You Can't Win if You Don't Play

So I got a megadose of Canadiana on the tellie this evening. How It's Made, a program produced in Canada, was interrupted by a commercial for a contest associated with two great Canadian institutions: Canadian Tire and Tim Hortons. The contest details? Purchase some Canadian Tire Craftsman brand tools and enter to win a chance to join the 2011 Heritage Classic build team. Let me clarify. Buy some tools and, if you're lucky, you can get shipped out to Calgary in the middle of winter so you can build a hockey rink.



I am holding off purchase of a Kenmore sewing machine until the spring, when Sears will fly one lucky owner to Sri Lanka to make hoodies for The Gap.

Aspirations

The bar for celebrity has been set rather low these days.

I was standing in the Barnes & Noble passing time among the bargain books and new releases when I noticed the magazine rack. Perfect. In the few minutes I had, I could get caught up with the specs on the most recent computer components, find out the names of the latest teen crushes I should be making fun of, and be able to identify the cars I'll see on the road next year. The Barnes & Noble magazine rack doesn't sell books. It sells the future. And it was there that I caught a glimpse of what this world is coming to, and it's not pretty.

Spoiler: I'm about to pass judgment on people I have never met.



When I was a little kid, I liked to watch Entertainment Tonight. By the time I reached eighth grade however, my paradox detector had developed, and I could no longer stomach a television show about people that were celebrities because they were on a television show about celebrities. Say what you will about John Tesh's smooth adult contemporary style, I gained respect for him when he stopped sharing the screen with Mary Hart's mannequin smile to focus on his music career, such that it is.

So like the kingmakers of yore, media outlets can find the silver lining in any sort of screw-up, so long as it can hold people's attention for 26 half-hour episodes, and mine it for all it's worth. I can't see how giving away a free ride in life to douchebags and fall-down-drunks from New Jersey, or to teenage moms can possibly go wrong.

Banana Swap

Bananas are a peculiar fruit. Or are they a fruit? I'm not sure. I think so. One thing that's funny about them is that the trees that supply the bananas we eat don't grow from seeds. We bred the seeds out of the fruit generations ago, so you can only get a banana tree by taking a cutting from an existing banana tree.

Another funny thing about them? As they ripen, bananas begin a bright green, start to yellow, and then develop brown freckles that grow until the entire banana is chocolate brown. And for most people, bananas are palatable during only one of these brief stages. The problem is, you're either waiting or gorging because they're only edible for 10 minutes. Amy and Gill like their bananas yellow with a hint of green; to me, they taste like chalk. It isn't until they are yellow and just starting to take on freckles, ready for the girls to toss in the bin, that I'd eat them. And then there's Szeto, who I know will would eat a banana after it has turned black. But what if it were easier to coordinate your banana purchase with a line of friends who would happily take your overripe bananas off your hand?

I present the next big thing in social networking: bananaswap.com

Of course, I was taking quite a risk when I typed the domain name into my browser to see if it had been taken. Once you see something on the internet, you can't un-see it. It turns out someone beat me to the name, though it appears they sell furniture. I don't get the connection at all. Hopefully nobody else does either, and the company will go out of business so I can get the domain name for pennies on the dollar. In the meantime, if you're looking for something to do with your overripe bananas, I recommend using them in hot chocolate:

Bananaswap Hot Chocolate
5 oz. milk
1 oz. dark chocolate
pinch cayenne
1/2 overripe banana

If you know anything about me, you will know I made those measurements up.

Heat your milk up on the stove in your double-boiler. Go do something like tag a bunch of MP3 files, and then when you remember you were in the middle of making hot-chocolate, your milk should be the right temperature. Break the chocolate in to small chunks (chocolate chips already are small chunks), and whisk until melted into the milk.

Add a pinch of cayenne because all the cool kids add cayenne to chocolate these days. It's very hip. And tasty. Finally, drop in your half banana. You have a stick blender, right? You really need one. Use it to blend the banana into the cocoa. It also goes all frothy, which is a plus.

Serve.

I don't know why recipes often include that instruction. Like you're going to make a meal and then leave it in the casserole pan to rot.

Enjoy your vitamin fortified hot beverage. And if you literally use "a pinch" of cayenne, do not -- DO NOT -- rub your eyes unless you want to look like a G20 protester on Bill Blair's watch.

