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Get Your Hands Dirty

Here’s an interesting article about how rats not exposed to a super hygenic lifestyle have better immune systems.

Click here for the article.

I totally believe in studies like this – I think that everything is out of control when it’s ‘hygiene this, hygiene that’. I remember Mom telling me about how there was a cup near the sink to get a drink of water. Everyone used it. Everyone didn’t get their own cup, that was silly! Nowadays, it’s a sin to drink out of another man’s cup (unless he can’t finish his beer).

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Electrical Storm!

“Attention, there is an electrical storm entering the area. Please get out of the water.”

That was the start of our first night of Petrie Island Volleyball. We could see this wall of black clouds coming closer but we decided to set up the net and play for awhile.

Once the lightning was getting close enough, we decided to pack it in and run for the cars. Less than 10 seconds of us all driving away, the torrential downpours hit us. Unbelievable. I’ve probably never seen anything like it.

Continuing up the road, we saw a lightning bolt hit the gas station up ahead of us. CRACK! The lights flickered as they tried desparately to take one final breath and then stopped.

By the time we got up the hill, I couldn’t see clearly out of the car windshield and I was thankful I was close to home.

Mike, Vero and I got drenched just running from the car to the safety of the house. Incredible force.

I proceeded to see probably 20 other lightning bolts in the sky, one of them smacking the lamppost in the parking lot behind my house.

The beautiful thing about this storm was the fact that I got to see our walkway in full force and I am proud to say that no water was collecting near the house! There was an area near far corner which collected a pool, but we figured that would eventually happen, and Mike noticed that after five minutes of the rain stopping, it had trickled into the lawn. BEAUTIFUL!

I also found out that the only reason my eavestrough was leaking was that there is a leak somewhere in it, not the fact that when it rains hard, it splashes over the eavestrough. EXCELLENT!

Electrical storms are a wild time. We could even see the hair on the girls heads starting to go up while packing up the volleyball net.

Volleyball itself was decent although it only lasted 15 minutes. We had a good turnout and next time we’ll know how to set up the net a lot faster.

Went to Joelle’s to catch the first two periods of the hockey game and then called it a night.

Unfortunately, as soon as I went to bed, the power went out so I had to remain awake for 20 minutes to set my alarm. THEN during the course of the night I noticed that my alarm clock had lost power again and was flashing. I reset it 3 times and I finally took it downstairs and proceeded to smack it (always the greatest troubleshooting technique there was ever was) and it seemed to work fine after that. This was around 1 AM so I was feeling pretty tired this morning.

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Review: Days of The New

I like how everytime I go to the used CD store nowadays (or garage sales) there’s a slew of albums from grunge/alt era that I wanted to own, so I’m just discovering them now.

Let’s take 1997’s debut album of Days of the New. What can I say about them?

Acoustic folk/grunge/country?/rock album. You can’t go wrong! His voice is something else also which just pulls you into the music.

But my only gripe with this album is that there are quite a few songs that sound the same! In fact at one point, the track had changed and I thought I was just entering a different verse of the song.

Perhaps the repetitive sounding guitar lessens his their subsequent releases and I would hope so.

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Review: Firefly and Serenity

Alright sci-fi geeks, listen up.

Joss Whedon (of Buffy fame) made this kickass sci-fi TV show called Firefly back in 2003.

I finished watching the 15 episode series (before it was cancelled) and my thoughts on it are this:

Awesome.

The show revolves around smugglers out in space, but since it’s only 500 years in the future, the customs of Earth are still there such as guns and dialect, but then you couple it with the new customs of the world (such as America and China being the supreme super power which rules the galaxy, hence the reason why everyone seems to know how to speak Chinese and English).

There’s a crew of 9 people and the main storyline revolves around two stowaways, River and Simon, River being a special girl who was in Alliance (the big superpower, think THE GALACTIC EMPIRE) custody and Simon broke her out of there because they were doing some crazy mind experiments on her.

