Category: Urban living

10 billion dollars and no water

Apparently they’re going to build a high speed rail line between LA and Las Vegas, 218 miles. Las Vegas’ ‘dead pool’ number is 895 feet. That means that if Lake Mead’s reservoir drops below 895 feet, there’s no water for the city.

The city is not projected to see those numbers for at least the next three to four years. Plenty of time to manifest some water from, er, somewhere, when they open the rail line in 2025 LOL.

Mega-projects are dead, when will people see it.

The ‘Cop City’ in Atlanta, which is going to tear down an urban forest to put up a training facility for the descendants of patterrollers, had the construction site set on fire yesterday. The cops have already killed a protester there. This is a generational conflict – in the sense that it will go for a generation.

I cleaned the kitchen counters, ran the dishwasher and ordered dim sum for delivery yesterday. NOM. Jeff was less impressed; we did after all grow up with Tak Sun. Mickey Dee’s for brekky this morning.  Otherwise I did not to a damned thing and I slept like a dead thing for half the day. Feel fine now, though. And I spoke to various family members yesterday and we’re all doing okay, which is lovely news all by itself.

Pedro Pascal said that Sarah Michelle Gellar was a complete sweetheart to him during their filming together in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the two of them getting on social media and being nice to each other was the tonic I needed this morning. Parasocial relationships, who can live without them LOLOL.

bathtub dive and Alex pickup

I just found out you can sing into the extra soundhole on this Riversong ukulele and get absolutely wild harmonic effects. Also, yesterday I learned THE ORIGINAL LYRICS to the ‘2 & 20 Blues’ and they completely change the tone of the song. I shall herewith demonstrate: The very first line is “There’s evil men in this DOGGONE town” but the way my ex (and Dr Filk) taught it was ‘GODDAMN’ and that really changes things. First is worldweary, second is angry, and the song is resigned, not angry. The very last line is “You may say that I’m wrong but you know I FEEL all right.” I was taught ‘I’LL BE’. The singer is OKAY IN THE PRESENT, not sometime in the future. But right now! The song’s about grabbing life where and when you can, not hoping you’ll be happy sometime.

Thank you for attending this bathtub dive into 2 & 20 Blues by Linda Morrison, pressed 1981.

Continue reading bathtub dive and Alex pickup

walkies

Jeff frowns, swings closed

Jeff and I went for a little walk in the gorgeous sunshine yesterday afternoon. Jeff said that he should go for a walk and I said, “I’m going to stagger up the stairs, stagger up the hill to the park and stagger back again,” and he thought I was joking; he joined me after watching me put my shoes on. This is the same park at the start of the pandemic; the logo has all washed off that hoodie but the hoodie remains.

I missed the DD celebration yesterday. I am not sad, I don’t feel sad. I am somewhat immobilized though.

Russians out of Kherson. They’re starting to put anti tank cement blocks on their side of the border, which triggered Finnish Twitter to do a most pointed and technical takedown of how insanely useless it all was. (Altho the discussion was in Finnish you can translate tweets on the fly and man the Finns were just shaking their heads, it was wonderful. There were also comments that since it WAS useless, some oligarch musta got paid for it, ten times what it’s all worth. Lovely.)

Supposedly the new washer will come in the downstairs back door around 11 am today. No movement on the tree, not that I’d expect it on Sunday.

 

by aquilegiaformosa on tumblr
guys we’re not being cringe to keep out the twitter users. we’re being cringe to keep out the ALGORITHMS, the CAPITALISTS, the INFLUENCERS. twitter users are welcome as long as they agree this site is UNMARKETABLE

In other words become ungovernable by being someone you can’t make money from…. by being cringe. You know who’s cringe ? autistic people, by virtue of the intensity of their many hobby horses.

I prefer to be ungovernable by having my own website, that nobody ever looks at, but which will be invaluable to my family after I’m dead. That’s how things work. It’s the longitudinal and continuous energy of it, not the content, necessarily.

Worked on yet another fanfic, “Special Deputy on the Run” yesterday.  I’ve poked into the file for Part II but I think I added 36 words.