The Power of Truthiness

Did anyone else read about the recent territorial dispute in Latin America? You can read more on The Ceeb, but just so you don't have to go off-site, I present the Cole's Notes version of the story: There's a land dispute between two Latin American countries in which an error in Google Maps borders resulted in Nicaragua crossing over into Costa Rica.

When I read that, I thought, "Wow, that's alot of power." Sure, I trust Google Maps for live traffic updates, but for coordinating military movements and establishing political boundaries?

I guess Stephen Colbert was on to something when he brought Truthiness into the vernacular.

I took this photo on the way in to work one morning.

So, given all this power that Google apparently has, is there any reason they shouldn't use it to usher in a new age of peace and prosperity? Reunification of North and South Korea? A new Palestinian state? Bypass diplomacy altogether and just update Google's world map.

If anyone has any problem with it, Google can always threaten them with the "bomb you back to the stone age" cliche.

Cooking for the truly lazy

Following the November 20 tailgating party at my place, there were 4 lonely bottles of Bud Light sitting by the back door. And being that not only am I from Canada, but my taste in beers is snobby by even Canadian standards, they remain there, now covered in Chicago's first snowfall of this winter season. However, I am also frugal, or at least try not to be wasteful (which is why they remained there), so I decided to investigate whether beer might work in some kind of potato soup. My standard procedure is to google the ingredients: if "potato beer soup" returns any hits, then I assume that it works well enough to merit a recipe, and have a recipe for reference, should I need any guidance. Fortunately, I have made potato soup several times with my trusty stick blender. Recipes generally seem to call for either baked potatoes, from which you subsequently scoop out the flesh from the skins, or else cubed peeled potatoes which are boiled in the stock. I say to hell with all that effort. By simply prefixing your recipe with the word "rustic", you can just toss some scrubbed and cubed potatoes into the stock, skins and all.

Rustic Milwaukee Potato Soup
2 Potatoes that you can't be bothered to peel
16 oz. Unsalted Chicken Broth
1/2 c. Cheddar Cheese
1 bottle of beer you don't really want to drink
Salt, pepper, rosemary to taste

Wash and cut the potatoes into large (1-inch) cubes, and drop them into a large saucepan. Add the chicken broth, salt, pepper and rosemary. Bring to a boil. Let simmer for enough time to finish a project you started in Photoshop. Add grated cheese and beer. Use your stick blender. Feel the power.

Loaded potato bonus: add sour cream and bacon bits. Instead of sour cream, I used some french onion chip dip that I was also not planning on eating. I think it may have been left over from that same tailgating party. I really got a lot of mileage out of that party. I also added some liquid smoke because I add that stuff to everything. I think I might be addicted to sulphides.

Brazen

E-Commerce is brilliant. At one point, it paid my tuition. You can find most anything you want on sites like Amazon, and pay less than you would in most stores. Sure, you can't try anything on, but if your sizing options are S-M-L, or you're buying something like a book or electronics, that hardly matters. The only real downside I can see is that you generally can't ask questions about your purchase. Of course, if you would otherwise be shopping at a large chain store, I would argue that the staff there aren't likely to be much more helpful (ever wander the aisles in Home Depot looking for help? The commercials depict a small army ready to assist in any way. What a fiction). No, if you want customer service, go shop at a small independently owned store. The local Ace Hardware has got to be one of my favourite places on earth.

So today, I fell down the rabbit hole, after reading up on ram drives. What that is, and why I was reading about it is not important (if you must know, this is what it is, and I was reading about them because I'm easily distracted when involved in drudgery). Anyways, I found myself following a link to an e-commerce website selling RAM disk software:



Note the URL (http://goldoemsoftware.com/legal-software/etc.). Naturally, I had to ask whether there was a corresponding directory where they showcased their illegal offerings:



Particularly amusing to me is the juxtaposition of the software titles alongside the logos of the copyright holders with whom they apparently are proud partners.

WWJD

A quickie from effamy? Two can play that game. Except this one has been in the works since this past weekend. I just didn't feel like typing it out in the car on my iPhone.

This weekend, Asher was baptized along with his youngest cousin, in what appears to have been a vain effort to drive the devil out of the baby. During the baptism, you are promising to instill good Christian values in your child. Some people go the extra mile and also instill the bad Christian values, like telling them that gays are an abomination, for example. But I'm lazy, so I just do the bare minimum, which means taking advantage of teaching opportunities when they present themselves. Like Saturday morning, for example. One of Jude's cousins is, for lack of a better word, bossy. And when she doesn't get her way, she gets quite sullen. I don't remember what order it was with which her playmates weren't complying, but the noncompliance resulted in her declaring that she "doesn't like them anymore."

