Les Bonnes Choses

I just answered the door, so I'm returning to the computer from an unplanned but well-deserved break from editing my manuscript. The painter had stopped by to drop off some paint chips so we could pick the colours for next week's paintapalooza, where the largest rooms in the house will be painted by someone other than me. Now, he hasn't actually painted anything yet, but so far my dealings with Ross Chapman Painting have been very good. Though I don't know him personally, I dropped the name of the family friend, Paul Luksts, renovator and now cabinet maker (Maple Leaf Millwork, of London, if you care), for whom he used to be a sub-contractor. I think I feel about as comfortable with having Ross take care of painting my house as I would if I knew him personally.

I also had Tim Filipi, owner of Filipi Lawn Care in London, come by in the rain to give a quote on prettying up my lawn. If you didn't already know, the Weed Man's program didn't really do a helluvalot over the last 2 years, though to be fair, I didn't do a helluvalot on my lawn in that time either. I'm not sure if lawn care companies can smell blood, but no sooner had I canceled our service with the Weed Man then two or three other lawn care companies started calling to offer their seasonal packages. Telling them that you're having your lawn taken care of by another lawn care company owned by a friend derails their script almost as well as does "I'm moving out of the country". Though on this last point, it doesn't stop everybody. I am just now remembering a recent call from a Canadian bank offering me a Mastercard (I already have one). When I told the guy at the other end of the line that I was moving out of the country, he replied that Mastercard is a multinational company, so I could use the card there. I'm quite sure I did nothing to mask my contempt when I asked him whether he'd agree that using a Canadian credit card exclusively to make purchases in the United States and incurring a currency exchange fee on each purchase was a remarkably stupid idea. He did agree sheepishly.

Finally, I expect we'll be picking up our new Rav4 today or tomorrow, which is quite exciting. I mention this in relation to my overall consumer-report-themed entry because we hadn't yet decided on whether we'd get the extended bumper-to-bumper warranty on the thing. Being a researcher, I hit the internet this morning, and learned that you're better off to buy your car warranty directly from a warranty provider, rather than through the car company (who acts as a middleman and marks the price up). I actually expected to find everyone nixing the idea, saying that they're a waste of money. After all, if you want to stay in business by selling warranties, you're going to have to sell them at or above the expected value of providing the service. In other words, if a company is selling a warranty for $1000 for 4 years, they have already figured out that it should, on average, cost less than $1000 to keep the vehicle under repair during this period. Of course, the expected value is an average, so it will sometimes cost more, and sometimes cost less; people buy into it because they're risk averse when things are framed as losses, which is why when they pitch the product, they emphasize that, though they sell a quality car, with all that driving, you just might find yourself facing a big repair bill, and the warranty can pay for itself.

Wow, look at all that education that I used in writing this blog entry. I'm not sure that a blog is the best way to get a return on the investment though, so I suppose I should get back to that manuscript...


The TomTom EasyPort mounting kit that just arrived as I was finishing this blog entry. I ordered it 2 days ago online from gpscity.ca

I thought I'd provide just a little bit of talk of bodily functions to start your day off. Like our friend V, who's got a son, Jack-Jack about the same age as Pokey, we're trying to get our little guy using the WC. We've got pull-ups, which could be described as insufficiently absorbent diapers that wear like underwear. The ones that we have been using have Pixar Cars themed designs on them, and with a blue indicator that disappears when wet. I understand that there are also brands that feel cold when they get wet. All that fanciness I think makes them a little more expensive than diapers, which makes it all the more irritating when they end up being used as diapers, as Pokey was doing all day long. I wonder whether it might not be more effective and less expensive to go the other direction and perhaps use some cayenne technology. I bet that gets pretty damn uncomfortable when it gets wet.

I swear there's a funny point to all this.

At the end of the day, he did the one thing in his pullups that I was dreading but expecting. And, as usual, I went through the routine of telling him that it should have gone in the potty. I have alluded in the past that using the potty could earn him a new toy car, but it didn't seem to click until I was changing him tonight. This time, I instead specified that, had he only gone poop in the potty, he could have maybe gotten a new RPM or NitroAid car (if this means nothing at all to you, that means you're enjoying a nice, normal life). When it dawned on Pokey that he had just missed out on that opportunity, he was crushed. He was sobbing, and absolutely had to poop on the potty after that. I was skeptical, as he had just filled his pull-up, but it turns out that some kids can be quite motivated. There was some grunting, and there were tears, but that little guy went and earned himself the last of the die-cast toy cars that Rebecca had cached away. He's a little young for Preparation-H though, so I hope he doesn't make a habit of this.

