Edgar Says I Love You

OK, I'm still working on a couple of other posts right now, so in the meantime, I'll post one of my stories.

EDGAR SAYS I LOVE YOU

By Adam La Rusic

When we had to go down to the room under the house I was scared because Mommy woke me up in the middle of the night.  Daddy let me bring my Edgar because he is my favourite toy.  Edgar is a elephant and he talks.

It was scary in the downstairs room because it was dark. I didn't like it and told Mommy so, but Mommy said we had to stay there.  Daddy had his ear to the radio. Mommy helped me play with Edgar.  When you pull his string Edgar says I love you.

Mommy cried a lot. I said to Daddy why don't we go to the park, but Daddy said we couldn't leave.  Were you bad, Daddy, I asked, because sometimes when I was bad I had to stay in my room.  Daddy said there was bad men out there and we had to hide from them.  I thought hide and seek was supposed to be fun, but this wasn't fun.

Daddy showed me a special hiding spot and said if the bad men came that I had to go in there.  I could only barely fit but it was a neat hiding spot.  I was sad when Mommy cried and I cried too.  She was really hot when she hugged me.  She held on tight and I had to squirm to get away.  Daddy would hold Mommy's hand, and I would sit in the corner and play with Edgar. 

I love you, said Edgar. I love you.

It got hot in the room, and I bet it was sunny outside.  I asked Daddy if I could go play outside, and he smiled and stroked my hair and said maybe in a while.

Later on Daddy said I had to be real quiet, and I heard boots stomping upstairs.  Mommy never lets me wear my shoes in the house.

Then the footsteps came downstairs.  Daddy put me in the hiding spot, but he was rough with me and I told him so.  He shushed me and said I had to be very brave and not make any noise no matter what.  He said he would be back soon.  Then I could go outside and play, Daddy told me.  I said OK.

There was a large crash and and lots of shouting.  It was easy to be quiet because it was scary.

After a while the voices went away, but I didn't come out, even after I got pins and needles in my feet, not until I was really sore.  Mommy and Daddy were gone.

Edgar was still there so I sat down and pulled his string and he said I love you.  Mommy is sure taking a long time, because it's past my bedtime and I haven't even had supper yet.  I'm hungry.  Edgar is my favorite toy and when you pull his string he says I love you.

The End

Kandahar and Canada

Kandahar Airfield smells like dust, sewage and jet exhaust.  The sun at dusk is a fiery orange silhouette.  The land here is a moonscape.  There's nothing else here but dust, stunted trees and a tough, resilient scrub brush that the camels off-base munch on lazily.  And the Taliban.

Camels feeding on the scrub just off base.

Kandahar is the spiritual home of the Taliban, and it is where Canada chose to fight the war in Afghanistan.  The TLS building, the first building I enter when I land here, stands for "Taliban's Last Stand."  It's where the Taliban regime finally fell in 2001, before spreading out into the villages of Kandahar and Helmand provinces and south to the badlands of Pakistan.

This hole in the roof pretty much spelled the end of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

Sandy mountains stand to the north, from which the Taliban regularly launch rockets at the base.  When the rocket attack alarms go off you drop to the ground--those that still pay attention to them--face to the dirt, and you're wiping the dust from you the rest of the day.  This isn't a desert of sand, but of powder as fine as china clay.  They call it moondust here, and gets everywhere. A film covers any surface after minutes.  It's in your hair, your eyes, your mouth; it clogs your nose. 

Kandhar Airfield Looking North.

The Kandahar runway is, I have it on good authority, the busiest in the world.  Thousands of missions fly out of here each week and the base is a wasp's nests of fighters, civilian planes and helicopters.

Life on the base centres around its famous boardwalk, where soldiers crowd around Afghan markets and fast-food joints. There's a TGI Friday, and Green Bean Café ("Honor First, Coffee Second").  In the middle of the ring is a turf football field and an exceedingly well-crafted hockey rink. 

Cruising the Kandahar Boardwalk.  Another world.  There's an American football
game going on to the right.

Canadians playing floor hockey.

Where I come from--headquarters--there's enough brass to fit an Irish pub and the average age is much older.  But here, Kandahar, is the pointy end of the operations.  You see lots of kids lugging their M-16s, their uniforms sagging from thin shoulders, laughing a bit too loudly.  This place will put a wrinkle or two into their smooth faces.

