Uh, um, aahh...oh, yeah! Piss Off!

Avid readers: do you ever survey your library in search of something to curl up with and think nah, I just read all this?
Well, right now I'm thinking, nah, I just wrote all that.
Seriously. Oh, there are lots of things I could write about, but the frame of mind I'm in right now, they'd all come out either depressingly boring or boringly depressing.
Take Jim Balsillie's upcoming battle royale with the National Hockey League, for example. As a hockey fan who is sick to death of 40 years of Maple Leaf mismanagement, I'd love to write about what will soon be the Hamilton Predators. But the NHL's management makes Toronto's look like, well, RIM's. I highly doubt there will be a team in Hamilton, or anywhere else north of 49, any time soon. Gary Bettman would rather have a failing American team than a successful Canadian team.
Depressing. And, if you're not a hockey fan, boring.
I asked my wife for a blog topic. She thought for a second and then said "Is Canada's greatest natural resource now water?"
Yike. Research required there, not to mention where the hell does she get these thoughts?
(If it isn't yet, it will be: you'll see water wars waged worldwide within a few decades.)
Depressing. Boring.
I could write about how I've discovered Facebook--how three people from various points in my past all nudged me (same week) into joining, and how I've since discovered and reconnected with people I haven't seen in years. But since it seems like everyone else is joining either Facebook or Myspace, my story's boring in the extreme, right?
I could wax political, but I've been there and done that; I could tell you about my work, but (a) it's boring, (b) it's depressing as hell and (c) I don't want to be fired.

I know! I haven't excoriated the CBC lately.

In the wake of the gang raid that 'took down' the Driftwood Crips street gang, the CBC television reporters showed their typical colours. Every question was directed against the police: either questioning why so many had been arrested, wondering about the racial makeup of the officers ("why were there so many white officers arresting black suspects?"), even at one point asking the chief to tell them about the "terrified children" who watched the raids net parents and siblings.
Yeah. Because living under perpetual threat of gang warfare isn't in the least terrifying. It's only really scary when the police come.
As my longtime readers know, I am the son of a career peace officer, now, thankfully, retired. My dad never fired his weapon in all his years on the force, a fact he and I both take pride in. Of course, he spent the majority of his time far removed from the mean streets of Toronto (when he worked those streets, they were nowhere near as mean).
My dad's choice of career colours my thinking, as my more perceptive readers may have noticed. I don't like criminals. Even moreso I hate people who seem as if they do like criminals. Such people include the majority of the Canadian media and practically every member of what we call our justice system. (That street gang? They weren't 'taken down' at all. At most, eleven months and countless person-hours bought the Jane-Finch ghetto maybe a week of comparative peace.)
When my father was my age, he'd already been on the O.P.P for fifteen years. I can assure you I wouldn't have lasted half that, had I followed in his footsteps. I probably would have killed myself by now. I mean, here's a job that, to my mind, is noble and distinguished (and monstrously underpaid, but that's another post...) But it seems these days as if everybody's on the I-hate-cops bandwagon. Most of the teenagers I work with think police are something less than vermin. The Toronto Star is forever suggesting that cops ought to be teddy bears/social workers/anything but what they are, people charged with 'Maintaining the Right', as the RCMP's motto goes. I admire the hell out of anybody who can keep themselves centered in the face of such blatant and ridiculous opposition.
And the CBC? It can take its agenda and shove it. Sideways.
Incidentally, here's another example of CBC doctrine at work. "Happiness is paying your taxes, study suggests", goes the headline. Well, now, I had to read that, because nobody I know enjoys paying tax.
The study they cite had absolutely nothing to do with taxation. It monitored brain response to charitable giving--which is a red-headed Swede if ever I saw one, a Norse of a different colour. Participants knew their 'money' was going towards a food bank. A food bank. That's a wee mite different from a bloated government bureaucracy, no?
But according to the CBC, happiness is paying taxes. It is, of course, un-Canadian to wish for lower taxes; to do so is greedy and selfish and...naughty! You are Canadian, you will bend over and YOU WILL LIKE IT!

I guess I had something to write about after all.

Quickblog

Our air conditioner is making our bedroom a livable place. In fact, it's kind of hard to leave it.
You know what I don't get? Government agencies telling me to set my a/c at 26 degrees. Now what, I ask you, is the point of that? Ours is set at 20 degrees--68 Fahrenheit--you know, room temperature. 26? That's almost as hot as our room gets. If you're supposed to keep your a/c at 26 degrees, you might as well just buy a dehumidifier instead.
There are certain things I'm willing to pay for. Willing to pay a lot for. And very high on the list is a good night's sleep. If I could, I'd get a couple of industrial air conditioners and set the temp at about 12 in there. Then I'd really sleep well.
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It's been a week here in the Breadbin. My mother-in-law underwent exploratory heart surgery yesterday. Nothing like that to ratchet up the stress...and it certainly didn't help that she's deathly allergic to the dye they had to use. Nor did it help that, despite being scheduled for 9:00 a.m., she didn't get into surgery until after 2:00 p.m. Emergency cases kept coming in and getting slotted ahead of her...you'd really think there'd be a separate stream for things like that, but...oh, yeah, this is Canada, eh?
Anyway, the good news is only one artery's blocked. The bad news is the muscle underneath it is dead. So there's not much they can do. It's a good thing my wife's family has a habit of outliving people's expectations.
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Last Friday, when I got home from the last night shift I'm going to work until September (yes, we'll have a night crew again, as soon as we can find and train some honest people!), I made a deal with myself that I could go to bed as soon as I finished moving the bedroom around. There was a little more work than I'd bargained on, but what really slowed me down was dropping the damn bed on my foot. Entirely new curse words were invented and strung together at high volume. For the better part of a day walking was beyond me; the only reason I'm semi-ambulatory now has something to do with a whole lot of ice.
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I hope something happens outside this house soon so I can blog about it!

Consequence free?

In my early childhood, at least, I was raised according to the "that'll learn ya" school of parenting. Touch a hot stove --> get burned --> "That'll learn ya not to touch hot stoves". This accomplished a couple of things. One, it made me extremely sensitive to cause-effect relationships. "Consequence" was not a concept that needed explaining in my house. Two, it initiated a loop that eventually made me into something of a bubble boy. I was cursed with a vivid imagination, and it imaginated all sorts of outcomes to the simplest of actions. If, for instance, I should dare to climb a tree, well, than certainly I will fall out of the tree and suffer pain unendurable. This equation was of the 2+2 variety in my mind: axiomatic, unquestionable. The fact the equation would have been valid a great deal of the time, due to my absentminded fogbound dreamy nature, simply reinforced my own perceptions and the perceptions others had of me. I was not a child who tested his limits.
Such tests were forced upon me from time to time. Yet even when I passed them, the dominant emotion I felt was rarely any species of triumph or pride: instead, I usually felt a sort of giddy relief that that nightmare was over. I can tell you right now that even if I had ever climbed a tree and made it back to terra firma intact, I would have never climbed another. Why should I? There are so many safer ways to get a nice view. Tempt fate twice?

There are all sorts of things I've never done in my life because my resident risk analyst deems them either dangerous, or simply not worth it. Incidentally, I've been drunk all of once, and the first order effect of drunkenness, for me, was to take that risk analyst, gag and bind him, and shut him away up in some corner of my brain where I couldn't even hear his screams. I found myself in a situation I wouldn't have ever considered were I sober, and since then I've treated alcohol like old nitroglycerin.

There remained lessons to be learned, of course. One comes to mind from fifth grade. My teacher that year was Mr. Sackville--probably the best teacher of my elementary school career, not least because he wasn't afraid to put me in my place.
I don't remember what the project was, but I dilly-dallied about it. The Monday deadline came and went, and Mr. Sackville threatened me with a zero if I didn't turn the thing in. My mother freaked. I still remember her French-Canadian accent, which only came out when she was angry: "If something is due on a certain due-DATE, you will hand it in on that due-DATE." Despite her anger, it was all I could do not to laugh. Hey, Mom, you got the emPHAsis on the wrong syllAble, there...
Thus chastised, I set to work with a will. It was a large project and it took me three nights to finish it. Paging through the completed project Thursday morning before placing it on Mr. Sackville's desk, I admired my writing--some of the best stuff I'd ever done, in my not so humble opinion. That'll show him, I thought to myself. A-plus for sure.
It wasn't until the next Monday that I got my project back. The teacher had written words of high praise on the cover sheet and there was a nice big circled "96%". Beneath that, in smaller handwriting, was another line: "-15% x 4 days late = 36%."