The amount of shit kicking Zibethicus (my name for Elon, means muskrat) has taken on the internet is amazing. In a few short weeks he’s scorched his fortune, facing a lawsuit for over 50 billion dollars from a former investor choked that he essentially stole shares from Tesla, received the brickbats of the commentariat and been held up as a model of everything not to do in business. Every time he says so much as boo on twitter hundreds of thousands of people tell him he’s a fucking idiot; it’s glorious, but not enough to get a twitter account.

Continuing counts in the US election still trend Biden’s way. They didn’t poll people who never voted LOL__  so many pundits have tender buttskin hanging out on this that another public spirited activity on twitter these days is going through the pundits’s last two weeks of salty prognostications and retweeting it, saying things like THIS AGED LIKE MILK or DO YOU SUPPOSE YOU WILL EVER BE RIGHT ABOUT ANYTHING EXCEPT AS THE SPECTRUM FOR YOUR POLITICS etc etc.

It is GLORIOUS and marvellous in our eyes. The night show hosts are having a field day.

Mitch McConnell, easily one of the most corrupt and disgusting politicians in American history, is not Senate GOP Leader any more, and rumblings are someone is going to grab his 15 year old perch in the Senate. The people who are candidates in replacing him aren’t as likely to be as competent at either whipping votes or stealing anything they can reach.

We are about six episodes into Farscape. Every episode is weirder than the next. Truly bizarre show.

Virtually every pediatric ICU in the country is at double capacity. There are so many sick children that you cannot buy children’s aspirin in this country right now.

Spoke to Tammy on the phone the other day, she called. She confirmed that she’s coming at Christmas and I’m seeing her on Boxing Day.

 

the saanich bank robbers were stochastic terrorism standard issue white guys

I was going to call it on twitter and thought THEIR POOR PARENTS. I’m glad I had the sense and decency to restrain myself even if that’s where they likely learned it. I hope the lads enjoyed their brief moment of liberatory violence.
And congrats you dead guys, you just made it inevitable that the taxpayers of Saanich will hear the police say, “Open your wallets and repeat after me, Help Yourself!” when it comes to better training for … er … terroristic right wing assaults. They’ll all have to go to Hawaii for training (or some such venue), and come back even bigger dicks than when they left. After all Victoria is a provincial capital of a G8 country, it should have a world class terrerizm response team, correct?
I can hear my auntie Mary cackling; who knows why, she’s not here, but I do hear things occasionally.

Kyiv is still Ukrainian

Putin’s a month into his war and he’s achieved so few of his original objectives that some commentators, while not exactly mocking him, are starting to worry that he’s being thwarted, which makes him prone to lash out and be dangerous and threaten nukes, repeatedly. He’s already put at least two hundred children in the ground. Why, if it wasn’t for the wars on the populations of Yemen and Syria, which Russia’s armed forces have helped to prosecute these past many years, and previous Russian outings in Ukraine and Chechnya, I wouldn’t have anything to compare it to.

Learned about SKIF’s, the Ukrainian country/urban tank killer, whose name literally means ‘Scythian’. They’re ferociously effective in modern warfare, cheap like borscht compared to the arms it can kill. It’s a modern day crossbow in terms of its asymmetrical warfare effects – it can take down a person, a vehicle, a tank, a chopper OR – with luck – a jet.

Two kudos overnight, very surprised by one of them; one of the stories I posted to AO3 is a complete outlier because the central character dyad is not destiel, it’s a three person triad that turns into a polyamorous household full of kids, and all this while the lead character is dealing with CRUSHING depression, new fatherhood, and coming to terms with being bisexual. So it has a million feels and some very dramatic and technical sex scenes and it’s not like anything else I’ve posted. (SO it doesn’t get much love.) The other kudo, from another person, is for my most popular fic, which has more than 6000 hits now, and a 4% kudo to hit ratio.

Weather kinda miserable and damp.

very complex ‘tholian web’  migraine imagery just now. It’s probably pollen triggered, it’s just been HORRIBLE, how crappy the allergens have been making me and Jeff feel. I feel brain dead, and then I perk up a bit, and then there’s another puff of cedar pollen and BRAIN DED AGIN. Now it’s a square full of vibrating chevrons; now it’s fuzz. Now it’s fading. dammit I need coffee.

