Abandoned Stuff by Saskboy

Last month I was in Saskatoon. I wrote about my first day there but didn’t take the story home so to speak. I have to work from memory a bit harder now, but the second day I was there was the first day of the conference, and the keynote speaker told us about “Happy Slapping” which is a cyber bullying technique where kids use a digital video camera like in a cell phone and record a friend hitting a kid in the head with their hand. Then the video is widely distributed as “quality viewing”, to humiliate the victim further. Who said kids can’t be callus?

A more interesting use of technology is sending a text message without pressing send. Instead you press the phone with the typed in message against the glass of a soundproof obstacle so that your friend on the other side of the glass gets your message. The speaker saw a group of children doing this in Australia.

I had a fairly uneventful morning then I saw an improv comedy act after lunch, and narrowly missed being pulled up on stage to move the comedians Mark and Lee around while they described a scene. A Sask Ed staff member was coerced to do a job interview skit, and he was almost funnier than the improv team. Our table contributed a word to the “random word from hat” skit - “fulcrum”. They managed to work it in to their routine alright, and no, I didn’t suggest the word.

I loaded myself up into a school bus in the afternoon after attending an orientation session about the Canadian Light Source given by a stand-in presenter who managed to field questions pretty well for not knowing what was in the slide presentation he was given. One slide was about the search for life on Mars, and he said “it’s a fascinating area of research… of which I know nothing so we’ll skip that part.”

On the way to the CLS, jokes were made, and a good time had by all. The tour was interesting, and the blocks of concrete to keep everyone’s chromosones safe, huge. The main room is too loud for an office environment, but they have doors on their offices to the side at least. The building is temperature controlled so the experiments aren’t comprimised.

On the way back from the UofS campus where the CLS is, the traffic was backed up on College Dr. due to a police car warning people around a stalled car with its trunk open in the middle of the westbound street. I saw a crane parked in another street, not yet hoised to the top of its vertical stand. As the bus whipped by, I managed to take a somewhat decent photo out an opened side window. Photos are elsewhere in the blog. Oh what the hey, I’ll repost some here so you don’t have to go looking.

My friend Steven who suggested the “fulcrum” word in the improv show, wound up winning an MP3 player of his own from a company’s draw. In the last minutes of the conference, Jan from another library region won the second iPod Shuffle up for grabs, so the libraries cleaned up in the door prize department this time.

I was referred to EE Buritos, an El Salvador Central American food emporium with home-style milk shakes and very good meals. I couldn’t even finish my plate there was so much, even though I wanted to. Unfortunately, when Ashley and I left the restaurant, I noticed something odd about her car. It was missing its license plate! If it fell of somewhere or was taken we’ll never know, but whereever it is, it’s with its screws too because they were gone. [UPDATE: Apr 18 '06 Ashley got a summons to court in Saskatoon to pay a parking ticket charged to her plate days after it was reported stolen.]We decided to drive around anyway at my urging, and went to a movie theatre on 22nd I think hoping to see Walk the Line but it had already played for that night. The car was still there when we got back to it (we were concerned the rest would go missing next), and drove over to Circle and 8th Mall to see the Rainbow cinemas that I think they put into the old Walmart building, with a Cineplex theatre too.

We also stopped by my aunt and uncle’s place for a short visit and looked at their photos of Cuba which they’d taken a week before our visit. Wrapping up the trip, I ate at Jerry’s Food Emporium on 8th St. East with Ashley and Doc, and had an excellent buffalo burger and some ice cream too. I accidentially left my laptop computer and more importantly my house and car keys in Ashley’s car, and drove home to Yorkton with Deirdre on some of the worst highway conditions I’ve ever seen. There was ice covering the highway nearly the entire way, and I don’t think I did 100km/h until I got to Springside just 15 minutes from Yorkton. My landlord let me in to get my spare car keys, and I promptly developed a cold that week. The End.