Just spent three days of *much* needed R and R Up North, in that fabled Land O' Lakes, at my Dad and Heather's place...the place I've nicknamed 'Sanctuary Much'...you get the idea.
It was a wonderful three days. Even though I could barely keep my eyes open. Maybe especially because I could barely keep my eyes open.
I didn't realize I was quite this bushed. But apparently so...I woke up at or around seven a.m. each morning, which is two or three hours later than usual. Come early afternoon, I'd be dead on my feet, and so would be off my feet and...you know how most afternoon naps, you just kind of doze, wandering dreamily in and out of sleep? Not me, not this time. Practically unconscious--so deeply asleep I didn't hear the alarm calling my firefighter father to this. (He needed a nap at least as badly as I did, but it was not in the cards: he didn't get home until after one in the morning. And he'd been up most of the night before. I don't know how the man does it.)
Anyway, my nap-slash-coma would last two or three hours, I'd wake up for supper, and by eight or nine I'd be zonked again.
Part of it, of course, is the air. I could quickly run out of adjectives describing Georgian Bay air: fresh, pure, crisp, clean...it's the kind of air humans were meant to breathe, none of this polluted city crap. It's invigorating and exhausting all at once.
A bigger part of why I slept so much was because I could.
I can't say I have many household obligations, and those I have aren't that onerous. Work is between 44 and 49 hours a week, pretty much including commuting time, which is a lot less than many people work. Yet I feel as if I've been running flat out for weeks if not months, and what I've been doing pales next to what's coming, and I'm not going to write about that because I still have one day left of holidays and I'm going to spend it in a holidaze, damnit.
Up north, I had... I couldn't log into Facebook for some odd reason, and my dad doesn't have Wi-Fi, so my Internet ramblings were slightly curtailed (and yes, even though I've railed often and bitterly against the seemingly ubiquitous compulsion to be constantly connected, being cut off from my Facebook friends was...difficult). What I had was peace and tranquility--the quiet up there is its own soothing sound. You hear the wind soughing through the pines and the water slopping and sloshing and if you're lucky, some
And dark? It's not quite as pitch-black as it used to be, but it's plenty dark enough...mind you, on the coldest of winter nights, the starlight is almost enough to read by, and that's without the aurora borealis you might be blessed to see.
I spent lots of time out on the deck, deep in Justin Cronin's The Passage, waving at the boaters and being waved to in return. (The one mosquito in the ointment up at Dad's--besides mosquitoes and the need for ointment to repel same, of course--is the boaters. Just when you've sunk into a slice of heavenly silence, it's shattered by the insectile buzzing of a 75-horsepower Merc intrudes on your world and a boat roars by entirely too close to shore, kicking up a wake that jostles the boats in their moorings. Some of them zip by so fast they're practically a blur, and I wonder who it is they're trying to impress. Certainly not me. Making a boat go fast is not exactly a challenge, nor is it a commendable life skill, as far as I'm concerned.
And I'd come in for supper to my stepmother's fantastic shepherd's pie...or my dad's storm-barbequed burgers (the horizontal rain added just the right seasoning) or Heather's incredible peach cobbler. I don't even like peaches all that much...I was prepared to eat this and call it good, and it wasn't good, it was freakin' great.
And then back to sleep, lulled off to dreamland by what's currently my favourite piano concerto:
Maybe that's why I slept so much. What heavenly music.
Dad, Hez, love you both. I don't get up there near enough. Thanks for having me.
Saturday, August 18, 2012
Monday, August 13, 2012
No Facebook Account? Why not?
Read. And weep.
Really. Really?
If you don't have a Facebook account, there's something wrong with you?
Disclaimer: Facebook is the second-most visited page in my Internet peregrinations, just after Reddit. I frequently update my status, chat with friends old and new, and play several games. I really appreciate having most of my friends in one place. I don't understand Twitter because I already have a Facebook Wall that does the same thing.
I spend entirely too much time on Facebook. Online in general, really. It's one very good reason I flat-out refuse to buy a smartphone: give me the ability to go online away from home and I'll be sucked out of real life in short order. I'll become like those people at the Olympic Closing Ceremonies. Did you see that? Seventy thousand bodies in the audience, and it looked like sixty or so thousand of them had no interest in actually watching the God-damned thing. Every time they panned the crowd, all I saw was a panoply of phones. There's something about that I find almost soul-crushing. It reminds me of the giant hip-hip-hooray that went up when it was announced Disney World was getting Wi-Fi. You know, the happiest place on earth? Apparently it sucks because it's not the Intermet.
(Yes, my attitudes on the Internet are frighteningly ambivalent. Always have been. I used to routinely spend upwards of ten hours a day online back in the early nineties. Now, as then, I love the constant information feed and I hate the almost irresistible compulsion to drown in it. I yearn to be connected, yes. For somebody who spent much of his youth existing on the outside of every inside there ever was, "connection" is a potent, potent force. But I'm deeply afraid that this constant connection is slowly depriving me of something essential to my humanity.
I'll be going up to my Dad's in a couple of days. He's on the shores of a river, forty miles from the nearest town of any size. High speed Internet is a recent phenomenon in his little corner of Paradise. He's online a fair bit, to be sure.
He's not on Facebook.
I think privacy issues are his biggest concern. But even more so, I'd suggest he doesn't need Facebook. He has a social circle the likes of which I lack the words to adequately describe. A lifetime of service to his community has made it so he can scarcely leave his driveway without encountering at least one friend. As a kid I used to be so impatient because it seemed like we'd never actually get anywhere for all the people wanting to stop and chat.
A former colleague of mine, name of Craig, is the sort of guy would have hundreds of friends on Facebook if he ever bothered to get an account. He doesn't, probably because he's too busy playing several different sports on teams far and wide. Sitting at a computer is death by boredom as far as Craig is concerned. He'd be a catch for anybody with a glove to catch him, and never mind the lack of a Facebook account. All you have to do is meet the man and talk to him for five minutes and you'll know what kind of person he is: a good one. Yet because he isn't a Zucker, he's somehow suspicious? Give me a break.
An e-friend I know only as Catelli tweets frequently, occasionally blogs...and shuns Facebook like a horde of plagues. Knowing what I know of the guy--he's in IT--I'd suspect he's not comfortable with the system's architecture and even less comfortable with being commoditized (and make no mistake about it: if you're on Facebook, you're a product). The thought that not having a Facebook account makes him somehow suspicious would fill him with scorn and a touch of existential horror.
We're in the middle of a social revolution. Every step forward brings outcry from those who preferred things the way they were. Every change begets more change until you wake up one day in a world not your own. I resent the notion that change should be forced on people. You have the right not to be on Facebook, and you should have the right not to be judged for not being on Facebook.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to post this on Facebook.
Really. Really?
If you don't have a Facebook account, there's something wrong with you?
Disclaimer: Facebook is the second-most visited page in my Internet peregrinations, just after Reddit. I frequently update my status, chat with friends old and new, and play several games. I really appreciate having most of my friends in one place. I don't understand Twitter because I already have a Facebook Wall that does the same thing.
I spend entirely too much time on Facebook. Online in general, really. It's one very good reason I flat-out refuse to buy a smartphone: give me the ability to go online away from home and I'll be sucked out of real life in short order. I'll become like those people at the Olympic Closing Ceremonies. Did you see that? Seventy thousand bodies in the audience, and it looked like sixty or so thousand of them had no interest in actually watching the God-damned thing. Every time they panned the crowd, all I saw was a panoply of phones. There's something about that I find almost soul-crushing. It reminds me of the giant hip-hip-hooray that went up when it was announced Disney World was getting Wi-Fi. You know, the happiest place on earth? Apparently it sucks because it's not the Intermet.
(Yes, my attitudes on the Internet are frighteningly ambivalent. Always have been. I used to routinely spend upwards of ten hours a day online back in the early nineties. Now, as then, I love the constant information feed and I hate the almost irresistible compulsion to drown in it. I yearn to be connected, yes. For somebody who spent much of his youth existing on the outside of every inside there ever was, "connection" is a potent, potent force. But I'm deeply afraid that this constant connection is slowly depriving me of something essential to my humanity.
I'll be going up to my Dad's in a couple of days. He's on the shores of a river, forty miles from the nearest town of any size. High speed Internet is a recent phenomenon in his little corner of Paradise. He's online a fair bit, to be sure.
He's not on Facebook.
I think privacy issues are his biggest concern. But even more so, I'd suggest he doesn't need Facebook. He has a social circle the likes of which I lack the words to adequately describe. A lifetime of service to his community has made it so he can scarcely leave his driveway without encountering at least one friend. As a kid I used to be so impatient because it seemed like we'd never actually get anywhere for all the people wanting to stop and chat.
A former colleague of mine, name of Craig, is the sort of guy would have hundreds of friends on Facebook if he ever bothered to get an account. He doesn't, probably because he's too busy playing several different sports on teams far and wide. Sitting at a computer is death by boredom as far as Craig is concerned. He'd be a catch for anybody with a glove to catch him, and never mind the lack of a Facebook account. All you have to do is meet the man and talk to him for five minutes and you'll know what kind of person he is: a good one. Yet because he isn't a Zucker, he's somehow suspicious? Give me a break.
An e-friend I know only as Catelli tweets frequently, occasionally blogs...and shuns Facebook like a horde of plagues. Knowing what I know of the guy--he's in IT--I'd suspect he's not comfortable with the system's architecture and even less comfortable with being commoditized (and make no mistake about it: if you're on Facebook, you're a product). The thought that not having a Facebook account makes him somehow suspicious would fill him with scorn and a touch of existential horror.
We're in the middle of a social revolution. Every step forward brings outcry from those who preferred things the way they were. Every change begets more change until you wake up one day in a world not your own. I resent the notion that change should be forced on people. You have the right not to be on Facebook, and you should have the right not to be judged for not being on Facebook.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to post this on Facebook.
You want me to what?!
You know what really grinds my gears? Repeated exhortations to "shop Canadian".
I understand the sentiment, and I agree with it on a limited basis: when you shop Canadian, you're protecting Canadian jobs. I get that. I really do. But protecting Canadian jobs should not cost me up to a fifty percent premium.
I work in retail, so I have some understanding of price drivers. If you feel you're getting gouged on an item, chances are very good to excellent that it's not the retailer itself that's gouging you. There are middlemen galore, each of whom takes a little cut...and all that red tape costs, too.
Example: Michelina's frozen "entrees". Made in Canada, packaged in the U.S., and re-imported. There's a reason for this, I'm sure, but nobody has been able to tell me what it is in ten years of asking. But I have no doubt that's one reason why they retail at $2.29 here versus 87 cents in northern Florida.
Bilingualism adds a cost to everything. Not near as big a cost as some would have you think: after all, the French side of packages here wouldn't be blank if this were an English-only country. But it is a cost.
Quality occasionally drives the price. I won't, for instance, drink American milk unless it's organic, and I don't care that you can buy a gallon for half the price it costs in Canada. I'd rather avoid the bovine growth hormones, thank you very much.
The most cited reason for Canadian higher prices: economies of scale. This country has a tenth the population spread out over a considerably larger area, and so of course everything's going to cost m---
BZZZ BZZZ BZZZ BZZ BZZZ
Hello Mr. Fly! What's that you're circling around? Why, it's a massive pile of bullshit! And I almost stepped in it!
Let's look at this last claim a little more closely, shall we? Roughly eighty percent of Canadians live within a hundred miles of the U.S. border. For purposes of transportation, that's negligible. I can definitely grasp why it might cost an arm and a leg for an apple in Iqaluit...but the prices in Sarnia should be within a country kilometer of those in Port Huron. Since most of this stuff is coming from China anyway, what's another hundred miles?
I have a friend in southern California that refuses to spend more than ten dollars on any item of clothing. Every time he comes up here, we do a mall walk, and without fail he'll walk into Roots and gawk at the prices. Shirts for $35. Sweaters for $90.
Our dollar is at f**king PAR. We have a free trade agreement between our two countries.
You know what's really causing the ridiculous price differential? Competition, or more specifically, the lack of it in Canada. Competition always lowers prices, and in Canada there really isn't very much in many sectors. There are, for all extents and purposes, three national telecommunications providers--Rogers, Bell, Telus--and there's widespread suspicion that they're ultimately the same outfit ("Robellus"), being as their prices are uniformly obscene. Aided and abetted by a complacent government they own, they make it a matter of policy to crush upstarts. There has been some movement on this over the last few years, but nowhere near enough to see meaningful price drops for the average Canadian consumer.
Not only are the prices so much lower in the States, they have access to products and services we can only dream of. Check out the pop aisle in any American supermarket. You could make an entire Canadian pop aisle out of the products we don't have here. Hell, we just got Wild Cherry Pepsi. It's selling like crazy. No Vanilla Coke, no Mello Yello. There are eleventy dozen varieties of Mountain Dew in the U.S.; often only one here, two or maybe three in the biggest stores. No Cherry Coke. No Minute Maid Pomegranate Lemonade, which just might be the tastiest beverage ever manufactured.
(Oddly, there are several kinds of chocolate bar only available in Canada, and many kinds of potato chips, but those are the exceptions that prove the rule.)
I don't mind paying a small premium to support the local economy, but I'm sick and tired of being told that true Canadian patriots must throw away the lube and bend over on command.
I understand the sentiment, and I agree with it on a limited basis: when you shop Canadian, you're protecting Canadian jobs. I get that. I really do. But protecting Canadian jobs should not cost me up to a fifty percent premium.
I work in retail, so I have some understanding of price drivers. If you feel you're getting gouged on an item, chances are very good to excellent that it's not the retailer itself that's gouging you. There are middlemen galore, each of whom takes a little cut...and all that red tape costs, too.
Example: Michelina's frozen "entrees". Made in Canada, packaged in the U.S., and re-imported. There's a reason for this, I'm sure, but nobody has been able to tell me what it is in ten years of asking. But I have no doubt that's one reason why they retail at $2.29 here versus 87 cents in northern Florida.
Bilingualism adds a cost to everything. Not near as big a cost as some would have you think: after all, the French side of packages here wouldn't be blank if this were an English-only country. But it is a cost.
Quality occasionally drives the price. I won't, for instance, drink American milk unless it's organic, and I don't care that you can buy a gallon for half the price it costs in Canada. I'd rather avoid the bovine growth hormones, thank you very much.
