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Birthday Boy

Posted on by Patrick

Birth­day Boy
Dis­cov­ered in Patrick Johan­neson’s Flickr photostream. 

Just me, wear­ing my new T‑shirt.

My bro-in-law exposed his sons to the Orig­i­nal Tril­o­gy, and ever since then they’ve been deeply into the Star Wars phenomenon.

I actu­al­ly was at their place when they watched Star Wars (you know, A New Hope). I was away the next day, when they watched The Empire Strikes Back. At sup­per that night, the old­est boy (he’s six) was agi­tat­ing to watch Return of the Jedi, so that he could see how it all played out. But it was late, so my sis­ter made him wait till the next day. He was grump­ing about it a lit­tle bit, so I told him, “I had to wait three years to find out what happened.”

“Why?” he said.

“Because that’s how long it took for the next movie to come out.”

He looked at me with a lit­tle smile, and said, “Boy, I’m glad I was born in 2000.”

Yeah.

IQ test

Posted on by Patrick

So we watched Test the Nation last night. I did the test online, and came up with an IQ of 121. Then we did it on TV, and I end­ed up with 137. I think the 121 is prob­a­bly more honest–some of the ques­tions were eas­i­er the sec­ond time around, since I knew, for instance, what they were going to ask for the mem­o­ry ques­tions, and could plan accordingly.

Inter­est­ed in tak­ing the test? Go to http://www.cbc.ca/testthenation/ and try it out there.

Westering (3)

Posted on by Patrick

Pre­vi­ous entries: Part 1, Part 2.

We got back to Edmon­ton and dropped the car off. Over half the deposit I’d put on it got refund­ed, since we did­n’t keep the car the full week. That was pleasant.

My mem­o­ry grows hazy of what we did–I know there was much play­ing with lit­tle Miss J, and Kath­leen got birth­day cup­cakes, and we went to the swim­ming pool again. One thing that I dis­tinct­ly remem­ber was vis­it­ing the Mut­tart Con­ser­va­to­ry, which is always an awe­some expe­ri­ence, but it’s some­how dou­ble-awe­some in the winter.

The Mut­tart is a set of four con­nect­ed pyra­mids, each one fea­tur­ing a vari­ety of plants from a dif­fer­ent eco­zone. There’s a tem­per­ate pyra­mid, a desert one, a trop­i­cal one, and a rotat­ing “show” pyra­mid. When we were there, the show was “The Birth of Spring” or some­thing sim­i­lar, and so the plants in there were things like cro­cus­es and oth­er ear­ly-bloom­ing plants.

(Which makes me feel all poetical:

April is the cru­ellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Mem­o­ry and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
–T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

But enough of that.)

Pho­tos:

Some kinda pink flower
What kind of flower is this? Well, it’s pink.

Orchids
Orchids. There were all kinds of orchids in the trop­i­cal pyramid.

Con­tin­ue read­ing “Wes­t­er­ing (3)” →

Frightening

Posted on by Patrick

I have GMail. I use GMail a lot. GMail has some built-in spam fil­ters. It’s rare, in fact, that an email makes it to my inbox offer­ing to enhance or expand my body parts, or give me 10% of the Crown Prince of Nige­ri­a’s mon­ey trans­fers, or any­thing of the like.

Every once in a while, I go into the spam fold­er to clean it out.

One thing about GMail is that it scans my mail for key­words, and presents rel­a­tive­ly unob­tru­sive links on the pages based on what it finds. Things I might be inter­est­ed in.

I’ve noticed that the links in my spam fold­er are down­right scary. Not that it’s ads for Herbal V1@gr@, no. Some­how it’s worse:

French Fry Spam Casse­role — Bake 30–40 minutes
Savory Spam Cres­cents — Bake 12–15 min­utes or until gold­en brown
Spam Con­fet­ti Pas­ta — Prepa­ra­tion time 30 minutes

With­out a word of a lie, those are the last three links that I’ve had. I feel like I have my very own ver­sion of James Lileks’ Gallery of Regret­table Foods.

40-odd things about me

Posted on by Patrick

…or is that 40 odd etc? You be the judge. Just as long as you’re not jury and exe­cu­tion­er too.

Enough blath­er. Here we go:

1. What time did you get up this morn­ing? 7:45 AM.

2. Dia­monds or Pearls? Which one’s going for more these days?

3. What was the last film you saw at the cin­e­ma? Chil­dren of Men. Awe­some film, but the book’s kind of a lit­tle dull. Tonight we’re going to see 300.

4. What is your favorite TV show? Com­e­dy: Cor­ner Gas. Dra­ma: Bat­tlestar Galac­ti­ca. News: The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos.
Con­tin­ue read­ing “40-odd things about me” →

Ficlets

Posted on by Patrick

For those of you that are inter­est­ed in writ­ing: check out Ficlets. It’s a col­lab­o­ra­tive short-short sto­ry envi­ron­ment where you’re encour­aged to write pre­quels or sequels to oth­ers’ sto­ries, or come up with your own. Have a peek. Maybe you’ll even get inspired.

(Found via John Scalz­i’s What­ev­er post.)

Snow (again)

Posted on by Patrick

We’re get­ting Hol­ly­wood snow right now. Big, fat, fluffy flakes, the kind that look like they’re made in a tank on the back lot and sprayed over the guy and girl in a mid­night kiss at the end of a Christ­mas-themed roman­tic com­e­dy. Fade to black, roll credits.

Snow daze

Posted on by Patrick

We got quite the dump­ing in the last cou­ple days. Not as much as those New­found­lan­ders that had to first find their cars, then dig ’em out, but still,

The table

we got a fair amount of snow.