Old Lost Sea

Curling: the cricketer's winter sport

2011-12-12T19:16:00.000-03:30

Curling stones on the edge of the house (Copyright - Hen Goodchild)

When the long Newfoundland winter sets in, and outdoor cricket is off the radar for a good many months, what does one do? Indoor cricket is fine, but a pale shadow of the real thing. Ice cricket would necessitate me learning to ice-skate, and as I've documented here previously, I need a hockey stick just to remain on my feet.

No, the only winter sporting activity I'm interested in is curling, and the fact it shares many parallels with cricket is no coincidence. Somehow I managed to persuade Cricinfo to let me write a piece about it.

ESPN Cricinfo | An ice way to keep cricketing

Setting myself up for another Herringshaw Shuffle (Copyright - Hen Goodchild)

Newf York, Newf York

2011-11-23T18:55:00.001-03:30

Friday night in York and, as usual, wego to the pub. This Friday, it was decided that the pub would be TheHabit, on Goodramgate. Hen and I headed there to find the othersupstairs, where the walls were adorned with some sort of artexhibition.

Having acquired drinks and stools andsat down, a particular image caught my eye. It was a large, invertedphoto on canvas, and it showed a 'York Street' road sign. “Thatlooks rather like York Street, St John's,” I thought to myself,“just round the corner from where we used to live.”

My phone photo of the pub picture

Sure that this was just wishfulthinking on my behalf, I laughed off the notion. There must be YorkStreets in English-speaking cities across the world, I admonishedmyself. Just because the place that you loved so much has onedoesn't mean anything. The sign could be from anywhere.

But Hen had the same suspicions, sowhen it was time to leave The Habit and get some food, we went overto check it out. And what did the print's caption say?

York Street: Inverted on Canvas

St. Johns, Newfoundland, Canada

Kelly Powell £40.00

We chuckled to ourselves, and told ourdrinking friends about downtown St John's, and walked off with a buzzin our step. Newfoundland pops up to remind you of its existencewhen you least expect it.

Back home, after dinner, we switched onQI. Stephen Fry was apologizing to Dara O'Briain for a transgressionon a previous series, where O'Briain had been wrongly deducted pointsfor a comment about fish not having tongues.

Fry explained that, although some fish,such as cod, have tongue-like structures, they do not function astongues in the way ours do. So they're not really tongues, and Darawas correct. But Fry added, of course, that – regardless of theetymology or homology – in the island of Newfoundland, fried cod'stongues are a delicacy.

Next day we went back to The Habit andbought the photo.

From caribou to the carrom ball

2011-10-24T14:32:00.002-02:30

A final postcard from Canada for Cricinfo, and all is looking well for cricket in Newfoundland:

ESPN Cricinfo | It's all coming up roses

(Footnote: there is a bonus Canadian twist to this piece, and one I was unaware of. The term 'carrom ball' was coined by Mahendra Mapagunaratne, a Sri Lankan writer, lawyer and cricket lover based in Toronto.)

Anything else, ce n'est pas le criquet!

2011-10-02T10:08:00.000-02:30

In the small Quebecois town of Otterburn Park, just across the Richelieu River, on a field between a chocolate factory and a volcano, a revolution is taking place. French may be the official language but cricket is the lingua franca.

The revolutionaries call themselves the Pirates of the St Lawrence, and their mission is straightforward: cricket for everyone.

ESPN Cricinfo | Égalité, fraternité, pirate

"May it rain only when you are indoors"

2011-09-19T09:08:00.000-02:30

Simon Calder, editor of the Independent Traveller, visited Newfoundland recently. Here are some of my highlights of his article:

1. If arriving at roughly the right time, right day and right airport are your criteria for a good flight, Newfoundland may not be the ideal destination. "My first flight to the island, 20 years ago on Aeroflot, touched down at Stephenville - 200* miles across the island from the intended target of Gander, which was snowbound. This summer has proved so meteorologically miserable that tourists have been exchanging salutations along the lines of "May it rain only when you are indoors"."

*it's nearer to 300, but not to worry.

2. Drive a hire car from the airport to Cape Spear, and you will get lost - "local signage ranges from rudimentary to baffling".

3. "The exceptionally friendly locals are mainly descended from Scottish* and Irish folk - and the province's weather emulates the Celtic fringe of Europe, too: summer visitors need not arrive overburdened with sunscreen."

*this isn't true. Scottish immigrants were far outnumbered by English ones.

4. "The island remained a colony of Britain, separate from Canada, until 1949 - which is roughly the era much of Newfoundland seems, endearingly, to be lodged."

5. "You will be transported, technologically, to a time before mobile phones: for the best part of a week, the only communication from my mobile was the message "No Service", and the effect was blissful disconnection."

6. "Outside St John's, you will struggle to find a cafe or restaurant that you can walk to from your B and B, or which opens much beyond 7.30pm."

7. The first transatlantic communication cable "rusts gently...on the shore of Trinity Bay, in the deliciously named town of Heart's Content. (A nearby, equally appealing port, share its name with a sex toy...)"

8. "The Colony of Avalon, founded in 1720*, occupies a beautiful bay cradled by a headland that, predictably, sports a lighthouse."

*It was actually founded almost a century earlier. As for the lighthouse, Mr Calder really should have gone for a lighthouse picnic.

9. "Newfoundland is a corner of Canada steeped in beauty and sadness."

Cricket NL: Taking the aerial route

2011-09-18T15:58:00.000-02:30

The Neapolitan nobleman, the stamp-collecting Ulster-Jewish gambling magnate, and the Newfoundland cricket-aviation connection:

ESPN Cricinfo | Postcards From Canada - You've Got Airmail

A plane comes into land over the new home of Cricket NL (Photo: Saad Shaifan Ahmed)

Fidel Castro goes tobogganing in Gander

2011-09-14T17:49:00.001-02:30

"Fidel Castro was a frequent visitor at Gander's VIP lounge, en route between Havana and Moscow. In the 1960s, a resident took him for a toboggan ride."

As reported on Flight Path: Gander (Alison Hancock, CBC News, 2003)

Healthier fast food in downtown St John's? I don't think so!

2011-09-06T18:26:00.002-02:30

Thanks to The Independent's Hans Rollmann, I have been alerted to this crazy story of the St John's City Council's sterling efforts to prevent two entrepreneurs from setting up a Middle Eastern fast food stall in the George Street area. Though rather depressing, it really is well-worth a read:

The Telegram | Tied up in red tape

Recording a Labrador duck

2011-09-05T16:53:00.000-02:30

The Labrador duck, Camptorhynchus labradorius, is (or was) a mysterious bird. It was known from the Labrador region, but may never have actually bred there. It had a strange-shaped beak, but no-one knows what it fed on. And it was last recorded in the 1870s, in New York, but no-one knows why it became extinct.

All we do know is that it was probably never very common, and now it has definitely gone.

It is the perfect emblem of Labrador cricket, therefore. Although the nominally Labradorian Ducks beat the Newfoundland B'ys at the King George V Stadium last summer, the team's links to the Big Land were tenuous. None of the players were from the region, and only a couple had ever lived there.

And, as I found out this summer, the chances of organized, outdoor cricket thriving in Labrador are slimmer than a malnourished white spruce:

ESPN Cricinfo | Cricket in the land of murderous flies

You want flies with that?

2011-08-25T23:59:00.000-02:30

Last year, as my beloved and I pitched a tent at the Triple Falls RV Park near St Anthony, the flies came out in abundance. It wasn't a great deal of fun.

It was, however, an absolute doddle in comparison to what I've just experienced in southern Labrador, camping in Pinware River Provincial Park, and conducting fieldwork along the coast.

I knew the blackflies were supposed to be bad this time of year, but I reasoned that Rich and I might be ok, as we'd be helped out by sea breezes, and probably a fair bit of rain, and anyway, we were only just in Labrador, rather than in the heart of the bug-bothered interior forests.

How wrong I was.

We'd not known about the blackflown state of Pinware, but our ignorance certainly did not lead to bliss. That said, we were treated misleadingly kindly to begin with. Pitching our tent on a breezy, showery evening, the flies weren't too bad, and when a deluge began the next day, they were non-existent.

Out in the field we had a brief burst of bother beneath the Bradore Formation of Blanc Sablon, the low cliffs acting as a windbreak that enabled the flies to act out their homonymic verb, but that was about it. And then, the next day, though the sun shone on the roadcut beneath the war memorial above L'Anse au Clair, the wind was vigorous, and not a fly was to be seen:

A fly-free view over L'Anse au Clair

Things began deteriorating after that, though. We'd erred in choosing a sheltered campsite, but couldn't be arsed moving the whole thing to a new and windier location. This meant that going to bed involved staying away from the campsite till nightfall, then dashing from the car to the tent, jumping inside, and spending the next few minutes trying to bash as many of the blighters as we could see.

Getting up in the morning involved being as prepared as possible in the tent, and then unzipping the front and clambering out as fast as we could, zipping it closed again, and sprinting to the car like bobsleigh riders trying to hop on board. Only once we'd got to a windier spot, usually a coastal outcrop, did we stop for breakfast.

But then the weather on the coast stopped behaving, and we'd find ourselves at a key locality with the wind being utterly unhelpful (i.e. non-existent). We were being bitten quite frequently, and our bug jackets weren't really helping.

The final straw was our final field day. It was as still and calm and beautiful a morning as one could wish for, and we were out on the Battery Trail bright and non-breezy. We couldn't see any rocks of interest, nor could we see a way down to some that might have been, but this was not least because Battery Point looked like this:

Rich points out the only thing in view that isn't a fly.

It was mental, and soon we were too. We marched in and marched out, and didn't stay very long at the roadcut section above English Point either, where we had to cover our heads in direct contravention of the orders of the British Prime Minister.

The best of all was saved for last, though, and a fishing session on the Pinware River. I didn't fish, as I don't know how to, and don't have a licence, so I sat and watched the number of flies that had penetrated my bug jacket whilst Rich tried to catch a salmon. It was fly-fishing of the most literal kind, and by the end of our trial (with no salmon as reward) we were bitten and bothered.

Next day, first thing, we caught the ferry back to the mainland. Labrador might portray itself as The Big Land, but that's a typo. It's surely the Bug Land.

Tom Dawe: Newfoundland's poet laureate

2011-08-23T23:19:00.001-02:30

I love poetry, and when done well, it reaches the places that no other literary form can. But on the written page, even the best poems miss something: the voice of the author.

Here in Newfoundland, this point is demonstrated wonderfully by the work of Tom Dawe. Reading his poems is thoroughly enjoyable, but to hear him read them is another thing entirely. The words come alive, the phrases crackle with the energy of his delivery, his bright mind and sharp eye glimmer and sparkle, and everyone in the room is bewitched.

I first heard Tom reading his works at the 2010 Sparks Literary Festival and I immediately went out and purchased his anthology Where Genesis Begins. I made sure, however, that it was a copy with an accompanying cd, so that I could hear the poems as he meant them to be heard.

This evening, however, I was lucky enough to be at one of Marlene Creates' Boreal Poetry Garden events, where Tom gave a reading in the intimate environs of Marlene's garage. There were 20-odd of us in the room, and we listened with silent reverie as he read poems of the hermit he knows who won't sell his swamp to developers because (quite correctly) a marsh is perfectly well-developed already, and of salmon, and alders, and asters, each one beautiful and thoughtful and delivered with a joy that kept his audience entranced.

Tom is the St John's poet laureate, but to my mind, he is far greater than that. He should be Newfoundland's poet laureate, and is the sort of writer-performer that the rest of the English-speaking world should be lauding, praising, and most importantly, listening to. There are precious few of his kind to be found.

Misinformation for fieldwork in Labrador

2011-08-23T17:01:00.000-02:30

At Costco, before leaving for Labrador, we stocked up on supplies. One such thing was Minute Maid Mixed Berry juice cartons, which proclaim that they are '100% Juice'. They then state, however, that they are made of juice from concentrate, 'plus other ingredients'. Does this mean, then, that the juice contains more than 100% of itself?

Meanwhile, bear bangers are meant to scare off bears, but the instructions on the box of the bangers we bought says 'do not point at animals'. How are we supposed to use them?

Product information is so confusing.

The destruction of downtown St John's

2011-08-22T19:34:00.001-02:30

Being back in St John's, and the weather being sunny, I went for an afternoon wander with my camera. Having photographed the city exhaustively during the two years I lived here, and only having been away for a few months, I didn't think there would be many new things I'd be able to take pictures of. It hadn't crossed my mind that I'd end up taking photos of old things that had been obliterated.

Firstly, it was the Star of the Sea Hall, on Henry Street. I had never been inside, but I remember standing outside it during one of the city's ghost walks as the guide talked about Nelson's body being shipped home to Britain in a barrel of rum. I can't remember if this story was in any way connected to the hall itself, but it was certainly an imposing structure.

Well, not anymore, as the St John's council gave permission to knock it down, and now it looks like this:

The Not-much-of-a-Star of the Sea Hall

It was torn down to make way for condos, apparently, which is standard for both the city and the times we live in. Further proof came a short while later, when I was walking along by the harbour. I came to the eastern end of Harbour Drive, looked up, and saw this:

A complete Golden Phuck-Up

I was dismayed. Disgusted. Who the hell allowed this to happen? What the heck were they thinking?

The owners of Coffee Matters, apparently. And they were thinking of condo cash. Ker-ching, they say, to which I respond, Ker-no more buying of your over-priced coffee and cakes! Of course, given that I live in the UK now, this will have no impact on their business, but what the heck. Boycott the butchers of downtown artworks!

Annoyingly, I never took a photo of the complete mural before it was . This is the best I can find in my library:

The bottom-right corner of the undestroyed Golden Pheasant mural

Clearly, though the dog loves Golden Pheasant tea, the coffee shop owners of St John's do not. Should you need to remember what has now been lost, here it is when it graced the corner of Turner's Tavern.

Adventures In The Big Land

2011-08-18T11:12:00.001-02:30

PART ONE - NIGHTS, FLIGHTS AND FRIGHTS

Although I lived in Newfoundland for two years, I never made it across the Straits of Belle Isle to Labrador. As Labrador is vast, and vastly larger than the island, I couldn't really claim to know the province properly till I had. So it was with eagerness and anticipation that I signed up to assist my former office mate, Rich, on his fieldtrip to The Big Land.

The Northern Peninsula and the west coast of Newfoundland would also feature, but it was Labrador first, so I will blog about Labrador first. And first I had to get there.

Say 'LLO to Labrador

Having caught the train from York to London on a Friday afternoon, I spent night one of my expedition in Feltham, near Hounslow. Although conveniently close to Heathrow Airport, Feltham is not an especially salubrious area, and I worried about being accosted as I dragged my luggage around some fairly rough-looking parts of town, trying to find my accommodation. When I eventually located the hotel, it wasn't the bail hostel I feared it might be, but the only praise I can really offer is to say that it was inexpensive.

I slept ok, though, and made it to the airport the next morning with loads of time to spare. My voyage across the Atlantic was equally uneventful, partly because the in-flight entertainment wasn't working, but then I landed in St John's to find that the weather was atrocious. Cold, windy and pouring with rain, it was rather more autumnual than Augustan, but at least it shattered any rose-tinted spectacles I had. And anyway, it wasn't the weather I was going back for, but the chance to catch up with friends, and to see some new places. And rather than a dodgy internet dosshouse, I got to stay in the comfort of James and Pinar's spare room on Gower Street.

The following morning, having stocked up on provisions, Rich and I drove across the province, trying to get as far as we could before nightfall. As a proponent of the Go West movement, I was delighted to have one of my arguments verified, as 10'C and rainy in St John's became 21'C and sunny in Deer Lake.

We made it into Gros Morne before nightfall, but the first two campsites we tried were full. The third - Green Point - was not, but then we discovered that our tent was non-functional. The piece that all the poles lock into was missing, so we had no structural integrity. It was now dark, too, so we tied things up as best we could and bedded down for the night in a rather odd-looking (and decidedly non-waterproof) royal blue and canary-coloured contraption.

Hoping it doesn't rain, I sang a facetious version of Yellow Submarine to myself:

This small tent is the best you've ever seen,
The best you've ever seen,
The best you've ever seen.

Yellow Submarine, Green Point.

Amazingly, the weather remained dry overnight, and we awoke in good time, unsoaked and relatively well-slept. Heading straight to the hardware store in Rocky Harbour, we managed to buy a few things that will enable us to erect the tent properly, not least Duck Tape, and then we hit the road again.

At 12.30 pm we pulled into St Barbe, for the Monday afternoon ferry to Labrador. We'd arrived three hours in advance in order to make sure we could get a ticket, but we walked in to find it interminable in the terminal. There was no-one staffing the ticket office, and no information available anywhere. After sitting in the waiting room for an hour, wondering what to do, whilst numerous other potential customers joined the (extremely vaguely ordered) queue, we finally watched two ladies materialize from their lunch break, and, after struggling to unlock the office door, set themselves up. They then informed those of us foolish enough to enquire about booking a place on the boat that they "can't sell any tickets till the propane arrives."

We wondered if a lucky few were going to be given jet packs and propelled across the straits, but disappointingly it turned out that this was the Monday 'Dangerous Goods' crossing. I'd hoped this meant they were transporting tigers, but it's nothing more exciting than some canisters of fuel. Eventually we were allocated a spot, and when we boarded we found the ferry was pretty much empty, suggesting that this was not going to be a dangerous week in Labrador.

A first glimpse of Labrador, and the coastal Cambrian sections we were there to inspect

At Blanc Sablon, which is actually in Quebec but appears to be regarded as Labrador for the sake of proximity, we read that the island next to the port is L'Isle Aux Perroquets, which seemed implausible. Not as implausible, I thought, as the fact I actually saw parakeets in Feltham on the first evening of my journey, till a translation revealed that 'perroquet' is the French word for puffin.

As happy campers, our two options in the region were the Northern Light RV Park in L'Anse au Clair and the Pinware River Provincial Park. The former is much nearer to the ferry terminal, and in the middle of the coastal rock sections we wanted to inspect, but upon arriving there we discovered that the camp site was a gravel car park. Even if I had a roll mat, I wouldn't have wanted to stay there, but the fact I didn't meant the idea of pitching a tent straight onto a surface of rock fragments was a definite no-go.

We moved onto Pinware, then, where the provincial park site was much, much nicer. It is sited on a sandy spit sticking out into the river, and is a strip of woodland with beaches on either side. We sign up for a week, and after a chat with Martin, one of the park keepers, head off to choose the best place to pitch.

Pinware derives its name from "pied noir", apparently, but [fly] noir would be more appropriate, as there are scores of the blighters. As we set up the tent, we hope that the evening breeze doesn't die down, and having done so successfully, and then whistled up some dinner, we are pleased to find that there are not too many flies around come nightfall.

Sitting outside under the tarp, with our little fire going nicely, and a nice cold beer, all is well with the world, and we are contemplating retiring for the night, when up pulls Martin in his park warden's van.

"It's probably not going to be a problem," he says, as he marches towards us looking serious, "but I thought I should come over and warn you that we have a male black bear in the area, and the campsite is included in his territory."

Abruptly, our plans of a cosy night's sleep in the properly constructed tent begin to unravel around our ears. But it's ok, Martin will reassure us.