The most cited reason for Canadian higher prices: economies of scale. This country has a tenth the population spread out over a considerably larger area, and so of course everything's going to cost m---
BZZZ BZZZ BZZZ BZZ BZZZ
Hello Mr. Fly! What's that you're circling around? Why, it's a massive pile of bullshit! And I almost stepped in it!
Let's look at this last claim a little more closely, shall we? Roughly eighty percent of Canadians live within a hundred miles of the U.S. border. For purposes of transportation, that's negligible. I can definitely grasp why it might cost an arm and a leg for an apple in Iqaluit...but the prices in Sarnia should be within a country kilometer of those in Port Huron. Since most of this stuff is coming from China anyway, what's another hundred miles?
I have a friend in southern California that refuses to spend more than ten dollars on any item of clothing. Every time he comes up here, we do a mall walk, and without fail he'll walk into Roots and gawk at the prices. Shirts for $35. Sweaters for $90.
Our dollar is at f**king PAR. We have a free trade agreement between our two countries.
You know what's really causing the ridiculous price differential? Competition, or more specifically, the lack of it in Canada. Competition always lowers prices, and in Canada there really isn't very much in many sectors. There are, for all extents and purposes, three national telecommunications providers--Rogers, Bell, Telus--and there's widespread suspicion that they're ultimately the same outfit ("Robellus"), being as their prices are uniformly obscene. Aided and abetted by a complacent government
Not only are the prices so much lower in the States, they have access to products and services we can only dream of. Check out the pop aisle in any American supermarket. You could make an entire Canadian pop aisle out of the products we don't have here. Hell, we just got Wild Cherry Pepsi. It's selling like crazy. No Vanilla Coke, no Mello Yello. There are eleventy dozen varieties of Mountain Dew in the U.S.; often only one here, two or maybe three in the biggest stores. No Cherry Coke. No Minute Maid Pomegranate Lemonade, which just might be the tastiest beverage ever manufactured.
(Oddly, there are several kinds of chocolate bar only available in Canada, and many kinds of potato chips, but those are the exceptions that prove the rule.)
I don't mind paying a small premium to support the local economy, but I'm sick and tired of being told that true Canadian patriots must throw away the lube and bend over on command.
Monday, August 06, 2012
...but satisfaction brought it back.
"Curiosity, the Martian rover, is posting images to Twitter".
If you don't get a little frisson of excitement out of that statement, you're not paying attention. There is a robot on another friggin' PLANET posting pictures of that planet to the Internet.
Please watch this, it's worth five minutes of your time.
I have absolutely no patience with the people saying Curiosity is a waste of money that should be spent here on Earth. These people, too, have not been paying attention. The American space program is one of a very few government programs that has paid for itself many, many times over. Most of the tech we take for granted today has its origins in the space program. There are dozens of first-order "spinoffs" just for the elderly and handicapped. There is enough wealth in our solar system to make billionaires out of every woman, man and child on this planet--it's all out there for the taking, using R and D on existing tech only, no new breakthroughs required.
Besides, NASA's Curiosity cost a piffling $2.5 billion to build. In contrast, the London Olympics are costing $14.46 billion.
I am not suggesting the Olympics are an unworthy expenditure. Goodness knows I've seen enough of that kvetching in online forums lately, too. Yes, there are poor people, but why does that mean the countries of the world shouldn't come together in peace for two weeks of competitive sport? (And as an aside, the athletes really do "come together", as it were. Ahem.)
Every two years we get to see humanity at its best on our television screens, engaging in feats of astounding physical wizardry, showing sportsmanship that warms the cockles of the heart, just generally elevating your opinion of humanity, usually when it could really do with some elevating. Are the Olympics without flaw? Hell, no. The corporate greed alone almost, but not quite, overshadows the actual events.
Odds are you'll eventually see that corporatism infect space, too...but for now, there are only people working together to achieve a common goal--Citius, Altius, Fortius, indeed--and they accomplished the near-impossible last night. I saw it characterized as a 350-million-mile hole in one, using an SUV for the ball and done on the first drive.
And all that on a shoestring budget. Mighty impressive, says I.
We'll be learning a lot from our Curiosity in the coming months and years. Was there life on Mars? Could there be, still? Are you and I actually Martian?
"Curiosity killed the cat," says the proverb. "But satisfaction brought it back."
If you don't get a little frisson of excitement out of that statement, you're not paying attention. There is a robot on another friggin' PLANET posting pictures of that planet to the Internet.
Please watch this, it's worth five minutes of your time.
I have absolutely no patience with the people saying Curiosity is a waste of money that should be spent here on Earth. These people, too, have not been paying attention. The American space program is one of a very few government programs that has paid for itself many, many times over. Most of the tech we take for granted today has its origins in the space program. There are dozens of first-order "spinoffs" just for the elderly and handicapped. There is enough wealth in our solar system to make billionaires out of every woman, man and child on this planet--it's all out there for the taking, using R and D on existing tech only, no new breakthroughs required.
Besides, NASA's Curiosity cost a piffling $2.5 billion to build. In contrast, the London Olympics are costing $14.46 billion.
I am not suggesting the Olympics are an unworthy expenditure. Goodness knows I've seen enough of that kvetching in online forums lately, too. Yes, there are poor people, but why does that mean the countries of the world shouldn't come together in peace for two weeks of competitive sport? (And as an aside, the athletes really do "come together", as it were. Ahem.)
Every two years we get to see humanity at its best on our television screens, engaging in feats of astounding physical wizardry, showing sportsmanship that warms the cockles of the heart, just generally elevating your opinion of humanity, usually when it could really do with some elevating. Are the Olympics without flaw? Hell, no. The corporate greed alone almost, but not quite, overshadows the actual events.
Odds are you'll eventually see that corporatism infect space, too...but for now, there are only people working together to achieve a common goal--Citius, Altius, Fortius, indeed--and they accomplished the near-impossible last night. I saw it characterized as a 350-million-mile hole in one, using an SUV for the ball and done on the first drive.
And all that on a shoestring budget. Mighty impressive, says I.
We'll be learning a lot from our Curiosity in the coming months and years. Was there life on Mars? Could there be, still? Are you and I actually Martian?
"Curiosity killed the cat," says the proverb. "But satisfaction brought it back."
Monday, July 30, 2012
Chick Fil-A: Anti-gay?
So Chick Fil-A has found itself stuck on the wrong side of the cultural road. So says Miss Piggy, and you don't want to mess with her.
Canada doesn't have Chick Fil-A, just like Canada doesn't have Cracker Barrel, Bob Evan's, Sonic, What-A-Burger, or a host of other delicious fast food eateries. Canada does have gay marriage, and last I looked the sky's still up there. Much as I'd love to see more choice in the Canadian fast food outlet landscape (and grocery store, for that matter), I wouldn't want this at the expense of something as important as same-sex marriage.
The two are mutually exclusive, right?
Check out this letter, from the Mayor of Boston to the President of Chick Fil-A.
While I admire the spirit of this letter, I'm not so sure I agree with the, uh, letter of it. Do we really want to check the beliefs of all company executives against a Pre-Approved Beliefs List before we grant them permission to operate in our city? Think carefully before you answer that.
Customers are free to vote with their wallets. If they think Chick Fil-A's bigoted, they don't have to patronize it. If Christians have a problem with Disney, they can stay away.
Now, Chick Fil-A's president, Dan Cathy, did say one thing that impressed me, under the circumstances. "We never claimed to be a Christian business. There's no such thing as a Christian business. Jesus didn't die for a corporation." These are not his words--he quoted another Christian businessman, Fred Roach--but they're worth reflecting on, for Christians and non-Christians alike. Cathy, for the record, has mounted a vigorous defence of the "biblical" family unit. He has not said one word directly attacking homosexuals or homosexual marriage.
I'll let Lewis Black rephrase that. "If you're against the war it doesn't mean you're for the other side". Has Cathy or his company donated to pro-family-values outfits that actively campaign against gay marriage? "Guilty as charged", he might say. But are they "anti-gay" outfits...or merely Christian outfits? Are they the same thing? And if they are, do we shut down any company professing Christianity?
This comes down to a topic I've mused on, and written on, before. Tolerance. It doesn't mean what it used to. There was a time when the word "tolerance" meant I don't like you, you don't like me...and that's okay. Now it means "you have to accept me exactly as I am, and if you don't, you're a homophobe zealot/godless heathen".
Note that: it cuts both ways. For every right-thinking person trying to drag a fundycostal sort into the 21st century by his or her ears, there's a Christian asking pointedly why she's no longer allowed to believe and live by age-old tenets.
I've fallen into this trap myself, most recently dumping a friend of long standing because of her views, which I felt were anti-gay and she considered simply Christian. I can justify this to myself because I also have gay friends (and family), and I can't in good conscience accept someone who considers them to be inherently 'wrong' as a friend as well...the cognitive dissonance would rip my head apart.
But would I prohibit that woman from owning and operating a business? How is that different from, say, running a gay man out of town?
I will make one suggestion. Companies should be forced to disclose what charities/political causes they donate to. I don't care which end does this, the corporation or the charity, but it should be done as close to in real time as humanly possible. I want to know what companies are doing with their money before I give them any of mine. Again, this would cut both ways: the Christians would be equally happy knowing which companies are supporting 'sin', wouldn't they?
Canada doesn't have Chick Fil-A, just like Canada doesn't have Cracker Barrel, Bob Evan's, Sonic, What-A-Burger, or a host of other delicious fast food eateries. Canada does have gay marriage, and last I looked the sky's still up there. Much as I'd love to see more choice in the Canadian fast food outlet landscape (and grocery store, for that matter), I wouldn't want this at the expense of something as important as same-sex marriage.
The two are mutually exclusive, right?
Check out this letter, from the Mayor of Boston to the President of Chick Fil-A.
Customers are free to vote with their wallets. If they think Chick Fil-A's bigoted, they don't have to patronize it. If Christians have a problem with Disney, they can stay away.
Now, Chick Fil-A's president, Dan Cathy, did say one thing that impressed me, under the circumstances. "We never claimed to be a Christian business. There's no such thing as a Christian business. Jesus didn't die for a corporation." These are not his words--he quoted another Christian businessman, Fred Roach--but they're worth reflecting on, for Christians and non-Christians alike. Cathy, for the record, has mounted a vigorous defence of the "biblical" family unit. He has not said one word directly attacking homosexuals or homosexual marriage.
I'll let Lewis Black rephrase that. "If you're against the war it doesn't mean you're for the other side". Has Cathy or his company donated to pro-family-values outfits that actively campaign against gay marriage? "Guilty as charged", he might say. But are they "anti-gay" outfits...or merely Christian outfits? Are they the same thing? And if they are, do we shut down any company professing Christianity?
This comes down to a topic I've mused on, and written on, before. Tolerance. It doesn't mean what it used to. There was a time when the word "tolerance" meant I don't like you, you don't like me...and that's okay. Now it means "you have to accept me exactly as I am, and if you don't, you're a homophobe zealot/godless heathen".
Note that: it cuts both ways. For every right-thinking person trying to drag a fundycostal sort into the 21st century by his or her ears, there's a Christian asking pointedly why she's no longer allowed to believe and live by age-old tenets.
I've fallen into this trap myself, most recently dumping a friend of long standing because of her views, which I felt were anti-gay and she considered simply Christian. I can justify this to myself because I also have gay friends (and family), and I can't in good conscience accept someone who considers them to be inherently 'wrong' as a friend as well...the cognitive dissonance would rip my head apart.
But would I prohibit that woman from owning and operating a business? How is that different from, say, running a gay man out of town?
I will make one suggestion. Companies should be forced to disclose what charities/political causes they donate to. I don't care which end does this, the corporation or the charity, but it should be done as close to in real time as humanly possible. I want to know what companies are doing with their money before I give them any of mine. Again, this would cut both ways: the Christians would be equally happy knowing which companies are supporting 'sin', wouldn't they?
Friday, July 27, 2012
Torn
A year and a half ago, the Winter Olympics were held in my home country (albeit 4512 km (2803 miles) away from me. (As information: the distance from the easternmost city in Canada -- St John's, NL -- to London, UK is only 3744 km (2326 miles). And St John's is 3172 km (1970 miles) from me. As the Arrogant Worms so memorably put it, Canada's Really Big.
("It isn't what you do with it, it is the size that counts...")
I have to confess I got sucked right into the maw of Olympic over-enthusiasm last time. In my defence, I was far from alone: hell, over eighty percent of this country watched Canada win the gold medal in men's hockey. It was something of a relief to stand up and be counted, to imitate the rah-rah U S A! U S A! patriotism we have seen so much of. And to be justified in doing it, as we won more gold medals than any host nation had ever won at a Winter Games.)
The Olympics are a spectacle, and spectacles are by definition mesmerizing. If they were a movie, the poster might look like this:
It used to be easy for me to subsume myself in the pomp and pizzazz of the Opening Ceremonies, to immerse myself in the thrill of competition, to cheer my country on. That was back when setting a "personal best" actually mattered...these days, it often seems to be all about medals, specifically gold medals. But every Olympiad brings stories of incredible obstacles overcome, sportsmanship, tragedy and triumph that are captivating, and I try my damnedest to keep my mind on these stories and the competitions themselves. I try not to think about the McDonald's has the exclusive right to serve so-called 'chips'. You know, McDonald's, that most British of institutions that's the first place you think of when you think of authentic fish and chips. I try not to think about the possible terrorists who were let into the country despite an obscene amount of money spent on security. I try not to think about how just saying "London Summer Olympics 2012" in any combination and in just about any context could land you a thirty thousand dollar fine.
You know, that's a pretty long list of things not to have to think about. Don't think of a white elephant. Damn, too late...oh, speaking of white elephants, check out the Beijing 2008 venues just four years on.
Yes, I'll probably be watching and cheering. The pull is damn near irresistible. But for the nothing it's worth, I'll be watching this year with a heady dose of guilt to go with the anticipation.
("It isn't what you do with it, it is the size that counts...")
I have to confess I got sucked right into the maw of Olympic over-enthusiasm last time. In my defence, I was far from alone: hell, over eighty percent of this country watched Canada win the gold medal in men's hockey. It was something of a relief to stand up and be counted, to imitate the rah-rah U S A! U S A! patriotism we have seen so much of. And to be justified in doing it, as we won more gold medals than any host nation had ever won at a Winter Games.)
