Ticketmaster, what are you trying to tell me?

Philosophy -- the chance to press your nose against the side of the fishbowl and take a look outside -- seems to come at me when I'm least expecting it these days. I don't know -- maybe I'm just getting to be that age.

Take yesterday, for instance. I was on the Ticketmaster web site looking for tickets to the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. The VSO is having a Beethoven festival, and though it's been a long time since I went through that particular phase in my life -- always making sure I had at least one Beethoven piece to play on when I was taking piano lessons, wearing down my tape of the Fifth Piano Concerto, dressing up as Beethoven for Halloween -- I still retain a soft spot for Old Deafy. I'd gotten to the page where you're asked to enter letters you see on-screen to keep bots out (and to keep blind people from going to concerts, I'm convinced). But instead of getting random letters like I used to, I now was presented with two random words.

Here's the part that actually made me stop: they're real words. And as with any two randomly selected words, putting them together makes a kind of poetry (or at least a halfway decent name for a garage band album). I stopped, thought about the words I was seeing, then went back and reloaded the page a couple times to see what I would get. I started looking for sense and reason in the words I was getting. At one point I started wondering, like early Christians thumbing the Bible for inspiration, whether the Internet -- the deus ex machina -- was trying to tell me something.

I didn't write down the words I got at the time, but here are ten more pairs of authentication words I pulled up, just for you:

disagreements nine
Arab center
collect smashes
huddled submitted
Jeffrey already
Bellevue was
from destitute
street, slowing
find Lissner
stamp Gannen

Who's Lissner, and how do I find him? What about the odd and slightly conspiratorial "Arab center"? And if "Jeffrey already," does he still?

I encourage you to replicate this experiment. Go here and you too can be exploring the mysteries (while also looking for Jack Johnson tickets).

After four months in Vancouver

"Routine" is too strong of a word, but living in Vancouver -- which for me consists mostly of waking up, going to work, working, and coming back from work -- has taken on the qualities of a beautiful tartan. There are many beautiful colors and the handiwork is interesting, but after a while I feel like I've seen it all. So the mountains... well, I depend on them to be there so I know I'm biking in the right direction. And the ocean... well, there'd have to be an unusual sheen coming off it to make me stop and stare when I'm walking somewhere on campus. And so even the most wondrous of places -- this intersection of mountain and ocean, of sea and sky -- seems to fade into the background of everday coming-and-goings.

If receptors on the cell surface can become desensitized after repeated stimulation, why not us as well? What are we but collections of cells?

Case in point: Walking around campus one night a couple weeks ago with RW, I saw signs posted up that said "SET" with arrows pointed west. On the median of Main Mall, the central thoroughfare through campus, I saw large white trailers parked. Large tents scattered around. Men in army uniforms milling about.

When I walked up to one of the trailers, I saw this:


It seems a movie was filming on campus: a remake of the 1951 film "The Day the Earth Stood Still". I'd seen the original in snippets back in elementary school when a teacher of mine, BN, a sci-fi buff, had shown it to us. An alien comes to earth with a large robot hoping to bring about peace. [The remake, I found out later, stars Keanu Reeves and Jennifer Connelly and is set to be released December 12th, 2008.]

Two men came out of one trailer and walked alongside us. "Look at this place! Look at those mountains!" one of them said with outstretched arms. I asked where he was from. "L.A." he said.

It occurred to me afterward how strange this all was: To me, the movie trailers were the interesting thing. I'd never seen one before, much less one up-close, and I was angling my head to see the extras (the men in army uniforms) and look inside the tents (for catering and costumes). To the movie hands from L.A., the natural scenery was the main attraction. (Admittedly, Main Mall gives great views of the mountains of the North Shore.) And ironically we were both connected to a movie about an alien seeing Earth for the first time, an alien played by Keanu Reeves (who himself might be an alien, I'm 80% convinced). Funny.