No, he won't. He decides instead to inform us that the bear weighs four hundred pounds, can run at about 50 miles an hour, and is not afraid of humans. It is particularly fond of fish, but can smell any kind of edible titbit, so we must make sure there is nothing foody and edible for him to get interested in. Lucky we didn't just unpack all our provisions and leave them on the campsite table, then.

A black bear carries off a tasty morsel (photo by Alan Vernon)

Oh, and our site is the worst spot to be camping in, Martin declares, as the bear likes to use one of the old trails, which just happens to pass about two feet from the end of our tent, behind the thin row of trees. Martin wouldn't camp here, oh no, sir, and he's lived here more than 30 years. In fact, he tells us he wouldn't go around without a rifle. He certainly wouldn't walk alone from the shower block back to the tents as some stupid campers are doing.

I am one of those stupid campers. I walked the route obliviously and solitarily just a few minutes earlier.

And having released all this terrifying information to clang around inside our brains, Martin walks back to his vehicle and jumps back in, with an ominous-sounding promise that he'll be patrolling the site throughout the night, and that we should be fine.

After hurriedly packing away everything we think might be of interest to a bear, we retreat inside the car and contemplate our options. I am genuinely fearful, and decide there is only one option. I will sleep in the car. It might be an over-reaction, and I know that nothing is almost certain to happen, but there's no way I'll sleep easy if I stay in the tent. I may as well sleep uncomfortably but securely in the back of the truck.

After a bit of thought, Rich decides he will do likewise, so we begin rearranging things again, and clear the back so that we can lay the back seats down flat. Agitated, unnerved and rather cramped, we close the car boot from the inside and try to settle down.

It will be a long night...

Today I ate an iceberg

2011-08-15T23:46:00.001-02:30

Icebergs: edible

So we needed to get out to Devil's Cove, across on the other side of Chimney Arm, the side that has no roads, and therefore we needed a boat, and the nearest port was Englee, which was having its Come Home Year, so we didn't think there would be many people available with boats, as they'd all be with their families, and not wanting to waste their day providing an aquatic taxi service to unknown geologists who weren't even Newfoundlanders, but we went and asked anyway, and a man named Everett or Everard or something said he could take us the next morning - this morning - if we met him at the old fish plant at 9am.

Devil's Cove - it's here, I think

So at 9am we were there and there was nobody to be seen, so we drove around for a bit, and went into the shop and they said they'd seen Everett or Everard or something at 7am, but not since then, so we asked where he lived, and went there, and met a man who was from Englee, but had lived in Happy Valley-Goose Bay for many years, where he'd watched RAF men play cricket, and he said that his brother said that our man was out on the water and would be back soon, but didn't know how soon, so we went wandering again, and came back, and then drove around for a bit, then came back, and our man still wasn't there, and after we'd waited almost two hours we gave up on him.

So we went up to Bide Arm and couldn't see any boats that looked like they might be able to transport us, so we went to the Green Moose visitor centre in Roddickton and it seemed there was no-one there, but then someone appeared from an office and she pointed us to her colleague who phoned up some of her acquaintances and explained that two geologists from Memorial University wanted to go in a boat to Devil's Cove, and asked if they could help, and one guy said he could.

Bide Arm, NL. The boat we caught is the one on the left.

So a few minutes later Ross and Corwen appeared and asked us how much money we could offer them to take us to Devil's Cove, and we asked them how much they wanted, and as neither group could provide an answer, we decided to sort it out later, and in the mean time, whilst they sorted out some gas, we drove to Bide Arm where they would meet us shortly, and they did, and we got into their small motor boat, and they took us to the north end of Devil's Cove, where there was a wharf we could disembark on, and, having promised to come back for us at 6pm, they left us to it.

Devil's Cove, or Otter Cove, Chimney Arm, NL

So we walked along the beach towards the rocks we were interested in, and the weather was now lovely, and the tide was falling, and the rocks turned out to be interesting, although not quite what we expected, and a bit more metamorphosed than we would have liked, and there were some very annoying stouts buzzing around, but we set up our base on Stout Meadow Island anyway, and the sun shone, and the hours flew by, and we were glad we'd made the effort to get out to Devil's Cove.

Stout Meadow Island, Devil's Cove, Chimney Arm, NL.

So when the b'ys came back to fetch us at 5.30 we were quite happy just to head back to harbour, but they had other ideas and asked us if we'd ever seen icebergs in close-up and we said no, we hadn't, so they took us out to the edge of Canada Bay where there was a cluster of bergs, some tiny, some enormous, and we got right up close to them in the little boat, slipping beneath beautiful pinnacles and platforms, sparkling in the sunshine, meltwater rills on their flat tops, and faces etched into their columns, and chevron patterns in their sides, and then a piece broke off one of the large bergs, and collapsed into the sea, and we bobbed through the detritus and it fizzed and hissed as a billion ancient gas bubbles escaped into the atmosphere, and then Corwen asked if we'd ever eaten an iceberg, and we said no, we hadn't, so he scooped a small block out of the water and dropped it into the boat.

A few pieces shattered off it, and I took a fragment and looked at it in wonder, at the microscopic spheres of millenia-old air trapped inside, and then popped it in my mouth, all so I could say that, today,

I Ate An Iceberg.

The weather forecast for the Labrador Straits

2011-08-14T22:15:00.000-02:30

And now the general synopsis for the Labrador Straits, covering the region from Blanc Sablon to Red Bay, issued today, any day in the summer:

Cloudy, grey, cool, rather like sitting in a cave. Drizzle overnight, turning to pish in the morning, becoming absolute filth around noon.

Icebergs: sneaky to brisk, moving quickly along the coast during dense cloud cover.

Flies: southeast, veering southwest, north, east, and all other directions on a compass, 6 to 7, occasionally 8 or 9. Dense, infuriating, bad.

Bears: sparse, large, becoming increasingly hungry in the evening.

Campers: tasty.

And that end's today's forecast.

Plan of Green Fables

2011-08-14T18:19:00.000-02:30

In my attempts to find out how to build a cricket ground in St John's, I asked the lovely folks at the Cricket Association of Prince Edward Island how they built theirs. The story they told me goes something like this:

Postcards from Canada: A plan of green fables

Republic of Squires

2011-08-06T20:10:00.001-02:30

It's August 6th, and it's 10 degrees Celsius in St John's, not to mention windy and pouring down. It's lovely to be back.

I mean it. I'm currently in the blue house next door to Doyle's, whilst this evening I'm going to a party in a house a prime minister once ran through to avoid an angry mob. And then, for good measure, tomorrow I'm going to be staying at a provincial park named after the aforesaid fleeing politician, before heading off to Labrador the next day.

As I said, it really is lovely to be back.

64 Colonial Street, St John's, Newfoundland.

Ice, ice baby

2011-08-05T18:19:00.000-02:30

Tomorrow I fly to St John's, and then on Sunday-Monday, drive to southern Labrador and the Northern Peninsula to see some splendid old rocks. It will be great to be back, and great to be geologizing with the MUN Ichno Massive again.

However, if I'm brutally honest, I'm actually most excited by the prospect of seeing this:

Petermann Ice Island reaches the Rock

And even if I don't manage to see it, just look at all the icebergs around the Strait of Belle Isle:

Iceberg Finder - Iceberg map

It is going to be cooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool.

Spanish cod tongues

2011-08-01T12:48:00.000-02:30

Having recently enjoyed a MUN Ichnology Group reunion at the International Ichnofabric Workshop in Asturias, I found myself watching Rick Stein's Spain on BBC2. The relationship between Newfoundland and Spain has been tense over the years, rather mirroring the Anglo-Spanish one. There have been plenty of fish-related disagreements, and my general impression is that Newfoundlanders regard their counterparts from Atlantic Iberia with suspicion.

It was amusing, therefore, to visit the region myself and realize that - dinosaurs aside - there are very many parallels. A rocky, storm-battered coastline, a living mostly made from the sea, lots of Celtic influences, with plenty of singing, drinking, and eating of stews and seafood, and a general sense of being separate from the rest of the nation they nominally belong to. I could be talking of Newfoundlanders, rather than Asturians, or Galicians, or Basques. As is often the case, perhaps, it is the similarities that create the tension.

And watching Mr Stein's programme I found yet another comparison, learning that one of the favourite dishes of fishermen from San Sebastian was hake throats. Different species, but essentially the same as cod tongues, and given their love of those, I can't help but think that Newfoundlanders would feel right at home in northern Spain.

Oh, and whilst at the icebreaker reception for the IIW, held in the Jurassic Museum of Asturias, one of the dishes we were served was bacalao. Get yourself online and book a trip there next summer!

See the dinosaurs that wandered from Newfoundland to Asturias*.

*During the Late Jurassic, the Iberian Peninsula was a large island close to the coast of Newfoundland.

The cricket-crazy kids of New Brunswick

2011-07-30T08:12:00.000-02:30

This weekend sees a landmark moment in the resurrection of cricket in Newfoundland. Thanks to the efforts of Dave Liverman, Rakesh Negi, Shaifan Ahmed, Ashwin Gupta and the Cricket NL team, a plastic Flicx wicket has been shipped from Toronto and installed at the Feildian Grounds in St John's.

A Flicx cricket pitch at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, NB.

As a consequence, the first hard-ball cricket league in Newfoundland for decades will start today at 2pm (NDT) and then run for the next few weekends. It's an exciting time for cricket in the province.

My first experience of a Flicx wicket was at the 2010 Maritimes Twenty20 tournament in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and it was great to be able to play with a proper cricket ball, even if it took a bit of time to get used to the skiddiness of the surface.

More importantly than the playability, though, the pitch is part of a bigger picture, and the guys who run Cricket NB have already made impressive progress in promoting cricket in the region. To find out more about their approaches, their experiences and their long-term goals, I spoke to Cricket NB president, Aditya Aggarwal, and the article is published on Cricinfo today.

Hoping For A Warmer Future In Icy Climes

It seems that, as in so many things, the children are our future.

In a bit of a Huff

2011-06-24T08:40:00.000-02:30

Yesterday, I was invited to become a science/natural history contributor to the recently launched Huffington Post Canada. This was very exciting, giving me the opportunity to bring my writing to a big audience across the country.

Then I made the mistake of asking what the deal was regarding payment, and received the following response:

"There is no payment for our bloggers, but 1.5 million Canadians will read your work."

I'm afraid that's just not good enough, and I told them so. AOL bought the Huffington Post for $315m earlier this year, and the Huffington Post execs claim it will make around $60m in revenue this year, so the organization clearly has a fair bit of cash to hand. The idea that it will not pay its writers for their contributions is simply not on.

US lawyer Jonathan Tasini agrees entirely with this sentiment, and has launched a $105m lawsuit against the organization on behalf of 9,000 unpaid bloggers. I'm not sure I would go so far as calling anyone who now writes for Huffington Post Canada for nothing a 'scab', but I certainly wouldn't encourage it.

If you want good writing, you should pay good writers good money. Simple as that. Anything else is exploitation.

A Man For All Seasons (except Winter)

2011-06-23T17:38:00.000-02:30

On Midsummer's Day, I went to Kiplin Hall, near Richmond in North Yorkshire. If you haven't heard of it, then you've not really been doing your history homework, for Kiplin was the manorial home of one George Calvert, better-known as the first Lord Baltimore, and (to Newfoundlanders) known-better-still as the founder of the Colony of Avalon.

Kiplin Hall looks like this:

The back of Kiplin Hall, viewed from across the lake.

The reason I was there was to try and find out more about George Calvert the man. What made him leave Yorkshire and head for the New World? What did he hope to find when he got there? And what happened to him? I found out many interesting things, and I promise to write about them here (or write about them elsewhere and link to them here).

But for now, all I will say is that Calvert only lived for a single year in Newfoundland, as the winter of 1628/29 was too much for him. As soon as he could, he set sail for the warmer climes of Chesapeake Bay, where he laid the foundations of what would eventually become Maryland. And it is thanks to these events that its capital is called Baltimore.

Who knows, if the winter of 1628/29 had been milder, perhaps things would have turned out differently, and The Wire would have been set in Ferryland?

The Grand Seduction - storyline

2011-06-22T16:32:00.000-02:30

I have no idea if the seduction involves a pretend love of cricket (as it should), but here is the plot synopsis I received from the producers of The Grand Seduction remake:

The tiny cod outpost of Dunfield Cross would be set financially if they could secure an oil platform service base. However, a town doctor is needed to land the contract… but they have been looking for one for 8 years! Resident Murray French takes it upon himself to find his village a doctor. When one candidate – doctor Paul Lewis – lands in their lap, the town rallies to seduce him to stay beyond his one-month trial. As the month grows, so too does Paul's fondness for the village, clueless that everything he loves is an elaborate web of lies set up by Murray. With the decision for the service base looming, Murray's grand seduction faces collapse from both guilt and revelation, potentially crushing both the dreams of a small village and the hope of a young doctor.

Apparently, it will be filmed in and around Champney's on the Bonavista peninsula.

2011 Atlantic Twenty20 Cup, Halifax, Nova Scotia

2011-06-16T18:31:00.000-02:30

The first five-province Atlantic Twenty20 Cup took place at the Commons, Halifax, NS, over the weekend of June 10th-12th. Debutants Quebec were victorious, with the hosts Nova Scotia finishing runners-up, but the big surprise (and, for me, tremendous delight) was Newfoundland & Labrador defeating both New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island to finish third.

The scorecards for the matches can be found here: Cricket Archive

Return to the rock

2011-06-16T10:20:00.000-02:30

Though I no longer live in Newfoundland, I am still writing about the attempts to revive cricket in the province. The first of this year's Postcards From Canada (From Yorkshire) has been published here:

Return to the rock | ESPNCricinfo.com

Reading a couple of the comments, I have upset some Cricket Canada fans. It was not my intention to belittle Canada's performance at this year's Cricket World Cup (my attempts at humour clearly backfired somewhat), but I stand by my general sentiments. Yes, it was good to beat Kenya, but they were a shadow of their former selves, so anything less than a win would have been very poor. Canada also gave Pakistan and Australia a bit of a scare, which was good, but the result against Zimbabwe (a 175-run defeat) was disappointing at the very least, and a 210-run thrashing by Sri Lanka wasn't great.

I want Canadian cricket to thrive, and the current situation is not necessarily Cricket Canada's fault: the ICC is definitely neglecting Associate cricket. But to claim that the World Cup wasn't a disappointment is to paper over the cracks: just look at the leaps and bounds Ireland have made.

Gros Morne’s Old Lost Sea

2011-06-14T15:45:00.001-02:30

The (extremely condensed) story of the American, Canadian and Newfoundlander who proved that the Atlantic Ocean had a father:

Gros Morne’s Old Lost Sea | TheIndependent.ca

Return to Penguin Island

2011-06-09T10:50:00.000-02:30

Anatoly Lieberman, the Oxford Etymologist, has written a piece about the origin of the name penguin, in reference to the great auk. In it he discusses the possibility that pen gwyn, 'white head' in Welsh, might originally have referred to Funk Island, rather than the birds themselves.

A grand seduction, b'y

2011-06-08T13:30:00.000-02:30

According to a new article in the St John's Telegram, the Quebecois cricket movie La Grande Seduction is being remade in Newfoundland. There is no mention as to whether cricket remains a central focus of the movie, but I sincerely hope so. And if it is, I encourage every single Newfoundland cricketer to sign up for the film by emailing grandseductioncasting@gmail.com.

The elusive Zuan Chabotto

2011-06-03T10:38:00.000-02:30

I was in Bristol last weekend, mainly to be chased by zombies, but as it is also the place from which the Venetian Zuan Chabotto (known anglistically as John Cabot) set off for Newfoundland, I thought I'd chase him too.

Unfortunately, the Matthew wasn't in harbour, the Cabot Tower was closed for structural repairs, and the new history museum, The M Shed, hasn't opened yet. And I forgot to go into St Mary Redcliffe church to inspect the whale bone that he apparently brought back from the New World.

So I don't have anything much to report. Till the next time I'm there, you'll just have to make do with a photo of a scaffolded Cabot Tower.

Bristol's Cabot Tower: currently under repair.

Safety on the roads of Newfoundland

2011-06-02T15:01:00.000-02:30

Whilst driving the highways of Newfoundland, particularly those enclosed by forest (i.e. most of them) you have to be wary of moose. In a standard-sized car, hitting one of these long-legged quadrupeds would almost certainly be fatal.

If you don't know the roads, therefore, or the visibility is poor, or you're out on your own, you find yourself driving more slowly and cautiously for fear of a collision. Unless, that is, there is a moose hoover you can use.

In the Herringshaw Dictionary of Newfoundland English, moose hoovers are - normally - large juggernauts for whom hitting organic objects smaller than themselves is merely an inconvenience. Since a collision with a moose will simply cause the over-sized deer to explode, and have minimal effect on the truck, the driver can keep his foot down regardless of the road conditions.

And this means that you can follow such a vehicle at a speed you wouldn't otherwise be able to get away with, and let it hoover up all the moose that might cause you damage. Of course, there's always a chance that a moose will time its run such that it misses the lorry and smashes into you, but that chance is small.

Sometimes, you might also use a confident/injudicious/stupid car driver to the same effect, but this is a trifle more risky, as they might just sweep the moose's legs out from underneath it and lob it in the air, causing it to become a missile (moose-ile, perhaps?) that will undoubtedly land on your vehicle.

So use a moose hoover by all means, but make sure you choose the right model.

Only a hoover can get this out of your car, pet

A view to a krill

2011-05-31T08:35:00.001-02:30

For reasons explained in the linked article, I was trying to find out the etymology of the word krill. Doing so led me to check the online version of the OED, where I discovered it entered the English language in 1907, as 'kril', in a book called Newfoundland And Its Untrodden Ways. How queer, I thought, and wandered off to the MUN library to locate this seminal text.

Written by naturalist, artist and avid hunter John Guille Millais, son of the pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett (Millais, obviously), Newfoundland And Its Untrodden Ways turned out to be a fascinating romp through the country of a century ago. There is rather too much deer-stalking for my liking, but Johnny Millais always has a twinkle in his eye that lifts the prose above the mundane.

Anyhow, I've written an Indy article about it, and never being one to miss out on a low-quality pun, here is my latest:

A view to a krill | TheIndependent.ca

For added excitement, here also is a picture of a whale:

Diving humpback whale, Bay Bulls, Avalon Peninsula

Rolling in the deep

2011-05-24T18:17:00.001-02:30

I jumped on the Adele bandwagon with the title of my latest Indy piece, but turbidity currents really do roll along in the deep ocean, so it's not completely spurious.

Rolling in the deep

Death of a penguin | TheIndependent.ca

2011-05-03T09:42:00.001-02:30

It may be an ancient language, but Welsh has contributed few words to the lexicon of modern English. Corgi (‘dwarf dog’) is one; gull, from gŵylan (‘the one that wails’) is another. And that’s about it.
There is, however, a second seabird whose name might have an etymology Cymraeg, and it was once one of Newfoundland’s commonest creatures. That bird is the penguin.

Read more: Death of a penguin | TheIndependent.ca

Rare earths and renewables | TheIndependent.ca

2011-04-19T11:49:00.001-02:30

The problem of powering the province, part 2, in which nothing in the world of green energy is black or white, and everything is tinged with grey.

