No time to write much, so I'll make this quick. You know when you have an interaction with somebody out there and then replay it in your mind, thinking of the things you might have said or done differently? Well, the magic of video editing is allowing me to go back in time and remake such interactions for myself. I have got to say it was super fun and I hope more opportunities to do this come along.
Hi all, long time no write! I thought I was back in the swing with that little spate of posts in July, but I guess not! I'm not ever gonna write anything about my posting frequency or the difficulties of writing regularly or any of that from now on. Have I said that before? Well, this time I mean it, because if you're here you are awesome and don't need me wasting your time talking about this stuff for one more damn second.
Mrs. Rantwick and I got away for a bit on our own recently, staying in a cabin with a max occupancy of 2 in a fine National Park that you can only access by boat. Not 1 car on the island. Staff drove those John Deere gator things, but its not like they we were buzzing around all the time. It totally jacked up the peaceful quotient; no exhuast, no engine noise and even visually no chrome or metal or headlights junking up our surroundings.
We rode bikes and hiked pretty hard in our short time there, and saw an honest-to-god rattle snake! There is only one poisonous snake to be found in my fair province of Ontario, the Massasauga rattler. One of these guys rattled at us from beside the trail while we were walking our bikes through some deep sand. We stopped and I grabbed a little video from a safe distance:
Hah! That was fun. I love snakes. I know many others hate 'em. See ya soon, I hope!
I used to think the Royal Canadian Mint was a kind of cool institution. I imagined serious, expert engravers and artists crafting collector and circulation coins that would have real cultural meaning to Canadians.
Apparently American cartoons now fit that description.
When I first saw that ad I thought it must be some kind of sneaky poser mint pretending to be the Real mint. Not so. The Real mint has gone into the cheesy licensed image collector coin business. I don't know why this seems like a betrayal to me, but it really does. I have no doubt that the Mint employs many wonderful people with very well developed artistic, historical and cultural sensibilities. If this kind of crap pains me as a proud Canadian, I can only imagine what it is doing to them. I guess I should be glad the Canadian mint isn't doing Disney Princess coins. They're just reselling the New Zealand mint's Disney Princess Coins:
Is this what the producers of legal currency around the world have come to? For God's sake, why? I mean, WHY? AAARRGGHH! Are You #%^1n' Kiddin' Me?
Yer Pal,
R A N T W I C K PS - I sure didn't think so, but I guess there's a chance that the Mint has been involved in this kind of thing for decades. If so, it doesn't make it any less repugnant to me. PPS - Now I see that thanks to my searching on the topic to see if anyone else was incensed, there's an ad on my site (I don't exactly pick 'em) to go buy one of these damn things! Insult, meet injury and irony. PPS - I feel the need to report that upon typing the words "injury and irony" above, the tune "ebony and ivory" sprung to mind. I am trying to stop myself from composing a full damn word-substitution Weird Al - style "Injury and Irony" song right now. Wish me luck.
The Rantwick clan is going camping next week, for the first time in quite a while. I will not be writing blog posts during that time, but if you're just addicted to the small details of my life I will likely be tweeting pictures of anything cool we come across. There's a Twitter "follow" button in the sidebar if you're so inclined.
We're going to Bruce Peninsula National Park near Tobermory Ontario, so not too far from home. We've been there before but the kids were too little to enjoy the excellent hiking and stuff that's available. Should be awesome.
Before we begin, can we agree that despite terrible over and dare I say ill-use of it, the poem "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost is still really great? Having ill-used it once more in a glancing way with my title, I re-read it for the first time in a long while. You hear it all over the place (i.e. graduation ceremonies), but reading it in print is, for me, so much better. So easily bent to the private emotional purposes of the reader! Ugh. Good stuff. Now, on to your scheduled programming: My stuff, which is of a consistency and quality that most definitely belongs in some other category, preferably a category of its own since it could potentially harm the other words... I can't believe I missed this post from my friend Steve at dfwptp.blogspot.com . It was posted back in February of 2014. It is a good post about our mutual friend kermit, who rides on Steve's handlebars and was on that occasion lost, run over, and found. I had previously written about (and mutated) kermit in a post in 2010, taking this: to this:
Turns out, if you visit Steve's post from 2014 you'll find a link to an image I had no idea existed until just yesterday. It is fantastic, depicting kermit when he is, in Steve's words, Rantwick Mad:
Oh man, he just looks so wrong... He features not only my squinty eye and mouth, but dinosaur head, dripping blood, and claws! It is a fr***kin' masterpiece, yet it was not displayed in the post; it was just hiding under a link! Bravo, Steve, I love it!
That got me to thinking about stuff on this blog that I had assumed just hadn't been of interest or worth comment. Had some things suffered the same fate, hiding under links not taken?
So, I now beg you to follow these links:
Mordecai McBumpanoggin's website. Mordecai was first referenced and his site created for this post, which was written March 2012. Mordecai's site was not directly linked to (other than in the comment sections) until October 2013.
The indie band website for Evil Peace created and linked to in this post from June of 2012. Now, if you had already seen these and just thought, "meh" to yourself, don't tell me that. Instead pretend you didn't see them until now. If it's still a "meh", don't tell me that either. Praise me for how great they are. I mean it. I don't care at all if your praise is sincere; just try to make it seem that way.
Yours In an Ongoing and Inane Quest for Validation,
This Wednesday morning I once again ran across a local cycling group comprised mainly of seniors. The first time was in 2011...
I posted on that encounter here, and explained that I was unable to locate any info on their group after we met, having only been told they were the "Silver Spokes". This time however, the leader told me they were a Huff N' Puff Cycling group, which when I looked into it yielded lots of good info.
The Huff N' Puff Seniors Fitness Association in London Ontario has a large membership and they do all kinds of stuff, not just cycling. I had never heard of them before; these people (at least the cyclists I met) are so nice it makes me almost wish I were old enough to join. I've been an old man at heart for, like, a decade at least anyway. Seriously though, their motto is "Because for us, life is not a spectator sport!" I think that is awesome and I sincerely hope to be that kind of senior when I get there.
I'm not going to post video from this morning, because the 2011 one is better. Today I was overtaking the group, so the video is just the back of a lot of heads and people yelling "bike on the left!"
When it comes to Huff N' Puff & cycling, the best info I could find was in their Spring newsletter, from which I snipped the following:
This seniors group appears to have THREE cycling groups, some of which have a WAITING LIST! I think that is just outstanding, since I think cycling is a great fit for seniors and I hope to do it forever myself.
Also, like I've already said, they do a ton of other stuff
R A N T W I C K 
