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):
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
why did i stop writing for a while? no reason. in a couple hours i’m flying down to richmond to visit my folks for christmas…i’ve never flown during a holiday (except once when i flew to arizona during some bowl game OSU played in. that was a lot of moms & dads) so i’m excited to see what it’s like. hoping to see huge drama at some point
when i was in first year, someone very involved in municipal politics told me in no unclear terms that it’s basically impossible to keep a bike in the downtown core for two years…”it will be stolen”, they told me. my bike just turned 3! i have a sweet lock, pinheads, i don’t lock it to stupid places (pretty much post-and-rings only, preferably double ones), and it’s not a sweet-looking racing bike or whatever. one time i left my apartment way early in the morning, something like 4, to get a snack and saw a homeless-looking guy checking out my bike and playing with the lock. i started walking towards him and he ran away. yorkville cyclists are not very hardy – during the summer, it was regularly hard to find an open post-and-ring, and lately my bike has been the only one on my block.
freelance work slowed down a LOT between the second half of november until now, not good timing for christmas shopping. it picked back up this week and i have a bunch of gigs in january. it’s going to be very nice to pay off my credit card and be able to put some in savings. and order sushi.
some advertising firm offered me money to put a bunch of horrible flash ads and games on this site a little while ago. even though i should have because it would have been free money, i was too proud or something and kept demanding to see the code before agreeing to a contract. they stopped emailing after i asked a couple times, which makes me think it was phishing or malware anyway. who knows why they came to me, it’s not like i have any kind of serious pagerank.
i’m going to watch the hurt locker on the plane, which i am very excited about.
remember this monster post from last month, and how all the crazies somehow came out of the woodwork to defend their imagined afflictions? i suppose they could realistically say “you’re a 22-year-old with a music degree and you like to read, what makes you an expert on things like ionizing radiation and human anatomy?” while i will vehemently defend all of the facts i presented (they’re well-accepted tenets), i would have accepted this attack on my credibility. however, look what was in this month’s issue of the skeptical inquirer!
the concise and easy to understand article runs down the scientific impossibility of EHS and sums up the pathetic state of the general public’s knowledge on the subject in a much less angry way than i did. i know the space background and planet icons make it look a little like a star trek fan website, but the skeptical inquirer is the periodical of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, a group of scientists that – in short – set pseudoscientific nonsense straight. its founding members include carl sagan (my favorite person), isaac asimov (come on), glenn seaborg (he has an element named after him), and james randi (the guy with the million dollar challenge to anyone who can prove supernatural ‘powers’ that has been unclaimed for over 10 years). unless you’re in the same group of utterly illogical new-agers as the conspiracy theorists that replied en relative masse to my last post on the matter, their credibility is unsurpassed.
a couple weeks ago i was doing some tech work for an intelligent, successful older woman. her laptop had a keyboard plugged into it, and when i had to unplug it to access a USB port, i casually asked why she uses a keyboard with her (obviously already equipped) laptop. she responded “to keep the computer farther away from me, you know, for the radiation.” i asked what she meant by the radiation. “well, it’ll give you cancer, of course! this isn’t something you worry about with all the computer work you do?”
that was an interesting situation – normally if someone had said that to me, i would quickly judge them as ignorant and uneducated, but this was obviously not the case. i guess dozens of years of mainstream media (news and otherwise) had drilled “ELECTRICITY WILL EVENTUALLY GIVE YOU CANCER, AND THE MORE, THE SOONER” into her head, and that ‘knowledge’ pushed the high school science out the other side.
i wish i had had this article to reference, because i definitely don’t want to give a paying client a link to my post where they would find themselves lumped in with “morons”, “crazies”, and “insane [people]” (my words). don’t get me wrong, i love aggressive science-related namecalling when people firmly decry cell phones or microwaves, and harsh judgement against anybody who believes in astrology, but there ARE people that i would like to correct in a civil, non-condescending way. so long story short, if you know anybody who thinks that cell phones can give you brain cancer or that you shouldn’t have computers near your bed, send them the article linked at the top. or this one. or buy them a subscription to skeptical inquirer. or lovingly give them a high school science textbook with a bookmark in the chapter on electromagnetic fields.
related to the above, i’m reading the demon-haunted world by carl sagan, and it’s already one of my favorite nonfiction books. it covers some middle-school basics like the scientific method and double-blind studies, but all with extremely interesting anecdotes and i totally love it. i somehow didn’t know that carl sagan wrote books NOT directly focused on space.
