Premarital sex, or lack thereof, seems to be in the news lately. I'm not sure why. I ran across an article (on Fox News, natch) that got my blood boiling, not because of it's oh-so-pure message (frankly, I don't care if you never touch yourself or each other before you tie the knot), but because of its holier-than-thou tone. Steven Crowder calls anyone who has premarital sex a "harlot"and "floozie". Notably absent, of course, is any equivalent male derogatory term, though he does sound awfully self-satisfied (dare I say prideful?) of his unsullied premarital chastity. Goody-goody for him.
I'm not going to sidestep the scholarly articles, and there are reams of them, showing pretty conclusively that non-virgins at marriage face a higher risk of divorce. I've no doubt that's true. People who have sex before marriage are also statistically more likely to cheat on their spouse, and for much the same reasons, I suspect. Those who wait to have sex make an investment in the relationship and tend--I'd guess--to take their marriage more seriously. The same holds true in cultures that practice arranged marriages, incidentally.
Tell you something, though, and I'm sure you've heard this before: Correlation does not imply causation. That's a logical fallacy, a very common one. The ancient Romans knew it as post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Your marriage's longevity is not dependant on whether you've never touched each other beforehand, nor whether you've engaged in every sex act known to man and beast during your, uh, engagement. It is, rather, dependant almost entirely on your attitude towards the marriage itself.
I'll be the first person to tell you I DIDN'T wake up the night after my wedding and think holy cow, everything's changed. No, actually, I felt exactly the opposite both a day, a week, and a month later: holy cow, everything's the same. Crowder alludes (or thinks he does) to that in his little slice of sanctimony, dismissing his beachmate's wedding as "just another party" whereas his, of course, was a once-in-a-lifetime event.
My wedding was a once-in-a-lifetime event...but my wife and I were married on our third date. The ceremony only served as a public announcement (though what a glorious announcement it was!)
I'll explain that, because whenever I tell people about the story of how Eva and I met and mated, I get incredulous looks and dropped jaws. As longtime readers know, my wife and I first met at a job interview. I knew walking out of that interview that I had a job, and I strongly suspected I had a girlfriend. Sure enough, within a few short months I had to quit that job since dating the boss is a no-no. (Okay, truth be told I sucked at the job and would have been fired if I hadn't quit, but I like telling this story the other way.)
Our first date lasted something like fourteen hours. We bought a bed after our second date, on the grounds that I didn't want her killing her back on that shitty futon (and my back was a consideration, too.) And on the third date, I moved in with her. At that point, a wedding had already been discussed: it was, we both knew, a foregone conclusion.
We both knew. We just did. An inkling of that knowledge presented itself before our first date. Speaking for myself, it took time for me to figure out that what inkling was, and accept it for what it was when I did. Call it...a week. By that third date, as far as we were concerned, we were married and had an attitude towards our relationship pretty similar--honestly!--to the attitude we share today.
Some atavistic relic deep inside me waited for the prison door to slam shut with the pronouncement of the vows. I'm a man, after all. Part of man-lore, handed down by every comedian ever, is that marriage is a trap. Russell Peters goes so far as to call it a disease
.
But there was no disease and no trap. Marriage, I decided, was just like single life...only with more security. That was what my wedding got me: a promise of more of the same, a promise I gleefully accepted and just as gleefully gave.
Well before that wedding formalized the arrangement, Eva's grandmother asked her almost within my earshot if she had "tried me out". This woman was married for fifty nine years. Most emphatically happily married.
Indeed Eva had "tried me out". What's more, neither of us lived in a sexual bubble before we met each other. (Psst, little secret: it's not premarital sex if you don't marry the person, now is it?) We've been married coming up on twelve years, or well over thirteen if you count from when I like to. We're more than happy: we're content. That's what familiarity breeds, isn't it? Content?
Once again, like I seem to find myself doing with every blog post, I'm going to say "ours is not a better way, ours is only another way." If you choose to wait to have sex until after you're married, that is your prerogative and your decision. I won't judge you for it and I'd ask you extend me the same courtesy.
Monday, September 24, 2012
Saturday, September 15, 2012
Here We Go Again
Another NHL lockout.
I'll tell you just how asinine this is. It's exactly one hundred percent asinine. You have to figure Gary Bettman likes things that are asinine. That he revels in asininity.
Yes, I blame Bettman, not Fehr and not the NHLPA. For a myriad of reasons, which I'll get to in a moment.
First, let me tell you that unlike most red-blooded Canucks, I haven't spent the last twenty years hating Gary Bettman. Oh, I can't deny the New Yawk lawyer reminds me of a weasel, and the traditionalist in me doesn't appreciate the changes he brought to the game I love. But I confess to a certain admiration for the son-of-a-bitch. He's held his post for twenty years. This in a game where coaches and GMs are hired to be fired, where many players have a shelf life measured in seasons. You have to figure he's doing something right. He's willing to be the face of a rapacious group of team owners -- not a job I'd take at twice his salary -- and despite several missteps borne of the best of intentions, he's managed to grow the NHL into a $3.3 billion-a-year enterprise.