We're here on business though--three environment guys looking at each other, perplexed, and wondering exactly how you go about looking after the environment in a conflict zone.  Or, like my good friend the Sergeant-Major says in his inimitable way, "We're in the middle of war and you want me to wipe my ass with both sides of the toilet paper?" 

The three environment guys in all of Afghanistan.
I'm rockin' the new buzz cut.

But it must be done.  From our point of view, this isn't just a military base, but a small city of close to 30,000 people.  With that number of people, and the seriousness of what's at stake, you can't half-ass things.  As sure as supplies come in, garbage and hazardous waste and sewage must go out.  To be vulgar but perfectly blunt, we--the environment guys--are the asshole of the operation here.  If you know any Canadian soldiers, ask them about the infamous Kandahar Poo Pond if you want to see their eyes roll.  That's the huge sewage lagoon located rather accidentally in the middle of the Kandahar base that can get quite aromatic on a quiet, hot evening.

The infamous Poo Pond and its warning signage.

I'm getting here just as Canada is pulling out and it's kind of a sad feeling.  The Americans are moving in.  Tim Hortons is closing up and packing up tomorrow and the girls working there are excited to go home.  Canada House--home to thousands of Canadian soldiers operating out of here since we joined the war--is quiet now, and the soldiers are focused on getting out of this hostile  desert and back to Canada with their love ones for Christmas.  Even the memorial to Canada's war dead in Afghanistan is to be moved home, piece by piece. 

Canada House!  A little bit of home for our Canadian troops.

Timmies!  The coffee was great and the staff was awesome.
Colleague Kevin poses under the sign.

For five years, from 2005 when Canada took over Kandahar, to 2010 with the US troop surge, Canada bore much of the brunt of the war.  This was not peacekeeping.  This was setting up in the middle of the enemy stronghold and driving them out, road by road, village by village.  All told, to date, 157 Canadian soldiers have died.  Regardless of your thoughts on the merits of the war, Kandahar is a significant chunk of Canada's history.  

A Chinook helicopter, like Canada's soldiers, heads into the Afghan sunset.

The Problem of Induction, Demonstrated through Another Unfortunate Encounter with Justin

In actuality, there is an omnipotent and omniscient deity watching over all of the Universe, coordinating all of the myriad interactions between objects to make them seem to be collections of particles and waves that behave in perfect harmony with an inviolate set of natural laws. This is all an illusion, however; this deity is the Great Comedian, Shecky. At some point, known only to the mind of Shecky, He will abruptly drop the facade that causes the Universe to appear to make sense. This will happen at the Moment of Greatest Comedic Effect, when all will know Shecky’s Truth, and there will be much wailing and moaning and gnashing of teeth. So perfect and pure is the Comedy, however, that mere days later everyone will think back to the MGCE, nod their heads, and with a thoughtful and appreciative grin remark, “Yeah, that was pretty funny.”

     -- blogger Mike Marsh.  

Science acquires knowledge primarily through through two methods of inference: inductive reasoning (extrapolating specific cases to a general proposition), and deductive reasoning (interpolating a general proposition to a specific case).

When we observe empirical phenomena in nature and propose a general theory to account for these observations we are using inductive reasoning.  Example:

Specific cases:  In my experience, every time I have ever banged my head against the wall, it is immediately followed by pain the area where I've banged it.

General Theory:  If you bang your head on  wall, your head will hurt.

What could possibly easier than that, right? Well, the philosophers can never seem to leave well enough alone, can they?  So about two hundred years ago the great Scottish philosopher David Hume formulated the "problem of induction" (when he wasn't chasing sheep about). 

Let's give an example of the Problem of Induction, using a conversation with my contrarian friend Justin at  party.

Me:   So, pancakes tomorrow morning at Pancake Haus then?

J:       If it comes, yes.

Me:   What do you mean "If it comes"?

J:       Well, if the sun rises and morning comes. Then I'm in for pancakes.

Me:   Well of course the sun will rise tomorrow.

J:       Really?  What makes you think that?

Me:   How many beers have you had?  The sun rises every morning.

J:       Well, yes it's risen every morning since I can remember, I grant you.  But what makes you think it'll rise tomorrow?