So, like any good TV show, not every episode revolves around the MAIN storyline…you have your humour filled episodes in which the crew of the Firefly class ship Serenity has to deliver cattle to other planets, or when they show up to one town and the slave workers workship one of the crew who had an encounter with them in the past…

All in all, I highly recommend this series. Vero even gave the thumbs up after watching one episode and she doesn’t even like sci-fi. She thought the story was good and even if the setting was in space, it really had nothing to do with space.

Alas, the series was cancelled, but there was such a major fan following that a movie studio allowed them to come back and make a major motion picture out of it to tie up some loose plot points (and to give what the fans wanted).

Hence, the movie Serenity came out.

I watched this on Saturday and I was blown away. It follows the crew of Serenity being chased by the Alliance who are trying to take River back because of some secrets she knows.

All in all, I would have definitely loved this movie even if I hadn’t seen the series. It was a great movie, great acting, great effects, great STORY!!! I will probably pick this movie up myself seeing at how good it was. It was strange to see the settings a little difference (such as the entire ship of Serenity all dark and mysterious) as opposed to the TV show where it was bright. Also, some characters have moved onto other planets but you still get to see them during the movie.

All in all, two thumbs up for both the series and the movie.

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Lay Those Stones Down

Saturday’s operation of laying down my patio stones went off without a hitch. With the help of Rob and Mike, I can now look at my walkway and realize that there’s no way that there will ever be any rain trickling towards the house.

Saturday started off with a start out of bed and into the car to go check out garage sales for a crowbar. I have determined that no one ever parts with their crowbar, but they do part with halogen lights for $5. Sweet deal.

After picking up a crowbar at Canadian Tire, I started hauling out the stones and shortly afterwards, Rob and Mike showed up. After an hour of messing around, we realized that it would be a lot easier if we had the proper tools for the job, so off to Home Depot we went. Let me point out that this entire day went smooth due to Rob doing some bricklaying back in the day in Paisley. His knowledge helped us out immensely.

The day was done by 3:30 and I can’t say we worked too hard. However, I have realized that drinking beer while working in a 35 degree day isn’t the smartest thing to do. I was feeling pretty sluggish around 2:45 so I thought some H20 may do the trick. After we were refreshed, the job was finished pretty soon after that.

I dig the jobs that would probably only take 2-3 hours if we busted our ass, but take all day because we don’t feel like busting our ass.

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Top Bonds

  1. Sean Connery
  2. Pierce Brosnan
  3. George Lazenby
  4. Timothy Dalton
  5. Roger Moore

Thanks to Kevin for bringing this up.

Discuss.

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Review: X-Men: The Last Stand

How the heck can I review this movie without spoiling some of it? Being an X-Men fan of old (someday I’ll get back into comics…like when I retire!), this franchise is near and dear to my heart.

Unfortunately, to go along with my spoiler free policy on Palmer’s World, I suppose I can’t get into too much detail here, so I’ll throw a pro/con list out here.

Pros

  • Beast was AWESOME!!! So cool. Way cooler than Nightcrawler. Well, I suppose this is true if you actually like the Beast better than Nightcrawler.
  • Decent ending (? if it is?) to the whole mutant vs. human storyline. The 3 movies revolve around it – I can see the next movie just focussing more on one villain (ala James Bond).
  • Storm – Hey! She got to speak in this movie!
  • Excellent clip after the credits which follows the comics (from what I can remember of them) and opens up the new storyline I think.
  • Good action?

Cons

  • Well, if you’re fan of the comic books, then this movie may irk you a little because it goes against comic lore in a few ways. But if you don’t read the books, then you will probably find it enjoyable (as many friends have).
  • Angel – Come on. Did he even speak in the movie? Way too little screen time. Should have been cut out of the movie.
  • More characters like Angel – A slew of characters introduced for little or no reason.
  • Juggernaut – Ugh. I don’t know…I don’t know. In some ways it was cool to see him, in others, he was kinda silly.
  • Deaths – Am I spoiling the movie if I say someone dies? So be it. Someone dies. Kind of unnecessary.