Those missteps, called the Lightning and the Panthers and especially the Coyotes, were borne of good intentions, no matter what Canadians might have to say on the subject. Florida might as well be a Canadian province in the winter, after all, and Phoenix is the fifth largest market in the United States. You can blame Bettman all you want for putting hockey teams in the Sun Belt -- I won't stop you -- but I gotta tell you, the American media shares some culpability here. Hockey isn't even an afterthought on ESPN.
(I've often wondered just why the game of hockey doesn't seem to translate into American. Of baseball, football, basketball and hockey, the latter is the fastest-paced by far, and it has that incipient violence that Americans seem to crave, It's got a mix of skill and brawn that really should appeal to the American sporting spirit. But doesn't. There was a time, back when the '94 Rangers ended their Cup drought, that hockey seemed poised on the verge of, well, not a renaissance, more of a naissance...then it petered out. Weird.)
All that said...
For every Tampa Bay Lightning team that has to comp tickets to the Stanley Cup Final (and isn't that just sad?) ... there's the Nashville Predators, home of the "hockey tonk" with a rabid fan base. There are the L.A. Kings, the team Gretzky built, still selling out games years after Wayne and last year's Cup winners. Carolina's another team in a non-traditional market doing better than many Canadians think they have a right to be.
The league as a whole is doing quite well: an average of seven percent growth in hockey-related revenues over the past few years. Not too shabby given the recession and all. There are a few teams drowning in a sea of red ink, besides the aforementioned Coyotes. The Sharks in San Jose were doing relatively well until recently; the Islanders in New York would still be doing well were it not for about two decades of colossally inept management. As a Leaf fan, the situation in New York is almost enough to make me feel better about Harold Ballard. Almost.
These teams could be eliminated, or more likely moved. Southern Ontario alone could easily support two more NHL teams, to the great benefit of the league. They've relocated Atlanta franchises twice, after all, both times to Western Canada. But relocation is an ego-blow and the people we're talking about here have large egos. Odds are pretty good that even the Coyotes will be staying put a while longer.
Which brings us to the current "impasse" and lockout.
I'd like to emphasize lockout. THIS IS NOT A STRIKE. I heard people bandying the word strike around in 2004 and it bothered me then; it really bothers me now. The players are not withdrawing their services. They want to play. The owners are not giving them the opportunity because -- we're told -- the players make too much money. Well, I ask you, who signed the players to their contracts? Who decided the value of the Scott Gomezes and Mike Komisareks of the world?
Yes, this is a "crisis" entirely of the owners' manufacture. The NHLPA recognizes this, and has offered a revenue sharing model to alleviate some of the financial difficulty of the league's weaker teams. The problem with that, of course, is that the richer owners would have to forfeit some of their wealth. They don't want to give more money to the players and they sure as hell don't want to share it with each other. Nope nope nope nope nope, it's mine all mine ALLMINEALLMINEALLMINE--
I must repeat: the players, to a man, want to play. So why not start the season on time and negotiate behind the scenes? Is there any good reason the fans -- who ultimately pay both the owners and the players -- should have to suffer through so much as one hockeyless Saturday night? I think not. But the owners believe, rightly or wrongly, that the fans will come back, as they did once already.
I think this time they're wrong. I think that should this lockout persist past American Thanksgiving, many NHL fans will abandon the league and become fans of their local junior franchises, or maybe they'll give up hockey altogether. And that, too, would be the fault of the owners.
(My money's on this being a short lockout, simply because the league is doing as well as it is. This isn't 2004, when the league lost hundreds of millions of dollars. They've just signed a lucrative American television deal of the sort that has eluded them for years, and that money is obviously forfeit once their regular season starts (or doesn't start, as the case may be). The owners are stupid, but they can't be that stupid.
I hope.
I'll tell you just how asinine this is. It's exactly one hundred percent asinine. You have to figure Gary Bettman likes things that are asinine. That he revels in asininity.
Yes, I blame Bettman, not Fehr and not the NHLPA. For a myriad of reasons, which I'll get to in a moment.
First, let me tell you that unlike most red-blooded Canucks, I haven't spent the last twenty years hating Gary Bettman. Oh, I can't deny the New Yawk lawyer reminds me of a weasel, and the traditionalist in me doesn't appreciate the changes he brought to the game I love. But I confess to a certain admiration for the son-of-a-bitch. He's held his post for twenty years. This in a game where coaches and GMs are hired to be fired, where many players have a shelf life measured in seasons. You have to figure he's doing something right. He's willing to be the face of a rapacious group of team owners -- not a job I'd take at twice his salary -- and despite several missteps borne of the best of intentions, he's managed to grow the NHL into a $3.3 billion-a-year enterprise.
