Farley Mowat has passed....

“Somewhere to the eastward a wolf howled; lightly, questioningly. I knew the voice, for I had heard it many times before. It was George, sounding the wasteland for an echo from the missing members of his family. But for me it was a voice which spoke of the lost world which once was ours before we chose the alien role; a world which I had glimpsed and almost entered...only to be excluded, at the end, by my own self.”
― Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf

More at http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/farley-mowat-dead-at-92-1.2634772

Floating on a word cloud...

I ran across a nice word cloud generator online (www.wordle.net)  Being unable to resist tinkering with every strange online tool I run across, by way of experiment I dropped in some song lyrics...

Atlantic City by Bruce Springsteen...

Mix in a bit of Queen...

 






...The Stones...

 ...and lastly some AC/DC.

Pick a song and give it a try.

Future Days

I like living in the future.

Do you realize that you can watch the sunset on Mars?

Check out this mind-blowing image courtesy of the Curiosity Rover.

Cry 'Havoc' and let slip the dogs of war...

For all the focus in recent years on building global security, the small arms trade remains one of the most pernicious, wide-spread, lucrative and deadliest factors in play.  Small arms (defined as assault rifles, hand weapons, explosives etc. rather than tanks or missile systems) kill an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 people annually and have accounted for the vast majority of global war casualties since WWII.

Forget everything you've heard about tanks or ultra-sophisticated drones.  Most people in conflict zones are killed by an assault rifle, an explosive or similar light weapons.

According to the Small Arms Survey there are approximately 875 million small arms distributed globally, with about 650 million - almost 75 percent - in civilian hands.

So who is buying & selling this massive arms trade?

More than a thousand companies in 100 countries selling an estimated $8.5 billion in legal sales per year, but the big exporters of these weapons?  The US, Italy, Germany, Brazil, Switzerland, Israel, Austria, South Korea, Belgium, the Russian Federation, Spain, Turkey, Norway, and Canada.

And where are they going?  Everywhere.

Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) launched a new project called MAD, Mapping Arms Data, where they pulled info from 35 different sources including export & customers records, the UN Register of Conventional Arms, and others to track global trade and transfers of small arms.


PRIO has used the data to create an incredible interactive data visualization of the global small arms trade - the legal one.  The illegal trade will trickle, pour and divert the legal weapons into conflict zones around the world.

Here's Canada:



Check it out.  It is educational to say the least....Scary as hell, but educational.

Beneath the hurtling moons of Barsoom...

No beauteous Dejah Thoris, and no tharks or thoats anywhere in sight, but the Curiosity rover is taking some breathtaking and superlative shots nonetheless.

Welcome to Mars.

"...when shadows fall."

A macabre look at a London "plague pit" burial site from the 1350's, uncovered by the Crossrail transportation construction crews...

 

My skittish mobile throwrug....

 Meet "The Gremlin", a feral cat we took in at the behest of my sister-in-law. It's like living with a small throwrug that runs...

After four months lurking and skittering about the upstairs rooms in a panic everytime someone looked at him sideways, he has calmed down enough for me to grab a finally get a photo of him.

About a quarter second after the shutter snapped he scrambled away again. Probably see him again in a day or so....