Yeah, so…all in all, definitely not as good as the other two X-Men…but not the worst movie ever. Benoit thought it was so horrible that he put it in league with The Incredible Hulk. Good lord, that movie was awful…but X-Men 3 was nowhere near as bad. I equate X-Men with the equivalent of a bad comic book in the series – you still love the X-Men and what they do, but the comic just wasn’t the greatest (but you still like it anyhow). It’s like with anything you like – take a TV show for example. There’s good ones and bad ones.

Oh! Let’s take James Bond and the whole Roger Moore era for example. Boom. Point proven. A low point in the James Bond history. Not as low as Timothy Dalton though. I liked him better as an actor compared to Roger Moore, but I didn’t care for the rogue agent story they were going for in…License to Kill? Or was it The Living Daylights?

If you don’t read the comics, you’ll like the movie. If you read the comics, you will be disappointed, but hopefully not TOO disappointed. I would say that if the movie had another 30 minutes added to it, it would have been great. I found they cut down a lot of stuff that would have been better if they added 5 minutes to each major sequence (like a fight vs. Pyro and Iceman…give it 5 more minutes and it would have been mint.)

I invite whoever wants to chat it up with me about specific points in the movie to do so (I know Benoit has been waiting 2 weeks to talk about how it was the worst movie ever. I’m not sure how I want to oppose his points. It wasn’t the Hulk, but it sure wasn’t Spider-Man)

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Volleyball – Monday Nights

If anyone out there is a fan of superpiking volleyball, then head on out to Orleans on Monday nights at 6:30 – Petrie Island.

In lieu of my class being over for the summer, and I have a little extra time on my hands, I figured we should start up some fun volleyball for the rest (beginning?) of the summer.

We’ll start this coming Monday night at 6:30 and decide whether or not this is a good time for all of us or not.

iplaying: Stepchild – Solomon Burke (Don’t Give Up On Me)

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King of the Hill

This morning I had to go to the West Block at Parliament Hill to watch some MPs in action.

I must admit that I feel proud when I step onto Parliament Hill for business and not while being sloshing drunk (ala Canada Day. That’s the only day that I’m like that on the Hill. It’s not like it’s a monthly event people). I walk up and think “Hey, I’m not here to sight-see, I’m here for business!”

Granted, this visit wasn’t the most exciting as I was only there to observe a Standing Committee meeting, but there was this one time years ago when I was in a meeting in the East Block and then I had to follow some official type back to their office and instead of walking across the grounds, we walked UNDER the ground in a tunnel which connects the Main Block with the East block. COOL! I felt like I was in my own little secret passageway. It was wide enough for a golf cart.

Anyhow, I’m sure some of the more politically minded friends that I have (read: Paul Duffy) would have enjoyed it a lot more, but I can’t knock walking up to the Hill on a beautiful morning and checking out the going-ons inside the walls.

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Help!

So this Saturday I’m embarking on the ‘let’s level my patio stones so they water doesn’t drain TOWARDS the house.

Seeing that this is a giant job, it will consist of the following elements:
– 4 guys
– beer
– bbqed meat

I was wondering if anyone out there could help me with some details? Here’s how I envision the process:
1. Lift stones.
2. Redtribute sand.
3. Lay patio stones down.
4. Make sure they are on such an angle that a tennis ball can start rolling away from the house (learned this from the house inspector).

Other than that, I’m thinking that’s it? Eric was mentioning maybe renting a compactor but I don’t really know if that’s necessary?

Offer the Palmer some advice!

***Update – after reading Katie’s comments, I’m not sure if I made it clear that what we’re moving are those giant patio stones that go up a walkway…like there are five or six of them…I’m not talking about the brick sized ones. I’m not sure if that makes a difference or not.***