|
DelusionOfGrandeur
|
read my profile
sign my guestbook
Name: Ricky
Gender: Male
Interests: Reading novels, current events, satire, randomness
Expertise: Physics, world domination (I think they go together very well)
Occupation: Student
Industry: Research
Message: message me
Member Since:
6/17/2003
|
|
| [Regarding my acquisition of cardboard buses]
Sorry we can't mail out the cardboard cut outs as they are very big but
please call TransLink at 604-453-4500 and ask for the marketing dept
they may have some left sorry we don't have any more.
CMBC Customer Relations.
[They tried, though. They at least get an "A" for effort. Yes, I know there are no a's in "effort."
Let's see if the marketing department tries, too...]
| | |
| Hi Ricky,
Thank-you for your interest, if you could please let me know how many you require, we are able to sent a few out from our office. I would also require your address.
Regards
Customer Relations
[Looks like I'm getting some cardboard buses in the mail soon :) ]
| | |
| Hi,
I was at the opening of the Golden Ears Bridge on Sunday and saw people with cardboard versions of TransLink buses!! My friends and I thought they were so awesome, but the TransLink booth on the bridge ran out of templates for making the buses! No! Thwarted!!
Yes, that's for me and my friends, not for our kids or little siblings or nieces or nephews; we're all over 20 years old. We love the cardboard buses. Seriously. I would be willing to trudge over to a TransLink depot on the weekend or pay a small amount to have five templates mailed or otherwise delivered to me at Simon Fraser University.
Is there any way to make this happen?
Ricky
(Yes, I actually sent this to TransLink customer service. I wonder how they'll respond...)
| | |
| Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions:
1) Copy and paste into a note of your own. Delete my answers.
2) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
3) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
4) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
5) Tally your total at the bottom.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien + (such a richly imagined world; I wonder what Tolkien would have done with his stories if he had lived longer)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X (haven't read book 7; plots are very entertaining, but I don't think I could read them a second time)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee +
6 The Bible (I fell asleep partway through Genesis... not a commentary on the content, though; I'm just chronically sleep-deprived)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell +++ (from this, I learned to beware people in power)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller *
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare + (at least 15 plays and some sonnets... close enough :p )
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger * (I wonder why several psycho murderers were obsessed with the book)
9 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams +++ (the universe has a sense of humour)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck *
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell + (I never got over Boxer...)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood +++++ (Atwood rants are awesome... best shots at male sexuality that I've ever seen)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert X
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley +++ (1984 is the main totalitarian nightmare, but what about sex and mindless entertainment? Not that I am a Puritan or fail to appreciate fart jokes)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck +
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov *
63 The Secret History - Donna Tart
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy X
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath *
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X (well, I had it read to me and in a grade 10 class, no less... does that count?)
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert *
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad +
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare ++ (maybe if I read this again, I'll spontaneously shout out "JUST KILL HIM, YOU MORON!!!")
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Read: 24
Hmm... This seems low to me, considering that as a kid, my nose was buried in a book half the time. Maybe if the list had included more science fiction and fantasy books, I'd have more Xs. Curse you, literary establishment!
| | |
| I saw the aftermath of a death at a SkyTrain station a few weeks ago. Apparently, someone jumped in front of a train as it was coming into the station. It was a personal tragedy for someone, but little more than a gruesome spectacle for others.
This is less about the suicide and more about the spectacle. As I silently watched police officers clear the scene, I was joined by more vocal observers, one with a hand-held video camera. They talked excitedly about the death as they filmed the police cleanup.
I think that this kind of occurrence will become commonplace. As cameras shrink and become cheaper, they will be seen more and more in everyday situations. If you could wear a camera to catch fun, unexpected moments of your life, to analyze instructional replays of your mistakes, or to relive your greatest achievements, why wouldn't you? The way this is going, everything in your life will be on video somewhere, whether it's a security camera, your own camera, or some random stranger's camera. Your death will be online on a YouTube for showcasing mortality.
This is the new 1984: a constant state of surveillance, but not by a malevolent, oppressive, centralized power. Instead, your fellow innocent-ish, individual, powerless fellow citizens form a fragmentary Big Brother.
Though not as threatening as a coagulated Big Brother, it is, nonetheless, annoying. For all the things you have done, good or bad, your most lasting image might just be a montage of football-in-groin moments or your death-turned-spectacle. But at least if 1984 comes to pass, there will be an army to watch the watchers... and montages of people's manhoods being destroyed by sporting equipment.
| | |
|