I was in the room, listening to this all transpire, and thought, WWJD? Turn the other cheek of course. "Jude," I said, "when someone tells you they don't like you, tell them ``that's okay, I like you anyways´´," which is how the two of them replied to their sullen and now verbally neutered playmate. I like subtle. Zealotry and blowing up infidels has no place in civilized society. If you really want to get under someone's skin, try passive-aggressiveness. It's what Jesus would do.

Red Tape

I'm back from Psychonomics 2010, which was much different from conferences of yore: Many of the usual suspects were conspicuously absent; I was unable to find a store within walking distance (liberally defined) that sold shirts; and I gave my first big conference talk. It was nice to visit with the old chums, however, and dinner with Albert at the House of Meat the night before my talk showed me I could slip into the role of a professional academic.

As for the talk itself, it went quite well. In usual fashion, I was calm up until about 90 seconds before I was to step up to the podium, but my heart stopped racing after the first slide, and the rest proceeded without difficulty. I was a little disappointed that hardly anyone in the crowd threw their underwear on to the stage, but was later reassured by a veteran speaker that it is not customary to do so.

So I am now halfway through a very abbreviated work week, and am just now getting to taking care of a number of matters that I have been putting off forever. Since September, the television has been on for about 6 hours, cumulatively, and I have been meaning to cancel the cable to save a bit of money for most of that time. I encountered little resistance when I called, but didn't believe the customer service representative when she said she had "never hear *that* one before" when I told her it was because I didn't watch TV. Even if it weren't true, it seems that would be the excuse I would make up if I wanted to cancel the cable. I took care of some other business, but decided that writing about it would probably expose me to some sort of fraud. So instead, I'll just talk about how it's very curious that the last 4 digits of my social security number, 858-43-2020, relate in numerology to my mother's maiden name, Lipschitz.

When this room is a-rockin'

St. Louis. Gateway to the West. Why am I up late at a hotel in St. Louis on a Friday night? A couple of reasons. I just finished practicing a talk I am going to give tomorrow at the Psychonomics conference where I hope to find members of several hiring committees sneaking in a freebie job talk. Not that I would have been sleeping anyways. At around 4:30 this afternoon, I stopped by a Starbucks and ordered a large black tea. With some help from the store manager, a genuinely bemused barista eventually handed me a piping hot cup that required two cardboard sleeves, and was thus too hot to drink immediately. It wasn't until 10 minutes later when I realized it had steeped more than long enough that I took the lid off to find two large tea bags, each more than enough to brew an entire pot of tea.

The caffeine hit certainly got me through the rest of the day, but I hope it doesn't keep me up all night. I think I may be coming down, however. A couple of hours ago, I may have acted on my idea to put socks on some of my colleague's doorknobs.

Hold on, my phone's buzzing

Okay, it's not that often that a blog-complete thought just drops on my lap like this. Usually they percolate for a few days, during which time they get pushed aside and sometimes forgotten altogether, leading to week-long lapses. Thank goodness for psychological researchers, on whom you can usually count to do something bizarre. In this case, it was a study on mind wandering about which I read just now on The Ceeb.

In their study, the researchers used an iPhone app, one of the few I apparently haven't downloaded, to track people's mind wandering at random intervals. That's fine and well. Kudos to them for being tech savvy (though not so hardcore as to hack the Half-Life game engine).

Does that count as a citation?

Anyways, here's the Bonnes Choses-ready passage that caught my eye:

The real-time data showed that on average, people reported that their minds were wandering 46.9 per cent of time, and no less than 30 per cent of the time during every activity except making love.

Ahem. Excuse me? The only way I can see that statistic being collected would be for participants in their study to have engaged in coitus interruptus to answer their damn iPhones. I mean, people actually did! And while the Catholic Church might approve of this method of birth control, I can't imagine participants were adequately remunerated, even if the authors gave away the damn iPhones to go with their app. Plus, now the participants are stuck with AT&T contracts. I think the Harvard IRB is going to hear about this.

PSA - Sheep Edition

I know that a number of people prefer to read these posts as they are imported on Facebook, rather than wait for the monthly print edition to hit the newsstands. What? your local newsstand doesn't carry Les Bonnes Choses? Be sure to let them know that you will take your business elsewhere until you see the Les Bonnes Choses masthead beside the New Yorker.

