Got everything I need; almost

Title is from a great tune that DownChild Blues band made a hit.
It occurs to me that at no previous time in my breathing has this line applied with such veracity.

Mindful of Maslow's hierarchy of 'needs', (which formulation I generally subscribe to) things are going real well for me these days.

Topping that list is shelter. Got it covered in spades. Indeed I have ownership interests in 3 places - 277 Elm, 68 Hennessy Rd., and 4500 Aspdin Rd. Any one does the trick more than adequately for me and if need be a few others. Three is near an embarrassment.  All places I observe have auxiliary wood stove heating - and decent supplies of firewood close at hand.

Food and water are equally well covered. While my stocks of food are modest, I want for nothing in this department. With cash in my jeans and a large grocery store within a couple of blocks, I eat pretty well what I want when I want. And this northern Ontario living keeps me close to the world's greatest reserves of fresh water - can't be beat. And in the city, it is simply a matter of turning on any one of a half dozen taps and clean clear water flows faster than I can use it.

Maslow doesn't talk about intoxication, but perhaps he should. It is a regular part of all of my days. There's cold beer in the fridge (and a beer store 5 minutes walk away), a case of wine on the racks, and whiskey under the counter. No need for me to ration these spirits, there's more where they came from. Then there's the thc stuff - with a couple months supply stashed close by. And some very nice smoke if I do say so - a couple of varieties of hash and 3 or 4 strains of pot.

For transport I have a surprisingly reliable 2004 Toyota van which has served me super well. And a bicycle for backup.

Of special interest these days, is the status of my bank accounts. For the first time I have a real good cushion of liquid assets, most of it in the credit union.

2bcontinued

Notes on Bucky 1 yr.+

Ahhh Buckminster.
Before I forget, a few words about the canine, as he seems to me these days.

It overstates the case to call this canine domesticated.
At best the domestication element is a work in progress.
Too frequently, but perhaps less frequent than 6 months ago, he shows off his 'wildness'.


B is persistent in his calls for attention. Really persistent.
Like some used car salesman who simply cannot register the sound No.
(for the record I have also tried the German 'Nein' with similarly poor results.)
I have also tried physical gestures - a tug on his leash, an elbow or knee to his chest,  a shove with my hand - and never does the first attempt get results.

Mostly he wants to play. With a ball or a stick or some battered toy.
But his understanding of play is twisted.
As much as he would like to chase a thrown ball or stick, he adamantly refuses to part with the thing.
He'll keep it in his mouth and urge you to take it from him. ... As if that's a fair contest.

B is a long dog. Long in limb and torso. And relatively lean, especially with a trimmed coat.
Standing on his hind legs, with his front paws supported - by your chest, or a fence, or a wall, - he appears well over 5 feet in height. Some find this intimidating.

B's range of vocalizations is remarkable.
Most notable is his 'big dog bark'. Terror inducing I'd say. So have others.
It'll stop you in your tracks, instantly.
This is the bark of a creature that is signalling its intention to disassemble your body parts messily.
At the other end of his vocal spectrum is the soft plaintiff wailing and whining - infant like.
And there is an array of in between sounds.
Exhalations of exasperation.
Short, sharp, barks just to grab attention.
Whole sessions of medium barks to announce the detection of intruders, or merely passers-by.
Quite the repertoire.

Bucky is a sneak.
He knows when you are watching, and the moment your gaze averts, off he goes.
Too clever by half this mutt.

Late Lesson

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When I was at the over ripe age of 57, a former lineman gave me a tip that now seems like an important life lesson.

I was helping him do a job around his place, at the waterfront if memory serves.
I was asked to tighten on a cable, having just finished tightening a bolt. The wrench was still in my hands. This made it tough to tighten the cable. I struggled until the master said it would be easier to tighten the cable if I put down the wrench first.

He was right. I put down the wrench, and with both hands free to tighten the cable, the job was done quickly and well.

One has to let go of the last task, to get the current task done right.

I have since reflected on this incident and lesson many times.
Often in circumstances while I was still holding a metaphorical wrench in my hands. His advice was remembered, and the new job became easier and quicker.

