well, it cost me $212.79, which works out to $15.10/book, but it should all be here by monday, with the exception of the complete robot, which should be here within three weeks.

the complete robot was $36, and i got tricked - i had my default address set to the ups store in detroit, which would have been free shipping. i agreed to the transaction, then got dinged on shipping into canada, which ended up as $15. you'll note it would cost me $10 to get back and forth anyways, but i might have found a cheaper seller. this particular text appears to be scarce in canada, but i could have probably taken it down a little. $5-7 or something.

so, if you take that one out, the average is more like $13.65, which is reasonable, considering everything is shipping.

and, the way we'll do this is that i'll have just read through the asimov texts - that will be the starting point of the blog, a total review of the greater foundation series.

yeah. trying to collect these together in windsor is going to mean spending hours sorting through rubbish sales, goodwill donations, flea markets...

it's not like there aren't book stores here, but they're not the type to stock 50 year old paperbacks - they're either the type to stock rare books or the type to stock the kind of pornography that passes for "art" nowadays. if i'm lucky, i'll find a stack of what i'm looking for at the value village; more likely is that i'm going to end up at chapters, anyways.

what i want is one of those big warehouses that i remember from ottawa, but the closest thing to that is detroit, and if i can't get my report to bring to nexus, i can't get over the border. this hasn't been a concern up to this point because it's been too cold to go anywhere anyways, but if i can't get that resolved before spring, i'm going to have a pretty boring summer - as there is absolutely nothing interesting to do in windsor.

again: the longer this carries on for, the stronger my claim for a s. 6 violation is. but, i'd obviously rather have the situation resolved asap.

anyways. looks like i'm buying a few texts new to start with, at least.

.....except that the kind of used book warehouse that i'm looking for doesn't even seem to exist in windsor.

i've walked by a dozen of these things in detroit. if i could get over sooner than later...

and, bizarrely, we're now four days past due on my oiprd report, with absolutely no response at all - despite repeated requests for clarification.

i'm going to have to make some calls tomorrow morning.

asimov and clarke are dead.

king is old and rich.

so, should i be buying physical books in 2019?

well, i still like to hold a book, and part of the point of this is to rebuild the shelf, after years of neglect. i'm not sure that this overpowers the unnecessary environmental effects of actually buying books at this stage in history, though.

i should probably look at this the same way that i look at clothes, and am increasingly looking at cds: i should be looking towards used books almost exclusively.

am i apprehensive about buying used books online? yeah. it's easy to lose a few pages. and, i should also be seeking to minimize transportation costs.

it's been a while since i've hit the used book stores in windsor.

it looks like it may be nice on sunday.

i mean, it goes both ways though, right.

if philpott & jwr are acting like psycho exes seeking revenge for being dumped, trudeau is taking it like the spineless co-dependent that he actually is, and happily allowing himself to be walked all over in the process.

and, if there's any inherent or implied sexism here, it's this - that trudeau still doesn't seem to think they can hurt him.

he doesn't want to engage in a fight with a girl.

if the intent is to let them hang themselves with their own rope, it may work in the long run, but the pmo had best be prepared to expect to incur some more damage, first - because they're not going to go away quietly. they're looking for blood.

because we live in the time of orwell, it might be necessary to change the language - to stop using the term "feminism", which is supposed to mean equality but doesn't any more, and start using the term "egalitarian", just to get the point across that much more clearly.

and, in an egalitarian society, if you're going to act like these women are acting, you're going to need to take some flak for it - you can't demand a free pass for being a girl.

ok, so this is a lot of bullshit, but i'm not going to waste my time ripping it apart.

one has to assume that gerald butts is still presenting the pmo's preferred narrative, so it makes more sense to analyse it in terms of that desired narrative - they are trying to avoid creating a conflict. they're just going to say nice things in public, let them both sit on the backbenches until they got bored, and try and move on without them.

i think this is a big mistake, as these women are clearly both out to inflict maximum damage for being demoted - like your stereotypical psychotic ex-girlfriend that wants revenge for getting roughly dumped. i mean, i agree that the goal should be to move on as quick as possible, but i think they should be rudely removed from caucus, first, to prevent them from causing any more damage.

but, we'll see what happens.

https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/2019/03/06/trudeau-was-warned-wilson-raybould-would-connect-the-cabinet-shuffle-to-snc-lavalin-issue.html

i only have three stephen king books left on my shelf.

