Natasha and I caught an episode of a reality show last night called “100 Mile Challenge” where volunteers in Mission, British Columbia do a cold-turkey switchover to only eating food grown locally. It’s almost cheating to base the show there – with the Okanagan valley and Vancouver Island within striking range they have some of the best food-producing regions  in Canada at their doorstep. It’s a cool show, and it’s inspired me to look a little more off the beaten path for tasty local food producers.

I’ve been observing the 100-mile and slow-food philosophies for a while, and I’ve taken some good lessons away from it. With our various food allergies it makes sense for us to do a lot of “from scratch” cooking, which in turn leads us to look around for good seasonal produce and meats, a lot of which are best from local sources. I’ve got a much broader awareness now of what’s in season, and I’ve become considerably more open-minded about trying all kinds of fantastic foods.

The 100-mile limit is somewhat arbitrary though, and the organic politics are frustrating. This is where I diverge from the typical tree-hugger foodie party line – I think the trend towards organic local farming is short-sighted and self-indulgent. Organic food grown close to home tastes great and is arguably more nutritious (or not?), but we have a responsibility to make the most efficient use of dwindling arable land to feed more than just ourselves. The green revolution was anything but “green” – massive monocropping, advances in genetics, mechanization, transportation, extensive use of pesticides and fertilizers came with an environmental cost, but helped put an end (sortof) to famines and increased world food security even though the world population is still increasing at a tremendous rate. Maybe these are necessary tradeoffs? I’m willing to eat less tasty (and less ethical) food sometimes if I know I’ll be able to eat again tomorrow.

On the show last night we watched some of the participants use what looked like half a tank of propane to boil down a bucket of ocean water for a teaspoon of “natural” salt. Food production and efficiency have a complicated relationship.

During our train stopover in Montreal, Natasha and I stumbled into an opportunity to check out the insanely cool “Bodies: The Exhibition” event taking place at the Eaton Centre. I’d read about it in magazines – a german scientist (Gunther von Hagens) came up with a plastination method that treats cadavers so that all of the original texture and colour of the organs are preserved and can be opened up for peeking inside.

The display is incredible, amazing, spectacular. Once you get over the initial heebie-jeebies of looking at dead people, there’s so much to learn. Organs are so small and neatly packed into your torso. The circulatory system is incredibly intricate. Muscles and bones all fit together so perfectly.

No photos were allowed in the exhibit (the one above’s been stolen from the interwebs) but one image will stay with me forever – they had somehow managed to extract someone’s entire nervous system, in one piece, and lay it out on a table. A little brain and eyes looking up, connected by the base to the spinal cord, a taproot of little yellow nerves that branched all the way down into finer and finer hairs. That was  it – all of your thinking parts (the you part of you) laid out like a pound and a half of corn silk. It blew my mind!

Do you remember the Chemical Brothers “Hey Boy, Hey Girl” video where the girl sees the skeleton and then breaks her arm – and everyone she sees later looks like skeletons? Totally the same effect when you come out – all weekend I couldn’t shake the thought that I was talking to people made of meat.

I don’t want to like Swiffer Sweepers, because they’re environmentally irresponsible, flimsily built, and uneconomical. Every corporate automaton’s dream – a pay-per-use broom.

But man – can that thing ever collect dust!

Maybe it can be a sometimes broom. Like, for special sweeping occasions.

Natasha and I joined some visiting friends on a haunted walk of Ottawa! I’m probably the last guy you’d want to invite on a haunted anything, but I bit my tongue and had a lot of fun. I learned a few things too – did you know that the east end of Sparks Street is built over an ancient cemetery, and that there are still bodies being dug up during construction projects? (I imagine this is less likely to be an issue now given the depth that most of the building foundations go to, unless corpses were buried REALLY deep)

The tour took us past a few familiar buildings on Elgin – allegedly the Fridays restaurant, crazy drooling fish fountain in Confederation Park, and Teacher’s college are all visited by strange apparitions. The real nexus of paranormal doom is – the dreaded Lisgar High School. It is said that the attic is home to the creepy spirit of a maintenance worker who met his end falling off the roof.

I wasn’t prepared to believe any of it, but when I developed my photos, I saw something crazy I hadn’t seen before!

Our guide (the living one, in the black cape) was great, her speeches were a bit rehearsed, but she was clear and easy to keep up with. It was good to get out for a walk downtown, so I’d recommend it. At $13 it’s about the price of a scary movie, but you get some exercise thrown in. And you might see something ghastly!

I’m really serious about trying to absorb some more French culture. I was embarrassed on Parliament Hill when an American asked me who the French Canada Day festivities host was – I really had no idea. I think a French celebrity could live next door to me and I’d never be the wiser.

