Screenshot of the February Seaside Magazine Web Site
(also, page 7 of the February 2, 2014 Edition)
The Homepage of the Website changes each month to match the cover of the hard copy edition.
Link to Seaside Magazine

Link to Photos of the new Seaside Magazine Reception at Mary Winspear Centre

Link to the Most Recent Update (February 27, 2014)

Congratulations to Sue Hodgson, Publisher of Seaside Magazine on the launch of the new Magazine Website.  The site, designed by Sean McNeill of McNeill Solutions, provides a bold new online presence for the locally owned and published magazine.

Sue Hodgson and her talented staff, Editor in Chief, Allison Smith; Design Assistant, Kelsey Bormann, and Advertising Sales, Marcella MacDonald, have worked to create a dynamic magazine catering to community interests along the West Coast with particular focus on lower Vancouver Island.  Sue speaks to the collaboration between Seaside Magazine and McNeill Solutions:

“Seaside is all about celebrating the community, so we were thrilled to work with locally owned web design and marketing company McNeill Solutions. Designer Sean McNeill helped us to come up with a website that truly reflects Seaside Magazine.”

From his side of the equation, Sean states:

“It has been an exciting project to create with a magazine that’s so focused on local culture. Working with Seaside came to be through the strength of referrals in our community. We are excited to continue working with them in the future.”

Congratulations, Sean, on a job well done and to Sue and staff for their continued pursuit of excellence in the production of a quality magazine.

Harold McNeill

Link here to a January 2013 article on the launch of the Seaside Magazine 

SIC Beauties: A new post being written explores the efforts of a group of young people as they work to enhance their artistic abilities as well as bring a high level of social commitment to their entrepreneurial efforts. It is in this new world that many young people seek to find new ways to interact with each other and with their business contacts.  The photos below include several Young Entrepreneurs who are part of the SIC Beauty Crew.

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A Call for Justin to Come Home

Over 100,000 citizens of the United States have signed the petition calling for Justin Bieber to be expelled from the US and his Green Card revoked.  The petition claims Justin is not a fitting role model for young people in the United States.  US law requires the White House respond to any petition with 100,000 or more signatures.

Following is a partial list of celebrities that have signed the petition: Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, MacCauley Culkin, Charlie Sheen, Alex Baldwin, Anna Nicole Smith, Tonya Harding, Mel Gibson, Geraldo Rivera, Denis Rodman, Kobe Bryant, O.J. Simpson, Ozy Osborne, Keanin Reeves, River Phoenix, Exl Rose and Eminem. 

Perhaps Bieber should come home as it seems it is he who is being lead astray.

Oh, a good post of Facebook yesterday featuring O.J. Simpson and referencing to Denver.  The last time we had a Bronco chase that was so widely watched was in Los Angeles.

Harold

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Profit from ‘Stateoil’, the #4 ranked oil company in the world and 70% owned by the Norwegian Government, has made all Norwegians Crown millionaires   (Link to Article) (Link to Ownership). When our family visited Norway in the 1970s, hundreds of oil rigs were being built. The North Sea oil boom was well underway and from that date forward, Norway kept tight control of their share of the resource.

What can Canada learn?

As a result of a FB post made by the daughter of a Cold Lake High School friend about free university in Norway, and an earlier post I made about the quality of ‘birth to death’ social services in Oman as compared to Canada, a few folks were inspired to take me to task. My position in both cases was that Canada and the Provinces need to make better choices regarding the use of our natural resources. Let’s take a look at how Norway manages its resources.

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Those we Love and Those we Don’t

It is immensely interesting how we humans choose to differentiate between animal species (including other humans). Most often it seems it is the “cute and cuddly” factor that makes all the difference.  In the above picture, which would be the first and second choice for a pet?  Of course, who could resist that little pup seal, perhaps even a little piggy under the right circumstances, but a rat or a nest of snakes, very unlikely.

Now, take that seal pup. The WTO recently ruled the EU was justified in prohibiting the import to seal pelts and products based only on “public morals concerns” (National Post,). At the same time the WTO clearly stated there was no “legal, scientific or conservation” concerns with respect to seals.  In a word, “seals” are just so cute that no matter how much damage they do to the environment (fish stocks, etc.) or how much their overpopulation begins to degrade an area of other wildlife, they must be protected.

Pigs on  the other hand seem not so deserving of our consideration. I (and likely you) also think they are as cute a buttons when they are babies. Does if not seem strange that when they are treated badly (and in many cases very badly) we don’t raise any concerns. We so love our bacon, ham and pork chops that we don’t much care how they live and die. The same applies to cattle and all sorts of other ‘domestic’ animals raised as a food source. Compared to pigs, cattle, sheep and others held in captivity, seals live an awesome life of freedom, even if a few of them end up being killed for their pelts or taken down by a sea lion or killer whale.

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Google Image Search

Since opening the McNeill Life Stories Blog in late 2009, over 400 life stories and articles have been posted.  Each post contains images (sometimes several) that relate to the particular post.

Google does an amazing job of indexing not only the stories, but also the images attached to the story.  An interesting feature of the index is that hundreds, perhaps thousands of the indexed images can be found in one location with one search and the order of those pictures can be altered by simply changing the search parameters. Following is screen shot of one image search. You can link to this particular full set at:  McLeish Chronicles + McNeill Life Stories.