Me:   Well, because it's risen every other morning, for all time, since anyone can remember, so much so that we can predict to the minute when the corona is going to pop over the horizon.

J:       I don't disagree with your data--that the sun has always risen in our experience.  I just disagree with your theory--that it will rise tomorrow.  What's the basis of your theory?

Me:   Well the sun has always risen before.

J:       I know, we've established that.

Me:   So if it's always risen before, then it'll rise again tomorrow.  Duh!

J:       Well, it could rise tomorrow. On the other hand, Shecky, the Great Comedian might decide he needs a giggle and drop his MGCE on us. So you can't be absolutely certain the sun will rise tomorrow.

Me:      Justin, you are truly the most exasperating collection of subatomic particles ever to aspire to conscious thought.  OK, fine!  I can't be certain that the sun will rise tomorrow, but I can be 99.9999% sure.

J:       How many nines is that?

Me:   A bunch, smartass.

J:       And why's that? 

Me:   Because the sun has risen 999,999 times before.

J:       And so the probability of the sun rising tomorrow is based wholly on what has happened in the past, with absolutely no bearing on what might before the sun rises tomorrow?

Me:   Well, when you put it that way...

J:       A moment ago we established that, just because the sun has always risen in the past does not mean it will rise tomorrow.  It seems to me you are merely taking a weaker stance of the same position now, by claiming that since it has risen a million times in the past, it will almost certainly rise tomorrow.

Me:   Well, what could possibly stop the sun rising tomorrow Justin? 

J:       Well, any number of things. Shecky, the Great Comedian--

Me:   --can cram his MGCE where the sun don't shine. The chances of that happening are infinitesimal. 

J:       But you have to allow for the chance, however infinitesimal, right?  I mean it may be that Shecky just made up his mind moments ago and that, because his mind is already made up, there is actually a 100% chance that the sun will not rise tomorrow.

Me:   Arrrgh, my brain!.

J:       You've already opened the door here. I'm not asking for much.  I'm just saying that there's a chance of that.

Me:   OK, OK fine.

J:       So, in fact, you can't tell me with any probability whatsoever that the sun is going to rise tomorrow, can you?

Me:   I'm going to get another beer.  Don't wait up.

J:       But we're still on for pancakes tomorrow morning, right?

Believe it or not, conversations with Justin are actually like that.

So here, illustrated, is the "problem of induction."  It s not rational.  It is ultimately a circular argument relying on itself for justification.  We see a pattern and we extrapolate from that a general principle, but there is no explanation for the principle other than the fact that we saw the pattern.

Indeed, finding patterns is one of the things that we do best. How long does your turn signal mechanically click before you pick up a beat, before every third click is just a tad bit louder?  In that case, the pattern isn't even there. Pattern recognition is a basis of human intelligence.  Perhaps we evolved that way; perhaps recognizing similarities in different situations ("You know, last time I saw one of those orange and black stripey things, it didn't end well.") made us more evolutionary fit.  Indeed, I would argue that pattern recognition brings us satisfaction, even joy.  Music can be described as a flux of harmonious patterns.  Poets often relate disparate experiences through patterns of metaphor and simile, creating a sort of intuitive leap for the reader, evoking a satisfaction akin to "getting" a joke.

I guess the question is this:  are those patterns we tease out using inductive reasoning really there as part of an underlying order, or is this human beings following a evolutionary imperative to impose design upon the universe?

"Why does the universe go to all this bother of existing?"

Kick at the rock, Sam Johnson, break your bones:

But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones.

       -- Richard Wilbur, Epistemology

It's apparently well-accepted what the base assumptions of science are.  I found several sites outlining anywhere from two to six basic assumptions, yet, curiously, no source.  Or maybe not so curious.   Basic assumptions are, after all, supposed to be self-evident, so perhaps they require no source?  Anyway, they were all more or less similar.

The most inclusive example I could find were those of Kitty Ferguson's in her excellent essay Fire the Equations: Science Religion and the Search for God, which I've just read and realized that she basically beat me to what I was going to say here, and says it more beautifully than I could have said it, thereby completely wasting the last two decades of my life.  Thanks Kitty.

