This morning while walking up Duluth past Coloniale in Montreal I witnessed the aftermath of an accident. An SUV had collided with a bicyclist in the intersection (an all way stop). The bicyclist was on the ground bloody and waiting for the ambulance, the bike was mangled and under the automobile. Very unfortunate, very messy.

I do not know who was at fault. I did not witness the accident itself.

I am, however, about to make myself highly unpopular amongst Montrealers. This city has a traffic problem. I do not mean the messy and screwed up road system, I’m talking about people following the rules of the road. I do not just mean the automobiles, I mean everyone: bikers, pedestrians and the car drivers. In almost every case everyone seems to think they know better than the laws which are put into place to protect us and protect others.

There is a reason for a red light. It means stop. Running the light whether you are in a car, legs or on a bike puts you at risk of getting hit, or worse hitting someone else. This is a bad thing. This is why you get fines if you are in a car and run a red light. The same goes for a stop sign. The sign says “Stop” for a reason.

Now, do not assume I am perfect. I jaywalk, I am like everyone else in Montreal. It is easy to jaywalk, it’s part of the culture, it’s expected and there is no feedback mechanism to prevent people from jaywalking. Laws are not acted upon.

The same goes for biking in Montreal.

Again I do not know what happened at that intersection this morning. But just today here is what I witnessed bicyclists do at that or around that intersection within a 5 minute period:

1. Run the intersection without stopping, glancing or even checking (3 bicyclists)
2. Run the intersection without stopping, glancing or even checking while wearing headphones (2 bicyclists)
3. Switch lanes crazily on St. Laurent while talking on a cell phone and handling the bike with one hand (1 bicyclist).

I personally believe that if you are in any vehicle, and a bicycle is a vehicle, you should be subject to the same laws. Running a stop sign or a red light in a bicycle is extremely dangerous. If I am driving a car I assume you will stop at a stop sign or red light if coming from the opposite direction. We all agree running red lights for cars is one of the worst driving mistakes. Why can we not fine someone who does it on a bicycle?

What would happen to an individual who is driving a car and wearing in-ear headphones? Answering a cellphone and driving with your knees while switching lanes of traffic?

I call on Montreal to actually set an example. Ticket bicyclists, jaywalkers and drivers alike, especially when it comes to running stop signs and red lights. I do not ever want to hit a bicyclist in a car driven by me, even if it is not my fault at the end of the day. A car does way more damage than a bicycle. It is to protect bicyclists that I even write this.

I challenge the police to go to that intersection and give out tickets to bicyclists.

I suspect I’m about to be labeled for my idiosyncratic ideas. But hear me out. If you are in the northern hemisphere you might have noticed that the weather has definitely cooled off just a tad. In Montreal we’re reaching the single digits for highs and I have even witnessed a flurry. Thankfully I was ensconced in a bar with a beer and crying into a beer is saved for other occasions of much more dire circumstances.

Now, I remember my high school models of the Earth. As the Earth rotates and wobbles on its axis we are treated to a change of seasons.

However, I would like to present an alternative view and a solution to this slow descent into the marauding madness of winter. Have you noticed that as the weather gets colder you tend to wear more clothes? You bundle up in parkas, toques (and for those non-Canadians who don’t know what toque is, you’re missing out), gloves, hats, sealskin and rabbit fur and more besides.

What if the reason for the general depression into Winter is due to us wearing more clothes? What if the mere need to wear more clothes accelerates the onset of winter?

I present to you exhibit “A”. When I was a child my eyesight started to deteriorate. To halt this sudden blindness (so acutely shown when a tennis ball hit me in the face when I was playing tennis at the age of seven), my parents hastily convened a meeting with the optometrist/ophthalmologist who nonchalantly insisted I correct my eyes with glasses. Wonderful.

The eyes of children are unfortunately quite unstable. My eyes decided to adjust to these new peripherals and then some. They adjusted to just below the threshold of perfect vision. Every six months thereafter, my favourite optometrist would continue to play a game of cat and mouse with my eyesight. He would exasperatedly correct my vision to near perfect and my eyes would drop in vision to non perfect, whereupon he would sigh and the process would start all over.

So taking this example, here’s what I propose happens: The weather drops in temperatures and we wear more clothes than necessary because we are unsure about our ability to handle this sudden coolness. To adjust, the temperature drops a bit more to prevent us from getting all sweaty underneath our jackets. We react badly. We swear at the sky, pull on an extra jacket and grumble our way out the door. And so the cycle begins again.

