Done

Closing the blog on that note.

Words

Martin Streek

Contrary to what it may seem...I've never blogged under the influence before,

but tonight is an exception.


I'm under the influence of the memory of working, albeit indirectly, with Martin Streek.

I was never a club goer in Downtown T.O. but nevertheless I worked with Martin for 5 years at
CFNY, more commonly known as 102.1 The Edge.

cause everyone has a little edge in them.

And Martin, certainly had the edge in him.

He was heard by thousands every week, and energized those around him.

Martin. You were a good soul in a corporate world.

You gave far more, to so many people, than you could ever receive, or know.

And likely gave, because you knew the need to give.

But were not adequately appreciated for all that all you always gave.

And you gave in spades.

What kills is...

seeing what looks like a lack of vision, of your own creative capability, of your future,

of life itself,

and all it's endless possibilities,

and all that newness yet to be discovered, seen, known, and felt.

In that kind of moment,

in these kind of days,

at this kind of time,

might have been enough,

to make you feel you what you clearly felt,

was the only answer.


I say felt, because it is a sensitive soul who feels these things so profoundly.


You are not alone despite all you may have felt.


These are the times that tries men's souls.


Your loss is greater than you individually.

Though as an individual - you were lovely, and a serious loss.

Your loss is for everyone who remains.


The key is to find that new way.

That is always the purpose of life.

Despite or in spite of it all.

Especially when one cannot see their way through, or in it,

at the time they most cannot - that's when it is most key.


Martin, you were the consummate professional to have worked with.

You were a generous soul.

You were a charming soul.

You were a warm, and loving, and inclusive soul.

You were a deep soul who felt greatly, loved greatly, and knew far more than was ever articulated.

Your influence will be missed. Your energy will be missed.

You will be missed.

But you will be remembered by those who knew you, and who remain.

I guess that's how we live on.

Love to you...



Be at peace.

Sport of Kings and Queens-with-Plates to give away, and Leopards oh my!

Man's exploitative use of the horse has been ongoing, in every culture on earth, since 4500 BC.

Ah yes...Exploitative Man (which came immediately after prehistoric man), millennia and horse....
Where would any of us be without the trusty steed to have gallantly brought us to the wincing days of the V8 Mustang GT?

If we look back, it was somewhere in all that evolving of going from nomadic to an agriculturally inclined people...and all that sitting cross legged waiting around for the crops to take root and grow, man found he suddenly had some extra recreational time on his hands....add to that manure mix, annoying neighbours!

Notice how the term never came to be "yeabours"...no? Ever wonder why? Cause they make us whinny, and snort, and scoff, and shake our heads, and neigh at them as soon as we round the corner of our purposely built blocking buildings.

So it wasn't long before aggravated-cultural-neighbour-man-challenged-neighbour, to see who indeed had the stronger steed, who's horse was the most loyal to it's owner and would go the extra mile, or die trying, not to let it's master down.....with the horse knowing full well he'd probably get a thrashing once back in the barn, if it didn't out perform & outrun a comet in front of everyone, when reputations and high stakes are riding on it most.

Thus the horse race of testosterone stetsonhood was likely born.

Don't quote me, I may be having a Farley Mowat moment with my historical info.

But I bet you $20 on a 2-1 I'm not far off.

To gallop through the years at breakneck speed...

Genghis Khan [aka: Temüjin], Alexander-the-debateable-great, Joan of Arc, everyone who ever competed in all those Greek and Roman smash 'em crash em up chariot races, the Knights who say Ni...no wait, they only had coconuts for horses, but there were those who came back from those pillaging crusades with shiny sleek new preowned Arabian horses, which made their dowdy old frumpy lumpy saggy back droopy eyed English horses (who looked that way cause they knew damn well how depressing 364 days of unrelenting rain was) look a bit portly and peely wally, which reminds me...there was also John Wayne.

So, there it is.

Everyone who was anyone rode into history on horseback.

Like the guy who was on Eye Of The Leopard today at the 150th Queen's Plate at Woodbine Race track Toronto.

That horse ought to be eating off the fine china from Queen Elizabeth's very own dining room hutch and sitting at her table, for being at the top of his game today.