Rare earths and renewables | TheIndependent.ca

Fortis: an apology

2011-04-11T09:13:00.000-02:30

Last year, Fortis submitted a proposal to knock down some old buildings on Water Street, in order to expand their headquarters. After a public outcry, this plan was abandoned, although my suspicions remained.

I am pleased, therefore, to apologize to Fortis for my cynicism. Their revised proposal has just been announced, and is in a suitable location, does not involve the demolition of any historic structures, and has met with firm approval from the Newfoundland Historic Trust.

This is an excellent example of an organization listening to criticisms and coming back with a proposal that is far more satisfactory to all parties. If only there were more examples.

Spirit level

2011-04-06T06:06:00.002-02:30

Spirit Level is a poem I wrote for Paragon IV, the latest publication from Memorial University's Paragon Press, which was launched at The Ship last night.

The last line here is slightly different from the published version, as I've changed it after a suggestion from Don McKay. Also following Don's suggestions, I have included a couple of illustrations to assist those of you who don't know what a geopetal is, or what a fossil tubeworm looks like. So here goes...

Fossil tubeworm, Early Carboniferous, Aguathuna, Port-au-Port peninsula, NL.

Spirit level

The fossil should be enough.

A calcareous cigar

Of a cold-seep chemophile,

Captured from the Carboniferous.

An ancient wormless tube

Half-filled with limy mud.

But bursting from the rough

Eggshell walls so far

Removed from their domicile,

A crystal. A dentiferous

Flower, blooming, strange, as a cube

In a wormhole could

Be. A swaddled treasure,

Geologically fetal.

Mineral birth after annelid decay,

Filling a void, providing a way

For me to measure

A sense of sea: spirit level. Geopetal.

Geopetal infill of a hollow shell, in cross-section

Earth, wind or fire? | TheIndependent.ca

2011-04-06T05:41:00.000-02:30

Earth, wind or fire? | TheIndependent.ca

About a year ago, I attended an oil company presentation in St John's. It was ostensibly a recruitment exercise, so I wasn't expecting anything interesting to happen.

Then, while summing up, the rep told us that hydrocarbons were not the future. Instead, he recommended that Newfoundland & Labrador invest its oil and gas revenues in renewables, especially wind power. This would ensure that the province became self-sufficient, rather than having to deal with the vagaries of the international energy market.

I don't know if this was the official company line or just his own perspective, but I was pretty startled. When multinational petroleum corporations start telling you that fossil fuels ain't where it's at, and to go local rather than global, you know something is up. Next thing they'll be telling us that anthropogenic climate change is real.

A wind-powered day at Holyrood

The government must have been listening. A few months afterwards, Danny Williams announced the Lower Churchill deal, and now Premier Dunderdale informs us that the new hydroelectric project "will help support the development of wind power." It seems that the die has been cast.

But is that it? Do we just convert oil and gas money into wind and hydro plants? Certainly it makes sense to utilize local, renewable resources, but what are the best options for the long-term energy needs of Newfoundland and Labrador? And are these choices as clean and green as they might appear? In this two-part feature, I will see if I can make sense of the ongoing power struggle.

To begin with the obvious, it's safe to say – unless there's a sizeable population shift away from the Avalon – solar power is a no-go. Our tides are fairly small too, so we might as well leave tidal power to the Bay of Fundy, although wave energy could be worth a look.

As for biofuels, we're not exactly blessed with great swathes of wheat, maize and sugar cane, so we'll just have to generate bio-ethanol from root vegetables. There is, of course, a local, renewable source of bio-diesel, but the conversion of seals into fuel might not meet with universal approval.

With the ongoing situation in Japan, nuclear energy isn't exactly popular right now, and the number of provincial power stations (zero) is unlikely to increase. There has, however, been an awful lot of nuclear nonsense broadcast. Whilst reassuring to know that our monitoring equipment can detect particles emitted by Fukushima, for example, it isn't newsworthy when the levels picked up are so stupendously low.

At a tiny fraction of the normal, background levels, it's more dangerous to be in close proximity to a banana. Apply this logic to the rest of your life and you'll soon be refusing to cross an empty road because in the middle of the tarmac there is a bolt from a car, and as it comprises one-millionth of a motor vehicle, it could therefore somehow career along the ground towards you, mow you down, and kill you.

I was resolutely opposed to nuclear energy before the Fukushima incident, but then I started looking at the scientific data. Yes, it can be dangerous, but so can all large-scale power generation, and by deaths and pollution, coal, oil and gas are unquestionably worse.

If you detest nuclear on principle, rather than science, don't worry. Plants won't be opening here any time soon. The Department of Natural Resources lists uranium as a possible future energy source, but for now we've too much oil to sell, and hydro to harness. We have to consider all options, though, and uranium from Labrador should not be rejected out of hand.

Equally, though Danny liked it, Kathy likes it, and Stephen says he likes it, we shouldn't blindly accept the Lower Churchill as a good thing. The concerns about its impact on wildlife, the environment and local communities must be considered carefully by Nalcor.

If Muskrat Falls is part of a broader renewables strategy, Nalcor has probably made the right call. One decision it undoubtedly has got right is to pull the plug on west coast oil exploration.

The Parsons Pond project yielded no oil and a small quantity of natural gas, and sucked up an awful lot of provincial money. Geologically, the west coast is old and complicated and heavily fractured; it's not that there are no hydrocarbons, just that drilling for them there is about as easy as trying to fish for trout by flying up above cloud level and then lowering a bucket from the plane. If the oil industry thinks it's a goer, let them prove it themselves. They're not exactly strapped for cash.

Gas for less? Or gas for fewer?

Maybe that's why they can afford to be magnanimous, and suggest turning petroleum revenues into wind power. It will be interesting to see if this actually happens, especially if federal money for the Lower Churchill project turns out to be hypothetical. Either way, wind energy seems to have a lot of backing in the province. As we'll see in part two, however, the idea that it represents an environmentally friendly form of power generation is open to question.

Stay tuned: Part II will appear April 19.

Clyde Jackman on sealing

2011-03-30T10:35:00.000-02:30

The sealing thoughts of Clyde Jackman, NL Minister of Fisheries and Aquaculture, from an interview with the Newfoundland & Labrador Independent, published March 30th 2011:

Q. The International Fund for Animal Welfare and the Humane Society International has criticized federal Fisheries Minister Gail Shea’s increase in the total allowable catch for seals to 400,000 saying the Harper government is playing regional politics with a federal election and has declared war on Canada’s seals. What are your thoughts on that?

A. Well, let’s just consider this… right now there are about 10 million seals off our coast. Fishermen and fisherwomen tell us often: seals eat cod. With this number continuing and continuing to grow (if you look back a couple years ago at the numbers that were quoted in the media you were looking at 6 and 7 million and it goes on up). Clearly these people should be looking at it from a marine stewardship and from an environmental perspective. This number cannot be allowed to grow. Clearly, 400,000 is not going to endanger the herd.

They are a mammal just as there are other creatures in the sea (fish) that get harvested for the betterment of society and the people that are employed in that industry. And I welcome the increase.

NL sailors go for Olympic gold

2011-03-27T07:41:00.001-02:30

Though Team Gushue and Harry 'Moose' Watson won golds in winter sports, no Newfoundlander has ever won a medal at a summer Olympic Games. Indeed, as far as I can ascertain, only one provincial athlete has ever competed: Eric Mackenzie Robertson, who ran the marathon in Antwerp in 1920.

This could all change in 2012, however, as St John's duo Jon Ladha and Dan Inkpen aim for success in the 49er sailing class:

N.L. sailors go for Olympic gold | TheIndependent.ca

Monsters of the West Coast

2011-03-25T07:50:00.000-02:30

My third 'Old Lost Sea' column for the Newfoundland & Labrador Independent is a re-working of a post that appeared here last year. I won't hold it against you, therefore, if you decide not to bother reading it:

Monsters of the west coast

Climate change and the lakes of Labrador | TheIndependent.ca

2011-03-08T12:19:00.000-03:30

Old Lost Sea in the Indy, part 2:

Climate change and the lakes of Labrador | TheIndependent.ca

"The closest thing to cricket in St John’s is the cockroach"

2011-03-03T14:40:00.000-03:30

I appreciate this might be getting boring for those of you who don't like cricket, but I've now written a piece on the provincial revival of the sport for the Newfoundland & Labrador Independent:

Cool innings: the revival of cricket in N.L. | TheIndependent.ca

East coast trails

2011-02-22T11:00:00.000-03:30

The first of my Old Lost Sea columns for the newly relaunched Newfoundland & Labrador Independent has been published. It is called East Coast Trails, and can be viewed here.

My Ediacaran friends, including Alex, the researcher who found the trails, tells me that an exciting new discovery has been made in China, with animal fossils that might be even older than those at Mistaken Point. That paper can be found here.

The return of the Independent...

2011-02-05T11:30:00.000-03:30

...is almost upon us, and Old Lost Sea will be part of it. Watch this space:

http://www.theindependent2011.ca/

In the spotlight

2011-01-29T09:39:00.000-03:30

I've yet to make a meaningful contribution to provincial culture, but it seems that doesn't preclude me being profiled by the Association of Cultural Industries Newfoundland & Labrador:

http://www.acinl.ca/blog/272

I feel rather honoured, but it was clearly a very quiet week.

Pub quizzes/trivia nights in St John's

2011-01-22T18:00:00.000-03:30

As something of a pub quiz aficionado, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the artform was alive and well in Newfoundland. I was even more pleasantly surprised to find that (generally) the quizzes were not strongly Canada-centric, but had a broad mix of topics. It was possible for teams consisting mostly of non-natives to do well.

Quizzing therefore became a Tuesday night fixture, with Yellow Belly and The Rose & Thistle competing for our custom. Sometimes we threw in a Thursday quiz too by going to Bitters Trivia in the Graduate Students' Union bar, and by the end of my stay in Newfoundland, I'd been on teams that had won in all four of the venues we'd sampled. Here is a summary of the options that competed for our attention:

VENUE - The Rose & Thistle, Water Street.
NIGHT - Tuesday, starts around 9-9.30pm, but seats go quickly after 8.30.
PRIZE - a $50 bar tab for the overall winners; a round of shots for the team shouting out the correct answer to each of two 'shots' question; usually a round of shots for the team with the best best name too.
FORMAT - 30 questions, in two halves of 15; max. 4 people per team. Labatt's products are on special offer during the quiz.
QUALITY - Usually very good, with relaxed atmosphere and plenty of interaction with the quiz master/s, who are prepared to correct themselves or remove questions if the answers prove debatable. For a spell in 2010 there was a terrible quiz master, obsessed with playing cheesy quiz show backing music as he read mediocre questions, but he didn't last long.

VENUE - Yellow Belly, Water Street.
NIGHT - Tuesday, starts around 9.30pm, usually run in two halves, in main bar at street level, and in basement bar below.
PRIZE - a $40 Yellow Belly gift card for the overall winners; jug of beer or a pizza for team winning each round in each half of the pub.
FORMAT - 5 rounds of ten questions; max. 5 people per team (sometimes max. 4). Yellow Belly's own beers are excellent; food less so.
QUALITY - Generally very good. Christopher is the regular quizmaster, whilst Ashley acts as hostess on other occasions, and both are good. I tended to do better with Ashley's questions as Christopher's focus tends to be too movie-heavy, so it's worth having a film buff in your team if he's in charge.

VENUE - Bitters, Graduate Student Union bar, Feild Hall, Prince Philip Drive.
NIGHT - Thursday, 8pm start.
PRIZE - A jug of beer for the winning team (specifically equal to 4 pints of beer, which isn't much good if you've got a large team); 4 bottles of beer for the best team name, voted for by the teams.
FORMAT - 8 rounds of ten questions; no limit on team numbers.
QUALITY - Extremely variable. Far too many rounds of questions, so often goes on too long. Also suffers from some quiz masters having no concept of what constitutes general knowledge, and therefore asking 10 questions on minor X-Men characters, or aspects of Bulgarian mythology. I did host it once with a friend of mine, but it didn't quite go to plan as the laptops couldn't be hooked up to the screen, the sound system was very poor, and my co-host got struck down by illness half-way through. Our questions were good though.

VENUE - The Breezeway, MUN Student Union, University Centre, Arctic Avenue.
NIGHT - Monday, starting at 8pm.
PRIZE - half of the proceeds from the entry fees; any team winning a round gets discounted drinks.
FORMAT - 5 rounds of ten questions; entry fee of $10 per team, max. 4 members, half of the fee going into the prize pot.
QUALITY - We only went once, and won it, so I give it the thumbs-up, but the Breezeway is a fairly dismal venue, and the beer isn't great (even at reduced prices). The questions were fairly diverse, and an international postgrad team such as ours had an advantage, as teams of undergrads often have very specific knowledge on a limited set of topics (see below).

OTHER QUIZZES - There is also a quiz at Christian's, George Street, on Sunday nights, and I think there's one at the Lower Path on Water Street on a Wednesday night, but I never sampled either of them, so I can't comment on their format or quality.

FOOTNOTES
Sports questions do tend to feature ice hockey, basketball and American football, so it's worth having a North American sports fan on your team. Strangely, the only time(s) that cricket made an appearance in St John's quizzes was in erroneous fashion. It happened twice, once in Yellow Belly and once in Bitters, and on both occasions it was the same question:

"Which sport used the term 'home run' long before baseball?"

In Yellow Belly, I sat there racking my brain, sure it wasn't cricket, but unsure what else was possible. I think we plumped for rounders in the end, and were pretty much the only team in the bar not to get the 'correct' answer: cricket. I didn't argue at the time, but went away to research this, and could find no evidence that home run had ever been used in cricket. Athletics and horse racing, yes, as a synonym for home stretch, and (according to the OED) used in the latter before it was used in baseball, but never cricket. I emailed Ask Steven at Cricinfo to see if he knew anything, and he confirmed my suspicions. This therefore meant that when the question was used again, in Bitters, I jumped up with Dutch courage and interrupted the quiz master before he could even finish the question, assuring him in stentorian English tones that that answer he was going to give - cricket - was emphatically wrong. This earned me a confused apology from the quizmaster, baffled laughter from the rest of the pub, and bemusement from my team-mates, but it was worth it.

The other memorable occasion was the sole time we did the Muse quiz. North Americans are often accused of a poor grasp of world geography, but one might think that university students in Canada would be above average. Not so, if the round on identifying countries by their outlines was anything to go by. The team of four students whose paper we marked thought that Germany was the UK, but, most impressively, had looked at the outline of India and decided it was that well-known country of... Africa. They did not win that round.

Joseph Banks in Newfoundland and Labrador, 1766

2011-01-19T09:57:00.000-03:30

Sir Joseph Banks is one of Britain's greatest ever naturalists and promoters of science. He became President of the Royal Society in 1788 and remained in the position till his death in 1820, during an interval of extraordinary discovery and innovation in all fields of scientific endeavour. And talking of Endeavour, his most famous journey of discovery was with Captain James Cook on the ship of that name.

What is less well-known is that Banks participated in a 1766 trip to Newfoundland and Labrador, collecting plants, birds, animals and insects for description in the new Linnean system, and just happened to bump into Cook - who was mapping and surveying the island - in St John's. Now, of course, it is entirely possible that these two gentlemen would have crossed paths elsewhere, but I like the notion that their extraordinary voyage to Brazil, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia and Indonesia only arose thanks to a chance meeting in Newfoundland.

The story of Banks' trip to Newfoundland & Labrador is told in an excellent book by Averil M. Lysaght, which I had the pleasure of reading in the British Library yesterday. I might just have to divulge more of his stories in a later post, but in the mean time, I particularly liked the following quote:

"For dirt and filth of all kinds St John's may in my opinion reign unrivalled... Every thing here smells of fish." (Oct 11th 1766)

The power of the outdoor meter

2011-01-10T07:59:00.000-03:30

In the UK, gas and electricity meters are almost always inside the house, and the meter reading man will almost always come round when you are out, leaving you at the mercy of estimated readings, where the power company assumes that you are operating an electric blast furnace, and sends you an estimated bill for £90 million.

In Newfoundland, and possibly elsewhere in North America, the meters are on the outside of the house, enabling them to be read easily and (hopefully) accurately without depending on anyone being in the house. This is a much better system.

Cheap flights to/from St John's (v. 2011)

2011-01-03T18:49:00.000-03:30

I'm not sure if such things really exist, but statistically there must be some places in the world whence it is possible to fly cheaply to St John's. Just in case there are, it would be worth watching this website - www.yytdeals.com - which keeps tabs on the (probably hypothetical) bargains. I will be, hoping that flights from the UK to Newfoundland this summer are both a) direct, and b) less than a million pounds return.

So long, and thanks for all the fish

2011-01-01T14:22:00.000-03:30

As a famous Canadian songstress noted, all good things come to an end, and my sojourn in Newfoundland is no exception. My contract has finished, my work permit has expired, and I have returned to England. I am not ashamed to admit that I shed a few tears as I left: St John's has been a lovely place to live, I've had a fabulous two years, and I feel proud to have called myself a CFA* and an NBC**.

I don't know when I'll next be back, but I hope it won't be too long. Whatever the duration, though, this blog will not fizzle out. I have so many things still to write about my time on The Rock that I can't stop now. Indeed, I will probably have to produce some kind of book, perhaps a uniquely perspectived travel guide to this marvellous, terrible place. I have enough photographs to fill several galleries, which is what I'm now doing over at Flickr, and if all goes to plan I shall become the natural history columnist for the Newfoundland & Labrador Independent later this month.

So, this ain't the end of Old Lost Sea, just a temporary cessation and a relocation. The Daily Liam will probably come back to life a bit more, but posts will certainly appear here intermittently. Especially once the Newfoundland cricket season starts up again...

*Come From Away
**Newfoundlander By Choice

Snow days and bus strikes

2010-11-30T16:08:00.000-03:30

It is snowing heavily in St John's for the first time this winter, and Memorial University closes for 'snow days' if the snow gets sufficiently heavy for the Metrobuses to stop running. However, as my esteemed colleague Dr Richard Callow has pointed out, the buses stopped running four weeks ago when the workers went on strike, so we're at a bit of a loss. Do we just presume that as both criteria are met, we should go home?

The cost of burrowing worms

2010-11-18T17:44:00.000-03:30

I am clearing my desk in preparation for my imminent departure, and in the process am turning over some stratigraphic intervals from the early part of my stay. As such, I was reminded of the following mini-story.

A few weeks after I moved here, when the local mudflats were still frozen and the possibility of collecting burrowing critters for my research was as low as the temperature, I made enquiries online about importing worms. I was especially interested in nereid polychaetes (known more commonly as clamworms or ragworms, and collected in great numbers by recreational fishermen) and the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts seemed to be the closest place that could supply them.

I emailed the address listed on the website to find out what it might cost, and soon got a reply.

