Blessed by the Potato

There were three separate accidents on the 401 during my drive back to London last week. The worst one happened in Guelph, which is out of the usual coverage range of 680 News, so when they reported on it (even though it was just a brief “hey, you’re fucked eh!”) I knew it was going to be bad and after sitting in stop and go barely crawling traffic for over 20 minutes I pulled off into the rest stop as soon as I could see it (with only a little bit of driving by the jam on the shoulder… hey, I had to pee!). I decided to kill some time there and let the accident get itself cleaned up, and listened to the radio in my car for a bit to try to get an update (though I could plainly see that the traffic was still just crawling by the rest stop). Eventually they said that the accident was near the “highway 8” overpass, which didn’t actually help me any. While I know many of the major interchanges and landmarks on this route that I travel essentially every week (twice every other week, that is), I had no idea where exactly highway 8 crossed the 401, or how far from where I was that accident then was. I knew that there were a number of decently high-speed highways/rural roads that I could have taken to detour around the accident, but not specifically which ones.

Fortunately, there was a map in the rest stop and I found the information I wanted. The side roads get a little complex around Guelph and Cambridge, so it would have required memorizing quite a few turns, so I decided to just wait it out in the comfort of the rest stop rather than try to navigate around based on a memorized (or hand-drawn) map.

In the end, the traffic started clearing up within another 10 minutes or so and I was back on my way, but the experience made me realize for the first time that a GPS mapping device might be handy. Of course, I don’t want a GPS device since I don’t want to have to remember another thing to take with me, or another charger for another thing, and because even on sale they’re fairly expensive.

Part of why they’re expensive though is that they have a GPS locator in them. It’s been a long, long time since I was ever so lost I didn’t have a clue where I was, so I don’t really think I need a GPS locator; I just need a good set of maps. So far, I’ve had a lot of good success with Mapquest and/or Google maps, printing off maps for anywhere I’m going in advance. But for situations where I unexpectedly get stuck, maps might be handy. And, since I almost always take my laptop with me on long trips, some mapping software seemed better than a giant map book.

Enter Microsoft Streets & Trips 2007. I just finished installing it on my laptop, and it has maps. Maps of Ontario, maps of Quebec, and maps of PEI. I’m set. At full-price for this year’s version (with optional GPS transponder so you can have your laptop bark out voice-guided navigation just like other GPS nav systems) it’s a little pricey for that, but at bargain-bin cheap-as-free for last year’s version, I’m pretty happy just to get maps on my laptop. Some of the other features I haven’t looked at yet include a list of “points of interest” such as parks, gas stations, and hotels (which must already be slipping out of date). What I would really like to see is a list of 24-hour drug stores and drive-throughs, but I doubt that kind of information is in it. Another neat feature which I haven’t tested myself at all yet is the ability to plan a trip, include your vehicle’s fuel capacity and estimated mileage, and it will add refueling stops to the route plan. Not much of a selling point for me since my car has a bigger bladder than I do, but maybe that turns your crank.

I never met a punctuation mark I didn’t like, and while I have made it my personal mission — indeed, the very purpose of my blogging career — to bring back the emdash and its misunderstood cousin, the semicolon… and mmm… ellipsis… though the comma is perhaps my very favourite piece of punctuation; maybe it was all those typing classes repeating “I’m King Comma” ad nauseum, or perhaps simply its use for adding small pauses to cadence which I use and abuse to mimic my halting style of oration. So you can imagine that I am in general in favour of the “serial comma”, currently a source of discussion over at John Scalzi’s blog “Whatever” (though I’m also in favour of using the ampersand {&} within a list to unambiguously identify compound elements, even though many editors seem to cringe at the “informal” character). I suppose that makes me evil, but it’s not the only thing.

I packed a variety of sandwiches: ham, tuna, and peanut butter & jam. {deliciously evil}
I packed a variety of sandwiches: ham, tuna, and peanut butter and jam.
I packed a variety of sandwiches: ham, tuna and peanut butter and jam.

