Changing Tracks

A few random thoughts...

Why don't they make Peanut Butter Cups the size of a pie?

I'm sitting on public transit trapped next to someone who apparently launders their clothing in bong water, and come to the sudden realization that "commute" also means "to shorten a prison sentence".

I found an iPod yesterday. When I was a kid, if I lost something it was usually a hockey card, or a key, or other flotsam. Nowadays kids are losing things worth hundreds of dollars.

I saw my friend try to pass a french-fry through his nose today. When he mentioned that they found a huge crater that had crashed to earth in Egypt. I waited for him to almost swallow before mentioning that craters don't crash to earth, meteorites do. Maybe that's what UFOs are? Craters that almost crash into earth but bounce off the atmosphere?

It finally snowed properly here... almost in time for spring. The kids thought it was pretty cool, but the snow removal crews were beside themselves with joy. I've never seen so much snow-removal equipment racing around to catch the limited supply of snowflakes. I'm surprised I haven't seen any huge grader-shaped snow-angels next to the highway.

I was clothes shopping at lunch. I passed a sales rack that had plus-size jeans. Well, that's kind of an under statement. These were 60-inch waist and up. Can you imagine what goes through the mind of the 3-foot-tall, 14-pound kid in some Thailand sweatshop when they're making pants with a 60-inch waist? Do they make their livestock wear pants in North America? I could use a pair of these as a house for four!

So do her kids...

I got hit pretty hard with the flu that's going around, so I've been off work for a few days. One of side effects of time off for self-pity is that you get to see a lot of T.V. you would not watch under normal circumstances.

There's a show called Nigella Bites on the Food Network. She's an English lady who seems bent on creating the highest calorie version of any particular meal she's preparing. She also has a habit of tasting things in the most unsanitary way possible. In the episode I watched, she cut a roast on the board she'd used while it was raw and then tried her cream sauce by dipping a bloody chunk of steak into it (almost going in up to her wrist) before bringing it to the table. A feat only topped by the appearance of her two offspring. Easily two of the ugliest little rat-children ever to gross a dining room.

At least, so I thought. I flipped a few channels and landed on a show called Nanny 9-1-1. I couldn't make it through the whole thing. A matronly old lady visits families with problem children. By problem children I mean, of course, puss-spewing dæmons straight from the bowels of hell. I'm glad it's not my show, or every episode would end with a phone call to the parents. "Yes, we've solved the difficulties with darling little Pestulencia... we had her put down. Best thing, really."

Back to the food channel to catch a travel show called $40 a Day with Rachael Ray. Oh, look. It rhymes. It also sucks. You can't get a whole lot on $40 a day, particularly in France or Madrid, or wherever. She tries, though, and then has to spend 10 minutes pumping up the fast-food dregs she's choking down like she's just been served by the Queen. "Holy crap! Hand me a panty-liner! I'm getting all moist. This is the best dry toast I've ever had!". Gag me with a complementary ketchup packet.

At least when I return to work, I can be slave in the knowledge that I'm definately not missing anything on daytime television.

Evolution

When I was young, let's say about 10-years-old or so, I was planning on being an architect. At the time, an architect still drew things by hand and built little cardboard models. My formative years were about a decade before computers really started to take hold. I think I probably would have been a good architect, too. I've got that sort of creative and analytical mind that can easily visualize things in 3D. It didn't quite turn out that way, though. I think I can trace the turning point to a single event.

I got my adult library card. That opened up a whole new world of books, but there was a problem. To a kids' eyes, all adult books look the same since their contents aren't differenciated with pictures. At the time, I didn't even have a favorite genre, although the seeds were sown. If I recall correctly, the books I loved back then were along the lines of Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang, and The Secret World of Og.

My first trip wasn't very successful, so my mom (a science fiction nut) recommended Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel. I couldn't find it at first, but the librarian found a copy called The Robot Novels that also included The Naked Sun. I was hooked from the first page and read it in a weekend. The story is about a police detective who is given a robot partner in a technology-phobic New York City. It's an amazing story about taking someone outside their comfort zone and seeing how they cope.

After that weekend, I was no longer a budding architect. My interests now were computers and technology. It's funny to look back and consider if I had stuck with architecture, I would have ended up more-or-less the same way. As I left highschool, computers were just making their way into the work-world. By the time I got out of college, they were well on their way to becoming indispensable. I witnessed the shift from dedicated word-processing machines and IBM Selectric typewriters to Apples and PCs. Architects everywhere threw away their pencils and started playing with Auto-CAD.

