On Saturday morning just before 10:30am a house located on the North-side of Lethbridge exploded.
A 68-year-old man was looking after his 11-year-old grand daughter. She was blown from the house and landed in the yard. Apparently she escaped with only minor cuts and bruises. The elderly man was discovered very soon afterwards by neighbors. He was under a pile of rubble laying on his sofa. The neighbors quickly dug him out and as from what I understand, moments after he was safe - what was left of the bungalow erupted up in flames.
Both he and the girl, though escaping serious injuries, remained in Lethbridge Regional Hospital yesterday.
The explosion is suspected to be caused by a natural gas leak in the basement.
Talk about a bad day.
After my 6:30AM meeting yesterday at the pool, I came home and wondered what I would be doing for the rest of the day. I have no shifts until Saturday so while I was considering my options, a friend of mine called me up and asked if I wanted to go to Calgary. He wanted to buy a new suit. His wife wanted him to buy a fancy new suit for a wedding they are going to this weekend.
After shopping, for a very nice and might I add expensive new suit, we drove down 17th avenue or “the red mile” on our way to lunch. We were there too early to see any celebratory breast flashing, which I guess, is becoming a tradition there. It’s like big foot, the Yeti, or Ogopogo - you hear about these sightings, but you never actually see them yourself. Except on the Internet. (NSFW duh)
On top of it all, the Flames lost last night. I heard yesterday morning that Tampa Bay defenceman Dan Boyle’s house had a bad fire causing $300,000 worth of damage. It’s really too bad, I can’t even imagine how devastating it would be if my house caught on fire. I thought that the whole team might be thrown off their game but it didn’t look like it affected them at all. They beat the Flames 4-1 last night tieing up the series with one victory each. You’ve got to hand it to them, it’s going to be a fight to the finish.
Better luck next time Flames.
Reuters has an article about the blogger and supposedly “famous actor” who goes by the moniker Rance. They claim that research indicates Rance is nothing more than a wannabe who used to work at an ad firm in Los Angeles:
Meanwhile, a Defamer reader tried to unmask Rance by researching the term “Captain Hoof,” which appears in the Web address. She came to the conclusion that he was a San Francisco man who worked at an ad agency and once ran a Web site with a similar name — possibly dedicated to an imaginary horse.The man, who no longer works for the agency, could not be contacted for this story.
While I have no clue who Rance actually is, I do enjoy reading his blog and will continue to do so - even if he’s not as famous as he claims to be.
Update: It appears Rance is a fake.
Anna-Maria is in Toronto all this week. I’m off to play Risk with some friends but before I go, here is a little message about Canada (from Joey DeVille’s Accordion Guy):
Joey, a Filipino-born Canadian, writes a spirited editorial in response to a jackass racist blogger at enterstageright.com who asserts that the Canadians who died in the Boer War, the two World Wars, and the Korean conflict certainly didn’t intend for Toronto to be annexed by the “Third World,” and says that the non-whites of Canada are less Canadian, with “no knowledge or affection for the old Canada, in either their hearts or minds.”
A parody helps change a corrections policy at The New York Times. An online critic’s query ends a career at the Chicago Tribune. Bloggers’ scrutiny is making its mark on traditional journalism.
Online Journal Review on how bloggers are influencing mainstream newspapers.
Last night they turned on version 2.0 of their main Creative Commons licenses. The new licenses clarify and refine the initial terms of the 1.0 licenses, and CC has posted good, clear commentary explaining the changes.
I know you’re thinking it. If you’re not well you can start now. When is Google going to come out with their own instant message program? They’re obviously working on it. Think about it - they started out with creating the world’s best search engine, then they bought out my favorite blogging service: Blogger, they own a pretty nifty networking service: Orkut and they’ve stated they want to infringe upon Microsoft’s turf. They clearly need to enter the messenger market in order to really pull the mass market of users from Hotmail to Gmail. I’m aware of Hello the IM that Blogger is pushing for the purpose of photoblogging, though I haven’t tried it. But I’m looking for something that can interact with my webmail - a true blue google product. It’s only a matter of time until we see “The Google Messenger”, and I, for one, cannot wait.
Update: Turns out Google doesn’t own Orkut, they are just affiliated. From Orkut’s help page:
Why is it called orkut?
