The weather forecast at the moment? SNOWSNOWSNOW!!!!

Surprisingly, the CablePulse 24 website hasn't started freaking out about it yet.

Right now I'm drinking Fetzer Chardonnay-Viognier. I'd never heard of Viognier before, and I think it falls into the category of "an acquired taste". There is an aspect in this wine that is more complex than Chardonnay (that would be the Viognier, says the peanut gallery). I didn't like it initially, but I'm getting used to it. However, I wouldn't go out of my way to acquire it. I guess it's a bit off-putting because I have this expectation that white wines be "light", and this is not light. It sort of requires spicy food to go with it. The best way I can describe it is Viognier is to Chardonnay like Zinfandel is to Merlot.

Last book read = Tropic of Night by Michael Gruber. This book is badly in need of an editor. It is apparently supposed to be a mystery, but the jacket flap tells you whodunnit, and the entire book is about tracking the guy down. I suppose this makes it a thriller, which isn't exactly my favourite genre.

At any rate, the book is four hundred something pages long, and it takes until page three hundred something to get as far into the plot as the blurb on the jacket flap takes you, so most of it isn't exactly compelling, although it picks up at the end.

I should also warn that this book contains passing mentions of just about everything that anyone might consider icky. It isn't overly graphic, but it isn't exactly understated either. I could read it while eating, but I wouldn't read it if I was sitting home with the stomach flu, or if I had had a panic attack recently. Admittedly, the vast majority of the ickiness is important to the plot, and if it wasn't there the book would come across as overly sanitized. But it should carry a warning label that pregnant women shouldn't read this book.

However, there are a few things that are very well done. The many many deus ex machinas (I'm sorry, I don't have the Latin to pluralize that phrase) fit in well enough - you don't find yourself rolling your eyes or feeling cheated, and they're easy enough to believe if you want to. The author gives us an opportunity for some lovely schadenfreude about an unsympathetic protagonist, which makes him decidedly easier to swallow. But overall, this book, and the blurb on the jacket flap, both badly need to be brutally edited so that we aren't 75% of the way through before we come upon new plot information, and so that about a third of the exposition in the beginning isn't totally unnecessary.

I just impulse purchased some shoes that I'm never going to wear because they were only $15. They're reasonable shoes - black maryjane style with closed toes and a bit of a heel - and they fill the "black shoes that aren't boots or sandals and can be worn with skirts and pants" whole in my wardrobe, but they aren't the best shoes in the world for my foot problems. They don't provide enough support and they might exacerbate my calluses. (Because I'm sure you all want to hear about my calluses). But $15 is a reasonable price for a pair of shoes whose job is to sit in my closet until I find myself in some hypothetical situation where I need black dress shoes that aren't sandals or boots. So I currently have a shoe situation where I'll never have to do emergency last minute shoe shopping (which is extraordinarily difficult when you're a size 11 with narrow width but wide toes and fucked-up pronation).

oooh, the poor widdle baby duckie fell down!

Reading this makes me wonder if men or women are more likely to perceive themselves as "grown-up", and which gender is more likely to start perceiving themselves as grown-up first.

A poll! A poll that is going to wreak havoc with my GoogleAds up top!

When you were a kid, the youngest age you can remember, what words did your parents teach you to refer to bodily fluids and bodily functions, ie: urine/urination, feces/defecation, gaseous emmissions of various sorts, vomit, anything else you can think of. Comment in the comment box!

For me:

urine/urination = pee/pee-pee
feces/defecation = poo/poo-poo
burp = burp (I don't even know if burp is the technical name or not)
fart (for which I don't know the technical name) = poopy air
vomit = upchuck
diahrrea (sp?) = the runs

1. It's a timeline of the history of Usenet, complete with links to significant posts!

2. They should put garbage cans on all TTC vehicles. And a sort of envelope/rack thing to leave your newspapers in, so you can leave them behind for others, but you don't have to litter or leave them on seats and then other people will end up throwing them on the wet floor and making them unreadable.

There was mentino in the papers today of how people aren't using encyclopedias any more because they have Google. It occurred to me that I haven't used an encyclopedia since elementary school, because they contain the wrong scope of information.

I do three types of research: academic research, work-related research, and personal research. For all the academic research I've had to do since the beginning of high school, encyclopedia articles have been too much of an overview without enough details. They would be helpful if I knew nothing about the subject, yes, but when I'm assigned an essay or a project I already know the basics of the subject and need more in-depth and specialized material than one would find in an encyclopedia. For these projects I use a mix of internet, books, and academic journals.