They say everyone has pivotal events in their lives. Seemingly insignificant occurrences that push you and your little raft towards a new stream. I wonder how many people can look back and see those course changes. Do they really alter who you become, or do they just take you to the same place following a different route?

The Pessimist's Guide to Conversation

When I say I'm a pessimist, I'm not kidding. It rules my life. In fact, the stress it causes is probably killing me. It'd be just my luck. I'd do something to try and change it, but I can't be bothered. It wouldn't make any difference, anyway.

You always have to be on your toes. Part of being a pessimist is the need to make sure you bring everyone else down with you. Why not? Just because everyone else is too dumb to realize how screwed they are doesn't mean it's going to be any better for them. I lower peoples expectations as a service to them. They won't have so far to fall when the inevitable happens.

To help you get started I've supplied some suggested responses to phrases you may encounter. Use them or don't. I don't care. I'm apathetic too.

"It's such a nice, sunny day!"
"Global warming. We're all doomed."

"Hi! How are you this morning?"
"I don't know yet, and I'm not willing to commit to something I can't deliver."

"Oh! Look at the pretty Pidgeons!"
"Flying rats that destroy native species. We're all doomed."

"You're looking a little under the weather."
"Good. I'd hate to feel this crappy and not have it show."

"Did you see that thing about Britney Spears?"
"Yeah! You know what's really cool about that? I absolutely don't care. Not even a little bit."

"Cute freckles!"
"They're probably malignant."

"Have a nice day!"
"Stop making unreasonable demands."

"That was a great movie."
"If by 'great' you mean 'caused no lasting mental trauma', it certainly was."

"Customer service. Thanks for holding."
"'Customer service' is more of a trademark than a job description to you, isn't it?"

What's Behind Door Number 3?

Are game shows as popular as they used to be, or have they been displaced by reality shows? On evening TV at least, I suppose they have. I recently saw something hosted by Howie Mandel, but it could hardly be called a game show. The task for the contestant was to randomly select suitcases that could contain a dollar value. The key word here being randomly. The contestant had no way of knowing the value contained within a particular suitcase. If the contestant picked a high value (which was bad in this context), Howie would say something like, "Oh, no, Mrs. Premise! You need to pick low values. Now, choose a low value on your next try". The contestant would then really think about it. If the planning was too much of a strain, their family was there to offer advice. Advice. Advice on a random selection.

Game shows used to be great. You could watch honeymoon divorces on The Newlywed Game, or institutionalized one-night-stands on The Match Game. You could cheer on the contestants of the variety show version of American Idol which was called The Gong Show, or be flabbergasted over the then-huge winnings of The $10,000 Pyramid.

If large prizes were too ostentatious, you could always tune into the CBC. The game shows in Canada had a yearly budget of $10,000. The budget was generally earned by the producer trying to get on an American game show. There is nothing like watching The Mad Dash and seeing players win A NEW CAR (rental for a week from Budget Rent-a-car). Some were even lucky enough to get beautiful new luggage perfect for a TRIP TO HAWAII (trip not included).

For insomniacs, Canada even had Front Page Challenge — sort of Jeopardy pulled from recent newspapers. That seemed to be a big market demographic, though I have no idea why, because we had Headline Hunters as well. And, speaking of Jeopardy, we had that too... but only in French. Quelle est une grande grenouille pour des mille dollars, Alex?

How to Rasterbate

It's time for a tutorial. Don't worry, I'm not going to show you how to abuse yourself to internet porn. No doubt you are already Mensa material when it comes to that. I'm just going to show you the results of a cool program I found.

The program is called Rasterbator. It turns small images into huge posters. You specify a pixel size, and it produces a multi-page Adobe Acrobat (PDF) file that you can print. You then tape the pages together and end up with a very cool picture.

Click on Robby the Robot to see what I did with it.

The final image is seven feet tall, and looks great even up close. I didn't even trim the borders on the pages that were printed out. It saved a lot of time, and I really like the resulting grid effect.

Here's another picture I did. It's about 4-foot square. I trimmed the borders off that one, and it took almost twice as long to piece together as Robby. The strange patterning is a result of resizing the image and doesn't show up when you actually look at it.

The Robby poster is 40 pages (5 x 8). I started with a roll of craft paper (the brown stuff you wrap packages in for mailing). I taped the first row of pages onto a strip of craft using double-sided tape. I was very careful to line the pages up with the straight edge of the craft paper. Each image page has a very light border printed onto it, so alignment is straightforward. A second row of pages fit on the first sheet of craft paper, but a complete third row would not, so I started a new sheet.

