The Pillar Biter
Drilling company or two-word review by aliens?
Fall
Ever wondered where the name Purolator came from?
If you are Canadian, the name Purolator is probably a familiar one — and possibly even if you are American, but for a different reason. For those who don’t know, it’s the name of a Canadian courier company, which is now majority owned by Canada Post. For some reason I started wondering where the name came from, since it’s kind of an odd word, so I looked it up, and it was originally the name of an American company that made oil filters (apparently it was supposed to be a contraction of the phrase “pure oil later” or something like that). The founders of the company invented the first commercially available oil filter in the 1920s. It still exists but it is a subsidiary of a German industrial supply company now.
For some reason, Purolator decided to buy a Canadian package delivery company called Trans Canada Couriers in 1967 (maybe it seemed like an extension of the oil filter business because they use a lot of trucks?) and they renamed it Purolator, even though it had nothing to do with the oil filter business. In 1987 the package company was bought by Canadian investors — and eventually wound up being acquired by Canada Post — but they decided to keep the name. Pretty glad I looked it up, because I love weird corporate stories like that! Like Nokia, for example, which started out running pulp mills and making rubber, and Nintendo which was founded as a maker of playing cards in the late 1800s.
Golden hour
It’s almost always the cocaine
Andre the Giant
Punch predicted cellphones
Saying the F word
Kayaking on Lake Rousseau
We happened to be up in Muskoka recently, visiting a friend who lives near Lake Rousseau, so I brought my kayaks and went out for a paddle with a friend who is getting back into kayaking. It was a perfect day for it — warm (around 19 Celsius) and sunny, with hardly any waves at all. So we set out from the public boat launch on the east side of the lake near the highway and spent a great couple of hours paddling around and chatting. Like a lot of Muskoka, Lake Rousseau is a combination of multimillion-dollar “cottages” — the kind with three fireplaces and a boathouse with four bays — and tiny old shacks like the kind that used to populate the lake before the rich people came 🙂 unfortunately we couldn’t wave to Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn because they apparently sold their place recently.
A hilarious coda to this story: I was so busy chatting with my friend as we were packing up at the end of the paddle that I forgot to tie the kayaks onto the car, and we drove away and made it about half a mile before one of the kayaks flew off the top of the car. Luckily it didn’t hit anyone driving behind us, and it didn’t wind up in the road — in fact, at first we couldn’t find it! We walked up and down the highway looking in the bushes and finally someone who owns a house right on the highway noticed us wandering around her property and found it lying in some underbrush!
It was a little banged up, but I bought plastic ones for a reason — not because I thought one would fly off the car, but because they get dropped on rocks and pulled across roots etc. and I didn’t want to have to worry about damaging it. There’s a dent in the kayak where I assume it hit the road and it is scraped up, and there appears to be a small pea-sized hole where it hit a rock or something, but I figure I can epoxy that pretty easily. And my friend got a cheap lesson in paying attention when you are supposed to be tying your kayaks onto your car! So it was a win-win IMO.
Baby rainbow tripod fish
A shaved alpaca
How to save your medals
Colours
A biologist told me once that in the fall, the trees that are under the most stress produce the most beautiful colours, and I feel like that’s a metaphor for something but I haven’t figured out what yet
Can’t oppress people elsewhere? Oppress people at home!
I realize this probably isn’t a penetrating insight unique to me, but I’ve come to the conclusion that what Donald Trump and the right-wing machine that supports him really want is to be seen as strong and powerful, like the US is supposed to be in the comic-book version of US history these people are fond of. The easiest way to achieve this is to throw your weight around oppressing people while rationalizing this oppression as a fight for freedom and justice, and the quickest and most obvious way to do this is to declare war on someone and then bomb them back into the Stone Age.
There is no obvious opportunity to do this, however — someone is already doing it in Gaza, for example, and in Ukraine, and Russia and China are too big a target. So the next best thing is to oppress your own people! All you have to do is find — or better yet, create — enemies within, a strategy that has worked very well for plenty of dictators in the past. Invent a reason why they are bad, hold them up as an example, imprison or rendition them, and brag about the result. And it seems that some proportion of the US population is more than willing to accept this as a substitute for real strength.