Those missteps, called the Lightning and the Panthers and especially the Coyotes, were borne of good intentions, no matter what Canadians might have to say on the subject. Florida might as well be a Canadian province in the winter, after all, and Phoenix is the fifth largest market in the United States. You can blame Bettman all you want for putting hockey teams in the Sun Belt -- I won't stop you -- but I gotta tell you, the American media shares some culpability here. Hockey isn't even an afterthought on ESPN.
(I've often wondered just why the game of hockey doesn't seem to translate into American. Of baseball, football, basketball and hockey, the latter is the fastest-paced by far, and it has that incipient violence that Americans seem to crave, It's got a mix of skill and brawn that really should appeal to the American sporting spirit. But doesn't. There was a time, back when the '94 Rangers ended their Cup drought, that hockey seemed poised on the verge of, well, not a renaissance, more of a naissance...then it petered out. Weird.)
All that said...
For every Tampa Bay Lightning team that has to comp tickets to the Stanley Cup Final (and isn't that just sad?) ... there's the Nashville Predators, home of the "hockey tonk" with a rabid fan base. There are the L.A. Kings, the team Gretzky built, still selling out games years after Wayne and last year's Cup winners. Carolina's another team in a non-traditional market doing better than many Canadians think they have a right to be.
The league as a whole is doing quite well: an average of seven percent growth in hockey-related revenues over the past few years. Not too shabby given the recession and all. There are a few teams drowning in a sea of red ink, besides the aforementioned Coyotes. The Sharks in San Jose were doing relatively well until recently; the Islanders in New York would still be doing well were it not for about two decades of colossally inept management. As a Leaf fan, the situation in New York is almost enough to make me feel better about Harold Ballard. Almost.
These teams could be eliminated, or more likely moved. Southern Ontario alone could easily support two more NHL teams, to the great benefit of the league. They've relocated Atlanta franchises twice, after all, both times to Western Canada. But relocation is an ego-blow and the people we're talking about here have large egos. Odds are pretty good that even the Coyotes will be staying put a while longer.
Which brings us to the current "impasse" and lockout.
I'd like to emphasize lockout. THIS IS NOT A STRIKE. I heard people bandying the word strike around in 2004 and it bothered me then; it really bothers me now. The players are not withdrawing their services. They want to play. The owners are not giving them the opportunity because -- we're told -- the players make too much money. Well, I ask you, who signed the players to their contracts? Who decided the value of the Scott Gomezes and Mike Komisareks of the world?
Yes, this is a "crisis" entirely of the owners' manufacture. The NHLPA recognizes this, and has offered a revenue sharing model to alleviate some of the financial difficulty of the league's weaker teams. The problem with that, of course, is that the richer owners would have to forfeit some of their wealth. They don't want to give more money to the players and they sure as hell don't want to share it with each other. Nope nope nope nope nope, it's mine all mine ALLMINEALLMINEALLMINE--
I must repeat: the players, to a man, want to play. So why not start the season on time and negotiate behind the scenes? Is there any good reason the fans -- who ultimately pay both the owners and the players -- should have to suffer through so much as one hockeyless Saturday night? I think not. But the owners believe, rightly or wrongly, that the fans will come back, as they did once already.
I think this time they're wrong. I think that should this lockout persist past American Thanksgiving, many NHL fans will abandon the league and become fans of their local junior franchises, or maybe they'll give up hockey altogether. And that, too, would be the fault of the owners.
(My money's on this being a short lockout, simply because the league is doing as well as it is. This isn't 2004, when the league lost hundreds of millions of dollars. They've just signed a lucrative American television deal of the sort that has eluded them for years, and that money is obviously forfeit once their regular season starts (or doesn't start, as the case may be). The owners are stupid, but they can't be that stupid.
I hope.
Sunday, September 09, 2012
Into the Graveyard
Relax, folks, this post has nothing to do with death at all.
I'm staring a string of six night shifts in the face. Ugly face, let me tell you.
I used to work nights almost exclusively. I've done it for three separate variety store chains as well as McDonald's. We're talking about five years or so here, and you can take those five years and subtract them from my expected lifespan. For those years I never really got fully to sleep and I never really came fully awake. I existed--hard to say lived--in the half-world, suppressing jaw-cracking yawns, wondering how it was I could rise from bed every evening more tired than I was when I fell into it every morning. (7-Eleven was notorious for occasionally throwing a 7am-3pm or 3pm-11pm shift in amongst all the overnighters, which depleted me further. It was something akin to perpetual jet lag.)
I'm a lark by nature, usually up by six a.m. at the latest whether I need to be or not. That said, I don't mind the night shifts in and of themselves: I actually rather enjoy them, especially now that I'm well away from the endless parade of drunken louts that stained my nights twenty years ago. Much more work can be accomplished, partly because there are no customers, partly because comfortable clothes can be worn and tunes can be cranked.) I remember rocking out to Winger, of all things, at Mickey Dees in the early nineties...now I have a radio station in my pocket, eclectic as hell and endlessly energizing if I want it to be.
