Homelessness

Homelessness is a phenomena which is very common in North America, I heard. I have seen it excessively in Vancouver and Calgary. The Federal Government and perhaps the municipal and provincials as well provide funds and services for the people who are considered homeless but I'm not sure what qualifies you to receive those kind of services. I am practically homeless because despite living here for years I never possessed any property and will probably will never posses one but that alone does not qualify me to receive different services that are available to homeless people. I have seen and personally seen people who simply use or abuse the service which in fact should not be available to them. These are the examples I can provide:

- Yahya, and I only name him here because I'm sure there would be no chance for him or a relative or friend of him to read this and his surname is protected, a guy from Afghanistan was a guy I met once. He uses the facility provided to homeless people in Calgary, simply because he was fucking lazy to find himself a job and pull himself together. According to The Chef, as they used to hand out, he was a drunkard. The Chef helped him with some $600 by purchasing him tools so he could work in construction but he blew it up. 

- Once we were walking in Downtown with The Chef as his place is closed to The Rehabilitation Center one Iranian guy approached us. I guess he heard us talking in Persian and walked toward us with a can of Coke in one hand, a cigarette in another and earphones hanging out of his ears. He said because he wanted to keep his Internet service and that was just too much for him he decided to give up his place so he can enjoy the free accommodation and save enough for other expenses! While the short story he narrated for us in the 5 min. walk we had together can not be even 1% true(!) it truly proves that people can make up any story they want and check in to the free motel! What you have to consider here is this free motel or hotel has a very interesting rule that The Chef explained to me and I like it a lot: You enter before a certain time (09:00 PM, I guess) and have to leave very early as well (maybe 06:00 AM). So it really is not a comfortable place but many people sacrifice comfort for money! 

- The Loyal is another Iranian guy that I hang out with a few times and knew him through The Chef as well and he used to spend his time in this kind of facilities and even going to the Food Bank. This guy, whom his story should be said soon is a cheap stingy bastard from Isfahan and worked for the late Zellers(!) and then got a few good positions with good companies as a professional but I'm not going to say his field as this might blow him. He even, I heard, has purchased a house now but that's how he started his life in Calgary. He kept telling me that the system offers these systems and we should use them! 

McDonald's restaurants, particularly the Downtown locations are a hang out for the homeless. Here a native woman or man (looked like a woman to me although I didn't see her or his face) was asleep when I was sitting for a coffee in a McDonald's 

- Another group of homeless people who actually are not homeless and you see a large number of them if you walk in Downtown is Native people. These guys, the majority of them, as far as I know, has their on homes on Reserve lands and travel frequently to the nearby cities and towns and wander around, drink, smoke, fight and get themselves in trouble. I have a few encounters with them which obviously none of them started by me. I have learnt, big, that I should stay as far as possible from them especially because they are in groups which is most of the time the case.

Now do the authorities know about these stuff? My guess is they do for sure but they keep the services up and running. I'm not happy about this because this is my tax money but is there anything we could do about it? Barely any! 

One MP sent me letters and Christmas card  a few weeks back. He/she asked me whether I think the Government is on the right track or not. I prepared a big letter and was going to send it before this past Christmas but then I changed my mind. I though I'd be better going through again and include this issue as well. Not that I hope something will happen soon but maybe this is a beginning. 

(Photo, top: I normally go for my running and jogging in the afternoon. One day before Christmas I did it in the morning and found it very rewarding. This guy was asleep besides a memorial plaque or something similar to that on Bow River Pathway in Downtown. It was pretty cold but I'm sure he's fine in his sleeping bag) 

Interesting Bow River

I went for a run to the Bow River Pathway but it was so damn cold that I decided just to have a few minutes of walk, take a few photographs and go back home. There they are:

Round Ice! This actually was taken yesterday in Fish Creek Provincial Park, of course by the Bow River. It was spinning at the same spot seen in the photo! 

There are a few signs similar to this put up at different locations around Bow River. Each has a question. You can find out more about them at: http://www.asktheriver.info/

A teacher discussing a topic. Very convincing.

Funny!

Someone drew this funny cartoon showing a middle finger indicating they not caring about defacing city walls!

Not a White Christmas

I went for a walk and run in the morning today and although it had been said that there would be a chance of snow or flurries, I saw mostly a partially cloudy sky by Bow River. I start my walk at Carburn Park at the east side of Deerfoot Trial, went north on Bow River Pathway and went back. I ran a few last minutes of route and went to the other side of the river where there is a fenced off-leash area and I assume it's Sue Higgins Park. At least it's what Google Maps shows! This actually is a very good idea that has been executed by the municipality because at times it's really frustrating dealing with the dogs on the pathways. They come to you and some expect you to pet them and some look for treats. Just today I had to watch at least 4 damn dogs that the idiot owners did not have them on leash.

