BAD THING #5 – Splashing Toilets

What happens when you drop something into a bathtub filled with water? Well, it makes a splash. Well, North American toilets are essentially miniature bathtubs…

If you’re a bomber pilot, you know that you can blow yourself up on your own bombs, if you are flying too low when you drop them. You’re also exposed to a similar danger when using a North American style toilet. The darned things splash you with cold and dirty water. If you’re a guy, it’s just gross. If you’re a girl, it’s gross as well as dangerous for your health. Remarkably, I find very few complaints about this, even though North Americans tend to delight in discussing all things toilet. Either everyone else but me is using some sort of “soft landing” technique (please tell me how you do it!), or they just accept the splash as one of the life’s inevitable unpleasantries.

Well, let me tell you – there are better ways! There exist flush toilets in certain parts Europe, and elsewhere, that have a wonderfully splash-free landing pad for your toxic waste. Some North American toilets come close if you lower the water level, but you still have to aim carefully.

Workaround: Dumping a bunch of toilet paper into the bowl before emptying the bowels.

Drawbacks: Needless waste of paper. Still some need for aiming and a possibility of a mishap. Paper sinks to the bottom after a while, so if you’re a little constipated, you might be in for a surprise. Increased chances of clogged drains.

BAD THING # 4 – Lawsuits

The warnings on some consumer products are a pretty funny by-product of the frivilous lawsuit culture, but there are far more serious consequences associated with it. It truly saddens me to think how many great initiatives have been squandered because of fear of lawsuits. Everything is made as drab, boring and restrictive as possible, for god forbid some moron does something really dumb, hurts himself and then sues you. It’s impossible to make a good thing without becoming responsible for every idiot’s injury that somehow results from it. Welcome to nanny state! Just check out this story: a personal injury lawyer (surprise, surprise!) is suing a bunch of organizations because he fell off his bike when pretending to be a mountain biker. Never mind that a technical mountain bike trial is SUPPOSED to try to throw you off your bike. That’s what’s fun about the sport! This case actually did cause plenty of unwanted consequences, as a bunch of outdoor initiatives were thwarted for the fear of similar lawsuits. What can I say – lawyers are scum of the earth.

Workaround: Be quiet, be anonymous. Go under the radar. Resist the nanny state without getting caught.

Drawbacks: Really big and important projects are impossible to accomplish undercover. Hiding all the time is not fun.

BAD THING # 3 – Fruits and veggies taste like cardboard

No wonder kids here are fat and hate their veggies. I hate chewing cardboard too! Unfortunately, North American agricultural industry does not sell good food – it sells looks. That’s why every apple and orange looks beautiful, huge, bright and perfectly round. Unfortunately, it usually is perfectly inedible too. Even organic food sections and farmer’s markets do not solve the problem: they use the same seeds as everyone else – seeds that have been optimized for easy maintenance, resistance to disease and looks. Taste barely enters the equation. A miracle occasionally happens and some plant with a hint of flavour actually makes it to the consumer, and boy is it an occasion for a celebration.

Workaround: Become an expert fruit and veggie chooser. Don’t be afraid to sniff produce in the store. Scout farms and farmer’s markets. Smuggle in some decent seeds and plant your own garden.

Drawbacks: Even the best ripe fruit detective won’t be able to find good fruit if there simply isn’t any available. Not everyone has the land, time, patience, and skill to plant one’s own fruits/veggies. Climate may not permit growth of certian fruits and veggies.

BAD THING # 2 – Ignorance and self-centeredness

Despite being extremely diverse and multicultural, North America is rather obsessed with itself. No doubt, physical isolation contributes somewhat to this trend, but in our Global Village world this is no longer excusable. Here are a few friendly tips to our North American (especially U.S.) friends:

* When writing on the internet, don’t write about “the nation”, “this country”, “our state” etc. Shocking as it might be, there are people from all over the world on the internet, not just “the” nation.

* Yes, shocking as it may be, there are other nations! You’re not the whole world, so calling World Series World Series makes you look like real doofuses.

* Americans didn’t win the 2nd World War singlehandedly. They weren’t even the ones who contributed most to the victory.

