Random Musings

With the nice weather, influx of tourists, and the kids out of school for the summer, the B-line’s and skytrains feel more crowded than usual, and at times, I think to myself it could not possibly be any more crowded.

More often than not, I have observed that when I proclaim something to be impossible, I am reproved by a youtube video that shows me anything is possible. The following youtube clip was forwarded to me.

I definitely had some serious LOL’s while watching this video, however, I was wary to show some restraint, as this video could be a tragic foreshadowing of the skytrain during the Olympics next year!

I was trolling the streets of downtown Vancouver earlier this evening with friends, as I am wont to do when the weather is nice, when I came upon a line of people wrapped around the block on Burrard Street near the Scotia Theatre (pictured above).

At this point, we had no clue of the reason for the gathering crowd, but I figured it was one of two possibilities: it was some sorta sale, or an impromptu memorial for Michael Jackson. As one who never misses out on a bargain sale, or the opportunity to be a part of pop-culture history, I rolled up my sleeves to ready myself for some serious elbow shoving to get through the crowd, when something in the air caught my attention: the delectable aroma of barbecued sausages, and Japanese spices that I could not identify.

It turns out, the crowd of people were in line waiting to purchase a Japanese hot dog. I wasn’t aware such a thing existed. The menu is pictured on the left. I have always been hesitant to buy food from street vendors, but we simply could not resist the aroma, and the crowd of people was sufficient validation for us that this place should be okay.

I got the Terimayo, where the sausage is smothered in Japanese mayo, nori, teriyaki sauce, and fried onions, oh my! (pictured below) I am so excited and happy to discover a new alternative to hot dogs in the city!!

When browsing through Google News today, I came across the following headline (left picture):

Has Swine Flu become so pervasive that it has taken on addition parts-of-speech? Grammar has never been my strength, but in this headline has ‘Swine’ been promoted from its usual noun usage to an interrogative adverb?

Perhaps one of the most exciting part of getting a new piece of electronic is the unboxing of the item itself. Veritable technology review sites such as CNet and Engadget have been harnessing this…um…euphoria in the form of videos and photo galleries detailing every step of unboxing for the masses to vicariously enjoy.

In the past few weeks, my 5-year old Dell laptop has been dropping heavy hints that it wishes to retire. What began as intermittent jams turned into regular blue screens of death and immense overheating.  After half a decade of service, my laptop wishes to end the grueling daily routine of being the laptop of a college student, and spend its remaining days roaming free in an open field chasing flying windows; though if it was a field dedicated to broken Dell laptops, it must be pretty crowded.

Nevertheless, I decided to switch to a Mac. User-friendly interface, no threats of viruses, and the endorsement by a friend who had been a die-hard PC until he switched to a Macbook Pro made it an easy decision for me. While I’m a huge fan of John Hodgman’s writing, those Mac vs. PC commercials convincingly showed me that being a PC is definitely not the way to go. So, I got a new mac, and below are the unboxing pics!

Shipment Box

Box opened

The Mac case opened!!

Gasp! There's the Mac!

the mac and accessories

the plastic casing of the mac opened

ports....

some kind of monitor protector

Mac loading up

the welcome screen

No, I have not forgotten that I have a blog – I have been too preoccupied with other things. Upon coming across Eastwood’s Elixir of Life, my blogging energy is revitalized, and what a better way to segue back into the blog world than to report a fire…or at least a pulled fire alarm on campus.

I was walking southbound on East Mall Rd when two screaming firetrucks approached and stopped in front of the Food, Nutrition, and Health Building. I tried to get closer to the action, but was stopped by a firefighter who declined to comment on the situation. All the firefighters appeared quite relaxed, and there were no visible signs of smoke and people injured, so perhaps some ninkinpoop burnt toast.

The past few weeks had been filled with work, stress, bad roommates, more work, jerky people, acne breakouts, and bad roommates. Did I mention bad roommates? They were the type of weeks I’m thankful to be over with, and will suppress all memory of (snap! just ended a sentence with a preposition…the sky didn’t fall). In the midst of it all, I encountered two incidents on the bus that were suprisingly uplifting.

I actually went an entire night without sleep; I got up at 7:30am (re: Good Morning!), worked that entire day, that entire night, and the next entire day. In the university community “burning the midnight oil” may be the norm for some, but I am someone who requires 7 to 8 hours of sleep. My circadian rhythm was solid like Barack (take that, Sarah Palin!). Nevertheless, at some point I found myself taking the bus during the early commute when the bus was packed, and I had nowhere to sit. I was quite loopy from sleep deprivation, and I remember having difficulty keeping balanced. A skater guy (he was holding a skateboard, hence my labelling) who looked no older than 14 or 15, tapped me on the shoulder, and offered his seat to me. I was so startled/touched by his random act of kindness that I remember having the urge to ask him if he was a unicorn, and reaching out to touch him to see if he was real. With so many evil forces in the world (terrorists, cellphone companies, the Republican party), that young person reaffirmed my believe that there is still some good left.

The second incident happened a few days ago. A girl had her head leaning against the window on the bus and was doozing off to sleep. A guy to this girl’s right was getting up to pull the “stop request” cord that was next to that girl’s head. The bus jerked violently and caused the guy to loose his balance and accidently slap the girl on the face. Now, it was not a slight nudge or prod, it was an open palm, clean slap across the face. There was an audible gasp, and perhaps communal teeth clentching and toe curling amongst the passengers.

What happened next truly amazed me. The girl, reflexively, broke into laughter and for reasons beyond my comprehension, so did everyone else including me. 

