Sometimes, something just makes you laugh

Today, it was this book (and its cover), which was highlighted in a BookBub newsletter I got this morning:

The full title is 3000 Orgasms: How I Went from a Sexless Marriage to a Multi-Orgasmic Wonderland.

I am happy for Rebecca and her (strangely specific) multitude of orgasms. I worked it out and at one orgasm per day, that’s about 8.2 years of daily orgasms (not accounting for leap years). In that light, it doesn’t actually seem like that much.

Well, maybe daily orgasms is being greedy. What if it’s just one colossally amazing orgasm per week? That works out to nearly 154 years (not accounting for leap years), which, given current life expectancy, seems a bit unrealistic.

OK, daily is too much, weekly is too little. Maybe twice a week? Frisky Friday and Torrid Tuesday, perhaps. That works out to just under 77 years of orgasms. Unless you live to be very old or start your shared orgasming very young, this seems like a very generous length of time. But you know what? Let’s call it 2.5 per week instead. I’m not doing the math for that, but it should result in a pretty reasonable stretch of time before one retires to knitting and watching TV or holoscreens or whatever we’ll have for mindless entertainment in the future.

All right, that’s enough math for me this week. Enjoy your orgasms, everyone!

Happy 20th birthday to this blog!

I knew I should have set a reminder. 😛

It was 20 years ago yesterday that I made my first post on this blog, creolened.com. Here it is in link form and as a quote in its entirety:

I was the last one to get bell bottom jeans in grade 5 and now I’m the last person on the Internet to have a blog. Hooray for me! As you may have guessed, I am using WordPress for my blogging needs. An apparent feature of WordPress is relentless self-promotion as witnessed by the three separate links for the software on this very page. I’ll be culling a few soon and adding some other links that might prove interesting or not.

Yes, blogs were seemingly cool back in 2005. And they are again! WordPress was new and was exactly what I wanted.

Today I am pondering moving away from it, because it’s both way more than I need, and it’s being run by a man with, uh, let’s say a few issues.

But in whatever form, the blog will continue. A lot has changed in the 20 years since I started writing here (5,498 posts ago, counting this one). I have less hair. I started running. I’ve had an IV stuck in my arms for 11 days. I’ve been to Nashville.

We’ve had three U.S. presidents, one of them especially terrible and literally trying to usher in both the end of democracy and the rise of fascism. So that’s fun.

In Canada, we’ve gone from Conservative minorities to Liberal minorities and our best bet is maybe another Liberal minority.

The world is hotter and stormier than in 2005. Aliens still haven’t saved us. Everything is, of course, more expensive. The internet is a pit of hell controlled by tech oligarchs who want everything they can get their hands on, but mostly power, money and control. It’s kind of bleak.

But some things haven’t changed, such as my capacity to ramble. Here’s to years more of that.

And, of course, cats:

It hailed today

I was not expecting that.

It also snowed some more, but it feels kind of perfunctory, like someone had a checklist with “Make it snow in the Lower Mainland” and did the bare minimum in order to check it off. I’m okay with that.

The week ahead looks mostly cloudy, clear and well below seasonal temperatures, with highs between 0-2°C and lows all the way down to -10°C. This seems like a good time to resume running on the treadmill.

Birding, February 1, 2025: Welcome to the junco

Or Cold, with ducks.

Where: Piper Spit, Burnaby Lake (Burnaby)
Weather: Partly sunny, 2-3°C

The Outing

Piper Spit

Gulls, coots and chilly temperatures at Burnaby Lake.

The weather for today was predicted to be a cold mix of snow and rain, with a possible break in the early afternoon, so we opted to go to the lake around 2 p.m. and see what the ducks were up to.

There was duck drama. And coot drama. The geese just plain flew off and left the whole thing.

But despite the chilly temperatures, the weather actually turned out to be surprisingly decent, with the sun even poking out (note the bits of blue sky in the above photo), so we got in plenty of shots. We didn’t see any particularly unusual birds, like buffleheads, but there were plenty of the usual winter migrants swimming and flapping and bathing. The gulls were busy pulling up eldritch horrors from the water, or grabbing golf balls and being chased by crows.

Oh, and juncos. The entrance to the spit was festooned with juncos, along with copious towhees and others. But if you were in the mood for juncos, you got all you could want and more.

In all, a fine, if shorter outing.

The Shots

Soon?™

The Birds (and other critters). Rare or rarely-seen birds highlighted in bold.

