Do we need to duck this time?

So was everyone expecting the world to end at the turn of the millennium?

Another satellite that was sent into orbit in the 1990s is about to land back on our planet. "Land" being a rather bland way of saying "hit very quickly while burning up and shattering into many pieces." And no one knows where it will land. 

Did no one in the 1990s think of what happens to objects in orbit after they've been up there for a while? They come back down. It's this gravity thing, you see... not really a new phenomenon, if people got the satellite up into orbit, they had a good understanding of the concept then, so they knew it would come back down eventually. Did they not care about the eventual crashing back on the planet?

Of course, this one is only the size of a car... the last one from the U.S. was the size of a bus. So much better. Really?

This latest satellite comes from Germany. The European Space Agency has a Space Debris Office. (That's a trashy job, ha, ha.) They say there is a 1 in 2,000 chance of hitting one of us monkeys with this satellite - the last satellite only had a 1 in 3,200 chance of hitting a monkey. 

A smaller, but better targeted piece of space debris.

This satellite has the added bonus of a mirror which the Space Debris Office says may not burn up before hitting the planet, meaning some serious shards may come flying off the debris when it hits.

Of course, the planet is mostly covered by water, so the satellite has a better chance of hitting fish than us monkeys. 

Any space aliens out there watching us must be wondering if we're just on a fishing trip with some really weird ways of catching fish.

Update: It landed in the Indian Ocean (probably) (hopefully). So it hit the body of water next to the largest population of humans possible. This could be the work of a super villain!

Is it Summer again?

The calendar says October 7. This weekend is Thanksgiving - the harvest festival time in Canada. So why is the Cox Bay Beach in Tofino covered in surfers? (There are more in the water.)

This is a screen shot from Tofino today. (Click on the image to see a bigger version.) (See the Long Beach Lodge Resort website for the live webcam.)

I'm not there myself, and I can't surf (but would love to), but it's 15 degrees Celsius on the beach! For Tofino, that's balmy! It's cold in that water... but it's cold all year round. Dry suits are the clothing of choice at all times of the year when surfing Tofino.

I've just spent a warm sunny afternoon cleaning up the plants on my balcony, and I had to come back inside because it was too hot!

We missed having a lot of hot sunny days this summer, so are we having it now? This weather does not make sense.

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!

Are street cleaners a form of crowd control?

The fireworks were on last night. We live about 3 blocks from the place where they have them, and depending on where they anchor the barge in English Bay each year, we get to see bits of them from our balcony.

Of course, the fireworks only last for about 1/2 an hour. There will be 3 nights of them this year.

But for many hours before the event crowds of people migrate to the beach to get a spot to see the fireworks. The first wave is typically young families with whining or screaming children and parents. Organizing a trip to the beach is quite the exercise in major troop movements for them. The second wave is typically the hooting and hollering teenagers. They've shed their parental monitors, and now they're drunk and just out for a good time. The third wave is typically the mid-twenties adults in ridiculously high heels clattering along, having arguments with their dates, all running to the beach because the fireworks have already started.

Then thousands of dollars of fireworks go up in pretty explosions.

And now comes the exodus. It took hours to accumulate all these people. Now there are loud speakers telling them to get out quickly; police to move them along efficiently; thousands of dollars of fences around the gardens in the neighborhood to keep them off the flowers; security guards at most of the buildings to monitor our homes for vandalism... and street cleaners.

Machines to clean streets. They have brushes in front that turn to sweep big debris. They have water that sputters onto the ground to clean dirt. And really big, loud, insistent engines to drive them. Possibly making them the most efficient crowd control device we have.

The machines that comb the beach the morning after to get all the debris left by the thousands of people who don't live here, and think dumping their garbage here is OK, are also seriously big machines. No one ever sees them unless they get up really early, but they do a lot of work. And if you are on the beach at that time... you will go off for breakfast somewhere else quite quickly.

Cleaning as a form of crowd control. That's what we've come down to.