No, the night shifts are just fine. The problem is sleeping between them. The last time I pulled this stunt, I barely slept at all for damn near nine revolutions of the clock. I'd say no more than three or four hours of sleep in every twenty four hour period, and none of it restful or restorative. I fell violently ill and missed the last of my scheduled night shifts altogether.
You can tell me to keep the room dark and quiet and cool, and I can do all that. Our bedroom curtains are a thick, deep and lustrous green and they block out sunlight very well. Aside from marauding telemarketers (the do-not-call list in Canada is a deeply unfunny joke), the house is fairly quiet during the day. I can play Georgia-ball in the morning long enough to tucker out the Peach for the day (the Tux is a sleepy rug about twenty seven hours a day anyway). And I have A/C in the bedroom in case summer hasn't quite finished tormenting me.
None of that does a damn thing to shut that bitch Circadia up. She cheeps and chirps away from sunup to sundown, telling the world it's time to be awake, damnit, up and at 'em, get your ass out of bed! After awhile you get to romanticizing comas and thinking about clocking yourself in the noggin with a frying pan.
My mother-in-law very kindly gave me some fortifications against Circadia's incessant chittering and my wife is prepared to add her own should the need arise. I certainly don't need a repeat of that last zombified week.
I know I just got finished saying the Breadbin is back open for business--but it will likely be shuttered for the next week or so.
I'm staring a string of six night shifts in the face. Ugly face, let me tell you.
I used to work nights almost exclusively. I've done it for three separate variety store chains as well as McDonald's. We're talking about five years or so here, and you can take those five years and subtract them from my expected lifespan. For those years I never really got fully to sleep and I never really came fully awake. I existed--hard to say lived--in the half-world, suppressing jaw-cracking yawns, wondering how it was I could rise from bed every evening more tired than I was when I fell into it every morning. (7-Eleven was notorious for occasionally throwing a 7am-3pm or 3pm-11pm shift in amongst all the overnighters, which depleted me further. It was something akin to perpetual jet lag.)
I'm a lark by nature, usually up by six a.m. at the latest whether I need to be or not. That said, I don't mind the night shifts in and of themselves: I actually rather enjoy them, especially now that I'm well away from the endless parade of drunken louts that stained my nights twenty years ago. Much more work can be accomplished, partly because there are no customers, partly because comfortable clothes can be worn and tunes can be cranked.) I remember rocking out to Winger, of all things, at Mickey Dees in the early nineties...now I have a radio station in my pocket, eclectic as hell and endlessly energizing if I want it to be.
No, the night shifts are just fine. The problem is sleeping between them. The last time I pulled this stunt, I barely slept at all for damn near nine revolutions of the clock. I'd say no more than three or four hours of sleep in every twenty four hour period, and none of it restful or restorative. I fell violently ill and missed the last of my scheduled night shifts altogether.
You can tell me to keep the room dark and quiet and cool, and I can do all that. Our bedroom curtains are a thick, deep and lustrous green and they block out sunlight very well. Aside from marauding telemarketers (the do-not-call list in Canada is a deeply unfunny joke), the house is fairly quiet during the day. I can play Georgia-ball in the morning long enough to tucker out the Peach for the day (the Tux is a sleepy rug about twenty seven hours a day anyway). And I have A/C in the bedroom in case summer hasn't quite finished tormenting me.
None of that does a damn thing to shut that bitch Circadia up. She cheeps and chirps away from sunup to sundown, telling the world it's time to be awake, damnit, up and at 'em, get your ass out of bed! After awhile you get to romanticizing comas and thinking about clocking yourself in the noggin with a frying pan.
My mother-in-law very kindly gave me some fortifications against Circadia's incessant chittering and my wife is prepared to add her own should the need arise. I certainly don't need a repeat of that last zombified week.
I know I just got finished saying the Breadbin is back open for business--but it will likely be shuttered for the next week or so.
Thursday, September 06, 2012
Life And Death and Life
You will have noticed that I have not written much in the blog for most of this calendar year.
From a couple of recent posts, you may be able to glean why.
My father-in-law passed away this past Monday after a hell of a battle with cancer. I will draw a curtain of privacy around the details. Suffice it to say I have now seen two kinds of death, the sudden and the prolonged, and I hope I'm given a choice, because I know which one I'd choose. I can take pain, I can take suffering: when the only prospect after pain and suffering is death--no thank you.
That said--sudden death remains a vivid nightmare for me. Not so much mine. I'm not afraid of death at all. It seems silly to be afraid of something everyone must do at some point--it'd be like having a morbid terror of eating, or defecating. But the thought that someone I love can die at any time! sends a chill across my heart. It's a selfish chill: I see that now. If a death is owed, and nothing else in life is as sure--then that death is better paid in one lump sum than in instalments. Yes, I see that now.