As you scroll down the images you will likely find the faces of family, friends, acquaintances and others whose photo was posted. If your photo (or a group photo) appeared in a story (e.g. New Years Eve 2012), it will likely appear within the search results. Just click the photo and you will be taken to the story. Note: This is separate from the McNeill Life Stories Facebook Page.

In order to get this number of related photos combine two category names (Categories are listed on the left side of the blog). For instance, the above was search conducted using “MacLeish Chronicles + McNeill Life Stories“.  Different two-category, or a category combined with McNeill Life Stories will bring up different results.

Images will not appear in date order although  the most recent entries will often appear at the beginning. After going down several pages, images from other sources will begin to appear. You can tell whether it is a related story by scrolling over the top of the photo.

If you have a blog or post pictures outside Facebook, try the search technique.

Happy New Year
Harold

Sample from several pages down

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 The True North Strong and Pot Free —– Not
Vancouver, April 20, 2012. Over 20,000 people, the largest crowd to date, attended the Four Twenty Protest.
At 4:20 pm (precisely), a sweet smelling cloud lazily drifted over the Library and across downtown Vancouver.
Twenty thousand people just had a group toke.

It has long since been ordained that the ubiquitous Mary Jane would one day become, if not legal, at the very least a controlled substance sold in Government style Liquor Stores. Marihuana grow ops will be popping up across the country like dandelions on a newly planted lawn. Now that a few States in that bastion of extreme conservatism south of the border have begun to decriminalize the substance, can the Province of British Columbia’s five billion (that’s right five, with nine zeros) pot growing industry, be far behind? For BC  this is not a trivial amount of untaxed ‘free enterprise’ money by any count.

Seeing an opportunity in this trend, Medbox Inc., a U.S. based company, is set to introduce into Canada, automatic Pot Vending Machines (PVMs) for use by those licenced to toke as permitted under the Canada Health Act (link to story).  Apparently the PVMs provide easy and secure 24 hour access. Imagine, pot on demand at your nearest 7-11. It was also reported the RCMP is looking at installing machines in their remote detachments (link). City members, of course, will be able to pop by the nearest 7-11.

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Human Rights Abuse: A Selective Policy

The Raeside Cartoon  ( October 9, 2013) in the Times Colonist this morning makes an important point about how we choose our battles.  It is always better to pick a small PR battle you might gain some points than to pick a big battle you know you will lose big time.

Smokers, An Endangered Species

The CRD in Victoria seems set to introduce some strict new rules concerning smoking in public places.  In addition to all the usual prohibitions (restaurants, bars, work place, in cars with children, etc.) and recently extended to public parks and beaches. It will not be long before smoking in a public place (e.g. parking lot, sidewalk, etc) will be taboo.  This may seem harsh, but on a recent visit to Kyoto, Japan, a city of 1.47 million, smoking in all public areas is prohibited (that includes all streets and parks).

On October 1, the price of a cartoon of cigarettes when up by $2.00 bringing the package cost closer to $10.00.  Later in my smoking life, I sometimes smoked two packages a day, so today I would fork over up to $600 a month ($7,200 per annum), a tidy sum.  Having been a long term smoker (age 1 5 – 45), I finally chucked the habit and have never looked back.  That’s a lot of dollars in my pocket, to say nothing of the health in my lungs.

Fifty years ago about half the population of Canada smoked on a regular basis, but today that number has dropped to 17% nationwide and to 14% in BC. In the Victoria Capital Region, only 11% light up.  Perhaps the lower rate in BC can be explained by the number of high (oops, I mean, high number) of marihuana smokers.  (Details and statistics from Jack Knox, Times Colonist, October 9, 2013).

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Climbers Found Alive on Mount Albert Edward

This morning’s headline in the Times Colonist brought back memories of an adventure that my sister Dianne McNeill, her partner Michel Payeur and I shared last year about this same time when we tackled Mount Albert Edward. (Link to Story and Photos)

In the present incident, “Jean-Simon Lessard, 22, and Christopher Yao, 31,(pictured above) were found in good condition after four days stranded in frigid weather at the 1,500-meter level near Moat Lake, three to four kilometers from Mount Albert Edward, which is where the men intended to go.”  (Times Colonist, Thursday, October 3, 2013, Link to story and Photos)

In the McNeill – Payeur challenge, taken in late September 2012, the weather was clear and crisp on our outbound trek to Moet Lake and even seemed promising the next morning, but by late afternoon that second day things deteriorated quickly when a storm front moved in. The temperatures dropped and the surrounding mountains were soon covered with heavy cloud that produced rain at the lower levels and snow above the freezing level at 1000 meters.

While Dianne and Michel proceeded with our plan to tackle the mountain by main route along Circlet Lake, I opted to cross Moet Lake by boat with a young man camping at the same site. On the north side of the lake, snow from previous slides had nearly reached the shoreline and, combined with the steep terrain and slippery conditions, made climbing conditions nearly impossible. We were not able to reach the main trail to intersect  Dianne and Michel by that time faced their own challenges and had to make their descent after dark in weather and trail conditions that were very dangerous.

Full Story and Photos join Dianne, Michel and Harold at:  Mount Albert Edward: An Adventure:

Full Story and Photos of Jean and Christopher go to: Times Colonist:

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