Kitty's assumptions are that the universe is:    

• rational
• accessible 
• contingent 
• objective 
• unified

It's interesting, as Ferguson points out, that these basic tenets, developed in the 17^th century and still accepted today, were written by scientists who were devoutly religious (at least would be by modern standards).  So their assumptions were not in conflict with their religious beliefs. On the contrary, many of the assumptions of science were also assumptions of Christianity.

Assumption:  The universe is...	Science	(Christian) Faith
Rational	The universe follows laws.	God is rational and we can see his symmetry and plan in the universe around us.
Accessible	The reality of the universe can be explored empirically (though the senses).	The way to God can be found in his creation.
Contingent	There is cause and effect.	All around is an effect; God is the cause.
Objective	The universe exists outside of the self.  The existence is shared by rational observers.	God exists outside of the self.
Unified	There is an underlying set of laws that describes the universe.	There is one God that describes the universe.

Trouble with this "science" business started brewing a little before the time of Galileo. Contrary to popular opinion, the Church did not have a huge issue with the earth orbiting the sun at the time (see Wade Rowland's excellent treatise on the subject, Galileo's Mistake).  Copernicus had already floated the idea almost a century beforehand and the guys working in Rome were no dummies. They had already practically resigned themselves to a heliocentric model, and were busy developing weasel clauses to maintain ecclesiastical consistency.

The real issue was Galileo's implication the universe could be completely known through science. Where, in such an equation, was there room for God?  This clockwork universe, in the words of Pope Urban VIII "imposed necessity on the Lord Almighty."

It turns out Galileo was wrong--at least by what we think we know today.  Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem and Chaos Theory demonstrate that neither empirical (inductive reasoning) nor logic (deductive reasoning) is capable of describing the universe completely.  Score one for the Pope.  At least until Darwin came along and pretty much nuked creationism.

In theory, there is still no conflict between religion and science.  Again, using the Christian religion as an example, it is possible that a supernatural omnipotent being created the Earth a few thousand years ago and then, being omnipotent, set the whole ruse up with the fossils and the carbon dating. 

There's no conflict with science.  Because God is (presumably) beyond empirical understanding ("supernatural") then the question of his existence lies outside the realm of science.  The proposition "Well an omnipotent God created everything and just made it look like we evolved from monkeys," is non-falsifiable, therefore non-scientific.  There is no conceivable evidence  anyone could present that would refute the hypothesis.

However, if God, or the Godhead, or a Supreme Being is empirically real--if he can seen or heard or otherwise sensed in a non-metaphorical sense--then his existence does become a question for science.  A most interesting proposition.

Of course there are other forms of spirituality besides the monotheistic personal god, such as, for example Buddha and Zen enlightenment.  Parallels have been drawn between, for example, Zen and some recent findings in quantum physics.  Many former dualities have disappeared at the quantum or relativistic levels (form/emptiness, time/space, energy/mass, cause/effect) and shown that reductionism, at a subatomic level, breaks down.  An event becomes a part of its context. It cannot be teased be out as an independent observable phenomenon, but can only be understood in an interdependent way with what is happening around it.

"Ultimate reality," in science, doesn't look anything like the grand clockwork universe of Newtons's day.  That apocryphal apple that dropped on Newton's head we believe today was made of protein and sugar polymers, and those polymers were made of atoms of carbon, and oxygen and hydrogen.  And those hydrogen atoms were comprised of a nucleus, comprising about one billionth of the volume of the atom, orbited by a distant, tiny electron smeared over some multi-dimensional probability cloud, all afloat in a frothing sea of virtual particles which tend to exist more than actually exist.  The apple didn’t bonk Newton on the head so much as a swarm of electromagnetic impulses on the surface of the apple interacted with Newton's head, itself a swarm of electromagnetic activity.  Today's model is more akin to a pile of leaves whipped into dance by a fickle gust of wind than Galileo's intricate clock.

I'm not sure our "modern" view is as comforting.  According to what we know, the universe cannot be known.   We can't answer Stephen Hawking's question, "Why does the universe go to al this bother of existing?"  


In the meantime, here we are--apparently--these brief, howling back eddies in the tide of entropy, clinging to the surface of an infinitesimal speck somewhere in the middle of the granddaddy of all explosions and going, "WTF, man?  W-T-F?"

