The Provincial Capital that Rhymes with the Most Rude Things

Greetings, gentle readers.
So here I am in Regina, after what was supposed to be a ridiculously rushed transfer from plane to plane, but instead has turned into what looks to be an impromptu four-hour layover.  I expect that the tourism statistics for Regina will balloon after tonight, since the airport is packed with stranded travellers.  WestJet has been gracious enough to give us a $15.00 meal voucher while we wait, but I reckon that I'll wait until the panic rush of the Brioche Dorée subsides until I grab a croissant or two.
To recap:  I was asked to buy last-minute emergency tickets to fly to Las Vegas for my cousin's wedding, an event of which I was previously aware, but not actually invited to attend until work and travel considerations became awfully nasty.  I then went to the Edmonton International Airport at noon with a virtual boarding pass (a scan code on my iPhone) and jumped on the cheapest turboprop smoking that would get me to a connection that would result in me arriving in Las Vegas, Nevada.  I didn't know that modern airlines still used turboprops.  It makes sense, if you consider the short hops between Canadian cities, but I still couldn't shake the sounds of Arlo Guthrie's "City of New Orleans" and the soaring triumphal chorus at the end of "Cry Freedom" as Donald Woods and his family fly out of Lesotho amidst a crawling scroll of names of those who died whilst detained without trial by the Afrikaaner Apartheid government.
But I digress.
First of all, the Edmonton International Airport has set all of its pinball games to the most sensitive tilt settings I've ever seen.  Airports are the last refuge of the arcade, and Edmonton has been let down mightily.  That being said, I still managed to get a replay and a match on the Iron Man game, so if you're really quick, there are two free credits that I've abandoned.
But the departure lounge wasn't all about pinball, oh no.  It was also about hanging out with people who worked at Fort McKay and the Firebag sites and were headed home for the holidays.  That is, until I heard a shriek behind me.  I turned to see a wild-eyed man pointing at me, shouting that "Louis CK told me!"  In typical fashion, I blinked impassively at him.  He grabbed my shoulder and looked over it at my iPhone (the one with the boarding passes), crying "I've seen it!  I've seen it!"  A staff member materialized at his side, saying that she could get him a cold glass of water.
"I have cancer!" he shrieked, then crouched, clutching a chair.  "How do I know?  I INVENTED it!"
He then spun around, dodging the staff member, and ran out onto the concourse crying "REBECCA!"
He ran off away from my gate, and I thought I saw him sitting on a couch, being comforted by some security and border guards.  But if the experience taught me anything, it's that this is bound to be no ordinary trip or vacation.  Strange and exotic things are bound to befall.  Right now, they're befalling in the frozen wastes of Saskatchewan, where the weather isn't too objectionable, but apparently airplanes elsewhere cannot find their way here.  I haven't even made it to the land of Fear and Loathing, and already things are disintegrating.
Oh well, at least if things aren't boring, I might find more things about which I could post.  Man may search for meaning, but I'm just looking for some decent topics to provide copy.
So 2016 is almost over.  The bloodbath of celebrities and cultural icons may be about to draw to a close.  Abe Vigoda's obituary is no longer inaccurate.  Requiescat in Pace, Gene Wilder.  Your long heartache for Gilda is over. Princess Leia and her mother Debbie will never be forgotten.  Bowie, Prince, and George Michael changed the world's soundscape forever.  The universe is a more desolate place, and we can only hope for future generations to continue the tradition of genius and innovation.
Bring on 2017 and the Era of Trump.  May the Berners continue the hard slog to redefine American politics in such a way that it is not a global slapstick routine.
That's all from me in Saskatchewan.
Good night England and the colonies.
—mARKUS

Meteorological Phenomena

Greetings, gentle readers.
Making the transition from Keflavik to Edmonton is a bit like walking off the set of "Interstellar" and onto the set of "The Day After Tomorrow," a film which has been getting more attention as the worldwide climate change crisis worsens.
In short, Edmonton is cold.  Has been for the past week.  But there's something weird about this cold weather.  As a survivor of numerous –40°C winter days, I can attest that they can be a bit troublesome.  The thing about prairie winters is that they are generally very dry with low humidity in the air.  Any moisture in the air condenses and freezes out as snow or ice, and leaves you with just plain cold air, bereft of most of its water vapour.
Ever wonder why people are comfortable in +5°C weather, to the extent that Steve Martin comments in "Roxanne" that people "...ski topless while smoking dope" while the same temperature of water is used to torment people in the ice water bucket challenge?  Basically, water can absorb heat better than air.  The more water, the more it sucks warmth from your body.  Here's why people in Edmonton are unhappy:

Two things stand out here.  One is that the humidity is 83%.  That's ludicrous, particularly in a landlocked part of the country.  That's a lot of water vapour absorbing heat from things.  How does that much water stay in the air without freezing out?  The barometric pressure is 104.7 kPa.  Normal air pressure at sea level is 101.3 kPa. Basically, much like in the Jake Gyllenhal film I mentioned earlier, there is a dense, cold column of air descending from the upper reaches of the atmosphere, pushing down on the air below, lowering the dew point (or frost point) so that the moisture can't condense out.

