General

My brain is being difficult again (plus a shopping cart)

I am having trouble motivating myself to write about whatever on this blog. I’m not sure exactly what causes this occasional ennui. Ironically, “ennui” is kind of fun to say out loud.

The weird part is years ago I gave myself permission to post anything here, so it’s not like I’m waiting until I have something important to say. The dozens of cat pics are testament to that.

I’ve looked through some recent photos I’ve taken and here’s one I haven’t posted from my shopping cart oeuvre1this is a word I can never spell correctly without looking it up first:

I like the juxtaposition of all the various objects, plus the blurry vehicle whizzing by.

There, ennui defeated by shopping cart. I take my victories where I can.

Lousy Smarch weather

Snow, flowers and my right foot.

Yes, today, on March 10th, less than 10 days before spring begins and after a winter featuring no snow at all in New Westminster, it snowed.

To be fair, after a few hours, it sputtered out and turned to rain and there’s only a small chance of any further snow, which will also get washed away as morning temperatures rise.

But still.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate snow–as long as it stays on the mountains, where it belongs. Or, like, the North Pole. That’s fine, too. And wherever penguins (naturally) live.

But that’s it.

Here is a cat in the snow.

It’s about time for good news (pun warning in title)

Yesterday the provincial government announced it would be switching to permanent Daylight Saving Time–henceforth to be known as Pacific Time and that moving clocks forward an hour this coming weekend will be the last time British Columbians will do so.

I am both surprised and happy about this. Surprised because the government had taken the position of waiting for the western states to switch first, so the whole Pacific coast could be in sync. After years of waiting and nothing happening, I just assumed this was another promise that would never be fulfilled.

But then the BC government decided, six years after a survey indicated overwhelming support for the time change, to lead by example and hope others would follow. We join the Yukon, which made the switch two years ago.

Unsurprisingly, some people are unhappy and pretty much any discussion of the change will have these people popping up grousing about how we should have switched to permanent standard time, not daylight time, because that means more light in the morning rather than the evening. I get it. But please, just let people be happy and enjoy the moment (I stopped reading any discussions related to this).

For me, it’s great. Changing the clocks twice a year has always been awkward and weird, with little benefit to modern living, so I’m glad to see we’re getting rid of it. I prefer more light in the latter part of the day, even as I understand the arguments for having more in the morning. I’m counting this as a rare win for common sense in a year and time (ho ho) that seems largely devoid of it.

CBC News story: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/b-c-adopting-year-round-daylight-time-9.7111657

This map is adorable

I somehow forgot what you call a piece of land that extends into water–a peninsula (duh), but searching for the term brought me to this site and the map showing all the different types of terrain and water types is information-dense in a good way, and just plain cute.

Also, it reminded me what an isthmus is, other than a word your tongue wants to twist.

The site: https://brilliantmaps.com/important-geography-terms/

The map:

I power-washed myself today

I was power-washing some concrete stairs in our condo complex this afternoon and when you get to one of the corners of a step, it’s surprisingly tricky to avoid having the spray bounce back directly at you.

Which it did, multiple times. And with something like 2,500 PSI of force, you definitely notice it. It’s not often my face gets gritty, but it did today.

But a good portion of the steps are clean now, so it was worth it!

Before:

Dirty steps. And a stroller that appeared jusrt as I snapped the photo.

After:

Clean steps! Plus the stroller has returned to the stroller dimension from whence it came.

Dreams: Frogs and vans

Two recent dreams:

Frogs

I am in the hallway of some kind of school, possibly a college or university. For some reason the floor is carpeted. There are several people with me that I know in the dream, but I can’t recall if they were actual or dream people. Doors to nearby classrooms are open. There is a lot of water on the carpet, leaving it quite saturated in some spots. There are some green frogs scattered about, one a fairly big size (for a frog), the others small.