All the Kings horses and all the concerted efforts, from prehistoric man right up to today's exploitative man can sit back and simply chew in their feed bag knowing that's one more natural damn-hard-day in the life of a horse done.

Congratulations to Eye of the Leopard for devastating my Milwaukee Appeal choice into a state of on-the-track-ennui which resulted in third place race for him...poor wee colt will get a thrashing tonight even if it's only a tongue lashing thrashing - but not by me!!!!

I just hope these gorgeous animals are treated far better than royalty is. Every single day of the year, throughout their entire lives.

They are utterly regal, elegant and stunning. And humbling to watch go full out.
Nothing like raw natural thunderous power to stir the senses.

The appeal is real.

My only appeal would be that they, along with every animal species that have somehow managed to exist with exploitative man, is appreciated, loved, respected and taken care of.

We hardly deserve the beauty that exists.

But what a sight when we see it !

Horses Without Carriages

Did you know that June 6, 2009 is the Global Day to End the use of Carriage Horses?

Well now you do.

"Horses Without Carriages International" will hold a Global Day. In addition to Toronto, many other cities will be participating, including Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, Montreal, Belgrade, Rome, Vienna, Tel Aviv.

The goal to secure a win for animals everywhere, by animal lovers everywhere.

In New York City Alec Baldwin, Pink, Rosie O'Donnel, Rhue McClanahan, and Betty White will be up in hooves and have agreed to join in, to speak up for the horses, who would also be up in hooves, but are slaving away in the tourist trade.

It is for we tourists horses labour...and put at jeopardy everyday.

For more information, and some awful images of the carnage the carriage trade causes, please go to:

http://horseswithoutcarriages.org/

Some facts about New York City's Horse-Drawn Carriage Trade.....

• There are (5) major stables that are involved in the horse carriage industry. They are all on the far west side of Manhattan from 37th St. to 52nd St around 11th and 12th Avenue.
  
• 1. Bryne Stable - 547 West 37 Street
• 2. Westside Livery - 538 West 38 Street
• 3. Shamrock Stable - 522 West 45 Street
• 4. Chateau Farms - 608 West 48 Street
• 5. Clinton Park - 618 West 52 Street

• To get to work, horse carriages generally travel up 10th Avenue to the Central Park area, which begins at 59th St., and return to the stables by 9th Avenue. There are two hospitals in this area – St. Vincent’s Midtown and Roosevelt Hospital. The entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel is at 37-38th St.; there are several entrances to the West Side Highway in this area.

• There are no restrictions as to when horse carriages can travel to and from the park. Unlike Local Law 89, which expired in 1993, carriages may travel during rush hour.

• There are 68 carriage horse medallions or licenses -- one per cab.

• There are over 200 horses – according to an October 2005 list from the Department of Health.

• There are approximately 350 carriage drivers in the industry – according to the NY Post – January 2006

• In 1982 there were 141 carriage drivers. In 1993, there were 296 … Peggy Parker testimony before City Council committee – 11/29/93

• Most of the stables house horses on different levels, accessed by steep ramps.

• Most of the stables do not have adequate fire protection and are not required to have sprinkler systems.

• Most of the stables have stalls too small for a horse to turn around comfortably or to lie down.

• The average working life for a NYC carriage horse is 4 years – compared to 14-15 years for a NYC police horse – according to research by the Carriage Horse Action Committee.

• According to current legislation - Horses may not be worked when the temperature is 90 degrees or more, nor when it is 18 or below. There is no consideration for humidity index or wind chill factor.

• The law requires the ASPCA Humane Law Enforcement Officers to order the drivers to return to their stables when the above temperatures are reached. The drivers do not have to return on their own volition since it is the ASPCA officers who have access to the thermometer.

• “Manhattan asphalt [street] temperatures reach - well over 200 degrees – hot enough to melt asphalt.” NYTimes 7/29/89 – quote by then Commissioner of Department of Transportation.

• When the sum of ambient temperature (Fahrenheit) and relative humidity exceeds 150 (especially if humidity contributes more than half the sum) the evaporative cooling mechanism by sweating is severely compromised. (published in Equine Exercise Physiology - 9/22/82

• According to current legislation - Each horse can work up to nine hours in any 24 hour period. A horse can be worked every day according to the law.

Horses are kept standing for extended periods of time on hot asphalt without shade. There is no shade on Central Park South on the hack line. Boredom is just one of the feelings these horses experience.