1) the tommyknockers
2) the bachman books (rage, the long walk, roadwork, the running man)
3) the stand (complete & uncut)

but, i had a big list of them, which also included:

- carrie
- salem's lot
- the shining
- night shift (short stories)
- the dead zone
- firestarter
- cujo
- danse macabre
- different seasons (shawshank redemption, apt pupil, the body, the breathing method)
- pet semetary
- the talisman
- thinner
- skeleton crew (short stories)
- it
- misery
- the dark half
- four past midnight (the langoliers, secret window secret garden, the library policeman, the sun dog)
- needful things
- gerald's game
- dolores clairborne
- nightmares & dreamscapes

i never read christine, and regretted it. the only other thing that's missing here is the dark tower series, which i skipped on purpose. that is otherwise an almost entirely complete stephen king bibliography, up to the end of 1993.

i'm not exaggerating - i went through all of this stuff over the years 92-94. that's like 10,000 pages of stephen king, mostly in the middle of the night. the move from my mom's to my dad's was the summer of 1994, and while there were some perks attached to it, i initially had to give up my all night reading habit because he would actually storm downstairs and tell me go to fucking sleep, whereas my mom was herself usually up all night chain smoking and watching tv. i also became much more interested in the guitar after mid-94.

am i going to buy all of those books? yeah. and, i'm going to move through this sequentially.

i don't know how much these cost, nowadays. you used to be able to get them at the drug store for $5. let's see what i can get shipped to me. and, i'll have to hit the local used stores afterwards.

but, i'm going to start with asimov, because that's more primordial for me. even as i'm pointing out that i don't remember doing a single book report from grades 7-9, i know i did a book report on the foundation series in grade five. i was in a split 5/6 class, so i didn't have english class in grade six (and didn't have math class in grade five). in hindisght, it is baffling, but my mom freely sent me to that school solely because it had a large yard. yeah. the foundation series was recommended to me by the teacher, and i ended up reading a bunch of his other stuff. asimov died in 1992 with a massive bibliography, but i remember these specifically:

- the complete robot
- caves of steel
- naked sun
- robots of dawn
- robots and empire
- the stars, like dust
- currents of space
- pebble in the sky
- prelude to foundation
- forward the foundation <----did not read this one
- foundation
- foundation and empire
- second foundation
- foundations edge <----- that was the book report
- foundation and earth

so, i read through that over 1992-1993. i should collect it all, and review it all as a starting point. all i have right now is foundation and empire, and a book of short stories called the martian way.

what else did i mention?

arthur c. clarke.

i had:

- 2001: a space odyssey
- 2010: odyssey two
- 2061: odyssey three
- songs of distant earth
- tales from planet earth

my grandmother bought me these books by accident, starting around 91. she was trying to buy me greek mythology, to have me understand my name sake. i don't think she ever read any homer herself, nor had my mother, but she was trying to give me a story about jason and the argonauts, by giving me what she thought was the odyssey. d'oh? well, i enjoyed them, nonetheless, so she kept buying them. i eventually read both some plato and homer in high school, as well as some aristophanes in first year. fuck aristotle.

the only one i have left is songs of distant earth, which helpfully is dated to the christmas of 1993. so, we can go through that one together for an early '94 post.

bradbury.

- the martian chronicles
- farenheit 451 <----- not actually, but if i'm going to do this...
- a medicine for melancholy
- r is for rocket
- i sing the body electric
- dinosaur tales

i remember the bradbury a lot less. i know i at least flipped through these ones.

i do remember some specific hg wells:

- time machine
- island of dr moreau
- war of the worlds

and also some jules verne:

- journey to the centre of the earth
- twenty thousand leagues under the sea

the wells & verne were probably the result of the influence of my aunt on my mother and grandmother, who was an english major at mcgill in this period.

i'm going to push the clancy, koontz & rand forward a few years, because my memory of it is specifically connected to my dad's house. there was some crichton, too.

there would have also been some twain read over this period, again thanks to nana:

- tom sawyer (daa-da da-daaaa)
- prince & pauper
- huck finn

what else?

