Wordle

Wordle is everything the construction outside my window is not: fun and quiet. This is the word cloud it generated from an e-mail exchange I had with Boopsie (click the image for a legible size):

As a bonus, here is a song. You will not impress me by guessing what it is.

OK So I Lied: Hyperlink-Sassy Comment Ahead

Man, Reagan is so hot this year. There he is again at 0:25, averting his eyes from John McCain. Can we talk about the number of other ways in which this ad is super-awkward? How about the HORRENDOUSLY AWKWARD segue in the second sentence of the voiceover: "Half a world away, another kind of love... of country." How Lifetime of you, Senator. "He believes our world is dangerous, our economy in shambles." Inspiring stuff indeed. "Beautiful words cannot make our lives better." Oh, holy hell:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...." "?

Fish in a barrel, maybe, and it is the summer silly season. But this ad could be a look at how the McCain campaign is going to try to work around Obama's mad rhetorical skills and turn having the more cantankerous candidate into an advantage of a kind.

Blogging About Blogging

One of the things I have noticed about Mike's blog is that he doesn't just blog about personal "what I had for breakfast" material. He writes posts about technology, defence, fuel efficiency, all kinds of content that could, in fact, be interesting to people who know nothing about him and may not care to. He also does more "essay-style" posts where he takes on a subject at a bit of length rather than the time-honoured hyperlink-sassy comment combination. This is pretty cool, methinks. Of course, our blogs aren't the same animal at all; much of the purpose of Capital, Capital is to help keep in touch with people I love who are far away - in conversations with my aunts and uncles and with my friends from home, the stuff I write about here gets brought up a lot. But it's also an exercise for me, the unexamined life not being worth living and all. Right now I get access to a great variety of things to talk and think about just through my classes, but once I graduate in December, it will be important for me to make an effort to maintain varied interests in hopes of continuing to be (I flatter myself) an interesting person. So from here on out I'm going to try to do an increased amount of editorializing and wee research bits about current events and developments other than my breakfast choices. That could cover anything from gardening and cooking to music to the latest grindings of the political machine. We'll see how it turns out, but I'm looking forward to challenging myself a bit. Though if I've had a particularly good breakfast, I will obviously write about that!

To that end, gardening: I've recently invested in some cherry tomato plants (Lycopersicon esculentum), basil (ocimum basilum), and tarragon (Artemisia dracunculus). Ottawa gardening is much different than Edmonton gardening because we get actual heat and sun in the summer - Ottawa is in Hardiness Zone 5a rather than Edmonton's 3a (the harshest zone is 0, the mildest is 8, and NRCan's Atlas of Canada has a cool map up here). So I am looking forward to having fresh, delicious cherry tomatoes, possibly sliced up with some basil and bocconcini and drizzled with balsamic vinegar. Highly recommended. The plants already have a bunch of little green tomatoes on them, so with continued hot weather we should be rolling. Becca's dad tells me that Tumbler cherry tomatoes are great, but I've heard good things about the yield of Tiny Tims. It would have been nice to have the "draping" effect of a Tumbler tomato, but that's not what they had in the Market. We'll see how they go; I tend to get impatient and neglectful with plants, and Katherine and I managed to kill several rounds of basil when we lived together. However, basil is a bit finicky and trying to keep it going indoors through the winter didn't do it any favours. If anyone has fertiliser recommendations, though, I'd love to hear 'em. I'd like to go for something organic if possible, and would love to do a bit of balcony composting if my balcony were not slightly too small to allow for that - although really, one person's waste stream isn't going to amount to much useful compost anyway.

Back to the personal for a moment: Jesus, my street is noisy sometimes. All the windows are constantly thrown wide open now that it's summer, and the buses that go past are of the special Old-School Awoogah Vroom Vroom variety that make crazy amounts of noise as they decelerate to go round the corner. Alex and Becca told me that last week in the early mornings they amused themselves by playing "Garbage Truck Or Bus?" until I woke up.