Altercation

In my research, I make heavy use of ratings. If there's one thing that I've learned, it's that sometimes these sorts of relational judgments are artificial, especially at the extremes. For example, who is the most attractive female celebrity out there? Does it even make sense to try and distinguish from among Elaine Irwin Mellencamp (you may recognize her as the face of Almay), Rachel Weisz and Natalie Portman? I mean, someone might insist that there is some way of quantifying beauty in such a way as to be able to rank order them, but I'll be damned if it would really mean anything.

On our way to my post-convocation lunch with my family, Rebecca and I witnessed what I claimed at the time to be the strangest thing I had seen. But then I remembered my philosophy on superlatives and decided that, no this wasn't the strangest thing I had ever seen, but it right up at the top: as we sat at the intersection of Kipps Lane and Adelaide waiting for a break in traffic, we saw what appeared to be some white guy decked out like a house painter lipping off at an SUV with four very much not white guys straight out of a hip-hop video. At one point, he walked out into traffic on a 60 km/h road to talk to the occupants of the car. It was when the car door opened that I learned something about Rebecca as she urged me to complete the turn so that we "[didn't] witness anything". Granted, we had a baby in the car, and it seemed not entirely impossible that some kind of gunplay might break out, but when I think back on it, Rebecca's choice of words amuses me.