The moral of the story is that you're never too young to game the system.

I was all prepared to mock the UK government after reading this BBC article, entitled Tax rise as UK debt hits record :

The chancellor tore up a key New Labour election pledge by unveiling a new 50p tax rate for earnings over £150,000

I was under the impression that p stood for pence, which would amount to the government trying to dig their way out of a record debt by asking the country's well-to-do to check between the cushions for loose change.

Instead, I will be mocking the BBC for using the amazingly ambiguous p as a stand in for the universally understood '%' sign. Maybe it's a keyboard thing. We don't have the £ symbol on our keyboards, so they probably don't have the $ symbol on theirs. Perhaps the online copy editors just took it too far and assumed that, in addition to missing the symbol for pounds sterling, we might not also have access to some of these other key glyphs. Except maybe the ones used to spam about \/!@GR@ and (!@L!$ -- those must be pretty much universal.

I've heard it said that the London Free Press "is a rag". Now, I've read it, and I can't really complain about the level of literacy of the writers. Really, the biggest complaint I'd have is that there's very little to it - a large part of it is taken up by full-page car ads, or else classifieds and obituaries. Now, I don't know how much the freeps are to be blamed for this. After all, this is London, Ontario. It's a regional center for a sleepy region. Of course, this is a chicken-and-egg situation: small-c conservative Londoners have a reputation for not being especially interested in anything. Aside from small pockets (most of which I seem to have my hands in, indirectly at least through Rebecca and her network of musician friends), we don't have a thriving arts scene - as evidenced by the lack of performing arts center, and the fact that Orchestra London and the Grand Theatre always seem to be teetering on the edge of oblivion. But when the only time these organizations come to mind is when they're in the news because they're broke, it's not hard to imagine how they came to be that way, and how the situation is likely to continue. The only thriving arts venue seems to be the JLC, which seems to be getting by quite nicely on the back of mainstream entertainers - of the sort that one might expect to read about in the paper. Which brings me back (or rather, awkwardly segued back) to my original point about the Free Press: aside from the Banditos trial, the only other newsworthy content to be found usually concerns the most recent performance at the John Labatt Center. So when I get a phone call from a telemarketer on behalf of the Freeps, I feel uncomfortable with telling them, "look, your publication is crap. The only thing I would be interested in is the Sudoku puzzle, which I can get online for free anyways." Instead, I tell them (truthfully) that I'm moving out of the city. I will add that this excuse works quite well for many phone pitches, especially when you're moving out of the country.

I know that newspapers everywhere are folding - pun originally not intended, but then deemed clever enough to be claimed as deliberate. There are many reasons: alternative internet news sources from all over the world, decline in ad revenue because advertisers are also going to the internet where the eyeballs are. And in the case of the Freeps, they also have to deal with the fact that their publication really doesn't provide much that can't be provided by a larger, better staffed paper like the Globe and Mail that also circulates in this area.

150 years ago, there were thriving shipyards all over Canada, and the Canadian shipbuilding industry, with access to our vast supply of cheap lumber was thriving. By 1870, however, steel-hulled ships had come to dominate. If you were a manufacturer of wood-hulled ships, you had a couple of options. You could drag your heels, and keep cranking out the same product that nobody wants. Or, you could find something innovative to do with your workers and suppliers, possibly even creating a new industry. The first person to figure that out is going to come out all right.

I'm a bit of a green poser. On one hand, we own a car and a motorcycle and are presently shopping for an SUV. Sure, I rationalize the motorcycle as being more fuel efficient than a car, but it is much less fuel efficient than, and lacks the health benefits of riding my bike -- and I tend to ride my motorcycle for the sort of short trips that would be suitable for bike riding. On the other hand, there is usually a bowl of kitchen scraps on our counter, which I diligently reserve for the compost bin at the side of our house. We refer to this bowl of rotting vegetable matter as "the salad", though we now have to be a bit more precise about this because Jude often uses the word 'salad' to refer to any vegetable matter, including the vegetables to be found in his food. And while I encourage a hesitancy to eat rotting food, I'm always concerned that we're not getting enough vegetables.

