Month: September 2005

Well it was bound to happen, and now it has. I woke up this morning at about 6am with a terrible sore throat and nobody to take care of me. I just hope it doesn’t turn into a full fledged cold / flu / pneumonia.

New research correlating video game experience with proficiency in the operating room indicates that those who have played video games in the past were significantly faster and, more importantly, created fewer errors than people who had no previous video game experience. And my Dad always told me video games were a waste of time. (Of course I’m not a doctor but maybe if I hadn’t spent so much time playing video games…)

Researchers at the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology have created a credit card-size battery that runs on urine as a disposable power source for medical test kits. Urine is rich in ions and ions are what makes electricity electric – or something like that.

Now if we could only hook it up to our cars…

Petro points will have to wait. I received the following email from a friend, and while Snopes says “not buying gas” won’t help the problem because a one to three day boycott of gasoline is too short a period to make a difference, maybe there is enough of a spin on this method that it might work.

Instead of forwarding this to 10 people, I’m posting it on the blog so that the 500 or so people that come here daily (assuming some of you are gas purchasing Canadians) will get the message.

It is rumoured that we are going to hit close to a $1.42 a litre by the winter. Want gasoline prices to come down? We need to take some intelligent, united action. Someone offered this good idea. This makes MUCH MORE SENSE than the “don’t-buy-gas” on a certain day campaign that was going around last April or May! The oil companies just laughed at that because they knew we wouldn’t continue to hurt ourselves by refusing to buy gas. It was more of an inconvenience to us than it was a problem for them. BUT, this is a plan that can really work. Please read it and join.

We all know that we’re being controlled by the oil companies. Does everyone remember how they drove up the prices and got the gas prices to where they wanted them, claiming there was a shortage of oil. Well, there isn’t any shortage now, and the oil is more abundant than it was 35 years ago when the price of a gallon of gas was 29 cents!!!

Now that the oil companies and the OPEC nations have conditioned us to think that the cost of litre of gas is CHEAP at $0.78 – $0.85, we need to take aggressive action to teach them that BUYERS control the marketplace… not sellers.

With the price of gasoline going up more each day, we consumers need to take action. The only way we are going to see the price of gas come down is if we hit someone in the pocketbook by not purchasing their gas! And we can do that WITHOUT hurting ourselves. How? Since we all rely on our cars we can’t just stop buying gas. But we CAN have an impact on gas prices if we all act together to force a price war.

Here’s the idea:

PAY ATTENTION HERE

For the rest of this year, DON’T purchase ANY gasoline from the two biggest companies (which now are one), PETRO-CANADA & SHELL. If they are not selling any gas, they will be inclined to reduce their prices. If they reduce their prices, the other companies will have to follow suit. But to have an impact, we need to reach literally millions of PETRO-CANADA and SHELL buyers. It’s really simple to do! Now, don’t wimp out on me at this point…keep reading and I’ll explain how simple it is to reach millions of people!!

I am sending this note to at least thirty people. If each of you send it to at least ten more (30 x 10 = 300), and those 300 send it to at least ten more (300 x 10 = 3,000)…and so on, by the time the message reaches the sixth generation of people, we will have reached over THREE MILLION consumers! If those three million get excited and pass this on to ten friends each, then 30 million people will have been contacted!

Again, all you have to do is send this to 10 people. That’s all. How long would all that take? If each of us sends this email out to ten more people within one day of receipt, all 30 MILLION people could conceivably be contacted within the next 8 days!!! I’ll bet you I didn’t think you and I had that much potential, did you! Acting together we can make a difference. If this makes sense to you, please pass this message on.

PLEASE HOLD OUT UNTIL THEY LOWER THEIR PRICES TO THE $0.64 OR LESS RANGE AND KEEP THEM DOWN. THIS CAN REALLY WORK!!!!!!

But it won’t reach 30 million Canadians, there aren’t even that many Canadians with Internet access, nor that many that actually buy gas. I guess the point is to just tell as many people as possible.

Update: Well I’ve decided it won’t work. Read about it in the comments.

My new roommate arrived from Calgary today. He is from Korea and is in Canada developing his English skills. He seems like a really nice guy.

The highlight of my day was getting gas at the outrageous price of $1.14 per litre. But on a positive note, I won 10 free air miles from Safeway’s Lucky Day promotion. Too bad I don’t have an air miles card.

School starts back up again on Wednesday. I signed up for “Theory & Aesthetics of Video Games”, and have decided to only take one class – which means I’ll have to start paying back my student loans soon. The unfortunate thing about this class is there are only two girls enrolled. Doesn’t look like I’ll meet anyone while talking about video games…

And your moment of zen is upon you. Take a look at some photoshopping of old and young faces together: Age-Maps.

Ok, the following stories are just a third person re-telling of some stories I heard last night but I think you’ll find them very interesting nevertheless.

I’m going to call the story-teller A.B. to protect the poor guy’s identity – though he was pretty open about telling the stories. Also keep in mind these were a lot more funny hearing them from the source. I can’t verify the truth of these stories either and I get the impression that he liked the attention so he may or may not have been exaggerating the details. I did hear that he had some pretty messed up roommates though.

A.B. started telling us about his psycho roommates. First of all, he never met them or checked out the house before he agreed to move in. He realized pretty quickly that the place was a dump and the roommates were nuts. For one, they insisted that he had to wake up at 8:00am for “family prayer” – no they were not related to each other and I don’t think A.B. is the type to want to pray by himself let alone at 8am with his roommates.

