Month: June 2015

Christopher Lee’s many villain roles: Count Dooku and Saruman (top row), and Scaramanga and Lord Summerisle from The Wicker Man (bottow row).

R.I.P. Christopher Lee, wonderfully evil movie villain, who recently died at the age of 93. You younger folks know him as Count Dooku from Star Wars: The Lesser Trilogy and Saruman from the Lord of the Rings films (he’s the only LOTR cast member to have actually met Tolkien), but he’s been a movie villain for far longer. He played characters like Dracula and Fu Manchu long before the age of CGI, and you should check him out as a superfluously-nippled Bond villain Francisco Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun (which was referenced in the Kamp Krusty Simpsons episode) and virgin-sacrificing pagan in The Wicker Man, which he considered to be his best film.

In tribute to him, here’s the scene from The Wicker Man where we get introduced to Lee’s character, Lord Summerisle:

Happy National Iced Tea Day! We’ve had hot tea for centuries, but we had to wait for readily-available ice — first provided by ice harvesters, and later via refrigeration — for iced tea to become a popular summer drink. Whether you enjoy it as actual tea poured over ice or as “sweet tea” as we call it down here (actually sugar water with just enough tea to give it a brown color), today’s its day. I’m going to celebrate as I hunker down with some of the real stuff over client work at my local tea shop, Kaleisia, later this afternoon.

As you enjoy an iced tea, be sure to check out this NPR piece: As American as Iced Tea: A Brief, Sometimes Boozy, History.

Outside the house: the sun’s starting to set.

Inside the house: dinner’s almost done.

The scene this morning at Spadina subway station.
Photo by Antonio Gomez-Palacio (@aurbanist). Click to to see the original.

The TTC has announced that all trains are back up and running. Get moving, Toronto working stiffs! Be advised that there will still be some “residual delays”.

This article was originally titled Toronto friends: The subways are down, expect a terrible morning commute. The original body appears below.

Toronto’s public transit system — the TTC (Toronto Transit Commission) — has announced that the radio system and even the backup radio system used to communicate with the subway trains is out of commission. Without working communications, they decided to shut down the trains until the problem is resolved. If you live in Toronto, you might want to hold off your commute and keep an eye on the official TTC Twitter account. Remember that even if you drive to work, a subway outage means terrible traffic on the streets (and Tampa folks, our terrible transit system, coupled with urban non-engineering is why our traffic is terrible).

…it’s grocery shopping day for me and Anitra. This is a photo of me earlier this morning at Bearss Groves, our local year-round open-air fruit and vegetable market, hefting a watermelon that weighs about as much as my big accordion.

Found via AcidCow. Click the photo to see the source.

This part from issue number one of the new Groot comic book starts off with a scene that we’re all familiar with…

…and here’s where it takes a left turn:

Found via The Brandon Show.