Workaround: Select your friends carefully, weeding out the ignoramuses. When encountering ignoramuses, smile and feel superior.

Drawbacks: Ignoramuses don’t disappear, and interactions with them can’t always be kept to a minimum.

BAD THING # 1 – Sprawl

The American Dream turned nightmarish. Monstrous traffic jams, depressing seas of concrete, rising levels of obesity (due to driving everywhere), lack of true communities, megamalls selling mega-crap, destruction of ecosystems as cookie-cutter subdivisions eat up more and more wilderness and farm land – God, do I ever hate suburbia.

Workaround: Live in the country or in a vibrant, human-scaled, pedestrian-friendly downtown area.

Drawbacks: If you ever want to live your downtown area, you can’t avoid travelling through the sickening suburbia. Other than that life’s pretty good.

Now, I must say I don’t blame my parents for anything. Among my undeniably good qualities I count the fact that I don’t tend to blame others for what happens with my own life. The irony of the situation is that it was probably at least in part the overprotectiveness of my parents that helped me develop this character trait, for I always desperately wanted to run my own life. To blame others for my misfortunes would be granting them control over my life. No way, Jose. I am in charge of me, and I take all blame and credit for whatever happens to me (within reason, of course – I won’t blame myself for boarding a plane that gets hijacked or for being hit by a car operated so inexpertly that I could do nothing to predict or avoid the collision).

No doubt, my parents tried hard to be good parents. Can anyone really blame them for going overboard a little? I was growing up in a period of great uncertainty, as the familiar world was collapsing on everybody and chaos reigned supreme. After living for quite a while in relative stability, how would you like to wake up one day and find out that all the money your family has been saving for the last five decades have turned into rubbish overnight? How would you feel if over the course of five years the crime and disease rates in your city increased ten-fold, with violent crimes and third-world-type infections in particular shooting up considerably more? How would you like to live with the knowledge that the basement of your apartment building is occupied by drug addicts and that the streets that used to be so quiet and peaceful are suddenly filled by a gamut shady characters: homeless drunks; embezzlers of all sorts; pimps and prostitutes; packs of wild and sometimes aggressive dogs; groups of youths with big muscles, shaved heads and violent intentions; groups of youths with vacant stares and tubes of glue? And how would you like to bring up kids at times like that?

I must admit my parents sheltered me from all that crap pretty well. Yes, there was stuff on TV, of course, and there were beggars on the streets, but apart from that my world was filled with school grades, sports, good books, and good boys and girls. I was never raped, or mugged, or invited to try drugs, or touched in inappropriate places by pedophiles or bad boys, or run over by crazy aggressive drivers that filled the roads of my native city. Yet I can’t help but feel that the measures they took to ensure all that were somewhat excessive. It was not even so much *what* my parents and grandparents did. (Heck, I now realize my parents allowed me more than parents in North America allow their kids these days. Imagine, I could, in some environments and under certain conditions, run off with a bunch of other kids and be out of their supervision for several hours!) It was more about *how* they did it.

After all, the world around me was not THAT bad. Yet I was lead to believe it was. Before leaving the house, my mother always put on a very strict face and chanted the familiar mantra: “Don’t come near the door, don’t open it to anyone!” Even though opening the front door was ingrained in my mind by age seven as an absolute taboo act I must never commit, it was still repeated daily with an air of “Don’t you DARE to even THINK about it!” In the same tone, I was told almost every day, sometimes more than once a day, to NEVER even THINK about talking to strangers, getting into anyone’s car, letting anyone touch me, playing cards with anyone other than family, trying drugs, crossing the road against the light and so on and so forth. I can imagine such repetition might be appropriate and necessary for the naturally carefree and easy-going kids. That’s how my mother was as a kid, and I suppose she was projecting that on me. But I was an impressionable, anxious and obedient child with very good memory. Telling it to me ONCE would probably have done the job. Pounding the stuff in every day, often peppering it with horror stories about this and that person they knew who got raped, killed, or otherwise suffered a great misfortune, made me absolutely dread the world. Not consciously, no. But that, perhaps, is even worse.

