I’ve only ever taken the one course on law, so I’m no legal eagle, but I’ve recently run afoul of some rental condition which I thought I’d been exempted from. I have a portable dishwasher which I’ve been using without any issues in the last few places I’ve rented. This place, in the heart of Vancouver, had a clause against it and I discussed it with the landlord before signing the lease, which resulted in the amendment below, placed below the requisite clause in the Tenancy Agreement

Liquid-filled items. Under no circumstances will the use of portable washing machines, dishwashers, or waterbeds be allowed. The tenant shall not bring on the premises or the Residential Property any furniture, aquariums or other chattels which can be considered to be liquid-filled without the Landlord's prior written consent. The Landlord's approval of the use of any such item may be subject to the Tenant providing the landlord with written evidence that the Tenant has in place adequate liability insurance. Any damages and subsequent costs arising from the unauthorized use of such items will be the sole responsibility of the Tenant. Any emergency restoration and repairs required will be dispatched by the Landlord at his discretion and completed to his satsifaction.

Addendum: 1 portable dishwasher ok; Tenant responsible for any incidental damages. [ Initialed by landlord and me ]

That is the agreement that we both signed in August 2011. I did not have any sort of personal liability insurance, renter’s or otherwise and informed the landlord about it. He didn’t press the issue and we went ahead and signed the agreement.

Now, in January 2012, I am being asked to produce proof of personal liability insurance or discard the dishwasher. It seems that building management has changed their mind with regards to the dishwasher. It seems as though the crux of the matter lies in the words “may be subject to”, which imply that the landlord reserves the right to make me produce proof of liability insurance at any moment during the lease.

I guess I can take the path of least resistance and just get the damn insurance and be done with it, but it’d be nice to know if this kind of about-face is legitimate, warranted or just simply ubiquitous.

Look at what I got when Chrome crashed on my desktop. Click to enlarge.

It starts out as four big circles. As you mouseover each circle, it divides into four. After you indulge in this ersatz cell reproduction for a few minutes, a theme begins to take shape and the above image assails you.

This is a rather grim article about how you might die, should you end up in a car accident.

And this is how you die

By Roger Aldridge

How do people die in motor “accidents”?
I’ll tell you.
Some people explode — like a thin plastic envelope full of offal which has been hurled against a brick wall. No pain.
They put them on a sheet of canvas and pick it up at the corners like, as one tow truck driver described it: “A tub of guts”
I haven’t seen one of these.
Others die intact. Ruptured inside, you understand, but un-harmed to look at. There may be a thin, trickle of blood from an ear or nostril.
It annoys you, subconsciously … you wish they’d raise a dead hand and wipe it away.
Death is not instantaneous.
Rather, it comes in a matter of minutes. There is no pain as we know it … nothing sharp, exquisite, searing. It is an inner numbness, a bubbling frothing thing and a terrible inability to breathe.
They are winded, punched in the stomach by a ton of metal moving at 60 mph or more, shattering every bone in the body as a fist would shatter a wine glass wrapped in a rug.
They never breathe again.
I’ve seen a number of these.
Men die with their trousers on, which somehow lends them dignity.
Women die with their legs apart in a lewd display.
Children die most horribly because they are seldom properly seated or braced. And they are very small. They are thrown through jagged windscreens to roll and skid along road surfaces as abrasive as cheese-graters.
Or, cradled in their mother’s laps, they are sandwiched between her and the unyielding dashboard. Mummy might just as well have jumped on the child from a third-storey window.
Without meaning to, of course.
Some people are burned to death.
They are not incinerated, as you’d imagine, but tend to bake or char.
Their clothes burn off them— if it is wool it forms a ghastly black”crackling”— and the skin bakes into quite a hard rind which makes a hollow sound if you tap it.
When the corpse is lifted from the wreckage it is as rigid as a papier mache dummy.
Often it is set in a sculpted, lifelike posture, but unnaturally stiff, like the little plastic drivers that toy manufacturers put in the front seats of model cars.
I’ve seen a couple of these, too.
I’ve seen men’s faces buried in the stringy bark of a tree trunk; fixed there, seemingly, by a gob of sticky red gum.
And men hanging from halfopen car doors; fl ung rag dolls of men embracing steel power pylons; men skewered on steering columns; men whose faces are gone, as if nibbled by rats.
I’ve seen men survive.
Dragged from the back seat, soaked in a shandy of blood and beer, the shards of smashed bottles glinting in the frantic blue of the revolving police light.
Carried into casualty on a stretcher, hurt, frightened, shocked.
Men without dignity, crying while other men cut away their blood-soaked rags and yet other men explore abdomen and groin with fingers that feel like fence-posts.
Men blinking through blood and tears into bright lights while probes and tweezers remove chunks and slivers of glass from facial wounds — eyes, cheeks, gums — that big bit was a tooth. Two teeth, actually.
Having trouble talking.
Panic-stricken men with crushed rib-cages trying to breathe through broken bellows. Grey-faced, incoherent, being asked questions:
What’s your name? Are you married? Where do you live? Where does it hurt … here … here … does THAT hurt? Any children?
Thighs as flexible as a rolled-up towel, pushed back into shape and splinted. Men wheeled into the X-ray room and laid this way, then that while the ragged edges of a broken pelvic girdle scrape together. Got to get a good picture.

