Today was our annual Condo Cleanup Day. We use this day to fix up all the various messes that have occurred over the winter, and get the lawn and flowerbeds looking presentable for the warm weather. It’s a great opportunity to meet the neighbours, since we don’t usually socialize. It was actually kind of fun. My job was to pull up weeds and help spread this red mulch stuff around the base of our cedar bushes.

As we did last year, we talked about building some kind of patio at the side of the building where we could put a barbeque. As usual, probably nothing will happen with this plan. But at least I know everyone else in the building is also fantasizing about being able to grill meat at home

Anyway, all of us are concerned about the neighbourhood. There seem to be a lot of rough kids around. Dave’s truck got shot with paintballs last week after he called the cops on some neighbour’s kids who were firing fireworks at our building and our cars. If we do get a barbeque, it will have to be chained to the building and surrounded by electrical fences to keep the brats out.

I went to see a play at the Dundas Little Theatre tonight. It was called Taking Sides and was about an American army major who was questioning public figures in Germany after the war to determine if they would be allowed to take a place in public life again. The general was questioning the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, who turned out to be a very formidable man. He was loved by the people because he used his connections in the Nazi government to help Jewish musicians escape from Germany. In the end it came down to a question of whether he was being cowardly by enjoying the privilege of his position and not taking a stronger stand against the regime, or if he was a hero because he protected the interests of art against those of politics, and helped individuals to freedom.

Because it is community theatre, there was a wide range of talent involved. Some of the acting was rather cardboard and stilted, but the actor who played the conductor was riveting. His performance was every bit as good as you might expect from Anthony Hopkins or Jack Nicholson. His stage presence was almost overwhelmingly powerful. He could modify his stage energy with very simple gestures and expressions, and he was able to express every emotion perfectly, from utter dejection to indignant rage. He did all of this in a very convincing German accent.

Anyway, what the play is supposed to make you think about is how you might behave under a reign of terror like the Third Reich. Would you bend and comply? Would you subvert from within? Would you rebel? Would you escape? It’s easy to make predictions now of what we might do under those circumstances, but impossible to know if we would be able to live up to those expectations.

Woo! I bought four new tires today. They should be here on Friday. They’re Hankook Ventus H105 205 R16 55 ultra high performance all-season radials. The price was $125 per tire including installation and balancing.

Ventus V4ES H105 * Ultra-High Performance All Season * V, W-Rated * 30/35/40/45/50/55 Series * 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22 Inch * UTQG: 420/A/A * Road Hazard Warranty * DSB: Diagonal Serrated Band The superb wet and dry handling is competitive with some of the best UHP summer tires available, but the Ventus V4 es also gets twice the winter performance of the typical summer UHP tire. The best technological advances in profile design, construction, tread pattern and tread compound have been applied together in one state-of-the-art tire. The result is a sophisticated tire that provides excellent handling in all weather conditions, along with an advanced, cutting-edge appearance.

Ok none of this may seem too interesting to you, but to me it means no more daily trips to the gas station to pump up my leaky old tire. Added bonus: I can go around corners faster. :bounce:

I totally want these books:

I saw something about them on 60 Minutes last night, and they seem to sum up everything I’ve been feeling about public communications lately. Politicians, corporations, the news media–they all spout so much crap it’s hard to extract any shred of truth from them. Take my shampoo for example. According to the packaging, it makes my hair 3X smoother. Seriously. 3X smoother? I guess if I had a hair smoothness-o-metre I could actually test that claim. On TV, I saw an ad in which Bayer claims to have the brand of aspirin that has saved the most lives due to heart failure. What? How would they know that? I’m skeptical. And now we’re heading into a period of unprecedented bullshit. We’re going to have another election this summer, and the politicians are heating up the pot and throwing in more and more BS so it has become a completely impenetrable stew of the stuff. I don’t have faith that a single one of them is telling the truth about anything. The truth is so highly undervalued these days.

Haha. I love these quizzes. This one asked a few questions about animals and came up with a pretty in-depth analysis of my psyche. I wonder how accurate it is?