National Do Not Call List

Today I registered my home phone number with the National Do Not Call List. This requires that telemarketers remove your phone number from their lists by Oct. 31. Hooray. The site has proven so popular that it was crashing all morning. I did however finally get through.

www.lnnte-dncl.gc.ca

From Fall to Winter

The leaves have started to change and it looks like it will be another brilliant year. I may rent a car this weekend and go up into the hills to do some photography with my new camera. It's very cold today however. It feels more like winter coming on. It will be time to pull out my favourite wool hat and mitts at this rate. Wasn't that an exciting post! Live hard and play harder.

Ministry of Silly Walks Dept.

It must be funny walk day in Ottawa. when I went out earlier I saw this very tall man, easily 6'2" if not taller. He was walking in the same direction as me about a block ahead except he was walking down the centre of the road, backwards. I saw him do this for about three blocks until I had to turn.

Then on the way home I met the hip-hop walker. He too was 'walking' down the middle of the street with a kind of side step and a twist of his hips so that he was going more or less sideways as he moved on down the road.
Another strange site was seeing 5 Montreal SPVM motorcycle cops and a Longueuil police van racing down Rideau street!?!

Me & My Skunk

 

Zombie Dawn: 404 Daly Avenue

 

September Epilogue: 404 Daly Avenue

 

Sleeper

 

Another Side of Blue

 

James Bird

 

Things I Have Lost Recently

12 CDs
5 lbs
myself FOUND Sept. 23rd. 2008 at 10:05 am.

Mouffette

Concerning the Whitechapel Club

I'm reading the Erik Larson book 'Devil in the White City'. It tells the factual story of the architect of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and that of the depraved serial murderer who lured victims from the fair to their sorrowful fates in his macabre mansion. One of the more uncanny elements of the milieu was the Whitechapel Club

Founded by Chicago newspapermen in 1889, in the rear room of a Chicago saloon, the Whitechapel Club was a notorious press club named after the area of London where Jack the Ripper committed his nefarious deeds. The club lasted five years,but remains legendary for it's bizarre and disturbing doings.


The Whitechapel Club circa 1890


The Club HQ circa 1907

Inside, on the first floor, was a table in the shape of a shoe smithed for a mule's hind foot. At each place was a churchwarden's pipe and a tobacco-filled bowl that had once been the brain pan of a human skull. Dr. John C. Spray, a member who was superintendent of a hospital for the insane, had made a study of skulls to try to determine differences between skulls of normal persons and those of the mentally ill. He contributed his collection to the Whitechapel Club, and the club's chaplain, decorator, and all-round handyman, Chrysostom "Tombstone" Thompson, neatly sawed off the tops, implanted brightly colored glass in the eye holes and rigged the skulls as shades for the club's gas lighting fixtures. The flames flickered eerily against walls covered with the canary yellow paper matrices of type forms. A communal keg stood in the corner for members who wanted beer. At the bar were corked bottles for those who preferred something stronger. On nights when Whitechapelers entertained guests, they served a punch concocted by Wallace Rice. In some members' memories the favorite was a milk punch they called "wild cow's milk," but Rice said that was only a rumor, one of the many unfounded stories the club would inspire.

In a smaller room on the second floor, drinkers gathered around a coffin-shaped table studded with nails with big brass heads. The boys tilted their armchairs back against the wall, put their feet up on the table, and "kept time to their own dreadful singing by hammering with their beer mugs" on the top. They held board meetings at that table and dealt poker on it, though not for money. "Playing cards and dice for money was strictly forbidden," Rice remembered. Rolling the dice for drinks was about as far as they went.

In the center of the coffin table was another skull, its top still attached. It had been the head of an Indian girl and it was among the souvenirs Herald reporter Charlie Seymour had brought back from the West. At least two other Sioux Indian skulls were part of the macabre decorations, both donated to the club by a Captain Stuart. Serving as a cup for honored guests was the silver-lined skull of a woman said to be "a lady of notoriously easy virtue" called Waterford Jane, Queen of the Sands. The Sands, or Sand Lots, a red-light district just north of where the Chicago River empties into Lake Michigan, was a favorite stopping place for sailors off the schooners that once tied up at the city's docks.

