Der Todesumpf

Toads are 'sploding in Germany: this is the grossest and funniest thing I have read on the BBC website for a while.

Also nasty: how to make your own prison hooch. Tang, it ain't.

happiness is free shoes

I picked up a rockin' pair of shoes this week, for free, and they've made my feet so happy. They're low-cut hiking Merrells, with really tough ass soles. Turn them over and they'll yell "gravel, i'm gonna eat you, motherfucker!". Yeah, tough like that.

I got them for free because a certain collective member left them behind when she moved back to Cape Breton. They were sitting there in the corner, as quiet and quivering as orphans, when I laid eyes on them Sunday night. It was fate and they are bound to me forever now. The shoes probably wish they were on a farm out east with a pick-up and a dog right now, but mwahaha. I may just set them free before I die so that they can escape my funeral pyre and live out their life to its natural end, but probably not.

I think I've finally found the ones -- my backpacking shoes for years to come. When it's right, you just know...don't you?

Nuclear fallout

David Brooks has a great column in today's NYT about what's going on with the population implosion in Russia after the fall of communism, and what could easily happen in China. The social fabric is so torn (75% divorce rate), the gender balance so skewed, the unhealthy middle-aged dying so much younger than their healthier parents. He's talking about an apocalyptic regression of civilization between generations. good, scary stuff.

p.s. on a completely different note, this news made me laugh today. Some Texan dudes on motorcycles actually tried to run down a fuel tanker truck, in tribute to Mad Max. I wonder what the trucker thought was going on.

It's a Muppet world

I'm sitting in bed listening to Arcade Fire in the early morning, writing this.
All I need is a mug of coffee (that's coming) and a pencil behind my ear to look... truly cliched.

Saturday night I had a carboloading party, which was much fun. Rob brought over a disk of the original Muppets episodes, and it was *amazing*. Once again, one of those astonishing experiences, where as a kid you saw something phenomenally imaginative, but accepted is as normal; and as an adult, you revisit your memories, and re-evaluate them in light of how phenomenal the original stimulus was.

Muppets drunk at a Christmas party ("freeloaders!! you're all stinkin' freeloaders!"), Beaker singing "Feelings...", Sal Minella the chimp chiropractor, and of course, Pigs in Spaaaaaace. One of the episodes had Prince as the guest star!

Half-marathon results

I ran my half-marathon in 2:02.46!!! It was pretty damn good, but of course the best part is finishing. My time was more than I'd hoped for, and blowing by the race letches in the final km was hilarious. Search for my name in the race results, and um, no, I'm not actually in the 30-39 age group...

I would like to say that last night's sushi buffet kick-started the recovery process. I still feel like someone took me out back with a tire iron and a phone book and beat my joints. Feels pretty good all over, though.

Janius ran with me from the 5.5k mark through to the end, and her coaching was better than a shot of steroids.

Manamana

Since it's muppet month around the office, here's what I've dug up: the Manamana video.
I think this must be from a very early episode of the Muppet show.

Awesome cartoon in today's NYT (yes, still about the pope)

caffeination

Sweet! Two days in a row I've made perfect cappuccinos on the office machine. Milk foam and all. Alternate career development day at work.

Rob and I agreed last night that the tone of the Vatican's announcement "Habemus Papam" was more like "Score! We've got ourselves a pope!" than the more dignified message you'd expect. Bombax.

And I finally did my Cross run last night -- an easy 5k to see what how the purple lights work at night. And guess what, I get around to doing it the day they go back to white. Janius and I tore it up through the back part of the mountain, running through the dusky woods like banshees. It was magnificent. Only 5 days to go til my first half-marathon!

habemus papam

print your own bumper stickers.
Boy did the Vatican ever update its website quickly... They must have had their techie altar boys on standby all night.

Swollen Stamens

Spending the weekend with scientists is fun. They can explain anything. They can come up with unbelievable ways to pimp dragonboats. And from our viewpoint on the "summit" of Mt-St-Gregoire on Saturday afternoon, it looked like Montreal was burning down. But no, that was just parallax.

They can even make strawberries sound dirty. I've decided that my next rock band will be called the Swollen Stamens.

Some links for the day:

- Ed Broadbent's NDP rap
- the funniest mime
- "COPS"-style Star Wars spoof, if you have 10 minutes

And I love all these photos in the media of cardinals... who look like they're being stalked by paparazzi. It's kind of funny, because normally the photos are interesting due to a salacious tinge, because of a sex scandal. If you think about it, it's like photographing the board members coming to a shareholders meeting, there's nothing glamourous about them. But the disheveled nature of paparazzi-style images imbue the cardinals with that seedy glamour.

There's also a magnificently forbidding image of the cardinals at mass in today's NYT.
Does it remind anyone else of the emperor reviewing the imperial guards? Man, scarlet robes are scary.

Why I shouldn't work weekends

Look what I missed on St.Paddy's Weekend:


Cathy, ducky, ears, guinness. perfect.

see also: a really happy shamrock. Jason thinks that's Bill Murray in a coonskin behind them.

Snoop Blog

One of the coolest things ever is to start at anyone's blog (on blogger), and click on next blog. It's a miracle of randomness. Once I got a blog dedicated to danish hamsters. (It's a small world.)

I'm surprised at how often they're in portuguese. Actually, I'm too lazy to figure out whether it's actually portuguese or brazilian. I can't read it all that easily, so it's probably brazilian. Unless the Angolan technoliteracy rate is one of the best kept secrets on the planet.
Anyway, either the guy who programmed the button has a thing for portuguese (and who doesn't) or... 'getting a Brazilian' will become phat slang among IT nerds in the near future.