I am wearing blue jeans. I look down at one of my legs and see the jeans are wet. It is not because I failed to get to the loo in time, it’s just water. But from that water emerges a tiny frog, as if manifesting from the frog dimension and onto my leg. It hops onto the floor and joins the other frogs. I see more frogs appear out of the saturated carpet.

Before the frogs can take over the world, which was undoubtedly their plan, I awaken.

The Delivery Van

Or possibly a moving van, but I’m pretty sure it was a delivery van. I am riding shotgun and the driver is a nervous young guy, maybe 18 or 19. We are returning the van to the lot from which it was rented/borrowed. I am aware the van is semi-autonomous, but the kid is driving and in full control.

We get to the lot and there is another similar van there, which becomes relevant shortly.

From a room with large glass windows, almost like a control tower at an airport, a supervisor of some sort guides us in. He tells the kid over the radio to line the van up with some kind of docking mechanism. The important part is, just as the van connects, the kid has to push a comically large button on the dashboard. The kid muffs on the timing and the van fails to dock. This causes it to wheel off back into the lot and somehow it becomes more autonomous and sort of out of control, but very slowly out of control. Think of the steamroller in the first Austin Powers move, like that.

The supervisor from the control room somehow manages to climb into the driver’s side to take over. The kid has either disappeared or got out real quiet-like, making me wonder why I couldn’t have done the same. The other delivery van is kind of looping around us and while it’s not explicitly stated, I understand this is a bad thing.

The supervisor gives me a big key and produces another identical to it. He says we both need to insert our keys into slots on the dashboard at the same time and turn them. “Like firing nukes,” I say, “except we’re the nukes?” He laughs, but in a nervous way.

Sadly, I wake up before finding out what happened next. It’s too bad, because I really wanted to know!

I accidentally littered today

And I feel bad.

When I was at the store, I bought a regular-size Aero bar, because I’d just walked something like 4 km and felt I’d earned the bubbly chocolate calories. But I kept the wrapper in a pocket of my hoodie, because I wanted to enter the calorie particulars into my food total for the day, as I do. If I’m going to indulge, I need to track it!

It was sunny and surprisingly warm wearing my lined hoodie, so I took my hands out of the pockets and just let them hang at my sides, like some clever ape. When I put my hands back in the pockets later, the Aero wrapper was gone. Apparently I’d either pulled it out without noticing, or it had just quietly slipped out on its own.

I thought about retracing my steps, but the wrapper could have been anywhere along a 1+ km route and might have blown onto the road or something, so I just kept walking home, feeling guilty.

And it made me wonder, how much litter is accidental? Maybe not a lot, but I know for sure now that some of it is.

In the meantime, enjoy this 1976 McDonald’s anti-litter commercial. I remember this!

Apple Music: That’s a nice album you got there, be a shame if something happened to it

I didn’t mention this in my post-run report today, but I had planned to listen to the R.E.M. album Accelerate on my run. It is a very good album for running, as the title might indicate.

Except it wasn’t there in Apple Music when I searched by (Downloaded) Albums on my iPhone 12:

Also, I have no idea why Abbey Road is listed twice.

I checked under (Downloaded) Artists:

And it turns out two R.E.M. albums are missing, Accelerate (2008) and Collapse Into Now (2011). These are albums I own, not just streaming ones I’ve downloaded. And they are albums I have listened to many times on my iPhone (Accelerate, in particular). I have not touched my music library in any way. Where did they go? Only Apple knows. Actually, Apple probably doesn’t know. But the bigger question is: Why is Apple disappearing albums I’ve actually purchased? It’s like the company is actively trying to push me away.

And guess what? It’s working! I am starting a trial of Deezer.

Speaking of the 1980s and the existential threat of nuclear war…

In the previous post, I talked about David Gilmour’s album About Face. Released in 1984, it has the fear of nuclear war coursing through multiple tracks., It made me suddenly remember a poster I had as a kid.

I got my own bedroom when I was 14. This was a very big deal for me, because it meant I could listen to my own music, got to have the family’s second TV (our first colour set) and I could express myself with a carefully curated collection of art and posters, as befits the sophisticated tastes of a 14-year-old teen.

