Did you know that Philip Pullman has a very . . . unique signature? I discovered this today when I found a signed copy of The Amber Spyglass in Strathcona Books. I was curious if it was a first edition and found that it was in fact a signed first (American) edition. Whoa, I thought, and flipped to the signature. I was a bit suspicious because it almost looked as if somebody just scribbled "Philip Pullman" to pass it off as his autograph. I asked the lady if it was genuine, and she didn't know. I bought it with the understanding that if it turned out to be fake I could take it back. I checked the internet, and it's real! Nice!
Michelle and I are starting to build a decent collection of signed books- last month I got A Feast For Crows signed by George RR Martin. Michelle has some Nick Bantock (from the reading we went to, remember gabrielle? Someone pawned their copies and I found them!) and Diana Gabaldon books. Oh yeah and gabrielle found a signed copy of House of Leaves when we were in Wellington and she talked me into buying it.
Do you guys have any?

Like a lumbering alkaloid dinosaur from Titan, Shovel 10 slowly walks its way up the mountain, maw open and ready to devour everything in its path with its blunt metal teeth.



Work really kicked my ass this week. We moved a shovel every day, and two yesterday- from the bottom of the pit to the top of the mountain, or off to the healing grounds to get fixed. A shovel, for those of you unfamiliar with the alien world that is an open pit coal mine, is the primary means of moving rock to get at coal. They're gargantuan electric digging machines, not the small handheld tools you find in your garage. They're also unwieldy. It's not like you can just drive them anywhere you want, you have to manhandle their power cables, move things around, make sure nothing catches on fire, or touches a powerline. Basically you stand outside in the cold ensuring that nothing goes wrong. When there's a ramp involved, and ice, then you want to have a bulldozer (another species of metal monster- a brutish and stubborn chilopod from Neptune) acting as a brake in case, as almost happened with 10 here, it starts sliding out of control. Moving one is a lot of work, and takes a long time. Still, it's not a bad job, especially with the scenery. I certainly don't mind working. And who else gets to play with giant metal alien dinosaur robots that eat rocks?
Anyways, work's done, time to enjoy some days off. Four of them. On the agenda for today: absolutely nothing! Lots and lots of nothing.

I was going to be all mopey about Team Canada's 2-0 loss to the Russians, but then I remembered that today was a great day for Canada at the Olympics. We're now in 4th place in the medal standings! Can't complain about that. Canmore's Chandra Crawford won a cross-country gold and radiated her 10,000 watt excitement all the way home. There was a short track relay silver, and Cindy Klassen won her fourth medal of the games, a gold in the 1500 m speed skating race. Her teammate Kristina Groves won silver! So really, we kicked ass today. I hope tomorrow's papers remember that and don't have a ten page insert on "What Went Wrong", and "How It Is All Gretzky's Fault". It wasn't a bad hockey game, for that matter. We just lost. And the women's team won gold the other day. So it's all good. The millionaires can come home to their NHL teams and try for Mr. Stanley.

If I have one vice (pooing in the woods is not a vice!), then it would have to be books. I sure spend a lot of money on books. Now that we live quite a ways away from the six excellent used stores and the best new bookstore of our old neighbourhood, I thought I might get a chance to get caught up on my bookshelf backlog. But then Michelle told me she would like to have a copy of Pride and Prejudice. So, we made an excursion to the old country to find one. Which we did, and then we spent quite a bit of money on stuff we weren't looking for. But how can you not buy the complete works of Lewis Carroll in one volume for ten bucks? Or Sopranos Season 3 for less than half price of what it would be new? And to finally get our own copy of Oh, the Places You'll Go, well, it's money well spent.
Right now, I'm reading a very cool little book called Darwinia, by Robert Charles Wilson. I bought it last year, and it has sat on the shelf because I read another book of his, called The Chronoliths, which had a very cool concept, but then I felt it sort of failed to capitalize on it. Still a good read, but if you have a story about a conqueror who hurls huge monuments of his victories back in time, well, I wanna read about that guy. But we don't get to. Oh well. Darwinia is a lost world type of story, but completely unique in execution and concept. As a nice touch, it has a few nods to Edgar Rice Burroughs. Oh yeah, he's Canadian! Nice!
Oh yeah, speaking of Canadian authors, I also bought a book by Charles de Lint on Gotthammer's recommendation.

