Time Immortal

Parents in Pickering, Ontario, are sorting through the Halloween candy their children have collected, on the lookout for cold medication:

Durham police received the first such report on Wednesday from the parents of a Grade 5 student at Valley Farm Public School who had found a Dayquil tablet inside a sealed box of Smarties.

Since then four more cases have been confirmed, all involving the cold and flu medication in Halloween-sized boxes of Smarties.

Seriously…there’s no quantifying what manner of asshat one has to be to pull a stunt like this and willfully endanger the well-being of children.

Apparently, police have localized the general area where the prankster lives, and it can only be hoped that they managed to nail him, or her. Not that there’d be much of a punishment, but a criminal record is a criminal record all the same. Something, at least.

So as Halloween approaches, the bars in Edmonton gear up for the season that isn’t, and the holiday that isn’t, by hosting all manner of costume contests.

Where was this taken?

I don’t know where this guy was heading, but I thought the Pac Man costume was worth a picture…and being that I always carry my camera with me, even to karaoke (which is where I was headed this evening), it just “clicked”.

I just realized how terrible a pun that was.

Anyhow, I can’t help but look at that costume and be reminded of this:

First snow of the year. Well, okay, not strictly true (also see here). Let’s call it the first snow of the approaching winter season instead, which would be the most accurate term for it, I think.

Where was this taken?

I remember a time when I was surprised by snow in October — I think I was in third grade at the time, in fact. Of course, the opposite has since become true; now I get surprised when there isn’t snow to be seen by Halloween.

It took me a lot of time in Adobe Lightroom to get the colours in this shot to normalize, actually. The streetlights produce an amazingly harsh light, and compensating for the white balance (colour temperature) of the shot typically produces an unacceptable green (or possibly magenta) tint on everything. At that point, one has to tweak the levels and saturations of individual spectral components. In this case, I had to diminish the magenta and cyan levels quite drastically.