Category: Uncategorized

If you click here, you can play Asteroids with this blog.  Use the arrow keys to move and space bar to shoot. It works in Firefox and Chrome, not sure in IE. Press “Esc” to end your fun. Won’t work if you have Javascript disabled.

Sometimes I like to go to random baby name sites to find out what they might have to say about my name. I haven’t done this in a while but I somehow managed to stumble upon another baby name site. I looked up my name and it didn’t really give me any new origin information that I didn’t know already. They did, however, have a section called “drawbacks” which I’ve never seen before. As some of you know, a few people call me “Winnie” which I quite like actually. Not a drawback. I’ve never had anyone all me “Window”, probably because it’s downright stupid. I don’t get a lot of “Mervin” but a few people have called me “Irv” when I was younger and I didn’t mind one bit. No one has called me “Wind” probably because I’m not fast as such. On the other hand, I do like passing it and on a frequent basis as well. I’ve gotten “Winner” before because if you reverse the syllables in my name, that’s what you get. Who doesn’t like getting called a winner?

As a comparison, I decided to look up the name “Adolf”, which for reasons I hope are obvious is not the most ideal name for a baby boy. While the same site did point out that “Adolf” was the first name of the world’s most nefarious evildoer, look at what it had to say when it came to “drawbacks” of having that name:

Yes, that’s correct, according to this web site, there are no negatives to naming your baby “Adolf”. Yet my name has five separate reasons why it might not be a good name. “Honey, it looks like Adolf is the way to go, sorry Dr. Schrödinger.”

Loyal readers, I know many of you reside in all different corners of the world. Your support, even in many time zones away, is much appreciated. In the last several weeks, the majority of my posts have dealt with the local professional ice hockey team in my city, the Vancouver Canucks. I know many of you don’t follow ice hockey, so these posts probably have very little value to you. I wish for every post about hockey I could write a post about kittens playing in boxes or goats on the side of a cliff. Alas, take comfort in knowing the playoffs will end one way or another by about the middle of June. Then this blog will go back to being boring in other ways.

So who saw that girl flash her twins at the last game?

I just learned this evening that my entire apartment building and the one next to it will be without power for eight hours next Saturday. From 11pm on Saturday to 7am Sunday, the power will be off. They are installing the last bit of the power hookups to the retail complex that is being built beneath my apartment. For some people, this isn’t really a problem. For me, it is an inconvenience I’d rather not deal with. I know some of you are out on most Saturdays but I’m just as likely to be at home on that evening, playing video games or whatever, as I am out on the town.

Maybe I’ll make sure I’ll be out that evening so that I don’t have to spend a good portion of my evening in the dark without anything to do.

So it has come to my attention this week that some dude thinks the world will end this Saturday. Apparently, this dude is arriving at this conclusion from a Christian point of view. To be honest, I’m not very familiar with the aspects of Christianity that supposedly back up his claims. Now if we were talking about the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail, or the Shroud of Turin, I might have some more informed thoughts.

I doubt the world will end on Saturday. The world is as likely to end on Saturday as it was likely to end on those fictional Judgement Days that came and went in the Terminator mythos. Though one could argue that the work of Kyle Reese, Sarah Connor, and John Connor might have accounted for that. I’m mixing up fiction with religion now, and when I do that, I tread upon dangerous territory.

Anyways, in my experience, significant events that occur on this planet have almost no warning beforehand. Stuff just happens. One day you wake up and PSN is down. Another day, you’ll go get your paper and your neighbour is trying to eat your brains because he’s now a zombie. It’s very difficult to predict when bad things are going to happen. Look at the dinosaurs when they were wiped out by that comet. They had no warning. If they did, I’m pretty sure they’d send up two teams of dinosaurs to blow that comet up in dinosaur space shuttles. Instead, there was nothing those Jesus horses could do.

I’ll see ya around on Sunday!

In a previous post, I wrote about the air purifier I have in my home. Future Shop is currently having a deal of the day sale where the current deal is another air purifier. I knew I should have waited.

Cory Monteith loves to text (image courtesy of Getty Images)

If you’ve followed this blog for any amount of time you know that I follow the exploits of the local professional ice hockey team in my city, the Vancouver Canucks. You might also know that I very rarely dole out accolades for the team. I frequently criticize player performances and point out what I deem to be weaknesses. Does this make me a bad fan? No, I am not a bad fan in the least. So why do I appear to lack the same sort of enthusiasm some other fans have? I look at hockey from a much more realistic point of view.

Other fans have this unbridled enthusiasm that I just don’t have. They seem almost assured that “this is the year”. They profess that the Canucks are going to win every single game they play. After every game the Canucks actually do win, I often hear fans say, “I just knew they were going to win”. The truth is, hockey is a very tough sport. The outcomes of each game, especially in the playoffs, can come down to a figurative dice roll, one small mistake that can cost one team the game. No one team is perfect in the playoffs and losses will happen. Players will play under their level and they need to be held accountable.

So why can’t I just sit there and cheer like the rest of the fans? The reason is, as a fan, I’ve celebrated everything a hockey fan can celebrate, except for a Stanley Cup. In 1994, the Vancouver Canucks went to the seventh and last game of the Stanley Cup finals. Despite a heroic effort by Trevor Linden and the rest of his team, the Canucks fell to the New York Rangers by a score of 3-2. During that magical run to the finals, I witnessed and cheered every single success they had. They defeated three teams to get to the finals and nearly beat the Rangers for the ultimate prize in hockey. I cheered overtime goals that will forever be etched in my memory. I marveled at the goaltending performances by Kirk McLean. In the end though, they were one victory short of the final prize. As a fan, a part of me is still stuck in June 14, 1994 at the Madison Square Garden.

With that experience behind me, I don’t really care if the Canucks win anything less than a Stanley Cup. It’s ridiculous to celebrate in the streets after winning one game in a single series. It means nothing. Won round one? Been there, done that. Round two? Who cares, they were called Dallas in 1994. Round three? Oh, I’ve seen the end of that movie before, a guy named Greg Adams is in the end. Round four? Not even there yet? Maybe we shouldn’t count any more chickens before they hatch.

So until they finally close the deal and catch up to where I was about seventeen years ago, I’ll continue to criticize players who need improvement and watch each game with more nervousness than actual excitement.

The last several days have been some of the busiest for this blog. I received a large amount of visitors who were looking for either the “creepy Nashville kid” or the “little girl and her squirrel“. By the way, I have the #1 and #4 top ranked Google search results for those things. In the end, people were only looking for the videos and not anything specific to this site. Well, it’s better than having no traffic at all.

Don’t worry, I’ll get them to come back with my witty stories, like the time Mrs. Krabappel and Principal Skinner were in the closet making babies and I saw one of the babies and then the baby looked at me.

The image above is from my visitor logs to this site. Someone at Valve came for visit. I hope they liked what they saw. I always get giddy as a schoolgirl when someone famous visits this blog. If this is the reason we don’t see Episode 3 for another two years, I’m ok with that.

Last night after doing routine maintenance on some of my Little Pony collection, I went to bed and to wondrous sleep. Some time just after 4am, I was awoken. I didn’t snap awake, instead, I was gently pushed back into consciousness. There was a nagging stimulus that tugged at me until I reluctantly opened my eyes. There was a ringing which had woken me. It wasn’t the fire alarm. It wasn’t my phone. It was the buzzer to the intercom downstairs. It kept ringing. Now awake, I realized no one I knew would be visiting me at this hour. Very few people know where I live and even fewer know what the intercom code is. Anyone who would legitimately want to see me would have called me first. I looked over to my phone in dark. It was still and appeared to be sleeping. None of the indicator LEDs were blinking, so I hadn’t missed a call.

The ringing stopped. I laid in bed for a few more seconds before I realized my balcony over looked the street entrance to my building and more importantly, the intercom. I got up, slid opened the balcony door, and stepped into the darkness of the early morning. Looking over the railing I saw nothing. Who ever had buzzed me was gone. I stepped back into my apartment and slid back into bed. Unfortunately, I was now wide awake and also thirsty. A glass of water solved my thirst but I was still awake. It probably took another hour or so before I was able to fall back to sleep.

I wonder who that mysterious person was that stole an hour of sleep from me. Was it a random prankster? Someone who punched in the wrong code? Was it the future me, who came back in time to warn me about the impending zombie apocalypse? Maybe it was just a fault in the intercom software. I don’t know. What I do know is I’ve unplugged the connection to the intercom and won’t plug it back in until tomorrow morning.