In An Instant

Everything can change in an instant.

Everyone knows this.

But when such an instant happens

even if you just happen to witness an instant happen to someone you don't even know

it stops you in your tracks. Today I was stopped in my tracks.

And your heart goes out.

Because we will all have instances. Moments you can do nothing about, but are on the road of,

but you don't know it, nor can you alter the course of it.

An instant was all it took.

I just so happened to cast my eyes to my driver side door mirror
and saw the whole instant happen.

Then I heard my instant fear confirmed.

Then it got worse.

Which made me pull the car over and run back knowing I can't do anything, but I was just as stopped
as the poor innocent guy lying face down, not moving in the middle of the road.

Everything was moving along as normal as ever. Everyone going about their Thursday, pre-long weekend business
in the warm 5:30 pm sunshine.

The guy on the motorcycle who had just passed me was humming along perfectly, I don't know why I even cast my eyes down to my driver side mirror, but there he was simply continuing on

then I saw the full side length of a black car suddenly in front of him

but because of the distance I couldn't tell if the car was 5 feet in front of him, or 25 feet in front of him, or if the car had just jutted out of a street without looking, or if it was parked and just did a u-turn to go in the opposite direction.

But we all heard the guy on the motorcycle hit the brakes.

Then hit the car.

He, and bike parts, and glass, and everything was air bound.

Then he landed sprawled face down on the road.

Then the bike landed on him.

Gas leaked everywhere.

Everyone.

All of us who were going about our business stopped as instantly as he did.

Everything just stopped.

That instant was felt and shared and attended to by everyone there.

How could one not?

Poor guy.

It wasn't his fault.

It was particularly bad.

Motorcycle accidents generally are bad.

But this was genuinely bad.

I know this happens everyday, but there was just something about that instant.

I hope he will be okay.

But some instances are indefinite.

The Butterfly Effect

The "butterfly effect", and term, is the work of Edward Lorenz,
and is based in Chaos Theory and sensitive dependence on initial conditions,
first described in the literature by Jacques Hadamard in 1890.

The idea that one butterfly could eventually have a far-reaching ripple effect on subsequent historic events seems first to have appeared in a 1952 short story by Ray Bradbury about time travel, but it was Lorenz
who made the term popular in 1961.

Lorenz was using a numerical computer model to rerun a weather prediction, when, he shortcut on a number in the sequence, and entered .506 instead of entering the full .506127 number the computer would hold.

The result was a completely different weather scenario.

Which caused quite a flap.

Lorenz published his findings in a 1963 paper for the New York Academy of Sciences and he noted;
"One meteorologist remarked that if the theory were correct, one flap of a seagull's wings could change the course of weather forever.". In later speeches and papers by Lorenz used the more poetic butterfly.

According to the actual theory, if history could be "changed" at all (so that one is not invoking something like the Novikov self- consistency principle which would ensure a fixed self-consistent timeline), the mere presence of the time travelers in the past would be enough to change short-term events and would also have an unpredictable
impact on the distant future.

Therefore, if one could travel into the past, they could never return to the same version of reality he or she had come from and could have therefore not been able to travel back in time in the first place, which would create a phenomenon referred to as a time paradox.

Chaos theory describes the behavior of certain dynamic systems – systems whose states evolve with time – that may exhibit dynamics that are highly sensitive to initial conditions

Chaotic behavior is also observed in natural systems, such as the weather...politics and the economy.

This may be explained by a chaos-theoretical analysis of a mathematical model of such a system, embodying the laws of physics that are relevant for the natural system.Turbulence in the tip vortex from an airplane wing shows the critical point beyond which a system creates turbulence which is important for Chaos theory, analyzed by Soviet physicist Lev Landau who developed the Landau-Hopf theory of turbulence.

The Chaordic Age, as coined by Dee Hock, refers to a system that blends characteristics of chaos and order.

The mix of chaos and order is described as a harmonious coexistence displaying characteristics of both, with neither chaos nor order behaving predominately. Some maintain that nature, and the universe, is largely organized in such a Chaordic manner; particularly, living organisms and the evolutionary process by which they arose are often described as chaordic in nature.

oh the chaordic turbulence we unwittingly incur.