Blessed by the Potato

I hate the way he yells randomly. I hate the way he thinks saying things louder make them funny. I hate his penchant for male nudity. I hate his terrible, forced acting style. I even hate his awkward, lanky stance.

But I loved Stranger Than Fiction. In it, he played a mostly straight character: a mildly bumbling, obsessive-compulsive IRS agent… who hears voices. Specifically, one voice narrating his life. Aside from the odd bit of yelling at the sky, his usual shtick was happily absent.

The movie itself was actually really well done: surprisingly in many aspects. The pacing was very good and even, which is a bit surprising since as a comedy/romance/drama coming in at two hours there was undoubtedly pressure to cut it down to one and a half. The writing was also quite good, a welcome surprise since quite often movies about authors have rather terrible narration. With this one though, I think if you closed your eyes and listened to some of the narration, you could easily see it working quite well in a novel. Even the effects were well done, somewhat unusual for a film that really didn’t even need them in the first place.

I saw this on boingboing: “Franck and Ludivine Lamande of Cascade Township, Michigan, unwrapped a special DHL delivery on Thursday and found a bubble-wrapped human liver and part of a head…” I couldn’t help but laugh that it was DHL that made this screwup. If you’ll recall, I had some issues with them in the past, and freaking hate their guts. Oh, it’s been over a year, and while I had some useless responses from Disney, I never did hear back from DHL (they cashed my cheque, though I kind of regret paying that nonsense).

I really like the weathernetwork.ca, the website of the Weather Network. Their forecasting is about as accurate as you can expect weather forecasting to be, and they have a bunch of other neat utilities like the highway forecast or current highway conditions. However, lately they’ve been getting really anxious about issuing weather alerts that often don’t pan out, but that’s not what’s been getting me lately. What I really find bugs me is that while you can go back and look at past weather predictions with their site, they never tell you what actually happened. So, for example, if we were to go back and look at December 8, 2006 (or the band of days 6th-9th), London got hit really bad with a huge snowfall that was way above what they were calling for — 30 inches in front of our place (760-odd mm of snow). However, the archives on the Weather Network show a measly 25 mm of precipitation. Now, they might not count a mm of snow as a mm of precipitation, since snow can be quite fluffy and volumous, but still, 760 is nowhere near 25, and I don’t think they discount snow that much (perhaps a factor of 10, and they were calling for 25 cm of snow that night).

I had the same problem this weekend: they were calling for freezing rain, ice, and snow to hit London through Toronto, which was going to make my drive home miserable. Then in the early evening they started changing their prediction: Toronto went from getting a mix of ice and snow (up to 20 cm) to a predicted 5-7 cm of snow. They were still calling on London to get iced in: basically the weatherpeople were wailing “But if you have any friends or relatives in London, it may be too late for them, as they’re already encased in their icy tombs. There may still be hope, however, as scientists ten thousand years from now may thaw them out and ask what it was like to hunt the Woolly Mammoth that was briefly resurrected from extinction by genetic engineering; they will, of course, have to sheepishly admit that they were frozen in the London ice storm just a few decades before that actually happened…”

The snow in Toronto was pretty gentle, and we only got about 2 cm, which wasn’t going to stop me from driving. It made me wonder what London actually got, because I’d hate to get halfway down the 401 just to find the driving impossible. Did we get spared the full wrath of the weather network’s predictions, as Toronto had? Or was Toronto merely spared because the clouds had dumped their load in London? The weather network’s site was pretty much useless for trying to answer that question. Their highway conditions page said that the roads were slushy and awful all along the 401, including through Toronto, but it didn’t look that bad out my window. I kept hitting refresh hoping to get an update, when I noticed that the information was several hours old and not getting updated. At that point I just decided to get in the car and risk it. I’m here now typing, so everything turned out fine: in fact, Toronto was the worst part of the drive, with a tiny bit of slush on the roads and the snow still falling. London’s roads are wet, but clear of snow (I guess it was largely regular rain, as opposed to ice — or the city put down a lot of salt) though there is some slush on the sidewalks.

It was just brought to my attention that there’s a strange error on the site right now where the sidebar is not loading properly (at all) for many people. It’s very strange because it loads fine for me when I use the local address for my webserver (192.etc.) but it doesn’t work for me when I go via the web (www.holypotato.com). I have no idea what could cause behaviour like that, so if anyone has any ideas I’m open to suggestions.

Edit: As soon as I posted this, the problem appeared to go away. I wonder if the extra post pushed the image (a few posts below) far enough down the page that it wasn’t interacting with anything on the sidebar or something along those lines…

Twice after we moved in, Wayfare and I asked our landlord how to turn off the water to the pipes on the side of the house. “Oh, you don’t need to” she said, “I’m pretty sure they’re the new ones that won’t burst.” I had never heard of such pipes. It was possible there was a small heating element in it (there is a small wire attached to the pipe, but as far as I can tell it then goes into the cable box, so my guess was that it was a grounding strip). It’s also possible that the world of plumbing has advanced and water freezing and expanding inside pipes doesn’t lead to failure anymore. To be safe, I asked the last tennant as well, and she said she never had to turn it off.

“Oh well,” we shrugged “it should be fine.” Of course, now my landlord’s on vacation in New Zealand (not just out of the country, but completely out of touch and in a completely different day/night cycle) and the pipe decides to burst. It’s very strange though that it would burst today: it’s close to freezing for the first time in weeks; I would have thought it would have burst last week in the bitter cold. Naturally, along with the water spraying all over the side of the house and the deck, there’s now water seeping into the basement.