Report has come that one of the Dunnetteers from Toronto has passed of cancer. The kind words are coming in and people are speaking well of the dead; she sounds like she was a superior sort of person and we’re also told she was well cared for, and having been through sitting with Tom (even though it wasn’t much and I didn’t materially assist, not really) I am glad that she was, and that no one stinted on the morphine.

Wordle in three this morning. Somebody I follow on twitter made a hint, that the word seemed apropos today, and that really helped. Didn’t hurt that I guessed the first letter of the word right out of the gate.

R value across Canada has dipped way below one. We’ll still get another surge as the new variant comes through (BA.2) but it won’t be as bad. I feel safer and I’m not as worried about my loved ones, especially my immunocompromised loved ones, but you have to watch the numbers…

Laundry’s all done, now I have to haul it upstairs and put it away. The rug survived being laundered, thank god, often the plastic backing comes off and then Jeff has to disassembled the machine to clear it out.

Time to go back to the world of Omar and Brad and Blossom.

Katie’s making plans to go back to work; I think childcare is going to be split between Suzanne and the (humph, advised not to post this descriptive but possibly offensive soubriquet) other grandma, with me as a backup I guess. There are many advantages to this as one can see, and one can only marvel at Ryker’s good fortune that when so many kids have no grandma’s he ended up somehow with three.

March Madness continues, and I’m adding new words to my conlang, admiring the hairdos of the contestants and their ability to pluck balls out of midair, steal them from each other and otherwise perform feats of athletic magic.

Ted Cruz the douche extraordinaire, brandishing a book which he very obviously has neither opened nor read, repurposed by the lovelies at Working Class History (on finer social media platforms everywhere):

This was a possible Hair Sinister cover:

Multum in parvo

(much in little)

Wordle got bought by the NY Times, so I’m not doing it anymore.

Still no letter for Auntie Mary. She’s owed one since October but I’m a bum.

Still processing the four of us getting together on Sunday. It was a lot of feels and it felt almost like group therapy, or more accurately, like the group meditations that we used to do through Beacon. I feel seen, and I listened with intent. I’ve said many times how amazing Jarmo is (he just is, okay, trust me) but Susanna is absolutely amazing and so kind, given her trials.

Thandiwe Newton reported as referring to Sean Penn as a jibbering fool made my morning (he was decrying the ‘feminization of men’ poor sod).  Sean Penn being a freehold scumbag is pretty much a given but her shade was a touch of perfection.

Rehearsed a tiny bit yesterday. Music has pretty much died inside me. I’m listening to music on line, but there’s no music inside me, and I read incoming emails about on line filking with no emotion at all and just delete them.

Pandemic brain is real. Jeff and I went out for food pickup yesterday and WE HAVE NEVER SEEN IN 35 MINUTES OF DRIVING SUCH AN ASSORTMENT OF CLUELESS AND ACTIVELY FUCKED UP DRIVERS. Broad flipping daylight, zero problems with traction and visibility, and drivers were all the words you use when you don’t want to say they’re mentally ill, chemically altered or just dgaf.

The DaVinci Drone

Straight outta Compton ruined by white people

Perdikomata

Above noted is a song by the Greek band Villagers of Ioannina City, a shoegaze/indie/folk band. The lyrics are a dreamy love song to ‘my partridge eyed one’.

 

 

IT’S A CHRISTMAS ATHEIST MIRACLE

You’ll never guess who’s back!

CURVEBEAK!

Yes, the crow with the distinctive honker has returned to the railing next to the back door, and how? and why? On Christmas of all days?

It’s all Jeff’s fault. At this point Jeff is reading this with a faint frown and thinking WHY DO I ALWAYS GET BLAMED FOR EVENTS THAT HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH ME but he was the instigating event.

Because I had threatened to make mac and cheese, and didn’t yet, he was saying well I’m not pressuring you but if you’re not going to make it I’m going to order something, but I don’t want to order what you can’t eat. I said “Order for one, if you really want something, problem solved,” but really that’s not problem solved that’s not how we do things, we family order to get additional meals, otherwise the cost per meal and delivery gets to be too much of the food budget.

