In Google Ads, Veritas

Couldn’t stop laugh­ing when a link to a news arti­cle on the Libby indict­ment on myWay.com pro­duced the fol­low­ing jux­ta­po­si­tion of Google ads via their con­tex­tual search algorithm:

It's Not Really as Bad as They Say

I have to admit that before we moved here, we had been warned about the weather. No — warned is not strong enough. It was kind of like that sign in The Wiz­ard of Oz, the one that Bert Lahr as the Cow­ardly Lion reads out loud: “I’d turn back if I were you!” We were led to believe that 9 to 10 months of the year, this place is under water, or it’s like Ray Bradbury’s Venus, in a short story I remem­ber read­ing as a kid. That’s the one where it rains for 10 years and then the sun comes out for only one after­noon (and a poor lit­tle girl is locked in a closet by her nasty class­mates and misses the entire event).

When we vis­ited in Jan­u­ary, it did in fact driz­zle for the entire time, but it was unusu­ally rainy that month, even for here. On the other hand, after we moved here, we were lucky to have sev­eral weeks of absolutely spec­tac­u­lar weather: dry, warm, and sunny every day. We went for a walk nearly every evening, and the sun set around 9 PM.

Fast for­ward to this week­end: Despite what the fore­cast is, today was a beau­ti­ful after­noon. The sun was low in the sky, and the tem­per­a­ture was a lit­tle chilly, but not uncom­fort­able. We took another stroll along False Creek south, and Pam took some pic­tures with her new cam­era (I’ll try and post some of them on Flickr later). The wid­gets on my Mac desk­top (click the thumb­nail to see a full-size ver­sion) bear this out. The web cams show what it looked like on the Bur­rard Bridge and Jeri­cho Beach. The wid­get to the left has the tem­per­a­ture (Cel­sius) and the forecast:

I know that there will be some rough weeks ahead when the sun shines very lit­tle, but that’s what books, movies, TV, the library, cafés (like the Wicked Café nearby), con­certs, friends over for games, sim­u­lated sun­light lamps and roasted chicken/beef/pork/vegetables are for. For today, at least, the del­uge is just on the hori­zon, how­ever bad it gets.