A quick aside: about 2 months ago, I had been feeling really lethargic for a the better part of a week when I realized that I hadn't really eaten vegetables (potatoes don't count) since the previous Sunday. I believe I grilled some vegetables that night, and felt like Superman the next day.

Anyways, we now refer to the bowl of kitchen scraps as "garbage salad", and while I wouldn't want to divert all that stuff to a landfill where it mummifies in an anoxic environment (at least, according the Ontario Science Center exhibit), it would be preferable to not have to trudge out to the side of the house. I'm not sure if I'd want to spend $400 on it, but this would solve all my problems. Or all the ones related to rotted food, at least.

Hello again, Antarctica! I imagine an outdoor compost bin is a little trickier down there.

Update: I went to the naturemill.com website, and as I looked at their various models, I started to wonder whether it might be possible to hack together something similar using some sort of box with a fan and hey their product looks like old computer tower case...

I was remembering this afternoon that I had a dream last night in which I stole something from someone for personal gain. I believe that, in the dream, I tried at one point to rationalize what I had done by claiming that the person from whom I stole didn't really want what I had stolen anyways. But I knew it was wrong in the dream, because I also vaguely recall trying to hide the fact that I had taken something. So today as I reflected on this dream, I kept feeling guilty, despite never having actually done anything wrong. I think it's the thought that I could be the sort of person who would steal from a friend. Is that irrational?

I've been trying to contact an Evanston nursery school for about the last three weeks. I've left a number of messages on the answering machine with our phone number, and called at all sorts of times of the day (taking into account that Chicago time is one hour behind local time in London). My most recent call was this morning at 9 am (Chicago time), and again got the answering machine, the purpose of which I am unclear because all my messages seem to be routed to /dev/null. I'm going to give it one last shot in a few hours, after I go in to school to retrieve the final exams that I am giving tomorrow night. The other thing I did today was call Don Mills (the person, not the Toronto suburb) who does (house) painting in the London area, on Bridgett's recommendation. Despite my recent experiences with answering machines, I left a voice message. Hopefully his works better than the preschool's.

Sorry this entry isn't particularly insightful, but I could see that my Zimbabwean readers were getting restless for something new to read with their morning coffee. I hope to have my revised manuscript ready for them before too long.

Update: Too late for my Antarctica (??!?!) reader to read about, I was finally able to talk to a real-live person with the preschool. She'll be sending along a registration package in the mail. Yahoo!

In years past, I would have started biking in to school by this point, using pedal power to get me from door-to-door in about 25 minutes (including an invigorating trek up a steep ravine behind the seminary). And in previous years, I would weight about 5 lbs less and be in better shape by this time (being able to go up flights of stairs without being winded), because this year my bike is motorized. A couple reasons for this: First, it takes less time by motorcycle. Second, it's not yet warm enough for shorts, and I'll have chain grease all over my pant leg if I wear jeans, and also possibly work up a sweat. And finally (but most influentially), it's much lazier to not pedal.

My buddy Kevin will be leaving the Good Life fitness club where he's worked for the past few years and starting up his own personal training outfit in the next week. He'll be specializing in programs for young-adults and group workouts, not just limited to lifting weights in a gym but also alternative workouts to change things up and keep it all fresh, which is key to sticking with it. Auger works out all the time as part of his job description, and then there's my buddies Al and Morgan who have been pursuing martial arts to get a good workout, and Amy boxes for similar reasons.

I'll just stop there, because I've gained about 125g and lost lung capacity as I sit here and write about how all my friends are staying in shape. If I had any sense, I'd give Kevin a call.

I was just on kijiji looking for a big bulky something that we really don't need cluttering up our kitchen when we're trying to declutter our most amazingly cluttered house in preparation for listing it with the real estate agent. Fortunately, it was not to be found - here, Toronto or Chicago. While on Kijiji, I found the following ad (spelling corrected):

One large room for rent in a 3-bedroom apartment, south facing balcony. Hydro, water ,TV cable & internet cable included. Share washroom with a girl, it will be available on May 1st.2009.

I'm not sure if it's a result of studying things like discourse comprehension, where one often sees incredibly strange and contrived phrases constructed to prove a particular point, but I habitually search for multiple interpretations of much of what I read. I found the above ad amusing when read in the context of the stereotype of women preening forever in the washroom. I imagine the current occupant's roommate just couldn't hold it in until May.

