Well Leslie finally bullied me into buying shelves. I think it was sort of a quid pro quo. So the pile of books that have lived in our kitchen is now gone. There is an entire wall we have never seen before 🙂

A busy trip to Ikea, hundreds of hard-earned dollars and several knee wrecking hours later we had a bunch of shelves set up in the basement. We went for the deep Kallax units and angled them perpendicular to the wall so we could use both sides. 2 4 x 4 units with a 1 x 4 unit on top as well as two lower 2 x 2 units to act as a table and some spare shelves. You would have seen the Instagram image from a couple of days ago. I will likely have to make one more trip to Ikea for another unit or two but they are all down stairs now. Oh, my aching thighs…

And wow, is Leslie ever happy to see some old friends.

More book spaces in our condo:

 

Back in 1997 or 98, I wandered over to Bill Hole’s house to watch qualifying with him between the staff orientation sessions. Qualifying for those of you who haven’t met me mean F1 qualifying. I had previously been mildly interested in F1 during the McLaren Honda years, although it more of a keeping-track-to chat-around-coffee type of thing.

And then, for one reason or another, being it sucking up to the boss, a genuine interest, or just to be ‘different’ from all my hockey-following friends I started to watch the F1 races.

For the first couple of seasons it was tough as I had an old VCR and generally resorted to getting up in the middle of the night to watch the European races. Eventually I got a PVR on my computer and it became a lot easier to record and watch qualifying and races. Since then I have watched religiously and the only time I have missed more than one race in a row was when we spent three weeks in Europe. While not a passion it was most definitely a hobby. As far as I know, Bill gave up watching the races years ago but I soldiered on.

And now I’ve missed the first two races of the 2015-16 season. Huh. Change is weird.

George once said to me and I quote

He said, “Never wait or hesitate
Get in kid before it’s too late
You may never get another chance”

“‘Cause youth’s a mask but it don’t last
Live it long and live it fast”
Georgie was a friend of mine

—The Killing of Georgie, Rod Stewart (1976)

I loved that song from the first moment I heard it. It was on my brother’s album “A Night on the Town,” which incidentally was my young adult self’s favourite ‘romantic’ album (it had a fast side and a slow side and featured Tonight’s the Night…).

The song as a whole is a lovely ballad about the narrator’s gay friend and his tragic end, but I’ve always loved the sentiment of the last verses…

A 70 year-old gentleman said something similar to me yesterday. His comment was a bit regret-filled…

The hardest working horses in town! I’ve seen working horses all my life, but nothing but nothing is as a smart, graceful and powerful as a great cutting horse. Just watch his eyes, he can read a calf’s mind and move before the calf does. For those you don’t know, the rider’s job is to hold on… this is all horse.

Go to youtube and search for more and you will find tons of videos. And if you are like me you won’t be able to stop watching. I have long admired the cutting horse but am in no way ever tempted to actually get on one. One trip around the barrels on a professional barrel horse cured me of that in my 20s. You need to be a world class athlete just to stay on the damn things 🙂

As we all should know there was a total Solar eclipse on March 20th, 2015. Apparently the best place to see it was from the Faroe Islands. Apparently a local band took a chance and decided to film a live music video (see below).

It is this kind of thing I so admire as I am usually too pessimistic and risk averse to attempt anything of the sort. Yup, I am that guy. The number of things that could have gone wrong boggles. The weather could have been bad: rain, high winds, cloud, a freak tsunami! And there could have been people on their shooting location, the eclipse could have occurred at a bad camera angle, their camera could have broken, the filters could have been wrong, the timing could be messed up…I could go on for hours. It seems like a recipe for total disaster. <shudder>

Sometimes I wonder how I ever got into such a risk-filled profession like print design and production:  ink absorption, colour shifts, postscript errors, registration issues… aargh!

Anyway… enjoy!

During the total solar eclipse on March 20th, 2015, the Faroese doom metal band Hamferð took the opportunity to shoot a creative live music video for their song “Deyðir Varðar” from a mountain in the Faroe Islands. It’s a 6 minute 36 second video in which the world goes completely dark and the total eclipse can be clearly seen in the background.
—petapixel.com

Don’t over-think this but I have a soft spot for two different kinds of movies. It’s inevitable if I am channel surfing that I will pause on any movie featuring either football or dance and watch the rest of it regardless of where we are in the plot. I have no idea why… of all the major sports, I know — or care — the least about football. It’s probably something deep and psychosis related.

But dance movies… well let’s just say in an alternate universe I was/will be a dancer. Even a small dance scene is such an expression of joy that I almost always get carried away in it. And this little compilation makes me smile and gives me a whole bunch of movies to look out for.

“Gotta dance…”

It seems these compilations are becoming a new meme but I appreciated this one a lot more than the “Women kicking butt” one I saw a few weeks ago.