I cried.

Now, Mr. Sackville saw to it that my intransigence didn't jeopardize my final grade that year. But that's not the point. I didn't know that until I got that final grade. And believe you me, I never turned another assignment in so much as a minute late...not even in university, after I had fallen out of love with the classroom.

I said all that as preamble. What you see up there is an anachronism. Sometimes I feel like the last of a breed.

Did you know that in Ontario classrooms, tardiness in turning in assignments is not to be penalized? This goes hand in hand with the prevailing educational attitude that no student must ever fail, at anything, lest he consider himself a failure. Give a child a mark of, say, 30% and more than likely the principal will raise it to a pass.
Today's Toronto Star has a long article discussing this phenomenon. In it, one educator says that the onus is now on the teacher to teach rather than the pupil to learn. "The teacher used to say, 'Look, I taught it, you just didn't learn it. My job is done: you try again'...now we know that if it didn't work the first time, more of the same isn't going to work." There is no such thing as too much help, says the article.
Bull. There is so. When you don't enforce deadlines--which are an unavoidable fact of life outside of school--who exactly does that help? When you give a failing student a passing grade, who does that help? It sure doesn't help the student, who is assumed to understand certain concepts by virtue of that passing grade.
But according to research done at Queen's University, students who fail more than one grade nine course are more likely to drop out of school.
So what? I know several high school dropouts. A few of them have gone on to attain multiple diplomas, degrees, and designations. Others haven't, but have instead become happy, well-adjusted (and very well paid) tradespeople. There is nothing wrong with dropping out of school so long as there are alternatives available. And should the student choose not to accept any of those alternatives? Then there ought to be consequences to that choice, too.

I'm very much convinced that the overwhelming sense of entitlement many of today's youth have can be laid at the feet of educators afraid to educate them in the realities of life (sometimes you're the windshield, sometimes you're the bug) and parents who are deathly afraid their little ones might not succeed at every last thing they try.

I've always wondered at the typically teenage dismissal of consequences. What causes a fifteen-year-old to steal a car and drive into a taxicab at an estimated 160 km/hr, killing two girls (who, ironically enough, took a cab because they felt the transit system wasn't safe) not to mention himself? Did that outcome not even occur to him? Why do so many teens think that drugs which have been proven potentially lethal won't affect them? Kids have always had these sort of attitudes. It's only recently that adults seem to have bought into this themselves, in their absolute refusal to set consequences for their children's actions. The above incident was called an "accident" in print. God, I hate that word. Most traffic "accidents" aren't. The very word denies the near-inevitable consequence of driving irresponsibly.

It's everywhere. Those kids I wrote about last post, who stole about $3500 worth of cigarettes? Both of them have been in trouble with the law before. One of them has been my pet project over the last several years. I kind of knew that without my efforts he'd wind up in a life of crime. Turns out that's going to happen despite my best efforts--which leaves me profoundly disappointed. Because now it falls to the justice system to straighten him out, and we all know how well that works. "Stop! Or I'll say 'stop' again!"

Our whole Canadian society is built on abdication of responsibility and dismissal of consequences. Whenever anything even remotely disturbing happens, you can count on a Canadian to announce the government should do something. In the aftermath of the "accident" alluded to above, for instance, there were immediate calls for a review of police chases, on the grounds that the police were chasing the car at at the time. Never mind that they were well back, travelling considerably slower than the young criminal. Never mind that, I say, it has to be someone else's fault because it can never be our own.

When there are no meaningful consequences to one's actions, there is no deterrent to wrong action and no reason to assume responsibility for right action.

Consider the environment. Not all that long ago, pollution of most kinds was perfectly acceptable, even a badge of progress. And why wouldn't it be? Belch a huge amount of crap into the atmosphere and the wind would blow it all away as if it never existed. A few people downwind would get sick and die. At first, nobody thought to connect this with the air they were breathing, so polluting was still okay. Then it was discovered that air pollution could kill you--and air pollution was still okay so long as it only killed other people. (Don't think for a second that people don't actually rationalize like this...) Now we're quite probably on the cusp of seeing wider, deeper and more unpleasant consequences of our environmental attitudes...and there are STILL people out there dismissing it all out of hand.
And what really scares me is that we forgot to teach the people we've entrusted with fixing our mistakes in this arena about consequences. We also forgot to teach them about personal responsibility.
Oh, global responsibility they get. The world has a responsibility to crown them, adore them, coddle them. Don't do any of that to their satisfaction and you're 'dissing' them...which in certain circumstances can get you killed. In their world, respect is assumed, not earned. In fact, if this goes on it's a good bet the word 'earn' will drop right out of the language.

I wasn't raised perfectly--who was? But I thank my parents, all of them, for giving me a sense of consequence and responsibility. It kept me out of trees, sure, but it also kept me honest.

Bachin' It/The Experiment Ends

I won't be working any more night shifts for the foreseeable future.
Which is really too bad, as I have enjoyed them immensely. There's a sense of importance that washes over you at three in the morning, as if it falls upon you to bring the sunrise. What's more, I was able to get vast amounts of work done, much more than I've ever managed in daylight. No customers will do that.
So why are there no nights in my future? Not through any fault of mine, believe me.
We had a sizeable theft last Tuesday night. I was there at the time, busy like a little beaver in my dairy aisle, while this was going on at the other end of the store. Didn't see or hear a thing. Two of my fellow workers were caught on tape and summarily fired and charged. (I know you're supposed to say 'allegedly' in cases like this, at least until the suspects are convicted, but the camera tells no lies.)
Rumours of additional hanky-panky concerning still other members of the night crew forced my boss's hand. No more nights. Which really bites. (Hey, Ken, you're a poet and you don't know it...your feet show it, they're Longfellows.)
So now I'm not back to work until Monday morning. Eva's up at her best friend's cottage in Wasaga Beach, having a girls' weekend. I'm here with the menagerie, trying to figure out how to plan my sleeps now so as to 'flip' for Monday morning. Oh, and there's a buttload of cleaning to do around here, too.

I Don't Get It

Much as I would like to, I can't claim to have been born without jealousy installed. It occasionally rears its ugly green head, masquerading as free-floating insecurity, and it always takes me some time to determine what it is. Why, that's jealousy! Get it out of your head! Jealousy, to me, is almost the most irrational emotion imaginable: feeling pain at another's happiness.
(And before you ask, I shall answer: yes, I have, for example, deliberately set up a girl I wanted dearly for myself with a good male friend of mine, on the grounds he was probably better for her than I would be. More than once I have done this. It never took, but it wouldn't have bothered me if it had.)
I've said before that jealousy is corrupted envy. Envy, a perfectly natural state of mind, is wanting something someone else has. Jealousy is wanting something someone else has, such that they can't have it any more. It's a petty and yet supremely damaging emotion, and whenever I feel it, shame is hot on its heels.
But there is one emotion I think of as more irrational than jealousy, more terrible in its implications, both for the self and for others. And it's sort of related. It's called schadenfreude: not pain at another's happiness, but happiness at another's pain.
Schadenfreude is, of course, a German word. It's often said that only the Germans could come up with such a concept and feel it worthy of a single word...an assertion that, besides being deeply racist, is also flat wrong: there are similar terms in at least seventeen other languages, from Arabic to Hebrew, from Greek to Gaelic. Which points to schadenfreude being a universal human emotion.
Not in my universe.
I can honestly and sincerely say I've never felt it in my life. To me, there is no more succint definition of evil than finding somebody else's pain worthy of celebration or merriment. I've often found myself in debates with people who find pain funny. I never win these debates, but it isn't for lack of trying:

Would you find that funny if it happened to you?
But it didn't happen to me. That's the point! [chuckles]
Yeah, but what if it did? She didn't find it funny, did she?
Of course she didn't, she's crying! [laughs uproariously]

It's all I can do not to stare at the person at this point as if they'd grown hooves and horns. And then I'm invariably told to "lighten up"...which I take as a command to pretend someone else's pain isn't real.

Sorry, I can't do that. I've never found pain--physical or emotional--at all funny when I've experienced it. I have no reason to think someone else's pain is any different than mine.