Oops--went a little off the rails there. Next up--inductive and deductive reasoning.  Let's blow the doors off those puppies!

Part Two: What is Science? What is Faith?

Of course, the laws of science contain no matter and have no energy either and therefore do not exist except in people's minds. It's best to be completely scientific about the whole thing and refuse to believe in either ghosts or the laws of science. That way you're safe. That doesn't leave you very much to believe in, but that's scientific too.

― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

I'm not going to get too carried with definitions here; this isn't supposed to be an academic treatise.  Nor should the reader consider my definitions particularly authoritative.  They're researched, but volumes since antiquity have been exhaustively written on the subject. 

If you're interested try some Karl Popper's Science, Pseudoscience and Falsifiability, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (free ePub here), Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Amazon), or Hofstadter's Gödel Escher Bach (Amazon).

What is Science?

Science comes from scientia, one of a few Latin words meaning knowledge. And for a long time, it meant simply that: knowledge of a specific subject.  It's still used in this sense today for terms like political science, or library science.  What we commonly know as science today was referred to as natural philosophy until the 19^th century or so.  It is a study of nature, in a particular systematic way.

What is nature?  Anything that can be sensed. Knowledge obtained through our senses is called empirical knowledge. Hypothesizing that the universe is just a dream a butterfly is having is something that one cannot (presumably) test using our five senses.  Thus it lies beyond the ken of science and in the realm of the supernatural or, in philosophy, metaphysics.

Famed physicist Richard Feynman said "The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific 'truth'."  Karl Popper summed the whole enchilada up nicely as "trial and error."

Gratuitous lol catz.

Mathematics is not science.  It is not concerned with nature (i.e. empirical knowledge).  It is a language; a very specific and remarkably beautiful language, but a language all the same.  Numbers have no existence outside our thoughts.  Same for logic.  They are languages often used to communicate science.

When I refer to science I'm also talking about the scientific method.  Very basically it involves forming a hypothesis, predicting an outcome based on the hypothesis and then devising an experiment to test it.  The experiment should be designed to try to falsify the hypothesis.  You're actually aiming for a fail.

Experiment is empirical, reproducible and measurable observation conducted in a controlled ("objective") manner and devised to disprove the hypothesis.  

Science involves three kinds of inference (and this is disputed to, but we'll accept them here for the sake of the argument).

Abduction:      Guessing; think of the old game Twenty Questions.  This is the source of the hypothesis.

Induction:         Induction involves developing general statements based on specific knowledge.  For instance "The sun always rises" is induction.  We make this general statement based on the empirical knowledge that it has always risen before.

Deduction:        Making specific findings based on a general premise.  For instance:
Premise:      All elevator music sucks
Observation:  Tool does not suck.
Conclusion:   Tool is not elevator music.

An example of deduction.

What is Faith?

Faith, of course, can have many definitions, but for the sake of the argument here faith is an unwarranted certainty of truth.  It is acceptance of something as absolutely true without supporting evidence actually,  even in the face of opposing evidence.

I've never heard of anyone describing it in these terms, but I'm going to define belief as faith-lite.  Something that you think, on the balance of probabilities, will be true without rational reason for doing so.  


Belief is the expectation of truth; faith is the certainty of truth.

There is no certainty in science.  It is based, ultimately, of empirical knowledge, and the knowledge provided to us through our senses is incomplete because our senses are imperfect.  If there was any doubt of that before, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, among others, put that to rest.  Well there is still some uncertainty; this is science after all.

People of religious faith may argue that faith comprises more than a simple acceptance of an unverified truth.  Faith can also mean trust in moral goodness, or a connection to a transcendental reality or Supreme Being, ort a means to enlightenment.  We'll examine these different aspects of faith a little later.

OK with that out of the way, onto the argument:  Does science require faith?

Does Science Require Faith? Part the First

If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our present thoughts are mere accidents -- the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else's. But if their thoughts -- i.e., Materialism and Astronomy -- are mere accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true    

  -- C.S. Lewis

A friend of mine, Justin, posed a challenge to me back in engineering school twenty years ago that I'm still trying to figure out.  I don't see why anyone who would pose a question so vexing that it still keeps me up at night decades later should be considered a "friend" but there you have it. 