The Olympics are a spectacle, and spectacles are by definition mesmerizing. If they were a movie, the poster might look like this:
It used to be easy for me to subsume myself in the pomp and pizzazz of the Opening Ceremonies, to immerse myself in the thrill of competition, to cheer my country on. That was back when setting a "personal best" actually mattered...these days, it often seems to be all about medals, specifically gold medals. But every Olympiad brings stories of incredible obstacles overcome, sportsmanship, tragedy and triumph that are captivating, and I try my damnedest to keep my mind on these stories and the competitions themselves. I try not to think about the McDonald's has the exclusive right to serve so-called 'chips'. You know, McDonald's, that most British of institutions that's the first place you think of when you think of authentic fish and chips. I try not to think about the possible terrorists who were let into the country despite an obscene amount of money spent on security. I try not to think about how just saying "London Summer Olympics 2012" in any combination and in just about any context could land you a thirty thousand dollar fine.
You know, that's a pretty long list of things not to have to think about. Don't think of a white elephant. Damn, too late...oh, speaking of white elephants, check out the Beijing 2008 venues just four years on.
Yes, I'll probably be watching and cheering. The pull is damn near irresistible. But for the nothing it's worth, I'll be watching this year with a heady dose of guilt to go with the anticipation.
Thursday, July 26, 2012
"There will be no more professional writers"
I call bullshit.
There will always be professional writers. And musicians, and artists. Words are windows on other worlds, and they're not going away any time soon. Music is arguably as necessary to the human condition as food and water: babies who are so premature they can't even suck yet respond positively to music. And art is...well, as a poster that went around Facebook a few months back put it, 'EARTH without ART is just EH".
But you read the article linked above and it really does seem as if the sky is falling on any number of careers. There are an increasing number of people who seem to be willing to "work" for free, "paid" in popularity. Huffington Post, I'm led to believe, doesn't pay its contributors a red cent. And it's not alone. Time was, whenever news happened, if you were lucky enough to have a camera on you--yes, you yowwens, "cameras" were once unitaskers that you had to remember to bring with you if you might conceivably wish to take some photographs--you'd pull out your camera, take the shot, get it developed (a process that could take anywhere from an hour to several days)...and then you'd look to sell your picture to a news outlet for cash dollars.
Now, of course, everyone seems to have a camera on them if they're awake, and that camera is capable of sharing its pictures in seconds to the entire world. "Selling" your picture is extremely unlikely, since (a) you're probably not the only person who got the shot and (b) even if you were, "information wants to be free". So you put your picture up on YouTube and count yourcoin hits.
You can't exchange hits for anything edible.
Yet.
In my wild dreamy moments, I hope the financial system we have now sticks around just long enough for a little more tech to develop...and then crashes utterly and completely, never to return. I like to think that dollar bills and debit cards are someday (and relatively soon) going to be as obsolete as wampum.
This is, I'll admit, kind of unlikely, because there are many chiefs out there with mucho wampum, and they have this desire to keep itfrom anyone else. But then again, given the amount of money being printed out of thin air, I still believe its only a matter of time before this
is bus fare.
If money is essentially worthless, what replaces it? A different sort of currency--a currency we're slowly getting used to even now. The currency of....currency. Call it what you will. Call it Whuffie, call it darknet credits, call it upvotes and downvotes...this only succeeds as a system if transparency is a constant, not just a buzzword. If everyone can determine with a glance your reputation score, and add to it or subtract from it based on your words and works--well, then we have the basis for a new society. A writer of the next century's Giller Prize winning novel--or, hell, Fifty Thousand Shades of Brown--will collect accolades and be able to spend them.
There are issues to be worked out, to be sure. There should only be so many credits accruable to any one entity, lest someone gain too much power. The credits could be scaled based on reputation: if you're rated an asshole, everything you do costs more. If you do something truly depraved, your credit rating, so to speak, goes right to hell. I'm sure there are other problems to be solved. But they're solvable problems, unlike some of the problems with our current financial mess...
There will always be professional writers. And musicians, and artists. Words are windows on other worlds, and they're not going away any time soon. Music is arguably as necessary to the human condition as food and water: babies who are so premature they can't even suck yet respond positively to music. And art is...well, as a poster that went around Facebook a few months back put it, 'EARTH without ART is just EH".
But you read the article linked above and it really does seem as if the sky is falling on any number of careers. There are an increasing number of people who seem to be willing to "work" for free, "paid" in popularity. Huffington Post, I'm led to believe, doesn't pay its contributors a red cent. And it's not alone. Time was, whenever news happened, if you were lucky enough to have a camera on you--yes, you yowwens, "cameras" were once unitaskers that you had to remember to bring with you if you might conceivably wish to take some photographs--you'd pull out your camera, take the shot, get it developed (a process that could take anywhere from an hour to several days)...and then you'd look to sell your picture to a news outlet for cash dollars.
Now, of course, everyone seems to have a camera on them if they're awake, and that camera is capable of sharing its pictures in seconds to the entire world. "Selling" your picture is extremely unlikely, since (a) you're probably not the only person who got the shot and (b) even if you were, "information wants to be free". So you put your picture up on YouTube and count your
You can't exchange hits for anything edible.
Yet.
In my wild dreamy moments, I hope the financial system we have now sticks around just long enough for a little more tech to develop...and then crashes utterly and completely, never to return. I like to think that dollar bills and debit cards are someday (and relatively soon) going to be as obsolete as wampum.
This is, I'll admit, kind of unlikely, because there are many chiefs out there with mucho wampum, and they have this desire to keep it
If money is essentially worthless, what replaces it? A different sort of currency--a currency we're slowly getting used to even now. The currency of....currency. Call it what you will. Call it Whuffie, call it darknet credits, call it upvotes and downvotes...this only succeeds as a system if transparency is a constant, not just a buzzword. If everyone can determine with a glance your reputation score, and add to it or subtract from it based on your words and works--well, then we have the basis for a new society. A writer of the next century's Giller Prize winning novel--or, hell, Fifty Thousand Shades of Brown--will collect accolades and be able to spend them.
There are issues to be worked out, to be sure. There should only be so many credits accruable to any one entity, lest someone gain too much power. The credits could be scaled based on reputation: if you're rated an asshole, everything you do costs more. If you do something truly depraved, your credit rating, so to speak, goes right to hell. I'm sure there are other problems to be solved. But they're solvable problems, unlike some of the problems with our current financial mess...
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Near Misses
Every now and again I am confronted with evidence that the average human and I are wired differently. This month's evidence, fittingly, is in the latest issue of Wired magazine. It's not yet available online, so I will quote Ben Paynter:
...[N]ear misses aren't successes. They are indicators of near failure. And if the flaw is systemic, it requires only a small twist of fate for the next incident to result in disaster. Rather than celebrating then ignoring close calls, we should be learning from them and doing our very best to prevent their recurrence. But we often don't.
Post-Columbia...researchers at Georgetown's McDonagh School of Business...asked NASA employees and MBA students to rank different versions of a mission scenario. One described a highly successful project; the other project nearly self-destructed but was ultimately saved by a lucky break. Regardless, subjects ranked both missions as equally well done..."
I wouldn't rank them that way. Though I admit I probably would have in my childhood and teenage years. My parents, my stepfather especially, used to regularly chide my black/white thinking. Things were either wrong or they were right, there was no gray area. Well, the older I get, the more I believe that almost everything is some shade of gray. Hell, gray has been my favourite colour for years.
I used to fall into the binary trap on a daily, if not an hourly, basis: making snap judgements that overwhelmingly tended towards "either/or" instead of, perhaps, "both/and". This made life considerably simpler, but it blinded me to different modes of thinking...rather ironic for someone who always felt inexplicably "different" himself.
My spiritual path reflected my attraction to binary thinking. I had ricocheted rather oddly from Christianity to fervent atheism and back; neither end of the continuum felt right to me, in a way that was exceedingly hard to describe. The sense that everything you believe just might be bunkum doesn't lend itself to ready analysis. But I persisted, with the help of several prods to the mental posterior that came along. Most notably, Neale Donald Walsch's there is no such thing as right and wrong.
As I migrated inward, seeking spiritual answers that didn't fail my internal bullshit tests, I came first to dispense with dyads and eventually to recognize continua in more and more places. And to settle, more or less, in the spaces between.
Whenever I find myself stomping down on one end of a see-saw--it still happens today--, my own Mrs. is near the other end to keep things from flying off the handle. Eva's a big girl, in more ways than just the physical. Dislodging her is no easy task, because she has thought out her position on any number of issues. Not just decided something...actually thought it out. The upshot of this is that she's able to take up contrary viewpoints with a facility that still occasionally frightens me and befuddles me. She would make a killer debater. No matter what view I blurt out, she can demolish it in short order, then take the view she just espoused and demolish it in turn. This is tremendously liberating: it can't help but bring me back into balance quickly. It is, of course, far from the only reason I married the woman...but it's a damned good one. Binary thinking is not her usual mode--she doesn't just think outside boxes, she occasionally questions whether there are such things as boxes.
Binary thinking is hellishly hard to combat, not least because in doing so you're apt to start thinking that it is bad and your "new" thought patterns are good.
On this and several other subjects, I owe a debt of gratitude to John Michael Greer. Binary thinking is not bad, per se: it's just, as Greer notes, often used nonproductively. Things are deemed "right", a "success" and "good" if they work; "wrong", a "failure" and "bad" if they don't. Well, stepping outside the binary box, a method might "succeed" after a "near miss"...is something that almost failed really a success? Or maybe there was no "near miss" and all objectives were achieved. Were they really the right, so to speak, objectives? Can http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences">unintended consequences be foreseen with more thought and understanding--which might spring out of ternary, rather than binary, thinking?
"Moderation in all things, including moderation." --Petronius (27-66 AD)
"Ours is not a better way. Ours is merely another way." --Neale Donald Walsch
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Gunplay: A Spiritual Perspective
In the wake of the shootout in Scarborough yesterday, I'm going to break one of my ironclad current events blogging rules and speculate before all information is in, to wit:
I'm willing to bet that the perpetrators are black.
I could be wrong, of course...but I doubt it. We're not permitted to collect crime statistics based on race, because that would be (gasp) racist. Never mind that Jamaicans, Somalians, and assorted other melatonin-enhanced people have been shooting each other since time out of mind in the cores of countless cities, Toronto no exception. Unless you're the Harper government, the first step towards solving any problem is collecting reliable data on its scope. We can't do that, because it might offend a few people, and being offended is so much worse than being shot.
Obligatory disclaimer: I have nothing against black people, brown people, or green polka-dotted people...only people who don't play by the rules. And if it is found, as I suspect it would be, that a higher percentage of black people don't play by the rules, the next question we must ask ourselves is why.
There is no shortage of specious theory being advanced to answer that question. It's American gun culture. (How many of these people have ever lived in America--which, for all its warts, is infinitely safer than so many other areas of the globe?)
It's the restrictions on gun ownership and use in Canada: if everybody had a gun, this line of "reasoning" goes, people would be afraid to draw theirs, let alone fire it.
Uh, okay.
It's the lack of meaningful sentencing: if, say, we handed out a mandatory ten-year sentence for possession of an unregistered firearm, all the gang-bangers would be in jail in short order...
...except that (a) you'd have to catch them first, almost always after they've shot somebody and (b) the sort of person who goes out and shoots people generally either doesn't care about consequences or is actually incapable of thinking them through--which is why mandatory minimum sentences don't reduce crime. Even the death penalty has no effect on crime.
So let's put aside all our reflexes to cry racism and look dispassionately at the cultures that produce the majority of the gang-bangers. I see two major issues here, each one insufficient in itself to create a criminal, but both together tending to produce them.
The first is a specific kind of poverty.
Yes, most poor people are law-abiding. So, incidentally, are most rich people, or most middle-class people. But culturally encouraged poverty is another matter.
Poverty is a hell of a disease to shake, it's true, especially when everyone around you is afflicted with it. But some people try to throw it off, and others simply give up. When you give up, that's when you're most vulnerable to the 'glamour' of the gang war: dulce et decorum est pro amici mori.
(Linguistic aside: the word 'glamour' originally meant a magic spell cast to convince its victim that somebody or something was attractive. That's in English. In Scots Gaelic, the term denotes a malevolent shapeshifter. Both definitions fit war of any kind rather well, I should think.)
What factors 'encourage' poverty? I would argue the biggest one is the second factor in producing criminality: familial breakdown, leading to community breakdown.
In certain cultures, it seems that fathers no longer have any obligation to mothers or children. The way women are portrayed in hip-hop videos reinforces this: they are simply receptacles to be pumped and dumped. That they line up for the chance to be receptacles tells you men produced the videos.
I wish I had a solution to this: it is so pervasive, and so damaging. Fatherhood binds a man to his family and offers a foundation on which a son (particularly) can build. I'd suggest further than except in extreme cases, even a poor father is better than no father at all. Poor fathers can be learned from: don't do this, don't do it that way. A void for a father breeds nothing but an attraction to voids.
Without cohesive families, 'community' is a nebulous concept at best: people tend to degenerate into an 'every man for himself' attitude that fosters shortsighted, often criminal, thinking.
As I said, I don't have a solution to this--far greater minds than mine have wrestled with it to no avail. But we have to talk about it. I can't solve this and I doubt you can, either....but together we stand a fighting chance. That's what family and community is for: together, we build each other up. As human beings, if we really want to achieve what Neale Donald Walsch calls "the greatest version of the grandest vision we ever had about who we are", we need to expand our perspective outward, beyond our comfort zone. Some of us care only about ourselves. Others care about their close families and friends, others about their tribes. A very few have demonstrated caring towards the entire world. That's where we need to get to. It seems like a hell of a long way to go, but it the journey can and has been made in a single leap of insight.
In the meantime, as with any evil act, the thing to concentrate on now is what next. If we continue along the path of least resistance, these victims will have died in vain. If we choose to really delve into the hows and whys of this tragedy, perhaps something good and lasting might be gained from it. That's my hope.
I'm willing to bet that the perpetrators are black.
I could be wrong, of course...but I doubt it. We're not permitted to collect crime statistics based on race, because that would be (gasp) racist. Never mind that Jamaicans, Somalians, and assorted other melatonin-enhanced people have been shooting each other since time out of mind in the cores of countless cities, Toronto no exception. Unless you're the Harper government, the first step towards solving any problem is collecting reliable data on its scope. We can't do that, because it might offend a few people, and being offended is so much worse than being shot.