Of course, I’m not nearly enough of a language geek to actually engage in any kind of debate like this, and had to look up what a serial comma was (though I do instinctively use them even if I don’t know what they’re called). These sorts of posts by authors are interesting to me moreso for the insight into the world of professional publishing. I’ve had my share of experience from both sides of the editing/reviewing processes in scientific journals, and it generally hasn’t gone very well for me. I tend to take editorial comments too personally (especially “this would not be of general interest to our audience”), and often have a really hard time making changes to my manuscripts. So it’s healthy to see that real live successful authors also get edited (and I’m going to remember “stet”).

This also reminded me of a broker report (for Q9) I read recently that included an interrobang in the title (“Trading Below Replacement Value?! Upping to ACTION LIST”). I mentioned this to Wayfare, in part because we both own a bit of Q9, and we’re both down quite a bit on it. She hadn’t heard of an interrobang before, and it instantly became both her new favourite punctuation mark as well as her word of the day.

Dear Bell;

Please stop highlighting this box on my bill. I’m typically a pretty careful guy when it comes to managing my finances, and for over a year with this new bill layout I’ve managed to find the right box for my payment and have sent in the right amount by the proper time. But every time, I look to that right-most highlighted box first, and then have to catch myself. Last month I don’t know if I was in a rush or tired or what, but for some reason I didn’t, and ended up sending in a payment that was short by the amount of the taxes. The late fees (10 cents) were pretty reasonable for being short by about $6, so I’m not complaining about that. But please, just stop shading that subtotal box. It’s not where people’s attention should be directed, so it shouldn’t be highlighted equal to the amount due. It will even save on ink!

For that matter, how about following typical layout conventions for people who read left-to-right and put the final sum on the right, with the smaller line items on the left? Better yet, how about going back to the old bills which were one or two pages, depending on how many calls I made, as compared to the three taken up by the new bill?

I wrote a bit about Guitar Hero earlier, and have now managed to finish the game on “easy”. I have to say, I eventually started to get the hang of it and was just flying through the last few levels, despite the increased difficulty of the songs. I still had a lot of trouble with some relatively simple parts of songs: half-notes* are pretty hit-and-miss, the guitar just doesn’t seem to strum fast enough to hit them, and if I try to force it by going down-up it occasionally throws in a third strum. I have a hell of a time holding the rhythm on fast repetitive parts too, and I can’t tell if that’s my issue or the controller’s.

* – Edit: Wayfare tells me that my musical terminology is wrong and that the notes I was having trouble hitting and that I was calling half-notes are really 1/8, 1/16, or 1/32 notes.

Medium, I find, is a big step up from easy. I really wish there was an “easy plus” or “medium light” where I could throw in the blue fret without this hammer-on pull-off insanity. Though it took a few tries on a number of songs, I managed to get up to the Live in Japan set, and am just getting crushed by songs like Knights of Cydonia. I simply can’t do it, not even close. There isn’t even much of a work-up to it: what few furiously fast sections like that were in previous songs were really short, and there weren’t any that required quite so much in the way of change-ups across the board and then bam! you’re hit with this two and a half minute monster.

While it came later on for him, Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation also seemed to find GH3 presented a brick wall of difficultly increase that was just frustrating and made the game seem a lot less fun…

Ah, well, back to being frustrated by DDR. At least with that I get exercise; though GH can be more of a workout than you might think at first, especially if you’re taken to doing flying leaps off the furniture, wailing out the tricky parts on your knees, and jumping up and down for star power…

I never read Stephen King’s The Mist, so I managed to be pretty well surprised by the movie. For starters, I went into it thinking that “the Mist” was that mist that turned people inside-out like the Simpsons mocked in one of their Treehouse of Terror episodes. Not to spoil anything, but it’s not. Aside from seeing it pop up in the list of movies at IMDB, I hadn’t really heard about this movie — no advertising for it managed to penetrate my consciousness, if there was any.

Spoiler warning!

It’s a pretty decent B-list horror movie. There are monstrous space aliens to boldly fight (or run shrieking from) and a slow die-off of the characters trapped in their less-than-safe haven. There are gross-out sequences (such as the soldier who gets put up in a web and finds alien spiderlings spewing forth out of his body), blood, and action… but it’s not a typical monster movie. The movie is really a psychological thriller about the desperation these shut-in survivors face as they ponder the prospect of never being rescued, of never returning to normalcy, and of course, being eaten or otherwise horribly killed.

