Les Bonnes Choses

Well, it's now all over but the crying. I still have some revisions to do, though I have no idea what they might be, as I have yet to meet with Ken. I've been home these last few days with the flu, you see. But I'm not here to complain about that.

Instead, I'll complain that I feel pretty-much like I did at the beginning of the week. I'm a dot-your-i's and cross-your-t's sort of person, so until I hand in the final revised version of my dissertation, I have not fulfilled the requirements for the PhD. And then there's the technical "graduation in absentia" in February, when my degree is technically conferred. It isn't until the June convocation that I get my pomp-and-circumstance and the official paper, suitable for framing. That reminds me, I still have to find out whether I ever did pick up my MA degree from the registrar's office. I hope I didn't, otherwise I seem to have lost it. Come to think of it, I don't know where my BA degree from '97 is either. I hope that isn't taken as an indication of how much I value all the work I have done since 1993.

I'd like to write some essays, or somesuch. It seems like I now have the authority to spout off on any random topic. Lately, I have been wanting to get my head around greed, as the backbone of capitalism. I agree with hardcore capitalists that greed and self-interest should be the gas that fuels the economy, mostly because it's probably the only human behaviour we can actually rely on. I do think measures should be in place to check it, however. Mostly, it's the wage disparity that bugs me because, consistent with the capitalist ideal (I think), I believe in meritocracies. Are CEOs exponentially more capable than the lowest level employees of the companies that they run? Why are they paid exponentially more? When I analyze error-rate data, I first transform the error rates by taking their square root. It pulls in outlier values. For example, the difference between 1 and 100 is 99. The difference between the square roots of these numbers is 9. Just thinking outside of the box.

I don't mean to sound anti-union (though, admittedly, I am anti-union), but what with all the talk about the automotive sector in the news, I wanted to check a few things out. It kind of definitely bothers me that so much of our economy is dependent on cars, one way or the other. Our cities are designed around them (I am now taking great effort to avoid an urban sprawl rant), the flow of money requires that they are regularly replaced, we wouldn't even be in the middle east, were it not for their oil ... the list goes on. Now that I am on the cusp of graduating after (2008 - 1979 = 29) 29!!!! years in school, I'm hoping I can look forward to a decent job before too long. Know what would be nice? A job that paid as well as those CAW jobs that are drying up. After their last round of negotiations, workers in the top of three tiers could expect to make $62/hr. Calculating a yearly income from an hourly wage is easy enough: multiply the rate by 2000 (50 weeks * 40 hours). That's $120,000 per year. The second-rate workers? They can expect $47/hr, or approximately $90K per year. To piece together Ford Explorers. Or maybe just push the buttons on the machines that put together Ford Explorers. I don't know. What I do know is that it's much clearer why the heck these companies are in danger of going bankrupt (I mean, aside from not adapting to the changing times and instead relying on old cash cows like SUVs built on 40 year old technology).

Show Jude a picture of Santa Claus: he has no idea who it is. Yet he can name Barak Obama from a video and identify him as the president-elect of the United States.

I mention this not [primarily] to boast, but rather, to serve as a bookmark. That way, we can all look back and say, "yeah, you could tell he was a little bit different right ... about ... here."

I don't know if this means anything about this pass through the job application process, but I received in the mail an Equal Opportunity / Affirmative Action Information request. I'm certain I've filled out at least one of these for another job, and perhaps for as many as two. Last year, I applied to four or five jobs and received none of these requests. So either I've made it a little bit further into the hiring machine and haven't been simply rejected out-of-hand, or else I just coincidentally applied to departments last year that did not require this information.

Either way, is there anyway I can argue that "metrosexual" constitutes a minority group?

I received a phone call last night from Weed Man, the now-former provider of our "lawn care". The only reason I ever got mixed up with them in the first place was to take care of a bindweed problem in our back yard two summers ago. "Sure, we can take care of that", they said, when I explicitly asked whether they could care of our bindweed problem. I understand from my reading that the conventional treatment for broadleaf weeds doesn't really affect bindweed. As we now have more, not less, bindweed in our backyard than we did two summers ago, I'm not clear they knew what the hell they were talking about.

Earlier this year, they called to set up an overseeding, whereby they apply a thin layer of topsoil and grass seed, to help thicken up the lawn. This was their suggestion as a cheaper alternative to laying down some sod. Now that I think about it, a newly sodded lawn probably doesn't need much treatment for weeds. Anyways, I agreed to it, and they came and overseeded my lawn. Someone then showed up about a week later to apply the spring weed treatment. To be clear: weed killer will prevent newly planted grass seed from germinating. Fortunately, I had not left for school the day they showed up to kill the seed I had just payed to have spread on my lawn.