Comics

Centerpointe Library has a pretty great stack of French comics, so I’ve been voraciously chewing through them on my weekly visits. A real highlight I’ve stumbled across is the “Gardiens Du Maser” series by Massimiliano Frezzatto (an Italian publishing a French comic being read by a Canadian – international!). The art is spectacular, and while the story points sometimes get away from me (one of the characters speaks with a lisp – so double the difficulty of an already abstract psych-sci-fi series), there’s just so much packed into every page that you can’t help but get caught up in all the detail. One of the main characters is brilliant – a reluctant backpack robot who doesn’t want to be brought along on adventures. He reminded me of C3P0 stuck to Chewie’s back in Empire, but much less of a twit. Tons of action and weird technology and incredible designs. Totally in love. I heard there’s a Prequel and an English translation available that I might try to find.

TV

During the heat wave, while we were hiding out in our basement, we flipped on the TV and channel surfed through the french channels where we stumbled on Les Chefs. It’s fantastic! The show is basically a direct ripoff of the format of Top Chef or Hell’s Kitchen, except everyone is super competent and they’re all actually nice to eachother. Even at the end of the show, when they ruthlessly eliminate a player, they give them a frying pan and a bunch of hugs. I can hear Gordon Ramsay cursing all of this civility! In the last episode we watched, we learned how to make gourmet Pogos, and what to do with Mini-bébé-bok-choy (which sounds hilarious when you say it over and over). We intend to watch the rest of the series online when we get a chance over our vacation. Great show!

I still can’t name any French celebrities, but I can at least find a good place to eat Pogos and Bok-choy in Quebec.

I became interested in Ottawa’s hidden lakes when I had an extra-long wait one rainy afternoon at a bus stop. The OC Transpo route map has bodies of water marked out in a weird shade of blue that makes all the little urban tributaries pop off the page. I couldn’t believe how many lakes and streams I’d been ignoring inside city limits.

My first intentional urban lake visit this weekend was to Bruce Pit which is a little-talked-about but beautiful dog park on the west end of town. It’s just a skip south of the Queensway Carleton hospital on Cedarview road. (Go to the end of Baseline and hang a left)

It’s one of Ottawa’s few open-leash dog parks, so you’ll see plenty of dog owners strolling around through the park with their four-legged friends. It’s a great place for an easy outdoor walk. The path is well groomed and pretty flat (although, being a dog park, you’ll have to keep your eyes peeled for messes). The path winds around through an open field and a forested area, and by a winter toboggan-run.

While we were walking around the lake, we caught a good look at an enormous blue heron who was skimming the pond. I’ll have to go back sometime with my long camera lens and some hip waders.

Natasha made an awesome spaz-out noise as we crested a hill – there was a big green garter snake crossing the path right in front of us. Brave snake to be hanging out on a dog path! He slithered away without gobbling up either of us.

We hitched a ride with some friends bound for Toronto over the weekend and visited the amazing Niagara Falls! Super cool!

The falls themselves were beautiful and incredible, but the surrounding tourist traps were an eyesore. I feel bad for people who’s first impression of Canada are the falls and then the wax serial killer museum.  My favourite monstrosity of all was this unbelievable Dutch/Indonesian/Chinese restaurant/internet cafe/jacuzzi motel/wedding chapel.

So Kert linked me to a cool MRI site the other day featuring cross-section views of the insides of various fruits and veggies. The author posted a bunch of DICOM files (the files right out of the MRI machine) and I grabbed them to play around with the layers. Turns out Photoshop will open a DICOM file and let you see all the cross sections.

So then I started (obviously) writing a tool to see if I could re-construct the scanned broccoli by stacking the slices in volumetric layers – and it turns out that yes, I could. But then I found out that Photoshop can also do it. Lame. As soon as you don’t need to write custom software to do something, that idea is officially no longer cool. (My version had extra features, though… and I intend to add some proper shading.)

(Edit: Sorry about the big file size – compressed it down a little)

I can taste them already…

Whenever I need to make a tweak to an image without Photoshop I always grit my teeth and bear my way through The Gimp* or an evaluation version of Paintshop Pro. But not anymore – I just discovered Pixlr and I’m really impressed!

Pixlr is free, has a UI suspiciously similar to Photoshop (I’m waiting for the lawsuit), runs in your browser using flash, and (at least on my machine) is zippy and full of features. Layers, adjustment layers, filters, masking, it even opens Photoshop PSD files and brushes from your machine. Amazing!

*I don’t want to throw The Gimp under the bus because it’s gotten me out of a pickle a bunch of times. It’s great in a pinch and it’s got a lot of features, but the UI is really difficult to adapt to when you’re used to flying your mouse around in Adobe software.