blinkit

The project: Day 2

WMD: Today we did the first work on the fireplace. The top picture at left shows the fireplace in its original condition: 30-year-old brickwork revealing its origins in the '70s. The picture at left is after we put the primer on. It's an improvement even in the intermediate stage. The final version will be grey, although what shade still has to be determined. The colour scheme in general for the walls will be shades of grey: right now I'm mulling over the G35/H35 colour key in General Paint's colour collection. The walls will be a lighter shade, although still recognizably grey to give it character, while the kitchen, wraparound wall and possibly the fireplace will be a darker shade for contrast with both the lighter shade and the white cabinetry in the kitchen. I'm not sure if the fireplace will be the darker shade, or somewhere in between the dark and the light. Inevitably, I'll mount a mirror or art of some kind to break up the brooding presence of floor to ceiling brick.  For those keeping score, shades of grey under consideration include Sterling Coin, Stonewall and Blackthorn. The goal: refresh the fireplace and the living room. The lesson: painting brick is laborious. First you you need to wash the brick with TSP, rinse it, allow it to dry, prime it and then put two coats of paint on it. Today, also bought hardware for the cabinets. The lesson here: hardware is not cheap.

Today's bLINKit: Cranky geek John Dvorak rages against the Blackberry, a device I've never used and don't really want. (I'd rather have a Gameboy or portable DVD player or a decent novel.) And the The West Wing enters its final few episodes. A lot of former fans abandoned the show after creator and central writer Aaron Sorkin left three years ago, and since then it sputtered. But this season has marched along smartly, with a war room feel to its portrayal of backroom politics during a fictional American presidential race. I, for one, will miss it, and I'm not the only one.

Plus: if you weren't freaked out by global warming, you'll definitely be freaked out by global dimming. Say farewell to the future.

 

Moving, ants and Rapture flicks

WMD: My boxes arrived today from Moving Blocks, a company which rents out plastic boxes and other storage material for moving. I went the rental plastic box route to avoid having to find and collect boxes and, hopefully, to prevent taking any little cardboard-loving critters with me to the new place. The boxes were delivered to my door this morning, and they'll be picked up from new place when I'm done with them in a couple of weeks. Thanks to Randy for the Moving Blocks recommendation.

The only problem now is that the boxes make the move real. I now have to put all my stuff in them. And that's work.

Meantime, the ants smell victory. Their patrols have been small but steady (with heavy casualties inflicted on them by me), and this morning they set off the smoke alarm again for about three seconds just because they could. The silverfish also grew bolder, skittering along the living room carpet in plain sight, but a well-placed foot put a stop to that for now.

Today's bLINKit: The Tyee seeks donations to pay for independent investigative journalism. The Onion reports on yet another new television standard coming into play in the U.S. And certain kinds of Christian filmmakers still seem to be making cheap, awful movies. Back in the day in church, we had to put up with the worst cinematic dreck you can imagine, especially the Rapture-paranoid The Thief in the Night series, discussed at hilarious length here. Not all Christian films targeting aesthetically gullible evangelicals were bad. One exception is the film version of the moving Holocaust-story The Hiding Place, with a terrific cast including Julie Harris and Jeanette Clift. For its camp value, there's the The Cross and the Switchblade, starring (and I'm not making this up) Pat Boone and Erik Estrada.
 

We're all going to (virtually) die

Today's bLINKit: In a startling case of games imitating life, a plague broke out in the virtual online universe of World of Warcraft and began wiping out players' avatars. The highly virulent plague--described as an infectious blood disease--was part of the game, but was meant to be restricted to individual adventure scenarios limited to just a few characters. It apparently was a very nasty bug, doing massive damage to characters, and intended for high level characters. But through an accident, the plague spread into the wider population and started killing lower level characters. Even more startling, it started to infect non-player characters. They were designed to be strong enough to take such punishment, but unfortunately also spread the plague. The Warcraft people eventually fixed and halted it but apparently lots of the players affected by the bug didn't mind the experience. It was an unexpected, unplanned event, that while shocking was fun, kind of like an unexpected twist or turn in a roller coaster. Some grief players even compounded the problem and made quarantining the plague difficult by purposely spreading the disease to others. It's another way in which virtual worlds are becoming more like the real world, at least in the way that they are perceived by players. See stories here and here.

We're all going to (not) die from avian flu

Today's bLINKit: The Courier's comprehensive feature story on Vancouver and a possible avian flu pandemic. But are such fears overblown? Personally, I prefer caution. Stock up on the bottled water and canned food now.

We're all going deaf

Today's bLINKit: Nancy Callan, ESL teacher and author and longtime friend of Blinkit, gets U.S. distribution.

Xena talks BSG.

Plus, and I've been thinking this for years, the preponderance of MP3 players and other portable devices heard through ubiquitous use of ear buds is very bad for the hearing health of the nation. Sounds like a no-brainer to me: stick speaker in ear, pump in loud music for hours on end, sit back, watch hearing loss develop. I don't know why more people aren't aware of this or concerned about it. It could partly because most users of such devices skew on the younger side. Their hearing is still relatively intact, and they think they're invulnerable anyway. Have fun in the silence (partial or not) ahead, folks.