Sparrows and sparrow-adjacent:

  • Black-capped chickadee
  • Dark-eyed junco
  • Fox sparrow
  • Golden-crowned sparrow
  • Red-winged blackbird
  • Song sparrow
  • Spotted towhee

Waterfowl and shorebirds:

  • American coot
  • Canada goose
  • Double-crested cormorant
  • Green-winged teal
  • Mallard
  • Northern pintail
  • Scaup
  • Wood duck

Common:

  • American crow
  • Assorted gulls
  • Rock pigeon

Raptors:

  • None!

Non-birds:

  • Maybe a squirrel?

It’s February!

Benefits of February:

  • Valentine’s Day if you’re in love, or just like candy and plenty of it. Or you’re a candy-selling conglomerate.
  • In most provinces, there’s a statutory holiday–Family Day! And it’s on a Monday, for a nice three-day weekend.
  • It’s shorter than normal, if you feel the months drag.

Downsides of February:

  • It’s shorter than normal, so you have less time to complete month-long projects.
  • Snow is still possible.
  • It’s still another month until Daylight Saving Time–the correct time!

As I type this, we are seeing our first intermittent snow of the winter. I disapprove.

February 1, 2025 is apparently Global Switch Day

Is it a day to celebrate light switches? Perhaps! But it’s mainly about switching from corporate-controlled apps owned by horrible techbro oligarchs, to ones that embrace privacy and the fediverse, which is not related in any way to Star Trek.

Looking this over:

  • X: Done! I never posted much on X/Twitter, anyway.
  • Instagram: Done! I have a Pixelfed account.
  • WhatsApp: Done! I never used WhatsApp much and have used signal for years.
  • Facebook: Pending! My account is “deleted” in less than two weeks. I have never tried Friendica, though, and the logo makes me think of two people in a 69, which is very friendly, I suppose.
  • YouTube: I’ve watched videos on PeerTube, but YouTube has huge piles of good video content. It’s not nearly as bad as the other services.
  • TikTok: Done! And by done, I mean I’ve never actually watched videos on TikTok. I have no interest in Loops, either.

Internet may be just a passing fad

I’m not sure where I came across this photo of a Daily Mail story from December 5, 2000, but I find it both amusing and prescient.

The prescient part is this:

They say that e-mail, far from replacing other forms of communication, is adding to an overload of information.

And this was before social media. Hopefully The Daily Mail has an updated story on how the internet was not a passing fad, but maybe it should have been, considering its current state.

I still find these weird things groovy

As a kid, I loved these things. As an adult, I still do, even if my approach to them now is more…nuanced.

When I was nine years old, I remember watching Chariots of the Gods in Duncan’s sole movie theatre. It was cheesy good fun. Someone threw their bucket of popcorn at the screen. Not a true believer, I guess. I also watched Mysterious Monsters in 1976, which, if I remember accurately, imagined Bigfoot as being kind of a rude jerk to people, crashing into their cabins and making a mess.

These aliens and monsters undoubtedly tap into some part of my psyche that loves the mysterious and unexplained for reasons I, uh, can’t explain. I mean, why is red someone’s favourite colour?

Anywhere, here’s the list of the weird things I still find groovy:

  • Bigfoot/Yeti. Will also answer to Sasquatch/Abominable Snowman.
  • The Loch Ness Monster and other similar creatures, like the more local Ogopogo.
  • Ghosts, poltergeists and the like. Boo!
  • UFOs or as they are often called now, UAPs. To a lesser degree: aliens [guy from Ancient Aliens gesturing].
  • Cryptoids. These are really adjacent to the first two items.

There’s other wacky stuff as a kid that I found interesting, but more in a horror story kind of way, like:

  • Witches, vampires and the like
  • Demons, and all that (the Satanic panic of my youth was something I found highly amusing)

Now, as someone pretending to be a relatively sophisticated adult, do I actually believe in any of these things? Not really.

BUT.

I am willing to entertain the notion that some of these things may exist. It does make me wonder why we have yet to uncover incontrovertible proof, though. Also, it’s hella (as they say) easy to fake photos, video and other evidence these days. Also also, there’s about a billion ghost hunting and UFO shows around, which kind of dilutes the mystery and turns it into Product.

But in the end, it doesn’t really matter to me. The best part about a mystery is the mystery. Once it’s solved, you shrug and move on. I don’t want to shrug, I want to revel in the delicious and improbable possibility of a big stinky humanoid wandering the forests of the Pacific Northwest and who isn’t just a tall hippie opposed to bathing on principle. Like Mulder, I want to believe.

I’m willing to settle for being entertained.