And he shows them, pearly white

After five years of faithful service, I have decided that my laptop's monitor and memory are no longer quite as stable as I would like them to be to continue to support my dissertation. Though I will undoubtedly find other uses for ol' Lappy, I now have a new word processing machine. Yes, I've become one of those people. In fact, I am composing this entry from a "Dashboard Widget" designed for this purpose.

It is pretty okay so far.

where my love lies waiting silently for me

I'm back, but here are some more thoughts I wrote down while away:


It doesn't quite get dark here.

Man that relish was green.

The poutine was...good. This was not too surprising; as a dude who has been known to dip his fries in au jus and to order them animal style, I am no stranger to the commission of delicious atrocities against god and tuber. It did look gross, although not as gross as it ought to have, as the cheese was shredded (I might have to try again tomorrow).

The "All Dressed" or "Suicide" (or "White Gummi"?) potato chips were also damn good, in an "I see you everywhere with infinite form, with many arms, stomachs, faces, and eyes" sort of way.

The food service people all seem to have serious OCD. I have watched so many of them assemble my food very gingerly, trim each lettuce leaf so it exactly fits the bread, and so forth

Steve Miller, not only did you rhyme "love" with "love," but I do not see any sort of entailment relation between being called Maurice and speaking with the pompitous of love.

A nice thing about driving: there are signs to let you know what crossstreet you're coming up on in advance

The traffic lights have a tiny delay, though. I bet it prevents accidents, but I always wind up stepping into the crosswalk a second before the light turns green.

I think my car is smarter than me.

Last time I rented a car they gave me a Pontiac Sunfire; I assumed this is what I had this time until I actually looked at the name on the back, and it turns out to be a Pontiac Pursuit. I figure this is because Canadians would prefer that their cars chase things rather than envelop them in plasma. I can respect that.

I have seen more mechanical ("chunk-chunk", with the carbon paper) credit card readers in the last week than in the fifteen years prior.

My hotel was on Tomken Street, which made me say "aw peas" every dang time I saw it.

It wasn't until Day 4 that I figured out how to turn my windshield wipers off. Scary thing was I had only wanted to twice until then.

I went to Tim Hortons for a cup of coffee and a donut, but they didn't have maple donuts, so I got one from the other Tim Hortons around the corner. With that, I ended my tour of Canada's consumer culture. Their slogan is "Always Fresh" or "Toujours Frais," which makes me think of Mehitabel.

Hey, "Medi-Cal" is spelled just like "medical," only with a hyphen.

Speaking of obvious things you didn't realize simply because they never really came up in your brain, HEY I bet the A in "Chick-fil-A" is long, as in "fillet," as opposed to..."fil-uh," which is not actually a word. (See how cosmopolitan I am now? (There was a Chick-fil-A in the Philadelphia airport. It tasted okay. But thanks you guys for not mentioning their disturbing religious connections.))

And, in turn, speaking of cosmopolitan, this dude is annoying to read. His prose is smug and cartoonishly overwrought, and combines the highfalutin and quasi-colloquial in a way that calls to mind Cornelius Bear attempting to get jiggy wit it. It reminds me of me.

On Monday I went in the CN tower, but not up it. I am afraid of heights, also there was a really long line and they wanted $20. So instead I stood at the base and looked up, and imagined the view to be a lot like that, only in reverse. I mean, heck, I'd be in an airplane in a couple hours, I could wait until then to look down.
Then I wandered around the Harbourfront a little and took in some sights. There was a park, some little gardeny things, a few Inuit art galleries. There is this amazing sculpture thing they do with musk ox horns; here is a picture that totally fails to capture the effect.

Oh, did I mention the conference? The conference was really really good.

Beady little eyes and flapping heads so full of lies

Random thoughts from Toronto:

Everyone sure is nice here. Though I've probably only spoken to about 6 people so far, and half of them were at customs. The customs people were especially nice; we had plenty of time to chat as they prodded my body with wands for an hour. That was nearly as long as I spent at the car rental desk.

I consider myself a pretty freeway-savvy guy, but half the time I have no idea what freeway I'm on. They are basically a case study in fuzzy boundaries.

The airport in Phoenix is kind of like the Drazi homeworld, with cowboys.

Why am I not finishing my paper and going to bed? I need to be up in like seven hours.

...

Hey, that seemed to go really well. Yay.


My first meal here included a Canadian Bacon (or back (or peameal) bacon, as they call it here), Lettuce and Tomato at the "Country Style," which had the singular virtue of being open at this hour. Also an eclair. The eclair was puzzling. The donut part was almost not sweet at all, but then it was like the chocolate and cream really gave it their all for the team.

And I nearly had a weird potato chip adventure. When I passed by the lobby vending machine, I saw that it sold these "Regular Nature" flavored Ruffles. I had no idea what this meant, and tried to look it up on the Internet with no success. Finally I found enough change and went back over to the machine, saw the package, and totally realized that "Nature" probably just means "Regular" in French.
I am still getting over my disappointment. I thought...I thought maybe they had something to do with Rousseau?

The parking spaces here are gloriously large. This is perhaps because one needs to own a car large enough to bungee-cord a caribou to, y'know, in case of emergencies?

There is a mall under Toronto. Honest. They dug a hole in the ground, filled it in with mall and built a city on top of it (though not necessarily in that order).

Also some cool churches.

On the whole, it is just a very charming place.

They seem to care much more about the quality of produce than we do. I had some orange juice at the subterranean food court, for crying out loud, that was significantly fresher than most oranges I've eaten.

I also had a BLT to go with my juice. After my CBLT on Friday, I started to feel nostalgic for my homeland and its above-ground ways, and so I had some American bacon to offset the homesickness. You may be thinking "wait, is non-Canadian bacon necessarily American? I think they may have invented bacon in one of those other countries," to which I say DON'T THINK YOU'VE DEPRIVED ME OF MY IGNORANT NATIONALISM YET, CANADA. Though here is something to think about: they put butter on their sandwiches. How is it that we are still collectively fatter than the land of the buttered BLT?

When the CN tower first came into view, I knew what it was because I couldn't stop staring at it (bad when driving). It's like it defies my conceptual understanding of what buildings do.

Ketchup potato chips are disgusting.

This is really a lot of fun.

And now, a musical interlude

Don't mind me, I'm just testing a) my webspace, and b) my use of the EMBED tag.



(And honestly, who doesn't like the Supremes?)

Silence like a cancer grows

Oh. Looks like I forgot about you again.

Sorry. It will probably continue to happen over the next few weeks. I don't even really have much to say right now, except that I was thinking about my car recently. Those of you who have taken a casual look at my desk, my bag, my room, or anywhere that I have been standing for more than five minutes, will have probably noticed the clutter. I think I release some kind of paper pheromone or something. Anyways, today I just realized that the interior of my car is almost completely spotless. I don't know why that is, but I can't shake the feeling that all I have to do to make everything in my life perfectly organized is unlock the dark secrets contained within that cranberry pearlcoat.

Anyways, look at these shirts, if you haven't already: Ryan's Whale (actually an orca) Shirt, and JohnA's Major Teacup and Ghost Band Shirts.

Also here is some more game stuff: Games Quarterly's Top 100 games of 2005, and a few lists of computer implementations of various board games so you can play Settlers or Carcassonne or Metro on the Internet.