Today went fine except the point where I was almost hit by an ambulance. I was just about to go through an intersection when he cut right in front of me (he was turning left to go in the direction that I was coming from). No lights, no siren, no nothing, just driving like he was in an car race. On top of it all he was talking on a cellular phone. Why do I have the feeling that hitting him would have been MY fault?

I was listening to this band on the radio. Nothing special, just more of the same formula rock you hear everywhere now. Originality may be dead, stay tuned. Listening to this guys lyrics didn’t yield anything special either. All he does is bitch and complain about his childhood. I want to listen to this because….? Of course, reading about me bitching and complaining about someone else bitching and complaining might give the same response in you was well. Next thing you know, I’ll be complaining about the internet, ON the internet. Wouldn’t that be interesting?

The part where I complain about the internet

I see all kinds of things these days where people and interest groups are championing the development of the internet in places where it currently is absent. The most recent example I saw of this came out of the G-8 summit. Something about getting 3rd world countries access. Why? Many people have pointed out that perhaps a better way to help these countries is not through access to AltaVisto or Yeeha, but perhaps through financial aid, food, or forgiveness of debt. Well, duh!. Of course, our Prime Minister Cretin pointed out that since they didn’t have telephone lines – well they can just use cell phones. Lunacy! There seems to be a lot of this going around. Why is the internet considered essential or necessary? Sure its nice, and I wouldn’t want to give it up, but I don’t NEED it. I once saw a website that had words to this effect on it (and nothing else): “This is the last page in the internet. Now go outside and play.”

Exactly!

Read a book dammit!

Isn’t there this big push in the US to have every school equipped with internet access? I have heard similar things here in BC as well. Why? When I went to high school there was seldom enough in the way of text books for everybody, so some had to go without. Would the internet have solved this? Should we be spending what little education dollars we have in order to supply the internet when things like textbooks are severely lacking? People are starting to get the impression that the internet is the only way to learn, to gather information. Its occasionally good for that, but I also find mostly misinformation there too. Rarely do I ever find any information on the internet that would be usable in any academic setting. This is where I search for the frivolous, not for the important. So why the big push towards getting this into schools? Because its trendy? I don’t know, but I just don’t think that it is necessary.

This is the end of this update. Now go outside and play.

I am by no means a fashion expert, nor would I want to be, but I am always surprised at what people will wear in public. I am not talking about the days where people are in a big hurry (especially around exam time) and they just throw on some sweatpants or something. I am talking about outfits that are more frequent, and find their way into a persons regular ensemble. For example, the guy I see who wears dress shirts everyday. This in itself is not abnormal, except he is always wearing extremely tight spandex “pants”. It thought he might have an excuse if he rode his bike to school. He takes the bus. Yuck. The other day I was near the SFU gym. I saw this girl wearing a pair of shorts that had a big stop sign on the back, and a yield sign on the front. I will leave any potential misinterpretation up to you. Of course, all of these people are not bad. I recently saw a girl that was about 16 or 17 helping some older man who was having obvious problems crossing the street. Nice to see, and I will choose to ignore the fact that she was wearing a shirt that read “Fuck You!” on the back of it.

Sigh.

Of course, the transgressions are not limited to visual assaults. Frequently I am violated nasally as well. When you were a kid were you ever exposed to those scratch and sniff stickers? Some of them didn’t smell too good, likely as their payload of smell was altered by either a chemical reaction or just age. I don’t know what the hell it is, but there is this perfume out there that I have been noticing more and more often. It smells just like those stenchy (neologism) stickers of yore. What the hell are you thinking?

Last night was simply amazing. There was this spectacular (by my standards…) lightning storm that was simply unprecedented in my recollection (we don¹t get many here…). I have only seen fork lightning once before, but I must have seen 30-40 in the space of a few hours last night. I actually went out and drove in my car, following it. I sat in the parking lot of Coquitlam Center Mall (in my car) and saw lightning that rivaled the best fireworks show I have ever seen.

It also reminded me of a joke I once heard (completely rewritten…). Something like: If you are in a thunderstorm on a golf course hold your 1-iron in the air. Even God can’t hit a 1-iron.

