Sweeping the desk clean

As I embark on this blog entry, I am officially three hours and sixteen minutes into my vacation. True enough, it actually started on Friday as soon as I left work. But although I have been working weekends over the past several months, I'm not required to be at work on weekends. I am, however, required to be at work on Mondays. Except this one. And next one.
I was able to relax a good deal sooner than I thought I could, largely because there's been no pressing reason to get out of bed in the morning. Did you ever notice how much better you sleep when you know the alarm isn't set? On some level, my sleeping brain is endlessly preoccupied with counting down the minutes until the TV lights up the room with its infernal glare. If--no, when--I wake up in the middle of the night with a bladder swollen to the size of a football, my first glance is always to the left, where the clock determines my mood. Is it before, say, 2:00 in the morning? Excellent, I have three or more hours left to doze away. Is it (more likely) about 4:30? That sucks--there's not enough time to get back to sleep before the TV does its thing at 5:11. Or maybe there is...just enough time to make you feel like you're settling down into the real meaty portion of your sleep before you're yanked, protesting mightily, back into wakeworld.
In any event, I've managed to sleep in each and every morning, once until almost 8:00! Luxury of luxuries.

(Last week, we went out to Real Canadian SuperStore and bought some PC Home EasyCare sheets. I can't recommend these things highly enough. When you first get in to bed, they're frigid, like most sheets, but they warm up almost instantly and keep you nice and toasty without overheating you. And oh, so comfortable...)

So ends the President's Choice sheet commercial...

Before I can really get into this holiday spirit, I must attend to the items cluttering up my mental desk, little thoughts that demand to be written out, yet aren't substantive enough for a blog entry of their own. And so...

That's it. We've reached bedrock in terms of human laziness. I was reading about some television show or other (think it was Ugly Betty) and how it's so popular they've moved it into the "very highly desirable timeslot leading into the hit Gray's Anatomy." I asked my wife, who's much more involved in all things television than I will ever be, what makes a timeslot desirable and why it seems to be so all-fired important to group hit shows together. "They do it so people won't change the channel", she said.
Fact: the first remote control was marketed under the name "Lazy Bones". Little did they know back then that come the new millennium, actually picking up the remote control and hitting a few buttons on it would be considered far too much work.
Think about it. It can't be commercial interests dictating this: you see the same commercials on every channel, sometimes twice in the same break. My God, if I see that ProLine 'throwback jersey' commercial one more time I'll hip-check my television. Not to mention that God-awful Tim Horton's ad..."Bill...Sara...PUNCH!"
And okay, great, so your network has captured an audience for a whole 90 minutes, not because of the quality of your shows but because they're too lazy to change the channel. So what do you do for the rest of prime time throughout the week, hmmm?
(Related: does anybody actually care what network they're watching? "I'm sorry...I only watch CBS." I can understand a preference for one network's news coverage over another's, but if your favourite sitcom jumped ship, wouldn't you follow it?)

Okay, enough of that rant. Moving on...

Funny how you never see any coverage of the protests over North Korea. Or Cuba. Or any other place where human rights are the punchline to a joke. No, all we ever see are protests over the actions of the United States. Look, I'm nobody's Bush apologist, but does it not smack of hypocrisy when everything America does is relentlessly criticized, even as tyrants are starving and murdering their citizens the world over?

On to the 'took them long enough!' file. Two entries today. One, here in Ontario they're looking at revising 30-year old seatbelt laws after a terrible minivan crash killed four people. Turns out the minivan had ten people in it: three more people than seatbelts. It further turns out that this is perfectly legal as the laws are written: you can stuff as many people into your vehicle as you want, provided (a) all the seatbelts are used; (b) the driver is not crowded and (c) the driver has a valid license.
Oh, I know why they never thought to limit the number of passengers to the number of seatbelts. It's because back in 1976, people weren't stupid enough to cram ten people into a van meant for seven. Or if they were, they accepted the natural consequences.
As a species, we've become much too self-important over the past couple of generations. We figure we can flaunt the natural order of things with impunity. When that natural order catches up--when the car skids off the skating rink at 120 km/hr, when people re-enact Jackass and...holy shit!...injure themselves, they stand around and say to ourselves how'd that happen?
Not that I'm saying seatbelt laws are, strictly speaking, necessary--for drivers, at least. No, I figure that if you're alone in the car and you choose to be an idiot, you should be allowed to be an idiot. I'm kind of Darwinian that way...I believe you can't legislate stupidity out of existence and you probably shouldn't try. Just make it known that anybody found ejected from a car at an accident scene--or anybody with alcohol in their blood--will be the last one treated at the hospital. No, we won't deny them treatment--that would be unCanadian!--but we'll...take our time about it.
(By the bye, I once took a trip in a 1984 Chevette loaded down with nine people. I was in the backseat, with a girl named Laura planted firmly on my lap (I damn near grew a seatbelt for her!) Fun while it lasted, but even getting in I knew it wasn't safe, and I never repeated that experience.)

Item two: They're going to change the law, again here in Ontario, and make it legal for people to drink in the bathrooms of licensed bars.
Why the hell would you want to drink in a bathroom, Ken?
Well, it turns out that before, you couldn't. Which meant that people--people of the female persuasion--had to leave their drinks out in the bar when they visited the bathroom. They'd go off in their packs and as long as you paid close attention to whose drink was whose (and, oh, yeah, you were psychotic), it was a simple matter to slip a little Mickey Finn in there.
Not being a veteran of the bar scene, I can't imagine why this hasn't been attended to, like, a decade ago. I guess enough people have been date-raped, now.

Ahhh, that feels better. Now I can get down to some real vacating.