Life, the Universe and Everything – Page 23 – Postcards from the Mothership

Twenty years of U2

My mom sent me an e-mail to complain yesterday because she was patiently waiting for my love letter to Tristan, and she got a post on Tim Hortons instead. (I tell ya!) Sorry, Mom, but you’re going to have to wait another day, because I won’t write that post to Tristan until I can do it properly.

But I can dash off a really quick post to say that I heard on the radio this morning that today marks the 20th anniversary of the release of U2’s Joshua Tree album.

Twenty years!!

So much of my life has a U2 soundtrack in the background. Pride (In the Name of Love) reminds me of my fifteen year old self, too geeky to be goth but with a painful crush on a guy who wore a black trench coat and occasionally painted his fingernails black. He loved U2, so I did too.

And then in 1987, I went to see the U2 Joshua Tree tour in Toronto at Exhibition Stadium. I was in Grade 12, and my friend’s mother would only let her go if we ‘let’ her get us a hotel room at the Royal York. I can’t even remember how many people we crammed into that hotel room. A dozen, probably. Remember, Fryman? My then-boyfriend (and now ex-husband) drove down from Sudbury, we drove in from London, and we actually managed to find each other in the crowd of 100,000 fans.

That concert was truly one of the best I have ever seen. We still talk about the near-religious experience of being part of a chorus of 100,000 voices all singing “how long, how long must we sing this song” as we poured out of the stadium and down Front Street – no cheering, no talking, only singing.

That was twenty years ago. Twenty years. Yikes!

What’s your favourite concert memory?

The Canadian-est invention ever

It’s a reliable sign of the end of the Canadian winter. No, not the lengthening days, the appreciable warmth of the sun on a frosty day, not even the first day you decide you can safely leave the house in shoes rather than fur-lined mukluks. Spring is truly on the way when the already long (but impressively fast-moving) queues at Tim Hortons lengthen appreciably each year with non-regular Timmy’s fans in the first few weeks of March. It is that annual late winter rite, the Roll Up the Rim to Win contest, that brings them out of the woodwork.

I’ve been lucky so far this year, at least compared to last year when I fruitlessly rolled up more rims than I could count for bupkis. This year, I’m on my third free coffee. And you know I love free. Over the course of the year, I drink hundreds of cups of Tim Horton’s coffee, and they buy my loyalty with three free coffees a year. Not a bad strategy on their part.

But I’ve been thinking about this whole Roll Up the Rim thing. I mean, is that not the least hygenic contest you can possibly think of? I’m going to slobber all over this paper cup, then I’m going to tear off a bit and hand it over to the clerk. I’m surprised the folks at Tim Horton’s aren’t wearing latex gloves while this contest runs.

How do you roll up your rim? I’m a chewer, myself. I work my lower incisors in under the rim and do a back-and-forth kind of mastication to loosen the roll, and then pull it up. It’s not too pretty, so I try to remember to use my thumbnail and the side of my index finger, rather than my teeth, if I’m in polite company.

And then I read about this guy in this morning’s Citizen. He invented a Rimroller, “a plastic device the size of a bottle opener that cleanly slices open and unrolls a rim in one fluid motion.” They’ll be selling it at Lee Valley Tools (one of my favourite stores for gadgets and whimsical indulgences) for the most excellent and affordable price of $1.95. Get yours here!

Canadian ingenuity. Ya gotta love it.

Edited to add: Now you too can win your very own Rimroller! See this post for details.

You can’t get there from here

Link surfing is a wonderful thing.

I can’t even remember where I was, but I caught sight of something about a lunar eclipse on March 3. Turns out it wasn’t visible from here, only in a wide swath on the other side of the planet through Europe and Africa. Disappointing. I love stuff like eclipses and meteor showers and the northern lights.

Then further down on the same page, I was reading about the solar eclipses for later this year. (Did you know that there are two lunar and two solar eclipses every year? A lunar eclipse is when the moon travels through the earth’s shadow, and a solar eclipse is when the moon comes between the earth and the sun.) Unfortunately, the solar eclipses for this year will only be visible in eastern Asia and South America.

