At least, that’s where they seem to be going, these days. Things are falling down, whether it’s the Concorde overpass in Montreal last year (five dead), the I35W bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis a month ago (13 dead) or the recent collapse of a bridge under construction in Fenghuang, China (at least 36 dead). And there are plenty of bridges in bad shape in the U.S. (and in Canada and elsewhere in the world, too!).

And as recently as this past weekend, there were more scares. In Montreal, a big section of downtown was closed for much of the weekend over fears a concrete slab in the “underground city” would collapse. It has been shored up with many supporting pylons, surely not a permanent solution.

Other bridges, such as the ten-year-old Confederation Bridge to PEI, seem to be doing just fine. Excuse me, did you say…TEN years old? I should hope not!

But today is the anniversary of another major collapse disaster. The Pont de Québec had its first (and most disastrous) collapse one hundred years ago today. It is an event Canadian engineers often learn about in their first-year classes; it is a lesson in responsibility, human error and humility. Some initial calculations weren’t checked and the bridge couldn’t even support its own weight. It collapsed under construction, killing 75 workers. Apparently, at 17h37 today (local time), church bells in many communities will ring, to mark the anniversary and commemorate the dead.

What do you think: Could I make my living as a human statue on Las Ramblas, in Barcelona?

Actually, this photo is from the Jardins Artigas in La Pobla de Lillet, Catalunya. The gardens were designed for a wealthy textile owner by none other than Barcelona hometown hero Antoni Gaudí, although they were not “(re)discovered” until quite recently; in the last 30 years or so. They are now open to the public. This statue is part of a bridge. I thought the likeness to “someone I know” was quite striking…

…alright, so maybe I did a little “mashing up” in Photoshop…

Here’s a great way to waste three or four hours (at least!). How? Just play with the latest Google Maps tools, which allow you to embed customized maps (such as the one below, which will dynamically update as I work on my version of it) without a developer’s key, and allows really cool plugins (which they call “Maplets”). Some of these allow elevation contours, calculate and graph trip elevation gain, and do other super-cool things (yes, you can plot the weather and any other geospatial data, too…bo-o-o-ring… ;-).

The neatest one I’ve found so far lets you generate a panorama from any location — which is very helpful for identifying peaks and other high points. As in: “If I’m here, then what is that bump over there?” Question answered… Check out Hey, What’s That? Note that this is still a work in progress, only really works well in Firefox, and also the performance can be slow (I’m sure Google Maps is getting lots of extra hits these days). The only problem is that it seems to have some problem calculating elevations with the area around Montreal (bug, which I’ve reported to the author). But give it a try anywhere else!

And if you weren’t able to waste enough time just looking at our planet, Google yesterday announced an update to Google Earth, called Sky, which — not surprisingly — allows you to explore the heavens. Shows stars and planets above your current location, animate time and see them move, plus tons of detailed imagery (hello Hubble!) so you can zoom into galaxies and nebulae with more and more detail, in that typical Google way. It’s really beautiful and addictive. Of course, other programs have generated “sky charts” for years, but with the GE interface you get the instant gratification of their zoom-to-your-heart’s-content interface.

Last night I had a bit of a “thrill.” I was at home, alone, watching some TV, getting ready for bed. The new neighbours across the back lane were having a big party on their terrace (basically on the roof of the restaurant below them). I’ve heard them playing music before, having a few friends over for dinner outside, but this was different. It was LOUD. Was it a housewarming or something else? Who knows, but there were around 100 people there. The place was really hopping, inside and out. Looking down from my own terrace, I could see flashing disco lights inside, people drinking and dancing, streamers decorating the terrace, tons of folks outside chatting, smoking, taking photos of each other with their camera phones. They were having a great time. Hey, live and let live, man.

It was after midnight. My house, as usual, was still cooling from a hot day, so there was no doubt that I had to sleep with the windows and patio door open. I harnessed my newfound tolerance…after all, everyone is entitled to a noisy party from time to time, right? And this was the first really noisy one from these new neighbours. Imagine if I were now living in Spain — I had to get used to people and noise. Relax. Don’t call the police. Don’t do anything.

Still, I turned my back light on just to let them know someone was there. I turned it back out. I went out back and watched them for a while, my passive-aggressive side getting the best of me. Just to let them know they’re not alone; there are other people in the world. Maybe they’d realize the time and turn down that subwoofer a bit. It went back out to watch a few times — not only to “send a message” (as if!), but also because it was fun. Fun to watch the social interactions from afar, like a little colony of social bees or ants. I meant them no harm, and they meant me none. Or so I thought.