Obligatory disclaimer: I have nothing against black people, brown people, or green polka-dotted people...only people who don't play by the rules. And if it is found, as I suspect it would be, that a higher percentage of black people don't play by the rules, the next question we must ask ourselves is why.
There is no shortage of specious theory being advanced to answer that question. It's American gun culture. (How many of these people have ever lived in America--which, for all its warts, is infinitely safer than so many other areas of the globe?)
It's the restrictions on gun ownership and use in Canada: if everybody had a gun, this line of "reasoning" goes, people would be afraid to draw theirs, let alone fire it.
Uh, okay.
It's the lack of meaningful sentencing: if, say, we handed out a mandatory ten-year sentence for possession of an unregistered firearm, all the gang-bangers would be in jail in short order...
...except that (a) you'd have to catch them first, almost always after they've shot somebody and (b) the sort of person who goes out and shoots people generally either doesn't care about consequences or is actually incapable of thinking them through--which is why mandatory minimum sentences don't reduce crime. Even the death penalty has no effect on crime.
So let's put aside all our reflexes to cry racism and look dispassionately at the cultures that produce the majority of the gang-bangers. I see two major issues here, each one insufficient in itself to create a criminal, but both together tending to produce them.
The first is a specific kind of poverty.
Yes, most poor people are law-abiding. So, incidentally, are most rich people, or most middle-class people. But culturally encouraged poverty is another matter.
Poverty is a hell of a disease to shake, it's true, especially when everyone around you is afflicted with it. But some people try to throw it off, and others simply give up. When you give up, that's when you're most vulnerable to the 'glamour' of the gang war: dulce et decorum est pro amici mori.
What factors 'encourage' poverty? I would argue the biggest one is the second factor in producing criminality: familial breakdown, leading to community breakdown.
In certain cultures, it seems that fathers no longer have any obligation to mothers or children. The way women are portrayed in hip-hop videos reinforces this: they are simply receptacles to be pumped and dumped. That they line up for the chance to be receptacles tells you men produced the videos.
I wish I had a solution to this: it is so pervasive, and so damaging. Fatherhood binds a man to his family and offers a foundation on which a son (particularly) can build. I'd suggest further than except in extreme cases, even a poor father is better than no father at all. Poor fathers can be learned from: don't do this, don't do it that way. A void for a father breeds nothing but an attraction to voids.
Without cohesive families, 'community' is a nebulous concept at best: people tend to degenerate into an 'every man for himself' attitude that fosters shortsighted, often criminal, thinking.
As I said, I don't have a solution to this--far greater minds than mine have wrestled with it to no avail. But we have to talk about it. I can't solve this and I doubt you can, either....but together we stand a fighting chance. That's what family and community is for: together, we build each other up. As human beings, if we really want to achieve what Neale Donald Walsch calls "the greatest version of the grandest vision we ever had about who we are", we need to expand our perspective outward, beyond our comfort zone. Some of us care only about ourselves. Others care about their close families and friends, others about their tribes. A very few have demonstrated caring towards the entire world. That's where we need to get to. It seems like a hell of a long way to go, but it the journey can and has been made in a single leap of insight.
In the meantime, as with any evil act, the thing to concentrate on now is what next. If we continue along the path of least resistance, these victims will have died in vain. If we choose to really delve into the hows and whys of this tragedy, perhaps something good and lasting might be gained from it. That's my hope.
Monday, July 09, 2012
Piracy, Again
First of all, and once again, apologies to my readers for the lack of fresh content. If it's any consolation, I have one e-friend averaging a post a month, another who hasn't posted at all in eight months, and another blog I follow that's been silent for well over a year now. Two of the three tweet pretty much constantly. I have tried Twitter--I've had an account for over a year now--and I don't understand the appeal at all. My thoughts resist being truncated into 140-character sound bites and those that don't go on my Facebook wall anyway...so what exactly is the point?
Anyway. if you read the above thinking what a weirdo, you probably should bail now.
The Reddit thread concerned the ludicrous shipping/handling charges that U.S. companies inflict on Canadian customers. I mentioned the vast discrepancy between the Amazon.com price for Season 1 of Game of Thrones and the Amazon.ca price...then detailed how I got around that. I sent a money order for the U.S. cost plus five bucks to my friend in California...who ordered the thing and mailed it to me. I saved about twenty bucks.
Reddit has a little orange-red envelope that lights up when you get a reply to your post. Within seconds, that envelope lit up, I clicked it, and found this: "cost on TPB: $0."
TPB, for those of you not up on your TLAs (three letter acronyms) is The Pirate Bay.
And so I answered my informer. "If something is worthless, why do you have it?"
He didn't understand. I rephrased the question.
Why would you want something that isn't worth paying for? I dislike the value of something being doubled just because I live on one side of an arbitrary line. But I really enjoyed Game of Thrones and if I were to assign a value to it, it wouldn't be zero dollars.
Response:
You have a gaping disconnect in logic there. Just because I don't wanna pay for it doesn't mean it's not worth paying for. GoT is a great show, it's definitely worth more than nothing, but I'm not gonna pay for it if I can get it for free. Simple as that. If there was a way that you could get a Ferrari for free (with no consequence and the equivalent ease of torrenting a file), would you do it? I know I would.
Would I get a Ferrari for free?
Assuming I drove, and had some use for a Ferrari in a country where it would rust out after a year and I couldn't drive it legally anywhere past second gear...I'd be wondering what mechanism I was using to get this free Ferrari, how much the people who made it were paid (would you want a car made by people working for peanuts, let alone nothing?) I guess the short answer is no, I wouldn't want a free Ferrari.
I sat there in the wake of writing this, thinking to myself you just turned down a free Ferrari. I checked and rechecked the thought process that led to that surprising conclusion, and eventually straightened up and said yup, I just turned down a free Ferrari.
For the record, I do, on occasion, pirate things. I will resort to piracy when the legitimate purveyor of content doesn't want my money. In the case of a record album, I will make this assumption if, for example, iTunes--the largest seller of music in the world--does not stock it.
I have also pirated many an album on a trial basis, as it were: the equivalent of taking it out of the library. If I don't like the album after a couple of listens, it gets deleted. If I do like the album enough to keep it, I buy it.
I do this because I am a writer and composer and I really like the idea of writers and composers being compensated for their skullsweat. Now, that said, I share with the most ardent pirate a complete and utter contempt for the middlemen who are desperately trying to cling to obsolete business models. I would just as soon reward an author or composer directly. I believe that this is eventually going to be commonplace, but right now it's very rare, and agencies like the RIAA and MPAA are fighting it like crazy. I get that nobody likes to be rendered irrelevant, but that's technology for you. We don't lament the loss of chandlers and smiths nowadays.
I can certainly understand trying to find as good a deal as possible on whatever you're buying. But for me, at least, that doesn't extend to free.
Anyway. if you read the above thinking what a weirdo, you probably should bail now.
The Reddit thread concerned the ludicrous shipping/handling charges that U.S. companies inflict on Canadian customers. I mentioned the vast discrepancy between the Amazon.com price for Season 1 of Game of Thrones and the Amazon.ca price...then detailed how I got around that. I sent a money order for the U.S. cost plus five bucks to my friend in California...who ordered the thing and mailed it to me. I saved about twenty bucks.
Reddit has a little orange-red envelope that lights up when you get a reply to your post. Within seconds, that envelope lit up, I clicked it, and found this: "cost on TPB: $0."
TPB, for those of you not up on your TLAs (three letter acronyms) is The Pirate Bay.
And so I answered my informer. "If something is worthless, why do you have it?"
He didn't understand. I rephrased the question.
Why would you want something that isn't worth paying for? I dislike the value of something being doubled just because I live on one side of an arbitrary line. But I really enjoyed Game of Thrones and if I were to assign a value to it, it wouldn't be zero dollars.
Response:
You have a gaping disconnect in logic there. Just because I don't wanna pay for it doesn't mean it's not worth paying for. GoT is a great show, it's definitely worth more than nothing, but I'm not gonna pay for it if I can get it for free. Simple as that. If there was a way that you could get a Ferrari for free (with no consequence and the equivalent ease of torrenting a file), would you do it? I know I would.
Would I get a Ferrari for free?
Assuming I drove, and had some use for a Ferrari in a country where it would rust out after a year and I couldn't drive it legally anywhere past second gear...I'd be wondering what mechanism I was using to get this free Ferrari, how much the people who made it were paid (would you want a car made by people working for peanuts, let alone nothing?) I guess the short answer is no, I wouldn't want a free Ferrari.
I sat there in the wake of writing this, thinking to myself you just turned down a free Ferrari. I checked and rechecked the thought process that led to that surprising conclusion, and eventually straightened up and said yup, I just turned down a free Ferrari.
For the record, I do, on occasion, pirate things. I will resort to piracy when the legitimate purveyor of content doesn't want my money. In the case of a record album, I will make this assumption if, for example, iTunes--the largest seller of music in the world--does not stock it.
I have also pirated many an album on a trial basis, as it were: the equivalent of taking it out of the library. If I don't like the album after a couple of listens, it gets deleted. If I do like the album enough to keep it, I buy it.
I do this because I am a writer and composer and I really like the idea of writers and composers being compensated for their skullsweat. Now, that said, I share with the most ardent pirate a complete and utter contempt for the middlemen who are desperately trying to cling to obsolete business models. I would just as soon reward an author or composer directly. I believe that this is eventually going to be commonplace, but right now it's very rare, and agencies like the RIAA and MPAA are fighting it like crazy. I get that nobody likes to be rendered irrelevant, but that's technology for you. We don't lament the loss of chandlers and smiths nowadays.
I can certainly understand trying to find as good a deal as possible on whatever you're buying. But for me, at least, that doesn't extend to free.
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Ken The Pole Dancer
So we did a Costco run today.
I work for what is ostensibly a competitor, but that doesn't diminish my respect for Costco one bit. Some of their prices are beyond belief, and there's no better place to go should you require a keg of ketchup or a barrel of barbeque sauce or a giant pole in the ribs.
Wait, how'd that get there?
Same way the tuna did, I guess.
We always take care to hit Costco within seconds of its opening, because (a) we don't like crowds and that place (b) crowded as hell within minutes of opening, every...single...day. Like most customers, we have a routine that takes us around the perimeter, with one quick and inevitable dart into the center to check out the books. New Uncle John's Bathroom Reader, yay. Back to the perimeter, and now we've hit the frozen foods. I snag a bag of burgers for an insanely cheap price, and then I turn around to make sure my wife is still in view. That's a real danger in that place: once Eva's gone, she's gone, lost in the madding crowd. Granted, the hordes haven't quite hit the frozen food yet, but bombardment is imminent.
At least I know what my wife is wearing today. I don't always; clothes, to me, are strictly functional and if I was substantially fatter, so as to have natural pockets, I probably wouldn't bother with them. (Oh, yeah, and if I lived in a universe where that image didn't just turn your stomach.) But Eva's clad in a new shirt I approved on her last Pennington's run, and she looks even prettier than usual.
But she's not in my aisle.
No problem, she's almost certainly an aisle over. I'll just cut over that way, holding the bag of burgers at chest level pointed away from me, looking at the magnificent array of food, boy does that tourtiere look g--
WHAMMO!
Several collisions happened at once, all because my head had collided with a cloud.
The burgers collided with a giant pole that suddenly appeared. My chest collided with the burgers. All the breath I had in me collided with the walls of my lungs and stopped dead. My pride collided with my dignity as I turned around to see how many hundred people had just witnessed this humiliation.
Nobody. Except Eva, who was trying to suppress sniggers of horrified laughter as she asked if I was okay. I was, I thought...a mite harder, though, and I probably would have yarked, and wouldn't that have been a story to tell the world.
I hate when I do something stupid that results in pain. I hate that I do it so often, of course, but I especially hate the mingled tears and laughter, the pain that screams you deserve me, you dumbass.
Now do you people get why I don't drive?
I work for what is ostensibly a competitor, but that doesn't diminish my respect for Costco one bit. Some of their prices are beyond belief, and there's no better place to go should you require a keg of ketchup or a barrel of barbeque sauce or a giant pole in the ribs.
Wait, how'd that get there?
Same way the tuna did, I guess.
We always take care to hit Costco within seconds of its opening, because (a) we don't like crowds and that place (b) crowded as hell within minutes of opening, every...single...day. Like most customers, we have a routine that takes us around the perimeter, with one quick and inevitable dart into the center to check out the books. New Uncle John's Bathroom Reader, yay. Back to the perimeter, and now we've hit the frozen foods. I snag a bag of burgers for an insanely cheap price, and then I turn around to make sure my wife is still in view. That's a real danger in that place: once Eva's gone, she's gone, lost in the madding crowd. Granted, the hordes haven't quite hit the frozen food yet, but bombardment is imminent.
At least I know what my wife is wearing today. I don't always; clothes, to me, are strictly functional and if I was substantially fatter, so as to have natural pockets, I probably wouldn't bother with them. (Oh, yeah, and if I lived in a universe where that image didn't just turn your stomach.) But Eva's clad in a new shirt I approved on her last Pennington's run, and she looks even prettier than usual.
But she's not in my aisle.
No problem, she's almost certainly an aisle over. I'll just cut over that way, holding the bag of burgers at chest level pointed away from me, looking at the magnificent array of food, boy does that tourtiere look g--
WHAMMO!
Several collisions happened at once, all because my head had collided with a cloud.
The burgers collided with a giant pole that suddenly appeared. My chest collided with the burgers. All the breath I had in me collided with the walls of my lungs and stopped dead. My pride collided with my dignity as I turned around to see how many hundred people had just witnessed this humiliation.
Nobody. Except Eva, who was trying to suppress sniggers of horrified laughter as she asked if I was okay. I was, I thought...a mite harder, though, and I probably would have yarked, and wouldn't that have been a story to tell the world.
I hate when I do something stupid that results in pain. I hate that I do it so often, of course, but I especially hate the mingled tears and laughter, the pain that screams you deserve me, you dumbass.
Now do you people get why I don't drive?
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Love my country, hate my government
Look at at the Breadbin circa 2004-2007 or so and you will see many posts excoriating Chretien, on the grounds of his arrogance, and Martin, on the grounds of his ditheriness. I repeatedly went against the national grain advocating Stephen Harper as a voice of reason.