Anyways the weather was cold and although I had enough on, I wasn't very comfortable but finished my exercise. Workers were working on the ice rink to make it ready, I guess for tomorrow. I also saw city workers in Prince Edward's Island doing the same thing. We haven't started our skating yet and we should or we will not be ready for the time we will have to go to Olympic Oval. 

(Photo: Bow River and Downtown Calgary in distance from Bow River Pathway at the east bank of the river)

The Nosedive Continues!

The price of Crude Oil continues to go down and subsequently is the gasoline price. Many might like that but many might lose their jobs as a result of that. Nothing has been announced by my employer yet and people are generally stay positive. We'll see in the next few months.

(Photo: A Shell gas station in Calgary shows 87.9 Cents per liter for regular gasoline. That might encourage some to take a trip outside town including me who is looking for a short hike this week, if everything else goes well)

Interstellar

Finally watched this new movie that almost everyone is making a big deal about and it has been in the news for weeks: Interstellar. First of all Interstellar means something situated or occurring between stars. For someone whose first language is not English, I think, it is important to know what the name of the movie means, first. Second of all this has brought attention and interest because it is a Nolan movie and its lead actor is McConaughey. So what’s the big deal with this British guy, Nolan? He is the director of The Dark Knight series (or trilogy as most like to call it). The movie was a commercial success particularly because of the now deceased Australian actor Heath Ledger and of course the fact that the movie is about a superhero, Batman! Ledger, I guess had been walking on a ledge for too long and eventually carelessness or maybe just bad luck made him fall to his demise. No! That’s not what happened to him, unlike other starts! I don’t think he had a drug or alcohol problem. He was suffering from Insomnia. I had never seen his performance prior to The Dark Knight but I knew he had the lead role also in Brokeback Mountain, a movie about a homosexual cowboy and that has been filmed in Alberta.

Anyways I never liked The Dark Knight. I wanted to watch it when it first came out in 2008 or 2009. I lived in Coquitlam at the time. I didn’t as my roommate didn’t want to and I didn’t want to just go by myself. Then I purchased the DVD a few years after that for $10. I tried to watch the long movie a few times and although I like actions, I never was able to finish it.

The fact is Americans are obsessed with superheroes. There is barely any month passing without a movie about these fictional characters: Superman, Batman, Captain America, you name it! In my opinion too much of something eventually ruins its pleasure. Imagine eating Hamburger every day! How would you feel? I really liked the first Batman movie when it came out first in 1989 (Jack Nicholson, Michael Keaton) although I never had the chance to watch it in a movie theater. A bit of other following Batman movies were OK as well but then it became too much to handle and too boring. I thought I had a question about the movie and that was: Why did American who barely liked any foreign movie, liked this one? A good example of that would be Blade Runner. I liked it very much but it was not as big of commercial success as other American movies although it has Ford as its lead role actor. I found the answer very soon: The Dark Knight is about an American fictional character, Batman and it must be a big success and it was.

Let’s go back to Interstellar. Interstellar is a difficult movie to understand if you want to go to its detail. It’s difficult to understand even for the ones whose their native language is English basically because it discusses physics and astronomy matters. I found it tedious for that reason and I could not help looking at my watch every 45 minutes or so. But why did people go to watch Interstellar? Maybe because of the recent McConaughey’s success and also Nolan as the director. Maybe they were expecting something as god as The Dark Knight! I wanted to see what happens at the end because that’s what you want to see when you go to movies and then I had paid a little over $1! It would have been very disappointing to leave, had I left the movie house before it came to its end. The end though was quite disappointing for me: Time travel was the point. Every time Time Travel is introduced I find it confusing and messed up! You see things that you have done and made you to come here and you cannot do anything about that or … I don’t know. It is all confusion. The other problem with Interstellar is lack of enough excitement, something you normally expect in a science-fiction/space movie. Apart from a few scenes, that I liked very much, you don’t see usual challenges that astronauts face in their voyages but that could be because the movie focuses on scientific facts about travels between galaxies for search of new habitable planets. Visual effects are good. I specifically liked the spaceship and the walking robots but the sound sucked in the movie theater that I watched it (Scoriabank Chinook). I guess there was a technical problem and it had nothing to do with the movie. The sounds and music overcame the talking in the entire movie. That made it even harder for me to understand. Actors and actresses performances were all acceptable. I didn’t know Demon had a role until I saw him in the middle of the story but his character is woken up by the other astronauts from a long hyper-sleep has a minor evil role and then kills himself! I like the plot and story except for the time travelling part at the end. Although it might have been the entire purpose of the movie! This is what it is: People of earth are having difficulties on their daily life due to different issues including Dust Bowl and NASA secretly has this plan of sending astronauts to search for habitable planets outside our galaxy, if I’m not mistaken. Cooper, who is said excessively in the movie that is the best pilot NASA ever had, accidentally finds this NASA research and lunch location (maybe not accidentally. The coordination of NASA secret lunch pad and center is somehow given to him through a Morse code which will later, at the end of the movie is revealed that had been sent to them by him! Time travel games) and was offered this great opportunity of being the pilot of a NASA secret mission to the infinity and beyond!