I remember the day when I once mentioned to my mom that I would one day just like to go for a casual stroll with no particular destination. “Perhaps,” I said, “I’d go to the railway station and stand on an overpass, watching trains.” This shocked my mother. She read me a lecture and made me promise that I’ll never ever do that. Unless I was with an adult or a group of other kids, I could only go outside for a specific purpose, like walk the dog, or go to the school, or to the store. Apparently if you’re wandering aimlessly, you’re much more likely to be picked out by a criminal as his next victim. And you know, I still feel very uneasy if I am ever outside without a specific purpose, even in broad daylight, in the safest of neighbourhoods. I’m not scared of muggers or rapists, no, just weirded out. I feel as if all the people around are looking at me disapprovingly and wondering how dare I venture out for now reason at all. And I’m wondering the same thing along with them.

I’m also nervous when dealing with strangers. I don’t think they’re going to kill me, but I feel definite anxiety if I have to speak with anyone on the phone, or talk to a store clerk. It has greatly diminished through a very delibirate effort on my part, but it’s still there.

But all of that is relatively minor thing compared to the background all-pervasive anxiety I live with. It’s low-key, but it’s always there. The world is a bad place. Strangers are all malicious and out to harm me. Especially because I am a girl. Girls must be especially scared at all times – they are weak and vulnerable and the world is not for them, really; they must be sheletered from it by strong men in order to survive at all (my parents still insists I must not be outside after dark unchaperoned). Oh, how much did I, a tomboy and an independent spirit, resent that notion, and how unable was I, the impressionable little kid who believed adults, to resist its being firmly planted in my subconsciousness. Sadly, the North American society, with its cult of “safety” and focus on horrible things that can happen to one, especially to a female, helps fuel this anxiety.

I am not succumbing to all these fears and letting it ru(i)n my life. I fight them, oh hell, do I ever. I do daring, adventurous, fun things and enjoy them (one side effect of a sheltered childhood is constant craving for adrenaline; another is that sometimes something as mundane as a bus ride is exciting enough to fulfill the craving). I roamed the streets on my own at 2 a.m. I rode my bicycle on an unlit deserted road in bear country one night. I have recently earned a pilot’s licence, realizing my old dreams of learning to fly. I even learned to speak to waiters in restaurants without pushing my heart rate into the 180+ zone. And yet I still feel kinda weird when I’m outside on my own with no specific destination. Some things are just too deeply rooted in us by the time we’re grown-ups..

1. My uncle once: was a officer cadet, but quit almost right away.
2. Never in my life: had I put on make-up.
3. When I was five: my family moved into a cool new place.
4. High school was: a bit lonely, but not bad.
5. I will never forget: many things I wish I could forget.



6.Once I met: an austronaut.

7. There’s this boy I know: wait, I don't know any boys... or girls... pathetic little nerd.

8.Once, at a bar: I tried to convince friends to have an orgy... and failed. :-(

9. By noon, I’m usually: awake.

10. Last night: I came home dog-tired after a day of idiotic clumsiness.

11. If only I had: an immortal soul.

12. Next time I go to church: I'll be going to a concert.

13. What worries me most: is that I'm going to die and the ultimate unfairness of the world.

14. When I turn my head left I see: a charming manual coffee grinder.

15. When I turn my head right I see: an espresso machine. :-)

16. You know I’m lying when: my normal axis is horizontal.

17. What I miss most about the Eighties is: being little and carefree.

18. If I were a character in Shakespeare I’d be: a comic relief character whose life is really all tragic though.

19. By this time next year: I'll have dealt with my serious injury, completed the next big level of my training, acquired
a dog, a habit to run in the mornings, and a couple of cool hobbies.  Yeah... it's a lot

20. A better name for me would be: Andrew.

21. I have a hard time understanding: why anyone would want to use a machine as awful as a leaf blower.

22. If I ever go back to school, I’ll: study something hands-on and satisfying - I've been studying hard
theoretical things all my life, and while that's been great, I'd want to mix it up a little.

23. You know I like you if: avoid eye contact and drop my pen three times in one minute.

24.If I ever won an award, the first person I would thank would be: myself.

