Category: Miscellaneous babble

There’s one small nit-picky thing that bothers me a little bit about Stargate: Atlantis. When McKay talks about the ZPM, he pronounces it with a ‘zee’. But he’s supposed to be a Canadian scientist and should be saying it as ‘zed’.
Of course the most obvious explanation is that he’s been working with Americans so long that it’s corrupted the way he says things. I bet he probably uses the ‘-or’ spelling instead of the ‘-our’ spelling too.
Well, it’s just a TV show I suppose.
I just realized that 4 out of the 5 main SG:A characters are Canadians after reading the cast profiles. I thought some of them looked familiar.

I happened to catch My Coolest Years: The Geeks on VH1 last night, which got the wife and I talking about our high school experiences.
I’d say I was definitely a geek in high school, but I wasn’t nearly as tormented (at least I don’t remember being tormented anyway) as some of the geeks on the show were. I roamed among a fairly diverse crowd and had a lot of friends in just about every group you can think of. But I was definitely a geek. I did things like Reach For the Top (one of those team-based answer the question type games) and student council.
While most of the guys opted for the machine shop/industrial arts type options or band or sports, I chose Food Studies because I knew one of these days I’d be out on my own and would need to know how to cook and feed myself. The three years of Food Studies (10, 20 and 30) I took turned out to be one of my favourite classes in high school.
Unfortunately I’ve since lost touch with many of my high school friends, except for an occasional e-mail from someone who managed to stumble onto my email address. Every now and then I wonder what some of those people are doing now. Maybe some of them will stumble onto this blog and find a former classmate. If you are one of those people, leave a comment or email me!

15 years ago on Dec 6, 1989 14 women were killed and another 13 injured by a gunman in a terrible incident at École Polytechnique in Montreal.
On Dec 7 1989, schools and universities across the country were unusually quiet and muted as word of the tragedy spread.
I remember the day very well. I was in my third year and had been busy studying the previous night so I didn’t watch any news that night or the next morning. Got onto campus and noticed everything was strangely quiet. There wasn’t the hustle and bustle or the regular chatting you hear on a normal day. And just about every woman I knew (even my friends) gave me a nasty cold stare or looked kind of sad. Still had no idea what had happened but there were a lot of sad, bitter and angry women around and I wasn’t about to do or say anything else to set them off.
It wasn’t until I made my way to the Physics Common Room later that morning after classes that I learned about the events at École Polytechnique. And then it all became clear. It was a sad time everywhere. Some guys joined in the sadness and remembrances, some stayed clear for their own safety, and others like me weren’t quite sure what to do. I wanted to be supportive of my friends, but didn’t want to get pounced on just for being a guy. And for several weeks afterwards, it seemed like just about every guy on campus was stepping on eggshells.
Eventually everything got back to normal, but nobody ever forgot what happened that day.

From the National Hurricane Center come word that a possible tropical system may be brewing out in the Atlantic on the last official day of the season. It might even become a tropical storm later today.

THE AREA OF LOW PRESSURE LOCATED ABOUT 800 MILES EAST OF BERMUDA CONTINUES TO ACQUIRE TROPICAL CHARACTERISTICS AND THUNDERSTORM ACTIVITY HAS BECOME MORE CONCENTRATED NEAR THE CENTER. IF THIS TREND CONTINUES…SUBTROPICAL OR TROPICAL STORM ADVISORIES MAY BE ISSUED LATER THIS MORNING.

Reading the newspaper really is educational! And I’m not talking about for just current events. No, you can learn all sorts of trivia from newspapers. In today’s paper, I learned that there’s a whole ‘ology’ devoted to studying flags. It’s called vexillology, and from the quick little Google search I did on it, it’s a Big Thing. There are whole associations devoted to studying flags of various types.
Never would have thought people would be so interested in flags to spend their time studying them.