Hello Liam,

Nereis virens are available year round and can be shipped to Canada with a Veterinary Health (DVM) certificate. The price breakdown is as follows:

Nereis $4.25 each
Packaging $13.25
Foreign Shipment Fee $63.50
DVM Certificate $89.50
Freight $100-$150 (estimate only, actual price may vary)

Needless to say, at a minimum cost of $270, even if I only wanted one worm, I decided not to bother and waited instead for the ice to melt. When that didn't happen quickly enough, I took Hen on a romantic two-week trip to the estuaries of PEI, where we managed to collect a fine array of bioturbating organisms, including these ones:

A burrow-irrigating worm and a wandering snail

They cost nothing (well, there was the car hire and the motel room, but let's not worry about that), and are still alive, so I think it was definitely the right thing to do.

Five pin bowling

2010-11-13T20:35:00.000-03:30

I used to live with the captain of the GB Students' Ten Pin Bowling team, and he was pretty good at chucking heavy balls down greased up lanes towards large wooden skittles. I, however, was not. I enjoyed the odd game, but always felt it was a rather limited pastime, one that involved good players just stepping up and knocking down the skittles, over and over again. My inability to play it well undoubtedly clouds my judgement, but that was how bowling appeared.

I was amazed, therefore, to learn that in 1909, in Toronto, a Canadian chap had decided (and I quote the C5PBA website) that ten pin bowling was 'far too strenuous'. He reduced the number of skittles, whittled down their size, made the bowling ball much smaller and lighter, and thus five-pin bowling was born.

Instinctively, I ridiculed the feebleness of such an idea, but then on Friday night I was given the opportunity to try it out, at Plaza Bowl in St John's, and it was really good fun. The grapefruit-sized ball has no finger holes, so you bowl it straight out of your hand, and you get three (rather than two) attempts to knock the pins down. I didn't know this when I began, nor did I know that different pins are worth different scores (2-3-5-3-2 from left to right) so it was slightly confusing.

More confusing was that sometimes you scored a letter rather than a number. X for strike was obvious enough, but H, R and A mystified us. All we could do was amuse ourselves by trying to score nothing but letters. Our first hour flew by (with the help of cheap beer) and we all dashed back to the till and paid $6.25 each for a second. By then, some people had the hang of the new game, whilst others (myself included) had crossed into the realms of non-sobriety, so our performances tailed off.

As a cricketer, I most enjoyed the fact that you can almost bowl the ball like you would if you were a spinner. I'm not, so my attempts gang aft agley, but Mr Alex Liu proved most adept at both wrist and finger spin, especially the former. It was like watching a Shane Warne masterclass, but in a disco-illuminated monotonous suburban aircraft hangar.

Bacon Cove and other edible places

2010-11-13T18:33:00.000-03:30

With another gloriously sunny weekend forecast (no, I don't know what's going on, but St John's seems to be undergoing an autumn of mostly lovely weekends), and my departure from this isle imminent, I suggested to some rocky friends that perhaps we should go out and do some geologizing. Thus, today became a day trip of Snowball Earth-chasing, unconformity admiring, and trilobite hunting. The former (Precambrian glacial sediments at Harbour Main) and the latter - Middle Cambrian arthropods in Kelligrews - I had seen before, but the middle one was going to be novel.

At Bacon Cove, the contact between the eroded landscape of the late Precambrian and the sediments deposited by the Cambrian transgression is visible as an unconformity. There are small shelly fossils to be found, and stromatolites, and various other geological delights, but our main source of entertainment was derived from the name of the place. Knowing we'd need lunch to sustain our lithological rambles, we decided that the only sensible thing to do was to bring a stove, a frying pan, some bread rolls, some HP sauce, and a pack of sliced dead pig, and make ourselves some sarnies.

Bacon cobs in Bacon Cove. Though I say it myself, it was a brilliant idea. We stood on the wave-cut platform in the dazzling daylight, set the stove going, served up the bacon, and chomped happily away whilst gazing out across Conception Bay (or staring absent-mindedly at the rocks). It was such a success that we intend to make it an annual pilgrimage. November 13th is now International Eat Bacon At Bacon Cove Day.

If that idea is too niche, maybe we can diversify it and make it International Eat A Place Day, allowing the following edible countries to be consumed:

Eat chili in Chile
Eat turkey in Turkey
Eat brazils in Brazil
Eat whales in Wales
Eat grease in Greece

But Bacon Cove will be forever enshrined as the place where it all began.

Republic of Doily

2010-11-11T23:09:00.000-03:30

Last weekend I went to the AGM of the Writers' Alliance of Newfoundland & Labrador in the former home of the Daily Mail. I stayed in the Carriage House Inn, Grenfell Heights, rather than the Mount Peyton, where the meeting was being held, as I'd just come back from Denver and the thought of another couple of nights in a generic hotel did not appeal.

I made the right choice - the Carriage House was very pleasant, friendly and homely - but I don't think I am part of its regular customer base. I stayed in a room called Shawna because it looked cosy, but also because there really wasn't any way I could have stayed in Ronnie or Amigo. I've nothing against chintzy, chintzy cheeriness, it just isn't me. I have no use for doilies.

I really shouldn't have been surprised to find such things in Grand Falls-Windsor. The town was founded upon a pulp mill set up by the owners of the Daily Mail, and GF-W appears to consist solely of different key elements of the Daily Mail demographic: identikit suburbs, big box chain stores, multifarious churches and municipal authority buildings. Like the paper, lovely it isn't.

I met a representative of the central Newfoundland multicultural society, though, which is the sort of organization I'm sure Lords Rothermere and Northcliffe would have frowned upon, even if the topic of our conversation - cricket - was probably acceptable. I also had a good time at the WANL AGM. I learnt quite a lot about how to get published and how to pitch your ideas to newspapers* and magazines, and the evening reading by Agnes Walsh was delightful. It was also grand chatting with Lynette Adams afterwards, when we conceived the idea (somehow or other) of having a Valentine's Day love poetry event, where all submissions had to be about Nantucket, but were never permitted to make obvious rhyme schemes, even if they were limericks. My first submission is as follows:

Nantucket haiku

1659

Sold for sum of thirty pounds

And two beaver hats.

The use of beavers is in no way allusive or euphemistic, honest guv.

*for my own perverse amusement, I should probably pitch the idea of an article on cricket in Grand Falls to the Daily Mail.

How the NHL supports paedophiles

2010-11-07T22:44:00.001-03:30

I WENT TO MY FIRST NHL ice hockey game last weekend. It was in Denver rather than Canada, but there were plenty of Canadians playing, and a Canadian bought the tickets, so it probably counts.

It could have been a more glamorous match-up, as the yes-I-vaguely-recall-them Colorado Avalanche took on the are-you-sure-you're-not-just-making-them-up? Columbus Blue Jackets, but the Pepsi Center was a fairly impressive venue. We were seated high up, which was cheaper and emptier and generally preferable, since the view of the rink was unobstructed.

Ice hockey inside the Pepsi Center, Denver

To get into the swing of things, we bought a hot dog and a local beer (Coors) and took our place in the gods. A chap wandered onto the ice and belted out an impressive a capella rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner, and then the fun began. The visitors started brightly, and only the Avalanche goalkeeper Robert Budaj stopped them from scoring on a number of occasions, but their failure to beat him left the Jackets open to a sucker punch, which duly came.

1-0 at the end of the first period was a bit generous on the Avalanche, but they took complete control of the game with a rapid-fire trio of goals at the start of the second period, and at 4-0 it seemed unlikely there would be a comeback from Columbus. A switch of goalkeepers was really too little too late, but the Jackets did manage a consolation goal in the third period (after the Avalanche had scored another) to leave the final score 5-1.

It was far better watching a live game than a televised one, and I very much enjoyed myself, but ice hockey is still an awfully scrappy sport, and not one I really warm to. I do, however, have a number of observations to make:

1. More sports should have an in-house organist. Golf in particular would benefit from a chap in a gold lame suit belting out the Inspector Gadget theme tune just as Tiger Woods is about to take his tee shot.

2. Columbus need to change their name. The Blue Jackets might as well become the Blue String Overcoats*, since abbreviating their name to either the Jackets or, even worse, the BJs, is clear evidence of some very poor quality marketing work.

3. Seeing an old lady in black leather gloves high-fiving a row of small children every time the Avalanche scored a goal was quite odd, but it was nice to have a friendly old lady security guard rather than a tubby male jobsworth.

4. Cheering rarely appears to be spontaneously generated by the action of the match itself, but by the exhortations of the TV screens and tannoy system. "MAKE SOME NOISE!" say the monitors, and the popcorned public politely oblige.

5. No longer heard on British radio or at British sporting events, Gary Glitter's Rock and Roll (Part Two) was an extremely popular musical choice for pivotal moments, be they goals or powerplays. Whilst not doubting the song's catchiness, does this not raise the curious spectre of hundreds of child spectators cheering on a piece of music written and performed by a convicted paedophile (who presumably still gets the royalties)?

That is all I have to say on hockey. Should you wish to read a 'proper' match report, one can be found here.

*in homage to an episode of the Clangers by the inimitable Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin, in which the froglets get cold, and acquire blue jackets.

No News-to-be-foundland

2010-10-20T23:52:00.000-02:30

(Disclaimer: this article is not especially original, the title and content being only a minor modification of something I blogged about here some months ago. Still, if you came here looking for originality, you're a bigger numpty than I am.)

ONE OF THE MANY THINGS I love about living here is the fact that nothing much ever happens. Sure, the climate, the environment and the geology throw up plenty of discussion topics, but Newfoundland, including St John's, seems mostly to live in the news realms of the Whitby Gazette. Crime levels are very low (whatever some locals might claim), the political scene is fairly tame, with most people apparently happy with Danny Williams as their premier, and there is no celebrity culture (thank goodness). The news outlets therefore rather struggle to find good material.

Take, for example, these recent stories from the CBC no-News-to-be-foundland website:

Fogo Island bone is not human

Here we learn that a bone found on a beach in north-eastern Newfoundland is, unsurprisingly, not human. Tomorrow, a pebble from the beach at Brigus turns out not to be Martian; next week, a piece of Stephenville flotsam is established not to be from the Titanic, and in March, we discover that a Grand Bank plastic bottle is not one of the Evian containers drunk from by Michael Jackson at his final concert.

Mouldy corn infuriates Bay Roberts shopper

The quality of fresh produce in Newfoundland supermarkets is generally very disappointing, and part of a bigger story on how best to feed the province (which I will write soon), but I hadn't realized it was quite this bad. That said, I'm not sure supermarket workers would really get 'murdered' on the mainland if they served such low quality fare.

When it comes to the printed page, the Telegram isn't much better, possibly because it has almost no competition (till the Newfoundland and Labrador Independent returns). A piece I read today tells us that a big warehouse might open one day in Conception Bay South (random quote: "I don’t believe the town can run a two-hole shithouse") and its front page story a couple of weeks ago was from 1775. No, really.

It all rather reminds me of this wonderful song.

The price of drinking in St John's

2010-10-16T23:58:00.000-02:30

Before I moved here, I somehow thought that St John's would be a relatively cheap place to drink. Given George Street's famous density of bars, competition was surely going to mean that prices would be fairly low?

Not a bit of it. The drinks are staggeringly expensive.

I don't go out drinking that often, but in The Ship last night, I bought three pints of Storm Island Gold, and they cost $22.05, which I guess is $7.35 each. In the Franklin Hotel a little later, I purchased two pints of Quidi Vidi 1892, and that set me back more than $16.

In Yellow Belly, I have generally gotten round paying for their excellent homemade ales by only going there on Tuesday trivia nights, where you win a jug of beer when you win a round, but if you do have to buy your own drinks, they ain't cheap. And in the Duke of Duckworth, a pint of the Duke's Own will require you to hand over $7.55, if my booze-addled memory serves me right.

There's no obvious logic to prices either - the graduate student bar, Bitters, serves Quidi Vidi pints that are more expensive ($6.25) than they are in Pi, the upmarket downtown pizzeria ($5.50).

I don't expect beer to be sold at the preposterous Wetherspoon's prices seen in the UK. Alcohol shouldn't be super-cheap. But St John's is almost Scandinavian in its expensiveness; it would be less costly to go for a night on the town in central London. I guess this explains why people don't go to town till after 11pm. It's far more cost effective to stay at home drinking your own alcohol than to toss away a week's wages on a round of drinks in a George Street bar.

CRC final - Atlantic Rock 19-8 Prairie Wolfpack

2010-10-11T11:16:00.000-02:30

I'm not a rugby expert, but the match reports (and the photos) I've seen from the recent Canadian Rugby Championship final have been so poor I've decided to write my own. So here it is:

Hearn kicks Rock to Championship glory

The Atlantic Rock are the 2010 Canadian rugby champions after a hard-fought 19-8 win over the Prairie Wolfpack at the Swilers Stadium. Both sides struggled to keep the ball in wet, blustery conditions, but the Rock came out on top thanks to the penalty kicking of Ciaran Hearn, a try from Geoff Warden, and a pivotal performance from substitute scrum-half Morgan Williams.

Ciaran Hearn kicks a second-half penalty to lead the Atlantic Rock to a 19-8 victory over the Prairie Wolfpack

The match was broadcast live across Canada on CBC, but any viewers new to the game would have had difficulties with the first half, which ended scoreless. The Rock were strong in the lineouts and scrums, but failed to convert forward pressure into possession as scrum-half Rich O'Malley struggled with his distribution. Indeed, the two best chances of the half came from Wolfpack breakaways, as first Nanyak Dala was stopped by last man Morgan Lovell, before Ciaran Hearn did the same to Nick Blevins. The less-than-optimal playing surface also put paid to The Rock's one chance of getting points on the board, as Dean Blanks slipped when kicking a penalty.

Set-piece strength: The Rock claim another line-out

The second half was a different story, though, as former Canada captain Williams - on as a late first-half replacement for O'Malley - began dictating play. Possession from set-pieces and breakdowns was retained, the ball recycled rather than lost, and slowly the pressure began to tell. A penalty awarded for a scrum infringement by the Wolfpack enabled Hearn to put the first points on the board, and then a deft chip from Dean Blanks allowed Geoff Warden to burst through the Prairie line for a try under the posts. Blanks converted, and suddenly it was 10-0.

The Rock and the Wolfpack contest a second-half line-out in front of a partisan St John's crowd

The Wolfpack team sheet listed their Team Totem as one 'Patrick Allan Swayze', but it seemed ghostly intervention was in short supply. No sooner had Stephen Woodward kicked a penalty to make it 10-3 than Hearn stepped up with another three points. A third penalty from Hearn, in the 72nd minute, made it 16-3, leaving the Wolfpack needing two converted tries, and a further infraction from the visitors saw the Rock number 14 put the final nail in the coffin.

A late period of Wolfpack pressure saw Nick Blevins finally cross over in the corner for an injury time try, but it was too little, too late. Referee David Schmortchevsky blew the full-time whistle a moment after the conversion was missed, and the Atlantic Rock were the 2010 Canadian Rugby Champions.

Rock captain Peter Densmore lifts the Canadian Rugby Championship trophy

Sea weasels of the Irish Loop

2010-09-19T18:54:00.001-02:30

Today I saw some otters in La Manche, which was cool. Really cool. I mean just look at this photo:

A swimming otter, viewed from the bridge at La Manche, NL.

I will post some more photos soon on the Flickr page I recently set up.

Anyhoo, whilst standing on the bridge at La Manche and watching these most entertaining creatures, we were discussing the difference between otters and seals, and from the depths of my treasure chest of random facts, I recalled that otters were mustelids. Aquatic ferrets, in other words.

I had to check the veracity of this fact once I got home, but am pleased to confirm I was correct. What I didn't know is that Atlantic Canada once had another species - the Sea Mink - which was hunted into extinction in the 19th century. Its pelt was deemed a precious commodity to such a degree that the animal was extinct before anyone realized it was a distinct species, and there are no preserved specimens, or even photographs, of it. It was apparently larger and more reddish-coloured than regular minks.

Wanting to know more about the sea mink in Newfoundland, I asked Google to tell me more, and was directed to the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society webpage about seal hunting. I have been meaning to blog about swiling for quite some time, and will definitely do so soon, but for the moment I will leave you with a comment that completely distracted me from sea minks, and which I really hope is true:

"The processing of seal penises is done in Dildoe, Newfoundland."

New-found fossils in the news

2010-09-06T12:07:00.000-02:30

Vertebrate palaeontology is of no especial interest to me. I find marine invertebrates, especially old ones, much more intriguing. This is entirely sensible in Newfoundland, as fossilized land animals are in extremely short supply. However, when they do turn up, the media (who have no real interest in fossils that aren't dinosaurs or something similar) leap upon them.

A couple of months after she'd found it, my friend Lina's discovery of a large Carboniferous bone in the rocks of the Codroy coast was publicized in a MUN press release. That was all fairly sensible, and interesting, and not too speculative, and piqued the interest of a couple of local news organizations. CBC Radio in Corner Brook interviewed me about the find, and then an article was published in the Western Star.

So far so good, but then the big guns got in on the act.

I didn't speak to anyone from CBC.ca, which might explain why they erroneously described me as a professor of Earth Sciences, but a six-paragraph story was soon posted. It wasn't epecially controversial, at least not to me, but the readers of the website went rabid. As of today, Labour Day, (Monday Sept 6th), 222 comments have been added, which is 78 more than there are words in the article.

In the world of spEak You're bRanes, this response was perhaps inevitable, but it is a real eye-opener to see just how few of the comments have anything to do with the story. It doesn't help that the first post said (probably in jest):

"but the bible says the Earth is only a few thousand years old"

Thence, a short piece about a single fossil bone became a soapbox for a quite staggering amount of rabid ranting.

I have gone carefully through all the comments posted, and as far as I can find only the following are in any way relevant, or worth answering:

Ultramarine

"Stockwell Day and Stephen Harper will be flying in on magical jetskis to clear up this misunderstanding about fossils -- they've made it clear that the earth is only 5000 years old, so having this kind of evidence in Canada of all places, will need to be rectified.

As for the student and professor at Memorial, kudos! Just don't look for grant money from the government to do more research -- those SSHRC and NSERC funds are for disciplines that don't challenge Stock & Steve's religious commitments. For anyone who doubts it, just look up the shifts in funding priorities for research in Canada since the Cons came in -- it clears up any confusion."

AlDankH

"I was taught that Newfoundland, the physical place, is actually a hunk of North Africa that broke off long ago and joined the North American continent. I wonder is these fossils predate that exchange, or whether there really were giant salamanders on the North American Newfoundland."

[Response - the fossil post-dates that exchange, but pre-dates the opening of the modern Atlantic. At the time the animal lived, the continental arrangement looked something like this]

REBRAB
"useless without a picture. good job CBC."

[Response - couldn't agree more. Have a look at this]

Leonard33
"It would be nice if CBC would gather a little more information, rather than a quote or two, and give the story some depth. How did they determine it's a bone? What makes them think it's an amphibian? How do fossilized amphibian bones differ from wood or bones from reptiles or other animals? The answers to these questions would be interesting (and good reporting), especially since they first thought it was a piece of wood."

[Response - We are confident it is a bone because of its colour, size, mineralization and because we can see the internal porous structure. The fossilized wood we find in the same rocks is much darker, is mineralized differently, and has a different internal structure. We think the bone may be from an amphibian because they were common and large in the Carboniferous, whereas reptiles were small and rare, and because the environment it is fossilized in was a swampy floodplain.]