Before I gear up in my traffic-cone-orange motorcycle jacket, I have time for a couple quick thoughts.
First, I've been increasingly interested in (read: obsessed with) that traffic meter. For cities like Montreal, QC and Stevens Point, WI, I can guess who it might be a-knockin' at my blag's door. However, it's not foolproof. First, it doesn't always get the city correct. I believe I have had some visitors from Toronto and Ottawa that showed up as being from London (I speculate that it might be the fault of Rogers who might be doing some kind of caching trickery or something). Second, if you were to click the link to see the Top London Blogs, this morning you would see a blog called Walking Through Africa (which appropriately enough is a photographic chronicle of the blogger's travels through Africa) close to the top when this list is sorted by relevance. To be clear, by relevance, they mean it to indicate "...how interesting a blog is to people in a particular city ... if [there are] many blog entries about [the] local town or city, you'll probably find [the] blog close to the top of this list." And this is perhaps where the confusion stems from. London, Ontario is not to be found anywhere in Africa. It seems unlikely to me that much about London can be said when one is talking about Africa.

Perhaps all this talk of London, Ontario will allow me to vault to the top of the list.

Speaking of Africa, how about those Somali pirates? The BBC had an online poll this morning that asked How can pirates be stopped? Clearly, they are unaware that ninjas are the perfect foil to the pirate.

Rebecca knits. So do a number of friends who have come to form a tricoterie. I don't knit, myself, on account of being a dude and all*, but I glean vicarious enjoyment out of sporadic knitting nights (now long overdue). I also gain direct enjoyment out of teasing Rebecca about just how extreme knitters can be. Take, for example, the fact that celebrities exist within the knitting subculture -- and I'm no anthropologist, but I'm sure that they qualify as a legitimate subculture; they even have their own cant.

So there's plenty of fodder for my amusement. Or, at least, there was until this week, when the knitting scene became just a little more edgy. As the world literally collapsed around 98 year old Maria D'Antuono, living at or near the epicenter of the earthquake that struck Italy earlier this week, she whipped out a pair of crochet needles and worked on a smart easter shawl.

Okay, knitters. You win. You're hardcore.

The title of this entry has nothing to do with anything I wanted to talk about, other than that I could perhaps mention that I made pancakes on Saturday afternoon just so I had a vehicle for the maple syrup that I bought at the sugar bush on a field trip with Jude's preschool. Mostly, I just wanted an excuse to use this image of a bunny with a pancake on it's head:

In researching this image, I learned that this brand of meme is called an image macro, so there you go: you learn something every day. I love those things.

Why the preoccupation with bunnies today? I blame it on a chain of subconscious associations, the last of which being the thought that 'I haven't written for a couple of days, and one of the bunnies needs something to read with her tea'. And then there was that discovery that half of my hits come from google images, so I figured I could thematically tie everything up in one nice, neat package.
One limitation of the format of this blog is that I don't often see comments that get posted to older entries; comments are hidden by default, so viewing them requires manually going back through my previous posts and viewing the comments for each entry individually. It wasn't until last night that I read some comments from the likes of Ed, Potassium, and Lead that were attached to posts that were several weeks old. There must be a better way...

For those who commented yesterday (Kilometer [KM], Terabyte [TB - hey, it beats tuberculosis] and Vanadium [V]), the fam is doing well. TBD is coming along nicely as far as we can tell, with about 7 weeks to go before the due date...

Is that right?!?!? Holy crap. Sorrygottagokbye

Update: I've had repeated hits from Malawi, spaced far enough apart that it seems to be deliberate. I don't know who's in Malawi, but "Hi!"

One of the upsides of screwing up my blog while applying a new template was that, when I found the replacement that I am currently using, it came with a traffic widget that I hadn't seen before. If you are reading this at the original site, lesbonneschoses.blogspot.com, you can see the FEEDJIT traffic widget on the right hand side. It's really good for the self-esteem, because otherwise, the only clue that I have that I'm not talking to myself is that I occasionally get responses from J, K, Pb, V, and a few other entries from the alphabet/periodic table. So it was really neat to see hits filter in from all over North America. People coming here seem to fall into one of two camps: people interested in reading about my observations on academic, politics, fatherhood, and what makes people tick; and people interested in stabbings. You see, the most common entry point to my blog is via google images, landing on a blog entry from the Ides of March, 2008, where I incorporated a renaissance painting of the stabbing of Caesar. So I may have to come up with a byline for my blog. Something like: Come for the murder, stay for the humour

I like news headlines because their lack of critical parts of speech, such as prepositions, makes them prone to comical misinterpretation, and general hilarity. For example, today The Ceeb had the following:

Stunning 82-year-old hospital patient with Taser was justified.