It is time to stop this insanity.

I demand all in the city of Montreal and beyond wear less clothes and warm the temperatures up.

Imagine a world where we all walk around in swimwear in the middle of December with balmy temperatures in the middle of the city of Montreal! I know we can make this dream come true without global warming. Wear less clothes and set yourself free from the tyranny of the temperatures!

It’s something that has mystified me for all the years I’ve lived here in Montreal. During the summer months or what is ostensibly called “Construction Season” in Quebec, mysterious pylons appear all over the city. Roads are blocked off, sidewalks closed, indecipherable detour signs (often leading in circles) appear and strange directions are hysterically broadcast to avoid unavoidable city sections.

However, this “Construction” part of the “Construction Season” goes incredibly slow. The pylons stick around for months and there are very few street construction crews to be seen. It’s almost as if the workers are invisible. The work somehow plods along haltingly. It’s like the thought that if you look at a watched kettle it never boils, the urgency of fixing any issue in the city crawls to a halt the more you look at it or want it done. Obviously Montreal street construction obey laws of relativity that I am unaware of and which would probably astound Einstein himself. But then again, as the nights get longer and the city inches towards our first snowfall, construction hits a pace of urgency that seems to be lacking throughout the rest of the year.

Montrealers, Tourists, wonder no more, as I have deduced what is happening.

You see, the Montreal Street Construction Crews are actually legions of the undead. Yes, you heard it right here. The Construction Crews are filled with daylight avoiding vampires, ghouls and other undead. It’s an ingenious attempt by our city council to tap a previously untapped potential.

Now granted, I don’t have definitive proof. I am slightly nervous at approaching a construction crew member lest they decide that I am actually good juicy food.

So here’s my reasoning:

1. Construction is slowest during the longest days of the year. Previously we all thought that it was because the nice hot weather was keeping construction crews from operating and enjoying vacation. Not at all. The undead cannot go out in the day, naturally the working hours for our frustrated dead brethren is rather short. No wonder the pylons pile up and no work gets done.

2. Pylons appear out of nowhere in the night time and there’s hardly anyone working during the day. Here I thought people were taking copious breaks or potentially the city could not get enough workers. No my friends, it’s actually that the undead crew must work during the night. It is why things go slow. But naturally they have to wait till after 1am to start work. Oh poor souls.

3. Again traffic jams on the streets at 2 or 3 in the morning, how else could it be explained.

4. The slow progress at getting anything done around the city! We all know that the undead are rather stupid and lusting after blood and live humans. Naturally this is why it takes forever. Have you ever tried to get a zombie to do anything useful other than eat your brains?

5. The crumbling nature of our concrete. Obviously the undead need to eat and occaisionally they kill humans and put them into the mix. I had thought this previously to do with the mafia and its penchant for dropping dead bodies into the concrete mixer, but really when you think about it. vampires must be to blame. Never trust a vampire.

I do have to hand it to our city council and mayor. I had no idea that you could keep something like this a secret, but then, what an amazingly brilliant idea. I applaud you. I applaud you.

As today’s Tweetisode gets published it will bring to an end the 12 weeks of the Tweet Rhapsody. The Tweet Rhapsody takes six Twitter accounts and creates a 2000+ Tweet conversation which creates the Tweet Rhapsody story. The details of “what” it is, I have blogged about, but the how and why… well that’s another story.

The How

Technically the Rhapsody is very very simple. So simple in fact that the entire technology was finished in a matter of three days. The site, its design, the wonderful portraits purchased from an artist on iStockPhoto and the bots which post to Twitter. In short from conception to realization the Tweet Rhapsody came together mostly over a single weekend.

The process for posting each Tweetisode went thusly: Write the 25-40 Tweets place them in a spreadsheet which automatically checked for lengths. For each Tweet I entered the GMT time which I had to mentally calculate for its relevance to the story and to what it meant to Montreal, Canada and Colombo, Sri Lanka. I did discover that conducting a romance between those two countries is entirely possible with the time zones (just in case someone wants to try in real life).

Once the Tweets were done, all I had to do was import the CSV directly into the MySQL database and the programming would take care of the rest. This included showing it appropriately on the web site as well as a bot which would post to the Twitter stream of each individual character. Simple, sufficient and in the end worked very well.