I can trace this strangeness in me--a strangeness which, by the way, I think is perfectly normal; it's the rest of the world that's screwed up--way back into early childhood. Remember the Swedish Chef on the Muppet Show? I hated him, and would burst into tears as he whipped kitchen utensils around, utterly careless of who or what he hit with them. Any child of a particularly messy divorce might be able to sympathize...but I honestly think I would have been appalled even if I hadn't seen stuff flying around my own kitchen on occasion. Pots, after all, hurt.
This gradually evolved into a hatred of violence in any and all its forms, something which I still harbour deep within me. Growing up, I often felt compelled to hide this hatred from other kids my age, to fit in. Sometimes it was impossible. I remember a movie night at my first job, a little staff party held for some reason or other. The movie was Die Hard, and I think I made it through the first 45 minutes before quietly slinking away. Part of my disgust revolved around the fact that seemingly every other guy in the room had at least one girl to cuddle--yep, jealousy, I was incredibly immature then--but a deeper part was concerned that anybody could cuddle up while watching the gore onscreen.
I'm sure a psychologist would have said I had difficulty distinguishing fantasy from reality. Bullshit. I knew perfectly well that the blood and guts on TV weren't real. What bothered me...what revolted me...was the idea that somebody would (a) want to portray such madness as if it was, and that (b) dozens (no, millions) of people would find such a spectacle entrancing.

Things have progressed. It's not enough any more to show blood and viscera. In torture porn like Saw and Hostel, I understand people get ripped apart. Eyeballs pop like grapes. And teenagers watch all this and think it's hysterical. They actually cheer, I'm told, as if dismemberment was a sporting event. (It goes without saying I haven't seen any of these movies. You have to pay me an awful lot of money to sit through just one of them.) You wonder why there's so much violence in certain segments of society? I'm positive the movies are part of it...but what I'd really like to know is how children get so desensitized to acts of unspeakable carnage as to eventually find them laugh-out-loud funny. I wonder how gut-bustingly funny it'd be if their guts were busted. Or those of their friends.

To this day, I suffer from a lack of schadenfreude. Yes, suffer is the operant word...because the pain and misfortune of others is so...damned...inescapable. You can't avoid it on television...I sometimes think it's the only basis for TV comedy. It's as if TV writers sit amongst themselves and think "well, we're stuck for a joke, here, so let's inflict some pain on this guy." Again, yes, I know television characters aren't real--but so what? Why is fictitious injury funny? I don't get it.

I don't think I ever will. Actually, I hope to God I never do.

500 and counting

Welcome one and all to my 500th post.
When I started this blog a little over three years ago, I had little idea where it would take me. Five hundred posts, well over a million words, and untold skullsweat later, I'm still not sure.

The nicest thing about Blogger, for me, is the chance to be an editorialist without all that tedious drudgery of being a lowly reporter. No, better yet...I don't have an editor. Doubtless that has led to some rambling, out-of-focus posts, not to mention a small mountain of typos (I'm particularly negligent at closing brackets. But ask any professional writer to name the bane of his existence and chances are it's Mr. Bane, his editor. The nerve of those people--who would try to temper my love of the emdash--who would dare to tell me I use more italics than Cosmopolitan. I know the job of an editor is to make a writer's message clearer, but for a stream of consciousness writer like me, that's akin to telling me what and how to think, and I resent that more than anything.
This blog has witnessed a host of world events. Some momentous ones, like the tsunami and hurricane Katrina), dominated my thoughts for days or weeks. Others were forgotten almost as soon as they had been committed to screen.
Unlike many bloggers, I made a decision early on to alternate political with personal posts. The Breadbin has seen a slow but steady evolution in my politics, even as it has catalogued my biggest biggest ups and downs. But the most important function of the Breadbin in my life is to keep me balanced...and to promote balance around me whenever I get a chance.
This blog has exposed me to other bloggers whose missives I read routinely and whom I count among my friends (hi, Peter!) I tied it to a group blog which has, in spite of being rather dormant of late, provided me with lots of food for thought. And the mere fact I have a blog means I've had to scrounge endlessly for stuff to write about, menaning in turn that I have learned a lot.
I have put more effort into this blog than maybe anything else in my whole life (with the exception of my marriage, of course). A friend of mine once had to delete her blog and start over. At the time, she had put about as much into her blog as I have now into mine. I don't know how she did it. The idea of all these thoughts, emotions, words going poof! fills me with horror. Even at gunpoint, I'd hesitate before I hit that delete key.
Because this blog has been my truth. Not the truth--one of the things the Breadbin has reinforced is that there is no such thing--but my truth, and I types it as I sees it.

Thank you, everyone, for reading my ramblings, for sticking with me, for commenting and making your presence known. Writers write to be read: an audience is our sunshine. This ongoing document just wouldn't be the same without you.

Comics!

I think I've been a little too deep lately. Not to mention too pretentious, too intellectual, too...frigging...boring.

So...THE FUNNIES!

Here are some of my favourite comic clips.

WARNING: Parental guidance strongly advised. In some cases--notably #3--the guidance should be well away from the computer speaker. Not work safe, not least of all because you probably don't want your colleagues to notice you've pissed yourself.

High speed connection recommended.

1) Ron James on Tim Horton's

2) George Carlin on losing things

3) Nikki Payne

We saw this routine live a few years back. I couldn't breathe. I cried in places, I was laughing so hard. The room actually went silent a few times because nobody else could breathe, either. I must reiterate the warning above: although they've bleeped her here, Nikki's material is...dirty.

4) Bill Engvall

The more I hear, the more I like. He kept us sane on the road back from Florida.

5) Stuart MacLean needs to pee

If you've never heard of the Vinyl Cafe, more's the pity. It's a radio program, recorded live in a different Canadian town each week. It features independent music and--most entrancingly, as far as I'm concerned--each week a new story, usually concerning "Dave and Morley" and their family and friends. It's gentle humour, but often gut-bustingly funny anyway. I strongly identify with Dave, who tends towards absentmindedness and is prone to petty disasters at every turn.
MacLean has written several books of Dave and Morley stories, and I have them all. They're great in print, but MacLean's voice adds a lot.

This one's one of his rare non-Dave-and-Morley stories. Funny, though.

6) Jeremy Hotz Saw him live, too, something like, yikes, fifteen years ago now. One of the best comedians I've ever run across.

Finally...

7) The Frantics on dirty words. (Not what you think...although you'll never hear these words the same way again.)

Souled

Being a rambling dissertation on the co-existence of science and spirituality


"Within you is the whole universe. You are a microcosm of the macrocosm.”
--Rabbi Shoni Labowitz

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
--T.S. Eliot

This month's issue of Discover magazine is an absolute goldmine. If you're me, at least. Reading about the cutting edge of science--articles such as "Soul Search", "Blowing In The Wind" and "In No Time"--my mind gorged itself on new information, evaluated, and found--pleasantly--that it all reinforced what I had believed already.

If you ask a scientist what time is, or what consciousness is--or even what an atom is--and she's feeling particularly honest, she'll respond "no idea. Next question."
We fool ourselves into thinking we know how things work. The reality is we have not the slightest idea how things work.

Take time, for instance. Einstein was the first person to mess with our idea of time as a constant, inexorable process. Quantum mechanics further buggers things up--so much so that the only way science has been able to unify Einstein's theories with quantum mechanics is to discard the whole idea of time, as if it didn't exist.

To which there are a whole lot of people, following a great many spiritual and philosophical traditions, saying, "well, duh."

I've long known in my gut that there's such a thing as a soul, that all souls are one, and that time is an illusion. I can claim no scientific evidence for any of these assertions...yet. According to "Soul Search", the amount of evidence for a "soul" depends on what you'd call "evidence". [Ken intrudes: the same can be said about the existence of a god or gods, incidentally. Some people see evidence everywhere; others don't see a shred of evidence. That's not a coincidence, at least to me. In my system of belief, all souls are parts of God. If that word "God" offends your sensibilities, you're more than free to substitute "Life", or "the Universe".]