I had this poster hanging on the inside of the door of my main closet (the upstairs closets of our house were weirdly large–I actually had two walk-in closets in my bedroom):

Step 7 always made me laugh and it felt edgy having a poster in my room with the word “ass” on it. I must admit, it still makes me laugh today, because it was and is so very correct.

A few thoughts on a few (old) albums

Not reviews, just thoughts!

Out of Time (R.E.M.)

After my fiasco of trying to listen to the album on a run, I grabbed it and listened to it in full a day or so later at home. I can see why people pick Automatic For the People as R.E.M.’s best album–it’s more cohesive and arguably more “mature” (it also has a better title and album art).

But Out of Time has something Automatic lacks–a sense of joyful experimentation. The band spent a lot of time experimenting in the latter half of their career, especially after drummer Bill Berry left, but a lot of it feels weird or kind of indulgent (or worse, a bit boring!)

Out of Time is a band doing new things and having a blast with it. Every member is present and fully participating–you even get two Mike Mills lead vocals (one because Michael Stipe couldn’t finish writing lyrics to “Texarkana” so Mills took over, rewrote the song, dropped any reference to Texarkana and ended up with one of the best tracks on the album).

Everyone remembers “Losing My Religion”, which centred around a mandolin, or the goofy “Shiny Happy People”–which may have had a more sinister meaning, even as the band dismissed it later as a children’s song (the video, which I’ve commented on before, is peak 90s), but the album is chock-full of what the kids call deep cuts, ranging from a rare instrumental (“Endgame”) to the eminently silly but catchy “Radio Song” in which Stipe deadpans the phrase “Hey hey hey” repeatedly. It makes excellent use of Kate Pierson of the B-52s on a couple of tracks. Even the song “Fretless”, which didn’t make the album, is great. The B-sides are A-sides.

Anyway, you should listen to it.

About Face (David Gilmour)

This was Gilmour’s second solo album, released in 1984 and when it seemed Pink Floyd was done (he would reconstitute the band without Roger Waters and release a new album three years later). Unlike his first solo effort in 1978, which has a loose, dreamy feel, About Face is What If Pink Floyd Made a Pop Album?

Gilmour has been a bit bagged on for his skill as a lyricist, but on About Face, he keeps things simple, direct–and sometimes surprisingly cheeky. My favourite example is “Cruise”, a breezy song with a soaring chorus that is, literally, about cruise missiles. Gilmour is clearly not impressed:

Saving our children, saving our land
Protecting us from things we can’t understand
Power and Glory, Justice and Right
I’m sure that you’ll help us to see the light
And the love that you radiate will keep us warm
And help us to weather the storm

“And the love that you radiate will keep us warm” is a great bit of word play.

Then:

Please don’t take what I’m saying amiss
Or misunderstand at a time such as this
Because if such close friends should ever fall out
What would there be left worth fighting about

Same for “if such close friends should ever fall out.” So cheeky.

He conscripted Pete Townsend to write three sets of lyrics and used two, the standout being “All Lovers Are Deranged”, which combines a furious guitar with lyrics both savage and droll:

You know that you don’t really fall in love
Unless you’re seventeen
The break of day will make your spirits fly
But you can’t know what it means
Unless you’re seventeen

Unlike with PF, here we get a brass section on the kicking “Blue Light” and while the album has the shadow of the Cold War hanging over it (it was 1984, after all), the whole thing remains eminently catchy and well-crafted. Apparently Gilmour was a bit dismissive of the album as being very 80s upon the release of his next solo album in 2006 (yes, 22 years later), but apart from the lyrics, it achieves a kind of timelessness as the songs swing between Gilmour’s concise acoustic strumming and him thrashing in a way he rarely did with Pink Floyd. It’s worth the nostalgia trip to see what might have been, if Pink Floyd hadn’t returned.