The Why

It’s not every day someone wakes up and says “I’m going to write an Internet-based romance between Sri Lanka and Canada and I’m going to use Twitter as a medium”. I can guarantee that that is likely not a thought most people wake up with. I did.

The Tweet Rhapsody was written to accomplish several tasks. One was a technical test of a generic platform I had written in PHP and Zend Framework with MySQL as the database, this platform I hope to now finish and use for various other projects (and yes, eventually open source).

The second objective was to finish a literary experiment I had started several years before during the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) initially at the behest of my good friend Craig Welsh. This was a story written through blog posts similar to the “Briefroman” or Letter novels of the 18th-19th century. I never finished it and it is these characters which became the central pieces of the Tweet Rhapsody. In addition, the great thing about the Briefromane was that they did not ignore the fact that the letters were important to the story, quite the opposite in fact. I wanted to make Twitter not just the medium, but indeed, part of the story. In other words the story might happen in Twitter-space but could not have happened without the characters being aware of Twitter itself.

The third reason was that I wanted to have a running commentary on issues in both Sri Lanka and Canada and show the similarities of the two countries rather than the large obvious differences. I am of the Sinhalese majority by birth but I long for the day that all the peoples of that island nation are brought together in peace, no more than I wish for the eventuality where there is no discrimination between the English, French and Aboriginal Peoples of Canada. In Sri Lanka yet, the divisions are very deep and my hope is in the possibility of friendships of the type displayed by Raj and David in the Tweet Rhapsody.

The last reason is that I am a closet romantic and I kind of liked the idea or seeing whether this format could actually make people believe in six characters enough to follow them through to the bitter end.

Report from Day 1

It’s a warm summer night in Quebec City. Alright, truth be told, it is an extremely hot summer night in Quebec City. It’s one of those nights that you wish you could simply sleep outside in the breezy night under a canopy of stars, and heck tonight (if you could see them through the light pollution, it would be a night of falling Perseid stars).

Quebec City is the first stop in my journey along the North Shore of the St. Lawrence and back along the South Shore to Montreal. The itinerary is as follows:

Quebec City, Tadoussac, Sept-Iles, Havre St-Pierre, Natashuquan, Blanc Sablon, Red Bay, St. Anthony, Deer Lake, Corner Brook, Gros Morne National Park, St. John’s, Port-aux-Basques, Halifax, Somewhere in New Brunswick, Montreal.

I’m not doing this completely alone of course, Mike Mannion is joining me until Deer Lake and Chris Smith is joining me from Halifax back to Montreal. You might also notice the lack of Air Canada (thank goodness) in all this, and that is because we are driving the entire distance in my little Suzuki. The only ominous sign so far is that one of the doors has become locked and will only unlock with suitable force, I guess it could be worse.

We escaped Montreal with few bruises. Traffic, while busy, was nothing like the previous trip to Quebec City when it took a full two hours to get off the island of Montreal. Indeed other than observations of rather weird Quebec road planning and construction, the trip was remarkably uneventful. Naturally, that means I must comment

Now, I fully realize that I am not the master road planner of the world. Heck I will even note that I have no engineering degree or courses or perhaps anything remotely resembling the ability to fix roads. I do, however, like to think that I possess a modicum of common sense. Now, many of my friends will disagree on this ‘modicum’ considering my ability to get hospitalized on a regular basis for sheer stupidity or tomfoolery.

I do, however, question the design of having a major two-lane highway be interrupted whereupon all traffic that wishes to continue must exit on one lane and then rejoin the highway less than one kilometre away, again through a single lane. Now my engineering skills, as noted, are quite lacking but I have heard that if you have a wide tube and then narrow the tube you create something called a bottleneck. Now I doubt this masterpiece of engineering that is the Highway 40 split in Trois-Rivieres will ever be fixed but it does make me wonder as to what the great road planners were thinking.

Of course all I have to remember is that at least this is still much more sensible than the feat of remarkable senility that is the Turcot Interchange or the bewildering circuitry of the Dorval rings, or the intricate Celtic knotwork of the Decarie circle. Those who have ever driven in Montreal may recognize these landmarks. I have this sudden urge to start up a new tour service for people who come to Montreal, kind of like architectural tours in other cities but focused instead on the many impressive attempts of creating Escher-like structures in road design. I do not know what the market for “Walking Tours of Architectural Idiocy” is…

From here on in though, our choices up the North Shore are limited when it comes to roads. We can choose route 138 or.. err well, actually there is no other road, we’re pretty much on it for 1400km till the road runs out in Natashuquan. I’m pretty positive that no strange interchanges will be found. Almost positive.