Trajan
"Good stuff. Could have used a CGI rendering, that is always helpful. And headline says 'giant' yet no word on what specific bone was found, nor an estimated size of the thing. In fact, very little information at all at this time."

Gordon Ingram
"A bone twejve to fifteen centimertres long and they can say it's from a giant so and so, bloody garbage."

[responded to by kencanuck:

"Clearly this is an ignorant statement by a person who has absolutely no knowledge of anatomy, zoology or palaeontology."]

The Equalizer

"mmmm...an amphibian would be a nice entree before my jig's supper."

Leftest Nut

(edited for length)
"Anyway,the final age of this bone will be determined by carbondating hopefully,not just by assuming the age as to the rock its in,which can be very inaccurate.
The article didn't say why Herringshaw assumed its from a "giant amphibian". Its only 15 cm. Could be a toe bone or a leg bone for all they know yet. I wonder if he's just grandstanding this event a bit. "

[Response - sadly the bone is much too old for carbon dating, which only works for specimens a few tens of thousands of years old. We cannot date the bone directly, so have to rely on dating of minerals in volcanic deposits above and below the layer in which it was found. As for Herringshaw, he is undoubtedly grandstanding, as he loves Grandstand, especially with Des Lynam. A creature with a 15cm long toe bone would be pretty enormous though, if you look at your own toes and think about how big you are!]

Eraxion

"Wonderful news. Do more research, build an interpretative centre (perhaps near the Wetlands Interpretative Centre), and monetize the find(s) - charge admission. Not only will this inspire a new generation, but it will add new wealth in perpetuity. It's always morning in Newfoundland."

[Response - I'm all in favour of such places, but fear the interpretative centre would be quite dull if all there was on display was a single bone.]

Leftest Nut

"another thought...If the MUN professor, Liam Herringshaw, is right in his announced assumption that it is a 300 Million year giant amphibian will we hear about it?
If he's wrong and it turns out to be a say a 1000 year old cariboo bone, will we STILL hear about it?...;)..hmmmm"

[Response - if a 1000 year old caribou was wandering about in a Carboniferous swamp, I'd DEFINITELY want the world to know about it.]

Time61

"I was going to comment on this story but after reading the last few pages of [creationist-anti-creationist] postings I think I'll keep my comment to myself."

Captain Archer

"Great story. I wish they would have said WHAT bone they had located. The problem with this sort of reporting is that it can be inaccurate. I am looking forward to hearing what a wider excavation of the section reveals."

sediba

"I'm thinking there should be a lot more exploration done on the west coast of NL. The island is chock full of marine fossils but that part of NL also has petrified forests and now a land dwelling 300my old creature. There's got to be more from where that came from!"

DaveMack

"Some fossils have been discovered in NL. I fail to see what this has to do with religion. All it means is that some fossils have been discovered. No one said that makes creationists wrong, that there is no god. It just means they have found some fossils in NL."

Captain Archer (in response to some comment about dinosaur and human trackways being found together)
"Footprints dont fossilize."

And the very final comment, which perhaps sums up everything and nothing.

CogitatusPrimus

"from the perspective of a 3-plus decade career as an evolutionary biologist, and having debated these points endlessly ad nauseum, I see clearly that throwing stones is the only worthwhile endevour."

What larks! Let's hope I am never involved in the discovery of a fossil that is really spectacular and controversial.

The cost of making a call from a payphone in Newfoundland

2010-08-16T22:29:00.000-02:30

Phone contracts in Newfoundland are a rip-off, which is why I don't have a cellphone (or even, for that matter, a home phone). Skype is infinitely cheaper for most calling purposes, and my office phone can be utilized if needs be. I never thought, however, that it would come to the point where using my UK mobile phone to call a Newfoundland landline would be cheaper than just using another landline.

I was in Gander, and I needed to call a hotel in Gros Morne National Park. I found a payphone inside a petrol station, waited for an angry trucker to finish swearing at his beloved, and then stepped up to the plate. How much would it cost to phone western Newfoundland from central Newfoundland? The call would be pretty quick, certainly no more than a minute, so I imagined it would be pretty low-cost, and readied myself with a few quarters. I picked up the receiver, read the instructions, and awaited the machine to tell me how much money it needed. I guessed at about $1.

The message came up.

PLEASE INSERT $4.30

$4.30? Four dollars thirty to call Gros Morne from Gander? For 60 seconds? How does that work? 4.30? FOUR DOLLARS THIRTY?

I was disgusted, but there was no other option. I had to make the call. I emptied my pockets of metal and shoved it into the slot. Hen emptied hers too, and between us we just about covered it. I made the call.

A few hours later, in Deer Lake, in western Newfoundland, about an hour's drive from our destination, and I need to phone the hotel to confirm our imminent arrival. The call in Gander was from central Newfoundland, presumably not classified as a local rate call, but now I was unequivocally in the same region as the place I wanted to phone. The cost would surely be more sensible, more like the 50c or so I had envisaged first time round.

Was it more sensible? Was it fuck-trumpets! It was $2.80! To call somewhere less than 50 miles away!

I didn't have $2.80, so I had to put in $3. I made the call, trying to over-ride my annoyance and speak pleasantly to the lady on the other end, who had (presumably) no say in the price of payphone calls in this province, nor on the time it was taking me to get to her hotel, and who I should therefore speak to with my customary politeness. I just about succeeded, but only just. At the back of my mind, more than $7 of loose change rattled around, accompanied by the cackling laughter of the telephone executives, dancing around a bonfire with their shoes made of gold.

Suddenly I found myself thinking that maybe the Carphone Whorehouse weren't that bad after all.

Tely 10

2010-07-25T12:09:00.000-02:30

And the winner of the men's race is a chap called Colin from Paradise! In second place, a guy named Bill from Utopia, and in third place, Derek from Brobdingnag!

At least one of those sentences is true. I'll leave you to figure out which.

Last year, although I was here, and although I live about 200 yards from the finish line, and although I knew it was happening, I didn't attend the Tely 10. I don't know why. Maybe it was too early on a Sunday morning. This time I was organized, and up and about, and I only missed the first few finishers as they came hurtling along Military Road and down Bannerman Street to the race end.

I couldn't find any particularly great photographic vantage points, even from the gardens of Government House, so I wandered about, snapping things at will. These are some of the pics I ended up with:

The Tely 10 takes its toll

Excuse me miss, but do you know where we might be able to watch the Tely 10?

Young spectators

Huffin' and puffin

In Bannerman Park, two people chat to a slice of bread

Military Road runners reflected in a Bannerman Park puddle

It was a great morning out. There was a big crowd, and they never stopped cheering people on, even after the presentations had been made and many runners had gone home. Lots of runners were suddenly energized to reach the final corner and find scenes of smiling, shouting souls encouraging them to the end. A great, sporting, supporting community event. It's what Newfoundland is all about.

The 7th hole, Admiral's Green golf course, Pippy Park

2010-07-21T23:31:00.001-02:30

I thoroughly enjoyed playing the Admiral's Green golf course this evening, even if I did take 24 shots over the two par-fives. However, I do have one major complaint about the par-three 7th.

The man in the club rental shack told us it was the course's signature hole, and it is certainly a dramatic one. Not so much 180 yards long as 180 yards down, with an amazing view out across the city, the harbour and the ocean. The tee is perched on the lip of a cliff, and the green is somewhere down below you, encircled in dense vegetation designed to swallow up the wayward tee shot, such as mine.

It is not the slope, nor the undergrowth that bothers me though. Both are part of the challenge of the hole, and ones I am not up to mastering yet. What bothers me is the ridiculous gravel buggy track that runs right above the green. I know that motorized vehicles are king in North America, and that the idea of walking anywhere is anathema, but this is taking the piss. The milk-float-drivers could quite easily park their sorry carts somewhere nearby and walk to the green, but instead the course designer has pandered to their lethargy and slapped a gravel lane right across something that is supposed to impress.

Without a lazy-arse road scything through the fairway, the 7th really would be a lovely hole. As it is, the track scours its ugly way across the picture, ruining this 'signature', and serving to emphasize that the Trans-Canada Highway is just a bit further off the back of the green. And when you're trying to pretend you're in the countryside, you really don't need reminding of that.

The Feild of Dreams

2010-07-19T22:32:00.000-02:30

This, the third piece in my cricketing Postcards from Canada, was published on Sunday (here). However, there was a bit of minor editing done to the piece, and I prefer the structure as it was. So, here is my original:

The Feild of Dreams

I knew what it was as soon as I saw it. Strolling up Rennie's River from Quidi Vidi lake, home of North America's longest-running sporting event, the St John’s Regatta, I reached the Riverdale Tennis Club. There, to my right, was a large, flat, mown field, a gravelled boundary curving round its periphery, and a small pavilion painted duck-egg blue. It could be only one thing.

The gates were locked, the signs warning “Feildian Grounds – Private Property”, but I snuck in through a hole in the fence, and had a poke around. White lines were daubed onto the grass, and goalposts erected at either end, but this wasn't really a football pitch. It was too square, with yards of spare field either side of the playing area. At the same time, it wasn't square enough: each corner of the field was rounded, indicating equidistance from a central point, rather than the rectangular junctions of goal- and touch-line. The layout was unmistakable, the conclusion remarkable. The footballers were interlopers. This was a cricket ground.

As someone who makes a living digging up ancient pre-history, such discoveries are right up my street. Having assumed, though, that all St John's' cricket pitches would have vanished long ago, I was amazed, and also rather excited. When was it last used? How had it survived? And might we be able to return it to its original function?

We could certainly do with a proper wicket. Playing tape ball cricket on a basketball court in Kelly's Brook Park is great fun, but no more than a short-term solution. The large metal posts with baskets on them rather get in the way, and the abrasive surface means we are consuming extraordinary quantities of electrical tape. A decent square could be developed if the council ripped up the asphalt and replaced it with turf, but I suspect the basketballers might object. The Feildian Grounds are far more tempting.

What Edward Feild would make of it is unclear. Not just an Englishman with an oddly spelled surname, Feild rose to became Bishop of Newfoundland in 1844. Over the next 32 years, this formidable High churchman set about making his mark on the colony. This can't have been easy, as he was also responsible for the bishopric of Bermuda, 1200 aquatic miles away, but Feild thrived. His most visible legacy in St John's is the dramatic (though strangely spire-less) Anglican Cathedral, but his education work had a more lasting impact. He established many schools, including one that still bears his name, and, in 1899, alumni of this college formed the Feildian Athletic Association.

It was a success: the archives show that the Feildians were 1910 St John's cricket champions, playing on a pitch next to Quidi Vidi. In 1922, meanwhile, they began the season with a 24-run win over Shamrocks, but thanks to the majesty of the local climate, this opener didn't take place till July the 8^th. The Feildian Grounds were inaugurated three years later, providing the players with their own facility, one they shared with athletics, baseball and football. However, despite its early glories, cricket was fading from view, and the final Feildian record is from the St John's Daily News for September 14^th 1938, when the Nondescripts beat the Guards. Soccer has reigned supreme since then.

So I stand with my back against the pavilion wall and stare out across the grass, feeling impossibly nostalgic for something that finished four decades before I was born, and half a world away. For the field is full of shades as I near a shadowy coast, / And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost, as Francis Thompson would have it.

Prising the Feildian Grounds from footballing fingers will take time and money, but nothing is insurmountable. Indeed, we might even be able to use soccer in our favour. Back down Rennie's River is the King George V stadium, scene of Canada's sole qualification for a World Cup, when they beat Honduras 2-1 to reach Mexico '86. This historic venue is available to hire, and with its artificial turf, floodlights and banks of seating, KGV is a fantastic place to hold a night-time exhibition cricket match. I don't expect we'll attract the 13,000 crowd that came along for the Honduras game, but you never know.

Trouble at sea

2010-07-19T15:22:00.001-02:30

Although most major wars of recent times are about oil, I've never thought of geological research itself as being something likely to start international conflicts. However, a research group from the Memorial University of Newfoundland, include a few friends of mine, are currently giving that theory a proper test.

The Turkish research ship 'Piri Reis' is being used by Professors Ali Aksu and Jeremy Hall to conduct seismic surveys of the eastern Mediterranean. A number of Memorial University students are also on the boat, either collecting data for their own projects, or assisting in the work. They left the coast of Turkey and headed out into the Med, and began surveying an area near the Greek island of Rhodos.

And that's when the fun began. The Greek navy took umbrage at the vessel being there, and sent in a warship to investigate. Although the waters are Turkish, the continental shelf is part of Greece, and the Greeks suspect the boat to be gathering hydrocarbon data on behalf of Turkey. What they obviously do not realise is that the boat is actually gathering data on the structural evolution of the eastern Mediterranean for a university in Canada!

I'm told the situation is under control, but that the guys on the research boat have the Greek warship for perpetual company, with the Turks threatening a counter-launch if needs be. Given that a near-identical scenario some years ago almost led to war, we're rather hoping nothing else happens.

My favourite quote so far? The Turkish government, perhaps a little ingenuously, has claimed that 'the vessel is carrying out seismic research for humanitarian purposes'. I know the research could have a knock-on effect of helping scientists understand where earthquakes might occur, but calling the structural geology project 'humanitarian' is a bit bold!

The Cricket Association of Newfoundland and Labrador

2010-07-17T11:15:00.000-02:30

Thursday July 15th 2010. An auspicious day in the history of sport in Newfoundland. At the Duke of Duckworth pub on McMurdo's Lane, a group of eight like-minded souls congregate to officially resurrect something that has been dead for rather a while. Cricket.

As you will be aware if you've read the last few posts, we've been playing cricket informally in St John's for a few weeks now. However, in order to turn ad-hoc games on basketball courts using tape balls into proper competitions on purpose-made pitches using a real cricket ball, we have to establish an association. A committee of at least seven people have to be elected, and a constitution ratified. Then we can go to the provincial government and register ourselves as a non-profit organization, set up an NPO bank account, and start fund-raising.

Official recognition of cricket as a provincial sport within the Sport NL programme will probably take a year, so this is a test run. Thankfully, sufficient people turned up to the Duke for us to vote in a committee, and inaugurate the Cricket Assocation of Newfoundland & Labrador (Cricket NL for short). Some time around 9pm, the vote was cast, and the first-ever president of the association elected - Mr Lutfor Rahman of Bangladesh.

This Sunday (tomorrow) we will be gathering at Kelly's Brook Park. We'll still have to make do with a tape ball game on a basketball court, but this time it will be the first official match under the auspices of the association. The Telegram sports reporter will be there to witness the event, and once the cricket publicity bandwagon starts rolling, there will be no stopping it.

How to build a cricket team in Newfoundland

2010-07-10T16:55:00.001-02:30

I've been out of the country for a couple of weeks, and I'm afraid to say my blogging has become non-existent. However, I am still writing fortnightly pieces on Newfoundland cricket for Cricinfo, the second of which can be found here.

For illustrative purposes, here is Brian hitting his wicket with the first ball he ever faced as a cricketer:

Cool Innings (part 1)

2010-06-20T21:13:00.000-02:30

In my eagerness to promote our attempts to revive cricket in Newfoundland, I persuaded Cricinfo, the world's largest cricket website, to let me write a series of articles for them. I will document our progress every two weeks, and the first piece was published this weekend. It can be read here.

Rakesh pings down a delivery in the India v Bangladesh game
(Venue: a basketball court in Kelly's Brook Park)

Old Lost Sea C C

2010-06-02T18:00:00.000-02:30

It has happened. I feared it never would, but yesterday afternoon, in glorious sunshine, on a basketball court in Kelly's Brook Park, using plastic stumps and a taped-up tennis ball, with a very friendly group of Bangladeshi guys, I played cricket.

Here are some photos I took to document this extraordinary event:

The guys told me they were hoping to set up a Newfoundland Cricket Association. I told them about the website of the St John's Cricket Club, and my plans to enter a team in the Maritimes Twenty20 tournament in Fredericton, NB, at the end of August. It suddenly seems as though there might actually be some players to select a team from.

So, the resurrection of cricket in St John's is underway, and the story unfolding has the potential to be a very entertaining one. If someone were so inclined, it would probably make an excellent documentary, or else a mockumentary movie in the style of 'Cool Runnings'. 'Cool Innings' perhaps? Or 'Cool Stumpings'? Or maybe, to play on the outside world's preconceptions about Newfoundland, 'Cool Clubbings'?

The Seasons of the Avalon Peninsula

2010-05-31T22:45:00.000-02:30

A Newfoundlander of whom I am acquainted told me recently that, weather-wise, his province was the armpit of Canada, and within that armpit, the Avalon Peninsula was a micro-armpit. I cannot disagree.

My supervisor, prior to my arrival, claimed the weather here was much like that of Aberdeen, where I was then living. This is complete cobblers. Aberdeen is much warmer, much less foggy, snowy, or windy, and has four seasons. They aren't necessarily great, but Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter all occur, and in approximately the right order.

On the Avalon, there are only three seasons: Winter, Sprinter and Sprall. Winter lasts from about late October to late April, close to that claimed by Sir George Calvert, and then gives way to Sprinter, which runs through April and May and possibly into early June. During Sprinter, you can be lulled into a false sense of summeriness by a couple of lovely, sunny days, and then Spring will decide to give Summer and Autumn a miss and go straight back into Winter. And there will be no rejoicing.

At some vaguely defined point in June, Sprinter gives way to Sprall, which is known to most people round here as 'Summer'. This fails to recognize, however, that the months of June, July, August and September are, for someone from Britain, more like May, June, September and October, rendering the term Summer only about 25% appropriate. Sprall is far better.

So next time a local talks of all the seasons occurring in one day, make sure it's clear which seasons he or she is actually referring to.

An open letter to Bob Mackowycz

2010-05-31T21:59:00.000-02:30

Dear Mr Mackowycz,

I appreciate your efforts to ingratiate yourself with your listening public on the CBC Radio 2 Morning Show, especially as Tom Allen is a tough act to follow, but may I please request that you desist from the following habits:

1. Saying 'I'm Bob Mackowycz' at least once in every spoken passage. I know you are. I am listening to your show, and I have a functioning short-term memory, despite my advanced age.

2. Saying before each news bulletin 'And now we're off for the CBC News so you can get caught up on your day'. I don't understand what this even means, but I have no desire to get tangled up in a unit of solar time, especially when I've just woken up.

3. Saying before most news bulletins 'Here is your news.' This is patently untrue, as my news would consist of the great .....................I'm Joe Cummings reading out what Hen would be teaching the undergrads that day, what Duncan thinks of my latest manuscript draft, what sporting event my father will be photographing that day, and how miserable the weather will be during my walk to campus. Very few other people would be interested, and CBC News would soon close.

4. Saying before some news bulletins 'Here is your news, with all the information you need to make the informed decisions that will control your life' (or something very similar). This is absolute and utter horseshit, and makes me throw things at the radio, which can be both damaging and expensive, and possibly also annoying to my neighbours, as we only have thin walls. Nothing CBC News has to say has any impact on my life whatsoever, except for giving me things to talk about at coffee time, and even then, fairly rarely. The notion that it is important is extremely patronizing, not to mention infuriating.

5. Imagining that much of the music you play is great. You play great music occasionally, but mostly, like the vast majority of DJs, you play blandly unmemorable music. Granted, CBC Radio 2 is less annoying than K-Rock, but in the year or more I've listened to Radio 2 Morning, I have heard no more than half-a-dozen exciting new tracks, and at least some of those were first brought to my attention by Tom Allen.