I wonder if my penchant for hanging on tight to the wrench is associated with being a twin. Best not perhaps to let go of the teat that a rival sib might take over. Who knows?

Bucky: Observations

composition date 2016.Jan.04 - first day back at office routine after a nice Christmas break.

I spent more time with The Buckmeister recent like, since I had this nice break from law work. Consequently I have come to form some new views, and thoughts, based on spending more time with him.

And here are a few random notions, about the characteristics of this pet.

On occasion,

• the proud and elegant gait of a Lipizzaner stallion.
• the rage and contortions of a Brahma bull, when restrained
• the slapstick antics of a classic Vaudevillian
• the good looks of a Hollywood icon 
• the manic behavior or a crazed meth addict
• the gentleness of a toddler looking for affection
• an incredible range of vocalizations from loud big dog scary bark, to wolf howls, to plaintiff whimpers that mimics humans
• eccentric circling when bored or curious
• an appetite that defies satiation
• a Velcro pet that tracks me relentlessly, save when he exercises
• an independence that makes him oblivious to all entreaties.

Bucky is currently at my feet, prone. Whining for even more attention and play.
I succumb.

Making Choices (Decisions), & Imaging the Future -Ethereum

W.H.,P.H.,M.G.C..
Work Hard, Play Hard, Make Good Choices.
That was the slogan that I used for some time as I sent my kids up the drive to catch the bus to school.
On well over a hundred occasions.

And I've reflected that 'making good choices' is quite a challenge.
One strives to get the choices good.
And making those choices involves patterns of thought and action.

And one pattern I've noticed is that pretty well all decision making involves assumptions about future states of affairs, and there is a pretty high co-relation between the validity of the predicted states and the efficacy of the decision making.

And how lucky I was to have spent that year and change with CN in future/strategic studies, 40 years back now (this May coming), which allows me to bring a rich background into play on the topic of future states of affairs especially in the 5 to 25 year projections.

And something I just got on to - Vitalik Buterin, Russian born Canadian raised and schooled with his Ethereum cryptoeconomic theory, plans, and organizations.
I say good chance he will be Big.

more later

Improbabilities: Amazing ?

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Improbabilities: Amazing?

No sooner than I had started the car for my trip to North Bay the car radio announced a happy tidbit. Coming up next was a phone-in-show that would surely keep my interest for most of the drive. CBC had a program focusing on amazing improbabilities, or coincidences. Host Amanda Pheffer would be joined by a statistics prof and authour, David Hand of the Imperial College, London, to discuss crazy coincidences. Listeners would be calling in from across the province to tell their tales of unusual experiences and the prof would comment on them from a statistical vantage point. His theme: remarkable coincidences that ordinary folk experience are invariably compatible with mathematical laws however incompatible they may seem at first.

As someone with an abiding interest in numbers and probabilities, the timing of the show was itself a felicitous coincidence.

I was not disappointed. A score of callers recounted their own memorable stories. One fellow told of meeting his future wife. They had grown up in communities separated by a few thousand miles, apparently with no friends or acquaintances in common. Turns out though, the grandfather of the wife had been a neighbour of the caller, and a good acquaintance during his youth. This auspicious connection was to bode well for the couple’s relationship.

These stories got me thinking about my own improbable encounters. I fancied that if I were inclined to call in with a story I would tell one that happened when I was on a high school trip to Europe. It was the summer of 1969; the year certain in my memory because Neil Armstrong had set foot on the moon while we were overseas.

The trip drew to a close as our large student group waited in the airport in Florence Italy. Then and there, to my utter amazement I think I see my neighbour from home, 2 doors over. And dang, it was indeed my neighbour from Sudbury, travelling on her own in Italy. Of course I approached her immediately, and we hugged, and both of us could hardly stop yakking about this amazing connection.

Over the years I have reflected on this encounter many times. Surely it had been mere coincidence. In trying to make sense of it I had wondered about quantifying the probabilities of the two of us meeting in an airport an ocean away from our family homes. Needless to say, quantifying the odds of such a meeting was well beyond my capabilities, and I imagined well beyond any human capabilities. But the probability had to be a ridiculously low figure – amazingly improbable.