And THEN, I saw that there will be a total solar eclipse ON MY BIRTHDAY next year, AND it will be visible from Canada. Now that’s way wicked cool.

Except, I kept reading and found out that it will only be visible from the very northern tip of Canada, through Nunavut. And I noticed that the path of totality runs right across Alert, Nunavut, which is the northernmost settlement not only in Canada, but in the whole world. It’s a mythic sort of place, this northern outpost, and I started to think about how I’m always saying that I haven’t seen nearly enough of this gorgeous country of ours, and how I’ve always wanted to see the far north, and an embryonic plan started to hatch in my busy little brain.

Wouldn’t it be way wicked cool to make a family vacation out of going to Alert for my birthday to see the solar eclipse? It’s north of the Arctic circle, but it would be high summer, so not only would the temperatures be moderate, but there would be 24 hours of sunlight – and then an eclipse. Really, could you imagine anything cooler than that? It’s Canadian, it’s astronomical, it’s my birthday: three of my favourite things. This was obviously meant to happen.

So I set out to find out how to get to Alert. And that’s when I started to grasp just how big this country of ours is, and that north as I know it really isn’t so very north at all. I mean, Alert – that’s seriously North. Let’s put it in relative terms. Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut, is just over 2000 km due north of here. (By comparison, Miami is just about the same distance due south.) Well, Alert is DOUBLE that, more than 4000 km due north. In fact, it’s only about 800 km from the North Pole.

Map courtesy of www.theodora.com/maps, used with permission.
Embellishment courtesy of Beloved.

Not only is Alert north, or should I say NORTH, but it’s isolated, and kind of desolate. Just about the only thing that’s up there is a Canadian Forces Base and an Environment Canada weather station. But neither the northness nor the isolation deterred me. I live in a generation of extreme vacations, after all – I never imagined there could be a populated place in this country that doesn’t have some form of tourism. (Okay, so ‘populated’ is a bit of a stretch – according to Wikipedia’s citation of the Canadian 2001 census, Alert has a permanent population of six.)

Typically, all of this actually encouraged me rather than discouraging me from my summer holiday plans. I spent quite a while googling various combinations of terms and surfing travel sites only to find out that for all intents and purposes, you simply can’t get there from here. And even if you could get there, it’s not exactly a tourism hotbed.

Nothing comes up, for example, when you search on “hotels in Alert” or “tourism Alert Nunavut”. And the closest you can get to Alert on a commercial airline is to Iqaluit, about half way. If you’re curious, it would cost a family of four somewhere in the neighbourhood of $6000 to fly to Iqaluit from Ottawa in August. That’s not including the charter flight up to Alert, which seems to be of the principal that if you need to ask the price, you can’t afford it.

Sadly, I think Alert is now off the table as a summer travel destination. Lucky for me, it’s currently -42C with the windchill right here in Ottawa, so I can have my very own Arctic experience simply by waiting for the bus.

Sesame Street

As seen first at Phantom Scribbler’s place and soon thereafter throughout the Interwebs:

You Are Elmo

Sweet and innocent, you expect everyone to adore you. And they usually do!

You are usually feeling: Talkative. You’ve got tons of stories to tell. And when you aren’t talking, you’re laughing.

You are famous for: Being popular, though no one knows why. Middle aged women especially like you.

How you live your life: With an open heart. “Elmo loves you!”

The Sesame Street Personality Quiz

Feh. Elmo? To be frank, Elmo annoys the shit out of me. I’d rather be Bert, or Oscar. Maybe Maria. Even Mr Snuffleupagus would be better than Elmo. Heck, anyone from the 1970s Sesame Street would be fine.

We are loving our vintage Sesame Street these days. I’ve said before that my mother is convinced I graduated magna cum laude from university because I watched two hours of Sesame Street every day when I was six years old, and I’ve always had a soft spot for it.

It was Andrea who got me looking on YouTube for vintage SS clips. We started here (still my number one favourite), and worked our way through the Ladybug’s Picnic, the Pinball counter, the King of Eight, and this classic with the aliens and the ringing telephone. Simon and I have spent many quality hours with the laptop perched between us, watching these gorgeous old clips.