25. Take my advice, never: wait for great things to happen to you - MAKE them happen.

26.My ideal breakfast is: Earl Grey tea, eggs benedict with some fancy trimmings like smoked salmon, and
almond croissants and lots of ripe, juicy, flavourful fruit.

27. A song I love but do not have is: There are lots of them.  My hard drive with my whole music collection crashed. :-(

28. If you visit my hometown, I suggest you: explore all the ethnic restaurants.

29. Why won’t people: just shut off their leafblowers?

30. If you spend a night at my house: it'd be cool if you made me my ideal breakfast in the morning. ;-)

31. I’d stop my wedding for: Huh?  What wedding?

32. The world could do without: leafblowers.

33. I’d rather lick the belly of a cockroach than: his ass.

34. My favourite blonde(s) is/are: bald.

35. Paper clips are more useful than: cockroaches.

36. If I do anything well it’s: fuck up.

37. I can’t help but: feel very sad sometimes.

38. I usually cry: when I see no hope ahead.

39. My advice to my child/nephew/niece: don't grow up to be like your father. :-p

40. And by the way: throw out that damn leaf blower, willya?

23:15 – Drink a nice big cup of nice strong black tea. With cheesecake. Mmmm….

00:00 – Think that it is time to go to bed because I have an important meeting tomorrow afternoon.

01:12 – No, really!

01:46 – Go to bed. Alarm set for 08:00.

02:11 – Hmm, it’s taking me longer than usual to fall asleep tonight.

02:13 – Okay, sleep already.

02:16 – SLEEP!!!!

02:58 – I relax my muslces one by one… I am perfectly relaxed… My arms and legs are getting heavy and warm… My torso is getting heavy and warm… My whole body is heavy and warm… I am going to sleep…. sleep…. sleeeeeeeep…… sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep…..

03:17 – Okay, that didn’t work.

03:22 – I once read about people with an extremely rare disorder. Their brain suddenly decides that one of their body part is not theirs. They actually wake up in the morning and feel someone’s leg is in their bed. They get terrified, try to throw it out and end up following it to the floor. Then, to their utter shock, they discover that this foreign strange leg is actually attached to them! I think I’m close to feeling that. I’m hyperaware of all my body parts and their tiniest movements, and they feel like jiggelty-jiggling rainbow-coloured creepy-crawlies shifting quanticary waves through the paradygmuses of omnipermeating zephyrous marshmallows. Aka extremely weird.

03:23 – I am also hyperaware of all the squeaks and creaks in the house. *startled* Was that a burglar?! *listen intently*

03:33 – No, I think it’s not a burglar.

03:52 – “ZzzzZzzzZZZzzzz…..” “ZZZZzzzzzZzzzzzZZz…” “ZzzzzzZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzZZZZzz… No, that’s not my snoring (I wish). That’s my boyfriend’s. It’s not very loud, but since the tiniest noise puts me in full alert mode (the opposite of shut-eye mode), it really bothers me. *give bf a good shove to get him to stop snoring*

03:53 -*another shove*

03:54 – *another shove*

03:55 – *another shove* Bf wakes up and asks me wtf I’m doing.

04:00 – Bf kindly goes away to sleep on a couch downstairs. Awww, he’s so considerate. Maybe this will help me fall asleep?

04:11 – Nope. Twist and turn. Reset alarm for 09:00.

04:17 – *chirp* *chirp* *chirpity-chirp-chirp-chirp!* Blasted blimey birds! There are a lot of them in that huge tree outside, and they are obnoxiously loud. And apparently 04:17 is their idea of “time to get up”. This neighbourhood needs more cats.

04:18 – Pull pillow over head to drown out bird noises. The noises disappear but this is a kinda uncomfortable position.

04:19 – Assume another position. It is comfortable, but bird noises leak through. Revert to the 04:18 position.

05:00 – Come on, by this time my worst insomnias usually tire me out enough to make me sleepy!

05:15 – Get up. Heck, I’m not even sleepy! Work to prepare for the important afternoon meeting.

06:58 – The meeting preparation is complete and I am feeling just a leeeltle bit drowsy. Let’s try this whole bed thing again. Reset alarm for 10:00.

07:07 – Come on!

