Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

So I’ve written in the past about various paradises you can move to in warmer areas (Brazil for example is an amazing place for real estate deals, perhaps for the brave), but after looking at the price of houses in Toronto — it’s hard to find a nice place to live these days for under $500,000, I thought I’d give some examples of places in Canada a person could “drop out” to with a limited set of resources and either the ability to telecommute, or enough investments to live off.

Let’s start with the Magdalen Islands, a beautiful little archipelago in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. Here’s a cute little three bedroom house (featured on various postcards of the island) on a four acre lot right on the ocean. Asking price? Only $64,000.

If you prefer something on Cape Breton Island, considered one of the most stunning parts of the world, here’s a five bedroom house on the Cabot Trail on a six and a half acre oceanfront lot. Asking price here is $59,000. If you’re willing to spend “Toronto amounts”, you can get gorgeous houses on mile-long stretches of private beach…

If you’re willing to go farther north, near St. John’s on the island of Newfoundland, you’ll find places like this little three bedroom bungalow in Placentia Bay on a small ocean front lot for the scant price of $29,000. Ocean at once serene and wild.

The properties above are all on the East Coast, which definitely contains most of Canada’s deals in oceanfront property, but even in British Columbia you can find deals, like this little two bedroom cottage (bottom) for an even $50,000 or the three bedroom house (top) for $76,000, both right on the ocean.

Anyway, there are a zillion more and I’m not really very good at searching MLS (I have a patience deficiency), but all of the above are on grid, maintained structures that a person could reasonably move into and work from if they telecommuted. That said, you could always take the path my father did and move onto a boat instead!

I was reading Mary Roach’s new book, “Bonk”, and in a chapter on clitoral relocation surgery is a brief note about the “Janjero tribe” –

…one culture cuts the nipples off boys, to masculinize them. Bonaparte gives a quote obtained from a nipple-less Janjero tribesman by an anthropologist named Cerulli. “We do this because we do not wish to resemble women in any way.”

Roach mentions that she was not able to confirm the above claim in a journal search, and I couldn’t find much about it either… The “Book of the Penis” by Maggie Paley also contains the following comment,

Among the Janjero of Ethiopia, a man who’s had both nipples and one testicle removed may never rule. All males with the exception of the king and his sons are mutilated in this manner. Members of the lowest class are left alone, since no one would let them rule in any case.

“Black God: The Afroasiatic Roots of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim Religions” by Julian Baldick and “Black Eros” by Boris de Rachewiltz, and a few web sites contain similar commentary about the puberty rites of the Janjero, but I couldn’t find anything I’d call definitive, and there’s an awful lot of fantasy in early anthropology. Still, I found it quite interesting because it’s the only reference to nipple removal / nipple nullification that I know of in a traditional context.

Anyway, I’m enjoying “Bonk” and will now get back to reading.

The “robot” in the video below is about half the width of a grain of rice. I’m not really sure if I’d call it a “robot”, because it’s more of a remote control device that’s being pushed around by EM fields from afar (so it has neither sensors nor autonomy on any level)… On one level it’s no more a robot than a leaf being blown around by a leaf blower, but at the same time, it’s definitely an eerie precursor of the many forms of limbs that shall tear us to bits in the impending robot apocalypse.

More details here.