Hong Kong WWII Veteran's Memorial Unveiled

 

Given the war ended 64 years ago, it took them a rather shameful amount of time to get this done. Nonetheless, a monument honouring 2000 who went to reinforce Hong Kong and who fought fiercly against the Japanese, resulting in nearly 300 dead and nearly 500 wounded. Then there was the long ordeal in Japanese prisons, where 300 more died.

Hong Kong Memorial

Hats off to those boys - they were thrown into the breach, ill-equiped and barely acclimated, and they fought hard despite that, showing their own great sense of duty and honour. They were and are a credit to Canada.

 
 

Hot Day In Ottawa In The Kitchen

 

This promises to be an interesting day; The weather forecast is for 31 C and I'm making jam. For the uninitiated, that means boiling water to blanch peaches (the cinammon-peach jam lot), boiling water to sterilize the jars and sealers, boiling water to cook the jam, and boiling the jam itself briefly (but sugared fruit boils at a far higher temperature than water). The net effect of this is more humidity than you can shake a stick at and more heat in the already hot apartment.

On the other hand, the cinammon-peach batch looks like it went okay. The peach blanching wasn't a perfect success - I need a bigger bowl for icewater and I need to get the ice in further in advance. I also discovered some peaches rot from the inside and you discover that when you get down about 1/4" into the peach and find you don't like the look of it (and of course any such material didn't go into the jam).

I may try another batch of peach jam if I find more decent peaches - I want to try the ginger-peach recipe I read about. I also kind of wonder if currants, raisins or cranberries could not be usefully added to peach jam. I know you can use honey for sweetening instead of sugar, but honey's not cheap stuff. I'd have to be convinced it was clearly superior.

I still have a batch of raspberry to go. No twists on that one, I hope. Wanted to make the peach and raspberry because my batches of blasterine (blueberry-raspberry-nectarine with a hint of strawberry) and strawberry are not edible by me old Mum due to her drop-dead-fast strawberry allergy. I figured I'd like to make something she could have and I like peaches and raspberries.

Next on the line is making some homemade pizza (maybe tonight) and trying out my newly acquired marble pestle on the fresh oregano I bought for the pizza. If I don't do that tonight, I'll do it Sunday. I've also got a canning operation to produce some salsa, but I may need to buy some more fresh ingredients. I wonder if canning my own salsa is any cheaper? The jam probably isn't, but I know what went into it and I can get more experimental interesting recipes (peach jam recipe to try #3 involves hot peppers and lemon zest).

And somewhere along the line, I should make another cake. I've got some eggs I should use up. Or maybe a loaf of some kind - banana loaf or pound cake. I have to share this stuff out because I'm only one guy and no way I can eat it all myself, but that makes sharing food a social thing...

 
 

Hubble Ultra Deep Field Gives Perspective

 

We have Hubble to thank for a view into our universe that sheds a lot of light on the significance of Humanity, let alone the significance we have as individuals.

Video showing Hubble Ultra Deep Field and a 3D construction of same.

Even if you aren't an astronomy geek, watch this. The narrator's presentation is simple and he has a good voice for narration. The facts presented are staggering. 100,000,000,000 galaxies in the universe. 100,000,000 stars in each. If I do my zeros right, that's 1E19 stars out there. 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 suns.

Carl Sagan was right. The probability of intelligent life out there other than us must be 1 (aka 100%). I cannot conceive of us being that special. Special, yes. That special, no.

Of course, that does not mean we'll ever meet these other intelligent species.

Some of those galaxies are receding from us faster than the speed of light now. That's also a hard concept to grasp. As is 47, 000, 000, 000 light years away (the distance of the furthest galaxy). That's 47 billion years at the speed of light, 3 x 10E8 m/s.

We collectively, as humans, are small sands on the beach that would be our own world. We think ourselves small as 1 in 6,000,000,000. We certainly are, by that standard. And yet, our sun is one of ten quintillion other stars. As rare as we are individually in the sea of Humanity, our sun is a smaller part of the total count of suns in the universe by a factor of 1.66 billion times.

The numbers involved here are celestial and literally incomprehensible in any direct way by the human mind. Our concept of scale just can't really process this. The universe is breathtakingly vast. Our little sun is a grain of sand's grain of sand on one very big beach. And we are then as inconsequential as a grain of sand upon that beach.

Think about that for a second. If this doesn't give you a sense of true awe at the magnificence of the entirety of our universe, then you have no poetry in your soul.

I'm reminded of something once said by a famous and humourous man:

"Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space." -- The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, Douglas Adams, Chapter 8

 
 

Douglas Adams had no idea how right he was. And this we know because we invest in projects that don't reap an immediate Earthly benefit such as our space program. We understand our place in the universe and the vastness of Creation because of the window into that which the Hubble Space Telescope grants. Think about that next time someone debates with you the value of the space program.

Chuck Norris takes on Obama's Health Care Bill - Roundhouse Kick!

 
Yes, I did say Chuck Norris. THE Chuck
Norris.


Chuck vs. Obamacare, Round 1


From a tagline at the bottom of the article page:


Chuck Norris is a columnist and impossible to kill.
 

Steal my wallet - what the hell's a matter with ya?

Good samaritan has his wallet stolen. Thief gets hog tied and left in street. Wallet returned to owner. Thief given some verbal dressing-down as well. Justice served.