“Never go anywhere without emergency rations, like candy bars,fruit, and crackers in your pockets; that way you won’t starve if someone locks you in a secret room.” — The Hardy Boys’ Guide to Life, The Secret Panel

So here we are, another great adventure lies before me. This time it is to discover the land of Ecuador in South America. As always my plan is simple. Survive in a country with a different language and culture, climb something really high so I can get a good look at the land and then wander around till someone ships me back to Canada. Simple.

Of course, I couldn’t simply get on a flight to Quito from Montreal. That would be too easy.

The plan is to drive to Rhode Island, stay with my high school friend (from Hong Kong) Sung and then take the train to New York and see another high school friend, Tiffany. Finally I will get on a flight to Quito from New York City.

Anyone who knows me will likely tell you my plans tend to always go, well, slightly astray towards the bizarre. Already I’ve realized that I will be arriving in New York City at Penn Station right in the middle of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade… this obviously has all the hallmarks of a small disaster. Niall and Rebecca suggested I just put my luggage on the side of a street and sit on them till the streets of Manhattan clear up.

I’m not entirely sure how that will go over in NYC.

So Saturday I drove away from Montreal after a hearty breakfast at Ye Olde Orchard on Prince Arthur with dear friends. Thanks greatly to the bartender who kindly brewed us a couple pots of Ethopian coffee that Janius kindly schlepped all the way over. I was buzzing by the time I left.

Which was probably a good thing. After following no more than four detours, two barricades and a partridge in a pear tree to get out of Montreal and off the island (a small miracle I figured), I headed for the Vermont border with a darkening horizon. Sure enough by the time I hit Burlington the snow had picked up and driving was quite uncomfortable to say the least. I wasn’t so much concerned about my car, I have new winter tires and I wasn’t pushing it, but I’m sure the sedan that passed me whose back end was distinctly trying to run away from the front, may not have been as well prepared.

Regardless, I made it to Rhode Island, settled into Sung and Liz’s place, woke up with kids and went to hang out in Chuck E Cheeses for a birthday party. Ah the life of parents There is something rather odd that we find people dressed up as giant rodents to be fun, cute and cuddly. However, Uncle Dups did his best to win tickets from the game machines so that we could reward the kids. Life is so difficult!

I must admit so far this has a very similar feel to my last great adventure when I travelled from London through to Shanghai. Then I started my journey in London with Tushar and his family.

Now I must be away, Uncle Dups is required to run around and play and have balls thrown at him. It is after all an Uncle Dups’ duty.

Oh, you might have noticed the quotation at the top. My friends Iwona and Derek gave me a small book called the Hardy Boys’ Guide to Life. I have decided that I should follow the guide strictly during this adventure. What could possibly go wrong?

Oh Craig, have you decided to run another betting pool as to my demise?

It’s been a pretty busy weekend.

As some of you may have read elsewhere or perhaps seen on Facebook and other such places, I’ve switched jobs at Sun Microsystems and have taken on the task of being one of MySQL’s Community Relations Managers. This of course means that I’m heading off to do some “on-the-job” training in Colombus, Ohio then presentations in New York City, then by train to Baltimore and finally attending Open SQL Camp in Charlottesville, Virginia before leaving the States from Washington, DC. Yup, it’s been pretty busy planning for that…

On top of all that, some of you may also know that I’m heading to Ecuador for all of December. And this is where my weekend became really busy. My friends, Mike, Janius and Ed climbed Mt. Cotopaxi in Ecuador (2007) and discovered some worthwhile causes care of Javier Herrera a mountain guide in Quito. Through Javier  I learned of a school that needs clothes for 5-12 year-olds so we set about trying to either get clothes or money towards clothes for these children since it was an opportunity for me to hand deliver said goods.

Someone (I’d like to claim me, but I might have been inebriated) came up with idea that I could co-opt my traditional Christmas dinners for my friends into a fundraising activity. Within a week, invites went out to everyone I knew in Montreal and suddenly I was faced with the task of cooking for 30 or more people on Saturday. For the record we raised $505 through the event. Thanks to all who donated and/or attended. Your generousity is greatly appreciated.

