Today I decided to buy some groceries out near Lougheed Town Centre late in the afternoon. This was a bad idea because I knew I would be caught in the rush hour traffic coming back. Sure enough, at the Lougheed SkyTrain station the first train pulled in and it was packed not unlike a sardine can. What amazed me, though, is how the car in front of me began disgorging passengers and after a good 10 or 15 seconds was still disgorging passengers. Ten or fifteen seconds may not sound very long but for a SkyTrain car this is a very long time indeed. And yet for as many people that improbably kept streaming out of the car, a good number remained in. The car had barely started to load passengers from th platform when the ‘clear out, this sucker is moving’ chime sounded and the doors tried to close.
My speculation is a wormhole developed in that particular car and it was letting out passengers from other cars all across the three SkyTrain lines in the Lower Mainland. That’s the only reasonable explanation, really.
Has it already been four weeks since I last ran? Yes, yes it has.
And I hates it.
My weight has been slowly creeping up as I lose all discipline and self-control. I am becoming soft and squishy yet I know the ankle is not ready, so I must continue to bide my time and ignore those sweet, scrumptious donuts.
Tonight I went bowling for the first time in a million years. Jeff, Jason and I went to Dell Lanes in Surrey (whose slogan sounds like a parody — “The future starts here”). Dell Lanes is part of the Dell Shopping Centre and features Dollar Giant, Al’s Vacuum Superstore and a check-cashing outlet among its retail jewels. Like most bowling alleys, Dell Lanes is below ground where the sound of pins being constantly knocked down will not upset the neighbors.
This was to be five-pin or sissy bowling, as I call it. I knew that such advance mockery would later come back to haunt me.
For some reason the interior of the bowling alley is done up like a disco. I mean, there are actual disco balls, colored lights, black light, everything you’d expect to see from Saturday Night Fever. And music, though not necessarily music. There was instead a digital jukebox, which looks somewhat like an old-style jukebox except it has an LCD screen, no records and probably costs a dollar a pop (I didn’t check). The maker of the jukebox was advertising on the screen to like them on Facebook and follow them on Twitter. Yes, I’m going to do that straight away. It also showed popular choices and it seemed the local folks favored “Jessie’s Girl” and a whole lotta country. We got to listen to Willie Nelson and Clint Black (the latter identified by Jeff). Yee and haw.
I bowled about as expected. Some gutter balls, hooking to the left so often I ended up overcompensating and hooking to the right. I think 5-pin may actually be tougher than 10. The balls are lighter and there are fewer pins but the pins are spread apart further and it seems easier to knock over just one without convincing any of the others to follow along.
Jeff, who said beforehand that he might get one strike per game, opened with a strike. This proved not to be beginner’s luck as he went on to amass an impressive score of 187 in the first game. I managed 110 and Jason was right behind with 108. I should point out that Jason is eight years old. Yes, I was almost beaten by someone who was born the same year Iraq was invaded.
First game scores:
Jeff – 187
Me – 110
Jason – 108
Jeff and Jason cooled off for round 2 while I improved a statistically insignificant amount:
Jeff – 153
Me – 116
Jason – 33
Once the official games were over, Jason improved remarkably, getting several strikes. He nearly threw the ball about a half dozen times while the pins were being reset, though. To his credit, his reflexes were fast enough to stop (except once, but the speed of the ball was just right, so the pins reset just as it arrived).
Jeff, meanwhile, seemed to favor a ‘launch the ball into the air and let it crash onto the alley’ approach. It actually seemed to work, too. None of us managed to go down the alley with ball in hand, so I consider the evening an overall success.
The pizza was entirely decent, too.
I’d like to think I’d do better at ten-pin (more stuff to knock over) but I know I’d probably goof up on that as much as with the 5-pin. No matter, bowling is silly and fun and that’s all that matters.
I am nearly but not officially ready to admit defeat with this year’s National Novel Writing Month. With 12 days to go, I have failed to light a spark on any of my attempts to write a novel. Part of it is poor planning, part of it is various distractions (health, work, fun stuff like that) and part of it is fear of over-committing to a complicated story that couldn’t be reasonably delivered in 30 days.
