Category: General

What a glorious night for a bike ride! Marlo and I went up 37th ave for…well a long way. And there were hills. Oh, the hills.

Things Toren does when he doesn’t have a work project:

Cleans & organizes his shelves
Adds to his “sell on ebay” pile
Answers old emails that have been sitting in his inbox for months
Changes his sheets and flips his futon
Transfers the files he’s had on floppy disks (discs?) for years onto cd.

Late at night I get around
Pedal round this lonesome town
on a bicycle
a bicycle
-Masters of Reality

The Senate Intelligence Committee released a scathing report on the CIA’s unfounded, unjustified, and unreasonable claims about Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destruction.
Japan’s defense ministry said that it will issue its annual defense whitepaper as a “manga” comic book. [Reuters]
Federal authorities in the United States were discussing the possibility of postponing the November elections in the event of a terrorist attack. Tom Ridge, the secretary of homeland security, warned that Al Qaeda might be planning an attack to disrupt the November elections, but he said that he was aware of no specific threat or details about the alleged plan.
The Pentagon revealed that pay records of George W. Bush’s National Guard service during the Vietnam War, records that might be able to establish whether he met his military obligations, were accidentally destroyed.
The Pentagon announced the creation of military review panels to allow prisoners at Guantánamo Bay to challenge their detentions, though they will not be permitted to have lawyers present, nor will the hearings be public; critics said that the Pentagon’s plan falls short of the standard set by the Supreme Court, which ruled that the prisoners have a right to an independent hearing.
Confused brown pelicans were crashing into streets in Arizona, because heat waves rising from the pavement look like water.
The British House of Lords voted to limit the right of parents to spank their children.
A federal appeals court ruled that the government’s standards for the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste dump in Nevada are insufficient because they extend for only 10,000 years. [New York Times]
Federal health officials were thinking about banning the practice of feeding pork, chicken, and other animal parts to cattle; the pigs and chickens eat rendered cattle and thus could transmit mad cow disease prions. There was apparently no plan to stop feeding cattle huge quantities of cattle blood, an obvious vector for the disease, and cattle will continue to enjoy the feathers and excrement of 8.5 billion chickens.
Condom supplies in much of the world were falling short, and [New Scientist] Britain’s Environment Agency said that male fish were being changed to females by hormone-laden sewage dumped into rivers. The EPA announced that it will fine DuPont for failing to report significant test results relating to a chemical used in making Teflon that was found in drinking water near factories and in the fetus of a pregnant employee. [New York Times]
Four organ-transplant recipients died from rabies; all four received tissue from the same infected donor. [New York Times]
The European Court of Human Rights declined to extend full human rights to fetuses, and the [New York Times] French parliament banned human cloning.
[Reuters] People in Canberra, Australia, were warned to beware of mad starving kangaroos; at least one golden retriever has been drowned by a kangaroo, and a woman was attacked while out walking her poodle. [Associated Press] A sinkhole in Louisiana ate a giraffe and an ostrich. [New York Times] Scientists succeeded in reading the mind of a monkey. [New Scientist]

Yesterday morning at about 5:30 (of course I was still up, what kind of a question is that?) there was a car accident on the corner 12th & Oak. The worst accidents on that corner always happen between 2am-6am and you can guess why. Because people assume they’re the only ones on the road that early in the morning so they whizzzz around and run lights. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Anyway I poked my head out the window to see one guy crawling out of his car, and then I called 911, which was pretty exciting because I haven’t done that…uh…ever(?). It was funny that I was all nervous and unsure of what to say. They said “911 – do you need police, fire or ambulance” and I said “police and maybe an ambulance.”
“What’s happened?”
“Uh, just a car accident at 12th & Oak”
“I’ll put you through to the ambulance.”
She kept her word. The ambulance guy asked if there was anyone pinned or trapped in the vehicle and I said I didn’t know. He thanked me for calling. God bless his heart.

Garage sales: I got 8 audio tapes for $2 – most of them still in shrink wrap. The price was actually a dollar but I just gave them $2. This was at the garage sale organized by the people across the hall. Then there was a “Lane Sale” at which I bought a frisbee for 25 cents while it rained heavily.

Now I just know that you want to watch Steve dissecting a mesonychoteuthis (colossal squid) – so here’s the video http://exn.ca/video/?video=exn20030529-squid.asx

It may be a bit jumpy but stick with it. It will stick with you!