3 weeks...

...until the 651st anniversary of the Battle of Poitiers. For the first and only time.

Why is this important, you ask? I'm not telling. Yet.

Facelift, part I

Right. Now that the one-year anniversary is out of the way, it's time to update a few things. Starting with a complaint from a certain person about the size of the sidebar text. Actually, another certain person complained about this a while ago too, so I'm inclined to believe it might be a real problem.

So, if you will, please clicky on the following poll and the Ricardipus Information Services Support Team* will implement your recommendations in a timely** fashion.

Disclaimer: I have no idea if this poll will work.




*i.e., me
**The definition of the term "timely" in this context has not yet been finalized.

And another year rolls by.

Meaning, of course, that the first year has rolled by. The first year since the inaugural post. The first year since the Glorious Launch Of The Ricardiblog™.

Gosh, where does the time go? And, come to think of it, where is it now? I’m only finding time to write this by typing like a madman on the 360 Express Bus which, as I’m sure I’ve complained about before, is hardly an environment conducive to the authoring of witty and erudite commentary. It’s even worse than the coach trip from London Heathrow Airport to Cambridge via Luton and various even less memorable places.

So, choose, if you will:

a) credit where credit is due, or
b) the following characters are to blame.

Zoe, whose blog is the first I ever started reading, after typing the word “Twat” into Google in a fit of frustration. She got me hooked, then badgered me mercilessly until I started one of my own. And she’s always been very graceful about my usually unhelpful remarks over at her place. She's got a book, you know.

Speaking of badgers, Dawn, who appeared one day in Zoe’s comments box, or maybe Scaryduck's, or maybe both, and rapidly turned out to be a chainsaw-wielding Canuck, just like me except a bit shorter and with funkier glasses. She did her share of encouraging, and even made some comment somewhere about how “there should be a Ricardiblog”, which is why this thing gets the title it does. She also hosted my first guest blog post ever, after I completely chickened out of guesting over at Zoe’s place. I think they’ve both forgiven me by now. Dawn is still also the only blogger I’ve ever knowingly met in person, along with an attractive and talented group of balancing fish.

Rik, who didn’t badger me but has always been rather encouraging, and I think may be the first person to link my blog from his. He hosts my music files too, which is rather nice of him, and has on several occasions offered to spruce the place up a bit. I may still take him up on that, although it’s fun messing with the template on my own, in a perverse, html-misery kind of way.

Scaryduck, who fuelled my blog addiction with his highly entertaining daily reads, even if the quotient of vomit and adolescent pain and anguish causes me to cringe every now and then. He’s got a book too.

Misty, who probably single-handedly convinced me (without trying) that Flickr is a great way to show off and waste time all at once. Not that I’m accusing her of showing off, mind. Her blog is a hoot, as they say.

And various others, for encouragement: Anna, Debi, Guyana-Gyal, TRT, Black Knight, Alethea, Wyldwoods, Kaptain Kobold, Bob, John.G, Auntymarianne and the rest of you lot whose blogs I visit from time to time. You'll find yourselves over in the sidebar, and yes, I'm too lazy to put in links to each of you here in this post. I may not always comment when I visit, but I always enjoy, so keep doing it all of you. Please. Oh, and a special shout out to the blogless Wonderferret for his kind words and nice photos, and to various other readers who drop by from time to time (Alicat and Heather, I'm looking at you).

Finally, some credits to the webby types who keep this silly thing running so elegantly:

Blogger, even though I like to complain about it.
Flickr, where I keep all the photos and hide various bits of the blog as well.
Statcounter. It counts the stats (surprise, surprise) and occasionally provides a humourous look into the ways people find their way here.
Clustrmaps. They make the map over there in the sidebar. The one with the clusters on it.
Rikaitch. As I said above, he hosts the music files that nobody ever listens to.
Javascriptkit.com, whose Google search widget I stole from Zoe.
Feedblitz. Email feedy goodness for all of you. Well, the two of you who signed up, anyway.
Creative Commons. "Some rights reserved" is a most excellent idea.
The Weather Network. For the weather widget, in case you were wondering.
AltaVista Babelfish. In case you want this translated into Canada’s Other Official Language, or something.
Brilliant Button Maker. Ok, I only made one button, but it's brilliant isn't it?

Plus all kinds of websites I used to learn bits of html... notably, this chart of colour codes, this indispensible list of Windows ALT-key codes, and this rather handy HTML / XHTML reference site.

Well, that's about it. Multiple apologies to anyone I've forgotten. If I'm still around next year, I'll try to post something a bit more meaningful. In the meantime, I leave you with this, in typical Ricardipus style: a picture of a flower.