In related news, I've been eating a steady diet of crow since last May. As I've come to understand, "Stephen Harper" and "reason" don't belong in the same sentence, unless that sentence is "Stephen Harper needs no reason to do what he does".
It's not what this government does that has me frothing at the mouth. Well, mostly not. Many of the initiatives the Harper government has put forth are at least worthy of debate. Hang around leftist blogs for a while and that point can very easily be lost: the general consensus is that Harper is hell-bent on destroying the country. I'm convinced he doesn't think that way: he thinks like Peter Arnett: "it became necessary to destroy the country to save it". I believe this because the Prime Minister has made his hatred for the country he leads very clear.
(As an aside, I find it very interesting that these criticism I'm levelling at Harper -- that he hates his country -- is often levelled at Obama by more than a few Americans. Could we switch leaders, please, America? You'd love this guy.)
Back on point, it's not what's being done, so much, but how it's being done that makes me loathe this government like none other. Harper has used every dirty political trick in the book to advance his agenda, and when the tricks in the book don't work, he just tosses the book into the fire and writes a new book. Don't like what Parliament's cooking up? Prorogue it. Don't like embarrassing truths being broadcast about your non-performance on the environment file? Kill the agency responsible, and slander them in the process. Don't like statistics that might show up your government? Make sure fewer stats get out there. and brag about it, saying things like "we don't govern on the basis of statistics".
Information? Who needs it? We're Conservatives and we know what's best. Whatever you think you know to the contrary, you're wrong. It's just that simple.
The crime rate's been going down for years, but never mind that: we need more jails because of all the 'unreported crime'. (Not sure what that is, exactly, but it strongly calls to mind unreported criminals, that is to say, unpersons. )
Not only does Harper ruthlessly silence any opposition to his plans -- just ask David Wilks -- he makes every effort to ensure no proper opposition to his plans can develop. Witness the omnibus "budget" bill.
Bill C-38 is crammed chock-full of things have have little or nothing to do with a federal budget. For instance, it explicitly allows the FBI or the DEA the same powers as the RCMP to arrest Canadians on Canadian soil. It basically eliminates a citizen's ability to appeal any decisions made with respect to her employment insurance or old age security. It repeals numerous environmental acts, with nothing to replace them.
By vice of stuffing all these things into one bloated bill, the government essentially killed any opportunity for serious scrutiny. This practically forces Canadians to wonder what (else) they're hiding. Rather ironic, since the Harper regime is a big proponent of "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear". Yet they routinely attempt to quash, and all too often succeed in quashing, any effort to glean information that might prove contentious.
I try not to wear my tinfoil hat out in public. I really do. But I can't help wondering, as I watch this country erode bit by bit, who our real government is. Is Canada now an oilogopoly? (Criticizing the tar sands can get you branded a terrorist.) Certainly the RIAA and MPAA have our government's ear and arms and legs, now that it's illegal to transfer a CD or DVD to your iPhone, if that CD or DVD is digitally locked. (Stupid, senseless bill that will only encourage what it's trying to prevent. It has about as much relevance as a speed limit on Ontario's 400-series highways.)
If there's any consolation, it's that even media outlets historically friendly to Stephen Harper, such as the National Post, have been publishing increasingly strident criticism. And Canada's reputation internationally, so good as little as two years ago, is starting to slip.. This is good because it means Harper will (hopefully) be tossed out on his ear in 2015. ("Douze mille quinze!" was the chant the NDP shouted as the voting marathon on C-38 concluded.)
Maybe, just maybe, there will be a Canada left to save by then.
In related news, I've been eating a steady diet of crow since last May. As I've come to understand, "Stephen Harper" and "reason" don't belong in the same sentence, unless that sentence is "Stephen Harper needs no reason to do what he does".
It's not what this government does that has me frothing at the mouth. Well, mostly not. Many of the initiatives the Harper government has put forth are at least worthy of debate. Hang around leftist blogs for a while and that point can very easily be lost: the general consensus is that Harper is hell-bent on destroying the country. I'm convinced he doesn't think that way: he thinks like Peter Arnett: "it became necessary to destroy the country to save it". I believe this because the Prime Minister has made his hatred for the country he leads very clear.
(As an aside, I find it very interesting that these criticism I'm levelling at Harper -- that he hates his country -- is often levelled at Obama by more than a few Americans. Could we switch leaders, please, America? You'd love this guy.)
Back on point, it's not what's being done, so much, but how it's being done that makes me loathe this government like none other. Harper has used every dirty political trick in the book to advance his agenda, and when the tricks in the book don't work, he just tosses the book into the fire and writes a new book. Don't like what Parliament's cooking up? Prorogue it. Don't like embarrassing truths being broadcast about your non-performance on the environment file? Kill the agency responsible, and slander them in the process. Don't like statistics that might show up your government? Make sure fewer stats get out there. and brag about it, saying things like "we don't govern on the basis of statistics".
Information? Who needs it? We're Conservatives and we know what's best. Whatever you think you know to the contrary, you're wrong. It's just that simple.
The crime rate's been going down for years, but never mind that: we need more jails because of all the 'unreported crime'. (Not sure what that is, exactly, but it strongly calls to mind unreported criminals, that is to say, unpersons. )
Not only does Harper ruthlessly silence any opposition to his plans -- just ask David Wilks -- he makes every effort to ensure no proper opposition to his plans can develop. Witness the omnibus "budget" bill.
Bill C-38 is crammed chock-full of things have have little or nothing to do with a federal budget. For instance, it explicitly allows the FBI or the DEA the same powers as the RCMP to arrest Canadians on Canadian soil. It basically eliminates a citizen's ability to appeal any decisions made with respect to her employment insurance or old age security. It repeals numerous environmental acts, with nothing to replace them.
By vice of stuffing all these things into one bloated bill, the government essentially killed any opportunity for serious scrutiny. This practically forces Canadians to wonder what (else) they're hiding. Rather ironic, since the Harper regime is a big proponent of "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear". Yet they routinely attempt to quash, and all too often succeed in quashing, any effort to glean information that might prove contentious.
I try not to wear my tinfoil hat out in public. I really do. But I can't help wondering, as I watch this country erode bit by bit, who our real government is. Is Canada now an oilogopoly? (Criticizing the tar sands can get you branded a terrorist.) Certainly the RIAA and MPAA have our government's ear and arms and legs, now that it's illegal to transfer a CD or DVD to your iPhone, if that CD or DVD is digitally locked. (Stupid, senseless bill that will only encourage what it's trying to prevent. It has about as much relevance as a speed limit on Ontario's 400-series highways.)
If there's any consolation, it's that even media outlets historically friendly to Stephen Harper, such as the National Post, have been publishing increasingly strident criticism. And Canada's reputation internationally, so good as little as two years ago, is starting to slip.. This is good because it means Harper will (hopefully) be tossed out on his ear in 2015. ("Douze mille quinze!" was the chant the NDP shouted as the voting marathon on C-38 concluded.)
Maybe, just maybe, there will be a Canada left to save by then.
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Thou shalt not watch others kill
A teacher in the city where Jun Lin was executed has been suspended for showing a video depicting the crime to his high school history/civics class.
Lin, 33, was murdered with an ice pick, raped, cannibalized, and dismembered. The video of the crime later surfaced a website based in Edmonton called "bestgore.com"...which means it's probably in dozens of places on the web by now, and in who knows how many macabre 'collections'.
The very thought that such a video exists makes me sick to my stomach. And regardless of whether or not high school kids unanimously voted to see the accursed thing, that teacher deserves far worse than a suspension with pay. Jail time should be considered, is my view.
I'll go further. Anybody who wilfully downloads something like this should be locked up. Watching it actually trips my get-the-fuck-away-from-me-meter, but I don't want to sound as extreme as I'm probably sounding. Rather, I'd like to try to convince you my "extreme" position is rational.
First, you try to convince me of some good reason why anyone would want to watch, let alone keep, a video depicting the actual murder of an actual human being. I have enough problems with simulated murders on screens -- at sixteen, I recoiled from something as relatively tame as Die Hard -- but an actual graphic murder?
Suppose the man murdered was your son. He was somebody's son, after all. Could have been yours. Still curious? Still got that hmm, I wonder what a real murder looks like sheen in your eye? Or are you maybe thinking of using the video of the murder of Jun Lin as some kind of obscene training manual?
No, I'm not going to suggest that anyone who downloads this is automatically a murderer-in-waiting...so I'll tell you what. You show me who, out of the hundreds of thousands of downloads I'm sure this goddamned thing has racked up, is considering murder right now or at some point in the foreseeable future. You do this with one hundred percent accuracy, and you continue to do it for as long as that video is available, and for my part, I'll make sure those are the people I jail, and everyone else can enjoy their little movie. With popcorn.
Good luck with that. Oh, and remember: Jun Lin might not be your son...but the next one could be.
********
"But the kids voted for it! Unanimously!"
Well of course they did. They're, what, sixteen? My sixteen year old self would have voiced the only dissent -- did, in fact, except the murders I didn't care to see were relatively tame and perpetrated by Bruce Willis -- and for that I got called a pussy. The overwhelming majority of kids that age have been conditioned by movies they Saw, torture porn movies to which I have an unreservedly Hostel reaction. Indeed, one of the students in this idiot teacher's class is quoted as saying the video was "troubling", but had no "lasting effect" on him. As one commenter on CBC.ca said, life is cheap to the videogame generation.
That the children even had the opportunity to vote at all is disgusting beyond words.
The teacher has expressed "regret", to which I call bullshit. Regret that he was caught, maybe. A microsecond of thought would have convinced this teacher that the murder of Jun Lin was not appropriate viewing for his class, no matter what his class might say. Anything that obvious isn't worth regret, and any sorry he might give is worth precisely nothing. That kind of reflexive 'apology' is often offered by sociopaths as they learn what is and isn't acceptable in society's eyes. Not saying this teacher is sociopathic...but I can't help wondering.
Lin, 33, was murdered with an ice pick, raped, cannibalized, and dismembered. The video of the crime later surfaced a website based in Edmonton called "bestgore.com"...which means it's probably in dozens of places on the web by now, and in who knows how many macabre 'collections'.
The very thought that such a video exists makes me sick to my stomach. And regardless of whether or not high school kids unanimously voted to see the accursed thing, that teacher deserves far worse than a suspension with pay. Jail time should be considered, is my view.
I'll go further. Anybody who wilfully downloads something like this should be locked up. Watching it actually trips my get-the-fuck-away-from-me-meter, but I don't want to sound as extreme as I'm probably sounding. Rather, I'd like to try to convince you my "extreme" position is rational.
First, you try to convince me of some good reason why anyone would want to watch, let alone keep, a video depicting the actual murder of an actual human being. I have enough problems with simulated murders on screens -- at sixteen, I recoiled from something as relatively tame as Die Hard -- but an actual graphic murder?
Suppose the man murdered was your son. He was somebody's son, after all. Could have been yours. Still curious? Still got that hmm, I wonder what a real murder looks like sheen in your eye? Or are you maybe thinking of using the video of the murder of Jun Lin as some kind of obscene training manual?
No, I'm not going to suggest that anyone who downloads this is automatically a murderer-in-waiting...so I'll tell you what. You show me who, out of the hundreds of thousands of downloads I'm sure this goddamned thing has racked up, is considering murder right now or at some point in the foreseeable future. You do this with one hundred percent accuracy, and you continue to do it for as long as that video is available, and for my part, I'll make sure those are the people I jail, and everyone else can enjoy their little movie. With popcorn.
Good luck with that. Oh, and remember: Jun Lin might not be your son...but the next one could be.
********
"But the kids voted for it! Unanimously!"
Well of course they did. They're, what, sixteen? My sixteen year old self would have voiced the only dissent -- did, in fact, except the murders I didn't care to see were relatively tame and perpetrated by Bruce Willis -- and for that I got called a pussy. The overwhelming majority of kids that age have been conditioned by movies they Saw, torture porn movies to which I have an unreservedly Hostel reaction. Indeed, one of the students in this idiot teacher's class is quoted as saying the video was "troubling", but had no "lasting effect" on him. As one commenter on CBC.ca said, life is cheap to the videogame generation.
That the children even had the opportunity to vote at all is disgusting beyond words.
The teacher has expressed "regret", to which I call bullshit. Regret that he was caught, maybe. A microsecond of thought would have convinced this teacher that the murder of Jun Lin was not appropriate viewing for his class, no matter what his class might say. Anything that obvious isn't worth regret, and any sorry he might give is worth precisely nothing. That kind of reflexive 'apology' is often offered by sociopaths as they learn what is and isn't acceptable in society's eyes. Not saying this teacher is sociopathic...but I can't help wondering.
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
Snakes on a Plane?
Summertime and the bloggin' ain't so easy...
I'm working on my retail tell-all memoir, originally titled "Tales from Aisle Ten" like several Breadbin posts (I'll be going with a different title, though). Because my discipline is non-existent, I have enlisted the services of a writing buddy to keep me honest. The deal is we each write every day, even if it's only two sentences. So far, I've skipped one day due to total work-related burnout...I could barely put two sentences together verbally. But otherwise it's coming along. I basically scrapped it and started from scratch and I've now surpassed my old word count: I'm sitting comfortably above twelve thousand words.
Blogging necessarily takes a back seat to that.
However, there's something that came up in the news the other day that tweaked my bloggerbrain.
Read and react...
To summarize: Married D-string actor removes his ring, hits on model on redeye flight. Model strings him along, tweeting the whole time, until her followers--armed with her hints--are able to identify the cad....whose career and marriage are most likely in tatters now. Model realizes (too late) what she has unleashed.
Actor is one of those 'washed in the blood of the Lamb Who Is JAAAAAY-SUS types (it almost goes without saying), but I'll refrain from further comment on that part of the story.
What interests me is that the reaction, which is split seemingly exactly in twain. Half the people whose comments I've read think the actor (Brad Presley) fully deserved the crap he's getting: serves him right for surreptitiously removing his wedding ring and then trying to cozy up to a woman not his wife. The other half says of the model (Melissa Stetten): what a bitch!