Recently a friend’s apartment was broken into. All the usual stuff was taken, the only “interesting” thing about it was that security assumes that all the stuff is still in the same building. Personally, thinking that most of my stolen articles could be a floor or two below me would just make it worse.

Naturally, the conversation turned to what to do to prevent or capture further attempts at thievery in the future :

1. The glue trap. Put a couple of REALLY big glue traps inside of the door. Just imagine the satisfaction of coming home to see your door crow barred open, but with the culprits lying pretzel-like in the glue trap just inside the door. This was dismissed as impractical not only due to the resulting mess, accidents, and the potential for litigation.

2. The giant slingshot. If you don’t press in the new alarm code quick enough, you are ejected out the bedroom window to the parking lot below. 16 stories below. This was also dismissed as impractical, as well as potentially illegal.

3. Chemical tracking. If you had a welcome mat just inside the door that had a chemical that fluoresced under UV light or something, you could track the culprits back to their apartment. This was also dismissed as impractical because of the potential for “good” people stepping on it. Look, we have followed the criminals tracks right to….. our car. Damn.

4. The only wild idea that was actually implemented was a sign just inside the door that said : “Smile! Your on camera a-hole”!! Apparently this disturbed the guy who came to fix the door.

I think that they finally settled on a plain old alarm system. How boring.

Recently I began drinking water. Well, no, not for the first time ever, but I began to take it to school with me and drink it. I tell you, if something is there in front of me (I’m talking practical ingestible items here…), I will eat it, or I will drink it. I have very little self control (especially with candy). If I were standing in front of a buffet, I would either explode, or I would run out of food. So when I carry a liter of water with me, it poses certain problems. On Friday, the most immediate problem with this whole scenario was realized during : the physics exam. The problem with drinking a liter of water right before an exam is probably obvious to most, but since I hadn’t really been drinking anything on school mornings I became oblivious to the potential problem. Lets just say that about half way through the exam I was in considerable… distress. This wasn’t only because the exam sucked, but more to do with the fact that my body’s most immediate desire was to rid itself of the vast quantity of water I had consumed earlier. I had a great deal of regret during this exam, mostly due to the overzealous water consumption but also, as I have astutely determined, that physics exams suck.

Last week I was driving to school at about 8:00 in the morning. There is this side road that goes to the SFU parking lots that has a speed limit of 30 kph. Of course, as is the case with all speed limits, people take this as a suggestion and go 60. I tend to go 40 – 45, a transgression that has already managed to get me a terse letter from SFU Parking and Security telling me to slow down or they would revoke my parking permit. Of course, I still go about 40, but keep a lookout for the radar van. Last week I had this young woman following me. I think she wished I was going faster than 40 because she decided to weave in and out of the lane behind me. So, since I am not a morning person and can get a tad cantankerous (the reason I am sticking to at the moment) I decided to slow down. As one might assume, she then got ornery. She tailgated, she honked, she waved a certain finger at me. She was yelling. This is a stretch of road that is probably only 1 kilometer. So, rather than follow me for a minute or two, she would rather fly into a rage, instead of just bearing with me. Sure, I was being an ass, but the reaction was just too over the top for me to resist the temptation. She started to say something after she got out of her car (after parking next to me), but then she stopped (I will be forever curious what she would have said, but I can probably guess). When she got to the door of the building, she stopped, sat down, and lit cigarette. Gee, and I thought she must have been late for a meeting or something… Sorry to have kept you from your cancer.