The battle affected me deeply. For one thing, nothing else really seemed worth writing about as it raged. The rest of the world pales into utter insignificance when you're dealing with life and imminent death. All else is trivia. This may sound silly -- hell, I have no doubt my father-in-law would have no use for this line of reasoning at all -- but it is, nonetheless, true. I couldn't find it in me to care about much of anything beyond my wife and her family. I still feel that way, truth be told. It's hard to pick up the threads of your own life after you watch someone else's get cruelly snipped.
Grief has a way of toying with your mind. When my Uncle Ted died, I confess I didn't feel much of anything for weeks. I felt nothing, that is, except steadily mounting guilt at feeling nothing. When an uncle dies, especially one as loved, you're supposed to grieve, right? It was as if I didn't know how.
(And then one day it occurred to me in the context of nothing at all that I would never see my Uncle Ted again...and a dam I didn't even know was there suddenly burst and left me floundering in a flood of tears.)
I've cried for my father-in-law, a little almost every day over the past six months. Again, he'd as like have no use for that. And he'd have a point, because even knowing the outcome of this pitched battle in advance didn't really do a damned thing to lessen the wave of grief I felt when it was over. What use tears, if they don't even lessen the sadness? Especially when you know the person you're grieving for would want -- expect -- you to minimize his death, and, if anything, celebrate his life instead?
My own father laughs in the face of death. Then again, in his career as a police officer, he saw vastly more than his share of it and he has the policeman's way of dealing with stress down to a fine art: he turns it into a joke. He's told me at various times that his funeral will involve (a) Whooppee cushions under everyone's seats; (b) a remote-control laughing box; (c) a tape-recording of his voice saying that yes, as he expected, he's been sent to Hell...but luckily, he remembered to bring the Fire Department's hose with him and now it's one big party down here. The only tears he'd welcome are tears of laughter.
And yet...
There are two funeral homes in Parry Sound, his childhood home and the closest town of any size to his home today. The practice at one of them, for as long as I can remember, has been to announce deaths on a bistro-like easel outside on the sidewalk. My father unfailingly refers to this easel card as "the menu", as in "who's on the menu today". Yes, he actually says this out loud. Often.
(Imagine my mingled horror and hilarity when, in researching this blog, I checked the website for this funeral home and found...right on its home page...a menu. Done up in restaurant-like script.
He checks "the menu" quite often and always has. The biggest reason for this, I think, is that at any given time he knows somebody on it, or at least knows of him or her. Police officer, remember? It seemed to my childhood self that Dad knew everybody in that town of six thousand, not to mention the outlying areas. It still seems that way today.
But I catch myself wondering sometimes, as my father's age steadily accrues, if today he's reached that stage of life where he's checking "the menu" not so much to see who has died, but to see who he has outlived. The elderly--a word I flat-out refuse to associate with my father, just as I couldn't associate it with my wife's dad--often check the obituaries in a spirit of mad competitiveness. Something about that I find disquieting. I hope that's not top, or even bottom, of mind to my dad as he checks his "menu". Because when you start outliving people, it's only a matter of time until you're outlived yourself.
No, death doesn't scare me. Dying, on the other hand...
My dad's day will come. My mom's day, my wife's day--I don't give a fart in a glove about my day, but I look at all those other days as monsters hidden in the bushes and I want to take them out somehow, if only I could see them. And then there are the warning shots--my father's heart attack last year, more recent heart attacks in two colleagues and a friend, all three of them of an age that's awfully similar to mine and therefore my wife's.
Get it out of your mind, Ken.
I try, I try, but nothing else has really been in my mind for half a year, now. I won't get all melodramatic and say I've forgotten how to think. No, it's more like I've forgotten what else there is to think about. And so--
Life must go on. My father-in-law would be the first to say it, and he'd say it with conviction. As with anything else that happens for good or ill, it's up to us to determine what to do next, and how to do it. I can think of no better tribute to my wife's dad than to live life as he lived it, and that's what I intend to do as soon as this novocaine wears off. The alternative is to sit in a dumb haze waiting for the next loved one to be picked off...and the next...and the next...
No. Fresh bread will arrive in this Breadbin with more regularity, henceforth. Life must go on.
From a couple of recent posts, you may be able to glean why.
My father-in-law passed away this past Monday after a hell of a battle with cancer. I will draw a curtain of privacy around the details. Suffice it to say I have now seen two kinds of death, the sudden and the prolonged, and I hope I'm given a choice, because I know which one I'd choose. I can take pain, I can take suffering: when the only prospect after pain and suffering is death--no thank you.