They had a cat that would lick A.B.’s face in the morning which would cause some kind of allergic reaction. Not something which put him in a good mood. He explained that one time he stepped in cat puke and asked if the landlord – and the owner of the cat – would clean up his cat’s vomit. The landlord explained that, “no, he would just let nature take its course“. Which, I guess, is just let the cat eat it back up again later.

Their method of dividing up the household chores consisted of a draw for the different jobs around the house. A.B. didn’t like the idea of washing the dishes since his decision to always eat out kept him out of the dirty kitchen and was supposed to prevent him from having to do dishes. He also didn’t like cleaning up the Landlord’s cat’s litter.

The Landlord had loaned A.B. a bookshelf and a T.V. stand – among other things. When A.B. did something the Landlord didn’t like (I’m not sure what that was, he didn’t say) the Landlord would go into his room and take them back.

One day A.B. found his collection of video tapes on the ground where the bookshelf used to be. He shrugged it off and just packed his tapes back into cardboard boxes. His T.V. still worked sitting on the floor, so no big deal. One time the Landlord told him that he want A.B. to remove the carpet from his bedroom floor because he didn’t want him to have it anymore. A.B. told him to remove it himself. I’m not sure whatever happened with the carpet.

But one day the roommates stole some of the A.B.’s WWF wrestling tapes because, “Wrestling was evil and watching it would make him go to hell”. Apparently they were trying to save him by stealing his tapes and burning them! I guess A.B. is a big wrestling fan and these were tapes that he had purchased over Ebay! He looked pretty sad about it and even though he seemed to like that everyone was laughing at the shock value of the story you couldn’t help but feel bad for the guy.

So tensions were beginning to get high between A.B. and the Landlord. One day the Landlord ran his cable connection through A.B.’s room and I guess A.B. didn’t like that so he told him to take the cable out by Tuesday or he would do it himself, “and you won’t like the way I do it“.

Well Tuesday rolled around so A.B. whips out his Cutco knife and slices that cable in half and removes the offending section from his room. The Landlord didn’t like that at all, so to get back at A.B. he called the police and told them that A.B. was beating the female co-workers at the restaurant where A.B. works and that he, A.B., was also planning to blow up that same restaurant. The police picked A.B. up from work immediately and brought him down to the Station for questioning. They also asked to search his room to make sure he didn’t have any bomb materials in there.

When the police found out that it was a completely made up story they gave him the option of pressing charges against the landlord for wrongful arrest – or something like that but he decided not to and instead just elected to move out of the house and into Res. at the University.

Another story about A.B. (not sure about the time frame on this one).

The Landlord was two hours late for work opening his store – I guess he’s a manager at Radioshack in the mall. As a result, the mall fined him $12,000 for neglecting to open the store on time. The Radioshack manager / Landlord asked A.B., “You’re parents are rich right?”

I guess they are pretty well off – his dad is a lawyer.

“I need you to ask them to give you $12,000 to loan to me”. To which he said, “um, no.” Then the Landlord told him he had to or he would kick him out. To which he said, “um, no. I’ll be in my room if you need me”.

The Landlord then asked A.B.’s friend for his parents phone number, called them and told them that A.B. was heavy into drugs and owed a drug dealer $12,000 and that they needed to give him the money.

The parents phoned up A.B. and said something along the lines of “Son, are you ok? Are you doing drugs? Look – we’ll give you the $12,000 we just don’t want you to get killed.” He was kind of shocked and explained that no – he wasn’t doing drugs and he wasn’t going to get killed. He just had a psycho roommate.

When A.B.’s dad came to town to help him move out of the psycho house the landlord had the nerve to tell the dad that he was A.B.’s drug dealer and that the dad was going to have to pay off A.B.’s $12,000 marijuana bill.

As a side note, if you smoked $12,000 worth of marijuana in only 2 months that would probably kill you, wouldn’t it?

Needless to say, they did not give the landlord any money.

A.B. had another story about a girl he hooked up with over the summer. She was an old flame from ADD camp. That’s A.D.D. as in attention deficit disorder, not “add” as in Math. I guess they both suffered from A.D.D. as teenagers and hooked up at their special camp.

So one day, out of the blue, this girl, I think he called her Biker Chic, calls him up and says he wants him to drive to Canmore (I think) to reignite the old flame. A.B. decides that yes he would like that idea and so he calls his parents and tells him he is going up to Canmore with some friends on a little trip. He asked them for some money so he can buy his friends some beers – to which they oblige him.

When he gets there the girl has a friend who won’t leave them alone. The girl explains that the other girl is her parole officer and must be with her at all times. A.B. undaunted thinks, fine, whatever hopefully later tonight he’ll get some time alone despite the claim that they cannot be separated. A.B. is told to remain at arms length at all times. He wanted to kiss Biker Chic but even doing that wasn’t allowed without the “parole officer” watching because, hey he may have slipped her some drugs or something through their mouths. Sick. Anyway he ended up paying for both Biker Chic and the parole officer’s food and entertainment for the evening. Long story short – it sounded to me like the girls took advantage of a horny and not to swift A.B.

Oh and I heard tonight that the woman was in her 40’s.

A few months ago I read a story about the discovery of a disoriented man whom the medical experts believed might be a concert pianist – very much like in the movie “Shine”. The stranger refused to utter a single word after being found in a soaking wet suit on a beach in Britain.

Well it turns out the “Piano Man” was putting the world on. He fooled the doctors and it turns out he can barely play a note.