Today marks the spring equinox.
Boo to winter, I say. I have had my fill of snow and bleak, rainy, short days. Today it got to double digits. Woo to spring! The sun even came out.
And naturally half the population was wearing shorts and t-shirts, thinking that sun = summer. People are weird. Or impervious to cool temperatures.
I woke up to this today:
Damn snow.
Things you don’t want to hear during the call:
Also, you really don’t need to say how old you are. Really!
Since I intend to document all of my hikes I’ve created a new category that I am cleverly calling Hiking. Woo, I say.
Seen at the corner of Pine St. and West 12th Avenue (image is courtesy of Google maps, as I didn’t have a camera handy as I went by it the other day):
I’m not sure why so many Vancouverites are fascinated by palm trees — though I confess I find them exotic and mysterious compared to the billion maple trees normally seen hereabouts — but this is my new favorite clump of palm trees in the city, nestled as they are around a sign proudly identifying the location as Pine Place.
Back in the 1980s — you know, that decade that started over 30 years ago — Berke Breathed via Bloom County commented on how the comics section of newspapers was steadily shrinking. He didn’t mean fewer comics were being run. If anything, even more were being showcased. You can only prop up the section with Blondie and Beetle Bailey for so long. No, what he meant was the physical space being devoted to them was shrinking, resulting in strips that were smaller and more difficult to read. The logical conclusion he reached was that the comics section would eventually disappear into a black dot of illegibility.
As it turns out, newspapers will probably vanish before this can happen. Thank you, Internet, for helping save us from unnecessary eyestrain!
But wait, for as the Internet giveth, so does it taketh away.
As per usual Facebook has done another one of its seemingly arbitrarily updates to its site, making it ‘better’ in ways that may elude common folk. The biggest change is apparently the profile page. I check mine so infrequently I’m not sure exactly what is different except it has a strip of photos slapped along the top of it now. I do not understand the purpose or value of this. The other more noticeable change for me is a universal shrinkage of the font size. This doesn’t make the site more readable, it goes against the demographic trend of an aging population and it doesn’t really allow for more information to be displayed. It just makes all the text a bit smaller. I can easily simulate the old look reasonably enough by using the old CTRL-mousewheel trick so it doesn’t particularly affect me. Sometimes I wonder if Zuckerberg dictates these changes just because of the irresistible power to affect 500 million accounts all at once (quibble to journalists: Facebook has 500 million accounts, not 500 million users. I could go out and create 100 new accounts if I wanted to, each one setting the default size of the font to something different using the nigh-amazing CTRL-mousewheel trick). You may be thinking to yourself, “Is this just a real roundabout way of saying I’m getting old and I would prefer sites on the web to not shrink their fonts so my eyes don’t need to squint so much to keep reading them?” and my answer would be “No, haha, of course not!” Because the font is just too damn small for no good reason. And I went jogging last week, anyway. And I didn’t fall down and break my hip. So there.
Also while I’m here, the Royal Bank cartoon businessman mascot they use (I think his name is Arby — get it? LOL!!) is creepy as all get-out. Tip: You do not make your monolithic, billions-in-record-revenue-generating banking enterprise more cuddly and personable by creating a mascot in a BUSINESS SUIT. Especially one with no neck. Creepy.
I got up this morning and thought, “Gee, my legs are still pretty sore!” Then I looked out the window and also thought, “Gee, the frost sure looks heavy today.” Then I realized it was not frost, but snow, it was sticking and already piling up.
Damn snow.
The temperature rose enough later to change it from snow to rain and by the time I was homeward-bound in the afternoon most of it was gone, as is usual in these parts. I predict this is the end of the local snow shenanigans this winter. If I’m wrong I promise to take a picture of myself eating a snowball.
This post will be 10,000 pages long.
Fortunately, the pages have been shrunk through the science of something I just made up and they are now small enough to fit on the head of a pin, unlike the collected books comprising The Wheel of Time, for example, the weight of which could serve to batter down doors or stop a runaway cruise ship (like in Speed 2. I never really watched that movie but I did manage to catch the ending on TV once and I stood there staring at the screen, baffled and amazed at the sight of an actual runaway cruise ship. It was a definite ‘What were they thinking?’ moment. Good call by Keanu to bail on this sequel. That good call was subsequently offset by the many other terrible movies he went on to appear in, unfortunately, but a boy’s gotta eat).
I did not jog today due to spending a little more time with Tim getting and setting up his shiny new computer with patented* Harry Potter** interface, but I am rescheduling for tomorrow. Since it was also windy as all get-out today and I hate running in the wind (not to be confused with running like the wind) I am not too upset about putting it off for another day.
* it probably isn’t actually patented but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was
** seriously, the opening steps on initial startup that HP (Hewlett-Packard) forces the user to go through looks like some weird Harry Potter-esque thing with weird disembodied hands (Tim called them jazz hands)
Just kidding! This blog post is entirely self-contained. Once you get to the end of it you will have complete closure and no need to read a follow-up post to find out how it all ends.
Sometimes I think I am the only person out there who prefers to read novels that begin and end in the same volume instead of being laid out over the course of 10 books and 10,000 pages, half of which are probably unnecessary. Maybe this is why I read so little fantasy. Or maybe I just hate elves. Or I’m simply jealous because Steven Erikson can write hundreds of pounds of books per year and I can only manage maybe half a pound at best.
Today is 1/11/11. It’s either the highest-scoring day ever or the lowest, depending on the scale you use.
Only 11 years, 1 month and 1 day until until 2/22/22 rolls around! (Did I do the math right? I hate math. Barbie was spot-on there. The old dumb Barbie, I mean, not the new computer scientist version that fools no one.)
And speaking of snowflakes…
After a few instances of being the proverbial boy who cried wolf, Environment Canada correctly forecast the first real dump of snow for Vancouver this month, as it began piling up a few hours ago. It’s expected to get warmer and turn to rain by morning but it looks pretty enough right now. Best of all, no shoveling!
I wonder if this will be the last blast of traditional winter weather. My famous* weather intuition is not getting a clear picture on this. I’m going to guess we’ll see at least one more notable snowfall. In March.
Technically it will still be winter when it happens.
* famous in the sense of “I just made this up now”
How can something so stunningly elegant and pretty be such a pain to shovel?
New Scientist magazine has about a dozen images of snowflakes captured using a unique snowflake photomicroscope. The images can be viewed here. The symmetry and grace of these tiny things helps remind me that sometimes the earth is a pretty cool place (no pun intended).