I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

BAD BOYS, BAD BOYS, WHATCHA GONNA DO WHEN THEY COME FOR YOU?

I've finally got some pictures of an Ottawa police car that has eluded my camera lens for the best part of a year.



While the vast, vast majority of the Ottawa Police Service's marked patrol car fleet is composed of Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor cars (in fact, I can't honestly say I remember seeing even a single marked Ottawa Police Chevy Impala in the two-and-a-half years that I've been living in Ontario), in 2006, Ottawa added a few Dodge Chargers to the fleet.



I first saw one of these bad boys responding to some kind of accident on Carling way back last July, but my mother's Ricoh Caplio camera, which I was using for digital pictures at the time, was still recovering from the unfortunate soaking it received when I got caught in a torrential downpour walking the 50 metres or so to my house from the bus stop on Meadowlands after arriving back in Nepean from Canada Day activities downtown.




I've seen several more Ottawa Police Dodge Chargers on the streets over the past few weeks, but they were moving and I just seemed to never have my camera ready at the exact moment they passed by, so I was elated to see this one parked right outside the doors near Toys R' Us in the St. Laurent Centre, on a median so I could get nice photos of it from all angles.



Look at that "stare". The Dodge Charger is the most "badass"-looking police car this side of those Lamborghini Gallardos that police forces in some European cities have. However, it's not quite as "badass" as some police forces; according to Wikipedia, the Dodge Chargers that the Ottawa Police Service uses aren't the ones with the Police Package 340hp V8 Hemi engine, they just have the base V6 engine, so they're less muscled than the V8-powered Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptors.

But they look cool.

CROWNVIC.NET BOARD VISITORS: I wouldn't exactly say that the Dodge Charger police cars are "elusive". Other people at Flickr have photographed them, I just had a 9 month bad luck streak that finally ended Monday, though now I have a new target... a Gatineau/Hull Police Dodge Charger.

Please check out my Flickr Police Car album... there are lots of Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptors (Ottawa, RCMP, OPP, Montreal, and Military Police) in there.








Speaking of digital photography, I was in Ottawa East partially because I wanted to feed my brother's cat (since my brother was spending Easter weekend in Toronto), but also because I wanted to get the cheapest possible SD memory card for my camera to tide me over until I figure out what I can do, if anything, to get a replacement for the 2.0 GB PNY Technologies SD memory card that died over the weekend (it's long past the store warranty, but I'm not sure about the manufacturer's warranty because I still need to find the fricking package).

I checked the Zellers website and found that there was one Zellers store in the Ottawa area that I had yet to visit, and it was just a block or so north of the St. Laurent Centre, so I'm not sure how it had eluded my Zellers-finding sixth sense until now. Unfortunately, the cheapest SD memory cards they had were 512 MB and were a good $10 Canadian more than I was willing to spend right now. And they didn't have any Hot Wheels or Maisto Ferrari model cars that I don't already have.

But I struck gold next door at Radio Shack "The Source by Circuit City", where I got the last clearance Centrios 256 MB memory card for just $18 Canadian (plus tax), $7 below my $25 Canadian (plus tax) cheapness threshold. I know 250 MB isn't much, but it means I can get 222 pictures at a time (not including the 30 pictures in my camera's internal memory), so fans of my photos of boring things in the Ottawa metropolitan area don't need to fret, the photos will go on. Even with as many pictures as I take, I think the only time I've even gotten close to taking 250 pictures at once was at the Ottawa-Gatineau Autoshow last month.

Also, at the Source by Circuit City, there was a middle-aged guy, who I think was Italian or Greek, testing Karaoke speakers, and he actually wanted the no-longer-Radio-Shack store clerk to turn up the sound on the televisions just to make sure that the Karaoke noise drowns everything else out. I just thought it was a funny enough random request to mention here.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 5:25 AM