Omega Point

“Why buy one when you can buy two for twice the price?”

Liv­ing in Van­cou­ver, one tends to notice that all the build­ings look pretty much the same, be they Van­cou­ver Spe­cials or not-yet-leaky condo tow­ers in Yale­town. How­ever, the 770 Build­ing takes the phe­nom­e­non to a whole other level:

In 1940 the Lubav­itch­ers pur­chased a small collegiate-gothic-style Brook­lyn build­ing (once a med­ical clinic) at 770 East­ern Park­way in Crown Heights, Brook­lyn, for the sixth Rebbe, Yoseph Yitzchak Schneer­son, who had recently immi­grated to the United States to escape Nazi persecution.

[…]

Because of the Rebbe’s charisma, energy and the devo­tion of his fol­low­ers, the build­ing in Brook­lyn has become a kind of holy ground for Lubav­itch­ers. It has been repli­cated world­wide, with vary­ing degrees of pre­ci­sion, mostly as Chabad centers

Really!

Per­son­ally, I like how the fur­ther you scroll—ahem, right—on the page, the cra­zier and more out-of-place the 770 copies get. Curi­ousity beck­oned, and though that side made no men­tion of it, I looked to see if a 770 Build­ing had shown up in Van­cou­ver yet.

As it turns out, while there’s a Lubav­itch Cen­tre in Van­cou­ver, good pho­tos are dif­fi­cult to find. Also, it’s at Oak and 41st and I really don’t want to go all the way down there right now.

Amus­ingly, the best photo I could find has a com­menter who astutely points out that it’s one of the many “steel crown” build­ings around Van­cou­ver, which comes back to my orig­i­nal point: Van­cou­ver has maybe five or six dif­fer­ent build­ing styles that are copied and pasted around as needed. It’s like liv­ing in SimCity.

World of Warcraft characters run at 12mph. Science says.

As seen on Infi­nite Lives: Mana Energy Potions’ RL Race across Aze­roth!

Wigs? War­craft? Get­ting hurt? Awe­some.

(Also, are these guys actu­ally hawk­ing mana potion energy drinks? Oddly, that actu­ally sounds more appro­pri­ate than the com­pe­ti­tion.)

A question about Russia

Has Rus­sia, in any of her his­toric guises, ever invaded a neigh­bour­ing state, won, and then withdrawn?

I see.

Catherine talks to the ladies

“Any­way, I met that guy at a blog­ging con­fer­ence,” I said.

She cut me off: “Flog­ging con­fer­ence!?” she exclaimed, seem­ingly both intrigued and alarmed.

After we cleared that up, I men­tioned an idle inter­est in video blog­ging and sug­gested I might try my hand at it at some point.

“So what would you talk about?” she asked.

I tried to remem­ber the last few posts I’d writ­ten here.

“Oh, you know… stuff.”

A friendly neighbourhood reminder

To whom it may concern:

Firstly, I want to assure you I have noth­ing less than the utmost sym­pa­thy for what you are going through. I can cer­tainly appre­ci­ate the sheer num­ber of emo­tional and logis­ti­cal chal­lenges inher­ent in car­ing for a dog as large and as gravely ill as yours appears to be. On a more opti­mistic note, we can prob­a­bly take your pet’s hearty appetite as a good sign.

How­ever, I would like to remind you of the pro­por­tion­ate rela­tion­ship between the height of very tall peo­ple (e.g. yours truly) and the size of one’s foot. This nat­u­rally cor­re­sponds to the area of the sole that con­tacts the ground. Also con­sider that height has a bear­ing on other val­ues: weight, momen­tum, sprint­ing abil­ity, fist size, et cetera.

Addi­tion­ally, you may not be aware of the well-established cor­re­la­tion between time spent clean­ing shoes (t) and emo­tional irri­tabil­ity (i). i increases expo­nen­tially as the value of t rises. I’m just saying.

In con­clu­sion, please buy a snow shovel and clean up after your dog, jerkface.