TL;DR

We're in a pressure cooker that freezes instead of heats.

Well, that's it for now.  Back again soon.  Thanks to anyone supporting me by reading this inane drivel.
Good night England and the colonies.
Cheers,
—mARKUS

Hot-Tubbin'

Greetings Gentle Readers.
And so the two week excursion which was supposed to ameliorate long-standing tensions and resolve internal conflicts with a longer term goal of restoring mental and physical health comes to a close.  At time of writing, I am three and a quarter hours away from landing at Edmonton International Airport, at which point I can begin grousing about the awful civil planning that used public transport to snarl traffic across the city, and yet cannot connect the airport to the city centre.

What have we learnt?

First of all, thanks to my father, I did some investigation and discovered that "learnt" is the past tense of the verb "learn" in the same way that the past tense of the verb "burn" is "burnt."  If one adds an "-ed" suffix to the root verb, you create an adjective.  Someone who has lots of fancy book-learning, or is wise in the ways of academia is said to be "learned."  By the same token, an arsonist may say that the house is burned to the ground, but she was also the one who burnt it.

No, Seriously

OK.  Here's something that is immediate and relevant to my thoughts - hot springs.  Icelanders call them thermal pools, geoactive baths, or just pools.  In the course of trying to fix my spine, I have spent days using these wonders of Iceland to relax my vertebrae and apparently exfoliate several layers of skin.  Here are some of the things I've learnt.

Modesty is Kinda Quaint

I remember teaching high-school girls phys-ed at Francis Xavier High School.  I didn't ask for the assignment, and I certainly didn't enjoy it.  During one class when the class was supposed to be learning the backstroke, I was told rather firmly by one student that she was too scared to put her head underwater, and therefore couldn't participate in the class.  She clung tenaciously to a ladder at the shallow end of the pool and asked if she could practice treading water instead.  I'm passive-aggressive and avoid confrontations now, but back then, I was a pushover.  That, and I was worried about what would happen to the water in the pool if it was suddenly exposed to the pancake makeup and the many different types of hair care products that went into coiffuring the architecturally elaborate structure atop her cranium.  I'm sure that Environment Canada would have fed me to David Suzuki if I'd let that wee narcissist dunk her head into any shared water source.
That being said, I forgot my towel when going to the thermal pools near downtown Reykjavik.  All swimmers must be dry before approaching the locker areas, so I had to stand buck nekkid and blow dry myself with the wall-mounted automatic hair dryers.  Apparently, I'm not the first person to do so, since no one else cared.  Since then, I've tried to observe the different standards of privacy and modesty.  For example, in Reyksjanesbær, there are no private showering stalls.  There are precious few in the capital city, but if you want to maintain your privacy, it stops when the locals don't feel like indulging the quaint behavioural anomalies of tourists.
People who sheepishly try to hide themselves behind towels, t-shirts, boxes of breakfast cereal, etc. will often find themselves the objects of scorn and derision from the roving gangs of flabby, overweight grandparents who have no idea what you think you're hiding that they've never seen before.

Beware the Water Slides

The thermal spas that I patronized had water slides, and they had a couple of things in common.
When you climbed to the top, people outside of the spa compound could see your half-naked body shivering in the frost and mist.
The water flow is never sufficient to get you all the way down the slide without some sort of propulsion from your arms and legs.  Unless you fling yourself down the chute with reckless abandon.
The water slide pools are always kept separately from the other pools.  Why?  They're chlorinated.
I have yet to parse this last bit out.  Everything else, from the steam rooms to the saunas to the pools themselves, smells of rotten eggs.  It's like one big scene out of a Margaret Lawrence novel.  Luckily, the water only has low dilutions of sulfurous acid (H₂SO₃), not sulfuric acid (H₂SO₄) and therefore will shut down your sense of smell faster than it will dissolve you like a Yellowstone hiker. Maybe the geothermically activated groundwater will gum up the water slides.  Maybe kids are more likely to void themselves on thrilling descents.

It's a Matter of Degrees

Icelanders are very conscientious about maintaining the precise temperature of each of the thermal pools at every given location.  As near as I can tell, the thermal pool precedes any urban development.  People find a hot spring, and then build a town or city around it, not the reverse.  Once they've found the "geysir,"  they carefully control and regulate it.  Personally, I had never given much thought to the variance in bath water temperature, but in such a highly-regulated environment, it's difficult not to notice.  For example, stewing in 42°C for an hour makes you some kind of super hero, but no-one bats an eye if you spend three consecutive hours in the 38°C pool.  Invariably, there is a 2°C tub for those that would like to do an ice bucket challenge for no good reason whatsoever.
That's about it for now.  It's been a long day's worth of travel, involving landing in an aircraft earlier in time than when we left.  Didn't even need a TARDIS.  Until next time,
Goodnight England and the Colonies,
—mARKUS

Last Fling in the Pool

Greetings, gentle readers.
Well, this is it.  One more sleep, and I'm off to fly to Iceland, and then back to my old life in Canada.  Went to the viewing floor of the Radio City Tower in St. John's Market - the second tallest building in Liverpool - and looked down on all of my favourite places and things.  As we looked upon the panorama of the cityscape and I silently prayed that the Irish Sea would churn in the aftershocks of a Katla explosion, I was hit by memories of the wonderful, but little known wonders of the city.