But back to the story at hand: A number of popular websites, including Facebook, have a security flaw whereby a thirteen year old with a laptop using a freely downloadable Firefox plug-in can snag the file that says "I am so-and-so, and I am logged into Facebook", and pretend to be you. Not only can this be done, apparently it already has. Why is this bad? Have you ever written a drunken email? Allowing a 13 year old boy to post to your friends walls on your behalf would be, like, a kajillion times worse. And it's not just the 13 year old boys you have to worry about either; it's the girls too. Imagine how tedious it would have to be to have to explain to thirty friends that, no, you do not really 'like' Justin Bieber or the Twilight Series. So especially if you are in a public location, do not use a wireless connection to check out your Facebook page.

There is one upside, though. If you do actually drunkenly reveal your appreciation of Justin Bieber's music late one night, and have regrets the next morning, you now have plausible deniability to fall back on.

Addendum: Hotmail has this same security flaw at this time, though gmail thankfully does not.

Threat Level ... um, what colour goes with this?

So, in case you haven't heard, some guy boarded a Canada-bound Air Canada plane in Hong Kong wearing about 5 hours of special effects makeup:


Part way through the flight, the passenger, appearing as the elderly Caucasian male pictured on the right, went to the bathroom and emerged as the young Asian male pictured on the left. Though they did not realize their normal coffee had been replaced with Folgers crystals, other passengers did notice that the elderly man in seat 5F was replaced by a drift racer.

So, I look forward to the next time I go through airport security when, in addition to displaying my liquids and gels, opening up and turning on my laptop and removing my shoes, I'm going to have to demonstrate that my face is attached.

Olfactory Fatigue

I've mused on this before, but the sense of smell is kind of wacky. They say that smells are one of the most powerful triggers for digging up old memories, so it might not just be coincidental that the olfactory bulb (the brain part that does the smelling) is wired right up to the amygdala (one of the brain parts that does the emotion). I speak very loosely, of course, but this isn't Nature Neuroscience, so whatever. One of the funny things about your sense of smell (including the part of smell that we refer to as taste) is that it's rather gullible. Go grab yourself an orange Crush. Go on, now have a sip. Mmmmmmm, orangey. Now go dig through your rotting bin of good intentions you call a vegetable crisper, find and peel yourself an orange and try wedge. They don't taste a damn bit alike, do they?



You know what else doesn't smell like its label? Ocean Mist. On the way back from the airport, I sat in a taxi cab run by some dude who was apparently excessively conscious about maintaining a no-B-O cabbie public image. Hanging from the mirror was an Ocean Mist air freshener. On the back of the seat behind my head was another air freshener. And piped in from the front seat was some flexible hose with a plastic tube drilled with hose that seemed to deliver a fan-driven payload of Ocean Mist. I've never lived near the ocean, but I've been to Yarmouth in the fog, and I live about a 10 minute walk from one of the Great Lakes. Whatever trick they pulled to make everyone think that Dimetapp tastes like grapes, my nose is not buying it. You want ocean mist? Puree a bucket of wet seaweed and a small flounder and throw it in front of a box fan. There's your ocean mist. That air freshener? It smelled like someone stuffed a LUSH franchise up my nose. How bad was it? My shirt still smelled like air freshener at the end of the day. And I had been wearing a zipped up jacket in the cab.

V1@GR@

A case of mistaken identity caused me to lose two cloth shopping bags this morning at the Howard St. Target. It must have happened some time in the dairy section, where I was getting yogurt. Now that I think of it, that's exactly when it happened. I had grabbed two 4-packs of Activia yogurt, put them in my basket, and then noticed that one of them had an expiry date of Saturday. So I went back to the dairy case to get yogurt that didn't expire until mid-November. And on I went with my shopping until I got to the checkout, where I found a couple of peculiar items in my basket, and my cloth bags were nowhere to be found. I kind of felt violated. I blame the other shopper because it's easy. Look, I just did it.

I didn't put much of my shopping away until I got home from work, which was late because I attended a talk and stayed after to (try to) speak to the speaker. I'm not very good at hijacking conversations. I can, but think I come off like an ass when I do, so I just wait politely for the perfect segue. Perfect segues almost never come, unless you can engineer them. Like the one I have just engineered to bridge to the next topic, where I talk about a conversation that I had with a grad student when walking back to my office following the talk.