So I finally (I forgot to take my bp meds and metformin at 6 this morning, didn’t get to them until 8, so I crashed hard and didn’t really shake off the doldrums until noon) got up and watched a little of the All Madden Christmas Day special (I saw him in his hotel in California shortly after John died but didn’t actually make the connection until I was back in Canada, which makes me snicker) and then even more finally dredged up the energy to make the ham and caper mac and two cheeses but in so doing I had to assess the current larder slash cheese situation and it was acceptable, except for that one fucking piece of moldy cheddar. You know how there’s aaaaalways one fucking piece of moldy cheddar. Anyway I figured it’s bright orange and crows like bright colours, mebbe they’ll see it and eat it, and if not I’ll trash it.

Ha ha

like crows are going to pass up cheddar cut up into half an almond sized chunks when it’s ass freezing cold and in between snowfalls and that, of course, is when Curvebeak showed up, sizing me up through the window, at the back of the queue, and I almost died of joy. He is a reallly odd looking crow- his head is a funny shape, it’s not just his beak.

Ratcatcha

Buster caught a teeny weeny rat outside the building this morning, then took it inside and either ate it or let it go. Hopefully it’s not curled up dead someplace, I find dead rat odour to be one of the most trying things psychologically.

Storm Ida had a few things to say about rats too.

If the link disappears, apparently the storm drowned almost every rat in NYC.

That’s what happens when you get too much water. How about just enough?

Above noted link is about how reintroducing water to a dried out river in Tucson has had stunning ecological effects. I prefer dragonflies over rats.

Ever notice how white ladies love to steal Indigenous ancestry?

WHERE IS YOUR KOKUM, KIES. I prefer people who don’t lie about their ancestry over rats.

 

4251

Jeff and I were just desperate for coffee yesterday so we picked up brekky at IHOP. I mean we would have been fine with coffee alone but I insisted. I think it will be a while before we eat out again. AND we got coffee this am.

The Mu variant is in Vancouver, apparently. Now we wait to see whether it drives the Delta variant off the pitch.

Steve Martin, Selena Gomez and Martin Short have a new show called Only Murders in the Building and apparently it’s really funny. Looking forward to it.

The story, obviously, (4563) is continuing to come along nicely. I have also started another story which is tentatively called ‘The Haunted Sideboard.” It’s about a guy who tries to give away a cursed piece of furniture and the neighbourhood man who convinces him to salt and burn it instead. Then everyone else in the neighbourhood decides it’s BURN YOUR CURST OBJECT DAY and well, you know, shit gets both weird and romantic.

Fuck the police. Seriously. I mean I’d settle for them wearing masks but they don’t want to do that either.

RANTING ABOUT 10TH AND CANADA WAY

oh FSM, Parking Goddess, anydeity on this frequency, aid me now and for all time to come https://newwestrecord.ca/local-news/opinion-someone-is-finally-trying-to-fix-this-gong-show-burnaby-new-west-intersection-3904159 YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND HOW BAD THIS INTERSECTION IS
Opinion: Someone is finally trying to fix this gong show Burnaby-New West intersection
·

1/ within the first 90 seconds of my brO having a dashcam, we watched a black suv go through this intersection southbound through a red light at 70 kph while stopped in the next lane over.

2/ there are three *heavily* trafficked driveways and two bus stops within metres of the intersection so you are continuously making evasive bumpercar/whackamole maneuvres with the most rancidly incompetent drivers in the lower mainland

3/ the advance green lights are wrongly bad and they should run all four ways, this is a busy intersection!!

4/ it’s at the bottom of a 150 foot elevation drop (over 6 intersections) people come screaming down that hill hoping to get through both the pedestrian crosswalk light which is two blocks away and the intersection itself, so drivers are routinely going 20 over the speed limit

5/ There’s a 7-11 + gas station on the corner and this weird fucked up fake lane that is basically how Mr. Audi and Ms. Accord get to know each other as one smashes the other trying to sneak around to the right while the other’s doing the same thing from the 7-11

6/ I’m not blaming the teens who go to the high school next to this intersection, they don’t usually seem too intent on throwing themselves under cars in my experience, but gawdam some of the wildest ad lib pedestrians on earth stroll adjacent to these crosswalks

6/ continued… I mean brO and I are happy if they make eye contact, mostly they don’t.

