van for the last bit of this day’s drive.

About an hour later, we were at Rolly & Candyce’s place in Manitouwadge. Arriving at around the same time were Norma and Lloyd, Rolly’s aunt and uncle from Dawson Creek, BC, who we had never met (Rolly hadn’t seen them in over 20 years). We got to know them a little over the next few days, and they are wonderful people; it’s too bad they live four thousand kilometres away. Also arriving shortly after us were Jackie’s brother Mitch (from Tracy, California), and two of Rolly’s (grown) sons, Foster (Owen Sound) and Ethan (Mississauga). Rolly’s eldest son, Rhys, is in the Canadian Navy and is stationed in Halifax, so he was not able to make it. We set up the trailer in Rolly’s driveway, right behind John and Jackie’s trailer, and just down from Norma and Lloyd’s camper/pickup. Rolly and Candyce don’t have the biggest house but they had thirteen people staying with them; without the campers it would have been a little cramped. Rolly later referred to everyone as his “band of gypsies”.

Dinner was a big get-together at Candyce’s friend Donna’s place. They had cooked both a roast and a turkey, and there were veggies and potatoes and salads and such as well. For dessert, they had several (at least four) of those big metal lasagna pans (i.e. two feet long, a foot wide, and four inches thick) full of cheesecake and Black Forest cake. Donna even gave us a couple of them to bring back to Candyce’s place, where we gradually finished them over the next few days.

Aug 24

Wedding Day! Tradition says the groom should not see the bride on the wedding day until the wedding, so Candyce stayed at Donna’s the previous night. The morning was very leisurely – the boys watched TV for a while, and we played cards and chatted. Last summer, Rolly had helped the boys make slingshots, and even offered to keep them until our next visit. Unfortunately, he’d forgotten where he put them, so he helped Nicky make another one. Nicky spent a good chunk of the morning shooting rocks at a plastic bottle, and Ryan and I took a few shots as well.

Soon after lunch, we got dressed for the wedding. As I mentioned in the previous article, this was a Hallowe’en themed wedding, so “getting dressed for the wedding” was a little different from other weddings we’d been to. The four of us wore costumes that were linked – we were the “punny Perrows”, and each of us went as a different pun:

Gail had a white shirt with a yellow circle on it as well as a cape, red horns, and a pitchfork – she was a “devilled egg”.
I was dressed as a medieval knight, complete with sword, with a LED light attached to my belt – I was a “knight light”. (Once I turned the light off, I was the Dark Knight.) In the picture here, the light is mostly hidden by the sword.
Ryan had a baseball cap with a “C” on it, a foam finger (Toronto Rock!), and a t-shirt made by Gail that said “Ceiling” – he was a “ceiling fan”.
Nicky was dressed in hospital scrubs with a stethoscope and a necklace with hot peppers on it – he was “Dr. Pepper”.

The wedding started around 3:00 and was held in a beautiful gazebo in Donna’s back yard. The weather was perfect and it was a lovely ceremony. Rolly was dressed as a Klingon, though he didn’t wear the headpiece with the long hair and bumpy forehead during the ceremony. Candyce didn’t wear a costume but had a beautiful orange and black dress that she had specially ordered from China – and then had a friend fix because when it arrived, it was the wrong size.

There were a number of other good costumes there – an awesome Xena, two different Shrek’s and one (male) Fiona, two other knights, Fred Flintstone, and a whole family full of Angry Birds. To go along with Rolly’s Klingon, Foster went as Dr. McCoy while Ethan donned the Vulcan ears as Mr. Spock. There was even a man who donned a Nike hat and red Nike golf shirt, coloured his face, neck, and arms dark with shoe polish or something, and went as Tiger Woods. I’m still trying to decide whether that was in poor taste or kind of clever.

The wedding party went for pictures, and we went back to Rolly & Candyce’s place to hang out until the reception, which took place at a local bar called K & G’s. The hall was all decorated for Hallowe’en, including bride and groom zombies behind the head table, and bride and groom skeletons on top of the orange and black wedding cake. The food was great, the speeches were fun (and there weren’t too many of them, just enough), and the music was good. The boys were up way too late but hey, it was their first wedding, and we’re on vacation.

Aug 25

Sooooo hungover.

Oh wait, no I wasn’t. I wasn’t even drunk the night before. We had another quiet morning of cards, reading, and chatting. As much as I like to be active while on vacation (we’ve never been big on “head to the beach, sit down, stay for nine hours”), I really enjoyed these mornings of doing a whole lotta nothing.

After lunch, Rolly took the four of us to the dump. Yes, the dump. And not only did we all go willingly, we all looked forward to it. Rolly and Candyce had both told us about a bear that lives near the dump and frequently wanders in to find things to eat, so we asked Rolly if we could go to see him. He took us over and we had no trouble spotting the bear; he was right out in the open, digging through the mounds of garbage for things to eat. Candyce said he was a big fat one, but I wouldn’t know a fat bear from a lean and muscular bear – I just know this guy was big. We were able to get pretty close before he backed away, but once we backed off a little, he ignored us completely. We didn’t get out of the truck at all but got lots of pictures.