Today (lacking anything much better to do) we were sharing stories of sickness. Those times when you would give almost anything to feel better. Someone recounted the story of how they went to Hong Kong for three weeks, returned, and ate the hamburger casserole that they made before they left! What was simply strange about this story was that he didn’t get sick at all (none of that “Power Yawning”, as the kids call it now). I think he just got lucky, rather than having a strong stomach for these things. Myself, on the other hand, came to the table with the story how I ate a four day old Kaiser bun in 1993 (the next day the others were found to be cultivating colonies of a hairy, mould-like substnace). The ensuing trip to the hospital (go home – you just have to “ride it out”) and the week of delerium spent in bed (too bad I was’t writing then – I could have come up with even weirder stuff) is a pretty good tale of woe. Suffice to say that the 25 pounds that I lost in one week (from 150 to 125 in a week) brought new meaning to the word skinny. 6 feet tall and 125 is not a pretty sight from anyones perspective. What was probably more aweful than having been sick was the interest from several girls who made annoyances of themselves trying to determine how I had lost so much weight in so little time (their only interest). Already what I would consider thin, they wanted to know how they could lose weight like that. “I was sick”, I’d say. Who were you around? “Food poisoning, likely”, I’d day. What did you eat? Where did you eat it? What else did you eat? Did you eat during your week away? I made the pointless attempt at pointing out that 1) Why do you want to lose weight anyway, looking the way you do already? and 2) There are MUCH better ways than the inadvertant manner in which I did it. I’d rather be “Power Yawning” than considering the socail ramifications of questions like these. Already skinny girls eager to get violently ill for a week in order to lose weight scare me, regardless of whatever pressures they may realize or imagine.

Why am I telling you this? – because I have been putting all of my efforts to do with the internet and this page into its redesign, rather than coming up with compelling new content for it. I don’t think that continuing tales of “Power Yawning” should probably satisfy anyones category of compelling, so I will spare you the details.

I have experimentally and scientifically discovered that it isn’t really possible to die of boredom, or it would have happened by now.

I have an oven that is so slow it takes it half an hour to get to 400 F. That sounds like a joke… I have an oven that is so slow….. Like, I have a sister who is so cross-eyed she can sit on the front porch and count the chickens in the backyard. Sorry, I digress. Having such a slow oven frequently sucks, especially if you want to eat your food in a reasonable time. So imagine my surprise and consternation when I realize that I had cracked one of my “oven safe” plates in said slow oven. It wasn’t even that hot? What is this? Doesn’t oven safe mean you can put it into the oven? This event prompted a great many “they don’t make them like they used to’s” and even a “kids these days”. I am not sure where the second one came from , but there it was. What’s next? I suppose that my neighbors canoe isn’t really “waterproof” and that pen of mine is only “permanent” in the eyes of a landfill. A glue stick that says “Glides smoother”. What is this? Do I care how “smooth” it feels to the paper?

Then I’ve got mushrooms that say “not to be taken internally” and shampoo that says “already cooked”. Wait, I’ve got those backwards. However, this doesn’t vindicate the whole name of the product. Its even got “sham” in the name. What if we want the real stuff? Will we someday be able to buy food that says “Already eaten” ? My olive oil says “extra virgin”. How does that work? I don’t’ even want to get into the fine print on my toaster (it is considerable). Some boxes say confusing things like “fragile”. Isn’t it the contents that could be fragile? What if I filled a “fragile” box with cotton balls? Would they all be broken and mangled if I dropped it all down the stairs? What if my box of expensive crystal doesn’t say “fragile” on it?

I’ve got this ointment that is supposed to make cuts heal faster and it also says “not to be taken internally”. How internal is “internally? If I get it too far into my cut will it do harm? Will it go into my bloodstream and form a clot in my brain – blocking the parts of it that do important things like allow me to scratch an itch or to enjoy the loyalty of a good dog? My unopened box of salt has a tag over the spout that says “safety seal”. Is this their mascot? There isn’t a picture of a seal on it anywhere! Did I get one without a seal on it? Does this mean that my salt is unsafe because there isn’t a seal on it? Would the seal be keeping me from hurting the salt or the salt from hurting me? Then it goes and says something confusing like “enriched with Potassium? Don’t seals get enough of this in their diet? It also calls itself “table salt”. Why? Why? Why? There was a sign on a restaurant that I was in the other day that said: “No shirt, no shoes, no service”. Then they objected to the fact that I wasn’t wearing pants. Is this really my fault? Why couldn’t they be more specific? Lets not even get started on how comfortable the “may explode and leak” message on my batteries makes me feel.