The walls of the upstairs room were covered with Indian blankets (in legend they were deeply stained with blood) and so-called ghost shirts--shirts that had been blessed by medicine men to make their wearers impervious to the bullets of U.S. cavalrymen. Seymour had collected those, too. There were nooses that had hoisted badmen in the west; pistols and knives seized as murder weapons and donated to the club by law officers; portions of fire engines destroyed in the great Chicago fire of 1871; and Indian war bonnets, tomahawks and bows and arrows. Buffalo Bill Cody, in full costume, looked down from a handsome, autographed portrait hung on one wall. Cody had bestowed it on the Herald's Brand Whitlock after the reporter had trailed him through Chicago's saloons one afternoon interviewing him, and Whitlock had carted it to the clubhouse. A series of photographs showed Chinese pirates before and after beheading. The decorations served as symbols of the often-dark world the members covered and of the mocking posture they assumed toward it. The devices also served as totems of their fraternity.

From 'Defining Chicago's Newspapermen in the 1890s'
American Journalism, 15:1 (Winter, 1998), 83-102.

Ghost House by Robert Frost

I DWELL in a lonely house I know
That vanished many a summer ago,
And left no trace but the cellar walls,
And a cellar in which the daylight falls,
And the purple-stemmed wild raspberries grow.

O'er ruined fences the grape-vines shield
The woods come back to the mowing field;
The orchard tree has grown one copse
Of new wood and old where the woodpecker chops;
The footpath down to the well is healed.

I dwell with a strangely aching heart
In that vanished abode there far apart
On that disused and forgotten road
That has no dust-bath now for the toad.
Night comes; the black bats tumble and dart;

The whippoorwill is coming to shout
And hush and cluck and flutter about:
I hear him begin far enough away
Full many a time to say his say
Before he arrives to say it out.

It is under the small, dim, summer star.
I know not who these mute folk are
Who share the unlit place with me--
Those stones out under the low-limbed tree
Doubtless bear names that the mosses mar.

They are tireless folk, but slow and sad,
Though two, close-keeping, are lass and lad,--
With none among them that ever sings,
And yet, in view of how many things,
As sweet companions as might be had.

The Strangest Place on Earth

I found this on the blog "Dark Roasted Blend", a blog of 'weird and wonderful things'



The place is an island in the Indian Ocean called Socotra Island and is home to hundreds of unique species of plantlife. The entry is titled "The Most Alien-Looking Place on Earth"

Palin Around With Republicans

According to this New York Times article Sarah Palin is indeed cut from the same cloth as George Bush (remember him he's still President)



"Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes"

Read more >>

Last Weekend

It was a fun weekend the last. Saturday I went over to my bosses house for some great homemade pesto, garlic bread and roasted red peppers. Mmmmmmm. They even bought one of my favourite beers, Mill Street's Tankhouse Ale. After dinner we sat around drank a Brazilian red wine and told ghost stories. Some eerie things happen out East is all I can say. Afterwards I stopped off at my old friend Jan's. We ended up going around the corner to the Elmdale Tavern and had some Beau's a fine local brew, and watched a corny but good old time country band. A lot of Carleton students hang out there so we sat in on one tables conversation. It was sad and strange watching the really drunk old guy dragging his girlfriend around the floor trying to dance, when clearly she didn't want to. Finally she sat down and he danced all by himself.

I slept at Jan's and made my way home for a meeting with a friend to go see the exhibit at the National gallery. It was a great collection of European works on the theme of "the New Man" that developed along with Fascism. They had works by Kandinsky, Picasso and all the other usual suspects. It was an interesting balance of art that glorified a fascist ideal and that which critiqued it.

Afterward we went for Vietnamese food even though it's Ramadan and my friend should not have been eating until sundown. We capped it off with some bubble tea before I finally ran to a standstill and went home straight to bed at the late hour of 6pm.

Bad Kitty

She killed another plant and decides to sleep in it's soily grave.



She's also strangely fascinated by smoke. I have a feeling she may have been a stoner in another life.

Mara and Sharon

Mouffie

 

Rainy Morning

So much water. Water never stops moving,it travels constantly around the planet. As oceans, rivers, rain, clouds, as floating blocks of ice dissolving in warmer bodies. It's ever changing state: gas/liquid/solid. It enters our bodies and those of the plants and creatures we consume, but it's only ever passing through taking the essence of its vessel with it: sweat, tears, spit, blood, juice. We need it more than we need electricity, because it is us. When we pass from this world do we only return to dust?

End of Summer

Signs that that this summer has come to an end, in spirit at least,are everywhere. Two buses were so full this morning that they didn't even stop to pick anyone up. Also the new crop of students are all over the downtown core doing activities for various charities. My roomate moved in yesterday. She is a lawyer in Civil Law, which is what they use in Quebec. She will be studying Common Law which is what they use in the rest of Canada. She's really great but it's going to take getting used to not having my sweet Leslie at home.