Now why am I writing all this after the fact (naturally someone is saying “humpf, he never invited me, the jerk”). Well by some measure of luck, the food I cooked came out okay. Some part of the credit has to go to my brother Miuru who made sure I had the correct recipe for the Sri Lankan cutlets which were a giant hit at the dinner amongst the other dishes that I managed to concoct. It was also the dish that took the longest to produce (1.5 hours). So I thought I’d write up the recipe, sadly I didn’t take any photos so maybe one day I’ll actually record photos and better instructions. By the way, I don’t measure anything so I’m sorry to say I have no idea the amounts of spices etc. please think of this as cooking by experimentation and taste and use spices as necessary.

Sri Lankan Cutlets

Ingredients:

Whole Potatoes
Sardines (Portuguese canned sardines), you can omit/use alternative
1 bunch of cut green onion or 1/2 onion
Eggs

1. Boil the potatoes in a pot. Once fully boiled, cool and remove the skin.
2. In another pot, add oil, some fenugreek seeds, a clove of garlic, the 1/2 onion, sardines and fry with spices (not very helpful considering, I’m not sure about the exact spices but I would imagine a mixture of, turmeric, coriander, cumin, chilli powder would work well, or go to an indian/sri lankan store and buy some roasted curry powder). Add salt and pepper as necessary. Get the sardines tasty (oh fantastically subjective recipe).
3. Add in the the potatoes and mash it altogether.
4. Seperate the yolk from the egg white.
5. Once the consistency of the potatoes/sardines is nice and gooey (should be still a bit dry), add the egg yolk and mix to create the internals of the cutlet. Should be nice and thick, pasty like.
6. If you cannot buy breadcrumbs, I suggest going over to Mike’s and using his blender, which is what he did to create whole wheat bread crumbs by blending toasted bread. Worked like a charm.
7. Roll the inside of the cutlet into a ball with your palms, dip in the egg white and then into the breadcrumbs. You may need to roll again to get a nice even texture of crumbs around the cutlet.
8. Repeat 7 until all cutlets are done.
9. Fire up a deep pan of oil or a deep fryer. Get the oil nice and hot. Dip the cutlets into the oil and fry until brown outside.
10. Eat. Or serve and let others eat. Or hide and just eat by yourself in a corner. Or hide the cutlets and eat the corner. Or corner the cutlets and cut the mustard.

If you follow the above and it works, please send me a picture. If the above does not work or creates a hazardous waste, please inform the authorities. If you produce the above and end up with something alcoholic, I suggest reporting yourself to the nearest religion and claim the ability to turn spice into wine. You will make a fortune.

I’ve spent the last day letting the results of the United States Presidential Election settle. For full disclosure, if you haven’t yet noticed, I’m a proud Canadian and I live in Montreal, Quebec. Why then has this election meant as much to me as it seems to have meant to those who it directly affects and who voted?

As I was coming home from my friend’s house last night after Barack Obama had given his acceptance speech and the pundits were poring over every last detail, I noticed that the bars on “The Main” in Montreal were spilling out with people. This was a Tuesday night after all and the Montreal Canadiens weren’t playing, which meant that most of these people had gathered together to watch these elections. No doubt, they too have been moved.

My friend the Towniebastard was glad the American people “didn’t fuck it up”.

To be honest though, we don’t know how Barack Obama will do as the leader of the world’s most powerful nation. So, in a year we may all be sitting around asking the question, “how did he screw up?”. I’m hoping that won’t be the case at all.

I’m not quite sure I understand my own feelings, but the election of Obama means more to me than just what he might do. It is much more about what he has already done and I think that makes me giddy with joy. These elections have been one of the most watched, televised, reported upon, vilified and generally media-filled in the history of mankind. More people around the world have probably heard of this election than any other since apes started walking on hind legs.  This is thanks to never before avenues of communication available to us from the Internet to mobile telephones.

This election may belong to the United States, but they were about us as a civilization. Here was a candidate who walked and talked the language of inclusion. Here was a candidate who was a different colour to the majority, whose race had been subjugated and had to fight hard for all the rights they achieved.

I am a coloured minority in my nation, I understand what it feels like to wonder the question, “if I were fit to lead would people see beyond what I am and see who I am?”.

But even more than that, it is the idea that at this juncture of the western civilization, we are talking about inclusion, we are talking about doing better, we are talking about what it means to be human, what it means to be part of this civilization and what it means to be part of this world. Instead of fighting about what we cannot do, this election was about what we could do, what a nation can become.

