Canadian Milk Bags!

About a month ago I took it upon myself to entertain an American guy who was working on a project here in London where I work. I always feel kind of sorry for people who travel a lot for work when Friday night comes along, so I took him to a London Knights hockey game. We had a really good time, and talked about some of the little differences between Canada and the US.

The thing that blew his mind more than just about anything else was that in Canada, we often buy our milk in bags rather than cartons or plastic jugs. This poor guy had picked up some bag milk thinking there were going to be some sort of caps or openings he could pour it from built right into the bags, and then felt stupid when he got the bags back to his lodgings and couldn't really do anything with them. So, in the interest of Canada/US relations, here's a quick primer on using Canadian milk bags.

Here in Ontario, bag milk comes in one big bag that holds three smaller bags. All three put together is 4 Litres (1 US Gallon) of milk, which means that one bag is equal to 1.33 L or 1.4 US quarts of milk.

When my friend opened the big bag and found the that the three single bags inside were just plain sealed plastic, he didn't know what the hell he was supposed to do with them. Who can blame him? He didn't know that people who buy bag milk have pitchers at home that are specifically designed to hold them. They are available for purchase right near the milk in the grocery store, most often hanging by their handles off the fixtures above the milk shelves. They look like this:

There is one important thing to know about using bag milk. Do not cut the corner of the bag until AFTER you have dropped it into the pitcher and banged the pitcher on the counter or table to seat the bag properly. As you might imagine, doing this bit out of order can be messy.

I am rather uptight about how the corner of a milk bag is cut. A clean, smallish cut is the best way to achieve a smooth and neat flow. The easiest way to achieve such a cut is with a little milk bag cutter thing:

Rantwick's actual milk bag cutter. I insist on the "snippit" brand, because I love my family.

Second best is with a pair of sharp scissors, and third best is with a knife. Depending on the knife used, you can end up with scraggly torn plastic that causes drips. I know, because despite my obsessiveness about a good cut, my laziness has often won out and I've used whatever was closest to hand, including crummy knives. Last, I guess if you were really stuck, you could use your teeth. I have never done that.

In conclusion, please note that drinking milk straight from the bag is an acquired skill, and should not be undertaken lightly.

Well there you have it; Rantwick's primer on the use of bag milk. If even one less American or other traveller to Canada is spared the mind-blowing impact of such a bizarre thing thanks to this post, it will have been worth it.

Yer Pal,

R A N T W I C K

How to Hold Your Mutant

Recently while riding in to work in the morning I was caught off guard by how cold it was. Most of me was fine, but my bare hands (fingers in particular) were aching. It was one the first days that I was riding "Mutant Winter". I have decided to rename her "Mutant Winter" because I really like saying and typing "Mutant Winter". Mutant & Winter are two excellent words when used together. Firstly, they describe pretty much how the cycling (especially in the worst parts) of winter feels. On the coldest days I look much like a scuba diver, sans snorkel: mutant. On the heaviest snow days I am the only cyclist for miles around: mutant. My bike is a fairly nice dirt jumper transformed into a weirdly fendered, pink cabled, plastic-tub-carrying abomination: mutant. Secondly, it sounds like an excellent name for certain kinds of bands, or maybe a nice scary movie...

background image used with permission from: the-becka.blogspot.com In an act of abnormal respect of copyright, I discovered that the blog from which I grabbed the image was authored by a woman not far from me, here in Southern Ontario! Her stuff isn't for everyone, but I thought it was pretty cool.

Anyway, my hands were really cold, and I had no mitts or gloves with me. So, in true mutant fashion, I grabbed a pair of old spare socks out of my way groovy blue Winter Mutant tub, and stuck 'em on my hands. Nothing says "mutant" like sock hands. That did the trick for the coldness, but shifting was difficult because my thumb was trapped. If only the sock on my right hand had been blessed with the hole I found on my left hand, all would have been well. Please do not comment on how how I could have switched the socks. I had already stopped once to put them on, and I wasn't stopping again, no way. In addition, that would have placed the baggy heel part on the top, which totally goes against my personal rules of hand sock fashion (I honestly thought that to myself at the time, god help me). My left hand sock action was great, so much so that I put it back on and took a picture when I was home that evening:

So, the answer to the age-old question "how should I hold my mutant?" is finally fully clear to me: with sock hands. When you think about it, what other answer could there possibly be?

Please don't stop reading this blog because I am a mutant in thought, deed and written word...

M U T A N T W I C K

PS - I came this close to registering mutantwinter.com and throwing a web page up just for fun, in case anybody tried to go there. I managed to resist, without any help from my sweet wife. I guess I'm not 100% mutant just yet...

I Obviously Have a Deshaker Fixation

I know I write about deshaker way too often, but I accidentally skipped a step in processing some video with it, and ended up with a neat result. Deshaker works by looking at video in two passes. The first pass compares each frame (my videos have 30 frames per second) with the previous one and maps how far certain pixels move. The second pass compensates as best it can for those movements if they don't make sense based on various criteria you can set.

Well, I forgot to run the second pass and got this instead, the results of the first pass in "real-time", instead of the 10 minutes the first pass actually took to process. Looking at it shows much better how deshaker works than my trying to explain it...

I know. Fascinating. To me alone. I know.

R A N T W I C K