While there is no rigid scientific quantification of a soul, there is a growing body of circumstantial evidence that something exists within us besides our minds. Witness near death experiences: people categorized brain-dead and subsequently revived have reported a vast array of sensory and mental experiences, often life-changing. These go well beyond the famous "tunnel/white light" phenomena that could be explained as the effect of some final neurons firing. How is it so many people report observing their bodies from above, and being aware of events in the room--or even beyond--while they were supposedly "dead"? Why do so many people recognize their dead relatives, or experience a "life-review", a sort of visual riffling of experiential cards? Science suggests this sort of thing is clearly impossible. Yet it persists.

Many religions and philosophies incorporate the idea that all souls are one. Christianity indirectly expresses this in several places, most notably Matthew 25: 35-45. Buddhism is chock-a-block with proverbs suggesting we are all one. Wicca, too. Hinduism holds that all souls are partially or fully identical with the Brahma, the supreme soul which encompasses All That Is.
These are OLD thoughts. Hinduism in particular dates back well over five thousand years, and is probably compiled from even older beliefs. It seems odd, at first blush, that so many disparate and ancient traditions should be telling us much the same thing. Especially when that thing is so contrary to what is generally held as truth today.

When I don my New Age cloak--something I don't often do in polite company--I find myself thinking that the only problem in our world is that we have forgotten we're all one, with each other and with the universe. Not that I blame anyone, exactly. The illusions we live under--that we are separate, that Time governs our existence--are terribly pervasive. How do you ignore the evidence of your eyes, whose basic function is to tell you where you end and where the world begins?

I will never forget the first lecture I attended in, of all things, literary criticism. The professor ambled into the room, turned, stared at us defiantly, and sneered. "Everything you know is wrong", he intoned.
Well, that got my attention. What ensued was a headache. The good prof started firing questions at us.
"Who was Adam's wife?"
Well, everybody knows this. "Eve", a dozen people shouted out.
"Was she his only wife?"
People were a little less certain on that, but only a little. "Yes", came the response.
"WRONG!" he shouted. "Lilith was Adam's wife. Also Cain's, and she had children by both. Don't believe me? Look it up."
At the time, Lilith Fair was popular, and that was the only connotation any of us could draw. I looked it up later that day, and couldn't believe what I found.
"When was the first computer built?"
I tackled that one, being something of a computer geek back then. "ENIAC, 1946", I called out, confidently.
"Not bad", he responded, "you're only off by a little over two thousand years."
I thought of calling him on that one, but decided there was no point. I'd just be proven wrong in front of the whole class...ugh. Later on, I looked that up, too..and just about shit myself.
The third inquiry, the one relevant to this post, came."What happens if you throw a ball against a brick wall?"
The entire class sat silent, trying to puzzle out the trap. Nobody could do it. Eventually somebody behind me muttered "it...bounces back...?"
"Well, most of the time, yes, you're right", the prof admitted. "But! If you throw the ball just right, it could go right...through...the wall! Or," he added as an afterthought, "it could get stuck halfway through."
Well now, that was patent bullshit. Several voices, mine included, were raised in protest. The prof didn't budge. "The ball and the wall are both made of atoms", he said. "What we think of as solid is in reality almost entirely empty space. If you throw that ball just so, the atoms of the ball and the wall will mesh. Oh, it's almost an infinite improbability"--I laughed here, thinking of Douglas Adams--but, at least in theory, it could happen."

If, as is now commonly known, so-called "solids" are mostly empty space...and if, as "Blowing In The Wind" asserts, you're currently inhaling part of what was, once, Caesar's (or Beethoven's, or Hitler's) last breath--not to mention submicrosopic bits of each of their bodies...notions of boundaries between the Self and the Universe tend to break down. It becomes possible to perceive the interconnectedness of all things...scientifically. Spirituality and science begin to converge. Indeed, at the quantum level they look a lot alike already.

Douglas Adams also wrote that "Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so." He was right with the first part, at least. "In No Time" (which seems to be available only in the print edition), is similar in bent to an article here. Basically, these articles argue that time is no more than a system of measurement devised by humans; that in ultimate reality we are all eternal and yet constantly changing (you can't even say 'instantaneously' since that would imply the existence of an instant). In other words, all times are one: everything that has ever happened, or will ever happen, is happening now. As preposterous as that sounds, scientists such as Stephen Hawking take it very seriously. Read the article and prepare to have your mind bent.

Spiritualists, of course, have taken the nonexistence of Time seriously for, well, a long time now. This is but one more example of the eventual convergence of science and spirituality. At some point, we're all going to look at each other and realize we've been using different languages to describe exactly the same thing.

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Addendum:

I hated math in high school. Science too, to a lesser degree. In both those disciplines (see? they're called 'disciplines', no wonder I hated them!), the answer was either right or wrong, with no room for creative manipulation. Math, though--yecch! Endless, pointless quadratics, plottings on Cartesian graphs, word problems ("if train A left Pillow Station at half past bedtime, and Snoozer entered Dreamland half an hour later, how fast can you fall asleep?")
Nobody ever told me math was useful. Oh, teachers asserted it was, but gave really crappy examples. "Math will help you balance your checkbook." No, that's not math, that's arithmetic. Where after high school am I going to run into the square of the hypotenuse, hmm, Teach?
I'm only finding out now that mathematics has a purpose beyond the purely utilitarian That level of math is so far beyond me I have to take anything it says on faith. But boy! I wish somebody had told me to stick with the math that tormented me, that it could ultimately explain, well, everything. I might have gone into physics. I would just love to take all that stuff I "know" in my gut...and prove it.

Ken On Those Moving Picture Things

Can I let you in on a couple of peeves? (Sure, Ken: it is, after all, your blog.)

But first, because I suffer from literary bloat, some background.

A few weeks ago my wife's company had a big garage sale. There were probably fifteen or twenty of us set up in the company parking lot early Saturday morning. Of the lot, we had by far the least amount of stuff--just one table, whereas there were some people there who wouldn't have a house to go home to, it looked like.
Our collection included a couple of big boxes of books. It's hard for me to get rid of books, but eventually the question must be asked, am I ever going to read this again?, and answered uh, nope, so why not make room for stuff you will read?
We also had some Nintendo DS games that had failed to hold Eva's interest overmuch, a vacuum food sealer that we hadn't used in about three years, and a bunch of assorted bric-a-brac that just kind of floats into the Breadner household on the tides. It was decided that we'd drop off whatever didn't sell at Value Village.
That ended up being, for the most part, the books. Most everything else went, and even though I was the one getting rid of the damned things, I felt, perversely, insulted. Hey! I thought. I've toured all your tables, and all of you have crappy books. (I know this because in any given box of books, it's a fair bet I or Eva has read at least three.) We've got the best books! Buy our books! But no, out of all those books, I do believe The Da Vinci Code was the only one that went. Hardcover. For a buck. Geez, I thought everybody'd read that one by now.
This mass garage sale turned out to be almost as much a big swap meet, at least from our perspective. Some of our profit got invested into other people's castoffs: we got a beautiful standing picture frame, almost taller than I am, into which we will put pictures of each of our pets, with a family shot in the centre. I bet it retails for five or six times what we paid for it. Also a whole bunch of other stuff we'll actually use.
Next to us, some acquaintances of ours had one of the biggest spreads. There must have been unpwards of a hundred old cassettes, to which my eye was drawn almost in spite of itself. Sure enough, I'd owned quite a few of them at one point in my life, and oh my God, is that Tiffany?
It was. I closed my eyes for a second and a poster from my teenage bedroom sashayed into view, steaming slightly. Probably the only serious celebrity crush I ever had, back when I was too young to understand I'd never meet her and therefore any fantasy I had would be doomed before it even got off the ground. Even as a young man, I preferred my fantasies at least marginally plausible.
I mentioned to the guy manning the table that I had the hots for her, back in the day. "Ken," he said, "I still do." Thereafter it became a running joke, how badly I wanted that tape--and the hell of it was, I really didn't. I've got one operating cassette player in the house, never used, and if I really want to hear Tiffany, I can download her off Limewire. (Okay...I have.)
Down on the ground, my eye spied several boxes stuffed to overflowing with magazines...and zeroed in on a box containing at least five years worth of Entertainment Weekly. I'd had a subscription to that one for a short while, and still missed it. These issues appeared to be from 1995 to 2000 or so, and I considered the box a veritable gold mine of popular culture. Good blogging material. I'm always in search of good blogging material. Plus, I could delve into the reviews in search of new books to read. Oh what the hell, I might as well admit it: I was eager to read the reviews of things I'd read and seen, just to see if the critical response differed from mine at all. Yeah, I know how weird that sounds. That's me. I'll read reviews of books before, after, and even during the time I'm reading them.
"Five dollars the box," Perry told me, "and I'll throw in Tiffany for free."
"Keep the tape", I told him, "but I'll take the box."