4 weeks...

...until the 23rd anniversary of my elder brother not going to a Toronto Blue Jays game, even though he had this free ticket:

Four dollars. That would probably just about buy you a hotdog at the game today.

The date is important.

You know you're a parent if:

I've given up counting these.

You have ever tried to be a figure of authority while wearing your pyjamas.

Photos of the Figure of Authority™ (not wearing his pyjamas, so don't get your hopes up):

by Junior Ricardipus #1:

and by Junior Ricardipus #2:

Endearingly geeky, as always

Playa_pixie, over at Flickr, whose home state I rather mercilessly dumped on in a couple of earlier posts, somehow or other got me to admit that I have, in fact, on one occasion eaten parts of that plant up there - the bullrush. Well, not that particular one, but you get the idea.

And the obvious question, of course, is: why?

Well, the answer lies in an endearingly geeky part of my youth when I was a dues-paying member of the Kingston Junior Field Naturalists. A group with meetings where we would learn about identifying birds, examine museum specimens and, on one memorable occasion, even skin small rodents. I was rather proud of the vole skin I produced, stinking of borax though it was. And I only nicked the bowel once with the scalpel, which was, truth be told, probably better than average. Let me tell you this - vole excrement smells like, well, crap.*

On a couple of other occasions, we had field trips to the Prince Edward Point Bird Observatory, overnight trips in the freezing cold where we patrolled the mist nets at regular intervals, plucking out Northern Saw-Whet Owls who'd gotten stuck in them while happily migrating along minding their own business. Cute little fellows, glaring stonily at us while they were subjected to a variety of indignities: being weighed, measured and having bands attached to their legs. They also have sharp talons, believe me. And we only hit one skunk with the car, another memorable experience that I strongly suggest you avoid at all costs.

But - the bullrush.

One of our KFN "activities" was a picnic, where each of us was supposed to bring food that was "found in nature". Thank goodness nobody brought bugs, but the rest of the fare was a bit suspect, there being not a whole lot of fruit and nut trees in that part of Southern Ontario at the best of times. I suspect that small, hard, bitter apples probably played a part, but I confess I don't really remember a whole lot about it.

What I do remember, though, is learning that you can grind up the tubers of the bullrush and make flour out of them. You can also eat the pith out of the stems, and maybe even the fuzzy part at the top if you're brave. Playa_pixie says these remind her of Corn Dogs, but I'm not convinced.

What I do know is that wading around in a muddy swamp, with Red-Winged Blackbirds dive-bombing your head, in search of tiny little roots that when ground up and baked in scones end up tasting, like, well, perfectly ordinary scones with bits of fibrous crud in them that gets stuck between your teeth, is not perhaps the best way to spend any part of a summer afternoon.** But I did it nonetheless, contributed my effort to the picnic, and as a result, 25 years later, you've all learned something about bullrushes and me that you didn't know before.

See? It's all about education here at the Ricardiblog. Really.

*I'm going to have to pay Scaryduck royalties for this one, you know I will.
** We may have a new contender for Longest Sentence On The Ricardiblog™

RAAARRRHH!!!

That's the noise an Allosaurus makes, apparently.

Which I heard in person, at the Walking With Dinosaurs live show, which visited the Air Canada Centre on the weekend. The two Junior Ricardipi and I also visited the ACC, at the same time.

And it was this: great. Lots of fun fog and lighting effects, huge audioanimatronic dinosaurs, smaller dinosaurs with people inside them (operating them, not being eaten) and narration by a guy who was like a calmed-down Nigel Marven with a hint of Aussie accent. Absolutely great. JR#2 was a little scared, and maybe the show was a teeny bit long for her, but JR#1 was entranced the whole time. The only downside was that Mrs. Ricardipus didn't come, since the tickets were horrendously expensive. But she got a bit of time to herself, which was nice.

The show-stealer was a baby T-Rex... until mummy T-Rex came along to fetch her home, that is.

And as a bonus, in the drizzle on the way home I saw a jet-black Ferrari Testarossa. That dual mirror-stalk is unmistakeable, just in case I missed the ridiculously huge cheesecutter side strakes. 400 horsepower-ish and rear-wheel-drive - not the first vehicle I'd choose to drive in the rain, though.

--

In other news, the wretched report from before has given way to a grant application, which got polished off yesterday. Now I have a progress report to complete, for tomorrow. All of these are for the same funding agency. What, do they think we don't sleep?

The quest for web domination continues

This photo of mine, taken on the recent cottage weekend:



has made it onto Mark Sisson's Daily Apple, in this post about running barefoot. How exciting! I'm not totally sure about the website - I tend to be a bit suspicious of "health and well-being" operations. But at least they have good taste in feet. They're not mine, by the way - they belong to Junior Ricardipus #2, she of the hilarious joke.

