Construction

There's a lot of construction in my St. Clair West neighbourhood just now.  There's an aparment building they just finished a block over from our house, which also has a What a Bagel! bakery. There are a couple more that'll soon be going up, so they've set up a shop for condo buyers.

It looks like we're in one of those "happening" neighbourhoods realtors talk about.  In recent years they rebuilt the streetcar line and gave it a dedicated lane.  The construction itself with something of a mess, taking a lot longer than it should have.  But now that it's finished, we're getting the benefits.  One is that there are a lot fewer accidents.

On Youtube I like to watch videos about building and engineering and city planning. One channel I watch a lot is City Beautiful.  I just saw a video of theirs where they talked about how you can improve traffic by slowing down the rate at which cars enter the freeway and reduce accidents with traffic roundabouts and double diamond-shaped intersections.  There's also one about the city of Savannah and how it was laid out in an 18th-century grid system that's improved the quality of life there today.

In China the hoardings around construction sites have government slogans written on them!

Balloons

I'm sensitive to loud noises. They literally make me jump!  One example is the sound of a balloon bursting.  As a result, I'm afraid of balloons.  I look at an inflated balloon and imagine the noise it'll make as it bursts.

Back when I was taking dance lessons at the Arthur Murray studio, they had a big sales event where if you bought lessons they'd have a ceremony for you that involved bursting a balloon.  When they had a ceremony for me, I had to go out of the room, which was a bit embarrassing.

I've never been in a hot-air balloon.  It sounds fun.  I did see a three-part film on The Wonderful World of Disney, "High Flying Spy." It was set in the Civil War and involved two Union men and a boy using a balloon to spy on the Confederate armies.  The part I remember is that one of the men said to the boy, "Someday you'll see the face of war, and know it for what it is." In the last episode the boy saw his older brother killed in a skirmish.  So he did see the face of war.

Roger Ebert, the movie critic, had a Balloon Rule:  No movie with a hot-air balloon in it is any good. (The exception is The Wizard of Oz.)

The Internet

What would I do without the Internet?  Just this morning my brother was renovating our house and had to turn off the power in my room for a short spell.  I actually went downstairs and talked to my father and sister for a bit!  Something like that makes me appreciate the Internet.

I first got online back in 1996.  Back then I was a fan of the Sailor Moon anime series and found tons of info online.  I'd also been playing the computer game King's Quest 7 but was stuck, until I found enough online cheats to complete it!

I got onto Twitter a couple of years ago, which is pretty fun.  I have almost 2500 followers! (You can only follow 5000 Tweeters, so after you reach that maximum you can only get more followers by purging those you follow who don't follow you.) I post links to my blogs there.

My new online interest just now is dating webpages.  I found the site OKCupid where they ask you tons of questions and you can search for potential relationships by which people have answered closest to you.  For me answering the questions is as fun as dating itself!

One question you can answer is "I could probably beat you at..." and my own answer was "Trivia." One artist I came across answered, "Chiseling mortar off bricks from old houses." I commented, "You'd be useful in our current renovation!" (We were recently removing the bricks in a disused chimney to make more room.)

Blue

The colour blue gets used with music a lot.  One of the songs my singing group has been the 1920s song "Blue Skies." (I like the Willie Nelson version.) We also sing "Blue Moon," one of my favourites.  And of course there's a whole musical genre called blues, like with Gershwin' Rhapsody in Blue.

I actually prefer grey skies to blue ones.

On American TV channels like Fox News they show election results with Republican states red and Democratic states blue. That's always annoyed me:  I thing they should be doing it the other way around, like red Liberals and blue Conservatives on Canadian TV.  Another Fox News innovation that annoys me is their showing news headlines on a moving crawl at the bottom of the screen.  It would be better to show fixed headlines like the BBC News channel.

In France they have blue smarties!

Kites

My hometown had a lot of wind, which was convenient for kites. On one occasion our kite landed in the cemetery!

Did you know that a water skier can carry a kite behind so that he gets lifted into the air?  That would be a cool experience!

In the movie Mary Poppins, the finale has them flying kites and the song goes, "Let's go fly a kite!" That movie had some brilliant songs.

You know that experiment where Benjamin Franklin flew a kite with a metal wire to see that lightning is electric?  If it sounds dangerous, that's because it was:  a couple of other people who tried to do it got killed!

I think there's a bird called a kite too.

Stephen King

I've never read and of Stephen King's books. (Horror isn't my thing.) But I have seen some of the movies based on his writing.

I liked Brian de Palma's movie of Carrie.  That's the one with Sissy Spacek as a girl with a religious nut mother and nasty schoolmates, who develops telekinetic powers and burns down the whole school.  It captured that feeling of being caught between your parents and your peers and not being understood by either.

I also liked The Shawshank Redemption, with Tim Robbins as a lifer who forms an unlikely friendship with prison fixer Morgan Freeman and ultimately transcends their institution.  The Robbins character seemed to have Asperger's Syndrome, like me.

I've also seen Stanley Kubrick's movie of The Shining, with Jack Nicholson as the caretaker in an isolated, mysterious hotel who ends up going berserk and hunting his own family.  It's a controversial adaptation that King himself hated.  I get the impression that the book was about the family, while the movie was more about the hotel itself: 

a haunted-house movie on an epic scale.

I did like some of the shots, like when Nicholson looks down at a model of the hotel maze and then we see his wife and kid playing in the maze, and it's done so smoothly it's like he's looking down at them!  And I like how Nicholson held his menacing axe near the end, with the gait of a caveman.

Cigarettes

I've managed to stay clear of smoking.  But if a smoker is considerate enough to ask "Mind if I smoke?" I give him a break and let him. (Steve Martin says that if someone asks you that question you should answer, "No, mind if I fart?")

Does anyone remember the candy cigarettes they had fifty years ago?

When you see a period show like Mad Men, the characters are always smoking, which makes them rather pitiful.

Sadly, Hollywood has done a lot to promote smoking over the years.  If you see Breakfast at Tiffany's today, you'll notice that Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard smoke constantly--even in bed!  In Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea they show people smoking on board a submarine!  As recently as Titanic, they showed that Kate Winslet was a "free spirit" by having her smoke despite her mother and fiance's disapproval. (Does she smoke Virginia Slims?) That isn't just wicked, it's trite!

And it's pretty clear that the cigarette companies knew their product was harmful long ago.  Back in the 1950s they came up with the ad line, "More doctors smoke Camels"!  I say that all cigarette companies should be nationalized.  And I think that tobacco and marijuana should be treated the same.