The idea of America is great. Its founding fathers were indeed inspired in the constitution. Great nations lead us to a greatness in humanity beyond the borders of those lands. Like in ancient times when great learning spread far and wide from single nations of learning. I wish for all nations to do great things. I wish for all peoples, even us here in Quebec who are about to go into mudslinging between Anglophones and Francophones to start thinking about what they could do together; to see beyond the differences rather than always accentuating the differences.

If a black man whose people were brought to a country as slaves could rise to be the leader of that country, then why must we bicker about small differences in what we eat, how we say things and where our parents came from? Instead we need to see what we can do, what great things we, the current caretakers for this beautiful world, can achieve together.

I hope that as Quebec goes to the polls in December that we look beyond how we can do things separately, and more towards how we can build a society together, how we can achieve greatness in our times and solve the crises that affect all of us. Let us learn from our southern neighbours and what they have achieved there. Let us practice the language of inclusion, opportunity and fraternity.

I’ve lived all over this great country now and as Obama has repeatedly said about the United States, we are not all that different. In fact the similarities far outweigh the differences.

In the last 24 hours I have been left speechless twice. Once was watching several scenes of Vertical Limit. One of the worst mountaineering movies ever made. Now, granted, I watched this before I really got into Mountaineering when it came out in 2000. I may have even paid good money to go see the movie when I was back home to St. John’s that Christmas. Well, that’s several dollars I will never get back I’m sure.

This weekend my friend Gen decided that she needed to subject all of us to frighteningly bad mountain movies in preparation for an upcoming mountain film festival in Montreal: Festival International de Film D’aventure de Montrea (FIFAM). Mike and I happened to be out trundling around Montreal when I discovered Vertical Limit in the $5 bin of a DVD store. Well needless to say, it had to be bought. Of course I forced Mike to proudly carry it to his house and house it in his video collection. Just remember kids, if someone gives you nitro and asks you to take it up a horribly large high altitude mountain, just say no. But if you must, remember that sunshine might make it go boom.

The second bit of speechlessness is due to the passing of Rudy Ray Moore. Now, I know many of you have no clue as to who I am talking about. There was a time in my life when my friends and I were very much enamoured by the Blaxploitation films of the 1970s. Heck, I even started up the Memorial University Shaft Society (still appears as a valid society on this page about MUN), tried to film a Shaft fan movie and we scoured St. John’s, Newfoundland for the very best Blaxploitation could offer. Rudy Ray Moore was at the top of the pile. Rudy Ray Moore inspired the rap genre and created such classics as, Dolomite, Dolomite: The Human Tornado and The Avenging Disco Godfather. The only movie that we searched high and low and never found was Petey Wheatstraw, the Devil’s Son in Law.

Well, today at the grand old age of 81 and due to complications of diabetes, Rudy Ray Moore has gone on to the grand disco in the sky. Thanks for the memories.

“I’m gonna let ‘em know that Dolemite is back on the scene! I’m gonna let ‘em know that Dolemite is my name, and fuckin’ up motha fuckas is my game!”

Honestly, I have never complained about a stretch of road more often than the Turcot Interchange in Montreal. I’ve even posted several blog posts that have mentioned this (”The Montreal Groan” being the primary one). But seriously, the stretch as every Montrealer will tell you, is some of the worst road planning in the world. I don’t think I’m exaggerating. In Good Omens Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman write about the the Devil using one of the motorways around London to be a permanent prayer to him by forcing motorists into a perpetual traffic jam. Oftentimes, the Turcot makes me wonder what evil deity gloats upon our misery.

My friend Rebecca MacDonald has discovered the final plans for the Turcot interchange once they finish fixing messing with it. The document is in French but here are the key images…:

Before:

After:

The photos make me think of those before and after shots from diet commercials, where a frumpy/dumpy person is turned into a super model after eating a diet of carrots and celery for three months. Except of course, in those commercials they have those disclaimers which make you realize that eating carrots and celery for three months certainly didn’t have the desired affect instead reality is represented in the disclaimer:

“* participant combined diet with 20 hours of exercise per day to get the pictured results, your mileage may vary”

Note: if you read this and decide on a diet of carrots and celery, not only will you lose weight, but you will likely die. However you will also be a fashionable orange colour due to excess carotene.

Well, I wonder what the disclaimers for the Turcot photos would be…

“* development will last 20 years and may result in madness”

“* new turcot will only last 2 years looking pretty before the special ‘concrete’ mixture crumbles, use quickly, don’t look too hard”