Yes, it’s time once again to pad my post count and what better way than with cats being silly?
General
A haiku for summer
A haiku for the summer, officially three weeks away.
I welcome the sun
Delightful and cozy warm
Welcome to the shade
Environment Canada is predicting it will be warmer but precipitation will be about normal. A possibly El Nino could screw everything up. Given how extreme and weird the weather has been the last few years, I feel safe in predicting I have no idea what the next few months will be like.
Sunny would be nice, though.
The Cars have run me over again
iTunes has a bunch of “Classic Rock Albums” on sale right now for under $7. While one might argue over what constitutes both rock and classic, there’s a bunch of good stuff here for old fogeys who fondly look back on the 70s and 80s because they were there.
Like me.
I decided to pick up The Cars’ eponymous 1978 debut and listening to it hit me with a powerful blast of deja vu.
Back in junior high, I took Drawing and Painting, even though I was never terribly good at either. During classes when we worked on our projects we were allowed to play music, provided everyone agreed to the selection. It was an unusual treat and one we savored.
One person in particular–whose name I’ve long forgotten–was the self-appointed arbiter of music and we pretty much went along with his picks.
He really liked Cheap Trick, who were a new band at the time.But he also liked The Cars, another new band.
We listened to a lot of Cheap Trick.
But he also liked The Cars, another new band at the time.
When I listen to the album now, it not only invokes memories of the class, I am reminded of how the album plays like a greatest hits collection. There are a lot of songs here that got radio play. I’m also impressed all over again at Ric Ocasek’s writing skills. The lyrics are funny and quirky and the music is catchy and inventive, effortlessly switching off from ringing guitars to cheesy organ and back again. The album is a brief 35 minutes long and it races from beginning to end, a near-perfect pop joyride.
Plus it has the lyric “Let them brush your rock and roll hair,” which is exactly what you’d expect the good times to do. Right?
Right.
Amusing cat image, May 2017 edition
Putting your head into it.
May: Time to construct the ark
Here’s the weather so far for the month of May:
May 1: Cloudy, a high of 9C. This is eight degrees below the average high for the month. This is February weather.
May 2: A mix of sun and cloud, high of 16C. This is almost seasonal (normal) weather.
May 3: Torrential downpour, a high of 12C by noon, well below normal. This is March weather.
They are forecasting absurdly high temperatures of 24C tomorrow, which would be well above normal. At this point, though, I think it’s quite possible that it could be raining unicorns instead because the weather no longer makes sense.
That is all.
Amusing cat image, end of April 2017 edition
Here a cat attempts to go after a ping pong ball and discovers great comfort instead.
June 2015 mini-vacation: Rain, sun, ants and horseshoes
Back in early June of 2015, I booked a few days off from work in order to attend my partner’s sister’s daughter’s (!) convocation in Kamloops. Apparently, some people are unfamiliar with this term–it’s another way of saying “high school graduation ceremony” but uses one word instead of four. It’s efficient. Our trip was five days in total, starting Wednesday, June 3 and ending Sunday, June 7.
(I started writing this post a few months after the trip and never quite got around to posting it. I am now posting what I had written to that point.)
The exciting day by day details follow.
If April showers bring May flowers…
The old adage says that April showers bring May flowers. If this is true, I expect to see the following in seven days, based on the current precipitation for the month:
Amusing cat image, April 2017 edition
This is probably how Toonces got started.
I ate a McMuffin today
McDonald’s recently launched an all-day breakfast menu with a kind of dumb ad campaign featuring “apm” to signify the zany ability to order pancakes in the a.m. and p.m.
I happened to be downtown at 1:30 this afternoon and remembered the all-day breakfast menu, while simultaneously remembering it had been a long time since I had an Egg McMuffin®. These two thoughts converged and I found myself ordering a Sausage and Egg McMuffin at the Waterfront Centre McDonald’s. I averted my eyes from the menu behind the counter as they now show the calorie count of each food item (kudos to them for doing this, though).
Because all-day breakfast is radical and new they had to make my McMuffin fresh. I was given a number on a plastic card for my order.
The number was 42.
This couldn’t have been a coincidence.
The Sausage and Egg McMuffin was surprisingly tasty. I mean, it’s exactly what it appears to be…an English muffin, a sausage patty, an egg and a slice of processed cheese. But still, it was yummy.
I feel guilty now, but in a slightly profound sort of way, like it was destiny.
Summer is coming, the perfect time for reruns
I’ve finally started working on expanding the Posts I Like section of the blog, which you can see over yonder in the column to the right. A new link is at the top of the section, Selected lists, complaints and observations. This will direct you to a page that distills the 1,800 or so posts on this blog down to the dozen really worth reading.
I didn’t feel like combing through all 1,774 posts tonight so this will be an ongoing process. I may also add or remove posts in moments of whimsy or as I otherwise see fit.
Enjoy!
Hair: Not the musical
Let me start by saying that my hair as a youth was a tragedy. Use whatever comparison you want–the Hindenburg of Hair, the Pompeii of Pompadours*–my hair was a long and limp mess that was only modestly tamed by firm application of brush and blow dryer.
The best thing to happen to my hair when I was a teen was having it all lopped off at age 18 in order to more accurately portray a WWI soldier in a college play.
I spent a few years after that going through a Robert Plant phase before finally coming to my senses and realizing that my thin hair was best-suited to being short or (as it is now) completely absent.
All of this is to preface how kids tend to clump together on the latest fashions (long and limp hair was the defining style of my youth) and just as my classmates once proudly wore acid wash jeans, today’s kids and more specifically, young men, have glommed onto a hairstyle that is pretty much everywhere now: the undercut.
It’s basically shaving the sides and back of the head while leaving the top fuller, allowing it to be styled any ol’ way. The most dubious (though not the most ridiculous–there is a distinction) variant might be one that Men’s Hairstyle Trends calls Short Sides + Long Hair Combover, or as I call it, The Hitler. To be fair, it doesn’t look exactly like Hitler’s hair because this is the 21st century and hair tends to be more fabulously styled now than it was in the early 1940s, at least when it came to fascist dictators. But the general sweep and lines immediately bring to mind Hitler. While some may deliberately choose to emulate this style for obvious if odious reasons, most guys don’t really want to look like Hitler.
And yet here we are.
In truth, the actual hairstyle–the undercut–doesn’t bother me. I find it both comforting and disturbing how each generation of kids slavishly follows whatever happens to be the hot thing and somehow it almost always turns out to be something that looks a little bit ridiculous in hindsight.
At least it’s not the man bun.
(You can see more undercut variants than is probably healthy here: 100+ Best Men’s Hairstyles + New Haircut Ideas)
* a small mercy for those who had to look at me when I was younger: I never actually had a pompadour