I will still be updating this site with other stuff from time to time. Hopefully that vacuous promise will encourage you to check back here at some idle point in your future.

Until then, you stay classy San Diego.

The bus was going from Edmonton to Winnipeg and the attack happened somewhere in the province of Manitoba. I don’t know anything about the loony who did this but having lived in Canada for the last nine months it’s obvious that the biggest problem in this country is the cyclical triumvirate of homelessness, mental illness and substance abuse. It wouldn’t be a surprise to anyone if we learned over the next few days that the killer was afflicted with any or all of these conditions.

It must’ve been a horrible sight for the other passengers and something that will stick with them forever. I watched a couple of Al-Qaeda’s decapitation videos a few years ago and it’s not anything I’d like to see again.

All female mammals (or at least the vast majority of them) produce breastmilk for their newborn until they’re able to digest solid foods themselves. Human babies feed on their mother’s breastmilk for a few months (or in the case of a friend of mine, 14 years). Little cow babies feed on mammy cow’s milk for a while too. But then they stop! They go off and eat grass and stuff afterwards. Humans are the only mammal to continue drinking milk after infancy. And they don’t even drink human milk. They switch to cow milk! It’s all very strange when you think about it.

In 2006, Ireland was the world’s third highest consumer of milk per capita. Which might explain the cattle attitude of the population!

Nowadays cows are pumped full of artificial hormones, antibiotics and steroids to make them grow bigger, produce more milk and produce milk for longer. These hormones are still in the milk after pasteurisation and homogenisation and get passed to humans. Some studies have linked these to various forms of cancer (link). And it’s not just the artificial hormones that get passed to humans. Natural oestrogen and progesterone from the cows gets passed in large quantities too which can be harmful to us (link).

Of course it’s not just milk, it’s all dairy products – butter, cheese, cream, yoghurt, ice-cream, etc.

Some links for you:

• godairyfree.org
• notmilk.com
• milksucks.com

With my extra hour today I headed to the Metrotown mall in Burnaby which is only 15 minutes away on the Skytrain. Metrotown is big. Really really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it is a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to Metrotown. Anyway I bought a new hat. I like hats. I get the feeling that at some point in the future I’m going to be the proud owner of a large collection of hats. I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing.

Firstly, here are some older photographs.

And here are some of the ones taken recently including today.

More photos are available in the gallery.