I have all kinds of questions like these. What is the square root of an orange? Why is blue such a depressing color? Why doesnt static cling bother me? Why dont kitchen sinks have overflow holes like bathroom ones and bathtubs too? Why haven’t Canadians reformed their senate? Its July, why does the weather suck? But lets not get silly now….

I was talking to a friend of mine today, and he told me about an event that occurred on the bus this morning. Quite often on his route to SFU, there is a woman who brings a pet parrot with her. This parrot isn’t in a cage, and gets free run of the bus when she allows it. Once, when there were a lot of people on the bus, this parrot began a “beak and claw climb” right up the shirt sleeve of the person next to the woman. I’ll bet the parrot was having just one hell of a good time. The person who was acting as the ladder, however, might not have been as amused.

Today the story got a little more interesting. The bus driver would have none of all this “parrot on the bus” routine. He told the parrot lady to leave and to take the avian desperado with her. He cited (besides the no pet policy) that someone might be allergic to it. She refused to leave. My friend couldn’t hear the gist of the conversation, but it wasn’t getting too heated. After the driver had returned to his seat at the front of the bus, the parrot lady remained. The driver then called out that if she wasn’t getting off the bus, he wasn’t going to take the bus anywhere. She crossed her arms. Seems we had the beginnings of a first rate stalemate. The driver then repeated that he wasn’t going to drive anywhere with the parrot still on board. This sort of reminds me of when parents say things like : if you don’t stop that I am driving this car off the first cliff I come to young man! Ah, the memories…

Eventually, after a few minutes of this, the driver realized he wasn’t going to get her off the bus by asking nicely. So he called transit security, which met them about five minutes towards SFU. Though I wasn’t filled in on the details, the parrot lady was taken off of the bus in what was not described as any sort of vastly unpleasant incident. She had been promised by the transit rent-a-cops that they would drive her to her destination. I was secretly hoping that the incident would become ugly because it might make a better update. Sadly, no.

In what can now only be construed as a natural progression from this story, I raise again the question of people who wear too much perfume. Obviously having a parrot on a transit bus is cited as a transgression largely because of the fact that pets aren’t allowed, and that the parrot was not in a cage. However, the driver suggested that it was because people might be allergic to it. Would he have the gumption to try and throw off someone who was wearing too much perfume/cologne? I doubt it.

I used to have terrible allergies – everything was a potential allergen. Food especially, would cause all kinds of horrible repercussions. Thankfully, this isn’t the case anymore. As I have “matured” I have also lost the majority of my allergies. Thankfully. The point is, before this occurred, I would have all kinds of horrible reactions to someone who was wearing too much chemical scent. Its not necessarily that they have applied too much of it, its often just that the scent exists at all.

I should also point out that this does not preclude my potential interest in such scents. Recently I was around this young woman who had on a modicum of perfume. Despite the fact that one of the results of my close proximity was sneezing and a runny nose, I am not saying that it wasn’t worth it in some small way. Hmmmm…

So having examined all sides of the issue I have come to the conclusion that… Actually I haven’t made my mind up about it yet, but I aim to soon. Perhaps more research is needed.

Insomnia is a phenomenon that I have never liked. Lying in bed and thinking to myself is something I like to do, if I am not trying to get to sleep. When I am, thoughts only become a nuisance to my goal of unconsciousness. So image how pissed I was when last night, after finally getting to sleep, the main smoke alarm went off.

Well, I wasn’t really mad so much as I was very suddenly wide awake. The house that I live in has one of those built in smoke alarm systems, and it is very loud. I have often heard it when they are cooking dinner upstairs, and I have learned to not panic when it goes off, and to even ignore it if the time is appropriate. Of course, it has never gone off at 3:00 in the morning before. So after getting to sleep approximately 20 minutes before, my unconscious state was shattered by this shrieking banshee on the ceiling. Needless to say, this really got my attention. All kinds of images started to leap into my mind. The house being on fire being most prominent among those. I imagined rest of the basement (I only occupy half) on fire, and what I would do if I discovered it was. I have always wondered why, when things turn really spectacular in an undesirable way, why I don’t panic. Inappropriately, sometimes.