we'll skip the shell silverstein. that sidewalk has ended.

i was given a copy of james and the giant peach, but i...i want to say i was too old for it, but i actually probably wasn't. i felt too old for it. frankly, i thought it was a stupid thing to waste one's time with, and didn't bother with it very far. i remember reading through about half of it one night when held physically hostage by my grandmother due to a babysitting task due to not having anything else to do, and i just found myself ridiculing roald dahl at the age of, like, 9. i never found myself immersed in fantasy novels - never went for the tolkien or the lucas or really any of that stuff. as soon as you started bringing in, like, elves and shit, i lost interest.

the purpose of this post is to build a list, and we will probably leave a lot of this behind. i'm going to start with asimov, check prices, and move from there.

the plan that hoskins helped write in ontario was a patchwork, and that's what we should expect from the liberals on this. even so, this is an election ploy - they'll run on it because they know it's populist, but they don't like it, and they're going to try to backtrack on it after the election, and might not do it at all. this is now a libertarian party, at it's core.

the ndp might run on a universal system, but they've never held federal office, and it's unclear how seriously you can take them on it.

if we look at the history of how we got universal health care in canada, it happened in stages and was in the end largely driven by the liberals, who wanted to emulate the nhs in britain. the ndp were a push factor, but the tommy douglas story is actually largely a myth; the liberals wanted this, and they pushed for it, and we wouldn't have gotten it, otherwise. what the ndp actually wanted, and had in saskatchewan, looked more similar to obamacare than single-payer; it was the liberals that pushed the nhs model, which was churchillian in origin, and what we ended up with. in fact, even the conservatives of the time (who were old tories, a very different political idea than the post-thatcher neo-liberal market conservatives of today) supported it based on the churchillian argument - universal healthcare in canada is a rare example of something that the entire spectrum supported: it was liberal policy, based on a british tory model, and supported by the ndp.

the best way to get an effective system in place is probably to angle for a minority. what we want is for the liberals to need ndp support to pass the budget. then, you get a deal.

a majority of either type could very well lead to a lesser system, or a broken promise altogether.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/morneau-budget-2018-pharmacare-1.4555186

that script finished this morning. still nothing. so, i've got it running a second time,

this was just sent to tripod.

until recently, old tripod sites like mine (which was active from 1997-1999) were accessible via archive.org. i vaguely recall reading a newspaper article a few years ago that explained that you had ordered a take down of these pages.

the archive.org server is currently producing a 403 error when you make a request to download this site, which indicates that the data is still there, but that general access is being denied. attempts to have this clarified by the people at archive.org are ongoing, but it may be difficult to take to somebody on the server side. as i'm sure you're aware, this is a non-profit with limited resources.

my end goal is that i'd like archive.org to grant me access to my old site, even if only for long enough to pull it down.

my request is for you to help my understand the conversation you had with archive.org around your takedown request, so that i can address the situation with them properly.

this is a loose end that i intended to have dealt with much more quickly. i don't have a good answer right now, but i also don't see much more that i can do. i'm going to have to try and suck some of the data down from the site manually, even as i try to get the server to react. the problem is that there's 45 snapshots, each with hundreds or thousands of documents. it would literally take months to do this...

still no reaction from the cops. i sent them a third email last night, slightly escalated to increase the recipient list.

i'm going to focus on these loose ends for the day, and see if there's a response by the afternoon. if not, i'm going to have to get somebody on the phone tomorrow morning.

i should be started on the journal soon. promise.

some stranger from youtube sent me a stupid email, and it was really just a pointless troll, but it kind of triggered me.

i never got a dna test. i didn't want one. it wouldn't have mattered; we had a talk, before hand. the intent from the start was that i would act as a donor, not a parent, by mutual consent. i was very careful; it wouldn't have happened without that agreement. but, i was supposed to be around, too. as a family friend...as a secret...

it was foolish, but it happened. she thought she was strong enough, and i let myself believe it, because she wanted me to.

i could have made more of an effort at the start, but it was also important that i kept a distance, as getting too close would have upset the balance. i maybe tripped over that trapeze line.

but, the gender transition turned out to be a red line; unbeknownst, but pretty rigid.

there wouldn't be anything else i could even say, at this point.