For Christmas, Beloved bought me the Sesame Street Old School DVD set, and it quickly became a family favourite. Maybe it’s the comparison with some of the drivel that’s on TV now, maybe it’s the rose-coloured glasses of nostalgia, but holy crap are those old episodes ever good. I may have to stick a fork in my eye rather than endure another hour of Tom and Jerry or Scooby Doo, two other old skool favourites the boys have recently taken a shine to, but I could watch those old Sesame Street clips for hours and hours. I only wish there were more of the old episodes available.

And speaking of pirated clips of childhood joy on YouTube, if you’re of a certain age and a certain geeky disposition, this clip of Luke Skywalker, C3P0, R2D2 and Chewbacca on Pigs In Space is worth watching at least once!

Suddenly it’s 1977 all over again. (Yikes – that was THIRTY years ago. Man, I’m old.)

Miscellaneous Monday

Oy.

There are days when you just want to bang your head against the desk. You know it’s going to be a long day when you get that feeling before you’ve even slurped your first blissful sip of coffee.

I’ve been having that stupid problem with my Blogger interface for about a week, where I could post titles but not content, and I couldn’t save any edits to previous content. I found out mid-week it was only from my work computer, and I was completely perplexed. Each morning, I’d sign in with increasing trepidation, hoping against hope that the problem would have resolved itself as silently as it arrived. And each morning I got a little more cranky when it did not resolve itself. I even posted on the Google Groups blogger help discussion board. No joy. I found creative methods to get my daily post up, by using a colleague’s computer and other trade secrets I won’t share with management potentially lurking nearby. Suffice to say, I was dedicated enough to you, Dear Reader, that I found a way.

This morning, I fired up the browser, signed in and clicked through the Blogger dashboard to the post editing screen, and again saw the same stripped down screen that greeted me all week. Then this morning, the hand of fate intervened. A propos of nothing, I pressed the F5 key to refresh the screen.

Problem solved.

I’m not sure if I’m a friggin’ genius or a frickin’ ijit, but at least I can blog in peace from my cubby again.

In other news, I’m officially down to my August pre-pregnancy weight, which is a bit of a relief. Another 5 lbs and my favourite jeans should fit again, and another 10 or so to my goal weight. I’m hot on the trail of a new daycare provider, and don’t even want to talk about it for fear of jinxing it. Let’s just say when I joked last week about finding “Mary Poppins right around the corner” I wasn’t far off. She’s choosing between us and another family, and I’ll know more later this week. (Please, please, please oh please let this one work out.) And the replacement iPod to replace the three that died before it has been working diligently and without protest for about 10 days.

I got nothin’ to complain about this morning. I missed the Oscars, though. Did you watch them? Anything worth gossiping about?

Blogger is holding today’s post for ransom. I can post titles but not content. More soon!

My dirty little reality TV habit

Sometimes, I file away little bits and pieces of information to blog about, and then I have no idea what to do with them. For example, there’s this bit via one of my new favourite blogs, Inside the CBC: a new reality television series in preproduction for the CBC called (wait for it) A Week Without Women.

A Week Without Women is an ambitious new series which explores what happens when all the women in a ordinary Canadian town leave for seven daysâ€¦ What happens to a workplace without women? What happens in a community? What happens at home when the men and children are forced to cope without girlfriends, wives or mothers?!

I have been noodling this little bit of information for days, and I just can’t come up with enough snark to do it justice. On the CBC, of all places! I would love to think that this could be a thoughtful exploration of gender roles, of the extra weight that women carry when they do a full-time day job and then pull another couple of hours on domestic chores, or even highlight how much more capable men really are at domestic and relationship issues than they are ever given credit for. But you know it’s not going to play out that way. Dollars to doughnuts, it will be contrived, sensationalistic, and divisive.