I was quite self-satisfied with myself back then, having read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and The Tao of Physics, and was expounding, I believe, on the idea that god could and would be derived through mathematics.  Most people just ran away or stood there nodding dumbly as I dropped words like "quantum entanglement" and "implicate order."  But not Justin.  Noooo.  Justin has a nasty habit of running amok in the serenity of one's spiritual garden, trampling the rose bushes and rummaging through the fountains for spare change, so to speak.

He slowly, and with (this made it worse) absolutely no malice, deconstructed my notion of some uber-rational argument for the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent being.  He pointed out in agonizing detail how my theory was exactly like taking a bunch of cool-sounding quantum buzzwords, throwing them in a blender and hitting Frappé. He  methodically went through my argument demonstrating where I had made my many unwarranted leaps; that my entire argument was ultimately sustained by a simple act of faith in how I thought things were.  At least I think that's what he said.  I might have been drunk at the time.

I staggered out of there like Pee Wee Herman after five  rounds with Mike Tyson. 

He was right about my theory. I couldn’t even understand a Schrödinger wave equation, so I shouldn't have been bandying about graduate level quantum concepts like the Swedish Chef mixing up a batch of meatballs.

Esh moom der hurly impleekat odor bork der bork

But that's not what bugged me. Justin wasn’t trying to disparage my argument because it was faith-based.  On the contrary, his point of view was--and still is, as far as I know--that science is faith-based, that it ultimately depends on accepted yet unwarranted assumptions.  Something about turtles; you'd have to ask him.  He was merely trying to demonstrate this point to me.  Anyways, that was twenty years ago, and it still keeps me up nights.

Does science require faith?

I was hoping for an easy answer, but, as someone once quipped, "Truth lies at the bottom of a bottomless pit." 

You have to differentiate, to start with, between knowledge and belief.  What exactly is knowledge?  Is knowledge truth?  Is faith the expectation of truth?  What is truth? Now you can see why I've been working on this so long.

In search of that answer I've been many rabbit holes and visited many wonderlands.  However, I finally have an answer and the answer is...

I've metaphorically hacked my way through dense jungle, forded torrential rivers, and climbed the iciest spires, through the stark pinnacles of human thought and imagination. At last I travelled the Path of Enlightenment to reach the verdant Valley of Truth. Guess who beat me to it?  This guy.

Seriously, I have no answer but it's been such a wonderful journey that I stopped looking for one. That's the thing about enlightenment.  To reach it you have to let go, but once you let go, you lose all desire to reach.

Over the next few Mindfingers posts I'm going to examine the issue a little, roughly defining what I mean by science and faith, seeing what other folks have said, looking at deductive and inductive reasoning, articulating a bit on what knowledge and belief are, and then wrapping it all up in a tortilla, slapping some salsa onthat baby, and down the hatch!  It will probably the most boring thing you've ever read.  Just so you know.

For a warm-up, here's an old riddler that epistemologists (philosophers who study knowledge) like to throw out at parties, if they were ever to get invited to one.

You have a guy with no senses.  He's blind, deaf, can't smell or taste, and can feel nothing at all.  You somehow manage to keep this guy alive until he's 21.  The questions:  Does he have a thought in his head, and if so, what is that thought?

(a)    No thought at all; his mind is a blank slate

(b)    One thought:  "Boy, am I ever screwed."

(c)    We are born with certain a priori frameworks that provide context for the input of our senses, such as a sense of time and space, so he would sense those.

(d)    That question is moot.  Any thought or non-thought is ultimately unknowable to us, and therefore just an exercise in pure speculation.

(e)    other.

Interested to hear your answers.

But enough about me, what do YOU think about me?

Out of the basement

And into your brain.

     -- Blood Clot

I've just realized that I've been blogging away for some time now without ever discussing my favourite subject: me.  As many of you know, I can go on about me for hours.  The subject is just an endless source of fascination for me.  Many's the time, in days of yore, I'd hold entire kitchen parties spellbound with tales of me.

Boring, compared to me.

Most of you probably know me a the piano player from Skystone from all those years reeling off Newfie tunes at the old Trap and Gill in downtown Vancouver, but I'm actually primarily a guitar man. 