Of course, I got into the car later and found that Tiffany tape had somehow come with me.

Anyway, the Entertainment Weeklys have proven interesting. There's an article from way back in 1995 advising people on whether or not they should buy a DVD player ("if you really like movies, you probably should--they're expensive, but should drop below $300 by Christmas"). Another article a couple of years later--concerning Titanic, actually, one of my favourite movies--discussed the merits of widescreen versus pan-and-scan. At the time, I learned, very few people were buying the widescreen edition of James Cameron's masterpiece, the usual reason why being given as "I hate letterboxing!"

And thus I found out that I'm stuck in 1998. Because popular attitudes have done a 180...it's almost impossible to find a new video release in fullscreen any more, and I still loathe widescreen. Hate it with a passion.
Damn it, does everybody have huge rectangular televisions now? Everybody except me? I've got a 27" TV, and if I put in any widescreen video it turns into a 9" TV instantly. Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating, but it really does seem like two thirds of my screen goes black. My brain knows that this approach is faithful to what is shown on movie screens, but my eyes insist there's all kinds of things happening in the yawning black portion of my screen and my mouth says that widescreen presentation should go back where it belongs...to the theatre. Thank heavens for my DVD's zoom feature. One or two clicks of that and the movie actually takes up most of my television screen.

While I'm on the topic of DVDs, let me give you yet another anecdote. Several years back, we were at the in-laws for Christmas. We'd bought my brother-in-law a DVD player, and we'd brought along Men In Black to make sure he had something to play on it.
We set everything up and inserted the disc, and my mother-in-law suddenly said "Stop the movie!"
We looked at her.
"Stop the movie, it's right in the middle of it!"
The menu had come up--pretty small print, as I recall--superimposed on a scene that was indeed from the middle of the movie. We laughed and explained that this was just the opening menu, where you could choose to play the movie or view extras."
"Extras? Who needs extras? I just want to watch the movie."
Oh, I found that hysterical then, but as the years have gone by I've found myself repeating her words several times. Just today there was a column in the Toronto Sun lamenting the ubiquitous practice of "double dipping", that is, releasing a movie on DVD as a bare-bones single disc and then, weeks or months later, following that up with a "special edition" loaded with all manner of bonus material. And I thought again, I just want to watch the movie!

As I said, Titanic is one of my favourite movies of all time. It's not the love story--I could do without that--it's the ship itself, and Cameron's very faithful recreation of it. I was just entranced the first time I saw it, and have remained so ever since.
Loving this movie as I do, I did buy, eventually, the three-disc Special Collector's Edition. I was appalled to discover that the movie was still split between two discs. I watched the deleted scenes and realized quickly they had been deleted for a reason. Ditto the alternate ending. As for commentaries--which are on practically every movie released, nowadays--how do you like it when people babble over the movie you're trying to watch?
Or consider this. Ever watched a magician perform? Sure you have, most of us have, right? Do you appreciate it when some wag sitting next to you says "he didn't really saw her in half, see, there's this trap door, you can't see it, but it's right back...there..."

SHUT UP!

Combine those things--someone babbling over the magic, simultaneously spoiling the magic--and you have the essence of a movie commentary. Amazing to think people will pay extra for something they'd be outraged at if it happened anywhere but in their own home.

Unless you're my friend Jen--who's in Film Studies and whose dream will someday land her somewhere far away from here, making movies--do you really need to dig down into the blood and guts of a movie, throttling it to release its secrets? I think not.

The only extra I ever watch is the blooper reel, which can be pretty funny. But even then, I'm grousing to myself. Because it often seems like actors screw up intentionally. Seven or eight takes to say a simple sentence and I'd be out finding myself another actor.

And that's all I've got today. Snark!

Depressing?

My friend Jen made a fair comment on my last jeremiad, saying it was the most depressing post she has ever read. She then added something that got me to thinking..."and you said Pan's Labyrinth was dispiriting!"
Yeah, I did.
Fantasy is something I generally avoid in my reading and viewing. Call it a fault of mine, a defect of imagination, but I prefer my characters human and my settings at least halfway plausible. My chosen form of escapist literature is either historical or speculative fiction: what might have been, what could be. There are exceptions: the world of Harry Potter is clearly impossible. But J. K. Rowling is so adept at world-building that you come to believe, over the course of just one novel, that Hogwarts just might exist, if only you knew where to look.
Likewise Guy Gavriel Kay sets most of his fiction in a world ever so slightly removed from our own, and incorporates his supernatural elements seamlessly. But you take something like Lord of the Rings. I've tried three times to get through that--mostly, I'll admit, because it's on The List of Books Which You're Supposed To Have Read--and I can't do it. Part of it is Tolkien's dense, well-nigh-inpenetrable thicket of words, but a greater part is that I have a hell of a time relating to just about everything. Even the humans in that tome don't seem very human to me.
I rented Pan's Labyrinth after reading what seemed like an endless parade of glowing reviews. Rarely have so many critics led me so far astray.
Yes, the acting is great, all around, and the story engaging enough to make the viewer forget he's reading the movie. (It's in Spanish with English subtitles.) I knew going in that the movie was, by and large, a fantasy.
I didn't count on the gratuitous violence. There's a scene very early in that more than sufficiently establishes the sadistic nature of the male lead--it made me wince, but it was effective as hell. Then people start getting shot in the head, and before long I feel like I might have been shot in the head myself. Do they have to show everything?
I really didn't count on the ending rivalling the novel version of Pet Sematary for sheer bleakness. Eva reminded me that fairy tales used to be much darker than they are now. I can handle endings that aren't the happiest, but I'd naively assumed a fantastical film wouldn't pull that rug out from under me so brutally. I know better now.

It's strange, you know. I can handle depression and brutality in the flow of daily events...probably because I expect it. I can likewise handle gore and grimness in historical or speculative fiction, the former because I know the world was once a much harsher place, the latter because I truly feel it will be again. But set something in another world--offer me a total escape hatch--and I think it ought to be a happy escape.

I'm odd, I guess.

One Song Glory

Anyone out there ever seen Rent, either the stage musical or the movie adapted from it?
Rent is a modern recasting of La Vie Boheme, concerning a down-and-out group of New Yorkers, living and loving and dying on the dirty streets of Avenue A. It's inspiring and dispiriting in equal measure: an occasionally light and frothy tragedy packed with life lessons.
One of its characters, an AIDS-afflicted former rock star named Roger, is obsessed over the course of the play with writing one final tune encapsulating his short, bittersweet life. He laments, in part

One song (glory)
One song before I go (glory)
One song to leave behind
Find one song, one last refrain (glory)
From the pretty boy front man, who wasted opportunity
One song--he had the world at his feet

The lyrics to that particular tune came to mind today, unbidden, as I considered the state of the world...and shuddered.

There are a lot of people out there in the world pushing doom and gloom of late. Doom and gloom has become a multibillion dollar industry, operating on many fronts. Right now climate change is merely the most visible front for that industry, a warm front, as it were. But there are many other problems facing the human race behind the scenes, both natural and man-made (well, since we're part of Nature, perhaps it's fair to say they're naturally man-made). I've discussed s few of these issues before and don't really want to get into them again here and now.
No, what I find more interesting than constant warnings of imminent collapse is the unrelenting optimism pervading the world lately in the very face of it all.
I've taken to calling the stock market Pamplona. Today notwithstanding, it's deep into the kind of prolonged running of the bulls not seen since, well, 1929. For those of you not up on your history, in October 1929 the stock market came back to earth with a horrific thud that reverberated for decades. Indeed, the market never made it back to pre-Black Thursday levels until 1954!
Now they say hindsight's always 20/20 (depending on whose hind you've sighted)...but in order to reap the benefit of hindsight you have to be willing to look behind you. Our society doesn't often do that. For that matter, it doesn't look ahead much, either. No, most of the time we're too busy looking around at the glorious present. Stuck with our heads up our assets, in other words.
It all brings summer 1929 to mind rather forcibly. Then as now, people were in hoc up to their eyeballs, swimming in a sea of speculation. In 1929, bankers cheerfully lent people up to two thirds the value of the stock they were so eager to acquire. Nowadays, similar tactics are in play when it comes to home mortgages. There are millions of people in the United States holding what are strangely called "sub-prime mortgages" (the rates are well above the prime lending rate), and many of them have faced or are facing foreclosure on their homes as they are unable to meet the terms of their loans--which were freely distributed like so much confetti, often without the most basic due diligence.
Why would a lending institution take such risks? Two reasons I see. One, because if they didn't, somebody else would. There's money galore in this kind of predatory practice, at least in the short term (borrowers often find themselves unable to even touch the principal, forking out payments covering nothing but interest). God forbid some other bank should be reaping all that short-term profit.
And reason two is simple: the housing market's been on a tear for so long that somehow we've convinced ourselves that it'll just keep inflating indefintely. Irving Fisher, arguably the world's first celebrity economist, stated a few days before the crash of '29, "Stock prices have reached what appears to be a permanently high plateau".