That said--sudden death remains a vivid nightmare for me. Not so much mine. I'm not afraid of death at all. It seems silly to be afraid of something everyone must do at some point--it'd be like having a morbid terror of eating, or defecating. But the thought that someone I love can die at any time! sends a chill across my heart. It's a selfish chill: I see that now. If a death is owed, and nothing else in life is as sure--then that death is better paid in one lump sum than in instalments. Yes, I see that now.
The battle affected me deeply. For one thing, nothing else really seemed worth writing about as it raged. The rest of the world pales into utter insignificance when you're dealing with life and imminent death. All else is trivia. This may sound silly -- hell, I have no doubt my father-in-law would have no use for this line of reasoning at all -- but it is, nonetheless, true. I couldn't find it in me to care about much of anything beyond my wife and her family. I still feel that way, truth be told. It's hard to pick up the threads of your own life after you watch someone else's get cruelly snipped.
Grief has a way of toying with your mind. When my Uncle Ted died, I confess I didn't feel much of anything for weeks. I felt nothing, that is, except steadily mounting guilt at feeling nothing. When an uncle dies, especially one as loved, you're supposed to grieve, right? It was as if I didn't know how.
(And then one day it occurred to me in the context of nothing at all that I would never see my Uncle Ted again...and a dam I didn't even know was there suddenly burst and left me floundering in a flood of tears.)
I've cried for my father-in-law, a little almost every day over the past six months. Again, he'd as like have no use for that. And he'd have a point, because even knowing the outcome of this pitched battle in advance didn't really do a damned thing to lessen the wave of grief I felt when it was over. What use tears, if they don't even lessen the sadness? Especially when you know the person you're grieving for would want -- expect -- you to minimize his death, and, if anything, celebrate his life instead?
My own father laughs in the face of death. Then again, in his career as a police officer, he saw vastly more than his share of it and he has the policeman's way of dealing with stress down to a fine art: he turns it into a joke. He's told me at various times that his funeral will involve (a) Whooppee cushions under everyone's seats; (b) a remote-control laughing box; (c) a tape-recording of his voice saying that yes, as he expected, he's been sent to Hell...but luckily, he remembered to bring the Fire Department's hose with him and now it's one big party down here. The only tears he'd welcome are tears of laughter.
And yet...
There are two funeral homes in Parry Sound, his childhood home and the closest town of any size to his home today. The practice at one of them, for as long as I can remember, has been to announce deaths on a bistro-like easel outside on the sidewalk. My father unfailingly refers to this easel card as "the menu", as in "who's on the menu today". Yes, he actually says this out loud. Often.
(Imagine my mingled horror and hilarity when, in researching this blog, I checked the website for this funeral home and found...right on its home page...a menu. Done up in restaurant-like script.
He checks "the menu" quite often and always has. The biggest reason for this, I think, is that at any given time he knows somebody on it, or at least knows of him or her. Police officer, remember? It seemed to my childhood self that Dad knew everybody in that town of six thousand, not to mention the outlying areas. It still seems that way today.
But I catch myself wondering sometimes, as my father's age steadily accrues, if today he's reached that stage of life where he's checking "the menu" not so much to see who has died, but to see who he has outlived. The elderly--a word I flat-out refuse to associate with my father, just as I couldn't associate it with my wife's dad--often check the obituaries in a spirit of mad competitiveness. Something about that I find disquieting. I hope that's not top, or even bottom, of mind to my dad as he checks his "menu". Because when you start outliving people, it's only a matter of time until you're outlived yourself.
No, death doesn't scare me. Dying, on the other hand...
My dad's day will come. My mom's day, my wife's day--I don't give a fart in a glove about my day, but I look at all those other days as monsters hidden in the bushes and I want to take them out somehow, if only I could see them. And then there are the warning shots--my father's heart attack last year, more recent heart attacks in two colleagues and a friend, all three of them of an age that's awfully similar to mine and therefore my wife's.
Get it out of your mind, Ken.
I try, I try, but nothing else has really been in my mind for half a year, now. I won't get all melodramatic and say I've forgotten how to think. No, it's more like I've forgotten what else there is to think about. And so--
Life must go on. My father-in-law would be the first to say it, and he'd say it with conviction. As with anything else that happens for good or ill, it's up to us to determine what to do next, and how to do it. I can think of no better tribute to my wife's dad than to live life as he lived it, and that's what I intend to do as soon as this novocaine wears off. The alternative is to sit in a dumb haze waiting for the next loved one to be picked off...and the next...and the next...
No. Fresh bread will arrive in this Breadbin with more regularity, henceforth. Life must go on.
Sunday, August 19, 2012
A Day In The Park
It's been, all in all, a pretty damned fine day in the park.
The weather's been all over the place: partly sunny, partly cloudy, a passing shower here and there, a couple of which were heavy enough to temporarily shut down all the rides and send guests scurrying for cover. And the lines for the rides were occasionally a little much to take: nobody likes standing still for any length of time, least of all you.
