Midas Touch

Allan has on several occasions remarked that as a great super villain, one would plunge the world into insufficient lighting. This would not be a horible blight on humanity, this would merely be an inconvenience. Sure things would be a little more dangerous for some people but the general effect would be that it is merely annoying. My life for the last while seems to be characterized by this sort of long string of irritating inconvieniences. I suppose that it all started when I tried to move from Edmonton to Drumheller. I'm sure that if one wanted to hear about my agrivating fight with U-haul or my infuriating dealings with my various landlords and the canadian human resources dept and immegrations, the easiest way would be to comment and ask. The most recent string of vexations appears to revolve around my uncanny ability to cause things to break. As far back as I can remember, things spontaneously break when I touch them. Chalk it up to clumsyness if you will, but consider the following. When I was younger, getting onto my bike one day the welding that held the brake apparatus to the handle bars suddenly broke. This summer I had the distinct pleasure of being alowed to examine some of the fine fossils in the collections of the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology. I was working specifically on Tyrranosaur skull material. One of the great fossils personally worked on by the famous Dr. Phillip Currie is the partial skull of Gorgosaurus Libratus. While puting the support jacket back on after taking photos (unfortunately without the label in the picture), the lacrymal (large bone in front of the eye) fell off. The base broke away cleanly merely under the force of gravity. In another instance I was working on the finest maxilla of the best and biggest Daspletosaurus torosus at the museum. Moments after taking a picure of the maxilla with the premaxilla in place in order to give an idea of the proper articulation between the two bones, the longest tooth (quite possibly the finest tooth I've ever seen on a non T. rex) fell off. Unlike the lacrymal that fell off, the base of the tooth turned to powder. I'm not quite sure that Jim Gardener won't kill me the next time I see him. On a day camp in which the children are allowed to dig at a moch dig site where there happens to be real amber, a child found a particularly large pice of cretaceous amber. I told him to give it to me to put into the vile that we kept amber in. The force of the stone hitting my hand from two inches above was enough to reduce it to dust.
Recently, i have noticed that the quality of TV reception decreases dramatically when I enter the room.