The Canadian Lemming

"So what shows were you working on today?"

"Lassie in the morning, Torchwood in the afternoon."

"That's quite the difference."

"In the morning, a heroic dog ushers cute wildlife away from the danger area so they won't be harmed when loggers cut down the tops of trees. In the afternoon, an innocent suburban couple is brutally slaughtered and the word TORCHWOOD is written on their bedroom wall in their own blood."

"Television has moved on in the last fifty years."

"And it's all the same world."

"They should remake Lassie. Urban Lassie. Lassie hanging out with a street gang."

"Lassie as a pit bull."

"Oh my god, that would work."

"Wassat, girl? You say my bitch been steppin' out on me?"

"..."

"This is totally going in my blog."

Your attention please: Secret Sauce TV has temporarily used up the world's entire supply of awesome. Please remain calm, normal service will resume as soon as possible.

In January, I was dealing with technical issues with my computer at work. I had to go to the dentist to get a filling in my left molars. Large parts of the GTA suffered a power outage. I went to Lesley Livingston's book launch, hosted by Bakka-Phoenix Books at the Dominion on Queen, and shortly afterwards, my father badly injured himself in a fall.

In the past few days, I've been dealing with technical issues while trying to download an audiobook from Big Finish. I had to go back to the dentist to get a filling in my right molars. Large parts of the GTA suffered a power outage due to the recent storm. And the Bakka-Phoenix mailing list sent out an invitation to Robert J Sawyer's book launch at the Dominion on Queen.

I e-mailed my friend Adrienne asking, "Should I go? My dad's back home from the hospital, and there are stairs there."

I then left the house to pick up the latest DWM from Bakka-Phoenix Books, and on the way out I checked the mail to see whether my insurance had sent me a cheque reimbursing me for my dental appointment, and found that instead, completely out of the blue, someone had sent me free samples of an audio play from a company that has Lesley Livingston in its repertory.

SWEET VIRGIN PLACENTAS, WHAT THE CRAP.

Overheard on the subway today.

"You can't just add 'That's what she said' after a sentence and expect it to be funny every time."

"That's what she said."

If you lay out a Tarot spread using cards from different decks, does it predict your future in multiple alternative timelines?

Today's closed-captioning assignment was an old stand-up comedy program from the CHCH formerly known as innovative. It's dated back to 1992 -- yeah, that long ago -- and watching it, my first thought was: "How is it not immediately obvious to everybody in the audience that each of these comics snorted up a gallon of cocaine before they ran out on stage? Oh, that's right, because everyone in the audience is drunk."

I think I know why this is airing on TV Land and not on the Comedy Network; because it's not funny, it's an historical curiosity. Charlie Weiner just spent five minutes talking about his vasectomy and giggling. It wasn't a particularly funny routine, but one woman in the audience was literally holding her sides from laughing so hard. This is, I believe, because it was 1992, years before South Park and such, and this subject was still considered too taboo for the mainstream. They're not laughing because the routine is all that funny, they're laughing because it's shocking and has thus surprised them into laughing. Ooh, look at that bad boy, tee hee, we're so naughty.

It was a more innocent time. Innocent and on cocaine.

Latest dream: I was at a wedding, Sylvester McCoy was one of the guests, and he was telling me about the work he was doing for NASA (he was appearing in their television commercials as the guy wearing aftershave).

I hope there's no hidden meaning to dreams, because I just dreamed about a book called 12 Spiritually Uplifting Stories About Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles and Mini-Lop Rabbits.

Five weeks ago, my work computer started acting up for no apparent reason, as the software suddenly gained the impression that the fonts I was supposedly using were a figment of my imagination. I've been able to work by logging on as Administrator rather than as a regular user, but I've been struggling to get someone to fix it ever since. This is the problem I was addressing in my most recent blog post, which I made on Tuesday.Yesterday, I double-posted the blog entry to another website I frequent, Hardcore Nerdity.

Shortly afterwards, we received an e-mail from the CTV Help Desk stating that all office workstations were going to be upgraded automatically overnight. Our supervisor sent out an e-mail telling us all to leave our work computers turned on overnight. I e-mailed her back, privately telling her that if this update made my computer start working properly for no apparent reason, then I was going to hit it.

Two hours after sending that e-mail, I was setting up my work for the next day while logged on as Administrator, and when I turned on ProCAP to make sure that everything was in place, it gave me the same "unmapped font" error I'd been receiving under my username, which meant that I would be unable to do any work at all on the computer until this problem was identified and fixed. By this point, all of the admin team had left for the day, so I left frantic phone messages and e-mails and waited to hear back.

Shortly afterwards, one of my work colleagues updated her Facebook status, announcing loudly that she didn't need a new cell phone but noting that she was doing this in order to tempt irony to break her current cell phone so she'd have an excuse to buy a new one.

I responded by telling her DO NOT TEMPT IRONY YOU FOOLISH FOOLISH FOOL or else her cell phone would burst into flames and burn down her apartment. (I only remembered much later that she used to be our office department's fire marshal.) I elaborated further by explaining that, after I'd sent an e-mail joking about my computer fixing itself for no apparent reason, it had broken down even further for no apparent reason.

Three hours later, while lying awake in bed, my brain put two unrelated facts together and I realised what the problem was. For perfectly good reasons, I'd changed the Windows file associations so that RTF files automatically opened in WordPad instead of Word, but for some reason, ProCAP stores some font information in RTF format. I got out of bed, walked over to my computer, changed the associations back to Word, and bang, everything was perfectly fine again. After five weeks. Within two minutes.

I e-mailed my supervisor today, explaining the situation and taking responsibility for screwing up the computer in the first place, although we both agree that IT and the software development team have been about half as helpful as a sack of toenails. I also told her that this might have been resolved much sooner if only we all still worked in the same office space; if I'd been able to call someone into my office and have a "Well, where did you last see your keys?" conversation, then my brain might have plugged the two facts together much more quickly. But no, I no longer catch the subway down to Osgoode station and walk over to 299 Queen St W; nope, I'm alone in my house, and real-time conversations now take several hours over e-mail.

I sent that message and then surfed onto the Toronto Star webpage to see that this morning, someone was shot during gunplay on the platform at Osgoode subway station.

I'm afraid to keep talking.

"Okay, that's it. I can't figure it out."

"You can't-- you don't know what's wrong with my computer?"

"No. Everything should be working. Everything's working when you do it this way, and it's not working when you do it that way, but the registry entries are identical in both cases. It should be doing exactly the same thing. I don't know why it's not."

"You're saying there's no difference between the two set-ups. You're saying the condition where it's working is identical to the condition where it's not working."

"That's right."

"So... you're saying my computer has a psychosomatic illness."

"Um, I guess so."

"My computer's condition is psychosomatic. My computer has stigmata. You're saying my computer has stigmata. My computer is the Second Coming. The Second Coming is a computer that is supposed to be doing what I tell it to and is ignoring me. My computer is fucking Skynet!!"

"Take a deep breath."

"Screw that. I'll take a deep breath when I'm dead."