7/ every pole for a block around pleads for witnesses to accidents

8/ IT’S A SHARED JURISDICTION intersection. So the Burnaby RCMP (eye twitch) and the NWPD (shrug) get to share the duties when the blood/debris crosses the intersection. I don’t know how they figure out who does what but I’m sure it doesn’t make things sparklier

9./ I’d need a contour map and some dinky toys to demonstrate some of the ways in which momentum, gravity, common sense and, provisionally, space/time itself, fail to operate normally at this intersection, so please I beg you just take my word for it.

Further comments: I travel through this intersection an average of 4 times a week during the pandemic and more like 10 times otherwise. I live close enough that I once heard a collision there. This is on the bus route I mostly use.

So I read with interest that they intend to spend a quarter of a million dollars on this intersection, and this would be great except for one teensy problem. Not a single intersection ‘improvement’ I’ve seen in the last 20 years actually made things better.

brO and I are going to watch them spend a quarter mil to make it worse. The banging and construction delays will be horrific. and in the end…. I’m prepared to wager twenty bucks that it will be distinctly & measurably worse.

And I haven’t even MENTIONED the truck traffic, which is heavy and continuous during the day and steady at night because the biggest food storage depot (400 SQ METRES OF BUILDING and much more for truck parking and storage) in the lower mainland is a kilometre west.

Tragedy in London

As far as I can tell I’m not reacting nearly as hard to the shot as I did the last time. There’s a hot raised spot on my arm but nothing like the last time.

I’m just so happy to be fully vaccinated. I CAN’T HURT SOMEONE UNINTENTIONALLY now. I can be disgusting and homicidal some other way I guess.

I have a new favourite dessert: cold home made rice pudding, done Jeff style (he prefers it more gooey than I do), with mascarpone layered on top and then home made chocolate sauce dribbled on top. I invented it last night and then promptly got up and ate another dish of it. LOL.  Possibly I should run the dishwasher now before everything gets too crusty.

The Muslim family killed by a 20 year old driver in London ONT …. I have few words.

– Salman Afzaal, 46 physiotherapist – Madiha Salman, 44 PhD student in Civil engineering – Yumna Salman, 15, grade 9 student – Fayez Salman, 9 – Grandmother, 74, family ‘pillar’

Struck down FOR WHAT REASON? Other than bigotry and hatred and ignorance.

 

The old lady and her memories

Today I was reminded that many many years ago I was the volunteer coordinator for childcare for a Toronto Pride, back in the 90s.

There’s a fight ‘in the community’ right now about Pride, all across the western world. Not so much in the parts of the world where being openly gay gets you beaten and murdered and being openly lesbian gets you ‘correctively’ raped. Anyway this first world fight is about ‘children at Pride’ and how a substantial minority of gay people who support Pride want the leather daddies and bondage enthusiasts and folks who whatever they sport amidships aren’t long on clothing to just…. cover up for Pride.

Now I think I established, with my childcare cred, that I do indeed care about children and want them to be safe while their parental units or some fraction thereof want to partay on the streets of the city; I also know that Pride started when among the most marginalized of the rainbow community, black transgender women, decided that they were tired of being subjected to raids and police harassment every fucking weekend, and started throwing bricks at the cops.

So for all the shrinking violets who have finished their days of LGBTQA+ activism and thus want all the rest of us to behave like tv housewives, this is le extended middle finger de moi.

For all the parents who want the leather daddies to cover up, fuck ya.

For all the parents who want to take their kids to pride, how about memorizing some easy answers about the costumes …. and lack of them?

The event is for ADULTS. Children are to be expected, and allowed for, and cared for in context of the parade and events, but they aren’t to be CATERED to. No more than the fucking cops or beer companies.

Having cops at Pride is bad. Having kids at pride is not. Having bigots try to tell activists how to dress is bad. Having bigots publicly struck hard in their rhetorical goolies is good.