Emptybottle.org: Recent Comments

Comment on "Hockey! It's A Sport!"

Mon, 18 May 2009 07:27:10 +0900

I dunno-- you and your subtlety. You'll be the death of all that's good and fine about this country yet.

Comment on "Hockey! It's A Sport!"

Fri, 08 May 2009 05:44:36 +0900

Monstah! One day you should take in a game at GM Place: I mean, I used to play in a Metal band, but @#$%! it's loud in there. I long for the days of the 'nucks duking it out in the Coliseum where only the sound of skates on ice could be heard above the general feelings of frustration and disappointment emanating from the audience.

- Rocco

Comment on "My Home Is Dying"

Wed, 06 May 2009 00:48:27 +0900

Great blog. This well-written and well-researched article has opened my eyes on some aspects that I completely ignored. Well done. Will be sure to return!

- Jenny@ Garden Landscaping

Comment on "The Ape and The Snake"

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 08:00:58 +0900

My condolences on the loss of your friend and I understand your position. However, you have to understand that the execution of these terrorists was not carried out to avenge your friend, or the other victims, rather it was done to for the benefit of society as a whole. Don't misunderstand me, I agree that we as civilized people must take a step towards the future and regard all life as sacrosanct; perhaps it will be so in a not so distant future. But we are creatures of the past and the present, therefore we must exist in a time in which we have to use barbarity as a deterrent to those who violate the laws which have been passed. If those laws decree life to be forfeit under certain circumstances that it will be so. Hell, I live in Texas, and it isn't April yet and we've executed the 7th prisoner! Death has to be not only a deterrent, but a means of removing the most vile elements of our society.

I have a divided house on the death penalty issue, so it is not uncommon for us to talk about this subject. I value the right to life of any human, born or unborn, but I must say that the capacity to forgive and let live diminishes when one is personally affected. Ultimately, it is the right of a civilized society, and the voice of the majority in a republic, to decide the fate of the worst criminals.

I wonder if a lifetime incarceration is a more conscionable punishment? No, in cases such as this, where the murder of innocents is wholesale or without regard for humanity, death is the only way to rid us of evil men.

- Qen BirQeni

Comment on "The Ape and The Snake"

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 16:50:06 +0900

I had an almost identical experience with a snake when I was younger. My friend Brendan and I found a harmless black snake bathing in the sun on his stone front steps and we ran to the garage, grabbed hockey sticks and viciously hacked it to bits in a fit of fear, excitement, and horror. His dad came running as we were just finishing and grabbed the hockey sticks from our hands. His looks was one of utter horror and sadness. I'll never forget it. I wonder how many others have had similar experiences.

- Charles

Comment on "My Home Is Dying"

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 16:17:39 +0900

Wonderchicken, JSB here, first time reader & poster, turned onto your blog by a friend in Shenzhen who I may or may not have ever met in person. Floored. Flabbergasted. Wonderful and dreadful post all at once, I've just returned from Xishuanbana in Yunnan province where I've seen once-verdant hills reduced to what looked like spreading lumps of moose feces thanks to having played host to rubber tree plantations for a few years. I think the thing to remember here is, crude as it sounds, well, fuck it, and I mean this in the best way - Earth Abides (great book, BTW,) and after we're gone, evicted from life due to our own collective stupidity, the earth will still be here (bereft, sadly, of a few hundred or thousand or tens of thousands of species who had the bad luck of sharing our planetary timeline), and in time - which exists in immeasurable abundance once we're not around to measure it - will heal the damage we've done until the earth remembers us the way a million-year old man might remember a case of painful chicken pox he had once for a few days when he was in his mid-20s. Or something like that.

Great Blog. You have new fans in Taiwan. Peace Out.

- Joshua Samuel Brown

Comment on "My Home Is Dying"

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 17:53:39 +0900

Bearman has the most relevant point. As long as we are tied to the U.S. economy, we are screwed! Tied to an economy that owes China how many billion? Tied to an economy that is based on smoke & mirrors. We need asian markets, at least for as long as we live by this market based economy. The american economy is hooped! What we've seen so far is just the beginning. There is an answer... but unfortunately, things will go to hell before changes in the right direction are made. Have a wonderful day, Ko-peh!

- Norm

Comment on "The Ape and The Snake"

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 08:00:39 +0900

i don't have a problem with them paying for their choices with their lives. justice/fairness aside, removing toxic attributes from the gene pool is not a bad idea.

but i DO have a problem with the wider consequences of their punishment being death rather than incarceration.

in a word: martyrdom.

rick and everyone else did not die from these men acting in isolation. they died from the pressure of a meme. and the bombers' deaths only reinforces the meme, and its effects on the far vaster bulk of its surviving influencees.

the bombers' deaths will kill more Ricks.

this is what i see, and despite my rage and desire to hurt as we've been hurt, i can not help but see that today is not forever, today does not stand in splendid isolation. the world is what happens next. and so i mourn the bombers' deaths, not for them, but for others.

- Saltation

Comment on "The Ape and The Snake"

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 04:00:38 +0900

When I heard about the executions, I thought of your friend, and the worry, and sadness you experienced.

As Bearman says, revenge won't bring back your friend, and as you say, how can we condemn violence by using violence.

- Shelley

Comment on "The Ape and The Snake"

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 16:41:34 +0900

We are the product of millions of years of evolutionary pressure to kill or be killed. It's part of us, that whole violence thing. Hockey fights and UFC pay per view and Discovery Channel specials on edged weaponry of the Dark Ages do well for a reason. The sorts of pre-man who thought we were all well and good and sacred and should be left well alone, even if push came to shove has already been bludgeoned to death long ago by one of our ancestors.