Drax, I Demand You Grant Me Access... to the LIBRARY

The Liverpool Central Library is near St. John's Gardens, and is flanked on all sides by colossal tributes to classical architecture.  Vast Doric columns and bas-relief lintels and marble blocks are sprayed around this district like cat urine in an old lady's basement.  In fact, what used to be the main entrance is just such an imposing edifice.  However, it's no longer used, and the "new" entrance is a little side door with a walkway leading to it that is composed of black flagstones with white and red engraved letters that spell the names of films, books, plays, and musical albums.  I immediately spotted a puzzle, and thus I was ensnared.  My deciphering led me to the phrase "CYCLOPS THE WOOD."  Of course I had to talk to librarians about it.
The first thing that strikes you upon entering the library is that the central hall is arranged like Sir Francis Bacon's Panopticon, but canted at about a 35° angle to the vertical, and capped after the fifth floor with a teardrop-shaped skylight.  Looking up at the skylight gives you a view something like this:

The two librarians were stunned that I'd seen the puzzle at all, saying that it had been a competition for students when this part of the library opened four years ago.  They also said that if I'd figured out that much, finding the answer should be a piece of cake.
Most of the rooms filled with collections or rare books are named after benefactors, donors, or other sources of endowments.  Except one.  Its floors are made from blonde oak, and all of the wall panelling and cabinetry is done in dark oak, and was hence called The Oak Room.  It's the home to one of the rarest and most valuable books in existence:  the Audubon Society's "Birds of America."  Julie is studiously avoiding it in the following picture.

Obviously, this is the paperback edition in the display case. 
A quick glance around the Oak Room told me two things - it is not organized at all.  Not by subject, author, publisher, chronology.  Even when they get a publication in multiple volumes, the numbering sequences are often wrong.

The other thing that leapt out at me was this rather unique cover.

George Maw wrote a rather bland book about the plant genus crocus, and his imaginative cover designer decided to make a three-dimensional representation of the human eye, with a crocus in place where the iris of the eye should be, making a third rate horticultural textbook into a beautiful work of art.  In any event, I found the cyclops in the wood, although I was hoping for something creepier, like Doctor Who's assertion that all paper comes from trees, and therefore all libraries are forests of the dead.
On the way back down, there's a poem written by Liverpudlian-born Afro-Caribbean activist and poet Levi Tefari that is extraordinarily difficult to read at ground level, but is far easier to read from the first or second floors:

A Night at the (World) Museum

Found right next door to the library, the Museum has a ground floor and five floors of exhibits above it.  After two days of visiting, I still haven't seen all of them.  It really is an information overload.  Each floor really merits a full week's investigation, and I find myself guilty of skimming.  The enormous display of indigenous arts, crafts, textiles, weapons, and other artifacts was entirely overwhelming.
In terms of the anthropology aspect, the exhibit that really raised my eyebrows was the Tibetan exhibit.  Filled with robes, prayer bowls and bells, and all manner of pottery, textiles and precious jewelry, the artifacts themselves are gorgeous to behold.  What caught my eye was the quotation from the Dalai Lama that accompanied the display.  In it, he mentions that many of the items that have been collected in the museum were gifts from Tibetans to serving British diplomatic and military officers, and comments that he is proud to see that these beautiful, hand-crafted articles are demonstrable proof of the friendship and sympathy that the two countries share.
This is a very loaded statement. In mentioning his people and his country, is he asserting Tibet's independence from China?  Is he implying that Britain do the same, diplomatically?  Is this basically a very quiet and polite refutation of China's definition of Tibet as the Autonomous Region of Xizhang?  It sounds very soft and cuddly, but there are barbs beneath the surface of such a placid museum dedication.
Other than quasi-seditious niceties, there is much to suggest that humanity is more of a family that we have ever realized before.  Compare the totem poles of the Haida Indians of the British Colombian coast with those of the Yoruba people of West Africa.  Then compare their textile patterns.  There are things going on in our collective species subconscious than we may have ever suspected.  Except for the Javanese people of Oceania - they've got their own thing going on.

Considering that the Scarab is a member of Order Coleoptera, I think that we can safely assume that Bastet is a Beatles fan.
And it looks like I'm out of time.  Need to pack and make my final arrangements to catch the train to Manchester in the morning so that I can hop the flight to Reykjavik in the early afternoon.  So until next time, goodnight England and the colonies.
Cheers,
—mARKUS