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?

Hot cold

I haven't been able to record any new music for quite a while, since my fuckin' @$%&* bitch of an ex-girlfriend stole my microphone when she moved out, along with a bunch of other stuff. Since she also stole all my money, I was in quite a bit of trouble there for a while just paying rent and getting food, replacing the microphone was pretty much out of the question. Now I'm doing somewhat ok again, and I ordered two new ones. After a crapload of research online, reading forums and reviews, I went for two MXL v67g large condenser microphones. They are fairly cheap low-end mikes, but the general consensus seems to be that they can be quite excellent for recording lower male voices and acoustic guitars. I have a fairly low voice, and I would mostly be recording songs with voice and acoustic guitar through the mikes, so I went for it. What little I've tried them out so far sounds excellent. Unfortunately I managed to catch the horrendous monster-cold of doom the day after they arrived, so I haven't been able to record much right now anyway. But as soon as I get better, I'm going to record a whole bunch of new songs and put them online.

Natural (s)election

I'm not American by any stretch of imagination, I'm not even from this continent. But I've been following the US presidential elections with some degree of curiosity, and I'm kind of flabbergasted by some aspects of it. Some of the things to come to mind is what seems to be 'inherited political loyalty', where people will vote for, and whole-heartedly support a political party for no other reason than that they and their family always did. There seems to be no brain activity involved in this. They don't seem to care what the party stands for, they probably don't even know what the party stands for. But my pappy always voted for 'em, so I'm gonna vote for 'em too.

*blink blink

WHY? Why in the name of Zeus's hamster would you do something that stupid? If you wanna vote for a certain political party, go right ahead, but for the love of God, at least find out what the party is all about and see if it makes any sense at all first! Don't throw your chance away to actually make a difference and make this planet a nicer place to live! You could be voting for a complete idiot who will make you regret every second of the next couple of decades! Think about what you are doing!

Another thing that stands out like an elephant in a Cessna is the Republican pick for vice president. There's been a lot of debating about whether Palin actually has any more or less experience with governing things than Obama. Among all the information and counterinformation and misinformation and stuff, I have no clue who to believe, and frankly, I don't really care that much. But after seeing the interviews done with Palin, I just can't help to think that no matter how flawed or inexperienced or [insert other negative assessment here] Obama is, please, please, please, please, pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeease don't let this person become the vice president of the United States of America. Have you seen the interview she did for CNN with Katie Couric? Seriously, this person honestly makes no sense at all. "Oh, but it's all angled to make her look bad because CNN is a liberal dog of the democratic party..." No, seriously. This isn't something CNN angled in any way at all, this is directly out of Palin's mouth, and she just doesn't make any sense. She's completely incoherent, to the point where I was just sitting there with my mouth open staring at the screen and wondering how come the world all of a sudden went completely insane and I didn't notice? What was McCain thinking? Go watch it yourself, it's all over the youtube. Just look up Palin and CNN or Couric or something. It's astounding.

Post-vacation

Aaah! Today was my first day of work after 10 lovely days of vacation. I had quite the un-eventful vacation, not really doing anything in particular, just chilling out and sleeping a lot at my girlfriend's place in Montreal. I played some guitar, wrote some more music, and just relaxed. Quite nice!

I got back to my apartment yesterday at around midnight, and I've sort of made it a habit by now to just inspect all the corners for spiders before I relax too much. My apartment, being a basement apartment in an old stone house, seems to be a paradise for spiders. I find a new kind of spider almost daily. This time was no exception. I found this grumpy-looking fellow sitting on the wall right next to the entrance. It looks like a tegenaria domestica, or "barn funnel weaver", although it seems abnormally large. Females of this species are normally up to 11 mm from nose to tail, and males are typically much smaller. This fellow is a male, you can tell by the palps, the things that look like long fangs with knobs on the end. But this guy is 13 mm from nose to tail, not counting legs. These nocturnal spiders are very fast runners and very often the culprit in cases where a creepy-looking running spider scares the crap out of someone, but they are actually quite harmless. Although they can give a nasty bite, they are not dangerous to humans and will usually run for cover when someone turns the lights on.