We were talking about how academic job applications are quite a mish-mash. Some positions are at old-skools, and they want you to send a ream of paper in an oversized envelope plastered with postage stamps. Other schools use 3rd party or in-house websites to manage the submission of your application materials. And finally, some positions require you to email a bunch of pdfs to a department secretary. This might seem like a big leap from the surface mail application, as it is theoretically instantaneous, and costs nothing for postage and paper. It is not without its drawbacks however. I discovered that when a vigilant secretary emailed me to ask whether I had emailed any other materials beside the CV (an academic resume) I had updated and re-sent to reflect a recent upgrade of my awesomeness. I had.

The job ad requested the usual CV, research statement, and scholarly writing samples (i.e., journal articles). Together, these documents weigh in at maybe about 3.5 MB. Some IT departments have strict policies about what can and cannot be sent by emails. UWO, for example, won't let anything pass that has a .exe or .zip extension. I will note they also have an email help section on the IT department website describing how to circumvent this restriction by asking the sender to change the file extension, and causing me to facepalm.


Another common restriction is a filesize limit. Emails exceeding a certain size are just dropped. I suspect this is what happened in my case, and perhaps the case of other applicants to this job, because the secretary reported having a problem receiving emails lately. Now, as I related this story, this grad student and I began to wonder how hard it must be to get a job for a biochemistry student coming out of the lab that invented Viagra. I mean, wouldn't all of their resumes get flagged as junk mail?

Significant Academic Achievements:
Developed a method to INCREASE the LONGEVITY and POTENCY of the VIAGRA drug by INJECTING the non-medicinal substrate with a HARDENING agent.

SpamAssassin Score: 867.4

Food Pyramid

This evening, I am having a rather spartan meal. Though I like to cook, I don't like having to decide what to cook, especially because I don't live in a grocery store, and am therefore constrained by what I happen to have on-hand and what needs to be used up (see also my recent entry on freezer-burned entrees). This evening, when I came home to face my kitchen dread, I noticed a couple of bags of pita chips on the table (presumably left by Jerome et al) from last weekend's homecoming tailgate party. The only correct thing to do with pita chips is to dip them in hummus.

I've got the ingredients for hummus covered several times over, probably as a result of some OCD grocery shopping. I first made it some number of years back for some small gathering of the usual suspects, following a random recipe off the internet. I still call up a random recipe, but that's mostly to get a rough idea of the proportions, so I don't end up making a thick salad dressing by adding too much oil, for example. The recipe to which I have linked is a good starting point, but you'll be quite happy with the results if you also add cumin and paprika (smoked paprika is especially tasty). Combined with pita chips, and some raw vegetables that will rot in my fridge if I don't use them when I remember them, that's a tasty meal.

Now, lest anyone be concerned about my welfare, I should note that I had a hearty breakfast and had 2 cups of chili for lunch. Arguably, people have their meals backwards when they have a piece of toast and coffee for breakfast to fuel the first half of their day, followed by medium lunch to get them through to a relatively large dinner, just a few hours before they go to bed. Unless you're a sleep-powerwalker, those dinner rolls are going right to your bum.

Plus, I still have a stash of jerky.

Superfans

It's taken 4 years, but my first fan mail came at the end of last week:


Normally, a high-profile celebrity like me would be wary of an unsolicited packaged in the mail. But I'm not like other celebrities. I'm a down-to-earth kind of guy. I put on my pants one leg at a time, except on those lazy weekend afternoons, where I just can't be bothered to wear pants. But I was wearing pants when I went out to the mailbox, in case you were wondering. I opened up the package to find one of the best foodstuffs ever:


Jerky. If ever there was an upside to survivalist living, it's living off salty, dessicated strips of animal flesh, not much different from the chicken nugget that fell beneath your driver's seat last April. For some reason, I like the stuff. So does my eldest son. The younger one doesn't yet have enough teeth for jerky, but I wager he'll like it too, especially since he shares my taste for black licorice, and that stuff smells like a tire fire.

As I was planning out this blog entry after work, I naturally decided it would be appropriate to eat a strip or two. And because my dinner was still on the stove, I started to snack on some mixed nuts. I'm pretty sure I've now exceeded my salt intake for the day. The first clue was that I am now exerting osmotic pressure on the groundwater beneath the house. I'm leaving puddles everywhere I step.

Okay, I have a confession to make. I embellished a bit. I am not actually leaving puddles on the floor. And the jerky that arrived in the mail came not from a crazy fan, but instead from Rebecca's cousin and her husband. But it was a very generous gesture on their part, and I have convinced myself that my blogging had something to do with it. So I shall go to the post office tomorrow and set up a PO Box, should anyone else out there want to send me jerky.