Last evening's phone call was in regards to an overdue charge on my account. I had received a phone call about 2 months ago about aerating my lawn. Their fantastic weed prevention program had not stopped crabgrass from overrunning my front lawn, so there are currently dense patches of dead (or dormant?) crabgrass all over the place. Ignoring my better judgment, I agreed to have my lawn aerated. I mean, I most certainly do have a thatch problem. I kept waiting all September and October for the day that I would come home and see soil plugs all over my lawn. That day never came. Accordingly, I didn't get an invoice for the service either. And yet, when I called this evening to find out what this overdue payment was for, it was, as I suspected, for having my lawn aerated.

I think I may take my lawn care into my own hands in the spring. It couldn't possibly be any more amateurish than this operation.

November 26th, 2008, 1pm. That's the time and date for my public lecture for my Senate Defense. UWO requires a minimum of 6 weeks to schedule your senate defense following your departmental, ostensibly to allow your external examiner time to read your paper. This is probably more of an issue for those fluffy disciplines that I make fun of for routinely having dissertations that require multiple volumes -- you can write about the significance of the Mister Men books on contemporary culture if you want, but make sure you use 3600 pages to do so because you otherwise may as well just submit Liam's grade 2 book report on the same topic.

Yes, there is such thing as academic snobbery.

Also, I will explicitly state that I am not taking a dig at Karen's dissertation. She studies interesting stuff too -- at least interesting enough to deserve mention in the media, which is more than I can hope for with my research topic.

So, if you find yourself with naught else to do, feel free to stop by the Dean's office on the 26th, and check out this presentation from which I am currently taking a break. Party at Ken's afterwards.

For those of you not on top of the saga of how I came to be a hog-riding hardcore biker*, my brother-in-law Billy put the idea in my head at the beginning of the summer. He got himself a Honda CBR125, which is, in his words, "a scooter that looks like a motorcycle". We have one car in this household, which doesn't generally cause any problems, though there is the odd occasion where Rebecca is out and about with the car, leaving me to rely on London's shoddy public transportation system. For times like these, and in the event that I go somewhere like San Diego for a postdoc, I thought that a small-engine motorcycle, similar to Bill's, would be handy. The thinking was that I would not want to have to rely on any 4-wheeled vehicle that the $3000 I spent on the motorcycle (about $3600 if you include the equipment and the motorcycle training course) would buy me.

I'm really methodical, and when I dive into an area about which I know very little, I research the hell out of it. It took about 8 weeks for me to actually purchase my motorcycle, and I ended up buying it from a guy in Sarnia - about the nicest guy I have ever met in my life. Seriously, if he had my mailing address, I wouldn't be surprised if he sent me a Christmas card asking how I enjoyed riding the motorcycle this fall. Of course, by the time I actually got the motorcycle home, it was already mid-September, and I had yet to take the motorcycle safety course, and I certainly wasn't going to venture out into traffic without having some formal training on riding the thing.

Two weeks ago, I passed the motorcycle safety course at Fanshawe which, if nothing else, gave me the confidence to drive around on London's streets. And then it snowed. Fortunately, it warmed up again this week, and I rode in to school for the first time this week on Tuesday and Wednesday. Yesterday I stayed home to finish writing questions for exam for the stats class I am teaching through distance studies, and today I am home again copying the questions to a word processor document that I can provide to the UWO distance studies coordinator. It's currently 17 degrees and cloudy, and we will probably not see this weather again for another 4 months, at least. So I came up with an excuse for one last ride around the neighbourhood, and rode over to the gas station to make sure that my tank was filled to the top, and that my tires were inflated to the correct pressure in anticipation of storing my motorcycle for the winter.

Now all I have to do is clean out my bloody garage. I'm not so good at finding excuses to do that, however.

It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that I pay attention to the sorts of things that Jude says with an ear for different developmental markers. I think his regular exposure to members of my family have somewhat warped his developmental trajectory. He's all over the map.

For example -- and my friends Karen and John, who know something about metaphor use can jump in here with their opinions -- the other day, Jude was watching Batman Returns with his Nana (I will leave the discussion of whether it was appropriate for him to be watching Batman for another time). Unlike the campy television series, or even the first set of movies from the early 90's, the latest Batman franchise has a fair amount of depth, and the plots are fairly sophisticated, especially for a 2 year old. The unsurprising part of the story was when he asked his nana "what happened?" at some point in the movie. The surprising part was his word choice when he then said, "I'm lost!"

I'm saving the next memorable Jude quote for when he's older. He's not always amenable to taking a nap, so sometimes, we have to engage in some modeling. At Nana's house, she does this by taking Carolyn's cabbage patch kid, Noah (Spiff), and pretending that the doll is going to sleep. However, Jude has a pretty good imagination, and has no problem having conversations with stuffed animals like Kesswick, or between his toy cars from the Disney movie. A few weeks ago, Jude reportedly asked the sleeping cabbage patch kid, "hello, baby. Who's your mommy?" That would be an awesome pickup line.