Abandoned Stuff by Saskboy

I spent most of Friday at a training course, and got out a little early. It was perfect weather, I had lunch outside, using my XO laptop to pick up a WiFi signal from a Husky station about a block away. The XO screen performs nearly flawlessly in direct sunlight, I was very impressed. I then went to a friend’s birthday party all evening, and managed to lose in last place every game (possibly coming in second or winning just one, come to think of it.

It was a busy day in the news with lots of important information including the expected banning of a dangerous chemical that’s been used in our plastic drinking containers! This bugs me to no end because I spent years using plastic bottles. Heck, my Brita is plastic, I’ll have to see if it’s on a recall list soon. If it is, I guess I can choose between the carcinogens that chlorine cause, or the container contains. Wonderful.

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Hawk Down in Saskatchewan - pilots survive crash. I’ve previously posted the chilling video of an earlier crash of the same style of airplane.

-2004

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Not everyone survived a massive explosion in Nipawin though.

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The Vagina Monologues is under attack again, this time from Albertans. High School students see/hear more graphic depictions of female sexuality in the checkout stand in the grocery store. I’ve written previously about the Vagina Monologues being censored. I saw the play earlier this year for the first time.

Westerners, as a whole, have a harder time understanding the impact pollution has on our environment. This is due to a combination of things (not really our education system in relation to elsewhere). One factor is that a lot of our jobs are based on resource extraction and agriculture. These jobs require heavy equipment with diesel engines, and people don’t want to feel shame about their ‘office’ equipment. They didn’t build the equipment anyway (they just repair it). If it was so bad, no one would build it, right?

Another factor is that unless an entire forest is on fire, we just don’t SEE pollution in the air like more urban-dwelling Canadians do. Calgary and Edmonton get smoggy, at least they have in the Summer when I’ve been through, but it’s not a year round problem. Regina and Saskatoon tend to get foggy at worst. Smog in those two cities is usually attributable to stubble burning, or a forest fire. Our water sources are not so great as it is in Toronto, to raise our humidity to the point where we can’t breath from the mixture of moisture and muck.

And so a combination of economic induced denial sets into people. It especially settles in people who have no grasp on chemistry, history, or physics because they lack the logic defenses their mind needs to shrug off propaganda fed from other people who depend on our broken systems not being changed.

If your skies looked like this, would you have 2nd thoughts to the seriousness of air pollution too? For some people out here, it’s the last straw they need to give up on logic, and to give in to denial and complacency.

- Museum with ship and a “new” elevator, 2 minutes south of Moose Jaw on Highway #2. There’s a NFB film about this ship, and the poor man who built it. He wanted to sail it back home to Europe, but was committed and died. He tried to tow it across the prairie with animal and human power, to sail it up to Hudson’s Bay via our river systems. In a way he’s a metaphor for people of this country who don’t understand or even acknowledge we have an air pollution problem. They build too many of the wrong vehicles, and mis-use them until they go crazy and die, defeated. Hard working, but in a role that can’t last. Instead of finding a new way to live where we are, we’d rather destroy ourselves on the chance that we can get back to how things used to be; Back to better times.