Men denied pain-killers while an eternity of assessment passes and other men pierce their arms and insert tubes and hold up little canisters of blood … blood donors love life, but butter eaters make better lovers.
Then sliding blissfully into euphoria as the pain-killing injection hits and they are wheeled into the operating theatre.
And I’ve seen men survive this, too.
The Russians were criticised in the 1930s for severing a dog’s head and keeping it clinically alive for a number of hours.
Alive enough to salivate at the smell of food.
I’ve seen men in the quadriplegic wards at the Austin Hospital and at Mont Park who might just as well not have bodies, although their heads are alive.
The unlucky ones are mentally unimpaired and strive for months and years to learn to write with a pencil held in their teeth, or to type by flicking one of the few remaining responsive muscles in their bodies.
Their intelligence is sharp, their appetite for books and learning is gargantuan, their role in life that of the eternal spectator … eternity being, in some cases, a “lif” expectancy of 50 or more years.
They make the best of it, but many wish for death.
And I’ve seen the lucky ones, those with brain damage, whose minds were shaken loose in the cataclysm of car with car.
Men with glazed, half-lidded eyes, with neither bowel nor bladder control who sog in bed with no sensation below the shoulders so that bowel obstructions, appendicitis, bladder problems go undetected by the normal warning systems which we know as pain.
Men whose total sexual impotence is parodied by an apparent state of constant sexual excitation.
Men who were mothers’ sons, wives’ husbands, girls’ lovers, children’s fathers. Men who recognise no one.
Or men whose eyes ignite for a brief moment with recognition, whose mouths open to speak a flubbery sound like deflating bubble gum, then sink exhausted into the pillow.
I’ve seen things that make me sick to the heart. I thought you should know.

Reprinted from The Age, Thursday, October 26, 1972

Taken from here.

Someone has single-handedly drawn out a larger-than-life Rage comic face in the first winter snowfall of 2011 at SFU. Right in Convocation Mall.

Here’s a screenshot and the webcam links are below, but I don’t expect it to be there for too long.

SFU AQ West/Convo Mall Webcam Link

Here’s a little comic about a certain fellow we all have heard of…

Worth every bit of logorrheic verbiage.

Here is a little excerpt from the works of Aldous Huxley.

It is man’s intelligence that makes him so often behave more stupidly than the beasts. … Man is impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic. Thus, no animal is clever enough, when there is a drought, to imagine that the rain is being withheld by evil spirits, or as punishment for its transgressions. Therefore you never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. No horse, for example would kill one of its foals to make the wind change direction. Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat’s meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, intelligent enough.

Texts and Pretexts (1932), p. 270

Or why bars in Holland should grow the fuck up and learn how to use computers. I’m sitting in a corner of the bar of our hotel and drinking beer. I befriend an Austrian chef who has been heavily imbibing, and I talk to him from time to time. Four sallow youths come in and start talking to Herr Osterreich. They order four Budweisers and retire to another corner of the bar.

Time passes and the four English youths leave. I go to pay my bill and am told that I owe the bar for the four Budweisers. I vociferously remonstrate but am told that they have ironclad evidence: a piece of paper with all orders on them, in an ungodly mess. This is despite having multiple computers behind the bar that orders were ostensibly keyed into. Exactly! Double WTF! No electronic tracking whatsoever, tons of room for human error. I enquire about the exact mechanics of the transaction: did I order the beers or did the youths order them and point at me as the purported payer? My enquiry is curtly brushed aside: the paper is proof enough. And how do I know they are English if I didn’t order them beers? This non sequitur is risible in its absurdity, and I brush it aside with ease. Those yobos were so loud and obnoxious, a deaf man at three leagues knew where they were from.

After half an hour of protracted protests and the production of a witness, namely M, we are allowed to leave, having successfully thwarted either the bar’s attempt at midnight extortion or losing money to their glorious incompetence. The whole bar is watching and M is numb with disbelief and humiliation. I am glad I didn’t budge and they finally let me leave after paying only my share of the bill. The whole incident was so asinine, it ruined our last night in Amsterdam.

Bonus: if you stay here, their router’s administrator’s credentials are the default out-of-the-box credentials. Nudge nudge. Think Linksys. Wink wink. Enjoy!

I’m off on a month-long trip to Europe tonight. I’ll be gone from now until July 18th. It promises to be a great journey, we’re visiting every country stricken by the E. Coli outbreak in Northern Europe. Germany, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, Sweden and the Czech Republic, here we come!

I don’t expect I’ll be posting any book reviews or other updates, so this should be it for a month. Adios, amigos!

I’m not easily impressed by most of the pablum that passes for “creative” or “inspired” advertising these days, but this is pretty neat. This is the winning entry for an AT & T advertising campaign.

Gaze and marvel.