If any of these issues are the responsibility of your supervisors, please pass on my comments accordingly, but I am sure you are not a complete numpty and are quite capable of addressing them yourself. I certainly hope so.

Yours radiophonically,
Disgruntled of St John's, Newfoundland

How to speak proper Cnajun

2010-05-31T21:42:00.000-02:30

I was labouring under a number of linguistic misapprehensions when I arrived on this side of the Atlantic. I thought the province I'd moved to was Newfoundland & Labrador and its capital city St John's, whilst the country it was part of had a capital known as Ottawa and its largest city was called Toronto. I was wrong, oh so wrong.

The correct pronunciations (to my outsider ear) are as follows:

Newfoundland & Labrador = Noofun-LANED and Labra-DOOR (stress is on the last syllable in both words)
St John's = SAINT John's (not 'Sint' or 'Snt' as I'd say for St Andrew's)
Ottawa = Somewhere between 'Odder-wah' and 'Order-wah' (the last syllable must be stretched)
Toronto = Tronno (fewer Os and Ts)

And the most northerly town on the island of Newfoundland is not St Anthony, but Snantney.

Good to finally know these things.

Living Planet t-shirts

2010-05-31T18:13:00.000-02:30

The Living Planet shop on Water Street sells some excellent t-shirt designs, especially those based around old Newfoundland stamps (e.g. codfish). However, its best product is undoubtedly this one, not least because it offends silly people once they realize what it actually says.

As a follow-up, may I suggest this idea, which will offend similar people?

I

BABY CATS

Big Sea, perhaps, but not Great

2010-05-30T22:16:00.000-02:30

I was in Belbin's, a fine little grocery store on Quidi Vidi Road, and the tannoy was playing music, as one might expect. A couple of songs in, and its dreadfulness began to register with my shopping-preoccupied mind. I stopped to listen for a moment. What was this rubbish? A boring-voiced man singing boringly trite lyrics to a boring melody, and then another song the same, and then a third one.

It was the third one that rang a vague bell. It featured a chorus about a Sea of No Cares, and I remembered my Bitters Trivia co-host setting a question asking about an album of that name, an album recorded by Newfoundland musical leg-ends Great Big Sea. And this was they, boring their songs out across the airwaves into my unwilling ears. 'How can they be so popular?' I wondered to myself, knowing that if I admitted such a thought publicly I would get lynched. They really are dull, dull, dull.

But of course, lots of dull people like lots of dull music. How else would Celine Dion sell so many records?

The only hope I have is that their collaboration with Hawksley Workman is (or was) fruitful, as Workman is definitely not dull.

CBC: Canada's Best Comedy?

2010-05-22T22:39:00.000-02:30

Not watching it except when at someone else's house, I don't get exposed to Canadian television too often. Yesterday (Friday) night, being at someone else's house, I sampled a selection of its comedy offerings and was muchly baffled. The fine Irish fellow watching the telly with me said I would blog about it, and he was quite right.

First up was This Hour Has 22 Minutes and though some of the people and references were lost on me, it was generally pretty amusing. I particularly enjoyed the spoof debate between a leading Newfoundland politician and his Quebecois counterpart, in which the host had to keep switching between Newfie and Franglais. I would like to see David Dimbleby try something similar when hosting Question Time with an Eton-Welsh-Glaswegian-Geordie-Spaceman panel.

Sadly, THH22M was as good as it got, and by some considerable distance. Quebecois smash show Just For Laughs - Gags was next. If ever an Englishman wanted his prejudices about the limitations of mainstream 'continental' comedy confirmed, this was the show to do it. A 'blind man' sits on a bench with a 'Wet Paint' sign, a member of the public chuckles to themselves whilst being unwittingly filmed; a 'blind man' gives a member of the public his guide dog whilst he uses a public toilet and the dog runs off and jumps into a passing car, and the MotP panics till someone puts their arm round them and says it's ok; a 'blind man' pisses in a public swimming pool having thought it was a river, or something, and MotPs are outraged till the actor reveals himself (though sadly not literally).

What would happen if they ran a gag that didn't involve mocking someone born without sight, but someone born with a different skin colour? Prepare yourself for comedy gold as a blacked-up white guy goes into a Ku Klux Klan meeting and tries to enrol! The KKK members are shocked and enraged, till the guy reveals he's not black after all, but a straight-up, honest honky like the rest of them! Your sides will split as the mischievous conceit is revealed!

The only amusing sketches involved a magician who convinced people they had killed the dove in the hat by hitting it too hard, and the one where an old lady's dog is made to appear that it has been electrocuted by pissing against a lamp-post, but there's nothing even close to the Trigger Happy sex shop sketch. Innovative and funny it isn't.

Depressingly, but unshockingly, Just for Laughs is lapped up by plenty of British viewers with very simple taste in comedy, who like seeing the same tired old slapstick over and over again, and I have learnt there was even a specially commissioned UK series, broadcast on BBC1 on Saturday nights for a few years. I suppose they needed something tired and old to replace Benny Hill.

And talking of tired and old, up popped Ron James: Back Home. He is, according to his own website, "our nation's consistently critically acclaimed comedian." If this is true, I fear for the future of Canada, as James is quite exceptionally unfunny. Really extraordinarily so. The footage of people creased up with laughter must have been cut in and superimposed from another show, as there is no way he would induce anything more than a minor upturning of mouth corners in anyone but a simpleton. Sample gag from his back home in Atlantic Canada spiel: 'People from PEI, they love potatoes!' (Cue audience hysteria).

He credits Billy Connolly as his inspiration, which is a dreadful slur on the Big Yin, who is a genuine comedy legend. James did make one valid point though - most Newfoundlanders are much funnier than he is. He'd better hope his producers at CBC don't realize this.

Transferring money from Canada to the UK

2010-05-22T21:50:00.001-02:30

When I began this blog, I intended it to be of some use to people who wanted to know what happened when you moved from the UK to Canada. As usual, however, I soon got distracted by the idiosyncrasies of the place I lived, and this plan fell by the wayside.

So, to resurrect some modicum of its usefulness, even if only briefly, I thought I would explain the good-value method I have found for transferring money from a Canadian bank account to a British one.

Canadian banks are like British banks used to be before they got greedy and over-ambitious. They charge for pretty much everything, and you can't just get credit cards or loans or money transfers at the drop of a hat. You have to fill in forms and answer questions and pay various fees, all of which was rather annoying to begin with, but to which I have adjusted with time (and with the recognition that Canada's economy isn't in the dreadful shape of most other countries' as a consequence).

To avoid having to pay to simply have a current account (known as a checking account in North America) I signed up with President's Choice Financial, as documented here. This was basically fine, but finely basic and sometimes frustrating. A couple of months back, with the loonie very strong against the quid, and a return to Britain lined up for some time in the not-too-distant future, I decided to transfer some money back across the Atlantic.

The exchange rate offered by PC Financial was poor, and with a $30 wire transfer fee (plus a cabling cost) thrown in for good measure, I investigated an alternative, which was this:

1. Sign up with Canadian Forex so that you can make foreign currency exchanges at rates far better than the banks offer.

2. Sign up with TelPay, who enable you to make low-cost money transfers from your bank to another Canadian account.

3. Make a deal with Canadian Forex when the exchange rate is in your favour. They will give you their bank details so that you can pay the money you wish to transfer into their account.

4. Log in to TelPay and give them the CanForex bank details, instructing them to pay whatever sum of money you have decided to transfer. I had to set up CanForex as a 'Customer Specific Biller' (charge of $1.25 per transaction), as there was a limit on how much money could be moved using a Funds Transfer ($0.50 per transaction).

5. TelPay will take the money from your account electronically, sit on it for a day or three, then move it on to CanForex.

6. CanForex will sit on the money for another day or two, and then - Hey Pesto! - it will materialize in your British account.

7. The end.

Fortis the sport to have the enginer hoist with his own petard

2010-05-22T16:58:00.000-02:30

For now at least, the Fortis plan for the demolition of part of Water Street has been shelved. The well-attended public meeting on the development of downtown St John's may have had something to do with it, but the Fortis press officer says they feared a lack of council support.

Understandably, amid the pleasure at the project's cancellation, there was skepticism from various quarters as to what the company's intentions are now, and this led to an article called Fortisgate? in The Scope.

The writer of the piece, Martin Connelly, noted that although the proposal had been dropped, Fortis had suddenly evicted a group of retail tenants from the buildings they owned between 159 and 163 Water Street, and he smelt a rat:

'Given that it was one of the buildings slated for demolition in the now-withdrawn project proposal, that sounded like a pretty unlikely coincidence to me.'

Very quickly, however, after some investigative work, he stopped smelling a rat. It wasn't Fortis Properties getting what they wanted in a roundabout way, it was them being excellent landlords and getting their tenants out of a dangerous building in which the fire suppression system had stopped working.

'So much for Fortisgate,' concluded Connelly.

Well, call me a cynic here, but I find the notion of a beneficent Fortis a rather hard pill to swallow, and Connelly has completely let them off the hook. Having declared publicly their desire to knock the buildings down, the company's dereliction of its duties as a landlord let them become dangerous fire hazards, requiring repair or condemnation, the latter of which would be curiously convenient to their stated intentions.

It then told its tenants to clear out, albeit helping them move into one of their other properties across the road, but this is hardly a gesture of great magnanimity since it guarantees Fortis the rental income it might otherwise have lost.

Meanwhile, no-one is going to be allowed to move in to the old buildings until the landlord stumps up some cash to fireproof them, and we already know they'd prefer the buildings to disappear, so that's hardly likely to happen. Their press officer has said, with wonderful ambiguity, that 'the long-term status...is something we will be evaluating over time.'

Fortis will surely hope we'll all just forget about it, and then one day when it's been quiet for a suspiciously long period of time, the following press release will be issued:

"Fortis is terribly sorry to announce that the historic buildings of 159-163 Water Street that we so desperately wanted to maintain and didn't plan to knock down at all, even though we might have given the tiniest hint, once or twice, that we did, have burnt down to the ground in a mysterious accident. This is a terrible disaster, as we were just about to invest in some high-tech fireproofing of the structures, honest guv, no, honest, we really were, but now they've gone up in flames and collapsed and are a terrible eyesore, and everyone at Fortis is really, really upset. As all forward-looking residents of St John's will agree, the only sensible approach for us to take at this juncture is to replace them with a bright and shiny concrete tower, which will be entirely in keeping with the architecture of the area, as long as you wear special glasses that block out all the late 19th century buildings and reveal only the TD Canada Trust office block and those monstrosities along Harbour Drive."

Fortis Properties. Strong Foundations* For Success.

*made out of excellent stone rubble obtained entirely ethically from the ruins of historic buildings

Carboniferous tetrapod discovered in western Newfoundland

2010-05-18T22:13:00.000-02:30

It's not often I can reveal exclusive and exciting palaeontological news, but today (May 18th), in the Early Carboniferous strata near Larkin Point, St Andrew's, southwestern Newfoundland, my friend Lina made a startling discovery:

Lina admires her find

The thing what she is admiring

It may not look especially exciting, but this specimen, about 12 cm long, is a fossilized bone. That in itself is interesting, but nothing like it has ever been found in the rocks of Newfoundland, and the gravelly sandstone bed in which Lina spotted it is around 325 million years old.

Newfoundland has many spectacular fossils, from the oddballs of Mistaken Point to the giant trilobites of Manuel's River, but most are marine, invertebrate, and very old. Lina's discovery is old too, but non-marine and vertebrate, which makes it very special indeed. Plenty of lithified plants have been found in the area, and a few fossil fish, but never anything like this.

I know nothing much about vertebrate fossils, and neither does Lina, so we deferred to the two experts in our group - part-time dinosaur hunter Dr Duncan McIlroy and Ms Małgorzata Bednarz, whose MSc was on Triassic labyrinthodonts. They agreed it was a bone, and one that must have belonged to a large creature, possibly an over-sized amphibian.

Pederpes finneyae, a metre-long Early Carboniferous tetrapod

Species the size of crocodiles are known from contemporaneous rocks at Joggins, Nova Scotia, so although the idea of a six metre-long newt is pretty weird, finding such a beast would not be implausible. Indeed, when visiting the site last year, Duncan had said to me he was surprised no traces of tetrapods had ever been discovered.

Well now they have!

(Undermining the significance of Lina's find, I stuck to my usual flippancy and amused myself with the thought that it was appropriate an old frog had been discovered on what used to be the French Shore.)

Roadside treats of western Newfoundland

2010-05-16T16:43:00.000-02:30

At the 'Big Stop' Irving petrol station on the Trans-Canada Highway outside Deer Lake, this billboard is to be seen, offering a new flavour of slushy drink:

Yes, that's right. Tropical Cheddar. The Carboniferous limestones of the Mendips were deposited in a warm, shallow sea, so the cheesy Somerset town was certainly once tropical, but this I simply cannot countenance. I bought one, of course, and it was startlingly orange, staggeringly sweet, stupendously chemically, and without a hint of cheese in it at all.

Please complete, in 15 words or fewer, the following sentence:

A Tropical Cheddar-flavoured slushie is wrong because...

Thoughts on the Port-au-Port peninsula

2010-05-16T16:28:00.000-02:30

At Aguathuna quarry, I search for conulariids but can't find them. Other people find them instead, but not me, the only person who is actually interested in these strange fossils.

As we drive across western Newfoundland, my friend Czarrna scours the forest edges for moose, but never sees one. Other people spot them almost every time they look up, but not her. Like Verruca Salt in Roald Dahl's Charlie & The Chocolate Factory wanting an Oompa-loompa, she begs and pleads for one to be directed her way, but it can't happen.

So conulariids for me are like moose for Czarrna are like Oompa-loompas for a Mistress Salt. I am confident this is the first time these three taxa have been compared in the same blog post.

Gannets at Cape St Mary's

2010-05-07T16:17:00.000-02:30

Saturday, hire car, TCH, rain. Lots of rain. Heading west across the Avalon, a decision has to be made. North or South? North to the Baccalieu Trail, or south to Cape St Mary's? In the dismal grey, who knows which way to head?

Decisively, on some insane whim, I decide that, being in the northern hemisphere, south is the best way to head in search of sun. Cape St Mary's Ecological Reserve it is.

We reach St Mary's Bay very quickly, the rain beginning to ease off, and I am sure I have made the right decision, especially as the gannet colony cannot be too much further. I am very wrong. My smugness at seeing the sun peeping out from behind the clouds is tempered by the lack of seabirds. We drive on and on along the coast, then on a bit more, then turn inland across some barrens, and drive on a good way further, finally reach a roadside hotspot (deserted) called The Gannet's Nest. We pass it, and end up in the settlement of St Bride's, which I know is too far, and I turn the car round. Having done so, we pass a sign that says 'Cape St Mary's Ecological Reserve, 1 km' and then, in one kilometre, The Gannet's Nest again. Though there is no sign, the coastal road there looks in remarkably good nick, and I decide to chance it.

Not a soul is to be seen as we cruise along tarmac of higher quality than the highway, and after a few minutes we reach a deserted car park next to a squat, white lighthouse, and a large white-and-red building with the legend 'Dr Leslie M. Tuck Interpretive Centre' emblazoned upon it. This must be the reserve, though there is nothing to prove it, and the blue sky and sunshine fill my heart with a springy joy as I step out of the car. And then the onshore wind knocks me off my feet.

But we are here, it isn't raining, and thousands of gannets will be all ours when we walk our windswept way to the viewpoint. The excitement is almost too much:

I am the gannet king. I can do anything!

At the end of the trail, perched on a rocky seat above a precarious drop to the ocean, the gannets swoop over our heads in quite extraordinary close-up:

The nesting colony is enormous. Thousands of couples cram into an unsuitably small space, like the Japanese underground at rush hour:

It truly is a sight to behold, one which in England in April would be over-run with eager bird-watchers, but which in Newfoundland in April is over-run with no-one at all. It is just you in the company of myriad birds:

Birds they may be, but their reptilian ancestry sometimes comes out, and you can see how the idea that dinosaurs aren't really extinct, just feathered, could work:

And then we see someone else walking along the cliff-top trail, and the spell is broken. The wind is a bit over-powering, too, and we return to the car to eat our sandwiches in shelter. Heading back onto the highway, we loop round the coastal road into Placentia, which seems to have nothing worth stopping for. The rain returns too, and a detour to Dildo is brief, and then we go back to St John's, ganneted up to the max.

The Ship Inn

2010-05-06T18:14:00.000-02:30

Whenever the drinking establishments of St John's are discussed, George Street hogs the limelight. In its publicity monopoly, it proudly declares itself to be the street with the densest accumulation of bars and pubs in North America. This claim is close to true, but overlooks an important fact: George Street actually boasts the densest number of shite bars and pubs in North America.

The interesting hostelries are to be found elsewhere in town. On Water Street, there is Yellow Belly, with its own beers and a good Tuesday night quiz, The Rose and Thistle, which used to have a good Tuesday night quiz too, but turned rubbish under a new host, and Nautical Nellies. Down McMurdo's Lane, just off Duckworth Street, there's The Duck of Dukeworth, which may not serve the best fish and chips in St John's, as sometimes claimed, but is a fine place nonetheless.

But my favourite of all, tucked away on another lane, this time Solomon's, is The Ship Inn, known universally as The Ship.

It's a funny old place, all dark and dingy and low maintenance, but don't let that put you off. Strange and interesting things happen there, almost on a daily basis.

My first experience was seeing Ye-Yeti supporting the Idlers, then the launch of Michael Crummey's wonderful novel Galore, and not too long ago, friends and colleagues from Memorial University giving Paragon III to the world in a flurry of readings and music.

But my most recent visit, on Saturday May 1st, introduced a whole new level of curiosity. Accompanied by a friend who'd just flown in from Halifax, I stumbled into the pub some time after 10 to find a doorman charging us $7 to enter and partake of a film showing that was well underway. Having thought about it quietly, and quietly decided to pay up, we moved quietly to the bar, quietly ordered some drinks, and sat there drinking them, quietly. Another friend, who we'd arranged to meet without realizing he'd have to pay to get in, saw us waving at him, quietly, and followed suit.

From our bar-side stools, it quickly became clear it was some kind of animation event, hosted by a laptop/projector-operating man and woman. The set of films we'd walked in upon midway finished, and then they finally had a chance to talk, and they did so for quite some time, sounding terribly excited, though the audience was mostly unresponsive to their banter. They were the Black Bag Media Collective, apparently, which sounded suspiciously Nathan Barley to me, but I don't like to be too instantly judgmental.

Eventually, the next set of films began, and there were some strange pieces and some really good pieces. The ones that stood out were two music videos by Alasdair Brotherston and Jock Mooney for the Nova Scotian band Tom Fun Orchestra* - Bottom of the River and Throw Me to the Rats - and another by Aram Kouyoudjiam and friends for the song Tank by Down With The Butterfly**. There was also a German-Scandinavian animation involving an old person in a graveyard, but I'm sorry to admit I can't remember its name or director.

