Tag: Remembrance Day

A Deadline

She’s Baack!
This gorgeous wooden schooner is a feast for the eye no matter what flavour of boat suits you. She has reappeared since her visit of last summer and was certainly eye-candy to me. (I had a nooner on a schooner with no name!)

A deadline not to be confused with a dead line. That bit of dark humour ran through my brain as I typed the title. I was going to call this “I’ve done it again!” as reference to my second video, just posted in time for Remembrance Day or Memorial Day if you prefer. After completing my first video I decided to see if I could meet the deadline of November eleventh and compose something in respect of that date. Mission accomplished! Here’s the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYLEx5fzbLg&t=8s

Or, go to You Tube and type in: Swoop  Fred Bailey. As it turns out, there are a lot of Fred Bailey dudes on YouTube, all shapes, sizes, ages and colours. Take your pick! My video, I hope, is visibly improved from my first. Please, please, if you see any hope in my effort, look for the thumbs up icon below the YouTube screen and give it a click. I need all the help you can give. I have tons of clips in my archives so there will be more to come. It is a fascinating art form, especially if you go at it self-taught. GAWD! But this cyber-neanderthal is determined to master videography. What I need now is a proper video camera. So far I’ve been using DSLRs, my mobile phone, and cheap action cams. I regret not diving into this discipline before computers came along and wonder at some of the brilliant work done on celluloid. Older short films and full length movies are especially amazing when you consider the considerable skill that went into making them.

My video muse is a good friend named Pär Domeij. His videos are what I aspire to and are of superb quality, flawless and award-worthy in every way. Coddiwomple is his latest masterpiece. Here’s that link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmM2a1CPjd0

If you don’t want to come sailing on the West Coast after seeing this….well real estate is still cheap in Donkey Shin Kansas or wherever it is you choose to live as far from the ocean as possible. And, I suppose, someone has to grow the wheat to make sea biscuits!

On a final note about film-making I’ve discovered a beauty this week called Fauve. You can find it on Twisted Sifter or Vimeo or simply by googling up the name. It is filmed in Quebec in real time, in real places with real people and is one of the most brilliantly made short films I’ve ever seen. This award winner is poignant, it does not have a happy ending but it is beautifully acted by two young boys and is perhaps an oblique consideration, in regard to today’s date, of how we seduce young men into going to war to die for someone else’s ambition. They have a sense of being invincible. By the way, if you are a short film junkie like me, one more film to google up is called Room 8.

Here are some still photos taken locally in the past few days. We have had spectacular weather this autumn and still, nearing the middle of November, we enjoy intermittent hours of soft, golden sunlight. I’m trying to enjoy it while it lasts because, as we all know, good weather is never, never paid for in advance. See you in the movies.

Boo Rex! Just a plastic toy, right? I was panning a film shot when this apparition appeared in the corner of my eye. It scared my witless for a moment. Kudus to someone’s great sense of humour!
It came from a crack in the wall. Not until I was editing this grab shot did I notice the spots of light in the darkest bit. I had to add a touch of green to them!
Roberts Street Pizza…and Sunflowers. This was growing in front of the colourful facade of the local pizza shop. Some of the best “bad for me” food ever!
Some days, in some places, with a certain light, you just can’t go wrong.
The last rose of summer. There is always a special beauty in a faded flower.
CLOSED!
This monstrous padlock appears to be the real thing. It secures the gate to a lovely outdoor dining area beside Roberts Street Pizza in Ladysmith
You gotta look up, and down. There is so much we look at and don’t see. This slug was enjoying the afternoon sun in the shelter of a tree root. If you click to enlarge and look carefully, there is a tiny fly piggy-backing the mother critter.
Beauty in miniature. Rain drops on a spider web.
A river grave. Nestled on a bank of the Chemainus River this appears to be where someone has interred the ashes of a wife and mother. It is beautiful and peaceful. Note the bark owls nailed to the tree above the memorial plaque.
Surface tension. I think summer’s over Dorothy!
Reflections of summers passed and children grown up.
There was a secret world at the far end of the tunnel. It might not be much better but it was upstream.
Actually, it’s a massive culvert beneath our main island highway, it has resting blocks for spawning salmon to rest behind. They also raise the water level for fish and provide handy stepping stones should you want to go tunnel-trekking.
More logs for Asia. A tug delivers logs to a freighter standing-off in Ladysmith Harbour. NO COMMENT!
AVAST YE SWABS! This bronze statue is an effigy of Frank Ney aka Black Frank. He was mayor of Nanaimo for many years, intrepid realtor, and father of the now world-famous annual Bathtub Race. There is some disgruntlement that he was not placed facing the water but it was was reckoned that tourists wanted their mug shots taken with a harbour background and not with Frank’s arse in the scene! Haar! I think the six feathers in his cap are a means of keeping birds from perching and pooping on his fizzog.

“ The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.” … Ralph Waldo Emerson