Category: Miscellaneous

I went for a quick dip at the Fritz Sick pool tonight. Over the couple years that I worked at that pool I’ve seen a few relatively minor instances of theft from the lockers so since I didn’t have a lock with me, I just brought my stuff out on deck with me.

It turns out that it was a very good idea because when I got out of the pool I overheard that someone had been going through the change rooms stealing whatever they could find. Apparently at least one lady had lost her watch and maybe some other belongings.

What makes people so selfish and inconsiderate? Thieves of the world, please quit thieving.

Ahhhh, it’s some kind of miracle! (Satellite image from somewhere in Peru). Well it’s probably just as miraculous as deciphering messages in music you play backwards anyway.

Google Siteseeing is full of other interesting satellite images.

My house is infested. It’s really frustrating, but I have a serious moth problem. (Not to be confused with a math problem which I may or may not also have).

I have been killing these intruders like crazy but every morning when I wake up there are fresh ones all over the house. (Actually I can usually find about… Let’s see three or four each morning but let’s not talk about numbers, as I said earlier this is a moth problem and has very little to do with math.) Just so you know, I’m not talking about the huge scary “Silence of the Lambs” style moths, luckily, but still even though they are small they are still annoying.

I poured out some Vector cereal this morning and discovered a moth in the bowl. This was pretty sick, but whatever, I scooped it out and ate it anyway. Looking in the box indicated that there weren’t any other moths and so I didn’t think much of it.

Tonight I grabbed myself another bowl only to pour in the milk and find ANOTHER moth in my food! GROSS! Little bits of moth dust spread through the milk. I inspected some of the other (old) boxes of cereal – which should have been tossed long ago just because nobody is going to eat Bran Flakes anyway – but when I opened them I found what you might describe as a moth hive. There were tons of dusty dirty moths creeping and crawling around everywhere inside the box. I didn’t count them (see paragraph 1) but I certainly tossed them. Which serves me well anyway because now that I’ve cleaned the cupboards I have room for more tasty cereal.

Hopefully that will be the last of them, if throwing out that old cereal doesn’t take care of them I’ll have to get some mothballs. Which begs the question of which is worse: moths in your food or the smell of mothballs in your kitchen?

I updated my backmasking page with a clip from The Hotel California. Tell your friends! Tell EVERYBODY!

Yesterday I discovered a link to the moon and today I read about the background of the project. It started as a birthday wish on a post-it note.

A Colorado congressman by the name of Tom Tancredo suggested bombing Mecca, as what his spokesman called a “hypothetical” response to a future Islamist terror attack on US soil.

Talk show host Pat Campbell asked the Littleton Republican how the country should respond if terrorists struck several U.S. cities with nuclear weapons.

“Well, what if you said something like — if this happens in the United States, and we determine that it is the result of extremist, fundamentalist Muslims, you know, you could take out their holy sites,” Tancredo answered.

“You’re talking about bombing Mecca,” Campbell said.

“Yeah,” Tancredo responded.

It’s pretty much a given that this guy is a complete asshole, but questions that remain in my head are how does someone like this rise to congress and how many “good Americans” actually have the audacity to think like this?

Previous to the brave new world we now find ourselves in – post September 11th, 2001 – I would have thought a comment like this was so outrageous that it would be a waste of time to even think about it. With the asinine comments that a congressmen from the United States is willing to make about this kind of “hypothetical situation”, I’m forced to believe this kind of thinking is widespread.

Here’s a hypothetical scenario for Tom Tancredo, what if there were a horrific terrorist attack worse than any other in history and on US soil, that was carried out, not by an extremist Muslim, but by an equally fanatic Christian in the name of the Catholic Church? Hypothetically would you consider bombing The Vatican? It’s the exact same thing!

Sometimes reading the news makes me so mad.

I went to see the Fantastic Four movie yesterday. I was warned that it was a pretty terrible movie but as is often the case when you have bad expectations for a movie, I thought it was pretty good.

The part of the movie that made me the happiest, though, was seeing someone that I knew in the movie! I knew him from my one week stint, back in April, as a production assistant in Vancouver. The photo above is a screen shot I got from apple.com trailers – he’s the one in the truck.

Remember the folks that brought you the election parody cartoon “This Land” last year? Well here is the follow up: Second Term.

This Superman Animated Short by Chris Appelhans wasn’t really what I expected, but all the same, I think it’s great.

I just heard the news that the American border is once again open to Canadian cattle. This will make a lot of Canadian cattle ranchers very happy, but it raises some questions in my mind.

First of all, I’d just like to say that it seems kind of ridiculous that the border was ever closed in the first place because with as much cattle trading that happens between American and Canadian ranchers, it’s not like their cows have any less risk of Mad Cow compared to ours anyway.

Now with the border reopening, it doesn’t mean the threat of Mad Cow is any less than it was before (and don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe it’s a particularly big threat, just that the problem hasn’t actually been dealt with). With all the billions of dollars in government aid, I would have liked to see (or heard about anyway) what advances have been made in solving the actual problem of BSE (Mad Cow) instead of focusing all attention on the closed US border. What is going to happen in the way of reducing Mad Cow now that trade has resumed? Ironically the resumption of trade will probably be less, rather than more, of an incentive to find a permanent BSE solution.