An aside: in the wake of that famously disastrous prediction, Fisher suffered from a virulent cancer of the credibility. Ever-observant hindsight suggests his prescription to cure the Great Depression could well have worked--except that it was greeted with howls of derisive laughter. Lesson: one screwup does not a screwup make.

A minority of attentive shareholders saw Black Thursday coming and got the hell out in time. A few fortunes were made in the middle of so many being destroyed. (Believe me, they were careful in subsequent years not to appear too rich.)
It's hard to abandon a bull market, it really is. But history suggests that this one's unsustainable. If you're heavily invested, you might consider how much money is enough.

But a stock market crash is small potatoes to what else might be in store. A thank you to Jim Kunstler for driving a few points home.

I've been paying close attention to the oil industry lately. They're awash in glorious profits, of course--they've got the world at their feet--and it seems like they can pull excuses out of their asses for the ever-increasing price of gasoline. Here's the thing, though: at least a few of their excuses hold, uh, oil.
Refineries have been running at 90 percent capacity or above for months on end, just to meet demand--which is still growing. The huge demand for their product limits the oil companies' ability to slow or shut their plants down for required maintenance...all but ensuring glitches and foulups. The only answer would be to build more refineries--which Big Oil's loath to do, as it costs money better suited to the wallets of stakeholders and oh, yeah, nobody really wants an oil refinery in their backyard anyway.
So demand's going up and price is going up and not to put too fine a point on it, but supply is not going up. Oh, there's lots of oil left, but it's increasingly difficult and expensive to get to--not to mention recovery operations wreak utter hell on the surrounding environment.

Look around you. I defy you to find something, anything, that did not involve oil in its manufacture or subsequent transport to you. Once the supply of oil really begins to get pinched, I suggest most of us lack the imagination to adequately predict the flow of events.

It'll make 1929 look like a minor and temporary correction.

A Whole Bunch of Totally Unrelated Stuff

I don't think I have too much to write on any one given topic today. But the topics are building up. So: compendium post.

First of all, I'd like to tell Jen she was right and I was wrong. iTunes is freakin' awesome.

I've been getting my music mostly by means of Limewire for the past year or so. I have found an awful lot of stuff residing out there on other people's hard drives. Alas, my musical tastes are eclectic enough that I haven't found everything I'm looking for...not even close. My friend Jason tipped me off to SHAREZ, which has entire albums, not just single songs. Downside: the selection, while voluminous, is heavily slanted towards world music. Nothing wrong with that...just not what I'm looking for.

Enter iTunes. So far, there's all of one group (The Proclaimers) that's woefully underrepresented at the iTunes store. Other than that, though, it's just as Jen said: you can spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars if you're not careful...especially since everything is so CHEAP! Each song is 99 cents, and an album, regardless of length, is $9.99. Try getting the London West End 2006 production of Evita for $9.99 anywhere else.
I've found euphonium compilations, many of them. For those of you who have no idea what a euphonium is, it's a sort of tenor tuba...I used to play it in high school band, and I was heavily into brass band culture then, the sort of thing that generally only exists in Britain.
I've found obscure albums by groups like Moxy Fruvous. I've found albums by (undeservedly) obscure groups like The Paperboys. And this morning I found the coup de grace: an album by Matthew Osborne.
Matt Osborne (1973-2004) was a crackerjack musician from here in Waterloo and something of a friend of mine. He was probably the most talented guitarist I've ever run across in my life, a tireless champion of new and emerging artists, and an all-around nice guy. We lost touch when I left Laurier, and I was shocked and greatly saddened when I read of his passing. I really wish I had set my fear aside and let him guide me into the music scene, as he was forever trying to do.
Now, according to the site, all four of Matt's albums have been reissued. That wasn't the case as little as six months ago--hell, I don't believe that website existed six months ago--and so I was pleasantly stunned to find Matt's last release in the iTunes store.

If anyone ever asks me what gift would make my heart sing, I always answer a Chapters gift card does the trick every time. Now I can add that an iTunes card does the same thing.

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I'm going to take a serious look at the Green Party whenever the next federal election rolls around. I don't support all their initiatives--I tend to agree with Stephen Harper, for instance, when he calls Kyoto a 'socialist scheme' to redistribute wealth on a global scale. But I do like that the Greens tend to think outside the box in a way that the mainline parties just don't.
Take, for instance, their stance on gas prices. Last I heard, they want them increased...doubled, I think. Now before you howl in outrage, note that they would cut income taxes proportionally so that the whole thing would be revenue-neutral.
I like that thinking. Reward people for being environmentally responsible.
I think you're going to see the Greens get stronger and stronger over the next several electoral terms, and I predict they'll form a government within 25 years.

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I am so heartily sick of the Conrad Black trial. I'd like to avoid it but it's taken over Macleans magazine like a fungus. Know what would be nice? A website/TV channel/podcast/whatever devoted entirely to celebrity trials. The various means of access would be widely published in the mainstream media, but that's it, at least until a verdict is rendered. Those of us who have the slightest interest in this sort of thing could then go wallow in it. The site could have full video, a full transcript, an analysis of every syllable uttered, an exhaustive description of what the accused is wearing, everything. The rest of us could then be left in peace.
Come to think of it, this idea could be expanded. I've long lamented that so-called "reality" television isn't shunted off to its own network. Every single day, my local paper chooses to put what I feel is questionable content on its front page. Yesterday, it was a picture of a two-year-old sitting on a statue. Above the fold. They didn't even publish the day before (holiday: world stops) or the day before that (Sunday: world stops) meaning there was...supposedly...three whole days of news backed up since their last edition.
Today, there's an article titled "Lifting weights can reverse ravages of time". Are either of these things news? The second, perhaps. Do they belong on the front page of a paper that purportedly serves a city of well over half a million? I don't think so. I can't wait for the day when our personal media assistants (PMAs) cull the news for us as we sleep to present the kinds of stories each of us finds relevant. Fragmentation of the mediasphere, baby. It's coming.

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There is much hand-wringing going on here in Waterloo Region over the large number of disappearing factory jobs. There have been upwards of a dozen plant closures in this city over the past decade, and there are doubtless more on the way. The overall employment level is actually up; there is just a huge ongoing shift in the nature of employment, away from manufacturing and towards service and technology.
I don't pretend to understand the underlying economics. The high dollar is often cited, which I could maybe accept if the loonie was trading at significantly above a dollar U.S. What I do know is that corporations will generally go where it's cheapest to operate...where the taxes are low, the labour laws lax, the environmental regulations non-existent. You can't really blame them. Blame instead the overarching societal motive to pursue profit at any cost...and to define profit so narrowly and over such a short term.
This is yet another reason we need One World Government: to abolish multinationals. It'd be nice to see humanity come to the realization that "nations" are figments of a tortured imagination. We are all one "nation": any assertion to the contrary is based on primitive us-versus-them thinking. This will come to pass, if we allow ourselves to grow up. Right now, our species is deep in the throes of adolescence. I hope we get through it intact, I really do.

Ahem. Go, Sens, uh, Go

If you go to the Toronto Maple Leafs fan forum and announce, as one unfortunate recently did, that henceforth you are going to cheer for the Ottawa Senators as they make a run for the Stanley Cup, the reaction will be immediate, intense, and unfavourable, to put it mildly. "Don't let the door hit you on...no, wait a second, I hope the door whacks your ass on the way out" is one of the milder things I saw.