I also wanted to mention this part that Demon appears and I almost forgot. Demon, as I indicated earlier, was visited by other astronauts, Cooper and Hathaway (One character name and one real name!) and woken from his long hyper-sleep. He was on this planet (or maybe a moon, I don’t recall completely. I should watch the movie again) which has 67-hour cold days and 67-hour colder nights and seems to be not much of a desirable place for Earth people to live their life there. In the beginning of the movie when the mission is discussed with Cooper, he is told that there are two plans for the voyage that they should consider: Plan A and Plan B. Here I’m again lost. I didn't quite get it whether they were there to save Demon and there was no Plan B or something else but Demon’s character gets in to a fight with Copper, breaks his Spacesuit helmet and tries to kill him but Cooper somehow (and magically as he is the lead role!) saves himself and goes back to the spaceship. Demon here seems to be trying to get to the main module and somehow makes this mistake of opening a hatch which depressurizes part of the module and kills him. Here the challenge becomes to going back to the travel module because that’s how they travel! Since Copper, again, is the best pilot NASA ever had, he manages to attach to the main module using his skills and help of the robot of trip, the character I liked very much. Here I guess again I was lost because I don’t remember whether the Black guy is in the module or somewhere else but that trip to the cold planet took them a few hours or days at the most but cost the Black fella and people of Earth a good 23 years! This again is part of this time travel thing and going through Black-holes and Wormholes! I guess they cause their trip to be much shorter.

The end of the movie is clear and obvious. Cooper is back (but not to Earth) while his fella astronauts are all gone. He actually is saved and he ages 110-years, I guess. His daughter who happens to become a NASA scientist and helped this journey to accomplish is now on a hospital bed surrounded by her family. They exchange a few words and show signs of affection and she asks him to leave because apparently parents aren't supposed to see their children’s death. And that’s the end of the movie. This last part happens on a sort of space station, similar to what is shown in Elysium, meaning that the mission has been accomplished and people of Earth are saved. This last scene was a bit lame because it was apparent that the director or production designer or whoever in charge of that part had not tried hard enough to create a little more real environment for the people who have left their habitat to have a better life. Or maybe the director wanted to stress that what the audience might have seen in Elysium is what they would get!

I have to watch this movie again to fill the gaps and understand it completely and I will. And yes it is definitely recommended. There is barely any science-fiction/space movie that I refrain from going to although there have been quite a few that I had been very disappointed at the end. One last thing: Interstellar is a rare movie that the audience can expect a sequel to. 

(Photo: Astronauts are walking on the surface pf  one of the planets that is supposed to be a habitable one for human. It turns out shortly after this scene that the plan is not what they thought it would be. The first one whose his spacesuit is a bit different from the other ones is Matt Demon)

I Like the Crude Price a Lot

The price of crude oil is going down on every single day like a big piece of ice melting and going down the drain! There's nothing like that in life that I like better. I will laugh at all the idiots who bought 600K+ homes after only a year and and a half working for these stupid Downtown companies. A society which is based on fake price of not such an important commodity, deserve collapsing. Housing market is going to crash and other industries will suffer as well. No doubt that this City is in a catastrophic situation and needs it. Maybe that's how  people stop from coming here and turning it to a big toilet it is now!

It's said that different factors play in this significant decline in crude price:

1- Saudi Arabia deliberately did not agree to reduce production in the recent OPEC meeting.

2- The US's production has gone up. 

3- There's not much demand in the market. I wonder if it has to do anything with the weather which has not been cold in the past 10 days. 

4- Stronger US dollar.

Good luck losers to get back on track! You're gonna suffer for long enough now! 

(Photo: This chart shows the changes in crude price since Sep. this year which has been mostly downward. This is for West Texas Intermediate which is the benchmark for North America production, Mexican and Canadian price are normally way lower than this)