Dave Bailey

Dad and I used to watch it regularly, and always thinking of the Big One we would get on our next outing.

Strange how people can feel such a sense of community loss even though most of us have never met. It's what humans do I guess. R.I.P. Tony.

I'm of two minds about it. I can understand why some are reluctant to take the chance on a good spot getting swamped, but it's also amusing to see someone swirl out a background which you can plainly see is nothing but trees, no buildings or bridges mixed in. C'mon, has anyone got the time to cruise every shoreline in the province before fall looking for exactly the right trees?

Oh, I wouldn't know anything about Fanny's...

You're guaranteed to laugh at this!

Out in Victoria B.C. is a guy named Alvis Petrie, and he is the Patron Saint of what iffers. A few years ago he bashed a B-17 Flying Fortress with an Avro Lancaster, with skills that many of us can only envy. He wrote up his back story and put it out on the net, and an aviation historical group actually fell for it! Took them a couple of weeks and a bit of a net search to find out they'd been hoodwinked. I'm proud to say that a couple of mine have also fooled people, they contacted me through e-mail and I let them down gently. Fortunately they got a chuckle as well, no hard feelings. The genre is growing, there is a web site called whatifmodelers.com where many of us hang out, a weird mob but a lot of fun.

I hear ya. One of the things that killed my first marriage was not just my ex, but her family. To them there always had to be hoards of people around, and the discussions always had to be about their huge family. I have always valued solitude, and when I used to go out on my nature walks on a Sunday afternoon, instead of being at the in'law's place getting all the latest family gossip, they thought I was weird. Some people just cannot understand that there is a great difference between being alone and being lonely. Trekking through the woods with my binoculars and camera made me feel alive and connected to everything around me. Sitting in their living room with half a dozen of them made me the loneliest person in the world.

Wait until I get the 5hp Briggs & Strattons delivered.

Go ahead, stroke my ego! A lot of them wouldn't mean much unless you're both a modeler and know the kit it was made from, but a few are easily understood by anyone. I'll give you the article links rather than posting interminably here. Each year during the first week of January the largest aircraft modeling site on the net, the Aircraft Resource Center (ARC) holds what's called 'Silly Week', during which various crazy models are sent in as a break from the more serious stuff. During 2005 the site was hacked and suffered serious damage by someone who called himself Latin Pimp. A model I was working on at the time seemed just right to have a little fun at his expense, and that explains the ending to the story of the Rayador, a Boeing 727 which was modified into a type of aircraft usually known as an Ekranoplan. I won't even try explaining those here, just go to this Wikipedia link for an enlightening read. So, without further ado, The Rayador (link). Years later I still had the PanAm decals from that laying around doing nothing, so I modified an old model that had been sitting in the pile for forty years and came up with this one. (link) If anyone remembers the old Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sketch about the Frog and Peach, that was partly the inspiration for this bit of lunacy. (link) Monty Python fans won't really need any explanation for this multi-media piece. (link) Since Canada should have had a strategic reconnaissance aircraft during the Cold War, my universe devised this modification to the venerable CF-100 Canuck. (link) Currently on the bench is another CF-100 being turned into a Star Wars X-wing style fighter, along with other assorted projects. It's that sort of madness which keeps me sane. :w00t:

Self-propelled, you just cut her loose!

'SUPERGIANT' CRUSTACEANS FOUND NEAR NEW ZEALAND

Check with the ministry to see if that's legal, I know there are admonitions against laminating other government documents like birth certificates. I keep my stuff in a small zip-lock sandwich bag, waterproof and it prevents it getting beat up.

Yeah, and we'll have another one as soon as we annex that bunch down south. The 'fifth columns' in Florida and Hollywood are well placed, it's just a matter of time...

One of my other hobbies is building model aircraft, and I stick almost exclusively to the sub-genre known as 'what if?' Models like this can be a simple as a different colour scheme, a different role from the intended one, or as wild as one's warped imagination wants to take it. A few years ago my daughter was taking a sailing course and found this while tootling around Lake Ontario: It just happened that she found it a few days after I had been turning a Rapala over in my hand, thinking that it would make an interesting fuselage for a crazy 'what if'. I promised her that after I was finished with it I would disassemble it, strip the paint, and install new hooks, so it's the only one of my models that no longer exists. With some scrap balsa, parts grabbed from the spares bin, and rotors borrowed from a pending project, I came up with this bit of insanity: I named it the Sudenkorento, the Finnish word for dragonfly. In the 'whiffing world' we also like to make up what we call a 'back story' to somehow justify the creation, and the full story, with more pictures, can be found here: The Sudenkorento

BAH! My Dad's 88 and he's probably in better shape than I am, tell your Grandpa to keep going full-tilt! The only thing the Grim Reaper deserves is a giant middle finger! Ah yes, more properly called a 'shooting stick'. I have one too, haven't got around to using it yet but your post has just given me a nudge.

Looks very nice, and since Lucky Strike are a Canadian company I'll definitely pick up some. I wonder if they'll be at the Spring Fishing Show?

Love those birches! As I drove down 11 from North Bay yesterday I tried to find spots along the hiway to photograph birches against various backgrounds, nothing really worked out. But it's long been my dream to get one as good as yours.

Chip truck in Coboconk, near the IGA.

Okay, going through a few more Restaurantica posts. I'll just report on the ones near or on the way to fishing spots. The Ponderosa, 12 Front St. in McTier, had a lovely breakfast there a couple of years ago. Just Eddies, 598 Atherley Road, Orillia, right near the narrows. Falls View, 9 Lindsay St., Fenelon Falls. Not fine dining, just family place, but excellent variety of dishes. And you can't beat sitting right beside the falls! The Mill Cafe 12 Bridge St., Thornbury. Had a venison stew there that was divine! They have an outside deck beside the water. The Riverhouse, right beside the Severn Falls Marina on Big Chute Rd.

Going back through my posts on Restaurantica to see if there's others. Just north of Minden (actually closer to Carnarvon) on Hiway 35 is The Pepper Mill Steak House, I enjoyed it.

Another vote for Danny's, an excellent place.

Great stuff by the way, that sandpiper is a beauty!

Pileated woodpecker, purple sandpiper, shrike (probably northern), red-tailed hawk, sharp-shinned, smew (in Ajax harbour), double-crested cormorant.

Don't quite get that. If they're perfectly safe to handle I would encourage people to keep them, thus cutting down the chance of a sick fish transmitting the illness. Or am I missing something?

Well said. Instead of blaming cormorants for just doing what comes naturally, let's try to find out WHY their numbers have rapidly increased in the past few decades. No species exists in isolation,something has changed in the environment that has allowed them to flourish. What if we found out that they are pigging out on, and thereby controlling, round goby populations. Would we be so eager to kill them then? With all the technological advances in fishing gear sport fisherman have it better today than we have ever had it in history. We complain because cormorants eat fish? Here's a shock for you - FISH EAT FISH! Guess we should control all predatory fish species too, which is... um... oh, all of them. I don't think there are any vegetarian species in Ontario, but I am willing to be corrected on that.