March 16, 2007

Westering (3)

Posted on by Patrick

Pre­vi­ous entries: Part 1, Part 2.

We got back to Edmon­ton and dropped the car off. Over half the deposit I’d put on it got refund­ed, since we did­n’t keep the car the full week. That was pleasant.

My mem­o­ry grows hazy of what we did–I know there was much play­ing with lit­tle Miss J, and Kath­leen got birth­day cup­cakes, and we went to the swim­ming pool again. One thing that I dis­tinct­ly remem­ber was vis­it­ing the Mut­tart Con­ser­va­to­ry, which is always an awe­some expe­ri­ence, but it’s some­how dou­ble-awe­some in the winter.

The Mut­tart is a set of four con­nect­ed pyra­mids, each one fea­tur­ing a vari­ety of plants from a dif­fer­ent eco­zone. There’s a tem­per­ate pyra­mid, a desert one, a trop­i­cal one, and a rotat­ing “show” pyra­mid. When we were there, the show was “The Birth of Spring” or some­thing sim­i­lar, and so the plants in there were things like cro­cus­es and oth­er ear­ly-bloom­ing plants.

(Which makes me feel all poetical:

April is the cru­ellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Mem­o­ry and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
–T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

But enough of that.)

Pho­tos:

Some kinda pink flower
What kind of flower is this? Well, it’s pink.

Orchids
Orchids. There were all kinds of orchids in the trop­i­cal pyramid.

Con­tin­ue read­ing “Wes­t­er­ing (3)” →

Frightening

Posted on by Patrick

I have GMail. I use GMail a lot. GMail has some built-in spam fil­ters. It’s rare, in fact, that an email makes it to my inbox offer­ing to enhance or expand my body parts, or give me 10% of the Crown Prince of Nige­ri­a’s mon­ey trans­fers, or any­thing of the like.

Every once in a while, I go into the spam fold­er to clean it out.

One thing about GMail is that it scans my mail for key­words, and presents rel­a­tive­ly unob­tru­sive links on the pages based on what it finds. Things I might be inter­est­ed in.

I’ve noticed that the links in my spam fold­er are down­right scary. Not that it’s ads for Herbal V1@gr@, no. Some­how it’s worse:

French Fry Spam Casse­role — Bake 30–40 minutes
Savory Spam Cres­cents — Bake 12–15 min­utes or until gold­en brown
Spam Con­fet­ti Pas­ta — Prepa­ra­tion time 30 minutes

With­out a word of a lie, those are the last three links that I’ve had. I feel like I have my very own ver­sion of James Lileks’ Gallery of Regret­table Foods.