I've been there way too many times, but holy crap is the office impressive that I had a meeting in today. It's like the top eleven stories of a major skyscraper, with a giant double spiral staircase running through the whole thing and the second largest private art collection in Canada. Right out of Devil's Advocate or something… Maybe I should have become a lawyer? I do remember being very impressed with the view from my uncle's firm when I was a kid (one of the big Bay Street towers)…
Anyway, I saw the coolest thing on eBay… a steam powered sportscar (which you can read about here). I read a bit more about it in the steam car forums and it's quite remarkable — the owner converted a VW engine to run on steam. Very interesting!
So I know that my ice age entry from a few days ago is pretty shady science, but on a “misinterpreting short term chaos for long term trends” line of thinking, it's really something to see it still pouring snow here at the end of March. I mean, I know that when I was a kid it started snowing on Halloween, and would generally be warm enough for my brother and his friends to stomp through the swamp at the end April for his birthday, so I shouldn't be surprised at this length of winter, but it seems like that's a thing of the past. Nice to see it isn't.
I have really fond memories of growing up in the country… We had a big farm on the lake with springs, marshland, forests, and fields, and my brother and I had relatively free reign to explore. I regret Nefarious not having that, but at the same time, playing with the ducks at the park is pretty fun.
We saw an unpleasant reality of life being illustrated this evening when we watched this duck, which had a broken foot, hop around sadly as other ducks continuously ran up to it and bit it… Even ducks have an instinct to kill off the weak I suppose.
I'm totally in love with the crazy raked trikes from Phoenix Trike Works… When I first wanted a trike, I asked a couple custom motorcycle shops about building a trike just like that and no one was interested — they just wanted to do old man style Harley conversions. These are so much nicer I think.
The trike I ended up getting is arguably a little crazier. In the ligher end of things, this little rat landsurf-trike is very cute and looks like tons of fun.
Wow — I just saw this story on boingboing about a man (born biologically female) getting pregnant. What an amazing experience that would be for a man (and I assume that this is psychologically a man) to go through… I wonder what he's doing in terms of hormones (going off them, staying on them?), and what effect that will have on the child? Anyway, click the picture for the article.
Along those lines, let me again recommend the post gender interview I did last year… one of the most interesting interviews on the site I think.
We walked 9km today, down Roncesvalles and across Queen. One thing that struck me is that the majority of people asking for money on the street were old women, at least in this neighborhood. When we got more downtown it shifted to men.
We looked at robots in the window…
We walked down to the old Stainless Studios location that was affected by the giant fire on Queen Street. The building is still standing and is adjacent to the buildings that were completely destroyed, but there's a notice on the door that says it's slated to be knocked down if they can't repair it.
