Blessed by the Potato

After last night’s crazy heavy rain in Toronto, we found a fair bit of water in our basement. Muddy water (pics to come?).

It was a very disheartening discovery, since it was very late when we found it, and since we were basically driven out of our last house due to water issues in the basement and mould. One of our only major criteria for our new place was that the basement should stay dry. Both Wayfare and I had basically lived in the basements of our parents houses, and we fully intended on making the below-grade rooms part of our usable living space — workout room, office, play room for future kids, we hadn’t quite decided exactly what form that would take, but the basement had to stay dry, damnit. We even came to visit the place on a rainy day in December while what snow we had was melting, and it was fine.

Perhaps the recent earthquake opened up a crack, or maybe the rain was just heavy enough to overwhelm the gutters and weeping tile. Either way, we had to clean it up in the wee hours of the morning. We didn’t even have a mop on hand, so I had to run out to the 24-hour Metro and pick up a mop before we could commence cleanup operations.

The ordeal was made all the worse by the giant bugs that have invaded the basement. Being the brave warrior that I am, I smooshed the hell out of a giant centipede that was trying to blend in with the furnace. I then turned around to see two large, black legs poking out of the grate to the drain in the floor. The slender black legs were comically long — they don’t really make spiders that big, do they? — I figured it had to have been one of our prop plastic spiders from the Halloween box lodged in the drain.

Then it turned, and looked at me. It followed my movement across the room. This werewolf spider had my scent, and all eight eyes were locked on target.

I knew then that I was going to die.

The centipede was but a pawn in this war, trapping me on the wrong side of the drain from the stairs and freedom. Wayfare then bravely rushed to my defense, using her shoe to shear off the creepy legs with a mighty battle cry of “Bwaaaaaahhhhhhh!”. Outmatched, the spider retreated back down the drain. I quake in fear though at the idea that her mighty blow did not finish it off, and that down there in the darkness lies a 6-legged horror plotting revenge.

And I have to wonder: what the fuck is up with these giant, terrifying spiders? I thought they were a London thing, since I’d never seen them before in Toronto, but they seemed to follow me back up the 401, plotting my ruin the whole way. Centipedes and the tiny little transluscent house spiders I’m used to dealing with, since they were endemic at my parents’, but these monstrous, dark spiders terrify me beyond all reason. Where did they come from? Why are they in our basement? Both the spiders and the centipedes are top-of-the-food-chain predators in the bug world, but aside from the odd potato bug, there are no other bugs for them to eat down there.

Are they eating my fear?

I can’t begin to get into the heads of the anarchists at the G20. I doubt many were local, so what good did they think they were doing by coming to our country and messing the place up? Cop cars on fire, windows smashed… it achieved nothing, and hurt completely innocent bystanders.

Many of the businesses who found their storefronts destroyed weren’t even all that close to the security zone. Some were independent shops, many others were franchises even if they had the logo of an “evil multinational” on their banner.

To try to undo some of the wrongs done by the anarchists, Wayfare is going to be shopping down Yonge, Queen, and College whenever she needs something that those stores provide (hopefully, not shopping for the sake of shopping) to support the stores that were victimized by the vandals.

I still don’t get why this event was held in Toronto. Huntsville was apparently deemed too small for the G20, even though the G8 fit there (they couldn’t find 12 more suites or even trailers? How big an entourage did the leaders really need?). We were talking about the cost and inconvenience for security (which obviously did not protect much of the city), and figured a small town could be purpose-built for such an event, or an island. Then we discussed why so much space (the convention centre) was needed — what about using a large portion of the money to build a facility on an island somewhere? Or why not hold it in a place like Davos, designed and equipped precisely for such summits?

Back when I had summers off and didn’t care about what time I went to bed or woke up, this used to happen to me quite by accident, my body just seems geared to run on a longer day… though I didn’t have it quite figured out to mesh up to a regular week rotation, it was more of a sleep-14-hours-stay-awake-16-hours-and-see-where-we-end-up sort of thing. I think the only time I ever saw the sunrise in the summer was when I stayed up late for it.

Of course, part of it is that, for computer nerds at least, a 24-hour day doesn’t seem long enough. We’re eternally drifting westward.

In particular lately, I have a number of late night experiments & analysis which is playing havoc with my sleep schedule. I keep drifting onto a longer day, moving my sleep time back by a few hours each day, until I get hit by a meeting and have to painfully reset.

It’s much easier to extend the subjective day than it is to snap back!

A poster at CMF has a “possibly unique problem“: he doesn’t know when he’ll die! How do you make plans for retirement if you don’t know how long you’ll live? It was suggested that he plan to live to 95, and if he lived longer, the government would take care of him, or he’d be so senile he wouldn’t care that he was broke. “But,” he wondered, “what if I die sooner?” Here is my take:

There are lots of solutions to not knowing when you’ll die, such as letting an insurance company worry about it, or planning to live an absurdly long time, while also making contingency plans for who gets your money if your first plan fails. Offspring, spouses, and charitable organizations will all vie for a piece of that pie.

This is conventional thinking though, and you have a decidedly unconventional, potentially unique problem. Conventional logic says that you can’t take it with you, but why is that thinking accepted so blindly? So, consider the ways in which you might take it with you.

Paper money on your person may not survive the transition to another plane of existence, particularly if you are sent on your way via cremation. So that leaves heavy metals and gems as the storehouses of wealth most likely to transfer to the great beyond. The question is just then a matter of form.

The Greek tradition is focused on proximity to the eyes, so you should get a pair of solid-gold sunglasses and wear them all the time, just in case. Best to design them with a lattice-work of cuts which can double as break lines so that you can break off small, fungible pieces of gold for your afterlife shopping needs.

However, the afterlife may be a place of strife and violence, as suggested by the Vikings. In that case you’ll need a sword and shield to carry with you. The last shield I made I included adjustable arm straps which, when at their maximum length could double as shoulder straps. With some removable storage pouches, it could conceivably become an only-mildly-impractical backpack for everyday use. The surface can be impregnated with semi-precious stones to also serve your transactional needs between battles, while also providing protection against the flaming arrows of skeleton archers. Of course, traditionally one paints their family’s coat of arms on the shield so that you can easily find your clan in the melee, but if your family isn’t close then it’s not a big loss.

XKCD has a comic up today about how lopsided the Earth is: there’s very little land in the southern “half” if you take the equator to be the halfway point (which is the logical way to bisect things). He uses this to poke fun at an old quote by JFK about the battlegrounds for freedom being in the southern half of the earth (when in fact, many were above the equator).

However, to reach for interpretations, if we just look at land mass, and ignore Antarctica, then half the landmass of the planet falls below about the 49th parallel. Looked at this way, his statement is true: the battlegrounds for freedom are in that southern half, below the 49th (which, ironically, includes the US).