If you're interested, I heavily favour the former interpretation (and I did even before I found out how "Christian" Mr. Presley is). Being hit on by someone you're not interested in poses a real dilemma for a woman, especially when you have a few hours of proximity to look forward to. Telling him off is out of the question: some men won't take no for an answer, and you never know which ones those are by looking at them. Caving is equally unthinkable, especially when you know (as Melissa did) that the guy is married. So that leaves you with a hybrid "be nice but not too nice" strategy that is acutely uncomfortable to prolong.
What do we do with acutely uncomfortable things? We share them, because shared pain is lessened. And we have a sharing culture now, don't we? Connected as never before, even at 30,000 feet?
Tweet...tweet...tweet...
People need to wake up. They need to understand the society that's a-building. We are moving towards a world of sousveillance....not Big Brother, but millions upon millions of Little Brothers who reach just as far. Some people find this terrifying. It need not be. There are many positives I can think of given a world extrapolated from current trends. One is the almost total elimination of crime. Only a very sick mind indeed would even consider murder, say, if his every action is likely to be seen by at least one camera, and probably many more, the locations of which he can't determine ahead of time.
In private is increasingly a meaningless term. Hitting on a woman in the privacy of your airplane seat is fraught with peril if you happen to be, ahem, married. Unbelievably, Presley had his own Twitter account. How stupid do you have to be?
I'm working on my retail tell-all memoir, originally titled "Tales from Aisle Ten" like several Breadbin posts (I'll be going with a different title, though). Because my discipline is non-existent, I have enlisted the services of a writing buddy to keep me honest. The deal is we each write every day, even if it's only two sentences. So far, I've skipped one day due to total work-related burnout...I could barely put two sentences together verbally. But otherwise it's coming along. I basically scrapped it and started from scratch and I've now surpassed my old word count: I'm sitting comfortably above twelve thousand words.
Blogging necessarily takes a back seat to that.
However, there's something that came up in the news the other day that tweaked my bloggerbrain.
Read and react...
To summarize: Married D-string actor removes his ring, hits on model on redeye flight. Model strings him along, tweeting the whole time, until her followers--armed with her hints--are able to identify the cad....whose career and marriage are most likely in tatters now. Model realizes (too late) what she has unleashed.
Actor is one of those 'washed in the blood of the Lamb Who Is JAAAAAY-SUS types (it almost goes without saying), but I'll refrain from further comment on that part of the story.
What interests me is that the reaction, which is split seemingly exactly in twain. Half the people whose comments I've read think the actor (Brad Presley) fully deserved the crap he's getting: serves him right for surreptitiously removing his wedding ring and then trying to cozy up to a woman not his wife. The other half says of the model (Melissa Stetten): what a bitch!
If you're interested, I heavily favour the former interpretation (and I did even before I found out how "Christian" Mr. Presley is). Being hit on by someone you're not interested in poses a real dilemma for a woman, especially when you have a few hours of proximity to look forward to. Telling him off is out of the question: some men won't take no for an answer, and you never know which ones those are by looking at them. Caving is equally unthinkable, especially when you know (as Melissa did) that the guy is married. So that leaves you with a hybrid "be nice but not too nice" strategy that is acutely uncomfortable to prolong.
What do we do with acutely uncomfortable things? We share them, because shared pain is lessened. And we have a sharing culture now, don't we? Connected as never before, even at 30,000 feet?
Tweet...tweet...tweet...
People need to wake up. They need to understand the society that's a-building. We are moving towards a world of sousveillance....not Big Brother, but millions upon millions of Little Brothers who reach just as far. Some people find this terrifying. It need not be. There are many positives I can think of given a world extrapolated from current trends. One is the almost total elimination of crime. Only a very sick mind indeed would even consider murder, say, if his every action is likely to be seen by at least one camera, and probably many more, the locations of which he can't determine ahead of time.
In private is increasingly a meaningless term. Hitting on a woman in the privacy of your airplane seat is fraught with peril if you happen to be, ahem, married. Unbelievably, Presley had his own Twitter account. How stupid do you have to be?
Sunday, June 03, 2012
Free tuition?
Topic for blog entry, as suggested by Kate on Facebook yesterday: "University tuition and why it should be free".
In some respects I am precisely the wrong person to ask for an opinion on this. I remain intensely cynical about university almost twenty years after dropping out of it. The reasons for my cynicism are legion, But the biggest has become a running tagline of mine over the years: tuition is far too high, since you shouldn't have to pay professors so much to read textbooks to you. Verbatim. Especially when you have to buy the textbooks, the prices of which are hideously inflated.
I've said that over and over, to varying degrees of online opprobrium. Yet no matter how many Reddit downvotes I garner for this sentiment, I'll keep repeating it, because it was my experience. Not just in one class, either. In most of them.
There was one class I took, "The Philosophy of Love, Sex, and Friendship". Bird course, right? Easy A? I initially selected this course just so I could rewrite a high school essay and get it (in effect) professionally critiqued. I had some odd thoughts on the subject. Still do, in fact. Many of them, Dear Reader, you have seen in this here Breadbin.
Anyway, it was a night class, 7 to 10 on Tuesdays, as I recall. The first Tuesday night I was sicker than the proverbial dog. Sore throat, aches, chills, you name it. The closer I got to the classroom, the sicker I felt. What to my wondering bleary eye should appear in that classroom but a syllabus. Syllabi, actually, a big pile of 'em, detailing absolutely everything relevant to that class. Readings. Assignments and due dates. The date, time, and location of the final exam. A note at the bottom to the effect that assignments could be handed into the professor's mailbox, and where exactly that mailbox was.
Yoink!
I walked out of the classroom that first night having never actually seen the prof, When I was feeling better, I digested the goldmine of information. Armed with this, I had no reason to actually attend the class, and so I didn't. At all. Ever. I handed in my assignments, including that essay, on time; they were available for pickup two weeks later where I'd dropped them off (the syllabus helpfully informed me).
I went into that final exam having not the slightest clue what would be on it. I got a B-plus in that course. Oh, yeah, and my essay? An A-, but nothing written on it that my high school teacher hadn't already inscribed on the truncated edition three years prior.
That's obscene, you know. What I did shouldn't have been allowed. And yet I hear from my university-aged friends that it's so much better now (or worse, depending on your point of view). Syllabi for most courses are now posted online. Assignments are handed in online, graded, and returned to you online.
Well, shit. What's the point of university at all, then? I can do "online" from anywhere. For that matter, between Khan Academy, TED talks, and a host of other such resources, I could, with discipline, mine the minds of millions and come away with the equivalent of a degree in any number of fields. All for the low and dropping price of a broadband connection.
This is the medium term future of education...by medium-term, I mean "in the foreseeable future, but before the implants show up". Eventually, you'll be able to glean knowledge just by installing the relevant software into your neural system.
I may not agree with piracy, but I certainly understand the motto the pirates live by: "information wants to be free".
In several countries, including Norway, Finland, Sweden and Denmark, tuition is already free. (Denmark even provides a monthly stipend to students). So it can be done: it is being done. All it takes is a wee paradigm shift: society needs to view free tuition as an investment worth making.
The consequence-obsessed bureaucrat in me would insist that a minimum GPA be maintained. Fall below that GPA and still graduate, you're on the hook for fifty percent of your educational costs. Drop out, and it's a hundred percent. (No penalty for changing programs within a year--many students realize early on that their chosen course of study isn't for them.)
I wish I'd been one of those many students. I took an English degree with no thought given to its pecuniary potential at all. People asked me what my major was, I said "English", and invariably they said "oh, so you want to be a teacher, then." The thought of teaching filled me with dread. Oh, I felt then (and still do) that I could be a good teacher, perhaps even a great one. But only for students who wanted to learn. Which, in my experience, was very few of them.
In hindsight -- which is perfect, depending on the hind you've sighted -- what I should have done was follow my best friend Jason into a Bachelor of Business Administration degree. My life would look markedly different right now, let me tell you. But the thought never occurred to me coming out of high school. Why would it? I'd never even taken business anything in high school, whereas I knew I was pretty damned good at English. It all goes back to that tragic misconception I'd harboured about the purpose of school: not to learn, but to show off what you've learned.
I've been talking about arts degrees as if that's all there is in the world of education. The fact is, university itself is far from the be-all and end-all of education. An argument can be made, in many cases, for a college/trade school education providing a more relevant foundation for a career path. Certainly society needs more people in the trades. The pay's not bad, either. As skills go, a carpenter or electrician is better positioned than a guy like me, who can ask "would you like fries with that" twenty seven different ways.
Should trade school be free?
Unlike university, there are actual costs attached to college and trade school. The people teaching you have real world experience, and so their time is considerably more valuable than any university professor's (the majority of professors have little to no interest in teaching anything to anyone anyway). You can't do trade school online. Tools cost. I'd suggest that public-private partnerships might provide an income stream for some institutions (this diploma brought to you by deWalt?) I do think students in such schools should probably buy their own tools with their own money...pride of ownership and all that. But otherwise I see no reason to perpetuate the outdated stereotype that college is a second-class education.
I'm a big fan of incentives. I've often felt that aspiring doctors, for instance, should be eligible for a discount of up to 100% on their university expenses provided they are willing to, say, practice where they're needed. If tuition is free across the board, you lose that carrot...and so you'd have to resort to a stick instead: set up shop in Toronto instead of Timmins and we'll thwack you with forty thousand dollars in student debt. The system can be gamed. And I think it should be. Because information does long to be free.
In some respects I am precisely the wrong person to ask for an opinion on this. I remain intensely cynical about university almost twenty years after dropping out of it. The reasons for my cynicism are legion, But the biggest has become a running tagline of mine over the years: tuition is far too high, since you shouldn't have to pay professors so much to read textbooks to you. Verbatim. Especially when you have to buy the textbooks, the prices of which are hideously inflated.
I've said that over and over, to varying degrees of online opprobrium. Yet no matter how many Reddit downvotes I garner for this sentiment, I'll keep repeating it, because it was my experience. Not just in one class, either. In most of them.
There was one class I took, "The Philosophy of Love, Sex, and Friendship". Bird course, right? Easy A? I initially selected this course just so I could rewrite a high school essay and get it (in effect) professionally critiqued. I had some odd thoughts on the subject. Still do, in fact. Many of them, Dear Reader, you have seen in this here Breadbin.
Anyway, it was a night class, 7 to 10 on Tuesdays, as I recall. The first Tuesday night I was sicker than the proverbial dog. Sore throat, aches, chills, you name it. The closer I got to the classroom, the sicker I felt. What to my wondering bleary eye should appear in that classroom but a syllabus. Syllabi, actually, a big pile of 'em, detailing absolutely everything relevant to that class. Readings. Assignments and due dates. The date, time, and location of the final exam. A note at the bottom to the effect that assignments could be handed into the professor's mailbox, and where exactly that mailbox was.
Yoink!
I walked out of the classroom that first night having never actually seen the prof, When I was feeling better, I digested the goldmine of information. Armed with this, I had no reason to actually attend the class, and so I didn't. At all. Ever. I handed in my assignments, including that essay, on time; they were available for pickup two weeks later where I'd dropped them off (the syllabus helpfully informed me).
I went into that final exam having not the slightest clue what would be on it. I got a B-plus in that course. Oh, yeah, and my essay? An A-, but nothing written on it that my high school teacher hadn't already inscribed on the truncated edition three years prior.
That's obscene, you know. What I did shouldn't have been allowed. And yet I hear from my university-aged friends that it's so much better now (or worse, depending on your point of view). Syllabi for most courses are now posted online. Assignments are handed in online, graded, and returned to you online.
Well, shit. What's the point of university at all, then? I can do "online" from anywhere. For that matter, between Khan Academy, TED talks, and a host of other such resources, I could, with discipline, mine the minds of millions and come away with the equivalent of a degree in any number of fields. All for the low and dropping price of a broadband connection.
This is the medium term future of education...by medium-term, I mean "in the foreseeable future, but before the implants show up". Eventually, you'll be able to glean knowledge just by installing the relevant software into your neural system.
I may not agree with piracy, but I certainly understand the motto the pirates live by: "information wants to be free".
In several countries, including Norway, Finland, Sweden and Denmark, tuition is already free. (Denmark even provides a monthly stipend to students). So it can be done: it is being done. All it takes is a wee paradigm shift: society needs to view free tuition as an investment worth making.
The consequence-obsessed bureaucrat in me would insist that a minimum GPA be maintained. Fall below that GPA and still graduate, you're on the hook for fifty percent of your educational costs. Drop out, and it's a hundred percent. (No penalty for changing programs within a year--many students realize early on that their chosen course of study isn't for them.)
I wish I'd been one of those many students. I took an English degree with no thought given to its pecuniary potential at all. People asked me what my major was, I said "English", and invariably they said "oh, so you want to be a teacher, then." The thought of teaching filled me with dread. Oh, I felt then (and still do) that I could be a good teacher, perhaps even a great one. But only for students who wanted to learn. Which, in my experience, was very few of them.
In hindsight -- which is perfect, depending on the hind you've sighted -- what I should have done was follow my best friend Jason into a Bachelor of Business Administration degree. My life would look markedly different right now, let me tell you. But the thought never occurred to me coming out of high school. Why would it? I'd never even taken business anything in high school, whereas I knew I was pretty damned good at English. It all goes back to that tragic misconception I'd harboured about the purpose of school: not to learn, but to show off what you've learned.
I've been talking about arts degrees as if that's all there is in the world of education. The fact is, university itself is far from the be-all and end-all of education. An argument can be made, in many cases, for a college/trade school education providing a more relevant foundation for a career path. Certainly society needs more people in the trades. The pay's not bad, either. As skills go, a carpenter or electrician is better positioned than a guy like me, who can ask "would you like fries with that" twenty seven different ways.
Should trade school be free?
Unlike university, there are actual costs attached to college and trade school. The people teaching you have real world experience, and so their time is considerably more valuable than any university professor's (the majority of professors have little to no interest in teaching anything to anyone anyway). You can't do trade school online. Tools cost. I'd suggest that public-private partnerships might provide an income stream for some institutions (this diploma brought to you by deWalt?) I do think students in such schools should probably buy their own tools with their own money...pride of ownership and all that. But otherwise I see no reason to perpetuate the outdated stereotype that college is a second-class education.