Movies used:

0:04 Silver Linings Playbook
0:06 Reality Bites
0:08 Something Borrowed
0:12 Love Actually
0:15 Charlie’s Angels
0:17 Dirty Dancing
0:20 Big
0:23 Reservoir Dogs
0:25 American Beauty
0:27 Happy Feet 2
0:29 13 going on 30
0:31 Slumdog Millionaire
0:33 Save the Last Dance
0:37 Alice in Wonderland
0:40 Kick-Ass
0:42 Pulp Fiction
0:44 (500) Days of Summer
0:46 Flashdance
0:48 This Is the End
0:51 Grease
0:53 Intouchables (French movie)
0:57 Tangled
1:00 The Replacements
1:02 Pride (UK movie)
1:05 Blue Valentine
1:07 The Wolf of Wall Street
1:10 Grind
1:11 Ted
1:13 Beetlejuice
1:14 American Pie
1:16 Blast from the Past
1:17 King of New York
1:19 Clerks II
1:21 The Mask
1:23 Mamma Mia!
1:25 New Year’s Eve
1:27 The Proposal
1:29 American Pie: The Wedding
1:30 Footloose
1:32 Magic Mike
1:34 Get Smart
1:36 West Side Story
1:38 Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
1:39 Scary Movie
1:41 The 40 Year Old Virgin
1:44 Hitch
1:47 Risky Business
1:49 The Breakfast Club
1:53 Penguins of Madagascar
1:55 Mermaids
1:57 Nothing to Lose
2:01 Billy Elliot
2:04 Shall We Dance
2:06 Hairspray
2:08 Napoleon Dynamite
2:10 Puss in Boots
2:12 She’s All That
2:14 The Heat
2:16 Rush Hour
2:19 West Side Story
2:21 A Night at the Roxbury
2:23 Burn after Reading
2:25 Step Up
2:27 Dirty Dancing
2:28 The Sound of Music
2:30 Silver Linings Playbook
2:32 The Ugly Truth
2:35 Scent of a Woman
2:38 Beauty and the Beast
2:40 Pretty in Pink
2:42 Grease
2:43 The Perks of Being a Wallflower
2:45 Along came Polly
2:47 White Nights
2:49 Cry Baby
2:51 Tropic Thunder
2:53 The Blues Brothers
2:55 Mary Poppins
2:57 Footloose (2011)
2:59 Friends with Benefits
3:00 The Sweetest Thing
3:02 Coyote Ugly
3:04 Saturday Night Fever
3:06 Center Stage
3:08 Rock of Ages
3:10 Little Miss Sunshine
3:12 Disaster Movie
3:14 Bring it on?

I have long been a lover of maps. They show relationships, history, demographics and where you are in relation to everyone else and myriad other things as well. Maps are cool.

I came across this awesome map the other day that combines the whimsicalness of old maps and our penchant for connectivity and online-ness. It struck my irony bone…

—www.sciencealert.com/beautiful-map-shows-the-mind-boggling-extent-of-our-underwater-internet-cables

“This year’s map pays tribute to the pioneering mapmakers of the Age of Discovery, incorporating elements of medieval and renaissance cartography,” the company states on its website. “In addition to serving as navigational aids, maps from this era were highly sought-after works of art, often adorned with fanciful illustrations of real and imagined dangers at sea. Such embellishments largely disappeared in the early 1600s, pushing modern map design into a purely functional direction.”

This is a company that takes a relatively boring profession of supplying cables and markets it to the masses by appealing to wonder and amazement. They truly are impressive engineering feats. and its good to use old technologies to try and illuminate where the world is now. I’s love to get one…

This one is interactive!

Ok, I’m behind… So here is a quick thought.

One of the things you will hear often if you hang out with editors is the question: Is such-and-such word open or closed? By this they mean is a word/phrase like ‘black face’ spelled out as two words (black face), hyphenated (black-face) or closed (blackface). The rule of thumb is usually how common has the word/phrase become. If it is relatively new or unused it remains open. If it is starting to enter the common language as a compound then hyphenate it. And if it is so super-common that people don’t bother to read it as two separate words that describe a concept then it becomes closed. Yes, yes, I know. I did say it was a rule-of-thumb (see what I did there?).

Anyway, by closing words, we can lose the original meaning and it can sometimes result in a duh moment. For example, a character in a novel I am reading stopped by his brother’s townhouse. I pictured a multi-story connected housing unit in the city. And for what its worth that was pretty close to what it was. But since the setting is Elizabethan London, where the character was going was actually his brother’s town house. You know, the smaller home that he maintains in the crowded city as opposed to his sprawling country house.

Since we still have homes in that style and have for hundreds of years, common usage has decided we close the compound: townhouse. And as a result the meaning has shifted form one of location, to one of construction. Since very, very few of us have country houses or even think in those terms, we don’t close that compound. In the case of the novel, the editor chose to close townhouse as we do in modern English, but I think that was a mistake. To them (the characters) it was simply the house in town or the house in the country.

BOO!

Simple, to the point and, hopefully, effective. As much as I am opposed to legislating people to death (helmet laws, seatbelt laws, etc.), I am wholly and completely in favour of education and spending tax dollars in teaching rather than punishing. #whowillyouhelp

This is awesome!

 Kathleen Wynne is changing the way Ontario treats sexual violence and harassment.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/ontario-releases-powerful-new-anti-sexual-violence-ad-1.2984460