The first thing I thought of were birch trees. Back in grade whatever I remember them telling us to make a plan with our parents concerning where to meet in the case that the house was on fire. The birch trees were where we were going to meet. This wasn’t really applicable here. I had already turned on the light, and was beginning to think that maybe I should perhaps go outside and assess the situation from there when the alarm suddenly stopped. Then I heard the people upstairs talking, thumping on the floor with their feet. One said to another to go back to bed. And that was it. Silent.

Just lets try and get to sleep after that shall we?

Of course, there was no fire, and I have yet to gain an explanation for why the alarm went off. For all I know, someone tried to get a quick indoor smoke late last night, without thinking of exactly the consequences might be. I might have appreciated someone telling me what was going on.

I had a great amount of time in which to think at this point. I do have a plan on how to get out of here in the case of a fire or other emergency evacuation situation. I’ve given it thought, and I have also covered myself in case I begin to desire to take things with my on my departure. The briefcase.

Recently I have seen two instances where it was necessary to distribute someone’s belongings to other family members. This seldom goes well, as I have both observed and heard from others. I am not sure if the resultant fighting is because they are intimately attached to the objects in question, or if they simply desire stuff at the cost of others not being able to get it. As I child I used to be very attached to my possessions, maybe that is the way that most children are, I don’t know. Recently, however, I took stock of my numerous possessions and determined exactly what was irreplaceable. Not what was important, but what I couldn’t replace by just going to a store. So I took all of these things, and I managed to fit them into a briefcase. Granted, much of it consists of things that I have written myself. Irreplaceable because I could write them again, but never quite in just the same way. I also have a .ZIP disk of around 50 megabytes of text files, also things that I have written in the past number of years. A copy of this web site and the others I have built for other people too, of course. I have many books that I really enjoy reading, but the only one that has meaning outside of the fact that it is simply a book is also in the case. There are photos, and a few articles that have been given to me by various persons in the last few years.

That’s it. It all fits into a briefcase. This is what I grab if I have the presence of mind to do so as I flee my suite for whatever cause. I believe that the pursuit of property and the worry of the loss of it is uppermost too often in peoples minds. I cannot know what is in someone’s mind, but I observe their actions and come to this conclusion through them. And I know that I don’t want to be like that again. And I also know that I shouldn’t be starting sentences with “and”, but who’s reading this anyway?

I have noticed how commercials tend to put a positive spin on their product. This is probably not a new strategy, as it likely has been a fixture in Advertising 101 classes since the beginning. I wonder how hard this is, sitting around the advertising table***, when you know your product is crap. I mean, come on, sometimes it must just be obvious. Obvious too, is the fact that people will buy your piece of crap and you could stand to make a lot of money depending upon just how many suckers reside within the geographic scope of your advertising campaign.

All of these thoughts occurred to me as I attempted to get to sleep while listening to the radio late last night (there are better ways). There was a commercial on about how you can learn to speed read. They seemed quite proud of the fact that their method didn’t involve such hassles as having to run your fingers down the page. Imagine! I don’t have to instantly “memorize” a page of text with that annoying finger getting in the way! Sure I may glance at a page and notice interesting words all over it, with sometimes one or two from separate parts of the page catching my eye, which I guess this “method” is based. I still think that it is bullshit.

Part of reading a book is the time spent reading. If I could read a book cover to cover in as much time as it took to turn all the pages, then I would read far fewer books. Even if I could remember exactly what every character did, said, etc., part of the experience of reading a book is the actual reading. I would be robbing myself of escaping reality for a while if I were to employ this quick read method. So sorry advertising campaign, your QuickRead^TM method won’t become mine, and aside from the fact that I think that your product is bullshit, I will continue reading books the old fashioned way. Besides, if I were turning the pages that quickly, I would probably bleed to death from the ensuing paper cuts.

“I took a speed waiting course, now I can wait and hour in only 20 minutes!” – Steven Wright

***Which reminds me, as soon as I said “advertising table”, I was reminded of this commercial for a rental car company. I kind of like this website actually (http://www.adcritic.com), there are lot of commercials that are good for a variety of reasons. Some are funny, some are just very clever, and where else can you watch the cat herders commercial as many times as you want?