I'm a big fan of incentives. I've often felt that aspiring doctors, for instance, should be eligible for a discount of up to 100% on their university expenses provided they are willing to, say, practice where they're needed. If tuition is free across the board, you lose that carrot...and so you'd have to resort to a stick instead: set up shop in Toronto instead of Timmins and we'll thwack you with forty thousand dollars in student debt. The system can be gamed. And I think it should be. Because information does long to be free.
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Frightening
click to enlarge--if you dare
The above is an actual resume submitted somewhere in Ottawa, as found on Reddit.
It is disturbing and depressing. Terrifying, even.
After you've skimmed through this thing and noted the lowlights highlights, check out this person's education. He (I'm assuming it's a he; girls usually care a little more about how stupid they appear in public) claims to be in grade twelve. The final year of mandatory education in Ontario. I wonder what his future educational plans are. Does he want to perhaps major in seince?
And in terms of future employment, the possibilities seem limitless. Government always has fileing to do, after all. Or he might just spend the rest of his life working at Tim hortians and hangging with his friends.
I AM NOT BRAGGING when I say I knew how to spell every word in this resume by grade two, I distinctly recall getting in a heated argument with a classmate in second grade over how to spell the word "operation" (he was dead certain it was spelled o-p-e-r-a-s-h-u-n). The teacher had to intervene because I was actually offended that somebody would insist on spelling a word like that wrong.
By fifth grade I was helping craft resumes for my Mom, resumes that were fairly effective. What I mean to say is that the above "resume" fills me with something very close to existential horror.
First, of course, there's the disturbing fact this person is almost finished with his schooling, yet he can't spell simple words. I've railed against this reality before: it has gotten to the point where I wish I was Conservative so I could simply ignore it. Not only is this 'creative' spelling allowed, I'm told it's actually encouraged. This is supposedly because (a) actual written communication is almost extinct and (b) spell-check systems are evolving to the point where soon everything you type will be automatically perfected.
(Incidentally, how did this aspiring job-seeker miss the numerous red squiggly lines scattered throughout his masterpiece?)
I have two objections to this notion that correct and proper spelling is no longer necessary. One, autocorrect isn't anywhere near perfect, or even remotely competent. I can't understand for the life of me why people don't just turn this "feature" off. (Then again, I still don't really understand very much about texting in general, so ignore the old fogey behind the curtain.) And given the first objection, the second obtains: spelling things properly, along with using correct grammar, may not be strictly necessary anymore, but isn't it desirable?
The very few times I have been caught out with some kind of error in a document I've made public, I have reacted with (internalized, of course) abject shame. I do not like to appear stupid. I always thought this was a defining characteristic of humanity in general. But the older I get and the more examples of so-called 'professional' communication I run across, the more I realize that many people don't care how stupid they look. I do not understand this mindset. I am thoroughly incapable of assuming this mindset, and therefore I have no empathy whatsoever for the stupid people. This is, of course, a failing of mine, and I'll own it. But the people are still stupid, and I have no problem saying so.
Good God, man, if your spelling is that atrocious, get somebody else to write your resume! Then again, if you feel that 'hangging with friends' [sic] is something that belongs on a resume in any form, you need extensive remedial education before you can even think of working somewhere.
Friday, May 25, 2012
The Flip Side of the Coin
So what brought that on yesterday? Why did I feel the need to publicly affirm I've got it pretty damned good, when normally such a statement goes without saying?
It's because the law of gravity has been repealed. ("There is no gravity: the Earth just sucks.")
No joke, it seems like the world is teetering on a precipice of late, and my personal world, well nowhere near as dramatic, has reflected some of the zeitgeist.
Larger world first. It's wobbly. Greece is fixing to abandon the Eurozone; the fact it never should have been admitted in the first place has finally dawned on the movers and shakers. The markets continue to be held aloft on who knows what, but most people look at the stock market nowadays and snicker. (The Dow's new motto: "Delusional since 2008!") Everywhere I look I see jobs disappearing, wages being cut, pensions being slashed, and the government -- which used to at least pretend to be on our side, once -- is firmly in the pockets of Big Business and says as much in every press release. What's more. they've cunningly cultivated a widespread anti-union sentiment, such that an increasing number of Canadians are actually cheering the race to the bottom. Surely they'll change their tune when it's their wages. What's frustrating is that the Canada I grew up in had an intrinsic understanding that, to quote Marcus Aurelius, 'what benefits the hive benefits the bee'. But lately it's been 'SCREW YOU, I'VE GOT MINE'. And this is considered healthy.
Besides unions, our federal government has essentially declared war on science and the environment. Their every action betrays a wilful ignorance of reality...and that, more than anything else, is depressing.
Quebec gets it. The rest of Canada thinks the ongoing protests in Montreal are about a tuition hike. They are, in the sense that the First World War was about Gavrilo Princip. The reason the modest tuition hike is causing so much consternation is simple: Quebeckers are being asked to pay more for an education that increasingly means less and less, in a corrupt environment where dreams go to die. If the rest of the country was imbued with even the slightest Gallic sense of outrage, we'd all be protesting too.
It wasn't that long ago that a university degree meant, at the very least, a good shot at stable, long-term employment that paid a living wage. Today a B.A. is a glorified high school diploma and even a Ph.D. could leave you with more debt than prospects to pay it off.
Remember those halcyon days when one breadwinner could buy a home, furnish it, and raise a family in it? Now, granted, we forget how many luxuries we deem necessities nowadays, but the point remains: in many Canadian cities a home is out of reach for anyone not making six figures. And even then, you won't actually own your home for decades. Not pretty, and likely to get worse.
Personally...
Starting with Eva's dad and his cancer. See, here's the thing. I wrote a Breadbin entry a couple of weeks ago that barely scratched the surface. No disrespect meant to my father or stepfather: I wish I had gotten to know John Hopf better than I have since I married his daughter. I respect and admire him tremendously and more than anything, I wish I could tell him so in person. Day to day life seems like such a flimsy excuse when shoved up cheek by jowl with mortality. So I have to work. Yeah. I bet he wishes he could.
That friend I dumped? Is going to stay dumped, and that's still bumming me out. I had hoped she would see reason. I should have known better.
Add in the stress and strife of workaday life that we all deal with and things just seem a tad desolate of late. I've been averaging about five hours of sleep a night, which is nowhere near enough, but short of displacing the contents of our chest freezer -- which I'm pretty sure would land me in trouble -- I don't know how to increase that number. Ah, well, this too shall pass. I need to remind myself of my last post and expand on it in my mind. Above all, I must think positively. Instead of saying "I won't succeed", I'll say 'I WILL fail!"
It's because the law of gravity has been repealed. ("There is no gravity: the Earth just sucks.")
No joke, it seems like the world is teetering on a precipice of late, and my personal world, well nowhere near as dramatic, has reflected some of the zeitgeist.
Larger world first. It's wobbly. Greece is fixing to abandon the Eurozone; the fact it never should have been admitted in the first place has finally dawned on the movers and shakers. The markets continue to be held aloft on who knows what, but most people look at the stock market nowadays and snicker. (The Dow's new motto: "Delusional since 2008!") Everywhere I look I see jobs disappearing, wages being cut, pensions being slashed, and the government -- which used to at least pretend to be on our side, once -- is firmly in the pockets of Big Business and says as much in every press release. What's more. they've cunningly cultivated a widespread anti-union sentiment, such that an increasing number of Canadians are actually cheering the race to the bottom. Surely they'll change their tune when it's their wages. What's frustrating is that the Canada I grew up in had an intrinsic understanding that, to quote Marcus Aurelius, 'what benefits the hive benefits the bee'. But lately it's been 'SCREW YOU, I'VE GOT MINE'. And this is considered healthy.
Besides unions, our federal government has essentially declared war on science and the environment. Their every action betrays a wilful ignorance of reality...and that, more than anything else, is depressing.
Quebec gets it. The rest of Canada thinks the ongoing protests in Montreal are about a tuition hike. They are, in the sense that the First World War was about Gavrilo Princip. The reason the modest tuition hike is causing so much consternation is simple: Quebeckers are being asked to pay more for an education that increasingly means less and less, in a corrupt environment where dreams go to die. If the rest of the country was imbued with even the slightest Gallic sense of outrage, we'd all be protesting too.
It wasn't that long ago that a university degree meant, at the very least, a good shot at stable, long-term employment that paid a living wage. Today a B.A. is a glorified high school diploma and even a Ph.D. could leave you with more debt than prospects to pay it off.
Remember those halcyon days when one breadwinner could buy a home, furnish it, and raise a family in it? Now, granted, we forget how many luxuries we deem necessities nowadays, but the point remains: in many Canadian cities a home is out of reach for anyone not making six figures. And even then, you won't actually own your home for decades. Not pretty, and likely to get worse.
Personally...
Starting with Eva's dad and his cancer. See, here's the thing. I wrote a Breadbin entry a couple of weeks ago that barely scratched the surface. No disrespect meant to my father or stepfather: I wish I had gotten to know John Hopf better than I have since I married his daughter. I respect and admire him tremendously and more than anything, I wish I could tell him so in person. Day to day life seems like such a flimsy excuse when shoved up cheek by jowl with mortality. So I have to work. Yeah. I bet he wishes he could.
That friend I dumped? Is going to stay dumped, and that's still bumming me out. I had hoped she would see reason. I should have known better.
Add in the stress and strife of workaday life that we all deal with and things just seem a tad desolate of late. I've been averaging about five hours of sleep a night, which is nowhere near enough, but short of displacing the contents of our chest freezer -- which I'm pretty sure would land me in trouble -- I don't know how to increase that number. Ah, well, this too shall pass. I need to remind myself of my last post and expand on it in my mind. Above all, I must think positively. Instead of saying "I won't succeed", I'll say 'I WILL fail!"
Thursday, May 24, 2012
The Good Things, Part 1
Whenever I'm feeling put upon, irritable with fatigue, or just plain (ahem) hotter than the hinges of Hell, I try to take several mental steps back and look at the good things in my life. Of which I have an abundance.
I'll detail the obvious ones first.
Eva. She's a big one.
She's spent parts of the past several weeks, quite rightfully, taking care of her dad, which has left me by turns lonely and pissed at myself for feeling something as trivial as loneliness, given the situation. It's just that, as I said recently elsewhere, despite having been together for nearly thirteen years, I for one still feel newly wed. It's interesting, though, to recall my life's circumstances just prior to our first meeting. I'd been without a girlfriend for a couple of years at that point, and had only recently come to fully accept that fact. I won't say I cherished being alone, but I was okay with it. Somewhat content.
It was only in hindsight that I realized how much I had clung to previous partners. Lynne, Cathy, if you're out there somewhere, I am sincerely sorry for the divots. The mere thought of being alone terrified me. For no good reason, as it turns out. "Alone" is a state of being; "loneliness" a state of mind.
Eva did not and does not complete me. I am a complete human being in my own right. What she has done -- among many, many other things -- is allow me to be that complete human being. To challenge me when I need challenging; to comfort me when I need comforting; to share the journey of life. I can state with certainty there are very few people out there who would make half the lifemate for me that she does.
My friends, without whom my days would be duller than dishwater. Thank you for the rays of sunlight you have so generously shone my way. I love you all.
My pets, Tuxedo, Georgia-Peach, and the ancient and venerable B.B-cat, who still acts kittenish on occasion. They have enriched my life beyond measure, the three of them. Everybody who has met our Peach has fallen in love with her. These creatures love me unconditionally, and thus serve as a model for how I should love the people in my life.
And really, there is something to be said for the life's philosophy of a dog: if you can't play with it, eat it, or have sex with it, pee on it and walk away.
When work gets me down -- and let me be clear in saying that as much as I occasionally miss my last job, I don't regret my new job one bit -- I reflect that (a) I have a job that (b) pays enough, and is (c) located close enough to my house that I can actually come home for lunch. That last is worth a lot. Given that I do not and never will drive, my career horizon has narrowed beyond most people's easy comprehension. Finding a job close by that suits me as well as I suit it is something akin to a moderate lottery win, is my view. And yes, there are good people at my new store. Many of them. People that after just seven months, I actually look forward to seeing in the morning. Which is, of course, the whole point of a job. You thought it was the money? Nah.
What else makes my life? Music. Piano music, much of it Russian, is gradually overrunning my iPod, but I still have pop and country and progressive metal and jazz and a whole lot of brass band and world and who knows what else. Nothing is better for shaping a mood. If I'm stressed, a little Levon Minassian will set me right in about ninety seconds. I have a whole playlist of material to go to if I'm feeling negative. Something like Great Big Sea will fix that in a hurry.
It's just an ordinary day, it's all your state of mind
At the end of the day you've just got to say it's all right...
Books. I'm currently neck-deep in Neal Stephenson's REAMDE,, which is living up to, if not surpassing, the hype of its reviews. I've had absurdly good luck picking out books I tend to enjoy the hell out of, which is probably why I'm still allowed to just buy a couple at a time.
And so on down the list until we get to the little pleasures, the things that bring a smile to your face not in spite of but because they're so small. The indescribably right feeling of putting on fresh socks. The taste of a cold Diet Pepsi. The gentle caress of a hot shower. Bedtime. Well, actually, if I was being honest, bedtime would rank just below Eva in my personal pleasure palace, and you get your mind out of yon gutter. Not for nothing did I give this blog an epigram from a poem by Charles Mackay:
I have lived and I have loved;
I have waked and I have slept;
I have sung and I have danced;
I have smiled and I have wept;
I have won and wasted treasure;
I have had my fill of pleasure;
And all these things were weariness,
And some of them were dreariness;--
And all these things, but two things,
Were emptiness and pain:
And Love--it was the best of them;
And Sleep--worth all the rest of them.
Speaking of which...the bed beckons. And I feel better. Still, more must be written. On the morrow, dear reader. Good night.
I'll detail the obvious ones first.
Eva. She's a big one.
She's spent parts of the past several weeks, quite rightfully, taking care of her dad, which has left me by turns lonely and pissed at myself for feeling something as trivial as loneliness, given the situation. It's just that, as I said recently elsewhere, despite having been together for nearly thirteen years, I for one still feel newly wed. It's interesting, though, to recall my life's circumstances just prior to our first meeting. I'd been without a girlfriend for a couple of years at that point, and had only recently come to fully accept that fact. I won't say I cherished being alone, but I was okay with it. Somewhat content.
It was only in hindsight that I realized how much I had clung to previous partners. Lynne, Cathy, if you're out there somewhere, I am sincerely sorry for the divots. The mere thought of being alone terrified me. For no good reason, as it turns out. "Alone" is a state of being; "loneliness" a state of mind.
