Blessed by the Potato

For my birthday, Wayfare picked up a copy of “What Eats Wasps?”, a book by New Scientist magazine basically containing a selection of their last page reader question/answer articles. It was a pretty good choice: I like books full of weird and vaguely useful facts, and wasps are scary so it’s well suited for just before Halloween.

From New Scientist’s point of view, this had to be an incredibly easy book to put together: take a bunch of articles that are already written, and combine them into a book to sell again. However, they didn’t seem to do a very good job with that. Part of the problem seems to stem from the fact that the articles were originally published with metric units, and for the book these were converted to units that would be “more familiar to Americans.” It’s mistakes like these that keep costing us Mars probes. The unit conversions seem to have been completely screwy, because I can’t make sense of most of the examples given: one talks about how big a person would have to be in order to have enough fat around their internal organs to stop a bullet before it hit anything vital. “For a man 16 [sic] feet tall…”. About 2/3s of the way through the book, they seem to have given up, and left everything in metric.

It was a bit of an interesting read, but I don’t think I’d recommend it to anyone. Maybe if you can find it in the library and just want to flip through, or if you can just read the articles right out of the magazine…

I really don’t understand what the heck has been up with the Simpsons’ Halloween episodes the last few years. I really expected there to be an episode this sunday (Halloween sunday), especially since the season already started over a month ago (with no notice, no fanfare, and a big stretch of reruns since the first 3 new episodes). November?! Foolish humans, we already have our Christmas decorations up by then!

Anyhow, I found it online, so all is right with the world again.

All the crazy people are making a break for it today. We’ve had a code red (fire), two code whites (violent person) and two code yellows (missing patient).

Our Halloween party this year was pretty lame. Wayfare, formerly renouned for throwing THE Halloween party to addend, had hardly anyone respond to her invitation. Of those who did come, none really dressed up, and no one wanted to go out as per the original plan (not even to Rol San, which is extremely surprising for Joce). There was lots of junk food, though, and Shaun of the Dead, so it wasn’t a complete write-off.

Worst of all, though, is that we ended the party so early that we never got around to getting our extra hour, which was half the fun of having a Halloween Saturday party night!

The next day, Wayfare & I had completely forgotten about the time shift, and hadn’t changed any clocks (oddly enough, my laptop didn’t give me that “your time has been changed…” popup). We wanted to see Nightmare Before Christmas in 3-D, so we rushed out to the theatre, and it was only when we were in the car that the radio reminded us about the whole daylight savings thing. That gave us some time to hit the Shoppers Drug Mart for some discounted candy and more Halloween decorations (I believe we are now up to 11 file boxes full of Halloween decorations. Our apartment is fairly thickly decorated, and we’ve only touched 4 of the boxes; none of them was completely emptied).

Anyhow, so eventually we get to the theatre in the middle of nowhere to see NBC3-D. And I’d like to say that it was really, really dumb of the theatres to not release this cult Halloween classic on any screen in the downtown area on Halloween weekend. Even way up in Woodbridge the theatre was packed for a Sunday matinee: how much business could they have got from the pre/post Halloween Saturday club crowd if they showed it at Paramount? But nnoooooo, Paramount was showing Open Range in 3-D instead. I wonder if anyone bothered to go…

Back to the point, the theatre was fairly full. Wayfare & I sat near the back and watched the show. There were two empty seats beside us, but garbage had been left there from the last show, so no one wanted to sit there while the lights were up. 40 minutes late (just about the halfway point for NBC), two people show up and plop down beside us with a tonne of food. They had nachos, burger king, popcorn, and a strong smell of beer (though I couldn’t say for sure whether they were just unshowered from the night before, or had snuck beer into a matinee). They talked through the whole movie, and made a giant mess of their seats when they left, right down to spilled nacho cheese. It was just astoundingly rude, and I was really close to actually telling them off, except the kids behind us were kicking their seats with reckless abandon, which was pretty entertaining (until they started kicking mine, too).

A day later though, and I’m still left wondering: why show up to a 2:30 movie at 3:10? Why not just wait until 4:45 and actually see both halves of your $13 movie? And if you walk into a theatre that full, that late, and with that much food, why not bite the bullet and plop down in the neckbreakers up front rather than running up and down the stairs for an aisle seat, or pushing past people who are trying to enjoy the movie?