07:28:53 – Yes… yes, I can feel it. Oh, yeah, baby! I’m coming! I’m com… AHEM! I mean, I’m falling asleep! My legs and arms do start feeling kind of heavy and relaxed! I’m drifting off… drifting off… In five seconds I will be entering the blissful realm of Morpheus!

07:28:57 – “Hey there! Get up. Your mom’s here!” Argh! Yes, she was coming over this morning since our place is on her way to work (don’t ask).

07:31 – “Hey daughter! Why are you still in bed? You told me you would be up by 7:30!” *grumble something back and turn away*

07:58 – The voices downstairs die down. Door slams. Bye, mommy.

08:19 – Who are these people in my bedroom? And why am I so worried about a high school algebra exam in the afternoon? I am not even in school anymore… Oh, wait! I’m asleep! ASLEEP! That’s awesome! At least I’ll get a couple of hours of snoozing in. Better than nothing.

08:24 – “Hey! Aren’t you getting up?! I thought you had important things to do today!” My boyfriend knows I tend to oversleep sometimes. How kind of him to make sure I don’t miss my meeting. *grump!*

08:55 – I think the people are back in my bedroom. I must be asleep again. Good night.

10:00 – *ring!* *ring!* And good morning! Go pour myself some black tea to fully wake up and face the day!

These brochures, by the way, typically contain nothing but most blatant sugar-coated lies. In fact, I’m convinced the tourism industry only survives because locals typically don’t read tourist-oriented stuff about their own region. Otherwise they’d end up so impressed with the place they live that they would really question the point of ever going anywhere else, especially in the wake of the oil prices, and hence travel costs, shooting through the roof lately.

But the statement I chose to start my today’s post with is, surprisingly, very true. I’d be hard-pressed to name an ethnicity that doesn’t have a few representatives living in our city. One (very welcome) side effect of this is the diversity of our local restaurant scene. Another is a huge fan base for the world and European soccer cups. Just wrap your head around this: when Toronto Raptors made the playoffs last year, I could barely find a pub that would show the series with sound on. But walk the downtown streets now that Euro 2008 is in progress, and every drinking establishment is packed with folks cheering for 22 guys from across the ocean chasing a round object across a lawn.

If you think that this post is about to spin into a rant about how North Americans should watch more basketball and less soccer, you guessed wrong. Cause I just happen to be a part of this huge fan base, rooting, of course, for the amazing Russian team. (Vperyod, Rossiya!!!) No, the rant is going to be about something completely different. Namely about what the fact that if you missed watching a game live, you have zero hope of remaining ignorant of the result. Which just ruins any attempt to enjoy watching the game recorded.

You see, I have to go to work. I don’t know what all those lazy underemployed bums are doing watching TV on a Saturday afternoon and why they’re not working like me. But twice already on the way from work I witnessed flocks of fans waving flags and cars with flags attached honking their horn, which spoiled all the suspense by making it quite clear who the winner was. So this Thursday I’m doing the only sensible thing – calling in sick and heading to a pub to watch Russia take on Spain in the semifinal. And if the Russians win, look for me on College Street – I’ll be waving the flag. Ole ole!

I’ve always wondered what their cuisine – and more precisely its linguistic aspect – says about them. We are supposed to marvel at the fact that Eskimos have several hundreds of words for snow (which apparently isn’t even a fact at all). But we are not at all surprised when a nation has a comparable number of words to describe what’s essentially the same dish.

Consider a tomato. If I choose to cut it into slices I make it into a sliced tomato. If I cut it up into little cubes, it’s a chopped tomato. If a fifth grader slips it into his teacher’s chair when the teacher isn’t looking, in all likelihood it soon becomes a squished tomato (and if we’re in England the fifth grader gets whacked by a ruler). However in every instances we recognize that a tomato is a tomato is a tomato.

Now consider a sheet of pasta dough. If an Italian mamma cuts it into long flat strips about 0.4 inches wide, it becomes tagliatelle. If she chooses to make the strips 0.3 inches wide instead, she gets fettuccine. If she wants to do a real intricate precision job and go all the way down to 0.15 inches, then little Giuseppe is having linguine for supper tonight. And of course if she’s feeling kinda lazy – to hell with all the cutting! Just stack those sheets up, and you’re treating the family with a completely different dish! Lasagna! And don’t even get me started on what happens when she decides to get all fancy and roll it into balls, twist it into spirals, twirl it into cylinders, and otherwise deform it in a myriad of different ways.