In my work-related research, I'm usually looking for something extremely specific, or extremely specialized. For example, I'm looking for a particular clause of a particular law, which I wouldn't find in an encyclopedia but on the internet (or in a law book). Or I'm looking for the title of a specific individual, which obviously wouldn't be in an encyclopedia. Or I'm trying to figure out what a "CU time-out sequence" is, which is far too specialized to be in an encyclopedia (and even if it were, I couldn't look it up without context). I use specialized terminology banks for most of this stuff, but if those don't help, Google will get me closer to what I need than an encyclopedia ever will.

My personal research is very diverse, about any little thing I happen to be wondering at the time. "What's that song I heard that keeps repeating 'Wo bist du? Wo bist du?'" "What was the name of that cop show sendoff on Square One when I was a kid?" "When's Easter in 2007?" While an encyclopedia might be able to tell me that Easter is the Sunday after the full moon after the spring equinox, it won't be able to give me the specific answers I need. My questions are too small, and they fall through the cracks of an encyclopedia.

Encyclopedias are useful if you need to write 500 words on the main causes of World War I, or you need to write a paragraph about trees, or you want to look at the retro 60s pictures in your parents' old World Book (which is thinly disguised US propoganda), but they are inherently finite and can't address the day to day research needs of the 21st century.

Helpful hint of the day: When reheating pizza, sprinkle a bit of shredded cheese on top before reheating. This a) freshens up the pizza a bit, and b) help you know when it's sufficently reheated - it's done when the cheese is melted.

Two thoughts:

1. The problem with the word "feisty" is that it's never used to apply to men

2. For most of my life, I thought that if you were falling, but you were on a surface that was also falling (for example, standing in a free-falling elevator) you couldn't get hurt. I just realized the reason for this was the scene in the Wizard of Oz where the house lands from the tornado but Dorothy is okay because she was on her bed.

On the subway to work this morning, the train started honking and slowing down. I looked out the window, and saw a group of workers in hard hats standing against the wall of the tunnel so the train could pass. I don't know what they were doing, but imagine if that were your job! The trains come by every 2 minutes during rush hour, so their work gets interrupted every 2 minutes, and they have to drop everything and get out of the way!

They should invent a substance that you can put into caffeinated coffee and it will make it into decaf. Without affecting the flavour. Or having intoxicating or narcotic side-effects.

Helpful hint: even if the second pizza is only $2 extra, and even if you're so hungry you could eat all the pizza in the world, it's not a good idea to order two pizzas if the two-pizza box is too big to fit in your fridge.

Canadian women under 30, click here. Sign if you agree, and pass it on.

I'm not 100% sure of the point of this, but I'll support anything that reminds the politicos that my demographic is politically active.

I just found out that "bemused" doesn't mean what I thought it meant!

I didn't see the preshow and I'm going to stop watching at 11:30, so if anyone watches the whole thing, is Peter Jackson wearing shorts, or did he deign to wear proper pants today?

I finished two books this weekend. The first was Pattern Recognition. I already mentioned how much I love the language in this book, but I wrote that entry about 25 pages in, before I'd gotten into the plot. The problem is that the plot is not as good as the language. There's nothing wrong with the plot, it's a perfectly decent plot, but it drew me in (as a good plot should) and soon I found myself reading to find out what happens next instead of swimming around in the language. Which is how a novel is supposed to work, I suppose - the language is only a means to deliver the plot - but I didn't get out of it what I had hoped. But it is a good book, the female protagonist doesn't suffer at all from Male Author Syndrome, and she's cunningly ageless - I think anyone from 18 to 45 could identify with her as "she's my age". Very enjoyable, and I'd read it again. I'd also read it in translation, just to see how Gibson's language is handled in translation.

The other book I read was Black Bird - Oiseau noir by Michel Basilières. I loved this book! It's a story of an unpleasant family of thieves and shady characters in 1970s felquiste Montreal. The author manages to take a story completely populated with unpleasant, unsympathetic characters, and make it into something that's amusing to read for me, and not just from a schadenfreude perspective! Basically, this book succeeds at doing what Married with Children attempted. Usually I find these kinds of characters difficult and not fun to read, but I really enjoyed this!

But that's not all - it's also full of beautiful magical realism and gorgeously subtle irony, and helped me greatly to increase my fluency in Quebecois profanity! Huge fun, made me want to keep reading (finished the 300 page book in two halves of weekend days), probably the book I've enjoyed the most since I discovered Harry Potter.

I was walking down the street, and there's this guy walking
two dogs. Behind him there's a little girl in a stroller.

"DOGGIES!" the little girl in the stroller announces.

"That's right," says her mother, "How many doggies are there?"

The little girl thinks about this for a moment, then decides "THREE!"