At one point in my reflections of this event, I conjured up an explanation that while silly, had superficial appeal. The probability of our meeting in a foreign airport might be related to the number of people in the world (3.5 billion then), and the subset of those people who would have been in an international airport. And with so many people to factor into the calculations, whatever the probability of our encounter it would be a very long shot indeed. But, I surmised, what if the estimate of the number of people on the planet had been grossly overstated. What if instead of 3.5 billion people in the world, there were only 3.5 million. And while I had no evidence that the demographers were off by a factor of a thousand, it would serve to make the chances of our airport encounter much more probable. And that provided a certain satisfaction all by itself. Alas, I digress….

As the radio show came to an end, (coincidentally?) I pulled into the parking lot of my destination, the North Bay Hospital. My work would take up the remainder of the day, and I would head back home about the supper hour.

But rather than head home directly, I decided to stop at the hospital cafeteria, nearly deserted late on this Friday afternoon in the summer. I say nearly deserted, but there was one other customer, grabbing a snack at the counter.

Perhaps you know where this is headed. On a day when bizarre coincidences was the topic du jour, there was one more coincidence in store for me. That lone customer at the counter was an old childhood friend of mine. Someone who I had not seen often since we both left our family homes to make our own way many years earlier. She was working at the hospital part time as a chaplain, and when she spotted me, called out. Surprised, but pleased, I went over to her with greetings, and we spend a few pleasant minutes chatting about old times and catching up on the new.

I’m sure there are some readers who might say this cafeteria encounter was not such an amazing coincidence. Happens all the time some would offer. I would have thought the same things myself but for one additional element of the story.

The chaplain at the cafeteria counter, my old childhood friend, was one and the same person as the student in the Florence airport I coincidentally met up with in 1969. The same person I had been thinking about in the car on the trip to North Bay all the while listening to a radio show on amazing coincidences. Put that into your probability calculation device, and stand back to be amazed.

All this stuff hurts my head. I want to turn to something simpler and easier to relate to. And so I close with my favourite, and most silly aphorism about coincidences from the late American journalist H.L. Mencken.

24 hours in a day. 24 bottles of beer in a case.

Coincidence?

I think not.

Michael Hennessy
2015.Aug 15

Bucky: Aug 1, 2015 - notes

This past month Bucky received a couple of new toys.
Both had small squeak elements built in that clearly fascinated him.
From the moment he heard the sound in each, he seemed determined to incapacitate the sound generator.
And he was sufficiently determined that he became near obsessed, chewing and plucking and tearing till eventually the squeaker was disabled, or swallowed.
While in some respects the toys were still recognizable, sort of, after his intense mastication, they held little interest for him without the sounds.

Compare this with an event earlier today.
I decided to quiet his mania with an ice cube.
He mouthed it intently. And flung it, and retrieved it a few times.
Then he chawed down on it, till it was crumbs, and he was momentarily sated.
A much less expensive alternative, if only slightly less long lasting.

Also today, the first neighbour complaint about Bucky.
The complaint came by way of a phone message to the office phone from an anonymous female living close by.
Her pitch: please don't put the dog out so early in the morning. His barks are disturbing my sleep.

Bucky was out early. He had been sick the eve before, throwing up. So I put him to bed early, and when he was whining at 5am put him outside till I finished my sleep, and had my morning routine.
He does have a rather severe big dog bark when he senses trouble, or an anomaly, or something he does not understand. It could be a leaf blowing in the wind, or simply lying still on the grass. Not easy for me to predict. Though one pattern that is emerging is that he is much quicker to bark when he is not getting attention from me.

I am learning I may have been giving him more attention than I should.
This is a self perpetuating cycle.  The more I give, the more he expects.
The new norm has to be less attention for him, and while there may be a little push back, he will come to recognize and accept the new norm.

Went swimming with Bucky at 5pm at 351 Walford - PCH's under construction place.
His swimming is improving. And he likes it. And it gives him a bath which is probably a good thing.