After the bear sighting, a few people decided to go swimming in Manitouwadge Lake, a 5 minute walk from Rolly’s place. Rolly, Foster, Alison, Ryan and Nicky got their suits on, while Gail and I walked down as well (with no intention of swimming). The lake turned out to be very cold, and neither Rolly nor Ryan could bring themselves to go in beyond their waist. Nicky dunked his head a couple of times, but Foster and Alison were the only ones who actually swam at all. The swim didn’t last too long before everyone was frozen despite the fact that it was 30+ degrees out. For dinner, Candyce had ordered pizza from the local pizza joint. Luckily for Candyce and Rolly, the pizza from this place is very good; when I say “the local pizza joint” I mean the local pizza joint – the next closest is the Pizza Hut in Marathon, an hour away.

Aug 26

Another hot, humid, and lazy day. Nicky asked Jackie and Mitch if they wanted to play Scrabble, and playing Scrabble with them is something I’ve never had the guts to do. Jackie and Mitch are both very good, and I’m pretty sure their sister Claudette (who lives in Alberta but was in poor health so could not make the wedding) was at one point nationally ranked. Nicky did very well in a close game, finishing third but within five points of both Mitch and Jackie, though he did get a fair bit of help from Rolly.

We spent some time in the afternoon doing more shooting, and then after dinner we got ready to go on a drive to nowhere. As I mentioned, this was our third trip to Northern Ontario and we had yet to see any wildlife that we wouldn’t see at home. On this trip we had already seen a bear, so we told Rolly we wanted to see a moose. He said the best way to do that would be to drive on the highway early in the morning or after dark, so we decided to head out at night with the intention of driving south on the highway for 20-30 minutes and then driving back. Just before we left, Rolly (who’s a bit of a joker) told the boys and Alison to put their tinfoil hats on, which would increase the chances of seeing a moose. He didn’t say why this would work, just that it would. To their credit, neither Ryan nor Alison simply grabbed the hat and put it on, even after Rolly did. NIcky did, and even brought some foil to me and Gail for us to wear, but to this day I’m not 100% sure whether he immediately bought into it or was just playing along with the joke. With Nicky, that second option is highly possible. But we did get a picture with the hats:

We left around 9:00, and managed to get lucky. About 15 km south of the town, Rolly suddenly stopped and said “there’s one.” Sure enough, in the bushes on the left side of the road was a moose. We couldn’t see it clearly, but well enough to get a good sense of the size of this animal. Think about one of those big Clydesdale horses; this guy could have been its big brother. Attempts to take pictures met with dismal failure since it was too dark, so I have nothing to show here but we were pretty happy we’d seen both a moose and a bear on this trip. I guess the wolf will have to wait until next time.

Aug 27

Driving Day Four. We got up and after a quick breakfast, packed up the trailer and left the Wadge around 9:30. After gassing up and lunch at Subway in Wawa, we arrived at Pancake Bay Provincial Park around 1:30pm. John and Jackie had the site across the road from us, and Sandy, Alison, and Foster had a site behind J&J. By this point in the trip, we were experts at putting up the trailer and getting things ready, so we were set up in no time. Nicky and I joined Foster and Alison for a swim in the lake. Pancake Bay is right on Lake Superior, known for being the biggest and coldest of the Great Lakes, but the bay was relatively warm. Note that it wasn’t actually warm, just relatively when compared to the icy waters near Sleeping Giant and Lake Manitouwadge. After we were done swimming, we played some cribbage (which the boys are getting very good at).

After dinner, Nicky and Ryan went back to the lake with Foster until it started to get dark. By the time they got back, John had a campfire going, and they roasted marshmallows and spider dogs. Never heard of a spider dog? You take a wiener and cut the ends of it into quarters lengthwise about 1/3 of the way down. Then put it on a stick and cook it over the fire. As it cooks, the bits you cut will curl up, and by the time you’re done, they’ve curled far enough that it looks like a spider.

Aug 28

After a breakfast of pancakes (did I mention my wife is awesome?) (Wait, actually John made these ones.) (He’s pretty cool too.) we headed down to a “3.5 km” nature trail at the north end of the campground. I put the “3.5 km” in quotation marks because that’s what the signs said, but it was way longer than that. I fired up the MapMyRun app on my phone which uses the GPS to keep track of where and how far you walk/hike/run/bike. Before the phone’s battery died, we were over 6 km and weren’t finished yet. We were making pretty good time though since the mosquitoes in there were unbelievable, and every time we stopped for more than a few seconds, we were all slapping ourselves silly. Once we finished the walk we were all sweaty and covered in bug spray, so we couldn’t wait to get to the showers.

After lunch, we drove back north to Agawa Bay to see the pictographs. These are paintings on the side of a cliff, done by the Ojibwe several hundred years ago. This picture captures a few of them: there’s a canoe with people in it on the left, two snakes at the bottom, and the other thing is Mishipeshu, or the Great Lynx. Mishipeshu has the body of a big cat but has horns, spikes down its back, and is covered in scales.

