This week the government announced that the one of Canada’s new Arctic Patrol ships will be named after Dr. Margaret Brooke. This will be one of the very few ships named for someone still living and the first named for a woman. In WWII she was aboard the SS Caribou as a nurse when the ship was torpedoed and sank off of Greenland. For her actions in trying to save others she received the Order of the British Empire, the only Canadian nurse to receive the honour during WWII. After the war Brooke returned to her studies at the University of Saskatchewan. She earned a doctorate in palaeontology and went on to author several major research studies. She’s now 100 and lives in Victoria, BC.
http://www.thestarphoenix.com/news/Ship+named+after+year+Sask+hero/10966212/story.html

Mixed news at work. Our robot system did appear on Elementary, but not as much as we had hoped. You can see the controller right here:



But no shots of the robot itself. As we understand it, when they built the set, the hole in the wall and tunnel the bad guys had dug was larger than the script had called for. The director then decided that it would be better to have Sherlock crawl down in there instead of the robot. The pictures of the big cable on the controller screens are dubbed in, which clarifies something I had been wondering about. The right screen is for the front camera and the left one is for the rear camera. The only way you could see the cable in both cameras is if the major internet cable connecting Europe and North America only ran in a four foot diameter circle in the basement of this Long Island house. 

Oh well, that’s show biz.

And then there is the crawler in Japan. We made the crawler tracks and they built the vehicle around them. The plan was for it to drive around taking samples, measurements, and pictures for at least ten hours. It survived for three. OK, but we doubt it was our tracks that failed. It seems much more likely that the electronics got fried by the radiation. You see, the radiation reached 24 Sieverts and higher. That’s a lot. It’s kinda like what you’d encounter if you took a nuclear reactor, melted it down, and then climbed around on the smouldering pile of debris. Well, I guess it would be exactly like that. This level of radiation would be fatal to someone in seconds, so three hours for the robot isn’t too bad actually. They got, I believe, fourteen of the nineteen spots they wanted to look at done before the system went down. Some of the articles made a big deal about how they were just going to have to cut the tether and abandon the robot. Actually that was the plan all along. There was no way it could be retrieved after being contaminated by such a highly radioactive environment. 
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-32294740
We made the silver and black tracks the rest of the robot rides on.

And Canadian Targets are closing right and left now. The one here closed at the end of March. Victoria closed this week. Soon they’ll all be gone. Some of the remaining staff at Victoria Target put together this farewell song. They did a really good job.
http://www.mtv.com/news/2135161/target-closing-time-cover-video/. 

And finally:
We were driving to the south end of Nanaimo this weekend when I had an idea. The conversation with Marsha went something like this:

Me: You know, it’s probably a good thing that we never had kids.
Marsha: Why?
Me: Because I suddenly realized that I think Fibula would be a good girls name.
Marsha: What?
Me: Yeah. Can’t you just imagine it. “Fibula, get down off of that right now.” or “Fibula, dinner time”. Doesn’t it just flow off the tongue? Or even “And now the class Valedictorian, Fibula Patella Aalseth”.
Marsha: WHAT?!?
Me: Yeah, Fibula, and her twin brother Tibia. We’d call him Tim.
Marsha: Uh……
Me: And the little surprise baby when we were in our forties would be Phalanges. We’d call her Phil.
Marsha: What are we, the Bone Family?!?
Me: No but that does give me an idea. A sitcom called The Bone Family.
Marsha: …
Me: Yeah, it would have the madcap adventures of the kids, and their father from Italy, Clavicle Bone. Of course he’d be an Orthopaedic Surgeon.
Marsha: Oh-oh yeah of course. And what about Mrs. Bone? What would her name be? Scapula?
Me: No, that would be silly. But, it would be easy to tell who she was?
Marsha: Oh? How?
Me: She’d be the one wearing the Verti-Bra.

Sometimes I think it’s amazing that we’ve stayed together this long.

Doug & Marsha

PIX: Momiji enjoying the sun and spring flowers.