Les Bonnes Choses

Rebecca and I have been blessed by a bounty of free babysitting this past week -- allowing us to afford us the opportunity to do pretty much whatever leisure activities we might care to do. All this free time has brought to our attention a small problem, however: we don't know what to do with it. I've never really known what the hell to do with myself in London, which may explain why my friends and I took to the sort of nerdy hobbies that consigned us to endless summer nights in basements. As for Rebecca, well, her brand of geekiness is of the musical variety, so much of her adolescence revolved around what had to be memorized for the next performance. So we now find ourselves unable to imagine what normal people do for entertainment. We feel a bit like aliens from outer space who landed here just last week and are trying our best to insinuate ourselves into normal human society. And I don't think we researched the topic well enough.

We've received a number of phone calls recently from the same number. Each time, they have asked for me, and each time, I have not been there to take the call -- otherwise, I would have had something to blog about much sooner. The caller wouldn't get to the point when Rebecca answered the first time, instead jokingly asking whether Rebecca was a burglar. Who does that? I learned this morning that they called for the third time yesterday, finally revealing their intentions. Would we like to buy lightbulbs? Lightbulbs you say? Tell me more about these bulbs of light you are selling! Hold on, I have to go turn down the phonograph. Needless to say, we weren't interested, but I find the idea of selling light-bulbs over the phone (in bulk, I assume, and probably CFL or new LED bulbs) to be bizarre enough that the first thing I asked myself was what they were really up to? So I guess that's one good test of whether you've got a flawed business model.

Though they are staying with Amy, I call sharesies on the first visitors of the summer, Deanna and Daniel. Jude is currently monopolizing Deanna with Play-Doh; given that Amy is usually Jude's go-to playmate, it will be interesting to see how this plays out. Even moreso when Daniel shows up -- Jude has cordially invited him to sleep in the top bunk.

So if you have your eyes set on Chicago this summer, drop me a line. Supplies are limited!

I use Facebook as a distribution medium for my blog because that's where more than half the people who I try to keep amused get their fix. At least, I hope it's more than half, because I probably only average about three hits a day on the blog itself, and most of those hits are from people interested in a painting of the murder of Julius Caesar, a demotivational poster mocking popped collars, or trying to figure out what the deal is with CBC's Kate MacNamara. Because I owe facebook so much for helping me get my word out, it's only fitting that I make fun of it.

One of my pet peeves is the suggestion box that appears in the upper right hand corner when I sign in. On one hand, facebook has gone on the record as saying they only want you to add "real" friends. On the other hand, they keep suggesting that I might want to be friends with 13 year old friends of a second cousin, who I am sure are wonderful people, but honestly... It's also somewhat creepy when I get suggestions to contact the deceased, and until they release a seance application, I just don't see how it is going to work.

And the ads! I've questioned how they've attempted to monetize facebook in the past. It's pretty ballsy to expect people to rate ads -- "please show me more ads like this!" (and yet it happens). Here's a few ads I saw today:

I'm unclear what this graphic has to do with liking psychology. I suppose that the picture depicts a female wearing puffy outerwear, so I guess it does capture the demographic at my alma mater, but that's pretty subtle. And is that a green aura? I've had my PhD for over a year now, and my aura is nowhere near that visible.


ndex.cfm? You better believe it!


Okay, this one doesn't strike me as dumb as much as an opportunity to make some money as a low-volume importer during all those trips I make between Chicago and London.

I received an email the other day from my alma mater -- two, if you count the automated message telling me that my last remaining uwo.ca email account is due to expire at the end of next month. The non-automated message (or at least, the one that appeared less like a form letter) was to inform me that a UWO student had tried to contact me recently but was unable to do so, and encouraged me to take a moment to update my contact information. The email was sent from the UWO department of alumni relations department, specifically, the person in charge of annual gift giving.

So to be clear, my alma mater is asking me for a phone number at which they can reach me to ask for a donation. I doubt I'd be getting anything other than a script at that, so it wouldn't even be worth doing for the opportunity to tell someone how I was doing and what I was up to. I think the thing that I found notable was that they never explicitly said that was their purpose, and yet their intention is quite clear, making the request seem all the more brazen.

Ironically, the email at which they contacted me was the address that is set to expire in six weeks time because they can't be bothered to provide permanent email addresses to alumni. Had they just waited just a little while longer to try to contact me and been unable to do so, that would have been poetic.

As you may know, I am seldom found without my tea. A recent large study published in Nature about the effects of caffeine seem to indicate that, far from being a pick-me-up, your daily cuppa serves only to bring you back to your normal baseline performance sans caffeine addiction. In other words, it's kind of like being superman, sticking kryptonite in your pants on a daily basis, just so that you can pull the rocks out of your shorts and feel like a million bucks. Okay, maybe comparing myself to superman is a bit self-aggrandizing. It's kind of like being the Green Lantern, and stuffing a yellow zucchini in your pants, et cetera.

So anyways, I inadvertently started detoxing last week when I went a day without having either caffeine or a caffeine headache, and decided to roll with it. Since then, I've been drinking either caffeine-free tea, or manually reducing the caffeine in my tea by first steeping the bag for about 15 seconds and then dumping the tea out. It seems to be working so far, though being stuck in the CAMRI basement today might make me fall off the wagon.

8:30: My eyes blink awake
9:45: On the road
11:00 Having a cordial discussion with the border guard about the rather unorthodox job description that comes with academia after an inordinately long wait on the Bluewater bridge.
16:50: For a moment I thought I had an original idea to have eggs and bacon for dinner until I realized that I was in fact being reminded of eggs by way of the air around Gary, Indiana.
16:05: Pull into my driveway. Yes, Indiana and Illinois are in the same time zone, but Indiana doesn't observe daylight savings time. Normally that sort of state-wide obstinacy would be something I'd make fun of, but I actually think DST is a stupid idea.
17:45: make bacon and eggs. Point my browser to Hulu.
21:15: I am now caught up on Glee. Don't judge me.

I really missed you guys.

Update: my fact checker tells me that Indiana does observe DST. Much of the state is also in the Eastern time zone, though 12 counties, including those in the Northwest corner near Chicago are in the Central time zone.