If you are a spaghetti eater of any nationality and hold a special affinity for pasta dishes, you might be tempted to argue that this linguinistic phenomenon is a tribute to Italian creativity and poetic soul. Those who dislike pasta might hold a diametrically opposed view: that Italians ultimately lack creativity to come up with more than one dish, and they attempt to disguise this embarrassing fact by calling this one dish 350 different names. I think it’s just clever marketing.

As anyone in marketing will tell you knows but will never admit to you, people love to have an appearance of a choice. Whether they actually have a choice is irrelevant as long as you manipulate them into thinking they do (which is much easier than actually coming up with a variety of choices that serve consumers’ true needs). Example: fill the market with hideous squishy sandals in a billion different colours, and suddenly the customer is debating “fuchsia vs. canvas pantone” rather than “hideous squishy sandals vs. reasonable footwear”. At this point I would elaborate on how this applies to pasta, but I am rather hungry, so I’ll wrap this post up in a hurry and go make me some pappardelle. Or am I more in the mood for gnocchettoni zitoni tonight?..

Ever since I was a teeny tot, I knew that I was definitely a dog person. Unfortunately this meant that for a long time I suffered from a “dog person inferiority complex”. It tends to be caused by the theory (developed and perpetuated primarily by the cat people, no doubt) that those who prefer pooches to pussies are social rejects secretly craving world domination. Thus the qualities they’re looking for in their pet are unreserved admiration and slave-like obedience, rather than self-respect and independence. Anybody who’s actually ever spent any time around dogs knows that the rumours of their “slave-like obedience” are mucho exaggerated. (Ditto for cats and “independence”.) However, since I was indeed a geeky social outcast from kindergarten through university, I actually subscribed to this offensive theory and felt bad about myself.

But don’t worry, dog people! That theory is wrong. I realized today, as I was watching TV and loathing the process, that it’s not “obedience” and “blind admiration” that I’m looking for in a pet. It is basic interactivity. A dog listens and responds to your voice and gestures. A cat pretty much stares blankly right through you. They just forgot to build that feature into cats. Oops.

Sure, you can get a cat to interact with you. Attempting to wash a cat, for example, would probably result in more interaction than you are ready to handle. But is this the kind of interaction you’re looking for? It’s like trying to interact with a TV by pounding it with a hammer. Sure, things would happen, and they would be a direct result of your actions. But that’s hardly a reason to call TV an interactive medium.

But with dogs, my friend, your input (words and actions) produces output – both immediate and long-term. And the output is not necessarily slave-like obedience – at all. Different actions produce different reactions in different dogs. Every dog is like an exciting computer game that you have to figure out. What makes its tail wag? How can I teach it not to pee on the floor? What strategy do I need to employ to avoid being jerked around by the leash? How do earn its trust and get it to love me (awww)?

So all you cat people who tried to belittle me for my canine addiction, I have a theory to throw right back at ya. You are just lazy bums who sit on the couch all day and waste your life watching stuff, be it TV or cat. And we puppy lovers are active minds that need mental stimulation. Just like our favourite pets… ’cause while you’re figuring out a way to train Fido to sit on command, he’s figuring out a way to train you to feed him treats on a sit. That’s why he likes you so much, by the way – he enjoys the basic interactivity in his pet too. *wink*

a annual physical useless Someone’s obviously not very excited about going for check-ups…

b bacterial abscess …even when one seems to be very much in order.

c chop them down to size YEAH!

d do squids feel pain A burning question someone just had to ask, right? I was quite surprised to learn, actually, how little is known about pain as experienced by animals, especially when the animals in questions are not mammals.

e ecocab Cool things – check ‘em out.

f five minute miles Not likely… NOT likely. Unless it’s cycling we’re talking about and not running.

g genital piercing No, I’m not contemplating getting any!

h huge bumblebee hovering near my house Terrifying, isn’t it?

i i am a pilot afraid of flying Gee… a career change might be in order?

