Still Afraid of the Dark

I have an old TV.  Yes, the heavy-as-hell, not-completely-flat kind.  It's held up pretty well, but the one problem is that the picture is getting rather dark.  I find that's not a big problem when it comes to watching TV - it's pretty rare that the plot depends on the viewer noticing one detail in an unlit room.

Where it does become a problem is in video games.  That's where you might miss something important in the dark.  You never know what baddies may be waiting for you in that pitch black hallway, so stick to the brighter rooms.  In racing games I've learned to keep to the lighter side of the street.  Or just remember where the guardrails are hidden.

All of this reminds me of the computer game Zork, in which you couldn't stay in any dark room for more than one turn, or you'd be eaten by a creature called a Grue.  Thirty years and countless technological innovations later, and I'm still trying to avoid virtual darkness.

So that's what an esoteric geek I am.  The situation didn't remind me of that one Vin Diesel movie.  It didn't even remind me of that Doctor Who episode with the carnivorous microbes in the shadows.  No, it reminded me of a text adventure written in the seventies.  Consider that the next time you wonder if you've become nerdy because you saw The Avengers .

Drop the Top!

You know what bugs me?  People who drive around in convertibles on sunny days with the top up.  It seems like I've seen a lot of them lately.  What are they thinking?  To have a convertible, they had to spend thousands of dollars extra on their car, and suffer on cold days.  Yet they don't take advantage of it.  I could understand if this were California, and you could assume they just didn't feel like driving with the top down today.  But this is in Canada, where you can only use the convertible for a few months a year.  If you're not going to use it on warm days in September, why did you buy a convertible?  Just to rub it in the fact that you - unlike everyone else - could put the top down, you just don't feel like it.

See, that's how you can tell I'm a real blogger:  my mid-life crisis doesn't make me buy a convertible, it makes me complain about them.

Waterloo Is Not A Normal City

Exhibit A: There is a museum in the food court

Try Again, Vivaldi

Spring is supposed to be a time for new beginnings.  In the natural world, it certainly is.  But I don't live in nature.  I'm a human being; I live in an artificial world with its own rules.  And it seems that one of the differences between the human world and the natural world is when things start.  For some reason, artificial things mostly start in the fall.  Particularly the first week of September.  School starts, new TV shows debut, financial years start.  But there's lots of little changes too:  here and there the familiar shifts just slightly, and you spend a week reorienting yourself.  Oh, Rachel Ray is on an hour earlier, McDonald's boxes are corrugated now, half the tenants in the building have changed.  And all my ancestors had were blooming flowers.

The Best @#*&$ Blog Post On The Internet

I remember reading (in the Book of Lists, I think) that the various symbols used in comic strips to denote swearing all have names.  A quick scan of the Internet revealed the following names: nittles, grawlix, quimps, and jams.  Unfortunately, I couldn't find anywhere that said which symbol has which name.  I could only find:

• quimp = Saturn
• grawlix = spiral

I can't believe it: there is still information in a book that is not yet available on the Internet. 

But what made me think about this is the way I treat these symbols: I don't remember how I read them as a child, but I find that now - after years of more mature entertainment - I have to read them to myself with the actual swear word that the character was probably meaning.  Let me tell you, it's a weird experience to hear Hagar The Horrible using the F-word when addressing his troops.

God Save The Queen For Something A Little More Appropriate

I've mentioned before that if it was up to me, Canada would dump the monarchy. I've also subsequently mentioned before that I realise I'm out-voted on the issue, so I won't waste my time flogging that dead horse. However, I think I can make this complaint anyway, if only on a technicality:

Recently, a monarchist group proposed to name a small park in my neighbourhood in honour of Queen Elizabeth's Diamond jubilee.  There are several layers of oddness about this.  First is their need to commemorate a non-event.  They aren't naming the park after her, on the occasion of her jubilee, they are naming it after her jubilee.  The jubilee isn't really an event in itself, it's an anniversary.

And this isn't even the first thing they've named after a jubilee.  A local stretch of road is now known as "Jubilee Drive" in honour of her Golden (50th) Jubilee.  A her reign gets to longer and ever more impressive anniversaries, there are going to be more and more times to commemorate, and they're going to run out of things to name after Jubilees.  Which brings me to the most questionable part...

The park in question is pretty small, and it is dominated by a memorial the firefighters who have died in the line of duty, along with a monument in memory of 9/11.  Naming the park after the queen's jubilee is not necessarily disrespectful, but unless you have a pressing need to find something to name, then the classy thing would be to leave the park to the people honoured by it.

This has me asking, what's up with these people?  They're so desperate to name things after symbolic events in the queen's life that they're muscling-in on deceased firefighters.  I'm glad to see that the whole idea was dropped when the local firefighters' union did not get on board with it.  But merely proposing it is a huge misjudgement in how the monarchy fits into modern society.  And that's the technicality I mentioned: fine, you can have the monarchy as a symbol if you want to (even if it's not the symbol I would have chosen) but it is just a symbol, and has to take a back seat to serious issues.  The royals themselves seem to understand that they need to take a back seat to those who make real sacrifices, it's time Canadians figured that out too.

Uncelebrated Celebrities

I'm not one to read supermarket tabloids.  But I do always scan them at the checkout.  I guess I like to keep track of certain things:

• Who is popular
• Who is trying to make a comeback
• Has Cosmo finally run out of sex tips yet

What I've always found odd are the arbitrary rules of which celebrities are tabloid fodder and which are not.  You can be a pretty big star without appearing on magazines.  A lot of it is of course the star's own behaviour: there's no mystery why Tom Cruise has been on more covers than Tom Hanks.

This strange, uneven respect given to celebrities has never been more apparent than the cover of People.  Among the items on the cover is a blurb saying that Avril Lavigne is engaged.  There's no mention at all of whom she's engaged to.  As you've likely heard, her non-cover-worthy fiancé is Chad Kroeger, singer-songwriter for Nickelback. 

I'll probably lose my membership in the International Siblinghood of Hipsters for defending Nickelback, but that does strike me as quite a slap in the face.  Especially since he's still selling music, while she's been reduced to being one of these lukewarm musicians who's worn out her welcome at home but is sustained by album sales around the world where they're still not tired of her.  But I can understand why she gets the cover: Lavigne's teen and tween fans from her most successful years are just entering their prime People-buying years now.  On the other hand, There can't be much crossover between People readership and Nickelback listenership.  Well, you might assume that, but right there on the other side of the checkout was a UFC magazine.