And I’m not talking about that pesky butterfly that keeps making hurricanes. There’s an actual Weather Modification Office in Beijing, tasked with ending droughts, firefighting, and now making sure that the weather is nice for the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games.

This came up in a special I just saw on CBC called, cleverly enough, “Beijing 2008″, about how China is preparing for the games. I love the Olympics, right down to the theme song (as has been well documented—it actual gives me goosebumps), so it was a good show for me.

Now, really all the Weather Modification Office can do is make it rain sooner rather than later, so if it looks like it’s going to rain on the opening ceremonies, they can seed the clouds and hopefully make it rain the day before instead. Something along those lines. It’s hard to say whether it actually works or not (it definitely won’t stop a big storm) but the Chinese government seems to be banking on it. They’ve guaranteed clear skies for the event.

If you’ve been reading anything about the games, you might have also heard that they’re cutting down on polluting cars. At first all I heard was that they’re just reducing numbers, but they’ve also got special cameras that, much like speed cameras can detect how fast you’re going so the police can pull you over, can detect how much pollution a car is giving out. And just like speeding, they pull you over and can even ban the car from the road. All in the hopes that marathon runners (among others) will have clear(er) air to breathe this summer.

So yes, China controls the weather.

I think it’s pretty obvious. There’s going to be an election this year.

The Tories have had over two years now, well above the life-expectancy of a minority government of about a year and a half (as far as I’ve heard, anyway), and already today I’ve heard of two entirely different ways the government could fall this session.

Of course, there’s the budget, but that’s always a good excuse to topple a government. So maybe that’s not so exciting. I haven’t even heard rumours about any ultimatums or back-room deals yet.

Then there’s the other thing. Afghanistan. There’s a motion to extend Canada’s mission there until 2011, extending the current 2009 timeline. Those confident Conservatives have gone and made it a vote of confidence, so if the parliament doesn’t pass the motion, we all head to the polls.

All this talk about whether Canada should stick with the mission until “it’s finished” or pull out now and save our troops from an unending struggle sounds very much like a conversation I’ve heard south of the border, swapping one middle eastern country for another. I often suspect Canadian politics just saw something exciting going on and wanted its own.

As far as I know, nobody’s saying that we should never have started a war with Afghanistan in the first place, unlike that other country. So whereas that’s one of the principle reasons cited for the American withdrawal from Iraq, it doesn’t exactly fly in the case of Afghanistan.

Now, I’ll admit, I know nothing about what sort of progress is going on or what sort of mission our mission actually is. I like to picture it as peace-keepers building schools, playing with children, and picking daisies, but I know that isn’t right, so I also try to picture it like Afghanada, which a slight bit more realistic. What I do know is that this is not an issue of Canada mucking around in another country uninvited, it’s a NATO mission. In fact, one of the stipulations of the current motion to extend our participation in the mission is that NATO needs to send more troops from other countries to help.

That’s about all I have for an argument for staying in Afghanistan. The reason we’re all reminded of by this sort of conversation doesn’t actually apply here, and, also, go team NATO. Clearly, not a very firm, lucid, or well justified argument by any means. Nonetheless, it certainly doesn’t seem like something the Liberals (who agreed to it in the first place), the NDP, or the Bloc should mutiny over. Sure, it’s more dramatic than the budget, but I’m not going to be inspired to vote for the dissenting parties over it.

In an article on Heath Ledger’s death, TMZ wrote this:

He was found dead in his bed in one of his residences in Soho by his housekeeper at 3:35 PM ET today. Law enforcement sources tell TMZ they believe it was not a crime, adding that prescription pills were found near his body.

http://www.tmz.com/2008/01/22/heath-ledger-is-dead/

Who wants to bet rumors of suicide will be all over the place? Maybe they’ll be true, I don’t know, but it sounds suspiciously like what started the urban legend that Mama Cass choked to death on a ham sandwich. Just because someone is dead and something is found next to them doesn’t mean that it caused their death!

A few days ago I heard on the news that Sook-Yin Lee was approached about doing a naughty photo shoot for a naughty magazine, but CBC said they’re fire her if she did it. I didn’t think much of it at the time and just filed it away as an interesting tid-bit.

Imagine my surprise when last night, knowing nothing about it beforehand, I sat down to watch the movie Shortbus and only a minute into it I see Sook-Yin herself getting eaten out on a piano. The scene quickly progressed to all manner of graphic (as in pornographic) kama sutra like acrobatics, intersperced with someone trying out a little autofellatio and another being put in his place by a dominatrix. Not exactly CBC approved material, no doubt.

