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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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"Sirens intended to warn Pickering residents of a safety risk at the nearby nuclear plant are gathering dust in a warehouse after local politicians refused to install them, calling them Cold War "monstrosities" and a threat to property values." Toronto Star Mar. 3, 2004.
Pickering is a suburb with a great big nuclear power plant on the eastern side of Toronto. This has been quite the hilarious hullaballoo. How about those rusty old reactors bringing down property values? Well they're behind the nice burm, you see, no problem. My friend B. Smiley suggests a design for the sirens: elegant curved poles that bend down to the ground so that the siren itself can be aesthetically buried (muffled, if you will) in a pile of sand.
The Star article has dropped offline, but you can read it here, on the riderfans.com forum (for those of you south of the 49th, Canadian football fans can be scary too). This guy David W. cites the story as an example of civilian foolishness. His surreal quote: "And you wonder why the military is falling apart in this country - and will continue to do so? 'cause Canadians talk a good preparedness story but when push comes to shove they only think of themselves."
Now that Arnie has been in office for long enough that the horror has worn off, I recently felt capable of somewhat enjoying Terminator 3. My friends and I laughed pretty hard during the big car chase scene, when the terminatrix is in a giant utility truck, swinging Arnold around on the end of a hook. Things get boring, however, as the show goes on. The dialogue is mostly lame recycled jokes and the acting is middling to poor. They really drag out the plot and I must confess that humanoid-shaped cyborgs just ain't where its at right now. I'm no expert, but I think they are testing out nanotech on scarier stuff than melty chrome. Here's my (least) favourite part, the impactful, overserious voice-over narration at the end: "I finally realised that my destiny all along was not to stop the planet from nuclear destruction, but to survive it." Niiiice. Him and his pretty future wife with their future kids swimming around in their gonads, all locked up together nice and safe in an empty presidential bunker. Time to go check on my trip-wire mine field, barbed-wire fence, and stockpiles of bottled water, plastic sheets and duct tape.