You probably wouldn't see this reaction, at least to this degree, if it was any other team. But the Sens and the Leafs have a history. No matter where the respective teams finished in the regular season, we owned them in the playoffs, eliminating Ottawa three times in four years. Then, of course, the Sens completely dominated us two seasons running, one of many reasons we didn't make the playoffs and have a chance at kicking them to the curb again.

And there's been the accompanying soap opera to ratchet up the hatred. For whatever reason, more Leafs seem to get hurt at the Corel Centre/Scotiabank Place than in all other opposing rinks combined. In the course of one season alone, the Leafs lost Bryan Berard, Mats Sundin, Nik Antropov, and Danny Markov--to injuries on Ottawa ice. (Well, perhaps we shouldn't count Antropov, as he gets injured putting on his skates.)

Then there's the "Ratboy" incident. In the final moments of a close game, Leafs captain Sundin snapped his composite stick on a scoring attempt. Frustrated, he threw the upper half of the stick into the stands and was promptly suspended for the next game...which happened to be against the Sens. In that game, with the Leafs losing 7-1, Sens captain Alfredsson snapped his stick in half and pretended to do the same thing, causing an uproar on the Leaf bench. Alfredsson instantly earned himself the eternal enmity of every non-thinking Leafs fan (which is most of them, I'm sorry to admit). He's booed lustily every time he touches the puck.
Me, I found it funny. And considering that Sundin and Alfredsson are very close friends--still--I figure Mats must find it funny, too.

No matter. Ottawa has supplanted Montreal as the team Leaf fans most love to hate. That they are one series win away from the Cup--while Toronto is years away from even contending--has everybody in a real lather.

Well, guess what. I'm cheering for Ottawa, Leafs fan cred be damned.

The alternative is to cheer for the winner of the Detroit/Anaheim series. I predicted Anaheim would win the Cup this year, but I've no real like for the Ducks, especially Chris Pronger, who pulled a Vince Carter on the Edmonton Oilers last year. As for Detroit, I'm an equal unfan of Dominik Hasek, who--talented as he is--likewise suffers from motivational malaise on occasion.

Besides, the last thing we need is another American team winning the Cup. Beyond the team itself and their mothers, it's not as if anybody gives a fart. Even Detroit, which fancies itself "Hockeytown", has struggled to sell out games this year.

I'll admit Vancouver would have been preferable. But I've decided there's nothing to stop me cheering for Ottawa. It's not as if I've abandoned the Leafs. It's more like the Leafs have abandoned me, actually. Whatever their braintrust might say, it's clear they have no real interest in even competing for the Cup. And why would they? The Air Canada Centre is full every game.
Nope. I'll cheer for anyone I feel like. Canadian teams take precedence, of course, and this is the third straight season one's been in the final.

(I do draw the line at Philadelphia, though. I'm not a barbarian.)

GO SENS GO!

Well, that's a tad depressing.

My friend Jen tipped me off to something called "Pandora" last year, and I've been a subscriber ever since. It's Internet radio with a difference...it "learns" your tastes as it goes, with input from you the listener. Pandora has exposed me to all sorts of artists I never would have heard of any other way. Its library ranges from number-one hits all the way down to songs there's a good chance you'll never hear anywhere (although you should!)

Among the discoveries I've made:

Johnathan Coulton...quirky folk artist, gently funny songs
Hayley Westenra...beautiful clear soprano with the best rendition of "Both Sides Now" I've heard, maybe including Joni Mitchell's original. Mom, you'd love her.
Sixwire...rollicking alt-country, tight, slick harmonies.
Laura Powers...a pagan singer strongly reminiscent of Loreena McKennitt.

Of course, I had to cheat to gain access to Pandora, as did the many thousands of other Canadians who have signed up to have this endless stream of music piped into their computers. You need a U.S. address to sign up. Well, that's a trivial obstacle. I do believe I made mine up, and just made sure the zip code and town matched.
I felt no guilt doing this. The way I looked at it, a desirable service was being offered to one group of people, while my group was excluded purely because we lived on the wrong side of a wholly imaginary line. Doutless I broke at least one law somewhere. In the case of silly laws like that, I try to hold myself to the higher moral code embodied in Heinlein's Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not get caught.

Caught I was. Caught were we all. After more than a year's enjoyment, I got a message in my inbox today from the founder of Pandora.
The message was headed "Change to Availability In Canada", which gave me hope that they'd found a way to make it legal. After all, while I won't quibble over disobeying laws when no harm to persons or property is involved, I would much rather be on the side of the angels, given a choice.
No such luck. The letter, which is quite lengthy, is full of words like "saddened" and "regretfully" and it says that due to their inability to secure international licenses, they will start blocking access in a couple of days.
I don't pretend to understand this. It should be a simple matter to determine how many times each song by each artist is being played, and distribute royalties based on that information. If it was announced that Pandora would henceforth be a pay-only service, I would accept it...and probably find some money to pay my share. Indeed, it amazes me just how much free content there is on the Internet. You can read any number of newspapers without paying a cent. You can play flash games that are admittedly quaint by the gory standards of the industry, but you can do it gratis, and similar games once cost $50 or more to play. I'm always amazed by the few people I still hear saying "I can't afford the Internet". It's the best deal in human history.

So, Americans, if you haven't used Pandora and you like music, do yourselves a favour and click here. And spare a thought for us deprived Canucks.

(Jen, if you know of any alternatives, I'd be glad to hear them.)

Adjectives

One of life's little epiphanies gave me a good wallop a while back, reading about adjectives.

Adjectives are kind of neat. You can take two different adjectives that mean exactly the same thing, insert one or the other into a sentence, and completely change the flavour:

My Uncle Paul is spendthrift. My Uncle Paul is cheap.

My boss is opinionated. My boss is bullheaded.

My wife is conscientious. My wife is fussy.

Sure, it can be argued that each pair of adjectives has distinctly different meanings, but every last one of us goes around with preconceived notions of what each word means. Cheap's a great example. Being cheap, in the sense of being a tightwad, is usually perceived as a bad quality in this consumerist society, but who hasn't admired frugality at some point? Still, you hear "cheap" and a whole list of complimentary or not-so-complimentary meanings floods into your head. Usually mostly one or the other.
It's all in how you look at things, how your life experience has shaped you to look at things. Events you paid attention to, songs you listened to, lessons you learned, all influence you later, while all around you, everyone's being influenced by their own markedly different experiences. For instance, somebody throws the word liberal at me and the very first thing I think of is AdScam. Then I think of that ditty by Supertramp, "The Logical Song" (itself a treasure trove of conflicting adjectives), part of which goes

Now watch what you say
Or they´ll be calling you a radical
A liberal, oh fanatical, criminal

It's only after all that negative detritus is out of the way that I remember how socially liberal I am; how liberal I once was with my money (to a fault!); how being liberal is usually, in my world, a good thing so long as the L's not capitalized.

The adjective life lessons go further. Take your best qualities, describe them with adjectives, and turn them up ten notches and suddenly they're not so good any more. Then try to remember that other people operate on different scales, and your spendthriftiness might make you cheap, your conscientiousness might seem fussy.

Would that all that wisdom came to me much earlier.

Hey, Revolution! Wait Up!

I have this perverse streak in me that prevents me from enjoying popular things, simply on the grounds that they are popular. The more popular they get, the more I'm likely to dig in my heels. This usually means you'll find heel marks in the technology sand as I'm dragged into the future. Where Tomorrow Beach intersects with the Ocean of Popular Culture, that's where those heel marks are most pronounced. Oh, I'll do things, buy things, in my own good time, for my own good reasons. I don't consider the fact that millions of other humans are doing something to be sufficient reason unto itself for me to join in. Commit suicide, goes the old saying. Ten billion lemmings can't be wrong.
Examples? Well, J.K. Rowling had published three books about a certain boy wizard before I'd deigned to read even one. I haven't seen so much as a single episode of--well, you name the popular show. House, say. Survivor. (Although I heard somewhere the ratings on that are starting to tank, and I'm fiercely grateful for the increase in humanity's collective IQ that portends). American (Canadian, British, Uzbekistani) Idol . Grey's Anatomy. And so on.
I only recently got an mp3 player, having poo-pooed them in the past. I'm still kind of iffy on cell phones, even though we have one of those now, too.
Of course, I'm as big a Harry Potter fan as the next man, now...although I still kind of wish I'd held off until, say, this July before I dove headfirst into that particular pool, if only so I could have read all the books in succession without these annoying year or more gaps. Television? I might watch House, after the masses have moved on to something else--I've nothing against the show itself other than its absurd popularity. But you'll never catch me in front of Survivor, not until it has something to do with actual survival. Nor any of the Idols. You'd think I'd enjoy those shows, as I'm a pretty musical kind of guy, but no. Not as long as they employ people to eviscerate contestants on stage for daring to get up and sing for an audience of six and a half squillion. And not so long as they rely on those six and half squillion people to act as judges of talent. The mere existence of websites like http://www.votefortheworst.com/ pretty much confirms my low opinion of this practice, don't you think?