Of course, I’m hardly the one to be criticizing reality TV as a genre. Beloved and I tuned in as usual for the first episode in the new Survivor season – I wouldn’t miss it. The debut I’m really looking forward to, though, is the new Amazing Race all-star season. I wrote about Uchenna and Joyce when they won season seven of the Amazing Race, and nearly two years after the fact, I consistently get google traffic looking for news on whether they ever adopted or were successful with IVF. I even wrote to CBS a year or so ago asking for an update I could post on the blog, since I get so much traffic asking the question, but (amazingly) they failed to respond to me. I’m looking forward to next Sunday night (Feb 18) to tune in and cheer them on again. It would be especially satisfying to see them trounce Rob and Amber!

What’s your guilty TV pleasure?

On nudity in (okay, near) the workplace

For the most part, going to the gym has been a solitary activity for me. Back in the day, when I was first getting into going to the gym, Fryman and I used to go together, and I give him props for getting me into it in the first place. But in the last ten years or so, I’ve been content to go on my own and do my own thing while I’m there.

In the last month, I’ve started meeting up with a friend at the gym on Monday mornings. She arrives a bit before me, and so far we’ve been able to get two elliptical machines side by side to chat while we sweat. Trying to have a conversation while on the elliptical machine has added an entirely new dimension to my workout!

And since we work in the same building, we amble past Timmy’s and grab a coffee and walk over to the building together and use the shower facilities there, which are considerably less gross than the dingy, grungy shower facilities at the gym.

All of this I like very much: the extra encouragement to get out of bed and show up for the workout, knowing she is waiting for me; the companionship; the chance to make friends outside of work with someone who I’ve always liked. It’s all good – right up until the showering part.

It’s surprisingly difficult to carry on a conversation with a friend you like and admire – while naked and getting in or out of the shower.

I’d like to be more comfortable with nudity, really I would. Bodies are beautiful, I agree. No reason to be ashamed. On an intellectual level, I totally agree with you. But in practice? Where’s that extra-large bath sheet?

And why is it so much easier to be naked in a locker-room full of complete strangers than in front of one person you’d like to invite out for a chat over coffee? Would it be weird if I started showering in my bathing suit?

A helmet law for toboggans?

Normally, I tend to favour the legislation of safety. I’m all for car seat laws, and bicycle helmet laws, and non-smoking laws, and seat-belt laws. I think the state has as much of a role to play in these areas as the individual.

On this issue, I’m not so sure. Today in the Citizen, there was an article about sledding safety and it examined the question of whether there should be a law requiring kids to wear a helmet when tobogganing.

Never mind the law part, I got stuck on the question of whether one should wear a helmet when sledding. I have to admit, paranoid as I am about the boys’ safety, putting a helmet on them to go tobogganing would have never occured to me. Not that it’s a bad idea. Lord knows I did enough damage to myself as a child on snowy hills.

When I was six or seven, I caught the sharp edge of a plastic toboggan across the bridge of my nose when I couldn’t get out of the way fast enough one day while trying to walk back up a slippery hill. I clearly remember the look on my poor mother’s face as she opened the back door to let me in and took one look at me, wailing and with blood streaming down my face. Another time, back in the days before snowboarding I did enough damage to my ankle trying to ‘surf’ down a hill on a toboggan that I started the second semester of grade nine on crutches. In fact, I hurt myself when I (wisely, in retrospect) bailed off the sled as it headed at great speed directly toward a tree.

Neither one of those injuries would have been prevented by a helmet. If I’d hit that tree, a helmet might have been a good thing, mind you. I can see no harm whatsoever in suggesting kids wear helmets when tobogganing.

But to legislatively require it? That is, pardon the pun, a slippery slope. (Confession: as soon as I starting noodling this post, I knew I had to work that pun in somewhere!) Legislating something implies we have the desire, let alone the capability, to enforce it. Would there be tickets for helmetless sledders? Would helmets be required every time a child is on a sled? Sure, it makes sense on the big hills like the ones the NCC maintains at Bruce Pit and Conroy Pit (another aside – I love the Canadian-ness of city-maintained sled hills!) but what about the gentle slope in the park across the street? Would helmets be required there? Would a helmet required when I trade our wagon for a sled to negotiate snow-covered sidewalks?

And lastly, but perhaps most importantly, do you put the helmet over or under the toque?

Category: Life, the Universe and Everything