the amazing sparky

I hate metal doorknobs with a passion. For some reason I get an electric shock every time I touch a doorknob at work. I'm wearing the same clothes that I've used since last year and I didn't get shocked before, but I get zapped several times a day now. It's been like that for a bit over a month now, and it's really annoying. I'm starting to get conditioned into being afraid of door handles. Every time I go to open a door, I have an instinctive reaction that makes me pull my hand back just as I'm about to touch the doorknob, along with a sudden flash of fear. It's becoming a reflex to not grab the doorknob. So instead I stand there waving at the doorknob, looking like an idiot, before I finally force myself to grab the handle and get the inevitable static shock. It's quite painful. It's a zap big enough that it can be clearly heard. I sometimes get zapped even through my winter gloves.

And every single door handle at work is made out of metal. Seriously... I can't be the only one who gets electric shocks. Why can't they make the doorknobs out of plastic or wood, or at least coat them with plastic or rubber?

I also get shocks every time I touch cars, unless they have plastic door handles. It's becoming instinctive to never close a car door with my hand touching the metal. Instead, I push it closed by the window glass.

Under an umbrella

It was a very rainy day today in Montreal. I went to see Quantum of solace with Gin. A pretty good movie, actually. Pretty short for a Bond movie, and not overly gripping, but entertaining from beginning to end. On the way home from the movie theater, we each had our umbrellas up. Mine is a blue one that folds into a package about 10 inches long. The canopy folds into three layers. As we were walking, I noticed that my face and my hair were getting wet. It seemed a bit strange, it wasn't very windy, so the rain should blow up under the umbrella too much. I looked up, and noticed that my umbrella isn't actually waterproof. It keeps most of the rain out, but a fine spatter comes through the canvas. I also noticed some small holes in the seams right were it folds. It was raining under my umbrella too. Not a very good quality for an umbrella...
I noticed during a walk a few weeks ago that there is a shop in little Italy that sells umbrellas of a slightly more unusual kind. They had different shapes that the traditional models, and some of them had nicely atmospheric paintings printed on some of the sections. I might go there tomorrow and see how expensive they are.

My knee is acting up for some reason. I don't remember doing anything in particular, and it was fine last night. But when I woke up this morning I had an intense pain just above my left kneecap. It hurts as soon as I bend my knee and put any weight on it. Odd.
Seems unfair that my knee is hurting without me getting to hurt it while doing something fun at least.

Oh, for crying out loud...

Obama won. Who'd ha' thunk? I must admit I was quite cynically expecting all the covert dinner table racists, and right-wing extremists to tip the scale in McCain's favor, if ever so slightly, but I'm happy to say I was wrong. Maybe the US (and especially the southern states) aren't quite as stereotypically bigoted as they are sometimes made out to be. Good for them, indeed!

My cynicism wasn't entirely unfounded, though. What an incredible shitstorm of right-wing commentary has been sparked by the fact that Obama won... And in true right-wing nutjob style, most of it is so incredibly far beyond ludicrous that it's hard to even laugh about it. Are these people for real...? I performed a little experiment, just out of curiosity. I saw some blogs and articles talking about how Obama was becoming the next dictator, and about how he was bent on world domination and communism. Gee, I kinda thought communism and world domination by one person were kinda mutually exclusive...? Wikipedia defines communism like this:

"Communism is a socioeconomic structure and political ideology that promotes the establishment of an egalitarian, classless society based on common ownership of the means of production and property in general."

Yeah. Doesn't sound like there's much single-person dictatorship going on there...

Some people even compared this election to Hitler being democratically elected in 1917. (Well, actually, Hitler only became the leader of the Nazi party in 1921, became chancellor of a coalition government in 1933, oppressed any resistance with violence and propaganda, and finally took complete power in 1934 after the death of president Paul von Hindenburg, but hey, who cares about accurate facts?) So I googled the expression "Obama dictator". It got 912 hits. How depressing... One famous radio host, Bob Grant, apparently asserted that Obama had created an Obama flag for himself to put up behind him when he appeared in public. Apparently the guy didn't know that the Ohio state flag has a white "O" on it. Whoopsie... Jumping to conclusions? What?

So many people are just outraged by the fact that a not-white person won that it kinda makes me wonder what century we're living in. Nutcases ranting about how he's going to destroy America completely, bring about communism, become a dictator, become the next Hitler, start up a new Gestapo, etc.

For fuck's sake, people... He hasn't even taken office yet! How about giving the guy the benefit of a doubt, and see what he does for a while? I don't care how evil and scheming the guy might actually seem to you, he's not going to abolish democracy, dissolve the senate and imprison the entire house of congress in the next few years even if he wanted to. The guy won the elections, for crying out loud! The majority of the American people actually want him to be president. So how about letting him take a shot at it, and if four years from now you still think that he sucks, then just vote for the other guy. But seriously... Don't start griping about what a bad president he is before he's even started working as one, ok?