Eva did not and does not complete me. I am a complete human being in my own right. What she has done -- among many, many other things -- is allow me to be that complete human being. To challenge me when I need challenging; to comfort me when I need comforting; to share the journey of life. I can state with certainty there are very few people out there who would make half the lifemate for me that she does.
My friends, without whom my days would be duller than dishwater. Thank you for the rays of sunlight you have so generously shone my way. I love you all.
My pets, Tuxedo, Georgia-Peach, and the ancient and venerable B.B-cat, who still acts kittenish on occasion. They have enriched my life beyond measure, the three of them. Everybody who has met our Peach has fallen in love with her. These creatures love me unconditionally, and thus serve as a model for how I should love the people in my life.
And really, there is something to be said for the life's philosophy of a dog: if you can't play with it, eat it, or have sex with it, pee on it and walk away.
When work gets me down -- and let me be clear in saying that as much as I occasionally miss my last job, I don't regret my new job one bit -- I reflect that (a) I have a job that (b) pays enough, and is (c) located close enough to my house that I can actually come home for lunch. That last is worth a lot. Given that I do not and never will drive, my career horizon has narrowed beyond most people's easy comprehension. Finding a job close by that suits me as well as I suit it is something akin to a moderate lottery win, is my view. And yes, there are good people at my new store. Many of them. People that after just seven months, I actually look forward to seeing in the morning. Which is, of course, the whole point of a job. You thought it was the money? Nah.
What else makes my life? Music. Piano music, much of it Russian, is gradually overrunning my iPod, but I still have pop and country and progressive metal and jazz and a whole lot of brass band and world and who knows what else. Nothing is better for shaping a mood. If I'm stressed, a little Levon Minassian will set me right in about ninety seconds. I have a whole playlist of material to go to if I'm feeling negative. Something like Great Big Sea will fix that in a hurry.
It's just an ordinary day, it's all your state of mind
At the end of the day you've just got to say it's all right...
Books. I'm currently neck-deep in Neal Stephenson's REAMDE,, which is living up to, if not surpassing, the hype of its reviews. I've had absurdly good luck picking out books I tend to enjoy the hell out of, which is probably why I'm still allowed to just buy a couple at a time.
And so on down the list until we get to the little pleasures, the things that bring a smile to your face not in spite of but because they're so small. The indescribably right feeling of putting on fresh socks. The taste of a cold Diet Pepsi. The gentle caress of a hot shower. Bedtime. Well, actually, if I was being honest, bedtime would rank just below Eva in my personal pleasure palace, and you get your mind out of yon gutter. Not for nothing did I give this blog an epigram from a poem by Charles Mackay:
I have lived and I have loved;
I have waked and I have slept;
I have sung and I have danced;
I have smiled and I have wept;
I have won and wasted treasure;
I have had my fill of pleasure;
And all these things were weariness,
And some of them were dreariness;--
And all these things, but two things,
Were emptiness and pain:
And Love--it was the best of them;
And Sleep--worth all the rest of them.
Speaking of which...the bed beckons. And I feel better. Still, more must be written. On the morrow, dear reader. Good night.
Monday, May 21, 2012
Drip...drip...drip...
I will try to keep the bitching, whining and moaning to a minimum this season. Try. I can't guarantee success. Maybe it'll help if I get it out of my system right now.
It's hot.
It's too #$&*ing hot.
I'm not cut out for summer in southern Ontario. When the temperature gets much above 20 (68F, otherwise known as 'room' temperature), I get cranky, and when it settles around 30 (87F) or higher for a spell, I get downright miserable.
We get one day of lead time before the house starts exuding heat, inside and out, like a giant bellows in a blacksmith's foundry. The thermometer in the kitchen reads 28, the humidex is somewhere around sweaty-seven, and the design specs on my model of skin pallor are surely exceeded.
Nights are worse.
Yes, we do have an air conditioner in the bedroom...but if the temperature outside goes below 20 overnight, it'll freeze up, so it's only good on the nights that are still to come. So we make do with the Twindow fan, the fan at the base of the bed and a ceiling fan. Problem being that the more weight I have on me at night, the better I sleep...but on summer nights a sheet is often enough to make me start steaming.
Central air would solve this problem...if we didn't have electric baseboard heat, or if we were made of money.
There's a nice breeze coming through here now: the temperature has dropped ten degrees in the past two hours. It's still beastly hot in the house no matter how many windows we open. People wonder why I go to bed so early--it's 8:30 right now, and I'm almost ready--well, I get up at five whether I have to or not, and the biggest reason to get up at five when I don't have to is the temperature is (usually) refreshing.
Sometimes I wonder if I'd be better off living in Antarctica...
It's hot.
It's too #$&*ing hot.
I'm not cut out for summer in southern Ontario. When the temperature gets much above 20 (68F, otherwise known as 'room' temperature), I get cranky, and when it settles around 30 (87F) or higher for a spell, I get downright miserable.
We get one day of lead time before the house starts exuding heat, inside and out, like a giant bellows in a blacksmith's foundry. The thermometer in the kitchen reads 28, the humidex is somewhere around sweaty-seven, and the design specs on my model of skin pallor are surely exceeded.
Nights are worse.
Yes, we do have an air conditioner in the bedroom...but if the temperature outside goes below 20 overnight, it'll freeze up, so it's only good on the nights that are still to come. So we make do with the Twindow fan, the fan at the base of the bed and a ceiling fan. Problem being that the more weight I have on me at night, the better I sleep...but on summer nights a sheet is often enough to make me start steaming.
Central air would solve this problem...if we didn't have electric baseboard heat, or if we were made of money.
There's a nice breeze coming through here now: the temperature has dropped ten degrees in the past two hours. It's still beastly hot in the house no matter how many windows we open. People wonder why I go to bed so early--it's 8:30 right now, and I'm almost ready--well, I get up at five whether I have to or not, and the biggest reason to get up at five when I don't have to is the temperature is (usually) refreshing.
Sometimes I wonder if I'd be better off living in Antarctica...
Thursday, May 17, 2012
Depart From Me, I Never Knew You
I'm losing a friend.
This isn't the first friendship I've sunk, nor even the first friendship of long standing. (Though interestingly enough, this time it's the only other person I mention in that Breadbin entry.)
It hurt to dump Jen. It damn near kills to dump Darlene.
I've written about Darlene before...twice. Which is nothing to the number of times I wrote about her in 1988 and '89, let me tell you. Her name appears in my diary an average of more than once a day over those two years. (No, I wasn't a stalker...just a sad, forlorn, lovesick teenager.) The friendship spiked in the summer of '89, trembling on the knife-edge of becoming something much deeper, then settled down into a low drone. I lost contact with her for a few years, eventually found her again on Facebook, and picked up the threads as if they'd never dropped. She was my first love, and it does not detract from my love for my wife one iota to say I never stopped loving her. Still do, in fact, which is why this hurts so much.
I've tried to make allowances for her devout Christianity, just as she has no doubt made allowances for my heathenism. (Wow, that's a word.) We've had our friction points and invariably we've stepped back and agreed to disagree. Our politics don't mesh well, either, but I think that's related: when you get that deep into a faith, it informs -- some would say infects -- everything you believe. This is called fundamentalism, and whether the single track leads to Allah, Jesus, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, it's abhorrent.
So today, I learned -- from Darlene -- about this exhibit at the Museum of Science and Technology in Ottawa. She was predictably disgusted: God forbid kids learn about healthy sexuality. I mean that literally: apparently her God forbids it. She reproduced this letter sent to the government from something called the "Institute for Marriage and Family Canada" complaining about the exhibit. (I'm always on edge as soon as organizations like this make an appearance: their definition of "family" and mine don't match. Here they are upset that kids as young as twelve might see (gasp) s-e-x. One wonders what planet these people are living on. It certainly isn't mine.
Montreal isn't on that planet, either. When the exhibit showed there, there wasn't a single complaint.
The first boner of contention (sorry, can't help myself) had to do with the supposed lack of abstinence teaching. Well, there's two good reasons for that. The first is that this is an exhibition called "Sex". Have you ever seen a math class without numbers?
The second reason is much more telling to the fundamentalist frame of mind. ABSTINENCE 'SEXUAL EDUCATION DOES NOT WORK. Not if your objective is fewer teen pregnancies and fewer abortions. If your objective is following Scripture in total ignorance of its effects in the world, well, knock yourself out. All I ask is that you either admit you're being willfully blind, or that you actually do want more teenage pregnancies and more abortions.
I could cite study after study showing that, for instance, in places like the Netherlands where exhibitions like this might not have age limits at all, teen pregnancy is virtually unheard of. Comprehensive sex ed there starts in kindergarten.
No matter how many studies I cite, Scripture would trump all. I can't help getting angry at that. It reminds me far too much of our wilfully ignorant federal government. "Don't bother with alternate points of view and seriously, don't bother with facts to support them. We're Conservatives and fundamentalists. We don't listen and we don't care."
Or as she said: "There is no Christian education in this exhibit at all." I couldn't help thinking of the book burners who got rid of everything except the Bible on the grounds that no other book was necessary.
Well, that's "love the gay person, hate the fag" for you. It's also, oddly enough, very apt to describe how I feel about dear friends with hateful attitudes.
This isn't the first friendship I've sunk, nor even the first friendship of long standing. (Though interestingly enough, this time it's the only other person I mention in that Breadbin entry.)
It hurt to dump Jen. It damn near kills to dump Darlene.
I've written about Darlene before...twice. Which is nothing to the number of times I wrote about her in 1988 and '89, let me tell you. Her name appears in my diary an average of more than once a day over those two years. (No, I wasn't a stalker...just a sad, forlorn, lovesick teenager.) The friendship spiked in the summer of '89, trembling on the knife-edge of becoming something much deeper, then settled down into a low drone. I lost contact with her for a few years, eventually found her again on Facebook, and picked up the threads as if they'd never dropped. She was my first love, and it does not detract from my love for my wife one iota to say I never stopped loving her. Still do, in fact, which is why this hurts so much.
I've tried to make allowances for her devout Christianity, just as she has no doubt made allowances for my heathenism. (Wow, that's a word.) We've had our friction points and invariably we've stepped back and agreed to disagree. Our politics don't mesh well, either, but I think that's related: when you get that deep into a faith, it informs -- some would say infects -- everything you believe. This is called fundamentalism, and whether the single track leads to Allah, Jesus, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, it's abhorrent.
So today, I learned -- from Darlene -- about this exhibit at the Museum of Science and Technology in Ottawa. She was predictably disgusted: God forbid kids learn about healthy sexuality. I mean that literally: apparently her God forbids it. She reproduced this letter sent to the government from something called the "Institute for Marriage and Family Canada" complaining about the exhibit. (I'm always on edge as soon as organizations like this make an appearance: their definition of "family" and mine don't match. Here they are upset that kids as young as twelve might see (gasp) s-e-x. One wonders what planet these people are living on. It certainly isn't mine.
Montreal isn't on that planet, either. When the exhibit showed there, there wasn't a single complaint.
The first boner of contention (sorry, can't help myself) had to do with the supposed lack of abstinence teaching. Well, there's two good reasons for that. The first is that this is an exhibition called "Sex". Have you ever seen a math class without numbers?
The second reason is much more telling to the fundamentalist frame of mind. ABSTINENCE 'SEXUAL EDUCATION DOES NOT WORK. Not if your objective is fewer teen pregnancies and fewer abortions. If your objective is following Scripture in total ignorance of its effects in the world, well, knock yourself out. All I ask is that you either admit you're being willfully blind, or that you actually do want more teenage pregnancies and more abortions.
I could cite study after study showing that, for instance, in places like the Netherlands where exhibitions like this might not have age limits at all, teen pregnancy is virtually unheard of. Comprehensive sex ed there starts in kindergarten.
No matter how many studies I cite, Scripture would trump all. I can't help getting angry at that. It reminds me far too much of our wilfully ignorant federal government. "Don't bother with alternate points of view and seriously, don't bother with facts to support them. We're Conservatives and fundamentalists. We don't listen and we don't care."
Or as she said: "There is no Christian education in this exhibit at all." I couldn't help thinking of the book burners who got rid of everything except the Bible on the grounds that no other book was necessary.
That passage pushed me right to the edge. What tipped me over was her insistence that homosexuality is "not okay", is "abnormal", is "not right". That "God did not design the human body to have sex other than the 'normal' way". One man, one woman.
Hey, there's nothing wrong with one man, one woman. That's my marriage, and it's a great one.
But I have friends and relatives who are gay. How can I be friends, on any level, with someone who thinks these loved ones of mine are "abnormal" and "not right"?
What if it had been me? I would have lost out on what was, at one point, a pretty solid friendship.
What if it had been her? I asked her that tonight. I'm very interested to hear the answer to that. It's the only thing that kept me from outright unfriending her.
Doubtless I will miss countless Christian nuances here. I'm no longer capable of parsing the simplest Christian sentence. I can't read "love the sinner and hate the sin", for example, without seeing "hate the sinner" instead. When the "sin" is something intrinsic to your very nature such as your sexual orientation....Have you ever heard that song that goes "it's you I love, not the thought of you"? I always thought those were the stupidest lyrics I ever heard in my life: I love you so much, but every time I think of you, I puke.
Hey, there's nothing wrong with one man, one woman. That's my marriage, and it's a great one.
But I have friends and relatives who are gay. How can I be friends, on any level, with someone who thinks these loved ones of mine are "abnormal" and "not right"?
What if it had been me? I would have lost out on what was, at one point, a pretty solid friendship.
What if it had been her? I asked her that tonight. I'm very interested to hear the answer to that. It's the only thing that kept me from outright unfriending her.
Doubtless I will miss countless Christian nuances here. I'm no longer capable of parsing the simplest Christian sentence. I can't read "love the sinner and hate the sin", for example, without seeing "hate the sinner" instead. When the "sin" is something intrinsic to your very nature such as your sexual orientation....Have you ever heard that song that goes "it's you I love, not the thought of you"? I always thought those were the stupidest lyrics I ever heard in my life: I love you so much, but every time I think of you, I puke.
Well, that's "love the gay person, hate the fag" for you. It's also, oddly enough, very apt to describe how I feel about dear friends with hateful attitudes.
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