You've been everywhere in the park, it seemed. Know half the guests by name, and more than a few of the employees; hell, back in the mid-afternoon you ran the place yourself for a while, just to see how it was, and it was...pretty damned fine. Between ten and noon you built a couple of shops, a ride or two, and created a marquee eatery that looks as if it'll be satisfying guests for a century or longer. You'd spent a goodly part of the day behind the scenes, sometimes tending the gardens that you'd also created to beautify the park, sometimes out in the fishpond off in the woods behind the back lot, alone with the fish and your thoughts. You raised your family to embody many of the same qualities you have yourself: your son is tinkering around the park even now, making sure everything's running as it should be--oh, there he is with his daughter, your lovely grand-daughter, stepping on one of the kiddie rides, holding her safe and revelling in her angelic grin, so like his own...Your daughter is a fixer, too: she can look at the entire park at a glance and tell you where the loose bolts are, how much food the concessions are going through, and even what tomorrow's attendance is likely to be.
Behind every great man is a woman rolling her eyes, and the wife of your life rolls hers with regularity at the antics you get up to, but you're not fooled. You're blessed with prodigious strength, of course...but even more comes from the love of a strong woman who has filled the day with laughter and affection...it's been a pretty damned fine day. Still plenty of time left before closing: the sun is a red ball sinking towards the horizon and the park doesn't close until midnight. But...what's that over there?
Who built that roller coaster without telling you about it? Why couldn't you see it before now? It's huge, gigantic, a monstrosity that towers over your family park. Even stranger, not many of the guests seem not to notice it at all. You can see the turnstiles of the lineup, and they're virtually empty. The few people in line are moving as if drugged, with vaguely frightened looks on their faces.
You go over to investigate this intrusion on your park and find yourself in line to ride it. That wasn't your intention, of course, and you grasp right off that nobody actually wants to ride this thing...and yet here you are in line, and if you turn around and try to duck out of it, you find a transparent wall slowly gliding along behind you, preventing you from taking so much as one step backwards. That's frightening...nowhere else today have you had the sensation of being pushed along a certain course. You've been setting your own course. But here you are in the dusk of the day being guided towards something unknown, something that, truth be told, you'd rather not know. There's a sign that says SINGLE RIDERS ONLY, and that's scary, too. But you've got courage, a day in the park has granted you a seemingly limitless reserve of it, and so you steel yourself and walk forward. Your back hurts...your whole body hurts. It's been a long day. But you walk forward and soon enough you're in the queuing area, ready to board the train. It's painted black--dark black, as if there could be such a thing--and you can see that this is a coaster you ride laying down.
The wall behind you gives one last jolt and tumbles you into the train. There is pain, and a real sense of humiliation--who built this why didn't I see it why can't I get off of it--that hurts worse. And then the train starts to move.
It says SINGLE RIDERS ONLY, and you're definitely alone in this train...or are you? If you look to your right, you can see your wife, grimly holding your hand; if you look to the left, you son and daughter are right there with you, along with their families, and there's a whole host of friends in your peripheral vision. You're not alone. Not even close. Your dogs are even in this with you, lending what love they can.
The lift chain grabs your train and begins to pull it up a long, long hill. You're torn. On the one hand, you never wanted to be on this thing in the first place and you wish it would just hurry up and be over. On the other hand, what goes up must come down and any hill this high must be followed by one hell of a drop.
You can see the whole park from up here. The rides and shops you built, standing proudly in the setting sun. The little lake--a fish just jumped there, see that? Your gardens are soaking up the last of the sun's rays. If you look closely--you can do that, somehow, even this high up--you can see that all's well down there. It should be. That's how you made it.
And then the crest of the hill: a voice intones 'KEEP YOUR ARMS AND LEGS INSIDE THE TRAIN AT ALL TIMES', which is a laugh, you can't move even though you'd like to; the train seems to pause on the edge of eternity before it begins to plummet towards the ground. Some people scream along about now. You're not one of them. Oh, that's not to say this is fun, exactly, but later on when you get off this thing, you might be able to appreciate it a little better. You close your eyes.
An unknown time later, the train approaches the station where you boarded. To the left, where you got on, you can see your family and friends--not in line, just milling around. There's tears and laughter and lots of talk about your day in the park and how wonderful it's been to share it with you. And then you look to the right....and there's a whole new park out there, so much bigger...and there are people here, too, people you know, people you love, and they're beckoning to you, telling you to come on, there's so much more to see and do, and you find you can, you can get up and walk...or float, or fly, or whatever you choose to do. With one last look back at the family and friends who have shared your day, you understand that when they choose to, they'll hop on the dilly of a coaster you just rode, and get off and join you. And you step out into a whole new world.
The weather's been all over the place: partly sunny, partly cloudy, a passing shower here and there, a couple of which were heavy enough to temporarily shut down all the rides and send guests scurrying for cover. And the lines for the rides were occasionally a little much to take: nobody likes standing still for any length of time, least of all you.