But as I said, I’ve not given up quite yet. I’ll have more to say in about a week’s time.
The Province is a newspaper that essentially makes fun of itself or perhaps a better way to describe it is to think of the editors as trolling the people of BC.
I espied this headline while walking past a pair of newspaper boxes. The box on the left was The Vancouver Sun and featured the headline Goodwill gone at Occupy: VPD chief. The Province carried the same story on its front page but with the headline that can be seen below.
Let me explain. Occupy Vancouver is a tent city at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the people gathered there railing against various societal ills, primarily how the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and something about 9/11 being a conspiracy for good measure. The city has been agitating for them to move and after a fatal drug overdose on the grounds started the legal paperwork to get the occupiers out. This has led to what some might term a tense situation. The Province headline has cleverly played on this by using the word ‘tents’ in the headline instead of ‘tense’ because it sounds just the same (that’s a homonym; relax, Province readers, it has nothing to do with homosexuality). See? Tents standoff. Ho ho.
It starts here, indeed.
I actually think this pun is an improvement over their usual front page stories, most of which are about assault victims, the headlines of which are written in the first person and usually along the lines of I thought I was going to die and he laughed like Hitler.
So, good work, The Province. You are slightly less deplorable on this day!
The HMV store at the corner of Burrard and Robson is sporting some new signs lately, as seen in this photo I took the other day. Compare the small sign on the left to the rather large one on the right.
I guess they need someone to help unload those Everybody Loves Raymond DVD sets at 50% off. And if you get fed up with the job, no problem, you won’t have it for very long, anyway!
I had to do a little unintended running today (it was only across a Walmart, but still*) and am pleased to report no wrenching pain, muscle spasms or other immediate maladies occurred.
I have also improved noticeably on the other fronts. My body is clearly on the mend, hooray!
I also feel like I am beginning to come down with a cold. Boo.
* it was not due to criminal activity, merely grabbing a dark chocolate rather than milk chocolate mega almond bar for Jeff
Maybe it’s just me but in the live video of R.E.M’s “Oh my Heart” (a fine song from a fine album, by the way) Peter Buck looks a bit like a woman. It’s the hair, I think. It reminds me of the old Monty Python gang when they would dress as (rather frightening-looking) women for some of their sketches.
To his credit, Mr. Buck is not frightening looking at all. Except for the hair. It is mildly frightening — much like my own.
Also, Micheal Stipe appears to be the only member of the band still looking lean. Maybe that explains why he started taking nude photos of himself. Brr.
The other day I was looking at this-here blog of mine and thinking about sprucing it up a bit. I have several other images I could use for the header, though I must admit I’m still smitten with the clean, crisp look of Buntzen Lake I have up there now. I could adopt a new theme but I blanch at the thought of all the manual tweaking I’d have to do in order to get it look just the way I wanted.
I also gave thought to tweaking the existing theme, perhaps going with a different body font. Right now I use Verdana, which is entirely readable if a bit bland. I experimented with Arial, Georgia and Garamond but none of them quite looked right. I began searching the vast reaches of the Internet and found a site called I Love Typography. I instantly went gaga over the body font used there and used my Interweb sleuthing skills to determine which font it was, as the site did not appear to share this particular detail. My efforts were without success so I sent an e-mail to the author of the (quite lovely) site and to my delight, he replied the same day with a single word response: Scala.
I now had knowledge but was faced with two new problems as a result:
How the heck did he get a font I clearly do not have to render properly on his site? What sort of JavaScript or CSS trickery was involved? I would have to find out.
Scala is a paid font. If I wanted to buy it I’d be looking at about $239 U.S. for the six fonts featured in the FF Scala Web collection. Now, I’m not saying they are not worth it. I’m saying I wish I had $239 to blow on fonts, because I’d probably have enough to buy some nice fudge, too. Mmm, fudge. Lacking both fudge and funds, my alternative is to look for a reasonable facsimile of Scala as a free font. That means combing through roughly one trillion hideous fonts scattered across an equally large number of font websites.
