Still looking for Waldo after all these years...

I normally prefer not to participate in the spread of so called "internet phenomena," but damn!!



Who will join me in starting up a camp to help these poor unfortunates? It would be superfantastic!!!

Let it rain.

Hey, you know what? It's almost September! WTF!!

Actually... since I experience time in a linear fashion... and can portion out that one day = one day no matter when it falls in the month/year... I kinda knew it was coming.

I've been splitting my time between my home-home and my home away from home-home (i.e. house-sitting), and this does make for a sort of disjointedness. Since I'm using Fredericton transit to get back and forth I'm a little hampered by their schedule as far as comings and goings. That just means that if I neglect to bring papers with me to work in the morning for some aspect of work/play/work-play it's about 3 days before I can take another stab at remembering. You know how you end up with all your umbrellas in one spot... not the spot you're in when it starts to rain? Like that but across the board.

As I mentioned last post the computer situation over there is less than idyllic, so I've turned my attention to other pursuits... Playstation on the big screen tv makes your eyes go buggy... so small doses there. There's nothing on tv really except Law and Order reruns... so, no. I've been trying to get into J-Pod by Douglas Coupland, but the 40+ page explication of Pi really gets on my nerves... so, no. Finally I turned my attention to the release of David Lynch's new movie on DVD.



Inland Empire is a 3 hour surrealist smorgasbord funded by revenue from Lynch's website and shot on digital video. Like many of his films there is the hint of a concrete storyline at play somewhere in the middle ground of the narrative, but it is obfuscated by layers and layers of visual metaphor and time-shifted doppelgangers so that balance is always compromised. The bare bones outline is that Laura Dern's character, Nikki Grace, is an actress hungry for a part in a movie called On High in Blue Tomorrows... indications are this will mark a comeback for her. The film, apparently had been the subject of an attempted production some time in the past... derailed when the leads met with an untimely end. Rumours are that the film is cursed. Sure seems so as Nikki disappears into the rabbit hole of the film's history... her identity shifting constantly back and forth between character, actress and other middle steps of self... make you woozy.



I've watched it once in two chunks (I started late one night and my brain only could take 90 minutes before it just... turned off), and perused the extras, a second disc with 75 minutes unused footage, random other weirdness and a vignette of Lynch preparing Quinoa. It'll surely take several more passes to get the lion's share of nuances... then again I'm still piecing together Mullholland Drive.

Even Flo

Sorry I haven't updated in a while. I'm in summer house-sitting mode which throws my routine off... and here at Howard and Linda's the computer, or at least the internet, seems not to like me.

Due to some technical jumbo-gumbo I'm on an older computer that had been disconnected from the internet due to it's ailing CD/DVD burner making it less than adequate for high density torrent shenanigans (those of you who don't know what I mean are really better off for it, trust me). In the meantime the new PC (yeah, PC) doesn't have it's virus repellent bondage program installed. I've temporarily re-connected this older burro to the super-highway, but it gets stubborn and sits still for long stretches when I do something radical like, oh, open a second tab. Although it may also be that the internet has discovered that I'm not using it in the prescribed method. I'm not clicking on the Yahoo! homepage links to win iPods or Plasma TVs or learn more about Britney's battered babies (Mmmm batter...) or Lindsay's Drug Hell... or whatever. I mainly only have store stuff to do, but the slow processing makes doing a simple order hellish and I have no patience left over to do blog stuff.

So here we are----

with some pictures (above and below) from my last Florenceville visit from a couple of weekends ago:




...and what was briefly left of all the trees on Carleton Extension between George and Charlotte after the city got through with them.



According to a street resident the power lines that run along Carleton are feeder lines that carry much higher current that splits off to the rest of the city grid along the way. As a result the trees had become "electrified." I.E. someone climbing them, or even coming into contact with them, ran the risk of electrocution. Apparently there has been a recorded case of this in Nova Scotia.

I'll have more of my Northside zaniness to report soon... such as my run-in with a near dead but still terrifying insect in the bathroom this morning. But for now... ciao