I sang and played guitar for a few years with Blood Clot ("Out of the Basement and Into Your Brain"), with my good friends Shayne MacDonald, Corey MacDonald and Dan Jamieson but unfortunately (or fortunately) that was in the Dark Ages before YouTube so no record exists.

Around 1995, Blood Clot was in some Battle of the Bands at the World Famous Astoria Hotel on Hastings Street (aka Skid Row) in Vancouver.  We were pretty loud and the regulars complained that it made the dust rain from the rotting acoustic ceiling tiles when we played.  S'OK though we'd always buy 'em more beer.  Then they loved us.

Cheap TVs in the parking lot, but you didn't hear it from me.

One time one of the ladies of the night working the area staggers into the joint and stops in the middle of the dance floor, stares up at us, and starts grooving. The bouncer ran up to throw her out. "What?" she complained, "I fixed outside."  Little did she realize the needle was still sticking out of her leg.  Good times. 

Blood Clot was a pretty good band, and might have made a name for ourselves if any of us had have been born with a motivation bone. As it was, I quit the band when I realized even the drummer was getting laid more than me.  That's what I said.  The drummer.  I know, right?


Here's the Blood Clot song "Rage" (audio only).  I'm not that angry anymore.  Really.

After the Clot, there was the insanity the depression, the booze, the women, the stark nights of terror, before joining Skystone through my good buddy Adrian Duncan.  Adrian Duncan is a fascinating fellow and one of the most incredible musicians I've had the pleasure to play with. But as we are talking about me, we shall dispense with the subject of Adrian.  I switched to mostly piano with this band, figuring was that a piano player should get laid more than a drummer.


Anyways the hard thing about Skystone was that, despite playing two instruments--piano and guitar--I was still the worst musician in the band.  Adrian plays about ten instruments, sings, conducts, entertains the crowd and has forgotten more songs than I'll ever know.  Saul Schneider and Mary Brunner bring the house down with their fiddling.  Gary Kennedy was a percussionist extraordinaire and had a kickass R&B voice.  Even the bass player had me beat.  Kenny Ogilvie didn’t sing, didn't play any other instruments, and pretty much just stood there like a mannequin.  But I've been playing with the guy for more than ten years now and I swear he's never hit a bad note.  Anyways, clearly I couldn't stay in a band where my inherent magnificence was not immediately recognizable.  

Skystone.  This drummer got laid more than me too.

So me and my good buddy Adrian started up a caving band wiht buddy Pete Curtis called Dangeous Dick and the Duckbusters.

We met jamming in Resonance Cave, Vancouver Island.

We are probably, it must be said, the most famous ever band that sings songs exclusively about caves.  Probably, it must be said, the only band that sings songs exclusively about caves.  Also, since the band has no drummer, the drummer doesn't get laid more than me.  Ha!

Dangerous Dick and the Duckbusters.  Adrian Duncan on the right.

Me doing a bubblehead.  This is the kind of stuff you have to do when you got no talent.

Here's one of favourite Dangerous Dick tunes.  Snappy little number featuring Adrian on madnolin and banjo.  And bass.  And singing.  Dammit, Adrian, am I even on this one?  

	Dangerous Dick & the Duckbusters - Mole in a Hole .mp3
	Found at bee mp3 search engine

We've got three CDs under our belt so far and have played internationally (and by internationally, I mean an hour's drive south of the border in Bellingham.  Still counts though. You can buy our CDs at the Cancaver website.  All proceeds to the Canadain Cave Conservancy.


I've had the pleasure of jamming with so many great friends over the years, and I'm looking forward to many more years of jamming.  Maybe even with my kids. Like Bach.  He had like fifteen kids and they'd all jam.

Jamming with good friends Yo Thornton (harp), Derek Miller (drums) and some dude from The Odds.
A great memory.

Sucks that I can't play over here though.  One of the magical things about music is its ability to bring people together.  I'm sure if we cranked some Judas Priest, those Taliban would throw down there arms and start giving 'er one of these...

Richard Simmons rocking the frizz-cut.  Oops, I mean Ronnie James Dio

When I get back from Afghanistan, as a gift to myself, I'm buying myself a Gibson ES-335

Alex Lifeson of Rush, playing a 1976 Gibson ES-335.
Still love all those Rush songs...that Geddy doesn't sing in.

But enough about me, what do you think about me?  Feel free to provide comments about me below.