Captain's blog: 2004/06

Ringu

Posted Saturday, June 12, 2004 at 6/12/2004 03:15:00 PM

I had a UCD (Unusually Creative Dream!) last night after watching the Americanized version of the Japanese horror film "The Ring" for the first time. Having already seen the original Japanese version, this version was a generally funny review experience knowing approximately what would happen next, eg seeing the spooky photoshop twirl filter effect on the photos.

Anyway, the dream involved me just looking at about 3/4 of a page of financial journal entries, reading down the columns of the page, checking that all debits indeed equal credits, the usual. Except the last group of entries weren't numeric entries. They were strands of dark, wet black hair, dripping water off the bottom of the sheet. I couldn't make sense of the adjacent account descriptions because they were smudged out, but the hairs were short bundles that fit into either debit or credit box, so there was some hint that this was still supposed to be Financial Accounting.

Please note that since I'm still dreaming and not in a lucid state, everything just happens spontaneously without my questioning it or any realization of just how absurd and creepy it is.

So I then proceeded as a diligent bean counter would, and started parting the wet, dirty intertwined strands of hair with a pen to count them individually, to be sure that hair strands on the left (debit column) did indeed equal the hair strands on the right (credit column).

Talk about splitting hairs.

At that point, my subconcious dream engine ran out of surreal fuel, or my rational side protested, or the birds outside my bedroom window just started chirping. In any case, I woke up, and decided that in the future, I should avoid watching Americanized Japanese horror movies while studying for professor Zuliani's upcoming Financial Accounting I tests.

Forces of Nature at the OSC

Posted Thursday, June 03, 2004 at 6/3/2004 10:31:00 AM

Went to see the 7 pm preview of FORCES OF NATURE at the Ontario Science Centre’s OMNIMAX theatre with a few high school friends last night, thanks to some extra tickets from Vahagn. A quarter of the audience was made up of children, the rest were probably with a group, such as Toronto’s Emergency Services Personel. The pre-show slides and introductory speakers seemed to make it a point to acknowledge and welcome them in the audience, in appreciation of what they do.

Then it was on with the show to see some real world natural mayhem. The volcanic eruption coverage was the most clear and spectacular of all, complete with lava flows, lightning streaks within the growing, morphing shapes of the volcanic cloud - the texture and overall round shape reminded me of vanilla ice cream on an ice cream cone, except that it was grey and constantly expanding.

After the OMNIMAX preview we went to Safi’s place for the pool tables, followed by a movie at Vahagn’s house. Vahagn also handed me a funny photoshop’ed picture of me surrounded by blondes and brunettes, printed, like a real photograph. The ladies seem to be wearing the same white sport/perforated white uniforms, probably from one of those car shows. Apparently a year ago he took my a pic of my head from the algonquin trip photos last summer and grafted it onto an existing fellow in this hi-res photo he got somewhere from the internet, sent it to everyone except me and was planning to mail it as a prank on my birthday or something. However he decided just to hand it to me now. So now I have a fake photo to add to my non-digital photo album (he couldn’t find the original photoshop file).