Isn't that cool, linguists? It's like a random test of identifying languages on spec. Kind of like going back to that page where they post a new set game puzzle every day.

One of the not-coolest things ever is when you hit the back button accidentally and lose your entire post. peace out.

bush patrol

From an article in today's Globe about how Bush may not enforce stricter passport controls at borders because it inconveniences the 80% of Americans who don't have 'em:

"When I first read that in the newspaper about the need to have passports, particularly the day crossings that take place, about a million, for instance, in the state of Texas, I said, 'What's going on here?"' Bush said when asked about the new rules.

"I thought there was a better way to expedite the legal flow of traffic and people. If people have to have a passport, it's going to disrupt the honest flow of traffic. I think there's some flexibility in the law, and that's what we're checking out right now."

Flexibility in the law? What, like for white people? if you pronounce it "eye-rack", do you get waved through?

How can you tell if you're in the dishonest flow? you know, the part that shouldn't be expedited?

And um, is that where he gets his information about government policies -- from reading a newspaper? Actually, I'm slightly more shocked that his staff let him near one of those things.

popewatch, day 12

Syria has a cardinal. Who knew?
That means Syria has a slice of power in the Vatican equal to Switzerland or Croatia. I wonder what papal kickbacks would look like?
Personally, I'm pulling for Gabon.

I'll take 8:1 on a Brazilian

How to bet on the next pope, from the new york times.

The Man Date, also from NYT -- oh, like you haven't gotten this in your inbox already.
It's priceless. This has never occurred to me before, but I can see my male friends testifying to it. A small excerpt:

Almost all men agree that beer and hard alcohol are acceptable man date beverages, but wine is risky. And sharing a bottle is out of the question. "If a guy wants to get a glass of wine, that's O.K.," said Rob Discher, 24, who moved to Washington from Dallas and has dinner regularly with his male roommate. "But there is something kind of odd about splitting a bottle of wine with a guy."

Pimp my Elephant

Last night over at the St-Urbain collective, elephant masks turned to discussion of elephant decoration, to... how would you pimp your elephant?

Elephants are unique among pimpable utilities, because they are both animals AND vehicles. So you could bling him out with diamond ear studs, chains, gold tipped tusks and other ice (not to mention phat shades), and at the same time add hydraulics, and of course, those fluorescent under-lights.

What is it about hydraulics that dictates it's always the second idea mentioned in any conversation about pimping? Cathy says she'd add balloons, but only purple ones, so that the elephant would think it was a bunch of grapes.

Chasing the Dragon

The old/new word on the global market street is "the Chinese are coming, The Chinese are coming!" But who knew they were so far ahead of the States in geriatric talent?

This Chinese grandma known as "Auntie Cool", is shaking up Beijing with her breakdancing. [Turn your speakers on for that last link! Can anyone name that tune besides my sister?]

She seems to be just an ordinary, well-adjusted person, with an ordinary life:
"Jin's ex-husband was persecuted for his political views in 1957. He was taken away from home to be re-educated through hard labour."

Who knows what was the pivotal moment in her life that brought her to breakdancing. Did someone dare her to speed up Tai Chi practice?
"A retired factory worker, she has forged a new career in her golden years as a dance teacher and elderly fashion model."

word.

Russian autocrat or tasty snack?

I noticed years ago that Vladimir Putin, pronounced & transliterated into French-French, is "Poutine".

Because the closest actual approximant in French is, of course, putain.

But dammit, Safire beat me to publication .

papal sabotage

Pope-related question of the day: What shoes would the pope wear?

The Vatican has provided the answer, with a picture that proves priests can Photoshop, or at least one altar boy/intern can.

Why can't someone make dignified comfy shoes for older men? Now there's a fortune waiting to be made.

Yesterday's pope question: embalming?

Decalage horaire

Okay, how many of you were rescued by your computer's auto-shift to daylight savings yesterday? My informal poll suggests: 5 out of 5.

Forgetting also to reset every single clock in the house now means that instead of Grey's Anatomy (starring the awesome Sandra Oh), my VCR taped the last hour of the Junos.
Which means I have a documented 25 minutes of Kalan Porter singing like Frodo on Botox with jheri curls. The next generation of Canadian women have a lot to answer for. This frighteningly unexpressive boy and most recent Canadian Idol actually fiddled until he was completely off tempo with his backup band.

More about Grey's Anatomy later, but let's just say it's like ER [-angst] [+comedy]. The episode I missed? "When the annual bicycle messenger race takes place in Seattle, the hospital emergency room fills with an assortment of injuries, causing the interns to compete for the most severe cases..."

Pope-o-meter

It's TRUE!!! The cross on Mount-Royal has turned purple.
It IS the world's largest indicateur papale [ed. clearly I need a redacteur].

Un-[infix deleted by moderator]-believable.
Sadly, I feel like celebrating because I'm so excited. I think this means:
(a) I'm too easily excitable by very wrong things, and/or
(b) I played "English vs. French in the New World" instead of "Cowboys & Indians" when I was a little girl. (The protestants always won, natch.)

I had a conversation last summer with a schooled catholic (you know, who learned how to colour in religion class), who felt that JPII was really a great guy. I thought that indicated that he wasn't really an ex-catholic. Now that I think about it, the pope was really a good guy. I'm not even going to add political footnotes. In pace requiem.

Fozzie wozzy was a bear

Which muppet are you?

Contest rules for "If you get Gonzo or Beaker, I'll buy you a beer!": no cheating, no do-overs, and contest expired March 31, 2005. Sorry kids. but you're still invited over to my place for a beer...soon.