At the base of the cliff is a small rock platform you can walk on to see the paintings, and then a short drop to the lake. Foster brought his swimsuit and was in the lake most of the time we were there, and the boys had fun climbing on the ropes attached to the platform to help swimmers get back out of the water. They must have done this for fifteen minutes until Ryan lost his grip and almost ended up in the water himself. He grabbed the rope again at the last second and pulled himself back up (still dry!), but then decided he’d had enough of that game.

When we were done there, we drove down a few km to the Agawa visitor’s centre, which was a combination tourist info booth plus a little museum with some very cool exhibits. I thought this was going to be a five-minute stop but we must have been there an hour before heading back to Pancake Bay.

The evening was similar to most other nights on this trip – dinner, cards, campfire, marshmallows, bed.

Aug 29

Our last day at Pancake Bay, so we decided to see as much of the bay itself as we could. We walked out to the beach just across from Sandy and Alison’s camp site, then turned right and walked along the beach to the point. The picture below shows the route we walked, though the point we walked to is shrouded in fog in the picture. I didn’t have my GPS app running so I don’t know how far it was, but it was farther than it looked. By the time we came back, it was almost lunch time.

We’d had fabulous weather on this trip. Up to this point, we’d had one night of rain and none during the day at all. But the forecast for the next day wasn’t looking so promising – it was supposed to rain all night and all day. We planned on packing up everything but the trailer in the evening, so we had less stuff to pack up wet the next day, and John and Jackie did the same. But Sandy, Alison, and Foster were in tents, so they could only pack up so much the night before, and packing up a wet tent and stuffing in the car wouldn’t have been too pleasant, so they decided to pack up and head home today instead. Sandy and Alison live in Sudbury, about 4 hours from Pancake Bay, and Foster was going to take a bus from there to Owen Sound. As it turned out, this was a good decision on their part.

After some more crib, we went over to the local trading post to fill up the gas tank, have a look around the gift shops, and pick up some ice cream treats. We then started to get ready for the trip home, packing up the clothes line and the mat outside the trailer door, taking down the dining tent, that sort of thing. By the time we were done, all that was left was to take down the trailer itself. After one last fire to get rid of the rest of our firewood, the boys went to bed, then Gail and I went back over to J&J’s trailer to play some more cards (with Jackie; John was asleep) before bed.

Aug 30

Driving Day Five, and the final day of this adventure. As I said, Sandy did make the right choice in leaving a day early, since it rained all night and was still raining when we got up (and continued raining for most of the drive home). J&J’s trailer is much bigger than ours, so we went over there for breakfast before the final packing up began. The pajamas were tossed in a bag, dirty dishes tossed in another bag to be washed when we got home, trailer taken down and hooked up to the van, garbage dumped, and goodbyes said. By about 8:30, were on the road home. We stopped in Espanola for lunch (Subway again) and some place called Grundy Lake for gas, and finally arrived home around 6:00pm. We all enjoyed this vacation and our new trailer is orders of magnitude more comfortable than tent camping, but boy, we all appreciated our beds that night.

Total number of kilometers driven: 3289.5. Not quite as many as last year (3608 km) but not bad. Pulling the trailer was a bit of a new experience. We’d done it a few times this summer, but most of southern Ontario is pretty flat so we didn’t notice much of a difference on the small hills. But driving north of Lake Superior is very hilly, so we certainly noticed the trailer then. We also used more gas, though I don’t know exactly how much more. But the comfort level vastly outweighs those extremely minor drawbacks. As I mentioned above, it was way more comfortable than sleeping in a tent, and the weather is just not an issue anymore. We’ve done our fair share of tent camping in rain, and Gail hates it. It ain’t much fun for the rest of us either. Plus the trailer has lots of storage space so packing the van is much easier. I’m even getting pretty good at backing up and having the trailer go where I want it to.

I don’t think I’ve written about the trailer at all since we got it. Earlier this year, John and Jackie gave it to us as a gift. They had it for several years (we stayed with them in it last summer in Manitouwadge and Pancake Bay) but they decided to buy a bigger one. Once they did, they asked if we wanted their old one. There was no way we were going to turn them down. We tried to buy it from them but they said no. We even gave them a “donation” that was a fraction of what the trailer is worth, but they refused to take it. In the short time we’ve had the trailer, we’ve gone on four different camping trips – three weekends in July and August and then this two week trip to northern Ontario. We have had an absolute blast, and we look forward to more camping next year too. We can’t thank John and Jackie enough for their generosity.

Cut The Chatter, Red Two

Comments on skepticism, technology, sports, and whatever else I feel like.

No Shadow of a doubt

Spending New Years with Harry, Captain Jack Sparrow, and the Hulk

My favourite picture of myself

Top 5 reasons why there is no global medical conspiracy

1. The number of people involved would be immense.

2. Success in corrupting the people involved would have to be near 100%.

3. Most of the people who would have to be involved in the conspiracy have no incentive.

4. The whistleblowers are still alive.

5. There’s more money to be made in providing cures than in suppressing them.

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