Hughtopias

 Suggested wording for illustrated display commemorating the 150th anniversary of BC's entry into Confederation, to be located in Strathcona Park. Strathcona British Columbia joined Canada in 1871 on the promise of a transcontinental railway within ten years. That promise was derailed by the Pacific Scandal that brought down John A MacDonald's government in 1873. One of the Conservative mutineers that ended the corrupt deal between the government and Hugh Allan was Donald Smith. Smith's own associates then built the railroad and acquired huge quantities of real estate, Smith himself bending the last spike in 1885. Smith was a central or background figure in the Hudson's Bay Company, industry and banking, the CPR, Vancouver real estate and just about everything else in the massive expansion of Canadian colonial industrial capitalism of the late 1800's. A loyal supporter of British imperialism, he was sober, hard-working, incredibly wealthy and well-connected, and a s

I went through a lot of material about how Color Theory is taught to artists and selected only the essentials. It could use a lot more illustration, but I kept it under 20 pages. Google Drive displays only the text in the RTF file, so you will have to download it to read it. RTF files usually display fine on almost any system. The link is here:    Deconstructing Color Theory ver 18 Header picture:  

 Here's a comment that I did for a Youtube video about the Alec Baldwin firearm death: Thank you KB32 for showing us how to check a revolver just like the one Alec Baldwin is alleged to have misused. Hollywood has lots to answer for. The Wallechinsky family documented decades ago how the place runs on money, power and exploitative sex. And you are right that Hollywood is the home of gun porn (which bears the same relationship to real life firearm use that commercial porn does to real life sex). Hollywood uses firearms and weapons so much that people who work in props - just the guys in the shop - have to take a firearms course. Props people here in Vancouver have a rule: never hand an actor anything - anything - that they can mis-handle. Because they always do. If you hand them a sword, someone has to make that sword duller than a toddler's dinner knife. If you hand them a fire extinguisher, a prop person has to take the extinguisher and discharge it first. If you hand them so

  To: Bob MacDonald and Producers, Quirks and Quarks, CBC Topic: Russell Funk and the low-hanging fruit Your show always has some good factual stuff that counterbalances the excesses and distortions of the news entertainment industry. But Russell J. Funk caught my attention. I automatically thought of the science and tech scammer Elizabeth Holmes, venture capitalism in a lab coat. When Funk started, I expected a classic discussion about Kuhnian paradigms and progress. (Like this one: ) https://stmuscholars.org/misunderstood-or-mistake-paradigms-shifts-and-the-growth-of-science/ The first clue that some different game was afoot was the straight-faced use of the term "disruptor", a word that is usually a joking term, as in the recent dark satirical comedy "Glass Onion" . "Disruption" is a trendy compression of the concepts nicely laid out by Andy Kessler in his "Running Money". https://www.amazon.ca/Running-Money-Honchos-Mons

Santa Buddha                            Short Fiction by Hugh Tayler 2022 December ver02a   I was picking up spilled Lego around the Free Table when someone famous and her two daughters walked up to the table.  She's one of those people who always says hi or makes a thoughtful remark that gets others talking. She seems instantly familiar, so I think she's famous, but I'm not sure for what.   The girls found a banana box under the table and dragged it out to look at what was in it. I said, "Yeah, there must 15 dolls in that box but someone took their feet off. It's creepy but I haven't had time to reinstall them." One of the girls said, "We'll do it!"  And their mum said, "But you can only take one doll each. We have so many toys already." I said, "So you don't need more Christmas stuff?" I pointed to a small stack of random decorations with a wooden Santa meditating in the lotus position, as if he were Buddha.   "

Here are contents of an email to reporter Erica Hellerstein, who did a piece in Coda Story with the title "Grieving California".  Thank you for saying what Joan Didion isn't here to say. I'm sorry, but I skimmed your piece on grieving California. Twice. I just could not look too closely at the degree of personal loss it contained, the loss that so many of us share. I became fascinated by the geography of California when our daughter's husband moved to Mountain View to work for "a company that sells advertising". Every year for five years we drove down from Vancouver BC to visit them. I found a bicycle and used to go riding on the Bay Trail between Alivio and Palo Alto. I read about the history of the Bay Area, then I read David Carle's "Water and the California Dream" and the place took on a whole different dimension. And, of course, I found Joan Didion's California essays. We had one last trip planned, one last chance for me to see the