In my mind, being slapped across the face is perhaps the most insulting thing one could do to another. Such a denigrating insult is usually reserved for extreme situations such as on soap operas when adulterers are confronted. Hence, one must have committed a severe vice to warrant a slap on the face. The last place one expects to be slapped is by someone losing their balance on the bus, and perhaps, it is this unlikely occurence that we found funny. It was quite a Jackass momment.

Did you know that when you buy ice cream at the grocery store, unless the ice cream carton specifically states the words “ice cream,” then it is not actually ice-cream?

Huh? That was precisely my reaction.

Ice cream, traditionally, is made with milk. Recently, manufacturers have been churning out (pardon the pun) “frozen desserts” that look and taste like ice cream, but is actually made with vegetable oil.

I am not claiming that frozen desserts (made with vegetable oil) is in any way hazardous to one’s health, or that it is in any way an inferior product to ice cream. I’m just pointing out that one should pay attention to the labelling. When I pick out ice cream at the grocery store, I consider flavour and price, and I’m complacent to the fact that if the carton has a picture of something that resembles ice cream, then it is real ice cream.

When I was first forwarded the article link, I raced to my freezer only to find I’ve finished off my carton of ice cream already, but I still have 1/3 of my McCain Chocolate Cake (slurp!) and I ain’t care whatz in that coz I’m finishing that sucka off.

My roommate, however, has a carton of frozen dessert. Perhaps I shall break the bad news to him after dessert…no wait before.

During a safety seminar a few days ago, the instructor talked about emergency plans, and how we should all have them in case of..well…emergencies. The notion of emergency plans gave me a flashback to an incident that happened in rez a short while ago.

At 3am in the morning, the fire alarm went off in our residence building, and we had to evacuate. We ended up waiting ~20 minutes outside in the freezing cold. We realized there was no actual fire, and some joker had probably pulled the fire alarm when we were allowed back in and fire trucks did not even show up.

Up to that point in my life, I was fortunate to not have experienced an evacuation situation. However, in the back of my mind, I thought if I had to make a quick escape, I would know to grab my essential items such as my wallet, keys, phone, lecture notes (priceless), and perhaps some important documents such as my passport.

Well, it turns out I grabbed only my phone, and I got to thinking: in an emergency situation, are we really capable of doing what we plan/think we should do?

In life, many disasterous events lurk among us, and may strike at any time: the asian tsunami, hurricane katrina, Madonna’s arms, Cloverfield Monsters….nobody saw them coming, and when the next one strikes, are we as apt to handle it as we think we are?

I was talking to a friend today, and found out she was facing a predicament where some unrelenting, competitive jerks in her program were getting the best of her. I offered to “pull a Tonya Harding” for her, having meant it to be a witty remark, and to my surprise she had no idea what I was talking about.

A civilized society, in general, is one with laws, rule abiding citizens, a formed government, literacy, an economic system, etc. While I value these qualities, the criteria that sits at the top of my list is common knowledge of the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan story and the ability to make witty banters referencing this incident in everyday conversations. Thus, I would like to devote this blog post to first introduce the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan story, then cite an example where I’ve satirically referred to it in the hopes of raising its awareness in our community, hence allowing me to refer to it without the response of puzzled looks.

Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan were teammates on the 1994 US Women’s Figure Skating Team. Their relationship is perhaps better defined as rivals, as they are each other’s greatest competition. During a skating competition, Tonya Harding’s husband hired some guy to strike Nancy Kerrigan’s knee with a forklift, thus impairing Kerrigan’s ability to skate. Whether Tonya knew of the attack is of much debate, and irrelevant for this post. Harding went on to win the competition, arguably by eliminating Kerrigan from the competition. Thus, the term “pulling a Tonya Harding” refers (often comedically) to using underhanded methods -eg.  striking someone below the knee with a forklift – to eliminate one’s competition.

A few summers ago, when I was working as an undergrad summer research assistant somewhere, our lab encouraged us to keep our lab benches tidy by holding a monthly competition of whose lab bench was the tidiest. Since I’m a slob, I was never in the running for the top prize, but my labmate always kept his lab bench in such a prestine yet functional state that we all thought he would be a shoo-in to win. Without any exaggeration, I’m certain had Martha Stewart herself witnessed his lab bench, she would christen it “a good thing.” Nevertheless, another person always won, despite having (in my opinion) a messier bench. As a consolation to my labmate, I satirically offered to “pull a Tanya Harding” for him so that he could win (hardy har har).

As I will have to return to being a patron of the Vancouver Public Transportation system very soon, I thought I would spend a moment to reflect on my last experience on the bus, which was during the midst of the blizzard of 2008.

I took the bus a total of 6 times, and on no less than 3 occasions, I was forced to abandon the bus because it was stuck. Was the bus stuck because it was caught in the snow? No. Was the bus stuck because a car/bus/truck/etc. was stuck or had an accident ahead of us? No. Was the bus stuck because a trolley bus broke down ahead? Hell yeah!

On all three times the bus driver forced me and my fellow passengers to abandon the bus, a trolley bus had broken down ahead. More specifically, the cable atop the trolley bus had snapped off. One time when I was on the 99B-line, I actually witnessed a cable snap off a No. 17 bus while it was making a right turn. I feel that I have experienced enough trolley bus failures to make the generalization that they break down faster during a winter storm than Sarah Palin during a sit-down interview (zing!!!!!!…..oh no he didn’t!).

I wish I had been able to take a better picture, but the scene is invariably quite chaotic when a bus is abandoned. My fellow passengers and I are scrambling about, elbowing each other, yelling into cellphones, as we try to find another means of conveyance. It is reminiscent of the scene from The War of The Worlds when everyone is rushing to catch the last ferry, except Dakota Fanning isn’t screaming in the background, and instead of huge alien robots, everyone is running from a 2-inch thick piece of cable lying motionless on the ground.