I don’t like Sarah McLaughlin much, but this is worth seeing. Well done.

(via inevernu)

Meeting with a realtor tonight, which I guess marks the official start of the hunt for a new place to live. As buying property is a first for me, if there’s anything I’m likely not to know, but should, I’d love to hear it.

All too often do we hear of the absolute horrors taking place in the world and feel helpless to do anything about them.

I was shocked to see the images of Haiti on the news yesterday, in the aftermath of hurricane Jeanne. The storm has left over 1000 dead, and as many people are still missing. The unidentified dead are being bulldozed into mass graves, to keep the decay from causing epidemics. In some areas, the only water available for drinking is that in which dead bodies lay.

Haiti has been getting aid, but it has been coming slowly and is still grossly insufficient to relieve all the devastated. Crowds of desperate, weeping people swarm the meagre rations and fresh water to be distributed, UN peacekeepers having to disperse them with tear gas.

If you want to reach out, you can make a donation via the Red Cross, or Oxfam Canada. Every dollar helps, I’m sure.

Babayaga has been simming the bloggers (hm, things you never thought you’d say). That is, she’s entering real-life bloggers into the Sims game, and seeing how they behave.

What I love most about this concept is that it’s like a Real-Time Strategy game, in that when Babayaga isn’t playing a particular Sim, they go on living and interacting with other Sims: “When I play with the Blorks, the other families all interact with the Blorks as well [if they meet them] but I cannot control their individual actions. It’s entirely possible that Ed’s carrying on an affair with Rachel without my knowledge.”

Wow, that gives a whole new meaning to alternate universes. Imagine if you could do this whilst entering accurate descriptions of your friends’ personalities and preferences: you could play “what if I…” and the results would be fascinating! Or you could enter someone’s current life and speed up time to find out what happens. Hey, I’d never leave the house!

UPDATE: Arg. It seems I gotta get me a better video card first

Dogs can sniff out cancer (?)

(via Paulski)

I couldn’t skip this month’s monkey: pitch your life as a movie.

However, while thinking about this post, I couldn’t help but think of the movie characters I have wanted my life to be like, at various times. So here it is: here is my life as a movie character, as I would have had it pitched to myself.

Childhood
Spent most of that time with a massive crush on an animated character, Peter Pan. I think that explains my preference for the lanky, pointy-nosed type (no, really). So I spent the first ten years playing Wendy.

Teenage years
That’s the easiest one: my best friend and I lived the movie Some Kind of Wonderful, reciting lines over our lunchtime patate sauce. I modeled myself after the drummer girl, even wearing dog tags and boxers.

I also had another character as a role model during those years: Ripley, in Aliens. That I had those two as style gurus, totally explains my soaring (not) popularity at the time.

Then, completely breaking with the butch look I had cultivated so well, and pulled off so badly, I went to my prom wearing the dress from Pretty in Pink. I was a little confused.

Twenties
Hm, the toughest one. Ten years filled with arduous studying and lots of travels. I don’t know, did I want to be Indiana Jones perhaps? Well, if we’re going with that, better make it Lara Croft (hey, my pitch, my fantasy!).

Thirties
Hm, in the mood I’m in, I’d say the chick from Chasing Amy, without so much of the whininess (oh uh, and not gay). A girl with geeky interests and exotic friends, who’s made mistakes in the past, looking forward to a clean start and to doing better the next time around.

I got to meet L’s baby (aka Baby J) last week at the ultrasound. It was truly amazing, in every tired clichéd sense of the word.

I was expecting a bunch of gray blobs that someone would try and convince me were a head and a foot, but it wasn’t like that. I couldn’t believe how much she moved, doing all kinds of fancy somersaults. She looked incredibly… human. Sticking her face right up to the camera, opening her mouth, sticking her thumb in… She even seemed to smile. Incredible.

The movement made it very obvious what was what. Saw lips, nose, the beating heart with all four chambers, the ventricles in the brain, the cerebellum, eyes, ears, umbilicus, toes, humerus bone, femur, spine, pelvis…

It was a really powerful and surreal moment, and lightspeedaunt had just been dumped less than 24 hours earlier, but I believe that they were tears of awe she was crying.

No angry screaming matches, no doors slammed, just a quiet, sad, sorry announcement that your life as you know it is over.

You keep waking up and remembering that it is not a nightmare. You cannot eat. You know that this absolute hell is a cliché of human experience, but it’s a novelty to you. You try to reason, solve, protest, but none of your usual weapons find any purchase against the finality of it all. You have no control over it. Through it all, some analytical part of your mind keeps repeating “This is something you’ve never experienced before. You’re becoming more human. Time will heal you, you know it will”. The rest of you wants to jump ahead to that day when all the hurt is gone, when the common possessions are separated, when the memories make you smile again. You mourn them, those memories, and the plans you will now never fulfill. You wonder if you’ve squandered the last of your youth, whether you’ll ever have a love life again.

You find yourself facing that sorry look on everyone’s face. You put up a strong face for those that you know can’t stand to see you hurt. You find true friends, and incredible amounts of support from unexpected quarters. You get great advice, and horrible advice. You’re thankful that people care to give either one. You marvel at how much simple gestures come to mean, and how many there are.

And then the skies begin to clear. You feel yourself getting stronger as first sleep returns, and then some of your appetite. You find yourself thinking about the new chapter ahead, instead of the one behind, even starting to make plans. When before, you knew you’d eventually be all right, you now feel it.

(Thanks to everyone who is and has been out there, you know who you are. I love you.)

Step right up…

Because dog-gone it, she didn’t look quite ridiculous enough already…

And now, for the matching hat with white pompom…