MP3 players, now. I'm a convert.

Eva bought me a little 1 GB Ipod knockoff (something called an ERi) for the commute to work. I held off on using it much through the winter, not sure how to comfortably wear headphones under a toque, but once I started in on these night shifts the thing has been a godsend.
Of course, the god involved turned capricious pretty quickly. Just my second night in, the player suddenly died out mid-song on me. Battery's dead, I thought. Two hours later, weary of the satellite radio, I checked it again. This is a quirk of mine, a quirk that works, more often than not. I keep pens that run dry, because in half an hour they'll work again. I turn off the television in disgust if the Maple Leafs are losing badly, and if I turn it on again ten minutes later, sometimes they've clawed their way back into a game.
Worked fine. For about 45 minutes. Then it happened again.
Undaunted, I came home that morning and changed the battery for one freshly charged. Left the house that night, bopping along to our wedding recessional...and before I'd even made it to work the bloody thing died again. I kept trying it through the night, and it worked every time, but for progressively shorter and shorter intervals. I'm sure my night crew-mates appreciated my singing along...

Once I was the King of Spain (now I eat humble pie)
Oh, my unspeakable wife, Queen Lisa (now I eat humble pie)
I'm telling you, I was the King of Spain (now I eat--) zzzut!
SHIT!!!

"Hey, Ken, quit eating shit over there!"
"Sorry. Damn mp3 player died on me AGAIN!"
"I had one did that. Here, let me look at it...yeah. This baby's overheated."
"So...what? Should I start spending the whole night in the freezer?"
"No offense, Ken, but this thing's kind of cheap."
"Well, I know that," I said. "My wife wanted to make sure I'd actually use the thing before she laid out tons of cash. Besides, it's not that cheap. Throw in the rechargeable batteries and it costs quite a bit, actually."
"Yeah, but those headphones cost more than the player, right?"
"Well...yeah. I'm hard on headphones. No matter how much money I spend on them, sooner or later one side or the other will short out. I'd just rather that happen next year instead of tomorrow."
"Y'oughta get an iPod."
I nodded my head at that and went back to work. Of course I oughta get an iPod, I thought darkly. Everybody else has one!
I got home from work Friday morning and went out on the Net seeking opinions. What I wanted, ideally, was a durable mp3 player with an FM tuner in case I got tired of my own music. I wasn't, actually, too keen on iPods, because I'd be a slave to iTunes--and I'd just mastered Windows Media Player; I had no real urge to learn yet another program.
Further research started to overturn my objections. It turns out iPods are popular for good reason. Several surveys have ranked the nano the most durable player out there. Also among the most easy to use. As for iTunes, it seems to be fairly intuitive. I was under the impression that you had to, gasp, buy all your content from the iTunes store. I don't know why I thought this. Maybe because Apple uses its own music format...the retailer web sites state that mp3s aren't supported. That's odd, I thought. The very definition of an mp3 player, and yet it doesn't play mp3s.

Turns out that iTunes automatically converts files from mp3 to whatever Apple calls their standard, compressing them in the process. Most importantly, I can import songs I got off SHAREZ or Limewire into iTunes and thence onto the iPod.

Another problem: iPods don't run on the same kind of batteries my ERi player uses. Cursory research seemed to indicate there are two ways to charge an iPod: through the USB port on the computer (like our computer desk isn't crowded enough) or by shelling out an obscene amount of money for something called an iPod station. Wow, I thought, Apple's really got you by the short and curlies there. That one costs $170!
Once again I was wrong. The iPod "station" is actually a full-fledged stereo system that just happens to dock an iPod. You can buy a wall adapter for a fraction of the cost.
No FM tuner, which is annoying but not a dealbreaker. I Googled "mp3 player FM tuner reviews" and kept running across durability concerns on site after site.

An iPod was looking more and more likely.

Long story slightly shorter, I am now the proud owner of an 8 GB Ipod nano. A nice black one, razor thin. It's charged but not loaded as of yet. We'll see tomorrow night how it performs.

Georgia, Part II

There wasn't supposed to be a second installment of this narrative.
Our "Georgia-Peach" came home from the vet's and everything seemed okay. She was keeping her food--what little we were supposed to be feeding her--down, always a good thing, and her personality was returning. If anything, she was a bit dopey and lethargic, but nothing too out of the ordinary.

Eva was chatting on the phone last night when Georgia suddenly gave out a piercing scream, jumped two feet straight up in the air, and came down snapping at her own heel. What the hell was that?, I thought to myself. Did she step on her?
Our puppy looked around, seeming to come out of some sort of trance, and darted behind her Mommy, where she cowered.
No cats up here...nothing to explain why she'd suddenly--
Just then, she did it again.
She landed splay-footed this time, wailing. Tux went over to sniff her, anxiously. I approached cautiously, I petted her head, murmuring the kinds of things you say to your kids to calm them down, while I tried to calm down myself.
She accepted the petting, and I examined her. No obvious sore spots, but she's...well, not exactly panting, but out of breath, anyway, and she's making retching noises. Nothing's coming out, just an ominous huk! huk!
Then she tore off around the living room as if all the bats of hell were on her ass, ending up, once again, cowering behind Eva.
That's not normal canine behaviour, I thought to myself, conjuring all sorts of awful explanations like tumours and infections and imminent death.
These...episodes...continued, alternating with periods where Georgia laid perfectly quiet, quivering a little, an occasional huk! the only thing to let us know she was still with us. With no warning at all, she'd suddenly snap her head up and bark piteously, shaking.
Eva and I looked at each other.
"That's not right", I said. She nodded.
"We ought to take her to the vet."
A little more conversation on that point, a call to the after-hours clinic, who assured us we weren't overreacting, and it was decided.
I had to go to work, right then--didn't want to, let me tell you--and we really didn't want to leave Tux at home by himself. The humans in the house weren't the only ones worried.

Auntie Suzie, thankfully, agreed to take Tux in for a bit, and we all piled into the car. Of course, by now, Georgia seemed pretty much fine. Isn't that the way? It's like when you take your clunker of a car in to the mechanic and it runs like a dream.
I was dropped at work, Tux was dropped at his favourite aunt's place, and Georgia was ferried all the way to Cambridge. Ninety minutes later, Eva called.

"She's okay", she said.

Apparently there had been a noticeable change in Georgia just while she was being examined.

"The vet thinks it might be psychological, stress-related."

Great. We have a crazy dog. MAD DOG ON THE LOOSE!

Then again, with the week she's had--taken away from Mommy/Daddy/big brother, knocked out, hysterectomized, revived all alone, brought home, subjected to fits of voluminous vomiting, face puffed up like a balloon...well, I'd go a little nuts, too.

"This vet doesn't have psychological background. Ours does. So when we bring our chlluns in next week, we'll chat a bit. But the clinic vet here did ask if Georgia had taken to chasing her tail obsessively, lately."

"W-e-ll, I wouldn't say obsessively..."

"I asked her to define obsessively. She said more than once a week. Our wee girl qualifies, don't you think?"

"I think." I was thinking of all the times I'd reached out to give her tail a friendly little yank, only to find it coated in dogslobber.

Sure enough, our peach has been just fine today. She slept with me all day, glommed to my side like she used to do when I slept at night like a normal human being. No sign of hallucinations, no vomit lagoons, and a dog who's playing-with-the-Tux as if nothing whatever happened last night.

Tux and Georgia, together again

I hope she's okay for real and for good, now.