You've been everywhere in the park, it seemed. Know half the guests by name, and more than a few of the employees; hell, back in the mid-afternoon you ran the place yourself for a while, just to see how it was, and it was...pretty damned fine. Between ten and noon you built a couple of shops, a ride or two, and created a marquee eatery that looks as if it'll be satisfying guests for a century or longer. You'd spent a goodly part of the day behind the scenes, sometimes tending the gardens that you'd also created to beautify the park, sometimes out in the fishpond off in the woods behind the back lot, alone with the fish and your thoughts. You raised your family to embody many of the same qualities you have yourself: your son is tinkering around the park even now, making sure everything's running as it should be--oh, there he is with his daughter, your lovely grand-daughter, stepping on one of the kiddie rides, holding her safe and revelling in her angelic grin, so like his own...Your daughter is a fixer, too: she can look at the entire park at a glance and tell you where the loose bolts are, how much food the concessions are going through, and even what tomorrow's attendance is likely to be.
Behind every great man is a woman rolling her eyes, and the wife of your life rolls hers with regularity at the antics you get up to, but you're not fooled. You're blessed with prodigious strength, of course...but even more comes from the love of a strong woman who has filled the day with laughter and affection...it's been a pretty damned fine day. Still plenty of time left before closing: the sun is a red ball sinking towards the horizon and the park doesn't close until midnight. But...what's that over there?
Who built that roller coaster without telling you about it? Why couldn't you see it before now? It's huge, gigantic, a monstrosity that towers over your family park. Even stranger, not many of the guests seem not to notice it at all. You can see the turnstiles of the lineup, and they're virtually empty. The few people in line are moving as if drugged, with vaguely frightened looks on their faces.
You go over to investigate this intrusion on your park and find yourself in line to ride it. That wasn't your intention, of course, and you grasp right off that nobody actually wants to ride this thing...and yet here you are in line, and if you turn around and try to duck out of it, you find a transparent wall slowly gliding along behind you, preventing you from taking so much as one step backwards. That's frightening...nowhere else today have you had the sensation of being pushed along a certain course. You've been setting your own course. But here you are in the dusk of the day being guided towards something unknown, something that, truth be told, you'd rather not know. There's a sign that says SINGLE RIDERS ONLY, and that's scary, too. But you've got courage, a day in the park has granted you a seemingly limitless reserve of it, and so you steel yourself and walk forward. Your back hurts...your whole body hurts. It's been a long day. But you walk forward and soon enough you're in the queuing area, ready to board the train. It's painted black--dark black, as if there could be such a thing--and you can see that this is a coaster you ride laying down.
The wall behind you gives one last jolt and tumbles you into the train. There is pain, and a real sense of humiliation--who built this why didn't I see it why can't I get off of it--that hurts worse. And then the train starts to move.
It says SINGLE RIDERS ONLY, and you're definitely alone in this train...or are you? If you look to your right, you can see your wife, grimly holding your hand; if you look to the left, you son and daughter are right there with you, along with their families, and there's a whole host of friends in your peripheral vision. You're not alone. Not even close. Your dogs are even in this with you, lending what love they can.
The lift chain grabs your train and begins to pull it up a long, long hill. You're torn. On the one hand, you never wanted to be on this thing in the first place and you wish it would just hurry up and be over. On the other hand, what goes up must come down and any hill this high must be followed by one hell of a drop.
You can see the whole park from up here. The rides and shops you built, standing proudly in the setting sun. The little lake--a fish just jumped there, see that? Your gardens are soaking up the last of the sun's rays. If you look closely--you can do that, somehow, even this high up--you can see that all's well down there. It should be. That's how you made it.
And then the crest of the hill: a voice intones 'KEEP YOUR ARMS AND LEGS INSIDE THE TRAIN AT ALL TIMES', which is a laugh, you can't move even though you'd like to; the train seems to pause on the edge of eternity before it begins to plummet towards the ground. Some people scream along about now. You're not one of them. Oh, that's not to say this is fun, exactly, but later on when you get off this thing, you might be able to appreciate it a little better. You close your eyes.
An unknown time later, the train approaches the station where you boarded. To the left, where you got on, you can see your family and friends--not in line, just milling around. There's tears and laughter and lots of talk about your day in the park and how wonderful it's been to share it with you. And then you look to the right....and there's a whole new park out there, so much bigger...and there are people here, too, people you know, people you love, and they're beckoning to you, telling you to come on, there's so much more to see and do, and you find you can, you can get up and walk...or float, or fly, or whatever you choose to do. With one last look back at the family and friends who have shared your day, you understand that when they choose to, they'll hop on the dilly of a coaster you just rode, and get off and join you. And you step out into a whole new world.
Saturday, August 18, 2012
Bushed in the Bush
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.
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.
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.
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