Squirrelling down

no, he's not sideways, he's just squirreling down the tree trunk sideways


I think I sniff peanuts!


Listen, lady, I need to get back to my gathering work.


We had a heavy snowfall



of light snow

Door Knockers

~ photo by Abdi Sami

Door Knockers

"A young girl in the historical village of Abyaneh [Iran] demonstrates to Rick the difference between the two door knockers. In the old times the door knocker to the left was used by women and the one to the right by men. Since they sound differently the women in the house knew whether the person behind the door was a man or a woman."

Katja Maki Art Zoom @Northern Woman's Bookstore

~ birthday card to my daughter, Yasmin, made by her aunt, Katja Maki, showing our (grand)father, Kalevi Maki, as a young man on his first (and only) motorcycle, and our (grand)mother, Ritva Orvokki, as a young woman in summer.

THE NORTHERN WOMAN'S BOOKSTORE & ART ZOOM

present the photo art of

KATJA MAKI

Saturday December 6, noon - 9 p.m.

To celebrate Art Zoom, The Northern Woman's Bookstore will offer 10% Off all Northwestern Ontario Writer's books

For more information, phone 344-7979
or go to artzoom.

The Northern Woman's Bookstore (65 Court St. S) is proud to take part in this year's Art Zoom, featuring local artist, Katja Maki.

Katja Maki is a photographic artist residing in Thunder Bay. In her work, she combines photography, digital technology and painting to create mixed media photo art. One of her art pieces was recently selected for a juried
exhibition at Definitely Superior Art Gallery. Katja is proud to be one of the founders and organizers of the SuperiorFinn MidSummer Arts Festival. She is also a writer and has penned poetry, short stories, and critical pieces, as well as a children’s book. Both in written text and visuals, Katja’s work engages with Finnish migrant experience, ancestors, nature, landscape, and contemporary identities, particularly gendered realities.

Women may be possessed by mink, so I read

When I went out for my morning walk on Tuesday, I had to look way out past the ice sheet to find the few remaining goldeneyes, mallards and Canada geese. Lucky I had my binoculars with me this time, or I would've thought they'd flown south yesterday.

I saw a huge flock of about a 100 ring billed gulls gathered at the edge of the ice having a party. They were sitting on the ice, nonchalant as can be, undeterred by the fierce westerly winds whipping along the shore. Suddenly, as if a signal had came from some mysterious voice, an urgent call from beyond the blue, the entire flock shot straight up into the air. This tight cloud of flying gulls hung over the ice, with the birds at its outer edges dispersing into wider and wider rings, like ripples from a spiraling gyre, while a breakaway stream of birds flew silently single file over my head. I was the sole audience. Transfixed, I watched this morphing body of birds shapeshift before my eyes, then suddenly the bird ballet ended and the cloud descended in a rush back onto the ice.

These beautiful bird clouds are all around us.


The ice made constellations spangled with dusty stars.

Orbiting like a flying saucer. But after walking further along the shore, I thought that opening to the other side might be less celestial and more a watery portal

where the mink comes up for air. I was surprised to see his chocolate brown body swimming in the icy waters, as you can tell from my haste to catch him. He likes to travel the edges of water, hunting for his favorite food, muskrat. He must like birds, too, as I saw a bundle of white feathers and a scattering of delicate bones on a rock nearby

his rock pile home. He is both hunter and hunted. Trapped not only for his glossy fur, which I once read sometimes ends up being made into scarves and shawls in China, the mink also has a thick layer of fat below his skin that is used to make mink oil to prevent wrinkles on human faces and to condition leather shoes and bags. But mink is not only a commodity, Mink is also a clan. When other animals burrow away for the winter, the mink continues to lead an active life throughout the cold weather. He likes to burrow and slide in the snow, too. If you look close, you can see the white patch at his throat [click on the photo to enlarge]. He has a good sense of smell, because after climbing out of the water and slipping in and out between the rocks,

he turned to stare right at me

then went out hunting again.

mainstreaming porn

Heather Mallick, a Canadian journalist, writes a weekly opinion piece for the online Globe and Mail. This week, she's taking on the mainstreaming of porn:

"It's all around us in advertising, movies, video games, DVDs, pay-per-view TV, subscription websites, cellphone downloads, newspaper and online classified ads, hotel rooms, doll costumes, those weird erotica shops in suburban malls and many odder places.

It influences the way we dress, how we talk and what we will put under the tree this Christmas....
.... mainstream culture [has] became increasingly sexually explicit and misogynistic.
We knew early on what Madonna's crotch looked like up close, even before she produced an entire coffee table book about it. Snoop Dogg popularized hard-core rap, daughters started demanding Bratz dolls (dressed like hookers) and glittery abbreviated stripper clothes, sons began rapping and killing prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto."