The Breadbin

It's been, all in all, a pretty damned fine day in the park.

The weather's been all over the place: partly sunny, partly cloudy, a passing shower here and there, a couple of which were heavy enough to temporarily shut down all the rides and send guests scurrying for cover. And the lines for the rides were occasionally a little much to take: nobody likes standing still for any length of time, least of all you.

You've been everywhere in the park, it seemed. Know half the guests by name, and more than a few of the employees; hell, back in the mid-afternoon you ran the place yourself for a while, just to see how it was, and it was...pretty damned fine. Between ten and noon you built a couple of shops, a ride or two, and created a marquee eatery that looks as if it'll be satisfying guests for a century or longer. You'd spent a goodly part of the day behind the scenes, sometimes tending the gardens that you'd also created to beautify the park, sometimes out in the fi…

Just spent three days of *much* needed R and R Up North, in that fabled Land O' Lakes, at my Dad and Heather's place...the place I've nicknamed 'Sanctuary Much'...you get the idea.

It was a wonderful three days. Even though I could barely keep my eyes open. Maybe especially because I could barely keep my eyes open.

I didn't realize I was quite this bushed. But apparently so...I woke up at or around seven a.m. each morning, which is two or three hours later than usual. Come early afternoon, I'd be dead on my feet, and so would be off my feet and...you know how most afternoon naps, you just kind of doze, wandering dreamily in and out of sleep? Not me, not this time. Practically unconscious--so deeply asleep I didn't hear the alarm calling my firefighter father to this. (He needed a nap at least as badly as I did, but it was not in the cards: he didn't get home until after one in the morning. And he'd been up most of the night before. I don't k…

Read. And weep.

Really. Really?

If you don't have a Facebook account, there's something wrong with you?

Disclaimer: Facebook is the second-most visited page in my Internet peregrinations, just after Reddit. I frequently update my status, chat with friends old and new, and play several games. I really appreciate having most of my friends in one place. I don't understand Twitter because I already have a Facebook Wall that does the same thing.
I spend entirely too much time on Facebook. Online in general, really. It's one very good reason I flat-out refuse to buy a smartphone: give me the ability to go online away from home and I'll be sucked out of real life in short order. I'll become like those people at the Olympic Closing Ceremonies. Did you see that? Seventy thousand bodies in the audience, and it looked like sixty or so thousand of them had no interest in actually watching the God-damned thing. Every time they panned the crowd, all I saw was a panoply of ph…

You know what really grinds my gears? Repeated exhortations to "shop Canadian".

I understand the sentiment, and I agree with it on a limited basis: when you shop Canadian, you're protecting Canadian jobs. I get that. I really do. But protecting Canadian jobs should not cost me up to a fifty percent premium.

I work in retail, so I have some understanding of price drivers. If you feel you're getting gouged on an item, chances are very good to excellent that it's not the retailer itself that's gouging you. There are middlemen galore, each of whom takes a little cut...and all that red tape costs, too.

Example: Michelina's frozen "entrees". Made in Canada, packaged in the U.S., and re-imported. There's a reason for this, I'm sure, but nobody has been able to tell me what it is in ten years of asking. But I have no doubt that's one reason why they retail at $2.29 here versus 87 cents in northern Florida.

Bilingualism adds a cost to everyth…

"Curiosity, the Martian rover, is posting images to Twitter".

If you don't get a little frisson of excitement out of that statement, you're not paying attention. There is a robot on another friggin' PLANET posting pictures of that planet to the Internet.

Please watch this, it's worth five minutes of your time.



I have absolutely no patience with the people saying Curiosity is a waste of money that should be spent here on Earth. These people, too, have not been paying attention. The American space program is one of a very few government programs that has paid for itself many, many times over. Most of the tech we take for granted today has its origins in the space program. There are dozens of first-order "spinoffs" just for the elderly and handicapped. There is enough wealth in our solar system to make billionaires out of every woman, man and child on this planet--it's all out there for the taking, using R and D on existing tech only, no new breakt…