and things went downhill from there

The former owners made a point of leaving this behind when they moved out - along with some other art that I may feature here as the weather turns colder. This hangs in the basement bathroom that we seldom use, so I typically don't give it much thought.

Having said that ... what the heck is going on in this picture? Is he yawning? Yodelling? Eating invisible grapes? Shading his eyes to stare into the ember-coloured sky? Falling backward? Is that a curved vuvuzela at his feet?



Also, where is his left hand? Why does he appear to have five fingers on his right hand (not counting the thumb)?

After ignoring the application for quite some time, I started using Instagram again fairly recently. I am not a big fan of their terms of service - though I don't know if they modified them after their "we own every picture you post here" blunder a couple of years back. I decided at one point that since the bulk of what I ever put up on Instagram was just crappy snapshots from a mediocre phone camera with lots of filters applied, I don't really care if they decide they want to use any of those pictures in their ads.

If they can make money from something like this, then more power to them I suppose:


They have also made it very difficult to actually link to any of my pictures on their site. Their web interface gave me a single share option, that created about 2k of garbage that did not work here. I finally right-clicked on the picture in Chrome and inspected the page element to find the link to the picture itself.

This was my breakfast on Saturday. atara and I stopped at a local restaurant near the museum on the weekend before walking over to take in the Salvador Dali exhibit while it was still in town. This was their "Mexican" breakfast, with a corn tortilla, refried beans, eggs, salsa, guacamole, a sour cream-based sauce and cubed potatoes. I ordered it with the optional chorizo. I had their vegan option of this breakfast on an earlier visit, and I think that I like that one a bit better. I think the next time I order this, I will order the vegan version with the optional chorizo, if only to see if they will do that.

The exhibit was good, but we had to take two passes at it to see it all. As we were about to enter the Dali part of the museum the first time, the fire alarm went off and they evacuated the building. Well, technically they were supposed to evacuate it, but they let most of us hang around down in the building lobby since it was almost -30 outside.

It seems that it was a false alarm, rather than something more serious like, say, a chlorine bomb in the stairwell. Within ten or fifteen minutes they had cleared the alarm and they allowed us all to go back up stairs.

This picture served as a gateway to the exhibit. I have seen pictures of this picture, but the life-sized version of it was very impressive. This shot does not do it any justice.



On the work front, it is starting to sound like I probably will not be sent out on Strike duty. The union representing the car mechanics signed a tentative deal four minutes before the negotiating deadline. I cannot remember any time when a union at my company has voted no on a contract that their leaders signed, so I suspect they are good to go for the next four years. The running trades guys walked out, but the news today said that the government already has legislation written and ready to pass first thing on Monday. That comes as a surprise to nobody.