i had a wonderful 2 days visiting home again.  am now waiting to fly to calgary then off to montreal - then back to kingston. 

In other news, I came accross this gem:

Mogwai/Gremlins could be used to singlehandedly solve the energy crisis, as if you get them the slightest bit wet, they immediately pop out about four or five more of themselves, which grow to maturity within minutes. The movies have shown that this process can be repeated indefinitely, so long as you keep them saturated -- they need no other energy input beyond just a tiny bit of water.
So what you do is make some sort of enclosure with a trap door that takes up about half the floor, along with a series of small, straw-sized tubes at the top. Every five minutes, pour water into the enclosure to make them start multiplying. After about 10 minutes (which is how long it took in the movies for the mogwais to grow to maturity), release the trap door, dropping a portion of the mogwais into an incinerator below. From there, the process will work much like a coal power plant.
While mogwai flesh probably isn't quite as efficient a fuel as coal, there are many advantages, first and foremost of which is that there's an endless supply of them. Another, though, is that there's no need to mine them from mountains, saving millions, potentially billions, on extraction. Plus, transportation costs will plummet, since you only need to a small handful of mogwais to start yo