I went inside for awhile, getting ready for bed. I was tired and figured maybe I could sleep, even with the music and chatter. No big deal. I brushed my teeth, then went back out for one last look. I was startled to find some people looking back at me. One guy pointed…or was he waving? What was going on?

Then a guy climbed down their fire escape to the lane. I looked down, over my railing. There were several other guys climbing my fire esacpe.

“Red shirt!” someone shouted, from the party. Many people were pointing my way. “Hey, RED SHIRT!”

Yes, I was wearing a red shirt. More and more guys started pouring out of the party, into the lane, and up our stairwell. The first guy had made it up the three flights to my back door (I was still one level up, “safe” on my terrace, looking down at them with a nauseating sense that something big was about to happen. No, this did not bode well.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Now, I should have been the one asking that question, but it was one of them. Now there were five or six angry faces, two metres below, looking up at me. “How do we get up there?”

“You can’t come up here,” I said. “What’s going on?”

“You’re the asshole throwing tomatoes at us.” What? “You been throwing eggs.”

“No!” I said. I couldn’t believe this.

“We’re coming up. We’ve got to check it out.”

“No, you can’t…” There are no outside stairs from the third level up to where I was, on my terrace. But as we’d been talking, already two guys had climbed, ninja-style, up onto the lower storage shed, leaping up to grab the railing above, and now stood towering above me from the shed on my terrace. My knees were shaking. What to do? I couldn’t just run inside to call the police, that would look really bad. I’d look guilty. No, stand my ground. I was innocent. I only had to convince them. Still, they were steaming mad, a little inebriated, and I suspected I was in for a beating — an undeserved beating based on a misunderstanding. For a moment, I imagined my friends reading a news item about me in tomorrow’s paper. Is this what they called a domestic disturbance? Was any of them “packing?”

I guess someone in our block had been so pissed off by the party noise that they’d thrown something down, across the lane. A dangerous and stupid move. But the party people had only seen me, my head suspiciously “popping up” from time to time on my terrace and then disappearing again. I’ll admit the music irritated me a bit, but I would never throw anything. I’m passive-aggressive, not aggressive-aggressive! But…could I convince a crowd — now of ten guys — of that? Some stood on the terrace with me, snooping into my house, others stood on the thin metal roof of my shed, others were now up on the roof of the condo, walking along, peering down into other terraces. Their rage was palpable.

Them: “What are you doing up here?”
Me: “I live here.”
Them: “Someone hit me in the head with an egg!”
Me: “It wasn’t me, I didn’t throw anything.”
Them: “Well, we’re gonna find out who the hell it was…”

How many times can you swear you didn’t do something? How pleading can you be? When your life depends on it…a lot, it turns out!

“If anyone did throw eggs, though,” I said, a little more confidently now, “it’s probably because of the noise from the party.” I assured them that I firmly believed that throwing things was no way to solve a noise problem — certainly I would never solve it that way. You should go and speak to the people directly, obviously. That was the rational thing to do, and I had to convince them I was a rational person.

Eventually, there were around 20 (!) angry guys up there, intimidating me, looking down at me or standing next to me, others searching (for what: a crate of eggs?) from the rooftop. Somehow — I don’t know how — I managed to calm them down. In spite of myself, I spoke calmly (though perhaps the obvious fear in my voice and wide eyes helped “satisfy” them a bit). I picked out one of them, one who seemed more rational, and addressed myself to him. He asked who lived here, who my neighbours were. I assured him we weren’t the kind of people that would throw eggs, and in particular — I couldn’t stress this enough — it hadn’t been me! I also said that they couldn’t just come up here; this was private property. I said that if their party had been assaulted by eggs, the best thing to do would be to call the police to sort out the whole mess. Obviously that wasn’t something they were too interested in, and perhaps that saved me. After about five interminable minutes of “discussion,” they headed back down to the party.

One of the last guys to leave spoke to me, almost conspiratorially: “Do you really think we’re being too loud?”

Hmm. A trick question? “Well, it is pretty loud,” I said. I quickly added: “But that’s okay, you know, to have a party once in a while.”