j jogging minutes per km No, come on, whom are you kidding? You ain’t gonna take up jogging… Getting yourself out of bed is a great achievement as it is.

k kitty hawk Was it the supercarrier or the town I was looking up? No clue.

l latitude and longitude Don’t laugh at me here, be honest: you confuse them all the time too, doncha?

m making money on the internet Ahahahaha… Mua ha ha ha ha… *slaps knee* Like, DUDE! Get real.

n nether This word is inappropriate. :-P

o out of breath while eating Are you still trying to convince yourself that the annual medical is useless?

p penis Short and sweet. Actually, I don’t know if “short” is a good adjective to use with that noun.

q quad There was only one starting with a q.

r razor bumps Ouch.

s sucks a big one Sure does.

t types of departure Hanging yourself is one way…

u umpty That’s A LOT.

v video granny crossing the road Have you seen that one? I got a good chuckle out of it.

w why did i get married If you have to ask… it was probably for a wrong reason.

x No searches starting with x! Disappointing! I thought everyone searched for xxx videos, at least.

y yqa atis Do you ever search for random strings of alphanumeric characters just for fun?…

z No searches staring with z either. I need to get more addicted to search engines

If you want to see what the rest of the world is looking for, this blogger has kindly provided a summary.

When I was a little kid, making scary faces in the mirror was part of my morning routine. The opposite of an early riser, I needed a jolt to wake me up, and I was, you see, too young to start a caffeine addiction. So halfway through my tooth-brushing session I’d open my foaming mouth, make my fingers into claws, and would start approaching the bathroom mirror while staring intently at my reflection and producing a soft but menacing howl. About a quarter of an inch away from the mirror my nerves would give out, and I would run screaming from the bathroom to finish my tooth-brushing in the kitchen (no mirrors there). Then I would be awake enough to face the day.

Somewhere around my early teenage years the mirrors lost their mysterious terror and turned into mostly benign objects (with the exception of making my nose look decidedly too big). Lately, though, the suspense has been making a comeback. There is something very spooky about those smooth reflective glassy planes.

Check it out for yourself today, or better yet tonight. Go to your bathroom and start looking into the mirror. At first your thoughts might run along the lines of “I need to go to the gym more often” or “Shit, did I really walk around all day with lipstick smeared all over my cheek and not a single freaking bastard had the decency to point it out to me?” Shhh… Relax. Just look. Just keep looking.

It will start as a mild unease. You’ll brush it off with a little, not-even-nervous-yet smile that your mirror twin will flash right back at you. But as you keep looking, the sense of unease will become more pronounced. You know it’s only your own reflection. But the way it’s staring at you starts sending shivers down your spine. And as if that wasn’t spooky enough, as you keep staring into those unblinking eyes in the mirror, you notice something in the depth of the reflected room… some almost imperceptible movement… light and darkness playing tricks with your mind… You shift your gaze to look just over and past your twin’s shoulder… and you notice that your twin is nervously peering over yours as if something was creeping up behind you..

And then you say “Enough of this nonsense!” (you’re too grown up and not scared enough to scream), slam the bathroom’s door, march into the kitchen, splash two fingers’ worth of scotch into a glass and flip the TV on. And when it’s time to go to bed you convince yourself that you’re too tired to brush your teeth tonight. And the next day you wake up, smile at yourself in the mirror, and post on your blog that mirrors actually aren’t scary at all and some people let their imaginations run way too wild over nothing.

Good night. :-)

Of course out of curiosity I simply had to type in my boyfriend’s name (he is a expatriate yankee currently residing in Canuckistan). Apparently among this vast 32-billion mountain is a tiny heap of cash (right around a 100 bucks, though they would not give an exact figure) that belonged to his now deceased mother and which is now supposed to be rightfully his. If only now he assembles a thick wad of supporting materials to prove that this woman was indeed his mother and he was indeed supposed to inherit all her dough, he can expect a hundred bucks minus the cost of postage stamps.

Canucks can search here, though our country holds a puny $200 million in unclaimed funds… that’s under ten bucks per person. That’s because Canadian unclaimed accounts eventually expire, unlike American ones that are kept indefinitely. No fair.