Some of the characters are a little cardboard cutout-ish. The next-door neighbour started off with a very workable personality and some hinted-at old issues with the main character. Then, he started to come together with the main character in their common struggle to recover from the storm damage and the story seemed to be leading us towards a nice arc where they become reluctant friends… until the Mist comes and brings with it the tentacled space aliens. The neighbour refuses to believe that there are space aliens out in the Mist, even refusing to play along with the games of the people who want him to come back to the loading dock to see the severed purple tentacle. Even after some more people see it and are convinced, he refuses to believe, thinking the town people are playing a joke on him. To be fair, it was a little suspicious of the main character to approach him alone first, thinking that since he was a well-spoken out-of-town lawyer, that he’d be able to best break the news to the rest of the people shut into the store.

Spoiler warning! Seriously, I’m about to talk about the end now!

It was interesting to watch as the crazy biblical lady brought so many under her spell and started to preach about the end of days and the need for human sacrifice. On some days I have a fair bit of faith in humanity; on others I can be pretty cynical. I didn’t really doubt that she could form her own little cult there in the grocery store after a couple of days of being isolated within an alien haze and scared absolutely shitless while people were dying. However, I was astonished at the number of people willing to follow her down the path of human sacrifice (the soldier? yeah, ok, there was bit of a reason underlying that… but the movie started to go beyond believability when so many people were reaching to sacrifice a child), and that no one tried to counter her craziness with something from the bible about god no longer demanding human sacrifices or something like that.

The most power and most fucked-up part came right at the end. After escaping the madness of the grocery store crowd and driving until they ran out of gas and never finding an end to the mist or alien devastation, the group of mostly-rational people lead by the main character fell into despair and decided to end it all quickly by the gun, rather than wait around to be eaten by some tentacled nasty (or worse). However, the gun doesn’t have enough bullets for everyone, so the main character volunteers to pull the trigger on all the others, and then walk out to his own less pleasant end. He shoots them all, including his own son, and leaves the safety of the SUV… only to shortly thereafter find that the low rumbling taken for the humming approach of one of the larger aliens was actually a tank plowing through — humanity had triumphed, rescue was here, and he was saved. The weight of it all hit him, and he fell to his knees wailing.

That was a very powerful moment, however I think it was more from the sympathy of the situation than from the performance seen on screen. It was a decent portrayal or suicidal despair, I suppose, but I don’t think Thomas Jane will be winning any awards for it. Compare that with George Clooney in Michael Clayton. I actually didn’t like the movie Michael Clayton very much at all, and if I were to rewatch one or the other, I’d probably go see the Mist again. However, there’s a minute right at the end where George Clooney hops in a cab and you see this look on his face. This holy fuck look, this I can’t believe I just did that and I’m totally crashing off my adrenaline rush right now expression. That look right at the end almost makes watching the rest of the movie worthwhile (almost). I didn’t get that same resonance at the end from the Mist, although the situation itself was so powerful.

One minor detail that threw the ending off for me was when the tank came rolling through, it came from the same direction as the land rover full of survivors. That SUV wasn’t moving very fast through the Mist (with visibility at maybe a couple of feet), but the tank would have had to be moving even slower if it was stopping occasionally to engage the aliens or add to its large convoy of rescued civilians. So the survivors really should have passed the military on their journey before they ran out of gas. Of course, it’s possible that they ran right by the rescuers in the Mist without ever knowing it, like two ships passing in the night; it’s also possible that they waited in the SUV after running out of gas for more than the few minutes it looks like it took for them to decide to end it. The Mist, which engulfed the town at supernatural speeds, also cleared very quickly as the convoy moved through, so it’s also possible that the Mist was retreating along with the moving SUV, allowing the military to move quickly with clear visibility to catch up to them… but I think it would have been better for my suspension of disbelief if the tanks simply rolled out of the Mist from another direction.