On the second and subsequent rows of craft I continued taping pages the same way except I left the top third of the first row unstuck. Once I had finished the 4 sheets of craft paper (two rows of five pages each), I joined them together with regular tape. Since I'd left the top rows of pages only partially taped, I could slide the craft paper underneath to hide the seams. Once I was happy with alignment, I finished taping down the tops of all the loose rows. A side benefit of this technique was that I had room to do most of the finicky taping on a table, and only had to move to the floor to connect the big pieces.

If you don't have a laser printer like I do, either sneak the PDF to work (a huge image is only 40 or so pages), or take it to a print shop. My local print shop would have printed this off for $2.50 + $0.05 per sheet. I definately wouldn't recommend this as an inkjet project. You could easily go through a couple of those more-expensive-than-gold cartridges doing it. It wouldn't be worth the cost.

So go grab a copy of Rasterbator and start playing around. You'll be amazed at how big you can blow up a crappy source image and still end up with a great result. It will even Rasterbate in color.

E = MC Scared

Long ago, during the summer holidays of my junior-high school years, my parents let me go on a biking tour put on by our city. It was a week-long ride through Jasper National Park heading south towards Banff. The park runs along the amazingly beautiful mountainous border between British Columbia and Alberta. We had a chase van, so we got to ride unladen bikes from campsite to campsite. It couldn't have been better.

The group met for the first time on the day we were leaving. We all gathered outside the city library and started loading our stuff for the trip. It was a strange group of folks who would never have been friends if not for the common goal. We were all different ages, and only one or two looked like they had ever done anything like this before. I remember we all groaned when the last rider showed up and he was a fat guy on a 3-speed Huffy. Our misgivings were misplaced, though. He turned out to be instantly likeable. Ken, I think his name was. The few times that he actually held us up to a very minor degree we were all more than happy to cut him some slack.

One time in particular he turned the tables, and ended up waiting for us. We were nearing the end of the trip. One of the last and best parts of the ride was the long, winding hill down into the Columbia Icefields Parkway. We all started down the hill, which was several miles long and of a formidable grade. Ken had decided to stay back a bit so that people wouldn't have to pass him on his Huffy. He didn't start down until we'd all rounded the first corner.

It wasn't long before we were all doing speeds at or a little beyond our comfort levels. None of us were doing under 50kph, I'm sure. Not bad for a pack of kids on old 10-speeds. What do you think we should hear, but Ken coming up behind us calmly calling out, "Track! On your left, please!". He cruised passed us all, his Huffy making that fan-like hum of a well-oiled racing machine. We tried to pick up the pace, but never did catch him. In fact, he over did it a little near the bottom and got a bad case of speed-wobble. He kept it under control, though, and pulled into the Glacier restaurant parking lot.

Once we all grouped up again, and had caught our breath, we started to congratulate him; "That was incredible!", "I've never seen a 3-speed going that fast!", "Where did you learn to ride like that?", "We didn't know you had it in you!"

"I didn't," said Ken, "I was squeezing my brakes so much I lost them while I was still near the top of the hill. I spent the whole rest of the time trying not to die."

Sure enough, he'd been pressing the brakes so hard that the rims on his poor Huffy were literally rubber coated. He had no pads left whatsoever. In fact, the wobble we'd seen him get into was when he tried his brakes one last time as he neared the restaurant in a desperate attempt not to go shooting through the dining room and out the back window.

Stop Toying with my Mind

Every once in a while my mind gets onto a retro train of thought. I remember something from my youth, and that reminds me of something else. It just keeps picking up speed until a distraction derails it.

I was thinking about toys. For some reason, I recalled the Spirograph. The selling point of this toy was that it enabled the lucky recipient to draw, well, spirals. They seemed to be in everyone's closet, so we all were asking for them as kids. I don't recall what miracle of advertising made this look good, but it was apparently effective. The idea was to use pushpins to hold a plastic ring gear onto a sheet of paper. You would then put a pen through another gear and roll it around the fixed gear. More precisely you would try to roll it around. Invariably it would almost make a spiral before slipping across the page.

Next to spring into mind was a toy aimed at those destined for a career far from engineering. It was a felt board and a bag of felt feet, hands, hats and such. You could stick the little felt pieces to the big felt piece and, uh, look at it I guess. This entertained you until your dog walked through the room and electrostatically stole all your pieces and spread them about the house for the vacuum cleaner to find.