Self-promotional Thursday: Architecture and memory

Today's bLINKit: My column based on my Strathcona walking tour from a few weeks ago.

Also, Sandra Thomas of the Courier wrote a piece about a summer space university wrapping up its session at UBC with a warning about rocks and chunks of ice devastating the Earth. Unfortunately, the print edition got screwed up in production, so this link is the only source for the full text.

We're all (not) going to freeze in the dark

WMD: The Globe and Mail recently ended its end of oil series on an optimistic note, including nine reasons why we don't need to panic. From the May 28 edition, presented in the interests of balance, they are:

1. The end of the world is always a day away.
2. There is no shortage.
3. We're finding oil, without even really trying.
4. Oil sands.
5. The present is not always the future.
6. The media often get it backwards.
7. Question the consensus.
8. Spared production capacity is on the rise.
9. A Spanish dance bodes well. (That's got something to do with the nature of oil pricing.)

I'd add, in closing, that the whole reason to talk about the end of oil, and to point out how much we depend on it and how our lives would be stone age-ish without it, is to think about the transition to post oil, whenever it happens. At present, few are thinking about that transition.

We're all going to freeze in the dark, pt. 3

WMD: My recent flirtation with musing about life post-oil seems to be in line with a wider zeitgeist. The Globe and Mail did a major, week long examination of oil, the oil economy and how long it will last, the idea is now getting regular mention on the radio home of conspiracies, Coast to Coast, and the idea even popped up in a weekly podcast I listen to, one that's generally upbeat about technology from a consumer point of view. Now there's this from Michael Ventura, on the alternative news site Information Clearinghouse, discussing life in America once gas prices there reach $4 a gallon US. Ventura, the article notes at the end, will be attending a conference with Robert Bly, which immediately makes me want to dismiss him as a flake, since Bly and other pseudo-nativists were most likely responsible for the epidemic of monotonous "tribal" drumming that polluted soundscapes in public parks in the 1990s. (It occurred locally in my neighbourhood near the beach, and made me want to chase with a water hose every dreadlocked person I could find.) And Ventura's piece does lend some credence to the accusation levelled against post-oil prophets like James Howard Kuntlser that they're really using concerns about the depletion of oil as a stick with which to beat the idea of suburban living, which intellectuals profess to hate. The problem for the critics is that suburbs are fairly wasteful, and in a post-oil era will be in trouble. Ventura talks about economic refugees leaving the hollowed out suburbs, probably to the cities, where, unfortunately, things won't be much better:

But where will the new refugees go, and what will they do when they get there? They will migrate to the more livable cities, where rents are already unreasonable and social services are already strained, and where the new refugees will compete with immigrants for the lowest-level housing and jobs. Immigration issues will intensify to hysteria. Native-born Americans will clamor for work that only legal and illegal aliens do now. In a culture as prone to violence as ours, that will probably get ugly.

By "a culture as prone to violence as ours" he means the U.S. But as a Canadian, I can't be glib about things not getting dark up here, albeit perhaps it will occur in a restrained, state-regulated way. In the U.S., they'll bring out the guns to settle things. Up here, we'll have ration cards and queues in which we'll participate meekly.

Today's bLINKit: Getting away from the end of the world themes, the Tyee's David Beers has a good interview with Lance Berelowitz about his book Dream City, a tome about the development and future of Vancouver. I haven't read the book, but judging from the interview and from what others have told me about the book, Berelowitz strikes a reasoned middle ground about discussing Vancouver. On the one hand, we've done a good job of creating a livable downtown. On the other hand, we're nothing compared to what they've got going on in Europe, a lot of our condo tower development is depressing the same and not very flexible, and we mistakenly believe our natural legacy of climate and geography, and the main reason many people live here, is something we created. What's more interesting than the interview are the Tyee reader comments following the piece, in which one reader after another systematically dumps on the idea of Vancouver being sustainable, progressive, enjoyable, cultured or even interesting. As a friend of mine who edits one of the commuter dailies said when he got dumped on for supposedly dumbing down the news, "Ouch."

An Astronomer's Day

Today's bLINKit: Ever wondered what an astronomer at NASA does during his day? Stephen lets us know amid the excitement of a big gamma ray burst the night before. Stephen, we can add, is Canadian, and according to the NYT, Canadian astronomers rule.

And speaking of NASA etc., former astronaut Russell Schweikart wants a NASA mission to land a transponder on a known asteroid to see if will or will not collide with the earth in 2035. That would be about the time we run out of oil and are picking ourselves up from the great avian flu epidemic... The mission is estimated to cost about $300 million, which is one really expensive transponder.

It's back: We're all going to die (continued)

Today's bLINKit: Just when it had gone out of the news for a couple of months, avian flu is back, according to a recent CBC story. Another man has died, bringing the death toll in Vietnam to 38. Fortunately, they infections are all still bird to human, meaning as far as anyone knows the virus hasn't mutated into a form transmissible between humans. The problem is that the virus is showing up in bird populations in China, and some of these are migratory birds.