Missing Mary Road

During the climactic men’s hockey game at the end of this winter’s Olympics, Toronto was united by a lot more than enthusiasm for sports. As this graph of the city’s water usage during the game clearly shows, Torontonians were also remarkably synchronized that night in the timing of their trips to the washroom, with massive spikes in water consumption to coincide with each intermission in play and a huge dip in usage following Sidney Crosby’s winning goal. This was almost certainly due to toilets, citywide, flushing, and not flushing, in unison. Bladders were straining together all over Toronto.

Similar graphs showing water usage in Edmonton and Winnipeg have already made the news?but this graph, from Toronto Water, our city’s water-supply agency, is the first evidence specifically in Toronto.

so i’ve been watching a lot more television than i have films lately (much harder to get out to the cinema being a new parent and all). some shows are far superior to some of the better films out there. (on a side note: amazon has a super sale on criterion’s kurosawa collection which i’m really tempted to buy right now.) so i’m just gonna post some brilliant shows that i’ve seen in the past 12 months, which you otherwise may not have seen and really should. oh by the way, some of the links to the shows have links to full episodes, so go through to the site if you feel like it may interest you.

in no particular order aside from memory…

true blood – vampires, shapeshifters, sex, blood, gore, and mind readers. awesome. season 3 is coming up and looks to be very promising. 8/10

mad men – the cool of the 50s, the precision of set design and some pretty awesome acting and script writing. 9/10

hustle – shows about con artists are always fun. 7.5/10

chuck – good clean spy comedy and drama. besides, adam baldwin kicks ass in any show. 8.5/10

ultraviolet – vampire vs. humans. show from the UK back when vampire culture wasn’t as cool as it was today. was cancelled after one season.  7/10

better off ted – a very funny comedy  with extremely witty and well written humour that takes quite an aim at corporate america. 9/10

fringe – one of the best sci fhows on television. besides, it has leonard nimoy in it. 8/10

firefly – the best tv show that only lasted one season. with big, damn heroes. shiny. joss whedon, ’nuff said. 9.5/10

mission impossible –  the original series, basically pulling off a lot of cons as they really didn’t need to be very technical as the new movies would portray them out to be. 6.5/10

the prisoner –  patrick mcgoohan at his best. this show has done more to inspire and motivate todays television than any other show that i know of. it also is referenced in all sorts of media in ways you wouldn’t have thought of before. 9.5/10

burn notice – the a-team meets mcgyver meets james bond. 7.5/10

the big bang theory – geek comedy at it’s finest. 8.5/10

V – the new one is promising to be a fairly awesome show. and elizabeth mitchell is definitely underrated as an actress. 7.5/10

lost – speaking of elizabeth mitchell, j.j. abrams’ second show on this list after fringe, it’s had it’s ups and downs, and it’s finally coming to a close and worth the watch.

torchwood – the last season of torchwood, children of earth series is some of the best television i saw last year. 9/10

dr. who – david tennant has done more for this show than any other previous doctor. he leaves a huge legacy. 9.5/10

castle – funny detective drama. i’m a fan of nathan fillion, otherwise don’t think i’d be watching it. 6.5/10

merlin – a new take on the retelling of arthur and his relationship with merlin the magician. 6.5/10

robin hood – one more retake on robin and his merry. 6/10

stargate: atlantis – my first venture into the stargate universe. i don’t think i can watch sg1 though, ten seasons to watch would be a bit much. 8/10

sanctuary – sci-fi shows are getting better and better, unfortunately they’re also getting cancelled at a faster rate due to shitty shows like all the idols, runways, bachelors and next top whatevers. 7/10

warehouse 13 – very promising show. sorta men in black meets indiana jones. next season sees sean maher and jewel staite meet up again, can’t wait. 8/10

battlestar galactica – don’t bother watching past the second season. it just goes downhill from there. 9/10 (uptil the 2nd season anyway).

freaks and geeks – another funny cancelled show with an awesome cast. 7/10

undeclared – see above. there’s a trend developing here. shows that get cancelled after one season are generally better shows than stuff they show on tv for ten years straight. (hint: that’s aiming at you CSI, idol, etc.) 6.5/10

dollhouse – the darkest joss whedon show yet. see shpeel above about cancelled shows. 9/10

on the to do list, edge of darkness, glee, eureka for now. what do you recommend watching?

so a couple of years ago i wrote a post about how farcical hand sanitizers were as nobody could explain how the damn things work and what good they were?

seems like two years later, they’re more and more pervasive and they’re still full of absolutely  no benefit to us. slate has a fairly in-depth article on whether or not they help protect us from things like the flu and H1N1. seems like for the most part, soap and water works just as well.

scientists were for some reason surprised that giving free hand sanitizers (and, in one case, even clorox wipes) to families and schools failed to cut down on infections.

Our homes and workplaces, we’re told, are trying to kill us. Recently, a University of Arizona microbiologist named Charles Gerba, author of hundreds of scientific papers about household microbes, gave a terrifying lecture at the offices of the Food and Drug Administration. Gerba—who, incidentally, has a child with the middle name Escherichia—that’s what the “E” in E. coli stands for—explained that a kitchen sponge and sink are home to thousands of times more bacteria than a toilet seat. Plus, 10 percent of household dishrags contain salmonella. After playing with other children, toddlers have more fecal bacteria on their hands than does a person exiting a public toilet stall. Those toilets, by the way, aerosolize so many droplets with each flush that Gerba compares their dispersion to “the Fourth of July.” And every public swimming pool he’s ever tested has contained disease-causing viruses.

In response to these kinds of data, more than 700 products promise to help consumers kill bacteria, molds, and viruses in their homes and workplaces, from ultraviolet lights meant to kill toothbrush bacteria, to dishwashers that superheat silverware, to specially treated doormats. Three-quarters of all Americans use six or more antimicrobial products each day.

Keep reading.

Almost thirty years ago, stuntman Dar Robinson leapt from the crown of the CN Tower with no parachute, no airbag, and only a thin wire looped around his torso to keep him from splattering on the sidewalk below. Today, we can relive that jump thanks to this excellent documentary video?uploaded by YouTube user Retrontario and posted at 1?T.O.?which, for no apparent reason, is narrated by Chuck Norris.

Robinson jumped from the CN Tower on two separate occasions. The first, in 1979, was for an action movie called Highpoint, in which Robinson was doubling for Christopher Plummer. Robinson wore a parachute for the original jump. It was, at the time, the highest such leap by any stuntman.

The second jump, in 1980, is the one shown in the video above. It was staged not for a movie, but for a documentary on Robinson, that eventually aired on ABC. According to Toronto Star articles from the time, Robinson received $250,000 to do it.

The video above is not from the 1980 documentary itself. It’s a segment on the MAKING OF the original documentary, from a second, completely separate documentary on Robinson, filmed in 1987. The occasion for the second documentary was Dar Robinson’s death, in 1986, after he (unintentionally) rode a motorcycle off a cliff during a routine stunt for another now-obscure eighties action movie.

Here, with more information on Dar Robinson’s untimely demise, is another YouTube clip?which, for no apparent reason, is hosted by Bill O’Reilly:

The revision thing: A history of the Iraq war, told entirely in lies

All text is verbatim from senior Bush Administration officials and advisers. In places, tenses have been changed for clarity.

Once again, we were defending both ourselves and the safety and survival of civilization itself. September 11 signaled the arrival of an entirely different era. We faced perils we had never thought about, perils we had never seen before. For decades, terrorists had waged war against this country. Now, under the leadership of President Bush, America would wage war against them. It was a struggle between good and it was a struggle between evil.

It was absolutely clear that the number-one threat facing America was from Saddam Hussein. We know that Iraq and Al Qaeda had high-level contacts that went back a decade. We learned that Iraq had trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and deadly gases. The regime had long-standing and continuing ties to terrorist organizations. Iraq and Al Qaeda had discussed safe-haven opportunities in Iraq. Iraqi officials denied accusations of ties with Al Qaeda. These denials simply were not credible. You couldn’t distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talked about the war on terror.

The fundamental question was, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer was, absolutely.

Keep reading, it’s pretty awesome.

Canonical has revealed the style of the new default theme that will be used in Ubuntu 10.04. In a significant departure from tradition, Ubuntu is shedding its signature brown color scheme and is adopting a new look with a palette that includes orange and an aubergine shade of purple. Don’t matter much to me anymore though since I’ve moved to Mint. Try it for yourself.

are you as cool as this guy?

when the internet was coming of age in the mid to late 90′s, the browser wars were kicking in.

technology has changed a whole lot since and so have the browsers, you can do more with the browser alone today than you were able to do with a fully loaded computer with all the shareware you could find hacked up from astalavista.

tom’s hardware has an awesome write up and comparison of the most popular browsers in the market available today.  aptly titled, the web browser grand prix, they set about an awesome methodology in comparing the big five, namely, IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari.

my favourite being Opera did rather well which I was expecting completely. what it doesn’t measure is the usability and feature set of the browser, which in my opinion is far superior for Opera than any other browser.  the amount of customization one can do in Opera, along with mail and feeds integration, tab management, opera unite and link along with widgets makes it the most usable piece of software i have on my computer.

anyway, go and figure it out here, but do go through it carefully, it rocks.