careful with toll highway transponders and rental cars!

whoops.

we bought our own UniPass transponder - cfxway.com/uni/ - and took it to Florida last month, and drove around in a rental car after updating our account to include the rental car license plate. Easy peasy.

Guess what happens if you return the rental car and neglect to update the unipass site, thinking “oh, surely it will only bill me if it actually detects my transponder, not just the license plate.”

well at least now I know where SOMEBODY was driving.

(protip: when you return the rental car, DON’T FORGET to go and unregister its license plate from your transponder account, or you might get billed for wherever the next person is driving. I thought the only thing the tollway would care about is the transponder, but apparently it falls back on license plates too.)

The Lion King, you should go see it too.

We really enjoyed Mirvish’s production of The Lion King last night at the Princess of Wales Theatre. It’s an incredible visual spectacle - the costumes, the sets, the clever use of perspective, just a feast for the eyes. You should go see it. The opening number where all the animals move down the aisles to the stage is just jaw-dropping. That elephant. Wow.

You kind of have to ignore the constant fart jokes in the Timon and Pumbaa sequences, but that’s left over from the cartoon.

Multiple times I was in awe of how the elaborate costumes worked. How does THAT actor manage to manipulate both arms and the head of their character? …. Oh …. there’s another actor disguised as the grass sitting beside them, operating one of the arms. Cool.

Here’s an interesting behind-the-scenes story from the New York Times (it’s a gift link) about the New York production and how they manage all these complex costumes.

You know I generally like everything, but two things in particular impressed me.

  • The theatre uses an app called Gala Pro. Download this to your phone and you can see live closed captioning of all the dialogue and songs, or even translation or described audio (only through your headphones, thankfully.) What a great way to make theatre more accessible for all! I left this running on my phone all through the show (it’s in dark, dark, DARK mode, doesn’t bother anyone else) and periodically glanced down to clarify some of the trickier lyrics.

  • We just happened to have a post-show drink in a nearby bar, and who should walk in to pick up his own dinner but actor David D’Lancy Wilson, who plays Mufasa. He graciously chatted with us and OF COURSE I HAD A MILLION QUESTIONS but managed to get one out. So - in several of the glorious sequences full of animals, some of the cast wave long poles on top of which are some bird puppets that fly around very convincingly. Multiple poles from multiple parts of the theatre. I had to ask - Do the poles and birds ever get tangled up? “All the time”, he replied. “One time, somebody hit one of the lights.”

It was really fun seeing this show again. We’d seen it on its original run a decade ago, and I remember asking my niece, who was maybe 4, whether she liked the live show or the original cartoon better. “The cartoon”, she replied, “because it has real lions.”

Well I thought the lions in this production were pretty amazing too. Thanks for chatting with us, Mufasa!

Cathy and me and actor David D'Lancy Wilson
Me, Cathy, and actor David D'Lancy Wilson

p.s. seeing as how we are aparently patrons of the arts, Mufasa graciously allowed us to pick up the tab. It’s the circle of fooooooooood ….

it's election time again

Now that we’re having another Ontario election, I have my list of Basic Questions from the 2018 election ready in case anyone knocks on my door. I think you should know some basic facts about Ontario if you want to govern.

So, candidates, get ready, I’ll even give you the questions in advance:

blog.hayman.net/2018/04/2…

(In 2018, nobody knocked, perhaps wisely.)

I don’t get how replies work here on micro.blog. I have Add reply text box on post page checked, but I don’t see a reply box on posts. Well - I do on some of the old posts, but not all of them, and (I assume) not this one. Hmm.

Perhaps my final team meeting

I could never say enough good things about my work colleagues and friends. 32 years ago I had no idea that my dream job actually existed, but it turns out, it does, and it’s working with this gang. It was great seeing everyone in New York this week and I’m happy they could meet Photographer Cathy too!

Y’know, it’s one of the odd things from working at home, which I’ve done the whole time (albeit with a LOT of work travel.). You get so used to video chats via WebEx and Zoom that you almost forget what it’s like to see people in three dimensions, and eventually you realize that your wife has hardly ever actually met anybody you work with. I’m glad I had that chance this week.

I’ve never really been a fan of hugging people at work but I made a lot of exceptions to that policy this week. (Cathy did too, but she’s always like that.)

Thanks, team. You’re all the best.

ps. wait, what, am I retiring? Well, yeah. Soon.

Pennsylvania 6-5000, theme and variations

an empty lot in manhattan today

Work took me to New York City this week, and I was a little sad to see this sight out the office window in Manhattan -

That’s the former site of the grand Hotel Pennsylvania, built in 1919 but demolished in 2023.

the famous phone number

You know that hotel! You know its phone number! Well, I do, and anybody who’s ever played in a big band surely knows the number 736-5000 - which, of course, in the way phone numbers were pronounced in the mid-20th century, where you gave a two-letter exchange followed by the rest of the phone number, was PE6-5000, or of course Pennsylvania 6-5000.

That’s possibly the most famous hotel phone number in the WORLD, because in 1940, Glenn Miller’s band was playing at the hotel’s Cafe Rouge. Inspired by the phone number, Jerry Gray and Carl Sigman wrote a big band classic where the band sings the phone number.PEnnsylvania_6 5000.

Everybody played this song, although nobody sang the full lyrics - the band just shouted the phone number.

Read More →

Movies about math

I’m enjoying the Apple TV+ thriller “Prime Target”, about a mathematical genius who is apparently on the verge of some breakthrough about prime numbers and somebody wants to take him down because he’s going to break all known crypto or something - and it’s kind of silly and fun, but it make me wonder:

Hollywood should make a biopic about legendary, and extremely quirky, mathematician Paul Erdös. That’d be fun.

Erdös got an honourary degree from Waterloo and spoke at my graduation in 1981. I remember how he started, something like …. “I flew from Hungary, to the USA, to Waterloo, and after this I’m going to California, then Japan, then back to Hungary … so I’m going 360 degrees around the world to get one degree.

361 degrees.

Now that’s an interesting number. 361 is 19 squared. I remember when I was 19, and …”

Tom Green's A Canadian

This “I’m a Canadian” song by Tom Green is by far not the dumbest thing he’s ever done.