the flying squirrel

Friday, September 6, 2002

Excuse me while I remove myself from the world for a bit. It's nothing personal. I'm just not feeling much up to dealing with people right now. No reason. Just one of those things.

There's a bunch of stuff going on in September that I'm supposed to be involved in. Problem is I don't want to be involved in anything right now. I just want to curl up in bed and listen to music or something. I'm happy there. Work's fine; I can do that. Anything else doesn't really seem worth the effort at the moment.

As much as I seem to want to turn down invitations, maybe I'll feel better about it in a few days. I don't want to close doors I might regret closing later... But my bed is still looking very nice.

Wednesday, August 28, 2002

Speaking of Belleville, there is a story in the Intelligencer ( the local paper) about the closure of the the store my dad worked at before I was born, and my mom works at now. I worked there for two or three years myself, in high school.

It's kind of sad. I shouldn't say much, since I'm privy to information (and speculation) David Geen evidentally doesn't want to be made public. I can say that the people quoted in the article are just making stuff up, however sensible it might sound. The article fails to mention that Mr Geen (David's father and the store's previous owner), died about a year ago.

This is newsworthy because, like a lot of downtowns in small cities, Belleville's downtown ain't what it used to be. People are proposing lots of crazy schemes to make it work again, and this sort of thing is hardly encouraging.

My dad worked at that store up until they openned the Loyalist market store in the late 80s. He left Geen's a couple years ago to seek a better opportunity elsewhere in the city. My mom started working part-time after I started school, and full-time after my little sister started. My tour of duty as stock person isn't something I like to think about a lot, but I'm still a bit sentimental about the old place.

Thursday, August 22, 2002

Speaking of Metropolis, I watched the movie again last night. (The crazy animated Japanese Rin Taro/Tezuka one. Not the Fritz Lang one. I haven't yet been able to sit through the latter. Have to do that some time).

So I was watching Metropolis. As we all know, there's this neat little map in one scene that has a whole bunch of Ontario place names on it. And that's way cool. I was paying a bit more attention, then, when we got to the scene where we see Metropolis from space.

It only lasts a second. But I saw it. I hit pause. I did a slow reverse on the DVD. Back and forth a couple times. I blinked. I stared. I thought there must be something wrong.

Metropolis is Belleville.

I'm serious. John didn't believe me either. What you see in that very short scene is this beam of light shooting out of the Ziggurat. The beam originates from near the shore of a body of water that looks very much like Lake Ontario. See for yourself. The pictures are up above there.

My video capture card is currently in a machine running Linux, and I haven't gotten around to hacking things so that the drivers actually work (stupid Linux), these aren't captures from the DVD. They're captures from a promo clip you can see for yourself here.

But I digress. Yes, John was a bit sceptical, too, when I showed him the evidence. To the right, you'll see the closest image to this area I could find on NASA's website. Uncanny, isn't it? That's Lake Ontario. The cool penninsula is beautiful Prince Edward County, which I have mentioned on these pages once or twice. You can see the St Lawerence snaking off to the Atlantic. Nestled up on the other side of the Bay of Quinte is my hometown. The city from which Duke Red shoots laser beams at the sun. How cool is that?

I'll admit, the Metropolis image isn't perfect. The County stretches a little to far into the St Lawerence Delta. Lake Erie isn't quite right, if it's there at all, and it looks like they turned the Adirondack Forest Preserve in Upstate New York into a really big lake. But that doesn't hinder the fact that Metropolis is Belleville. And that's just cool.