And then the female host announced the final animation, declaring this to be its North American premiere, after its European premiere in Amsterdam a while back. Not initially paying attention, we thought it must be an important piece of work, but as she rambled hype-ishly on, it slowly dawned on us that it was her own film. With all the self-publicizing, I then assumed, very foolishly, that she was a well-known animator, a talented exponent of artistic digital media who had produced a truly astonishing piece of work.

Within a few moments I was proven half-right. It was astonishing. Astonishingly awful.

The pretentious and illiterate title - machine i am*** - should have been a clue. The fact it was made entirely using Second Life, the 90s computer game masquerading as an alternative world, should have been another. No serious animator could use such a tired medium, a virtual reality populated by preposterous-looking avatars, clunky landscapes and motion of the quality not seen since FIFA 98, but 'machine i am' did. Had it been short and sweet we might have tolerated it, but it went on for what felt like days, as a pneumatic bimbo with dragonfly wings wandered round a garish fantasy landscape and gave birth to monkeys, whilst Old Man River played and then a gas mask turned into sand that fellated itself and then exploded. Or something. We sat staring at the screen in nonplussed bafflement as it meandered vacuously on, and continued that way after it finished. Applause was not required.

The lights came up, and we finished our drinks, and we contemplated having another. And then the announcement was made that in a short while, the gifted animator would be performing on stage as part of a musical finale. There was no way we were staying to hear what aural butchery she could come up with to complement the visuals, so we headed off to the safety of the Duke.

The Ship may be great, but there are occasions when you simply have to move on. Still, it will be interesting to see what it throws up next time.

*their lead singer is very Tom Waits-like
**their lead singer is a fusion of Peter Gabriel and Guy Garvey
***should you wish to endure it, the film can be viewed here

A Guide To Yorkshire For Newfoundland Geology Students

2010-05-05T20:29:00.000-02:30

This piece was cobbled together by me for a group of Memorial University of Newfoundland Earth Science students, as they were about to embark on a field school to the UK. Fearful that the culture shock of Yorkshire would be too great without advance warning, I wrote them a guide. It will be of little interest to most people, but I thought I'd post it here anyway.

The Herringshaw Guide To Yorkshire

For those of you lucky enough to be visiting Yorkshire on the Memorial University field school, you will be given plenty of geological insight and information. You will not, however, receive all the facts you require. For that you need a more personal perspective, and though Lonely Planet and the Rough Guides are fine and dandy, they don't get at the heart of the matter. This can only be provided by the Herringshaw Yorkshire Handbook, the indispensable guide to life and culture in northern England's strangest county. As a half-Yorkshireman, I am ideally positioned to assess its pros and cons, and can give a fair and unbalanced account of the things to see and do. I have also been on an advance reconnaissance mission this spring, and can confirm it definitely still exists. Whether it is ready for you lot is a different matter. So, if you're sitting comfortably, then I'll begin.

Yorkshire - an introduction

Although now divided into four separate counties (North, South, and West Yorkshire, and the East Riding), Yorkshire is traditionally the largest county in England, covering an area of around 12,000 km² and with a combined population of about 4 million people. This makes it eight times as populous as Newfoundland & Labrador, but only around 1/32^nd of the size. Essentially, if Yorkshire was the size of Newfoundland, or Newfoundland was as densely populated as Yorkshire, there would be 128 million people living there. It would be the 10^th most populous nation on Earth.

Yorkshire has a very distinct identity. In recent years, since the granting of self-government to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, some residents have petitioned for Yorkshire independence, but this is unlikely to be granted in the near future. Nonetheless, most Yorkshiremen and women will regard themselves as Yorkshire first, English second, and British third. To understand something of the typical Yorkshireman's mentality, it is recommended that you watch The Four Yorkshiremen sketch.

The county town is York, a lovely old city which the Romans called Eboracum, probably due to a misunderstanding of the residents' surprised cry of “Ee by gum!” [see below] when they found themselves confronted by Italians. The Vikings later renamed it Jorvik, and that title is now employed as the name of an excellent interactive museum, which, along with a spectacular cathedral (the Minster) and some of the most complete city walls in Europe, is one of the city's many historical attractions. York is also home of the Kit-Kat, the Chocolate Orange, Quality Street, Fruit Pastilles and, of course, the Yorkie bar, although most of these products are now made by third world orphans*, the York confectionery firms having all been taken over by multinational conglomerates. York attracts tourists all year-round and the narrow streets are often over-run with people. It can get a bit manic, so you might want to get up early, but it is one of the most characterful places in Britain, and really should be sampled.

York is the largest settlement in North Yorkshire, but the biggest city in Yorkshire as a whole is Leeds, particularly famous for its football and rugby teams. Leeds is also renowned for its student-friendly nightlife and cheap beer. Other major conurbations include its West Yorkshire neighbour of Bradford, best-known for its curries; Sheffield, in South Yorkshire, home of stainless steel cutlery; and Hull, in East Yorkshire, reputedly the birthplace of cod liver oil tablets.

The main towns on the North Yorkshire coast, where Mesozoic successions are exceptionally well-exposed, and where you will therefore spend much of your time, are Scarborough and Whitby. Scarborough is the larger, a curious amalgam of genteel Victorian spa and tacky neon amusement park. It had its tourist heyday in the 19th and early 20th centuries as factory workers in Britain's expanding urban centres escaped the dark, satanic mills for the bracing sea air. This has rather died out, but you may still be lucky enough to encounter a mob of drunken, sunburnt numpties if you go to the right pubs.

The ruins of Scarborough Castle sit atop the promontory that separates the north and south bays, and there are many lovely views to be had. Scarborough also has an excellent geological museum, housed in the town's Rotunda, and the seafront is apparently a Wi-Fi hotspot. It should be noted at this juncture that Scarborough is pronounced "Scar-bruh" (as in the 'bro' of brother) and not "Scar-ba-ro" or "Scar-burrow", as Ontarians seem to think. For reference, this "bruh" pronounciation applies to pretty much all British place-names ending in -borough (e.g. Peter), -brough (e.g. Middles) or -burgh (e.g. Edin); using it will help ensure you are not mistaken for an American.

Whitby, meanwhile, is a higgledy-piggledy fishing town of whalebones, ruined abbeys and Gothic charm. The Magpie Cafe is regularly voted one of Britain's best fish and chip shops, whilst the town is also the home of Whitby jet, the black, mineralized remains of Jurassic monkey puzzle trees, often carved into jewellery. There is also an abundance of trinkets and knick-knacks commemorating/desecrating Whitby's links with Dracula and Captain Cook.

*probably.

***********

Sport in Yorkshire

Sport has played a critical role in Yorkshire history over the last hundred years or more. The three most popular sports in the county are cricket, football and welly-wanging. Cricket is the sport of kings, and beloved of all true Yorkshire folk. The annual matches between Yorkshire and Lancashire are always hotly contested, whilst one of England's most legendary Ashes victories over Australia took place at the Headingley cricket ground, Leeds, in 1981. WARNING: THE FOLLOWING TEXT WILL MAKE ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE TO YOU, BUT IF YOU CAN QUOTE ANY OF IT TO A YORKSHIREMAN OR WOMAN, HE OR SHE WILL BE UTTERLY GOBSMACKED: England were forced to follow on 227 runs behind Australia, and odds of 500-1 were offered on them winning, a bet which a couple of the Australian players decided to have a flutter on. As England slumped to 135 for 7, it looked as if their money was wasted, but then Ian Botham smashed 149 not out, including a six that went straight into the confectionary stall and out again, and Bob Willis took 8 wickets for 43 in the final innings, as England performed an astonishing turnaround to win the match by 18 runs. For the Australians, the money they collected from the bookmakers was little consolation.

The biggest football (soccer) team in Yorkshire is Leeds United - known to many as The Damned United - although they aren't doing especially well at the moment. Indeed, the most successful Yorkshire team at the moment is Hull City, who have traditionally been rather rubbish. It's rather as if the Toronto Maple Leafs were demoted to playing Quebec Junior Hockey while the St John's Fog Devils competed in the NHL. Leeds United fans will not be pleased if you point this out.

Wellies are rubber boots used for walking around in mud, such as is often encountered in Yorkshire in April and May. If you decide to throw one of your wellies across a field, you are wanging it, hence 'welly wanging'. The World Championships of Welly Wanging are held each year in the wonderfully named Yorkshire village of Upperthong. With a strong arm and a good tailwind, a champion competitor can wang a welly to a distance of seven miles*.

*this is a lie.

**********

Yorkshire in the arts

Yorkshire is famous for its literature. Not only has D. McIlroy written a seminal paper on the lateral variability of trace fossils in the Jurassic of Boggle Hole, but J. Macquaker has also published some fine work on the mudstones of the Cleveland Ironstone Formation. Less well-known are such minor tomes as Dracula, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre. Dracula features a shape-shifting, blood-drinking chap from Eastern Europe, who disembarks from a boat in Whitby whilst disguised as a dog. Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte, and Jane Eyre, authored by her elder sister, Charlotte, are both set primarily in the wild moorlands of Yorkshire, inspired by the countryside around Haworth, where the Brontes grew up. Wuthering Heights is darker and more exciting, and Jane Eyre is a bit dull, but this may be my experiences of studying it as a 16 year-old clouding my judgement.

Musically, most of the best Yorkshire performers have come from Sheffield, the Steel City. These include Joe Cocker, Human League, Pulp, Arctic Monkeys and Richard Hawley. Elsewhere, Hull produced the Housemartins, York's best-known band is Shed Seven, and the Kaiser Chiefs hail from Leeds. The finest of all Yorkshire musicians, however, is Arthur Brown of Whitby. Front man of The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, he is a psychedelic pop-rock legend renowned for setting fire to his head, particularly during renditions of his 1968 UK Number 1 single, Fire, and was a major influence on Motorhead, Kiss and many other famous acts. If you are lucky, you may see him walking along Whitby harbour wall with his trousers ablaze*.

Televisually, the three most successful Yorkshire shows are Last of the Summer Wine, Emmerdale, and Heartbeat, although the last two are rubbish and the first one is only funny for a short while, till you get bored of old men rolling down hills in bath tubs. Far more informative is The League of Gentlemen, a dark BBC comedy, which shows what life in a local town for local people is really like**. Welcome To Royston Vasey, says the sign, You'll Never Leave! It is a bit like Mount Pearl.

In the Yorkshire movie world you're best to seek out The Full Monty, in which some unemployed workmen take up stripping to make some cash, Kes, in which a lad befriends a kestrel, or Little Voice, set in Scarborough, with musical impresario Michael Caine trying to persuade Jane Horrocks to sing. Caine's character is rather like Simon Cowell, except for the fact that you don't want to punch him repeatedly in the face whenever you see him.

*this is also a lie.

**Professor Macquaker has asked me to point out that it was actually filmed in Derbyshire.

**********

Yorkshire food

Although exotic cuisine, such as Cheddar cheese and Cornish pasties, has now reached the county, Yorkshire people are skeptical of fancy food. They prefer a nice cup of tea and a curd tart of an afternoon, fish and chips for supper, and roast beef and Yorkshire pudding on Sundays. For folk of a sweet tooth, Pontefract cakes and parkin are two popular delicacies. If you see a sign saying "No parkin" it may not refer to cars, but a lack of soft cakes made from oatmeal and molasses. Equally confusing is the fact that Pontefract cakes are not cakes, but disc-shaped liquorice sweets.

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Famous Yorkshire folk

Many famous people are from Yorkshire, but the best-known and most universally loved are Peter Stringfellow, Geoffrey Boycott and the Tetley Tea-Folk. Born in Sheffield, and called the G-Stringfellow by his many fans, Peter Stringfellow is a long-haired lothario who spends at least 22 hours of any working day trying to persuade daft young ladies to come to his clubs, remove their clothes, dance around poles and, eventually, marry him. Although now 83 years old, Stringfellow has had a series of trophy wives and girlfriends, the latest being 65 years younger than he is.

Geoffrey Boycott is the greatest sportsman Britain has ever seen*. He played cricket for Yorkshire and England, winning matches and fans with his exciting play. Sometimes fans became so overcome with excitement that they had to leave the venue for fear of falling into a deep, deep sleep. He now commentates for the BBC.

The Tetley Tea-Folk were a group of cartoon characters used to advertize Tetley Tea in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. Although founded in Yorkshire, the Tetley Tea company relocated to London in the 1850s and is now owned by an Indian-based multinational group, Tata. As such, many Yorkshire people prefer to drink Yorkshire Tea, made by Taylor's of Harrogate, although ironically, "Ta-ta" is a phrase beloved of Yorkshire people, and means 'good-bye'.

*according to G. Boycott

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Yorkshire Connections to Newfoundland

Sir George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, founder of the Colony of Avalon, was born in Kiplin Hall, near Richmond, North Yorkshire in 1580. He was Secretary of State to King James I from 1619 to 1624 and, after converting to Roman Catholicism and retiring from politics, he became responsible for trying to colonize Newfoundland. In 1621, he had sent a couple of agents out to his settlement, the Colony of Avalon (now Ferryland) and finally followed himself in 1627, despite unfavourable reports from his men. Having arrived in the New World, Calvert quickly found he agreed with their assessments of the Avalon, complaining that the winters lasted from October till May, and that he was always having to defend his colony from French attacks. In 1629, having reached the end of his tether, Calvert packed his bags, jumped onto his ship, and moved south to Maryland, where Baltimore now bears his name. He never returned to Newfoundland.

The next Yorkshireman to make his mark (literally, this time) on Newfoundland was Captain James Cook. Born in 1728, in Marton, North Yorkshire, and trained in Staithes and Whitby, Cook became one of the finest navigators, cartographers and captains in British naval history. He sailed to Newfoundland in the 1760s and spent a number of years producing the first accurate map of the island. Various Newfoundland place-names (e.g. the River Humber, Flambro Head, York harbour in Labrador) were assigned by Cook after familiar Yorkshire landmarks. Robin Hood's Bay is another, though Cook would probably be unimpressed to learn that the picturesque North Yorkshire town is now immortalized as a giant rubbish tip just north of St John's.

The most infamous Yorkshire visitor to St John's of recent times was Mr Stephen Stukins, Ph.D. student of Dr Duncan McIlroy at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. Mr Stukins spent six weeks in town, entertaining all and sundry with his heavy drinking habits and Motown dance routines. Should you see him during the fieldtrip, say "Hola love!" to him and he will be your friend for life. To further ensure his eternal friendship, you may wish to use some of the phrases below.

**********

Useful Yorkshire phrases

“'ow do?” - Good day to you

“Ee by gum!” - Goodness me, I am most surprised.

“Many a mickle meks a muckle” - Lots of small things combine to form a large amount (or, look after your pennies and your pounds will look after themselves)

“'e were out on Ilkla Moor baht 'at” - the gentleman went walking in a windswept spot without suitable headwear.

“Mardy bum” - A stroppy or sulky person

“As 'appy as a pig in muck” - Very content with one's current situation

“By 'eck, lad, tek a look at thissen and stop your mitherin'” - Please, young sir, examine the very depths of your soul and desist from this bothersome behaviour.

Auntie Crae's

2010-05-01T18:13:00.000-02:30

A bottle of Vimto with 'Trial Price £1' printed on its label retails at $5.77, and 80 Yorkshire Gold teabags cost about $18, so I won't be using their foreign exchange services (should they offer them) but Auntie Crae's is a magical place for ex-pats to find favourite foodstuffs.

It's a pretty magical place even if you're not an ex-pat. Their bread is good, the chocolate chip cookies were described by one notable visitor as 'perhaps the best I've ever tasted', and a friend assures me their smoothies are to die for. As if that wasn't enough, you can get a freshly brewed coffee, a selection of tasty items from their deli, and then move next door to Fishhook Neyle's Common Room and consume them at your leisure whilst reading the paper.

And, like all good things, it began in 1977.

An otter in Quidi Vidi Lake

2010-04-27T14:11:00.000-02:30

Late afternoon, Sunday April 25th 2010. A stroll along the Battery to North Head, then up to Ladies' Lookout, over to Cuckhold's Cove, down into Quidi Vidi, and back along the lake towards town. Just past the St John's Rowing Club, home of the Regatta, and we glance out across the water just in time to see the curved tail of a small monster disappear beneath the surface.

Micro-Nessie is the obvious, scientific conclusion, but I have my binoculars with me, so I inexplicably decide to check. And it turns out to be an otter. Which is very cool indeed, but slightly less news-worthy than the appearance of an extinct, possibly imaginary, aquatic reptile.

We watched the cheeky little fellow for a few minutes, but though he kept us entertained, it never got as exciting as this.

Old Lost Sea in Ireland: A View To Achill

2010-04-08T19:04:00.000-02:30

Making a connection between Newfoundland and a riverside farmhouse in Powys seemed improbable, but happened. It was impossible, therefore, not to expect links between Talamh an Éisc and the Atlantic coast of Éire. To come to County Mayo and find it shared nothing with the next landmass west would have been preposterous. Nonetheless, the connections between our three-night-home of Achill, a place less swept by the westerly winds than hoovered, and its island counterpart a couple of thousand miles away were still more plentiful than I envisaged.

Offered up immediately on the googled selection for 'Achill Newfoundland' was a Mayo News story from October 2007, describing a Keem beach-stroller's discovery of an election campaign poster for Scott Simms, the Liberal MP for Bonavista-Gander-Grand Falls-Windsor. The board may have been washed up, but Mr Simms' political career certainly wasn't. Even with one poster missing, he was elected in 2004, re-elected in 2006 and 2008, and has served on parliamentary committees for Canadian Heritage and Fisheries and Oceans.

I then discovered that the appearance in Achill of a wooden object from the Bonavista Peninsula was rather appropriate. The town of Bonavista lays claim to being the landing site, some 510 years earlier, of John Cabot and his New Founde Lande-finders, and the 1963 hypothesis of one Melvin Jackson argued that, after leaving Bristol and sailing round southern Ireland, Cabot would have used Achill Head as his final transatlantic launch point. A note of caution, though: there is no direct record of Cabot's journey, of where his boat last saw the Irish coast, which route he took, or where in North America he landed, and Jackson's idea was denounced as 'ridiculous' by Derek Croxton.

Accepting (if for nothing else but the sake of linguistic simplicity) that Cabot did arrive in Newfoundland, he might simply have been following an ancient geological route. Researchers at that eminently trustworthy institution, the Department of Earth Sciences, Memorial University, have argued that the metamorphosed lavas of the Baie Verte area of Newfoundland are geochemically similar to the Kill-Callow suite of County Mayo, and may have been part of the same continent before the Atlantic Ocean opened.

For MUN earth scientists to say "Kill Callow" is a dreadful thing though, as their colleague Richard is a highly respected young researcher conducting some fine work in Newfoundland. He is also an excellent rower, and will be taking part in the inaugural Quidditch Vidditch boat race at the 2010 St John's Regatta*.

And rowing brings us neatly to the final, and arguably most extraordinary tale of Newfoundland-Achill affinities. On September 5th 1987, in the thrashing seas of a Force 9 Atlantic gale, Don Allum and his boat QE3 were pulled ashore by the villagers of Dooagh. After setting off from St John's on the Summer Solstice, after 76 days at sea, after being repeatedly blown off course, after capsizing countless times, after almost drowning when the seas dumped him 60 feet from his boat, and after writing, in what he thought were his final storm-lashed moments, a note to his family that said 'the boat won't survive. I love you all', Allum became the first man to row solo across the Atlantic in both directions. The privations of his epic return journey were eventually too much for his body, and he died at 55, but Allum is remembered fondly in Dooagh, where a commemorative pillar marks his extraordinary achievements. He was also immortalized in a song by Marillion.