A bit later, I noticed two big guys were still camped out on my roof, lurking there in the shadows.

“What are you doing?” I asked. They said they wanted to keep an eye out, watch for further egg-throwing. No, this would not do. They had to go. And somehow, I felt more and more confident. It hadn’t been “1 vs. 100″ but it had been close enough. And I was in the right. “This is private property,” I reiterated, waving them away. “Sorry, but you can’t sit on my roof.”

Amazingly, they climbed down and returned to their party. “We’ll be watching,” they said, ever-friendly.

“That’s great,” I said. “Have a nice night.” Then I went inside and tidied my house for a few hours, because my tiredness had been overcome by my pumping adrenal glands and testosterone; my brain was going a mile a minute. I was angry. I was relieved. I was scared. If someone did throw more eggs, would they assume it was me? Would they come back when I was asleep, with only a screen door between me and the mob? No, I wouldn’t get to sleep until 3:30am. Only now, it had nothing to do with the music.

No, I’m not talking about “Bonds, Barry Bonds” and his new and dubious (or not) home run record. I’m talking about the baseball-sized hail that rained down on southern Manitoba yesterday.

It reminded me of something; another storm. Twenty years ago, I was in Edmonton on “Black Friday,” when, on July 31, 1987, a devastating tornado killed nearly thirty people. We didn’t get any baseballs where I was, but we did get hailstones borrowed from another sport — golf ball-sized chunks of ice. Our car roof and hood needed dimple-reducing surgery, and car insurance premiums went up the next year. I was in another part of the city, away from the main tornado, but there were other funnel clouds around where I was, and the sky was an ominous greenish-yellow colour…something I have since associated with very bad weather. I’d been riding my bike in a nearby park and (as the “tallest thing around” on my metal bike) had to race home as the lightning started crashing all around and great gusts of wind tried to knock me over.

Our dog suffered post-traumatic stress disorder from that “weather event.” Most dogs are afraid of thunder, or perhaps they have some “sixth sense” to pick up low-frequency vibrations or pressure changes or…I don’t know. All I know is that previously he had been a little nervous during storms. Probably a healthy, sensible nervousness, if there is such a thing. After that day, he became neurotic.

At the first hint of thunder, he would begin panting nervously, leaving huge puddles of drool on the floor. He would slink downstairs, to the basement, as far as he could get from the noisy rumbling above. Sometimes, when I felt like having some “fun,” I would put on one of Dan Gibson’s “Environments” records, something along the lines of: “Distant Thunderstorm at Loon Lake,” and watch the poor dog quiver. In my defense, I would actually stroke his fur and hold his head, trying to reassure him: “You see? I’m not scared. Nothing’s going to happen.” A kind of (highly unsuccessful) therapy, you might say. But he was always a total wreck, and it was hard not to laugh. No, I’m not proud of it; but it’s true, and I was young. Cut me some slack: at least I wasn’t pulling wings off flies or tossing cats by their tails into walls of velcro.

Once, when we were at my grandmother’s for Sunday dinner, he was left outside in his kennel. It was a luxurious enclosure my Dad had built — a long concrete pad (easier to scoop up you-know-who’s you-know-what) with a trendy, winter-proofed, A-frame doghouse. The whole facility was surrounded by heavy chain-link fencing (to protect him from other dogs?).

If we suspected it was going to storm, especially once he became neurotic, we’d leave him in the house, but this one took us by surprise. It came suddenly and the heavens flashed and crashed and dumped down their oceans. We returned home to find our “prisoner” had escaped. He was not prone to running away. It seems the storm drove him insane, and he managed to tear through the metal fence with paws and teeth, and ran all the way to…our house. Ten metres away.

He escaped from the dry safety of his doghouse to whimper, drenched to the bone, by the back door of our house, presumably because he felt closer to the protection of his masters. It was awful. When we found him, he was a pathetic, soaking, shivering mess, bleeding from the mouth and paws. He had lost a few teeth and lots of hair on the sharp metal edges that poked from the hole he’d made in the chain-link. Luckily he didn’t lose an eye.

After that, even if skies were blue, when we went out for any length of time we made sure to leave our “plucky little fellow” in the house. I don’t know if dogs can have Generalized Anxiety Disorder, but, by GAD, he certainly did. Unfortunately, it seems that often the worst storms we suffer are literally in our heads.

One of my photos has been featured in a Montreal guide: