Am I living in a cartoon?

How NOT to Break Into a Safe, a photo by Clara Johnson on Flickr.

The Flintstones is a TV cartoon show from my youth. Fred Flintstone worked at a quarry mining stones while sitting on top of a brontosaurus that picked up the stones in its mouth.

Now I find myself watching the action again... from my balcony.

There is a crew of demolition workers leveling the old stores and restaurants from the property beside my condo building. They are almost done, but there is one bit of the old buildings that is not going anywhere soon - an old safe.

So on Thursday, while finishing up breakfast, we heard and felt loud thuds. We knew the demolition workers were about to get rid of some large stones from the site, so we figured they were being put into the dumpster that had been driven on to the site that morning.

Well, they were moving the stones, but it wasn't putting them into the truck. They were lifting one of the stones with their machine with a shovel, and dropping it on top of the safe!

It didn't work. The safe seems to be as solid as ever. In an earthquake, the safe would be fine. In a cartoon show, the safe still seems to be fine.

Am I living in a cartoon show now? Is reality slipping from me? Or did the guy with the machine with the shovel watch too many Flintstone episodes when he was a child?

Where did that satellite land?

The satellite known as UARS (Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite) is now back on the planet Earth. Somewhere.

It landed sometime last night. Probably.

It was calculated to hit somewhere between 57 degrees South and 57 degrees North. So pretty much anywhere on the planet Earth that isn't a magnetic pole. But that was just a guess. Well, the planet Earth part was pretty certain, the rest, not so much. And, oh yeah, most of the planet is covered in water, so it's probably in an ocean somewhere.

So don't we have thousands of these satellites circling the planet Earth now, giving great GPS tracking information down to the centimeter in accuracy? Aren't there many tracking systems for planes, tracking everything flying in the sky? Isn't Google Earth using satellites to take pictures of most of the planet most of the time? Surely someone must know where the satellite landed!

Or does someone want to fuel conspiracy theories?

If we never know... we can always imagine a good conspiracy to theorize about.

Maybe NASA did have control over the satellite and wanted to hit somewhere specific. Nah, too much effort. Maybe aliens grabbed it, and it didn't actually make it to the planet. Nah, we have lots of space junk up there, they don't need to grab something that was burning up already (there were photos of that). Or maybe fiction writers just needed a fresh idea to build on... yeah, that's why it has to remain a mystery, to cure writer's block.

Is it ironic to watch a movie about movie rentals on Netflix?

We've finally decided to sign up for Netflix, since all our local movie rental places shut down.

Our first viewing was a documentary about cracking the Maya glyphs writing system - so this Flixster thing does have the potential to be educational and not just a bunch of brain-numbing movies.

Next we moved onto movies - and the independent movies were the most intriguing. We watched a movie called The Sasquatch Gang - which was very well done and quite funny - a bit of teenaged adventure angst wrapped in a Pulp Fiction-like time editing package. The main characters had a lot of connections to movie rental places - during the time of the old VHS tapes. One worked at a movie rental shop, another rented his own tapes out to friends - a main story conflict was focussed around getting one of his tapes back.

So is it ironic that the first movie we watched on Netflix was a movie centered around renting movies? The stores that are no more because Netflix is here?

We weren't shooting for ironic... it just sat there and stuck out it's tongue at us.

Why am I always in a bathroom during an earthquake?

Since we moved to Vancouver, just over a decade ago, we've experienced 2 earthquakes.

The first time, back around 2004 or so, I was in the shower. I wondered why the water was splashing oddly on the bottom of the shower, and I felt a bit dizzy... I thought it was me. I heard that one of our hanging lights was swinging back and forth, but I didn't see it myself.

A few hours ago, I was on the loo. And we had an earthquake just off Vancouver Island, which could be felt in Vancouver. Again, I felt a bit dizzy, but I thought it was just movement from the building next door to us which was being demolished today.

So an experience that not everyone gets to have - the planet shifting underfoot - and I'm in the bathroom.

I'd like to see what happens outside during an earthquake - do the trees sway? I bet they did. Of course, with the building next door being demolished today, would I really have noticed anything that unusual that I wouldn't have attributed to the demolition? Probably not.

Not that I'm hoping for another earthquake... I just wish I wasn't always in the bathroom for them!