Blessed by the Potato

You know, it’s kind of a miracle that we have clean water coming right into our houses that we can get any time we want.

… and the London public works makes sure that we never take that for granted for very long…

As I sit here, trying to clean the watermelon juice off my keyboard while it’s dripping down my arms to the elbows, I realize that watermelon is a very descriptive name for a fruit.

It’s a very wet melon. I don’t think I could have come up with a better name for that particular fruit.

It makes me think of oranges, which sound like they have a descriptive name, but it’s actually not. After all, if you’re thinking of a fruit you want to eat, the colour it happens to be is probably not high on your list of criteria, so it’s not a very useful attribute to describe the fruit or name it after. And of course there’s the added confusion that not all oranges are orange (with the sudden popularity of blood oranges driving that home).

We went to see Up yesterday at the movie theatre. It looks like it would be a fun movie, and has been getting very good reviews. Unfortunately when we showed up at the theatre, it turns out it was still in 3D (despite being out for a few weeks now), and I have zero interest in paying more to try to fit some flimsy plastic glasses over my prescription glasses and get a headache just so that some cheesy 3D effects can be thrown in.

So we saw Public Enemies instead, which looked like it might be a decent summer-time popcorn muncher from the previews.

It’s not. The movie is just not good. It’s full of weird camera angles, and just drags. There doesn’t seem to be any sort of character development, no backstory to anyone, and with one or two exceptions, the action scenes weren’t even any good.

I read the Wikipedia entry on John Dillinger, and there’s a lot of good stuff in there that they missed. Right at the beginning they mined the “crook with a heart” thing with the line “put that away, we’re here for the bank’s money, not yours.” But then that was sort of it for showing any charm during a robbery. Apparently later on, he robbed a bank without a shot by pretending to be a movie director making a bank heist scene — wouldn’t that have made for a good scene??

The movie was also lacking any sort of Depression-era feeling. Sure, the costumes and cars and tommy guns all looked great, but everything was shiny. We didn’t see the desperation and the unemployment and the crop failures that helped contribute to the massive crime wave that lead to the formation of the FBI. With these public enemies it wasn’t really desperation driving them to rob bank after bank, but it was still something I noticed was missing from the movie.

On the whole, the movie had the feel to it that we were supposed to have read the book first or something, since there wasn’t a lot of development or exposition.

Of course, part of my enjoyment of the movie could be due to the foul mood I was put in by the person beside me talking incessantly for the first ~20 minutes or so. Talking, not whispering. I actually turned around and told him to shut up, and rather rudely at that. It was annoying me so much — he was louder than the movie for a number of spots! — and anyone who knows me knows that’s never happened before… I’m actually still kind of shocked at my behaviour myself.

Today I target my random realtor rage at Roya, who put up a MLS listing for a million-dollar mansion with two libraries lined with wall-to-wall bookcases, and not a single interior picture.

[Note: I waited too long to post this and the link/listing is now dead]

I have to give some props to Mojan: the house she’s flogging is like 40% overpriced for the street (especially for not having any landscaping), but the website with its own domain name is impressive.

Paris is a big city. It doesn’t really seem to have an identifiable “downtown core” like most Canadian cities do, no single major street or intersection that defines the centre. There’s the La Defense district, which we haven’t been to see yet, but seemingly the whole of the city is crowded with one-way alleys and 5-storey apartments with retail on the ground floor. It makes the whole city seem like a teeming downtown core, and I just can’t quite wrap my head around it all.

The stonework is impressive though, and Wayfare and I were wondering how it was that they managed to put so much effort into seemingly every building over such a wide area. Of course, the downside is that there’s very little greenspace to be found, and any little patch of lawn seems to instantly spring sprawling sunbathers in this summer heat.

Oh, the terrible heat. I don’t know how it’s so hot underground, but that has to be the biggest downfall of the metro system here. None of the trains are air-conditioned, which is especially bad when bathing seems to be as optional as it is here. They open the windows so there’s a bit of a rush of air when the small trains are moving, but the system is quite a bit different from the subway of Toronto. There are an enormous number of stations and lines, all criss-crossing across the city. It’s kind of nice knowing that up on the surface a metro stop is never much more than 300 m away, unlike the 20+ minute walk you could face in North York or London just to get from your house to the nearest bus stop, let alone subway station. However underground it means that the trains spend way too much time stopped at the stations, baking with no air movement, rather than making progress through the tunnels. There’s also no guard car like the TTC has — no one checking to make sure that everyone is off the train, that those boarding aren’t getting caught by the doors. The buzzer sounds (and it’s an unpleasant noise that does not help the claustrophobic nature of the situation), the doors slam closed and the train moves. The doors don’t even open on their own, you have to hit the release yourself. Of course, none of these issues stop it from being a very well-used service: even at night just before the system shuts down the trains are fairly busy; at one stop the people hadn’t even finished getting off, let alone given a turn to the hundreds of people on the platform to get on, when the buzzer buzzed and the doors tried to close.

Today we spent a lot of time walking and looking at buildings, including the impressive Notre Dame cathedral. However we were pretty baked by the heat and the sun and a slight bit of dehydration given that a bottle of water or can of pop runs us north of $3, so we haven’t been taking as many pictures as we should have been. We walked by the Louvre, where bizzarely enough a gang of people were giving out free hugs (with the signs to advertise it). Wayfare was quite excited by the free hugs, and got 7 or 8 on the way through the crowd.

“Yay, free hugs!”

We grabbed some crepes for lunch at a small restaurant in the shadow of Notre Dame, where there happened to be a small white kitten sleeping on the bench (until some American girls came in and decided to pick him up and tell him how cute he was). We now have more pictures of the little white cat than we do of the Louvre and Notre Dame cathedral combined.