At this point, I need a sentence that sums up everything neatly, and leaves you with a profound moment of Irish-Canadian contemplation. Unfortunately, I am incapable of coming up with anything suitable, so you'll have to make do with this.

*subject to confirmation

Old Lost Sea in Wales: And the Rodneys are queuing up

2010-04-05T16:12:00.000-02:30

In an old farmhouse in a tiny hamlet about half a mile the Welsh side of the Shropshire-Powys border, I enjoy another lazy Easter afternoon. From my spot in the conservatory, all I can see are goldfinches and blue tits on the bird feeders, a horse on the riverbank, sheep in the fields, clusters of trees, the maze of hedgerows, and the abruptly igneous Breidden Hills across the floodplain of the rivers Severn and Vyrnwy. St John's is three and a half thousand kilometres away physically, and perhaps further away mentally, especially in all this springtime greenery. There is nothing to connect me to Newfoundland.

On top of Breidden Hill, 1199 feet above sea level, Rodney's Pillar looms phallically over the landscape, one of those obelisks to the landed gentry that occur so frequently in the British countryside. I've gazed upon this one many times, but I still don't know who Rodney was, so I bring up a popular search engine and type in "Rodney's Pillar", half-expecting a flurry of euphemistic pornography.

Instead I find that it was erected in 1781-82 to commemorate the fact that Montgomeryshire oaks were used to construct the ships that helped Sir George Brydges Rodney defeat the French and Spanish in a series of Caribbean naval battles. The pillar did have a golden ball atop it, but that was destroyed in 1835 when it was struck by lightning.

Admiral Rodney, I learn, was a very famous and controversial figure, the biography on Wikipedia describing him as "vain, selfish and unscrupulous". The portrait below, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, certainly doesn't make him look very pleased with his lot. But then I find out there was one part of the British Empire in which he was very popular, a region which he served as naval governor of in 1749, and where he then remained for a further three years. He made a series of significant and well-received changes to its judicial system and his name lives on today in a distinctive type of local boat.

Baron Rodney, by Joshua Reynolds (painted 1756-59)

So, which place was that, I hear you ask?

Why Newfoundland, of course.

Rodney first came to the island in 1738 as a junior officer in the British Navy, collecting information on the fishery and the outports. Eleven years on, he returned in rather grander style, as commander of HMS Rainbow and the colony's 15th appointed naval governor, with orders to protect British subjects from those narsty Frenchies. Within a month of arriving, he had begun what would be later described as a 'remarkable administration'. It only lasted one year, but the consequences where far-reaching, and he didn't just clear off, as many previous governors had done. Instead, Rodney remained in Newfoundland till 1752.

His reforms "resulted in the establishment of a local court of Oyer and Terminer (which dealt annually with all crimes except treason), a governor's court at St. John's, and the formalization of a system of surrogate courts in the outports presided over by naval officers the governor appointed to act as surrogate judges." (http://www.heritage.nf.ca/law/naval_gov.html)

Kevin Major, meanwhile, includes a picture of Commander Rodney in his history book, the caption noting that 'Governor George Rodney, in Newfoundland for an all-too-short three years, was known for dispensing justice in equal measure to the rich and the poor.' He was clearly an important figure in Newfoundland, and our old friend Wikipedia states he was so popular that the rodney boats of the province (see below) are named in honour of him, though I have to confess I can find no independent verification of this. The Dictionary of Newfoundland English describes them only as 'small, round-bottomed boat[s] with square stern, used chiefly as a tender' and cites the first recorded usage of the word as being from the late 19th century. There is a rodney on display in the Rooms, so I will inspect it next time I'm there and see if I can find out more.

The rodneys are queuing up, God forbid

Whatever happens, I understand now that I am under Newfoundland surveillance wherever I go. I have walked obliviously down Rodney Street many dozens of times, as it is part of the most direct route from the MUN Geography Department to our part of downtown. Knowing what I do, I shall doff my virtual cap to the great man next time I'm there. I'd better also make sure I raise a mug of rum to the guv'nor in the Admiral Rodney in Criggion next time I'm in the vicinity of his pillar.

The price of taxis between downtown St John's and the airport

2010-03-25T13:01:00.001-02:30

Last night, getting an orange taxi from the airport back to town, I paid a fixed price of £22.50. Today, getting a yellow taxi from town back to the airport, I paid a meter charge of £16.75. One can therefore conclude that orange paint must be a lot more expensive than yellow.

Freezing rain falls mainly on the plane

2010-03-24T20:59:00.000-02:30

It happened to my dearly beloved, now it has happened to me. The weather is fine and dandy, then the day you're supposed to fly home from Newfoundland to Blighty, something meteorologically mental takes place, and you end up being grounded.

For Hen it was a sudden snowstorm, for me a shower of triangles (the Environment Canada symbol for freezing rainy sleety ice pellets, it seems). The forecast had been ominous, but at lunchtime it was all fairly tame outside my office window. Driving to the airport, it still didn't seem too bad, and I was able to check in and get to the departure gate without trouble.

It seemed a bit nastier as we began boarding. A member of groundstaff appeared in glistening yellow oilskins as if he'd just stepped off the deck of a storm-lashed fishing boat. The walkway was wobbling precariously in the wind, and, as I stepped onto it, so was the plane, but the stewards and stewardesses seemed very happy, one chap telling me the book I was carrying - What Is America? by Ronald Wright - was really good, but that another of his (Stolen Continents) was even better.

I took my seat contentedly enough and, as we taxied onto the runway, began watching a movie starring Allan Hawco as a Newfoundland geologist who falls for a local girl whilst studying the limestones of the Burren. It was pretty cliched, far too Oirish for my liking, so I gave up a short way in, and noticed we were stationary. The captain informed us the de-icing crews were in full flow, which probably explained why some guys were spraying the wings bright green. Either that or it was some local ceremony to mark the end of the St Patrick's Day shenanigans.

Whichever, it didn't help. A few minutes later the captain told us we were going back to the airport. He wasn't happy that we'd been de-iced properly, so didn't think he could fly the plane safely, and who could argue with that? I've seen the Krypton Factor.

A few more minutes later, we were back in the departures lounge. A few minutes after that, having made good use of the free internet at St John's airport, it became clear I was not going to make my connection to Heathrow, regardless of whether the plane left the ground soon or not. After queuing for information, I was told to call a number and re-book a flight, which I did (also using the free internet, this time to Skype) and then re-join the information queue to notify Air Canada I was de-planing. I couldn't bring myself to actually speak such a disgusting verb, but the staff were lovely and patient and did their best to help me.

Now needing to reclaim my baggage, I was ushered back downstairs to the check-in area, where I did some more queuing (lucky I'm British, really), bought and ate a turkey wrap that had been microwaved to a volcanic temperature, and was finally reunited with my belongings, which looked like they'd just lost a fight with a fire engine. And then I got a taxi home.

The Missing Houses of Downtown St John's

2010-03-20T15:42:00.001-02:30

4 Stewart Avenue

29 Bannerman Street

26 Bond Street

28 Colonial Street

88 Gower Street

26 King's Road

36 Prescott Street

13 Flavin Street

52 Colonial Street

23 Cochrane Street

25 York Street

42 and 44 Colonial Street

Do not arrange to meet someone at any of these addresses in downtown St John's as they don't exist. The old streets of Newfoundland's capital city have many quirks, but this is the one I am most baffled by. The houses are all connected, there are no gaps between them, yet the numbers simply jump out of sequence, skipping one in favour of the next.

How can it be? How can the builders not have noticed? I don't understand. Colonial Street is particularly crazy.

The only thing I can possibly think of is that the many fires of the 18th and 19th centuries led to small houses being lost and slightly bigger ones going up in their stead, such that occasionally a house number was erased.

Something Fishy In The Chippy

2010-03-05T11:10:00.000-03:30

Crossing into Morocco from the Spanish enclave of Ceuta some years ago, I presented my passport to the border official. He took it, compared the face I was wearing with the one on my photo, seemed satisfied, and was about to return it when he noticed my nationality.

Something clicked, and he laughed as he handed it back to me.

"Fish and chips?" he grinned.

Yes, that's me, I thought as I smiled politely. I come from the land of fish and chips. It's not exactly a cultural high point by which a nation should be defined, but I suppose it's preferable to ‘the land of Simon Cowell and the Osbournes’.

However, after a few months in Newfoundland, I'm wondering if I might have to revisit North Africa and tell the customs man to change his patter. The fish and chips I've sampled in Atlantic Canada put most of the offerings back home to shame. The crown of British cuisine, already tiny, is slipping.

Neither fried fish nor chipped potatoes were a British invention, the former being Iberian, the latter Belgian. However, the combination was new. The first fish and chip shop opened in about 1860, in east London. Or in Oldham, Lancashire. Or possibly in Yorkshire. No-one really knows. Regardless, it might be reasonable to assume that, a century and a half after introducing it to the world, Britain would have perfected the product. Instead, like railway networks and cricket, other regions have taken the idea and run with it, whilst it flounders in the place where it began.

To be fair, I don't think Newfoundland would claim to have had great success with either cricket or trains, but fish and chips are a different matter. I hadn't realized how readily available this quintessentially British combo would be over here, nor what rude health it would be in. It's hardly shocking that an island so indelibly associated with cod knows how to cook it, but even in some quite unpromising settings, the sorts of places that in England would begrudgingly serve you reconstituted catfish in soggy batter, I've gotten crispy cod and pitch-perfect potatoes.

It's not just Newfoundland, either. I was in Prince Edward Island last spring, and the chip shop I visited there was also serving top-drawer fare. I found myself feeling slightly sorry for my friends back home, obliviously shoveling down sub-standard suppers whilst the good stuff was being dished out thousands of miles away.

Of the multifarious options available to the fast food connoisseur, fish and chips is one of the healthier, as long as you have fresh fish and decent potatoes. In the UK, with swathes of spud-yielding soil and every town being within 100 miles of the sea, it really oughtn't be too difficult to obtain both, yet it happens all too infrequently. It's not that there are no decent British chippies - the economic crisis has apparently led to a revival, with people taking comfort in an old favourite - but high-calibre outlets are few and far between. In Leicestershire, my home county, there is just one that has a Seafish Quality Award; the rest need an educational excursion to this side of the Atlantic.

Before they get here though, there is one small thing I'd like to see addressed. The things served with the battered fish are chips. They are not, never have been, and never will be fries: the clue is in the word that follows "fish and". But I can probably blame the Americans for that.

Erratum - not a waste of MUN-ey, just a waste of time and effort

2010-03-01T16:49:00.000-03:30

I posted recently about the screens that have gone up all around the Memorial University campus, complaining that they were a waste of cash. The powers-that-be have now explained that these didn't cost any money, having been donated free of charge.

OK, so at least no-one at the university is paying for them, but it still doesn't mean they're needed. "The screens are an effective tool in reaching that particular segment of the Memorial audience...that doesn't sit down and actively consume news by the web, print or e-mail," claims a university spokesman. Well, I've never seen anyone paying any attention to them, so I'm not sure about the 'effective' part of that statement. Have any studies been carried out to assess their usage?

The email sent round the university community stated also that, "[a]s well as acting as a channel for local, national and international news, the screens will be an effective tool in the case of storm closures." So, if you're already in campus, they'll tell you that you are now trapped there by a storm, and if you're not already in campus, they'll tell you nothing, as you won't be able to see them.

Still, as long as the CEO of Explosive Media, the ad agency behind the scheme, is 'very excited,' that's the main thing.

Direct flights from Newfoundland to Europe, the saga continues

2010-02-27T19:34:00.000-03:30

It had to be too good to be true. Cheap, direct flights between St John's and the UK aren't going to happen after all:

Go Travel out of business

Go Travel demise affects NL travellers

Go Travel founder blames credit-card processor

Air Canada will be running direct flights to Heathrow this summer, though, and the prices aren't too bad if you're flexible. I was hoping to go home in late June, coming back in early July, and the Air Canada website offers a Wed-Wed two week trip for just over $800, including taxes.

The question is, will they carry on running the flights if there's no competition?

Curling a beauty

2010-02-23T14:52:00.001-03:30

I've tried to get into ice hockey, I really have. I watched a fair few matches during the Vancouver Winter Olympics, many in the company of Canadian enthusiasts cheering on their country's march to gold (although hunger won out in the final, and I was in the kitchen making dinner when Sidney Crosby scored the golden goal). I even sat through a Canada Hockey Night this Saturday, as Tronno and Oddawa fought out a turgid 1-1 draw. Problem is, I simply don't care for the game. It doesn't move me. When it comes to ice-based sports, there is only one really worth following.

Ailsa Craig microgranite, I'll have you know

Incorporating brooms, granite and frozen water, curling is a Scottish invention, and as a lover of quirky games with arcane rules, I ought to have been a fan of it for years. Curling ought also to have grabbed me as pretty much the only geological sport, but there is only one curling rink in England, and it's a long way from Leicester. Even when I lived in Aberdeen for 32 months, I never once tried it (except that one occasion when some friends and I lobbed lumps of granite onto a frozen pond near Dinnet).

Here in Newfoundland, I've finally gotten my arse in gear and given it a try. It probably helps that the 2006 Olympic men's champions were the team led by St John's Curling Club stalwart Brad Gushue. As reward for becoming the first born-and-bred Newfoundlanders to claim an Olympic gold, Mr Gushue and his team now have their own dual carriageway. 'Lasting recognition' of their achievements, I'm sure you'll agree.

Gushue and team weren't able to defend their title in 2010, losing out to Kevin Martin in qualifying, so my Vancouver curling attention was focussed solely on the British teams. With David Murdoch's men being world champions, and Eve Muirhead, skip of the women's team, having won the 2009 World Junior Championships, it all looked promising, but both teams failed to reach the semi-finals. They played some fine shots, but Steve Cram and Rhona Martin's Test Match Special-esque commentary didn't get the British medal it deserved.

Nonetheless, I was wholly impressed by the skill and control on display, the teamwork, and the sportsmanship, and not just from Crammy and Rhona. In the end, the men's Olympic gold medal match was between Norway's Morten Harket and Canada's Bobby Charlton. And as if to prove the sport's indifference to glamour, Kevin Martin's team won.

But watch out Canada! I'm perfecting the Herringshaw Shuffle, a new stone-sliding technique that involves no sliding at all, and Yorkshire's Steve Stukins is showing an admirable understanding of the game, despite never having played it. In 2014, those Winter Olympic golds will be curling their way to the UK, and as reward we'll demand nothing less than the naming of a new M69 service station in our honour.

No newspapers-to-be-foundland

2010-02-05T14:07:00.000-03:30

It's nice living in a part of the world where the media can be pretty easily ignored. Not owning a TV helps, but so does a general lack of printed media.

The local newspaper here is the Telegram, which is easily preferable to the Leicester Mockery, and the only other paper you can find readily is the Globe and Mail. It's also pretty good, and as it regularly sources stories from the Guardian and the Times, it has a reassuring familiarity about it. CBC radio is similar: UK news stories get covered surprisingly often, and BBC reporters pop up in the news far more than can be attributed to chance.

I miss being able to pop to the newsagent to buy the Grauniad, but I can read Charlie Brooker or Ben Goldacre online, and the BBC News website fills in plenty of gaps. It enables me to strike just about the right balance between being able to find out what's going on in the UK, and ignoring the feeding frenzy that envelops many stories.

It's just a pity, then, that some bright spark in the Memorial University post office has decided to stock the international version of the Daily Express.

This bastion of journalistic integrity is the only British newspaper available for purchase anywhere in St John's. How can this be? If Newfoundlanders needed to avail themselves of the latest conspiracy theories regarding the death of Princess Diana they could buy "Hello!" or go online. It's what Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web for. There isn't a single valid explanation for offering the raggiest of all the tabloid rags. Clearly I don't have to buy it, but simply seeing it sends me into paroxysms of despair. Why can't there be random stockage of Word or Private Eye instead?

The only thing that annoys me more is that Newfoundland was the breeding ground for the Daily Hate Mail. Literally.

MUN-ey for nothing

2010-02-05T10:31:00.000-03:30

Thanks to the infinite wisdom of our media-obsessed puppet masters, the communal dining and seating areas of Memorial University of Newfoundland are now overseen by myriad giant TV screens. No-one pays them the slightest bit of attention, which is appropriate, as they are not worthy of any. Unfortunately, like the pubs that play MTV on plasma screens with the sound turned off, the constantly moving images catch your eye over and over again.

In the University Centre food hall, the screens tell us to WASH YOUR HANDS NOW OR YOU'LL KILL US ALL WITH SWINE FLU YOU UTTER, UTTER BASTARDS, which is at least of some vague benefit to society. In the Engineering Cafe, however, they've managed to hook up to a service provider that can only beam up celebrity gossip (Zac Efron has a new pair of trousers made from real prairie mole-skin), banal pieces of fabricated trivia (ostriches can only eat with their heads upside-down, one wing outstretched, and one leg pointing straight out behind them), and the weather for Nova Scotia.

Another eight thousand dollars well spent.

Bitters Trivia Round 7 - Wind & Fog

2010-01-30T15:34:00.000-03:30

1. Who generally provided the voice of the cartoon character Foghorn Leghorn?

2. What name is given to the wind that begins dry and dusty in the Sahara before becoming humid as it crosses the Mediterranean towards Italy?

3. Who directed the 1980 horror movie, The Fog?

4. The solar wind is responsible for what phenomenon of polar regions?

5. The famous London fogs, immortalized in Sherlock Holmes, were named colloquially after what food?

6. Blowing in the Wind was first released on which 1963 Bob Dylan album?

7. Phileas Fogg is the lead character in which novel?

8. According to the Canadian Wind Energy Association, currently existing wind farms operating at maximum efficiency have the capacity to supply what percentage of Canada’s electricity demand?

9. The St John’s Fog Devils played in which league from 2005 to 2008?

10. Where holds the record for the highest wind gust measured directly at the Earth's surface?
(Bonus: What was the speed, in mph?)

N. B. For copyright reasons, I have not posted the Picture Round, but it might appear at some point in the future if I can be arsed to acquire open-source images.

Bitters Trivia Round 6 - Seabirds & Fish

2010-01-30T15:32:00.000-03:30

1. In a 1974 film, who is told he must cut down the tallest tree in the forest...with a herring?

2. Pen gwyn means "white head" in which European language?

3. In November 2006, whose painting "No. 5, 1948" sold for a world record $140m?

4. In which US state do the Anaheim Mighty Ducks play their home games?

5. As a noun, how many different meanings does the OED attribute to 'cod'?

6. Newfoundland is home to the largest North American breeding colony of which seabird, with the Latin name Puffinus puffinus?

7. What two former Pythons starred in the 1988 film “A fish called Wanda”?

8. Which seabird took Fleetwood Mac to No 1?

9. Cage & Fish was a law firm in which Boston based TV series?

10. “Puffins: Island Adventure” is a Newfoundland-based computer game for which game console?