It wasn’t any surprise when I did a little searching around the internet about the movie. As it turns out, CBC threatened to fire Sook-Yin back in 2003 when she took this role as well. It was only through much pressure from other musicians, actors, and artists, as well as the public, that they backed down. I don’t know if she’d get the same support for a pornographic spread in Playboy, though. (If that’s even what it was. I don’t remember the details, so the offer might have been more tame than that.)

That is was Sook-Yin, who I wake up to and spend every Sunday afternoon with via CBC’s Definitely Not the Opera, made it feel like I was watching a friend go through her trials and tribulations on screen. Is that creepy? Maybe. But I already felt a connection with a lot of the characters, seeing a bit of me in all of them. Maybe that’s also a bit creepy. But that’s what good movies should do, right?

Today was the day of a provincial election here in Québec. I chose not to vote, because I’m still maintaining my official New Brunswicker status for such things, but I did watch the coverage on TV tonight. I noticed two things:

1) Each of the three english networks are so desperate for results and something to talk about early in the evening mere minutes after the polls have closed, they put up results from some ridings with only 5 or 6 votes counted and say what a surprise the standings are so far. Come on guys. When the frontrunner only has 3 votes so far, each of his opponents have 2, and there are still several thousand votes to be counted, I think it’s a little early to talk about what a surprise it is that Mr. So-and-so is winning the seat. I think everybody needs to calm down.

2) When I say I watched the election coverage I actually mean I watched the two minute updates during the commercial breaks in 24, but I loved the way the anchor tried to tailor the coverage to 24 fans.

“Well everybody, while Jack tries to solve his latest problem, Jean Charest is facing a problem of his own here tonight….”

“The Liberal Party needs to get some more seats fast, because time is ticking, just like on 24.”

“And from one thrilling drama to another, welcome back to our election coverage.”

“Looks like it’s going to be a minority government here tonight, which means once and for all that Charest is definitely not as cool as Jack Bauer.”

Ok, I made that last one up. None of them are exact quotes anyway. I wasn’t paying that much attention. Really what I’ve been doing is working with a computer program my lab partner and I have put together for our research project. We call the latest version “the puffy plotter”, and that alone I think is more entertaining than the election.

The disturbing thing is that, according to one pundit on CBC Radio, this is one of the best outcomes Stephen Harper could have hoped for. He doesn’t have to worry about a referendum, his federalist buddy is still in power, and there’s huge support for the closest thing this province has to the Conservative Party, the right-wing ADQ. Combined with rumours at the federal level of poll numbers turning significantly in favour of the Conservatives and an election looming in the spring, this makes another term with Prime Minister Harper seem all the more likely.

I’m going back to play with the puffy plotter.

This year, daylight savings time is starting earlier, and as with any change, there are people out there who love it and people who are upset about it. They all seem to be forgetting one thing, which I’d like to take this opportunity to remind everybody of—changing the numbers on a clock does not actually change what time it is.

Take this guy, for example, who is happy to have more daylight savings time:

Jerry Smits, who runs his own painting company in Southern California, says that he can get more work done with the time change. Since exterior paint has to be applied by 3 p.m. to dry properly, Smits can squeeze in another job during daylight saving time.

– “The new daylight saving time: Will it really work?“, Columbia News Service

Listen, Jerry. Putting the clocks ahead does not actually make the sun set an hour later in the day. There are no more hours of sunlight than the day before. If you want to get more work done, just wake up when the sun wakes up. You can call it three in the afternoon if you want and work until midnight in bright sunshine, but the sun’s going to set at the same time regardless.

Same goes to you farmers. Cows do not observe daylight savings time. They do not set their clocks back or forward an hour and expect you out in the barn to do the milking when the big hand and the little hand are wherever they like the big hand and little hand to be when being milked. If anything they probably get confused when you start showing up an hour early in the spring.

The people who tend to think daylight savings matter are actually the ones to whom it matters the least. If you require daylight to do your work, you’re working with animals who know no time, or doing anything else that depends on the day/night cycle, then the arbitrary numbers on a little display don’t change anything about what you do. For the rest of us, all that changes is how bright it is when we happen to leave our classrooms and offices to venture into some other builing.

The only thing that actually changes the number of hours in the day is the tilt of the Earth’s axis and its orbit around the sun, and no act of the US Congress is going to change that.

The local news on CTV this afternoon reported that London’s Selfridges department store is selling the world’s most expensive chocolate heart. (I couldn’t find a link on CTV’s website, but the story is here. The first two paragraphs are word for word what was said on CTV.)

When I heard this from the kitchen, I had visions of extremely pure high grade cocoa carved into a large intricate masterpiece of design, perhaps with rich truffle and cream fillings. However, when I came into the living room to see it for myself, all I saw was a boring hollow cheap-looking chocolate shell that just happened to have a half-million dollar diamond ring inside.

