View Aylmer Fire Lookout in a larger map

What to do if you see a bear.

From Backpacker Magazine

More to come on the trip and scenery.

On the BBC, 45 minutes long, link here.

Melvyn Bragg and guests Amira Bennison, Robert Gleave and Hugh Kennedy discuss the split between the Sunni and the Shia. This schism came to dominate early Islam, and yet it did not spring at first from a deep theological disagreement, but rather from a dispute about who should succeed the Prophet Muhammad, and on what grounds. The supporters of the Prophet’s cousin Ali argued for the hereditary principle; their opponents championed systems of selection. Ali’s followers were to become the Shia; the supporters of selection were to become Sunnis.

It is a story that takes us from Medina to Syria and on into Iraq, that takes in complex family loyalties, civil war and the killing at Karbala of the Prophet’s grandson. Husayn has been commemorated as a martyr by the Shia ever since, and his death helped to formalise the divide as first a political and then a profoundly theological separation.

Amira Bennison is Senior Lecturer in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge; Robert Gleave is Professor of Arabic Studies at the University of Exeter; Hugh Kennedy is Professor of Arabic in the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

According to the Canadian Council on Social Development, the average cost of raising a child to age 18 –college fund not included — is $166,549 for a girl and $166,972 for a boy.

via Recession may create new baby boom.

No wonder I’m poor. And they are not counting the cost of living in Kuwait. Well at least no baby boom for me.

More on this later.

He died today at the age of 87. His obituary from the Washington Post is as follows. Read the last paragraph.
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Check here and try out the salt-o-meter on the Globe and Mail. Watch out for the french fries!

Click here to see a map of where the photo was taken.

I’ve arrived in Calgary for a brief vacation.

And even some flowers are out and the bees are buzzing in the bushes.

Pertinent with the mess going on in Iran now!