Category: General
Updated: 2/9/2004
Answer
orkut.com is a new social networking service named for the Google engineer who developed it, Orkut Buyukkokten. (Orkut is easier to spell and pronounce than Buyukkokten.) This was created as an independent project and is not part of the Google product portfolio.
Update August 2005: Google Talk has just been released.
I received a forwarded email this morning quoting a blog posting of a letter from a soldier in Iraq.
The gist of what this guy says is that while he is grateful for people “supporting the troops” he is disappointed that they don’t support the war.
My quick response to that is: the people don’t support the war because the reasons used to justify it were lies, it’s a waste of money and people, and it’s not going to make a long term difference.
Of course he supports the war, he’s a gun toting, warmongering soldier who loves kicking ass over there, and he just wishes the American people could understand how fun that is.
On the day of my last exam in the spring semester, I raced home from the university so happy to finally be done for summer. I raced home at 105 km per hour according to the photo-radar bastards, exactly 15 km an hour over the posted limit. Now they want me to pay a cool $90 but I’m thinking of asking for a reduction. Gary shares his ticket fighting strategies and unless I’ll lose more money from not working that day, I’ll probably take his advice.
Update: I never got the reduction because I waited too long to act on it.
The “pre-election” spending spree can now become the “election” spending spree, as Prime Minister Paul Martin visited Governor General Adrienne Clarkson and asked her to dissolve the 37th Parliament. Thus setting off a 36 day federal election campaign, ending with the vote on June 28th. This is the first general election for all three of the main party leaders. Slumping Liberal support in polls and a more regional vote should make this interesting. I’m predicating a minority government with the Liberals being the party with the most seats while the NDP and Alliance being on opposite ends of the spectrum fill in the rest of the seats and make sure that nothing is passed.
I’ve decided to add a little something to my backmasking page. So for now I’m working on adding Britney Spears - Hit Me Baby One More Time, Queen - Another One Bites the Dust, and The Beatles - I’m So Tired. I might be tempted to add more after these ones are completed and online. This post would be a good place to comment on other songs you’d like to hear backward samples from (of songs that are known for backmasking).
Update May 23rd, 2004: The new backmasking additions are up.
Update: June 9th, 2004: I just added Pink Floyd’s “Empty Spaces” to the backmasking page.
Anna got the job at the University that she had applied for. It seems like a pretty great job and she is very excited about it. She will be in charge of the Summer Programs for English as a Second Language (ESL) students. It’s similar to something she did working for the college three years ago only this time she is in charge of the whole program. It will be interesting having us both work at the University—I start my New Media Movie Making Camp in July and she started work today.
As disappointing as this is, I still don’t know whether or not Andy is back. Pictures posted from the Bunny Ranch seem to indicate that Tony Clifton, not Andy Kaufman showed up last night.
Andy Kaufman’s new blog claims however that he was there and that he is the real deal. Yahoo news has stated that they believe him, but who can believe anything Yahoo posts - after being fooled by Andrew Carlssin the time-traveler I won’t trust them anymore. Not that I believed he was a time-traveler but I at least thought the story about someone claiming to be from the future was true. I never noticed the part about the Weekly World News covering the story.
Anyway Google News about Andy is coming in fast, and though I wanted so badly to be right, it looks like he’s really gone.
He hums your favorite tunes. I downloaded Teen Spirit and yeah, Dokaka is pretty good.
As a five-year-old child, Dokaka hummed along with melodies on television, but one day plugged headphones into the TV, discovering that the sounds in his head matched those piping through the headphones. He quickly realized that songs consist of many parts like bass, drums, etc. Within a year, he began to record himself humming.At 18, Dokaka started drumming in bands, and four years later stumbled upon his childhood recordings, reigniting his interest in humming. He was first heard humming by others when his band’s bassist missed practice, so he hummed the bassline. The band’s singer found the humming catchy and recommended professional recording. Dokaka financed and produced his own recordings and uploaded them to the internet, dubbing himself with the onomatopoeic name “Dokaka” from his drum-derived humming sounds!
NASA has provided 90 second videos of the first 90 sols (martian days) of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers [both are 5MB .mov].