Doesn't mean it's the 'right' thing to do, of course. Not sure if sowing the seeds of peace with an M-16 and IED really has staying power, but it's our immediate, easiest to not think about response.

- Niteowl

Comment on "The Ape and The Snake"

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 08:39:55 +0900

When I was a kid one Stuart Lake summer, I remember catching a bucketload of sucker fish. When my cousins said we should kill 'em, I grabbed the bucket, ran to the end of the dock, and poured 'em into the lake, saving the poor little fellas. My feeling of triumph lasted only until they floated to the surface, belly up, dead from the force of hitting the water from six feet up.

I don't feel much at all about these killers being killed. Although it guarantees these particular people won't kill again, killer's are easy to come by. Rick's still dead, nothing's changed in my world. So much of the misery in this world seem to stem from the desire for revenge. I won't play that game.

- bearman

Comment on "The Ape and The Snake"

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 00:47:30 +0900

What I DO remember, cuz, is not the snake, but the bats we flailed about for out by the lake. For me - the smallest - it was more fear and mob mentality I'm sure, but the memory that sticks is that we connected with one of those mosquito-hoovers and though we did (at Grama's behest) give it a proper return to the earth on a fiery pyre - the Northern Lights that night were like nothing I'd ever seen before.
At that age, those Northern Lights were enough to drill home my own cosmic insignificance, as well as somehow instill a fear that the universe would balance the books on the day's carnage. As I've gotten older, I realize that this balance is of course inevitable, but not anywhere near as formulaic or immediate as it could be. There was no giant Monty Python foot about to squash me like a bug as we sat around the campfire that night. It's out there somewhere, though.
I guess I accept that I don't understand the eye-for-an-eye mentality because I also accept that it isn't my equation to write.

- cuz

Comment on "My Home Is Dying"

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 14:30:42 +0900

Beautiful post Stavros, and I'm sorry that you're home town (and other towns) are in such a dire state. If it's any consolation, down here in Tennessee, where I live, pine beetles are devastating our trees as well.

- Joseph A Nagy Jr

Comment on "My Home Is Dying"

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 16:30:15 +0900

Thanks Nicky and thanks everyone. Stay tuned for my next post, sometime in 2009. ;-)

- stavrosthewonderchicken

Comment on "My Home Is Dying"

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 13:30:24 +0900

Dear Stavros,

How beautifully you write! What a moving and informative essay. Thank you. Also a touching and lovely to look at word cloud.

Nicky

- nicky

Comment on "My Home Is Dying"

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 04:57:29 +0900

sucks

on a slightly positive note (that unfortunately might not apply here): the calamitous destruction of vast swathes of england's forest after that monster gale came thru in *ehh* the late 80s? was too big too costly for the government to feasibly replant. much mourning for the huge swathes of unreplanted ex-forest that would no more etc. and so it has been accidentally discovered that the UNreplanted forest regenerated an order of magnitude faster than the replanted stuff.
kew gardens's's new policy re damaged forest is to leave it the hell alone.

i love it when a plant comes together.

- Saltation

Comment on "My Home Is Dying"

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 21:23:47 +0900

Eh. This too shall pass.

- Hieromonk Don Pardo

Comment on "My Home Is Dying"

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 05:36:05 +0900

Very well spoken! I lived 40 miles west of Prince George at Clucultz Lake in a lakeshore cabin from 1971-1974, working as a high-school dropout, in a local sawmill and living "rough" with a wood-stove and no running water, and a classic outhouse...

I shudder to think of the coming firestorm when, inevitably, the standing red/dead-woods ignite one summer, from a bolt of lightening or from some cigar butt dropped by an ass**** American tourist from Florida, travelling in convoy in a string of 40 "Airstream" trailers being towed by a gas-guzzling S.U.V. or Hummer...

If large-scale logging was REALLY sustainable, there'd be no need to import wood to England.. "Sherwood Forest Products" would **still** be a thriving enterprise...

We're all in for some hard-times, and heavy choices!

- David A. Lewis

Comment on "My Home Is Dying"

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 02:09:19 +0900

A few thoughts:

1. I think another reason for the closing down of the mills in the central interior of BC is the poor economy in the US.

2. The people who live there and have worked in the bush as loggers or truckers or in the mills or what have you shouldn't take the blame for the dead forests. No more than the rest of us, anyway, and not as much as the governments and corporations who refused to take a long term view of industry, choosing instead to make as much money as possible in the shortest time. Hopefully this will change the industry for the better here in BC.

3. All the dead wood standing in the forests, waiting to burn, will just add to the climate crisis. There should be smart people with power figuring our way out of this problem, whether it's free toothpicks for the world for life, or a new IKEA factory in Prince George, or a new generation of ultra-efficient wood-burning power plant.. well I'm out of ideas.

4. I've always identified BC as the great outdoors - trees, lakes, mountains, a garden of eden. My garden of eden. It's still awe-inspiring, it really is, but this devestation hits hard. There's a lot of hand-wringing and standing frozen in the path of the headlights right now, I hope we can get moving on some solutions sooner rather than later.

5.Thanks for the words about 'The Fort', Stav! I'm not the special little snowflake I thought I was, our experiences there were so similar. (-: Good writing, mate!

- bearman

Comment on "My Home Is Dying"

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 11:41:14 +0900

Another visitor from The Blue. Thanks for the viewpoint.

My Dad is a professional forester. While attending U of Toronto (early '50s), he worked summers in Prince Rupert, and he's told me some wonderful stories from his summers logging in B.C.

I'm going to send him this link. He hasn't been active in the forest industry for near 30 years, and his involvement was mostly in Northern Ontario. Even so, I wonder whether he saw something like this coming.

Your description of your childhood in Northern B.C. was beautiful. I have many of the same feelings about Northwestern Ontario.

Best regards,

A.C.

- A. Codger