Are you guys going to enter the Bulwer-Lytton Contest this year? I am busy paring my hopefully-horrific sentence down to around 60 words, but it's hard. It would be better if we were allowed an entire painful paragraph. Well, I have it down to 61 so that should be bad enough. (No wiseguy remarks about how I should be a shoo-in!)

Make it stop! Please! I'll give you a lucky loonie!
Anyways, back from nightshift today. Tired. I'll be back tomorrow with my usual Substantial and Brilliant Utterances Upon Varied and Sundry Topics Sprinkled With References to Ursines of All Species And Their Tendency to Poo in the Woods. Which, some minor trivia for you, was originally going to be the title of this blog, until brevity prevailed.

Happy Valentine's Day! May you not be embittered by this oft-heartless day. Here is a V-Day poem dedicated to my amazing wife- not one of those mushy and cliched poems, with lots of references to eyes being like oceans,though, or climbing really high mountains. It's just a love poem, with robots. In fact, that's what it's called:

Love Poem, with Robots


A fleet of technospaceships
full of robots
from the planet Technotopia X
arrived at Earth the other day
looking for the meaning of life
and love
all the questions of the human condition
that have plagued robotkind since
at least the golden age of pulp fiction
they sent a robot researcher
down to study you and I
and make a report to the mothership
he followed us around
mostly unobtrusive
but occasionally pestering us with
tiresome requests to clarify some
figure of speech
that he took literally
anyways
he kept a careful tally
medians modes and means
of every time we
hugged
touched
said I love you
he returned to his
mothership
to report on his findings
love is
he said in his robot voice
love is . . .
love . . .
love . . . does not . . .
compute
love . . .
and then
his technoneural processors
fried
and he died
so the fleet of technospaceships
fled
back to Technotopia X
we felt sad
I said
I loved that little guy
and you said
I love you!
I laughed
and said
I love you too!

Marilyn Manson has been fairly quiet lately, causing gabrielle and I to send urgent emails across the equator wondering what's up with that. Turns out he's been working on a film about Lewis Carroll, author of such classics as Alice in Wonderland and Jabberwocky. Which, when you think about it, is a perfect fit.

Yay for Olympics!
Eighteen years ago, when I was 13, I fell in love with the Olympic Winter Games. They were in Calgary that year, and our province embraced the Games with a zeal I had never seen before, or even since, really. It was cool. There were larger than life athletes, people like Alberto Tomba, Katerina Witt, Eddie the Eagle (a hapless ski jumper from Great Britain who qualified by virtue of being the only Brit ski jumper, the Jamaican bobsleddders, and our own Canadian heroes like Elizabeth Manley and Karen Percy (now married to Oilers GM Kevin Lowe) who won us two of our five medals that year.
Yay for Olympics! Michelle and I watched and cheered (Michelle cheered especially loud) as Spruce Grove native Jennifer Heil won Canada's first medal, gold in Women's moguls. We watched Cindy Klassen get a bronze in speed skating. Today I watched some figure skating- did you see that Chinese pair, Zhang and Zhang? She fell hard 38 seconds into the program attempting a quad throw, skated hurt off the ice, and then they came back and won the silver. That's what the Olympics are all about- inspiring stories of human accomplishment. Every four years it's good to get caught up in that again and cheer on the athletes, regardless of their national affiliation.
As an aside, I'm not really sure what the legal betting habits of Janet Gretzky, a non-athlete, has to do with anything. Hopefully the focus will shift off of that and on to what matters, the athletes.
Turin 2006
CBC's Olympic Coverage website
Canada's Olympic Team
New Zealand's Olympic Team (for no particular reason, other than I was wondering if my kiwi friends had much of a presence in the Winter Games)
Yay for Olympics!

Isn't there a football game on today? It's been a while since I payed much attention to American football. And in fact, I know absolutely nothing about the present incarnation of either team. But that won't stop me from handicapping the game for you, using my Ingenious and Infallible method of adding "poo" to the two teams involved. So it's the Pittsburgh PooSteelers vs the Seattle Poohawks, eh? Well, obviously, stealing poo is immoral and really gross, but when has that ever stopped Pittsburgh? In fact, the only way I can see the Poohawks winning this one is if they litter the field with so much birdturd that the Pittsburgh defence is overwhelmed. Not gonna happen. PooSteelers 31, Poohawks 13.