Kara’s Blog

I must admit that occasionally I succumb to the tempting siren calls of brain crack. The past couple of weeks have been so very busy that I haven't had much time for creative stuff, to the point that it's fermenting into brain crack whether I like it or not. I've been trying hard to relax at least a bit each day and push a couple of ideas out into the world, lest my head explode.

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It's a Wednesday. (That doesn't mean anything particular. I just wanted to point it out for those of you who hadn't noticed.) I haven't posted a new blog post in a while, so here's something I wrote a little while ago and never got around to posting.

I first read about this in an issue of TIME magazine covering the best inventions of 2007. Recently it was featured in an episode of Daily Planet,…

My reading week has suddenly left me swamped with things I'm normally doing but don't feel like doing right now, things I don't normally do and don't feel like doing right now, and things I wish I normally did and wanted to do this week but can't do right now. Still, I managed to go see Coraline last night, and I've managed to find some time right now to write a short blog post with…

Once upon a time, I expressed a desire to live in Iceland. Unfortunately, these tough economic times have been even tougher on Iceland, what with the government collapsing and all.

Our government came close to dissolving. It looks like that won't happen, however, now that the Liberal party has a new leader who's decided he'll support the Conservative budget. Many people are upset with this about-face by Michael Ignatieff.((Especially Jack Layton: "Blast! My evil…

Furious doesn't even begin to describe it. Town councilors in Birmingham, England have decided to drop apostrophes from signage. This unilateral decision about signage grammar is nothing less than a declaration of war against the English language. I call for a retaliatory preemptive strike.((You may be wondering how that is possible--suffice it to say, considerable amounts of power and some time travel would be involved.))

I'm appalled that people have the nerve to desecrate…

I woke up this morning to the following headline in my RSS feeds, courtesy of CBC News: N.B. school silences O Canada. It already had 249 comments then; it's up to 658 comments as I'm writing this. CBC News has since updated the article to expand its content and provide a more detailed story; the original article was less informative, which didn't stop people from commenting on it.

In case I haven't been clear…

Note to self: when melting butter in the microwave to use over popcorn, do NOT set microwave to high.

Luckily, our microwave is from 1987 and thus built like a tank. In order to destroy it, you'd actually have to stick a smaller microwave inside it and activate the two simultaneously. This would, of course, tear a hole in the space-time continuum, destroying the universe as well as the microwave. So don't try it.

Here's…

Sometime between November and ... now ... it became now. I'm not quite sure when this happened, or how it happened((If you know, please do explain it to me.)) ... but it happened. Now that it's now and no longer then, that which was must become what was going to be when then became now--which is now.

In that same spirit, the university felt it right and proper to commence a second term of classes…

We all have humbling experiences that remind us we aren't as smart as we think we are. And even if we are that smart, sometimes we still lack common sense, and other times we just plain don't think.

A couple of days ago, I woke up to the a slow but inexorable cracking noise coming from the vicinity of my bedroom door. Sometimes my cat scratches at my door in order to gain entry, oblivious…

I had originally intended to eschew the "best of 2008" and "worst of 2008" trend that always appears at the end of the year.((I still intend to avoid resolutions.)) However, one of the best websites I discovered in 2008 was Goodreads. Since joining in May, I can't recommend it enough. A self-proclaimed bibliophile, much of my leisure time goes toward reading. Thanks to a terrible memory, I have trouble recalling the particulars of books…