bone in sub

this is straight out of my nightmares

check out this crazy nonsense southeast of homestead, florida:

i was just relaxing & looking at the caribbean when i saw it, and i couldn’t figure out what it was without looking it up. it’s obviously connected to a main Thing at its northeast corner, but that didn’t have any helpful features so i went looking around on wikipedia and stuff. it’s turkey point power station, a two-reactor nuclear power plant. in retrospect the two big reactor-looking things paired with two stacks and a lot of water stuff around it, combined with the massive electrical stuff outside of the parking lot, is pretty salient.

the “crazy nonsense” is a 168-mile long cooling canal. that is awesome

also “misfits” is a very funny new tv show.

you know what’s weird? condensation on eggs. when i’m going to boil eggs for a meal, i set them out on the counter with all the other ingredients while i let the water boil. by the time the water’s ready, the eggs are covered in condensation. wet eggs.

i’ve been scambaiting “packer estrada” for quite a while now – the first email i got from him was in june 9 2009. things died off for a little while, but i guess it’s famine times in nigeria because he’s come back begging. we had a couple cordial reintroductions, then he hits me with the following awesome email (from scamwatchfbi@*****, but the same IP):

Read the rest of this entry »

the best april fools i saw, and i have found the best sushi pizza in toronto (so far): j-time at bloor and brunswick. they actually make a sushi PIZZA, not just flat sushi toppings on rice crust. it’s got tomatoes and (real) onions and all that, served with the rice crust hot and the salmon cold, Delicious.

michael moore is a horrible conspiracy theorist. he gets a little of my respect for the guts (haha) it takes to voluntarily show his disgusting bloated self on screen, but i started watching his most recent documentary on capitalism and i didn’t last very long. i did like this, though – michael moore “interviews” some priests on capitalism, and of course they go on and on about how evil and ungodly it is. when asked why it’s been able to become so overwhelming, one of them brings up propaganda and mentions how a harmful system has “the ability to convince people who are victimized by the very system to support the system and see it as a good” through propaganda. how beautifully hypocritical.

tomorrow morning is going to be the best morning. i will wake up at 7:30, put on coffee, have a long shower, make toaster strudels, and eat them with a fake-mocha (cafe americacao?)

here is my live blog, made in notepad and posted now:

the CTV “countdown” video : everyone is going to think the salient feature of canada is our abundance of helicopters. wish i could find this on youtube, it was honestly 90% helicopter shots of winter sports

requisite “support our troops” shot of people watching from afghanistan: there are old white ladies and teenagers. i think they mixed up their feeds and that is actually a police station in thunder bay

announcer: “australia! 40 athletes!”
rebecca: “let’s see how many inbred people there are…..….40!!!”

“this is the first olympic games for colombia” this is the first time columbian athletes have survived for 4 years without being murdered by cartels

in the cultural segment: Middle-earth, one athlete: Gandalf

is that bear full of helium? is that how it stays up? are the people in the legs high as heck right now?

re: french-irish fiddle players: in addition to our helicopter abundance, the rest of the world has had their suspicions that all french canadians are evil confirmed

i hope final destination 5 takes place at an olympic opening ceremony. there are just so many ways for things to go horribly wrong

on my way home around midnight, i was on my bike in the left turn lane on bloor at avenue. a lady (25 maybe?) in a rav4 or something stops in the middle lane, rolls down her window, and starts chatting to me about “aren’t you scared to ride a bike downtown, i’m scared to even drive, bla bla bla”. we talk for a little, and then this happens:
her: “what sign are you?”
me: “what? that doesn’t matter.”
her: “are you a gemeni?” (my ‘sign’ is cancer)
me: “it doesn’t mean anything, do you seriously believe in astrology?”
her, surprised: “it means EVERYTHING!”
me: “well you’re dumb, astrology is superstitious nonsense”

the light turned green and i made my turn as she yelled new-age epithets at me (i couldn’t actually understand her, it just sounded mad). it frustrates me to see and hear so many people that take horoscopes at face value (or any value), so this was a very satisfying interaction.

i look out the window today and i see some construction looking guy using a flamethrower on kind of a concrete balcony. i think he was speed drying new concrete, based on how the floor there looks and his dirty pants and shoes. check it out:

that balcony is here

on sunday there was a medium-sized power outage for most of the day. the power went out at 11:30, and when i left for work at 11:45, there was already a cop directing traffic at bay & bloor – did not expect that quick of a response!

the cool part was when i was coming home at 5:30. i went around the block to see where the outage ended (avenue), and up to cumberland. cumberland was awesome – all the lights were off (obviously) and i’ve never seen it that dark. everything had an orange cast because it was still dusk, and it looked like it should have been super quiet (there was nobody there except a couple pizza guys), but it was actually pretty loud because all the condos had their backup generators running. the generator for my building was powering some essential stuff – hallway and stairwell lighting, the rfid door system – but it was also powering ALL FOUR ELEVATORS. what a huge waste. i understand people on the top floor would be pretty put out by having to go up and down the stairs the entire way, but i feel like we could have dealt with one or two. i didn’t even realize the elevators had been on until after the power came back…i had been taking the stairs.

related to the generators: i really do not care about anthropogenic global warming or “the environment” very much. it’s true that pollution is a very bad thing (see: los angeles’ air quality, water quality in mainland china, unethical nuclear programs), but the ‘green’ and ‘energy reduction’ and ‘carbon neutral’ buzzwords are just frustrating. what i do care about is resource conservation. petroleum is something that will eventually run out, no matter what. yes, biofuel can be manufactured, but so many steps are involved in the manufacturing process that the idea of ethanol or anything along those lines being “efficient” is hilarious. i’m nowhere near a peakist, but i do think it’s going to be very interesting when it truly hits everyone that fossil fuels are going to start running out – forever – within the next couple generations.

what i’m getting at is how ridiculous it is for dozens of backup generators to be running off of gas, powering elevators so people don’t have to take the stairs. i’m not going to lobby to change this or anything, but it’s representative of ridiculous levels of waste. the same with cars. it’s been a refrain for years and years, but the amount of finite resources being wasted by cars is incredible. i understand that global shipping and transportation (planes, trains, boats, trucks) is so deep-set that it’s laughable to even think of changing it, but the amount of people that drive around ‘just because’ is insane. i’m not concerned that they’re going to kill my unborn children with air cancer, but if i drove around everywhere the fact that i’m just burning up an unreplenishable resource would be eating away at me. another reason i love cycling: keep the bike (and yourself) well-maintained and it will always be a viable method of local transportation.

i know that right now, any form of energy has fossil fuel implications. it would be nice if most electricity came from nuclear (or better, wind/hydro/solar/geo/tidal) sources, but that’s a ways off. what’s cool is that with current technology, fossil fuel is unnecessary (except for the fact that it’s so deeply built into infrastructure): the amount of solar-related energy (photovoltaic, wind, and hydro) that is unharnessed greatly exceeds all of today’s power needs. i’m super glad i live in the generation that i do, science and technology developments are incredibly exciting to me.

note to self: write about protests and petitions. they are ridiculous