So you've been felt up enough, and decide to try your hand at engineering again. For the real geek-in-training there was Meccano. This was a huge bag of tiny nuts and bolts and a stack of various hole-filled metal struts. Unlike the other toys, this could be pretty fun for the right type of child. You could actually build some things with it. What I remember most about it was how much it hurt to step on one of those little nuts. It hurt way more than one of those one-dot lego pieces. Oh, and if metal wasn't your thing, you could opt for the Quaker-friendly Tinkertoys. Similar concept, but made of wood.

Of course if you were into electronics there were many options open to you. They were called Lightbright. It plugged in. It had to. It was based on that fantastic technology first exploited in the Easy-bake Oven: the light bulb. Rather than being harnessed for its food preparation abilities, Lightbright actually used the light. You would put a piece of card over the hole-filled plastic bulb cover and then push tinted pegs through the holes. The pegs would pulse with the unholy glow of a hideous flaming fart issuing straight from Satan's own anu... ok, maybe not. They just kind of lit up. You also learned to finish your artwork quickly because the Lightbright never quite freed itself from its Easy-bake heritage.

I would love to give one of these as a gift today and see what sort of response it got. I'm guessing it wouldn't be favourable. More likely fatal.

Urine Trouble Now

I took my lunch break a little late today. That's not a particularly newsworthy event, but it means that I had to find a table in the boonies. I was sitting across from the washrooms and, as I sat there eating some Phở, I noticed something interesting.

Every time a woman came out of the washroom, she left in the wrong direction. This struck me as odd since it wasn't a confusing area. The proper direction was towards all the noise and people of the food-court, and the wrong direction was into a quiet bakery at the end of an otherwise deserted hall. Once I noticed, I started counting. Out of seven women, seven of them either got near to or actually inside the bakery before stopping with a baffled look on their faces. They would then turn around and wander back past me trying to figure out where they were.

There's definitely something genetic going on. None of the men were having any difficulty. One lady even came out of the washroom with her little boy. Without looking up from his shoelaces, the boy took a step in the right direction only to have his arm almost dislocated as his mom strode confidently into oblivion. He almost got it dislocated again when he saw the bakery and walked eagerly toward it, only to get yanked again as his mom did a confused 180.

I have a hard time reconciling this with something else I've noticed about women: you can drug and blindfold a woman and then lower her by helicopter into any unknown mall in any unknown country... and she can still immediately find you your choice of either the closest or cleanest washroom.

What a Wordsworth

I love words. I love how you can manipulate them. I love how certain words feel when you say them. I love puns — particularly those so carefully constructed as to initially slip past most people. When I think of such things, a few very special examples come to mind.

From the original Hollywood Squares —

Peter Marshall: "When you pat a dog on his head, he will usually wag his tail. What will a goose do?"
Paul Lynde: "Make him bark?"

Paul Lynde was absolutely brilliant. Those of you too young to have seen him really missed out. Visit ClassicSquares.com to see a few pages of his best quips.

Known as a consummate wordsmith, somebody asked Dorothy Parker to use horticulture in a sentence. Without missing a beat, she replied:

"You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think."

And, while not puns, you can't really talk about words without evoking Winston Churchill. Here are three of his many gems —

Lady Astor: "Winston, if I was your wife, I'd put poison in your coffee."
Winston: "Nancy, if I were your husband, I'd drink it."

"The Americans will always do the right thing... after they've exhausted all the alternatives."

"I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly."

You can't have the good without a little of the bad. I don't like misquotes. Particularly misquotes whose intention was to raise the speaker above the listener. I don't have a problem with being superior (how could I and live with myself, after all), I just think if you're going to try and pull the wool over someone's eyes, do a little research first. To help you out, here are some of the common ones.

"Music soothes the savage beast."

No it doesn't. It soothes the breast.
"Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast, To soften rocks or bend a knotted oak."
That's the opening line to "The Mourning Bride", by William Congreve

"Alas poor Yorick, I knew him well."

No you didn't. You knew him, Horatio.
"Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!"
That one's Shakespeare. Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 1.

"Out, out damn spot!"

No. The fine Lady didn't stutter.
"Out, damned spot! Out, I say! One- two -why then 'tis time to do't."
Shakespeare, again. From MacBeth, Act 5, Scene 1.

"Play it again, Sam."

Sure, Rick, but that's not even close to your line.
"You played it for her, you can play it for me... if she can stand it, I can. Play it!"
Casablanca with Humphrey Bogart. He's talking about the song As Time Goes By

So, keeping playing with words, but treat them with respect. It's a lot of fun, and doesn't cost a thing.