As for the movie itself: I don’t think the 3-D aspect added anything to it. It was already claymation which does tend to “look” 3-D even on flat screens (at least, a bit more than much cel animation), and those 3-D glasses are a little nauseating when worn overtop of my regular glasses. However, it was nice to see it up on the big screen for Halloween weekend, and I’m rather surprised that sort of thing doesn’t happen more often. Rocky Horror gets shown every year like clockwork, but fall is usually a somewhat slow time for the theatres (usually they see the desperate, re-edited/re-shot dregs that couldn’t quite manage a summer release), so I think they might actually do better putting some classic Halloween movies like this (and other horrors) up on one or two screens of the multiplexes… and in areas that are actually close to the demographics that enjoy that sort of thing (i.e.: not woodbridge).

So I just finished telling someone that I was going to stick with Bell rather than Rogers for my phone service because there just wasn’t any price advantage with Rogers for a basic line, and that I had excellent service/sales reps with Bell the last 4 or 5 times I had to call.

The process of moving my line however, is making me reconsider that.

For those that don’t know, I’m going to be moving out of my halfway-to-res (including food fights in the hallways and monthly fire drills!) apartment into a very nice looking house that’s closer to the hospital. That’ll happen around the end of November. I had heard rumours that you could get stuck with last-minute hassles if you don’t give the phone/cable/hydro companies at least 30 days notice of your move, so last week sometime I called and let them know.

The first call went smoothly enough: “Sure thing, November 27, we’ll move that line over for you and it’ll be operating at the new address around 8 am, guaranteed by 5 pm. Would you like wiring insurance for the new place?”

Then, they call back a few days later and were very rude to Wayfare (her summary “hey bitch, you called me!”), and demanded that I call them back without really saying why. When I called back I got a pleasant person who explained that there was a problem with my move order because there was a line already in use there without a move-out order. I said “Hey, it’s a month away, but trust me, they’re moving.” Then I kinda put my foot in my mouth just a little bit by giving them more information than their tiny brains can handle “They should be moving out on the 18th, and I’ll move in the 27th or so.” “Ok sir, I’ve changed your order to move the 18th now.” “Whoa! No! Bad phone monkey! Keep it the 27th of November [at this point I still wasn’t sure of the date we’d move, and figured later was better than early, since we’d probably have to spend a fair bit of time cleaning/painting/repairing the old place after we moved]” “Ok, November 27th it is…”

Sure enough, today, October 27th rolls around aaaaaaaand my phone’s been cut off. The message when I pick up says the phone can only be used to call Bell at 310-BELL, so I do. After dealing with “Emily” I get a tech who speaks very little english with a heavy Indian accent and a fuzzy phone connection. She says that it shows on her screen that my order to move is for November 27th, and also that my line’s been cut off. No idea why that might be, but she can’t do anything about it… I need to call back in the morning for the day staff.

Grr… what happened to leaving a few people on the phones at night with the power to actually do something?

Update: I phoned in this morning, and got a decent person. Turns out the move is November 27, but the cut-off date had been mistakenly entered as October 27. To turn it back on, all they have to do is flip a switch in the central office, which I’m told will happen today… but Wayfare’s having conniption fits because she’s got an important teleconference at 1…

I love Halloween, and I don’t think anyone doubts that (though I’m a little troubled myself that I didn’t bother to make a new Halloween page layout… though my current theme is black all year long… :)

Anyhow, Halloween’s just a great time of year to be a kid, and I get kind of jealous of ones who are real kids (and not just pretend like me), and also feel like I’ve got to help the kids I see have a great Halloween. So it was so incredibly cute when Wayfare & I went to the Shriner’s Haunted Mansion this year and it was full of little ones.

The Shriners do a great job: lots of cool effects, including the ghost effects with split mirrors, an indoor waterfall with a projector, singing skeletons, a swami, a rotating tunnel, a tilted room, and lots of professional touches throughout. While most of the stuff is cool and freaky, not very much is actually scary, so it’s a good place for kids. This year they stepped it up a bit to make it a little scary, but still tolerable for families. At one point they had a long, cave-like tunnel with bats hung around. Then…

Spoiler warning!

… then, a screen came on at the far end and showed a movie of thousands of bats flying across the full moon. The room then went completely dark, and a stick with dangly bits of fabric flew over our heads, got to the other end and came back over us. It was really cool, and while I’ve been to many scarier haunted houses, I haven’t seen that effect before.

So just before we get to that part, two kids come running backwards through the place, telling us about the fright ahead, and that it might be too scary. “Bats! They fly in your hair!” “They might eat your ears!” When we went to go in, they came through with us. What was so cute was that the boy grabbed Wayfare’s hand to go through, and then the little girl sort of got a lock on her elbow… and we’re complete strangers! Wayfare’s just simply that kid & Halloween-friendly :)