And a comment over at Flickr by Wonderferret, he of the excellent photography and invisible blog, made me remember that a few of my pics have shown up on Matrixsynth, here and here and here. Warning: Matrixsynth is run by people who are seriously obsessive about electronic musical instruments.

And the following two pictures even got used a while ago over at the Science Advisory Board as part of one of their articles about a conference I attended in Scottsdale, Arizona. It was on their ticket, so fair enough.





Just a wee little bit more web presence, and who knows, I might just start to rival Scaryduck for domination of the internet. Or maybe not.

Joke of the day

Courtesy of Junior Ricardipus #2:


Q: Why are bugs going bugging?

A: Because they're hiking! [gales of laughter]


I have no idea, either.


--

In other news, I also have no idea what a rather lovely red Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano would be doing parked outside an industrial building not too far from Chateau Ricardipus. That's basically an Enzo engine stuffed into a rather elegant Grand Touring automobile, at the cool cost of, oh, a quarter of a million dollars or so. At least it comes with an iPod connector as standard.

A week earlier, a Mondial T, sporting a mere 300 horsepower or so, on the same road. And on the same day, the bus I was taking chased an orange Lamborghini Gallardo downtown. For a very, very short amount of time.

And my brother reminded me that a mechanic friend of his took him for a little spin in a 365 GTC/4 that he was working on. I really must start hanging out with my brother's friends more.

The annual cottage trip, again

Just like last year, but with fewer fish.

Five adults and four children under the age of seven, all under one roof for a long weekend. It wasn’t restful, but it was fun, and a nice break from all of those reports I keep whining about. I think this is the twentieth year in a row we’ve done this on the August Civic Holiday weekend, but I confess that I haven’t really been counting since 1989 or so.

Except that this year, there were no fish to be caught. None. Probably because the only morning we all didn’t sleep in, it was raining, and if there’s something I like even less than getting up early, it’s getting up early and getting wet at the same time. By the time the rain had stopped, it was way too late and the fish were engaged in other pursuits, like hiding under the dock, lounging around chatting with each other, and generally not eating rubber and epoxy imitations of food items that they probably wouldn’t be interested in even were they made from meat and skin and bones and tasty, tasty worm-flesh.

How’s *that* for an image, hm?

Anyway, there were some nice fungi:



a walloping great insect or two:



a lot of trees and undergrowth:



and some really impressively curly birchbark.



As well as a rather nice white-tailed deer, running off into the bush, lots of very attractive orange-and-black Monarch butterflies, black-and-orange Netwing Beetles, and the usual not-so-attractive mosquitoes. Plus some rather nice spiders down on the dock. It always helps to have a friend who's a technician in the entomology department of the Royal Ontario Museum along for the trip to identify these things.

And no major quibbles, problems, hassles or other hiccups – just minor ones like slightly damaging the car’s front fender while executing a less-than-elegant three-point turn rather close to a large rock. Fortunately, my brother was around, and with his experience in rallying he’s become rather adept at fixing cosmetic (and not-so-cosmetic) damage to a wide variety of vehicles, including our aging Mazda Protegé, as it turns out. So all is well.

It wasn't, however, exactly a vacation in Antigua. And for that, I am thankful.

(More photos on Flickr).

Vacation, part II

Sorry, I've been on vacation, but at the cottage rather than in Antigua, thank goodness. Photos and things from that trip will be over on Flickr as soon as I get around to uploading them at the mighty speed of 128 kilobits per second; posts here might have to wait a bit. In the meantime, here's part II of the previous Antigua trip part I.


It wasn't all terrible:

1) The crabs turned out to be quite cute.

2) As were the blackbirds.

3) The rum. Super-premium English Harbour, about $4 US for a big bottle. Mmmmm.

4) We saw a mongoose.

5) We saw a cotton tree.

6) We saw lots of cute lizards.

7) Historical sights - Nelson hid his fleet in English Harbour, apparently.

8) Complimentary rum punch on arrival.

9) Happy hour at the poolside bar.

10) Some guy offered me a "trip to paradise". Naively, I asked what he meant... a joint (spliff, doobie), apparently. Come to think of it, he *did* look a bit too Rasta to be a native Antiguan. And no, I did not partake... but it was worth a laugh that he took the time.


It was still kind of disappointing though. As a vacation destination, Antigua gets a 3 out of 10. Try somewhere else.

This public service announcement brought to you by the good people at Ricardipus Tourism Advocates and General Complaining About Things, Inc.