Lawn chair driving

Only in Saskatchewan would someone use a lawn chair in place of a driver's seat in a car.  Now I could understand wanting a handy beach chair in a person's car, especially if one lived near a beach and the weather was warm and sunny at almost all times.  But where I come from the normal thing to do is take out the beach chair in the spring - usually around the time the snow starts to melt, and put it away when the snow arrives again - usually in November.  However, there are always exceptions to every rule.  Take Dairy Queen for example.  People will line up at an outside the DQ booth in minus twenty celcius weather for a DQ treat and think nothing of it.  Mind you, when your brain is almost as frozen as the dairy treat it really doesn't make much difference.  So, keeping that in mind, I can see - sort of - the logic behind the man with the lawn chair.  What is a little - odd - shall we say, is using it as a car seat so that he can drive.  Lawn chairs are notoriously tippy.  Not to be confused with tipsy, which apparently this particular person was.  What we don't know is why.  Did he have a sudden urge to go ice fishing and required a chair?  Was his car seat on the driver's side seatnapped?  Did his wife remove the seat so that he wouldn't drive drunk?  Is this an ongoing saga and will we ever know how it all ends?  Do we really care?  I know I don't, but until I can have DQ in minus twenty weather again and think nothing of it, I'll let the whole thing go.  Until next time when I have some icecream.

Medvedev, Simon Cowel and other entertainers

A good friend of mine posted on facebook that he saw a picture of Medvedev and thought it was Simon Cowell, then couldn't understand what Mr. Cowel had to do with NATO.  I do that kind of thing often.  Confuse people, literally and figuratively.  I still have trouble telling some of the actresses apart.  Take for example Melanie Griffith and Meg Ryan.  While I know they are not alike, I have always managed to confuse them with each other (not confuse as in we are having a conversation and they don't understand what I'm talking about).  Same thing with Susan Sarandon and Sigourney Weaver (see last sentence).  Again they look nothing alike, but in my mind they are interchangable.  Kind of like one size fits all pantihose, or any non-gender specific clothing, or any one of the new cadre of actors/actresses and musicians.  Perhaps it's the way my brain works.  I do, after all, tend to confuse headlines coming up with something much more interesting than what was there, but still confusing. But lets get back to the issue of Mr. Cowel and Mr. Medvedev.  I can certainly see how my friend could get confused.  Both men are in the entertainment business, though many might not think so.  Think about it for a minute.  Ok.  Feeling better?  Oh good.  Me too.  It's hard on a person when they have to think about all the similarities between Mr. Cowel and what he does and Mr. Medvedev and what he does.  So lets just talk about a couple of them.  Hmmm.  Which ones shall we choose?  Both are from Europe, both have interesting jobs and both need attitude adjustments.  So what we need is to put both men in a room together and see what happens.  Does Mr. Medvedev use all his diplomatic skills to persuade Mr. Cowel to not be so sarcastic and teach him the fine art of stick handling in a diplomatic situation (think comments on American Idol when Cowel was there), or does Mr. Cowel teach Mr. Medvedev how to shoot from the lip and forget the whole diplomacy thing?  Who would win this competition and who really would care?  Not me.  I'm going back to sleep until next time when something almost interesting happens.

More from Science

Don't you just love it when scientists make a big announcement that they have proven some thing or other is really beneficial?  Take, for example, chicken soup.  For absolutely ever scientist said there was no empirical, scientific proof that chicken soup really did make you better.  It was all an "old wives tale" they said, poohpoohing all the wise old women who knew better.  Only after some bright bulbs decided to actually test chicken soup and found that it really did have healing properties did science take things seriously.  In the mean time I think I heard millions of "Old Wives" laughing up their collective sleaves.  Now, it appears, that scientists have once more proven what anyone with a brain already knew.  Chocolate, especially dark chocolate, is really good for you.  It has, so they say, an effect on the body that helps lower blood pressure.  So not only does chocolate taste good, it is now scientifically proven it is good for you. So does this mean now that when someone tells me to boil onions and add honey to the liquid that I need to find some scientific journal, or for that matter, scientist to give me the go ahead?  What about genetically modified onions?  Do they count?  Will it keep away the mutant mosquitoes?  How about regular ones?  Vampires? - oh wait - that's garlic.  Personally I can't see why I'd want to drink onion juice, honey or not, but many of the women here swear by it as a cold remedy.  True, it would certainly put off anyone who didn't have a cold from hanging around, but where's the data?  Where are all the nice tables of numbers and graphs and charts?  Where is the double blind test to prove this?  I have no idea, but if the Old Wives around here swear it works, I think I might take their word over some scientist, even if that scientist did test the theory (see chicken soup).  Until next time, I'm taking something less potent for my cold and eating a big bar of chocolate.

Mutant mosquitos

Maybe it's just me, but somehow having mutant mosquitos flying around just seems wrong.  It's bad enough with regular mosquitos - you know - those irritating insects that buzz in your ears and bite and leave you itchy and uncomfortable at best.  Hmmm sounds a lot like my students but without the biting part (they are, after all, teenagers and unless they happen to be vampires, don't usually bite).  Now scientist have done something that could be incredibly stupid or incredibly smart, but only time will tell.  They've genetically modified male mosquitos.  I'm sure their intentions were good, but then so was Dr. Frankenstein, and we all know how that turned out.  Besides, mother nature already did the whole mutant insect thing, and look what  happened.  In my opinion, scientists should have left the whole blood sucking thing to vampires and left mosquitos out of the equation.  They do a good enough job as it is (vampires and mosquitos, not scientists).  The question then is, what happens when the mutant mosquitos mutate?  We all know they have a very short life span, but how many generations of mutant male mosquitos will it take before we have man size mosquitos buzzing around looking for lunch and giving us their multifaceted eye as the next snack?  Personally, I would prefer my mosquitos, as irritating as they are, less than human size.  Maybe a little bigger so they are easier to see and kill, but not much.  One of my coworkers has bats in her roof (as opposed to bats in her belfrey) and they do a fine job of controlling mosquitos.  Does this mean that if things get out of hand, scientists will mutate bats?  What about other mosquito eating insects like dragon flies?  Will they get bigger too?  Shades of Jurrasic Park!!  Until next time, I'll be watching out for giant mosquitoes.

Behind the 8 ball and other stuff

It never fails.  Just when I think I'm on a roll and things are going smoothly, I find myself playing catch-up (not to be confused with the Katchup we use on or in food).  This year I'm trying to sort both myself and my students out so that we can have a semi-productive year.  I say semi-productive because it takes the first year at a new school to learn both the written and unwritten rules of a school.  What do I mean by unwritten rules?  Well, you know, everything that's not covered in the student or teacher manual that you are supposed to know because you learned to read minds in university - well ok, maybe not read minds exactly but certainly guess accurately.  It's all part of the fun of being a new teacher.  That combined with learning a new language (or in this case new dialect of a vaguely familiar language), dealing with students whose reluctance to do anything remotely related to work (they make the most stubborn mule seem obedient and placid) and parents who firmly believe that either a)  their darlings are absolute angels or b) all the problems in class are the teachers fault because, you guessed it, their darlings are absolute angels.  So between that and dealing with a combination of cold and allergies (I still haven't figured out if my cold is allergic to something, or I'm allergic to colds) life has been grand.  Could be worse, could be better, but definitely worth a comment or two.  Now that I'm mostly sorted out life should be getting back to normal.  Which reminds me - what exactly IS normal anyway?  Until next time, coffee is calling me.