Now, you might click on the link with eager excitement at the prospect of reading about an elderly invalid in a fabulous black evening gown who's got a good excuse to be carrying around a non-lethal sidearm -- but you'd be disappointed. Instead, you'd read about how Canadian law enforcement means business. Forget that polite stereotype. Around here, laying on a gurney (or wielding a stapler) is a good way to get yourself zapped, my friend.

Of course, we could also be defined by what we don't do. For example: fund research. My thin envelope from NSERC arrived in the mail today. I didn't have to be Johnny Carson to know what it said. One thing I did forget about was that it had a brochure about applying for the Industrial R&D Fellowships program.

Dear Canadian Funding Agency Purseholders,
If I wanted to work for a large multinational conglomerate, I would have spared myself the last 6 years of graduate work and tens of thousands of dollars of tuition and applied to work at a bank directly out of my undergraduate career. Then I could have been doing something that the business community finds useful for the last several years. Like help run the world's economies into the ground, for example.

A few years ago, when I held an NSERC Doctoral scholarship, it was appropriate to put a little NSERC logo on the posters when I presented my research. Because, you know, they supported me so I could do the research. I regret that, for the time being, I will have to put an unacknowledgement on my conference posters: the Canadian government had nothing to do with this discovery or innovation. Is embarrassment effective at influencing policy?

Today, my sister Carolyn (the one that the most of my friends have met through many of my planned social activities, from sushi to dodgeball) turns 28. April 2, 1981. Anyone who knows her would attest that she was born 24 hours too late.

A fair bit of flatulence playful mockery goes on in my parents' household, and Carrie is often the instigator. One thing that always invites her scorn is to mention a game called Settlers of Catan. "Sorry, I've cut sheep and wheat from my diet," she might say if you invited her to play.

Now, Carolyn isn't the only sister of mine that could deserve a blog entry for her birthday. Heather's birthday was just over a month ago, on February 24th, but I didn't blog about it then because it didn't coincide with any cool news, like the fact that she and her husband (my man-crush) Kristian are going to be on Property Virgins (after they get their sh*t together and pick a bloody house before it gets snapped up). However, it seemed that it would be especially good to mention Carolyn and her disdain of everything Catan on a day that I stumbled across an article declaring Settlers of Catan as the most awesome game ever, and anyone who thinks otherwise is lame (and it's on Wired, so it must be true!).

It's April Fool's day. I, for one, was fooled into believing K's blog entry about getting out of academics. It wasn't until she said that she was going to get a job in sales for a South American rubber company that I could see that something was up. It wasn't the rubber company part that tipped me off; it was the part about getting into sales: I can't think of any line of work for which she could be more unsuited than sales. I think it has to do with the requirement that you have to pretend that the sun rises and sets on your customers, and that their requests are always reasonable. I've had the misfortune of being responsible for making every client's every whim a reality just because a sales guy promised that it could be done (without first consulting me). That's why I got IN to academics: it's one of the few lines of work where cleverness is rewarded. Back when I was being paid by the hour, when I got all clever and figured out a faster, better way of doing something, I found I was actually cheating myself out of money. If you're part of a big union or organization, being clever either gets you ostracized for rocking the boat (by raising expectations) or else leaves you like a salmon swimming upstream against a raging river of bureaucratic policy. Salmon die once they get to where they're going.

However, I know that many of my colleagues have recently been stomped by the system that restricts the flow of newly hatched PhDs into the academic stream, which is why K's ruse seemed quite plausible. Heck, I'm still waiting for a couple of rejection letters from faculty positions to which I had applied, as well as the letter from NSERC that no doubt will tell me that the competition this year was exceptionally fierce, and that there were many, many qualified applicants that they were forced to decline. Of course, applicants who were indeed qualified wouldn't be rejected at such a high rate if the Canadian government provided adequate funding for research and development -- and not just research that is explicitly tied to business interests. So yeah, if she did decide to call it quits, I can't say I'd wonder why.