It makes “world’s most expensive chocolate heart” a bit of a misnomer. It’s only as expensive as it is due to its having some diamonds inside. If I could get my hands on a slightly more expensive ring I could easily whip together a slightly more expensive chocolate heart and have news teams knocking down my door too. Hell, I could stick it in an oatmeal cookie and have the world’s most expensive one of those instead. If I said to somebody that I’ve put together the most expensive meal ever made they’d expect several courses of the finest cuisine put together by the world’s finest chefs, not a burnt chicken breast and a diamond ring stuffed in the mashed potatos.

I just get annoyed when someone promises quality chocolate and disappoints me. The great thing about chocolate, as opposed to wine and cars and diamond rings, is that even the highest quality specimens is only a few dollars. You can get a fine bar of 70% dark chocolate for less than $5, and it’ll be far more enjoyable than the most expensive bottle of wine. If somebody gave me a Lamborghini, I’d sell it for tuition and a chocolate bar.

My favourite to date is Isis Luxury Belgian Dark Chooclate. An expensive sounding name for $2.89 worth of chocolate. For those in the downtown Montreal area, you can pick one up at Eden, in Galleries du Parc. One square after dinner is perfect. And a word of warning—Lindt’s version of the 70% cocoa dark chocolate is the worst I’ve ever had. For a few more selections, see my page on chocolate.

I don’t know why I’m such a big fan of Canada’s Food Guide, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it had something to do with it being on my fridge since I was little. Traditionally only great things like perfect scores on test or really good art projects make it to the fridge for any significant length of time, so maybe seeing it there year after year drilled into my head that it was pretty amazing.

Today, Health Canada released a new food guide. Last night between all the talk about the superbowl, I heard a 30 second spot on the news announcing it was coming out, and it was by far the most exciting thing on the news that night.

It’s quite similar to the old (14 year old) version, but fancier graphics, of course, and more specific information based on age and gender. I ordered a print copy, because it was free. My personalised version tells me that I’m still not eating nealy enough fruits or vegetables, but my litre of milk a day is more than enough. Big surprise, eh?

My childhood is punctuated with memories of my dad waking me up in the middle of the night, driving me to unknown locations, and then pointing something out in the sky. The earliest I can remember was driving over an hour, thermos of hot chocolate in hand, to Fundy National Park, where I saw the rings of Saturn through a telescope for the very first time. Once, while camping in that same park, he brought me out into the woods away from other campers and pointed out the diffuse glow spanning the sky that is our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Perhaps less visually impressive but equally memorable was when we went out into the back woods of French Village to see a small seemingly insignificant fuzzy dot—a comet.

Naked eye comets are rare enough as it is, but this month Comet McNaught has been making headlines around the world. In this picture, from Nasa’s Astronomy Pic of the Day, it can be clearly seen above the city of Krakow, Poland, just after sunset. Now there’s word (eg. from Phil Plait and Astroprof) that the comet is so bright that it’s visible in broad daylight.

Unfortunately, not only has the brightness probably piqued this past weekend, so with each successive day it’ll get harder to see, but Mother Nature chose today to finally start winter, so the Montreal sky is full of snow and clouds. Otherwise I’d be tempted to trek up Mount Royal and try to get a look at it. Hopefully it’ll be nice and clear tomorrow, so I’ll finally be able to get a look at this, the brightest comet in 30 years, far surpassing that fuzzy blob of my youth, if only in aesthetics and not significance.

Being slightly over half done writing out my notes for the Electromagnetism exam tomorrow, I though I’d take a break, stare at the wall for a while, and rebuild my glycogen stores.

I noticed a big trend in a lot of today’s news stories. They go something like this:

BIG TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCE!
This is the first step towards that thing we’ve been promising for a long time, and even though we’ve said that other developments were the first step before, this time we really mean it. Honestly.

For example:

• Astronauts have made some improvements to the space station, which means it should be completed any day now. Seriously.
• Man gets mechanical heart. The cool part is that he’s now the only living Canadian with no pulse. It doesn’t look as cool as Captain Picard’s model, though it is much smaller.
• Flexible electronics are on their way! This time when they say that they’ve made a lot of progress and we’ll have a piano keyboard we can roll up and put in our pocket by next Christmas, you might actually believe them. Oh my, was that two Star Trek references in one posting? For shame.

You might also want to note that the UN is getting a new boss, Dion is expecting an election before the spring, some anti-nuclear types are saying nuclear power isn’t safe (surprise, surprise), circumcision prevents HIV (but not in Canada), and anti-smoking ads encourage smoking. What a world.

But more than any of that, I really enjoy how Stephen Harper is apparently getting his calendars from the same supplier as Mr. Langford.

Back to the books!