Making a tasty purse out of some unidentifiable animal's ear

There's a division of labour in our house -- or, at least, there was when I had Rebecca with whom to divide the labour. Generally speaking, Rebecca handled the grocery shopping. In retrospect, somewhat odd, given that I was the one who generally turned the groceries into meals, but appropriate given my general disinterest in leaving the house to go shopping. Those grocery delivery services were invented for people like me: highly functional shut-ins. So it should be unsurprising that I have been rooting through the freezer like a pig hunting for truffles so I can delay the inevitable trip to the grocery store as long as possible. Unfortunately, I have picked all the low-hanging fruit (that is, the entree-qualifying items not hidden by bags of frozen berries), leaving me to find forgotten freezer bags of unidentified slightly freezer-burned meat.

So the other day I decided to wing what is probably my favourite dinner on the Cheesecake Factory menu: tuna tataki salad. An interesting side note: cilantro features prominently in this dish, as prepared at the Cheesecake Factory. I hate cilantro. The smell of it makes me slightly nauseous. It is to my great consternation that pretty much every dish served at Cheesecake Factory, with the possible exception of most of their cheesecakes, use cilantro. But the taste for cilantro is apparently genetically determined, so it's not like I'm just being difficult. In fact, in some of the reading I did for a paper I am working on, I learned that people's tastes differ because their chemical receptors for the flavour carrying molecules are physically different. As a fairly close analog, people generally take for granted that a red crayon out of the Crayola box looks the same to everyone, though that is not the case (for colour-blind people, for example). If you're a picky eater tired about getting flack about not eating your quiche (egg + cheese + spinach = gag), science is here to the rescue.

Um, yeah, so back to the story at hand. The tuna tataki salad at Cheesecake Factory is so good that, even with the cilantro (which I scrape off), it's probably my favourite thing on the menu. So naturally, when I found a freezer burned slab of formerly sushi-grade tuna at the back of the freezer, I figured I may as well trim off the dried out bits and give it a whirl. Half-way through preparing it, I decided to see if I could find a recipe to see if I was on the right track (I was, but I hadn't guessed that lime figured into it). And dammit, did it ever turn out good.

Now, tomorrow is the Northwestern Homecoming parade, which will include NU alum Stephanie Marsh -- an impossibly white actress who I kind of sort of recognized. I wouldn't normally care, as I don't watch TV much anymore. However of more interest is the fact that Ms. Marsh's husband, Iron Chef Bobby Flay will be in attendance. I'm holding out hope that his ulterior motive was to come here to challenge me to a throwdown after the parade. And if the challenge is to make a freezer-burned entree, he is totally going to get pwned.

Giddinerdun

Gill has me exclaiming "Brilliant" all the time, often with a disconnect between the subject of the statement (that which is purported to be brilliant) and the subject's objective characteristics. As I first noticed the rather liberal use of the word in the Harry Potter series (often with the modifier bloody), I must assume that it's a British Isles thing, so maybe I'm just getting back to my roots.

My home media center, based around a Mac Mini, is objectively bloody brilliant, especially when paired with a free app downloaded from the iTunes store that lets me use my i-device as a remote controller for iTunes, effectively letting me fill my otherwise desolate house with whatever music strikes my fancy (I also overuse fancy, but that's the result of a linguistic feedback loop between myself and Jude, with John providing a repeater signal). This is exactly what I am doing now, as I tend to the household chores that I have been neglecting over the last three weeks. I'm not really sure what to do about the mess of leaves all over the property. I don't have a rake. Neither do most of my neighbours, I would wager, as I live in a neighbourhood where everyone and their dog has a small brigade of Mexican workers come once a week and tend to their properties. I'm just one white dude. How can I compete with that? At least I can vacuum like nobody's business -- or could, until I misplaced one of the attachments, which I suppose I should go find now, because I'm not giddinganythingdun as I sit here blogging.

Phoning it in

This is brilliant. I'm on a bus¹. Just going into work now because I had to get some groceries in order to fulfill my lab treats duty tomorrow, and haven't shopped in weeks. At the checkout at Dominick's, the cashiers read your name off the receipt and wish you a good day. Nice sentiment but I sometimes wish they wouldn't bother. "Have a nice day, Mr. Mc...hmmmghhnmg" she said, her voice trailing off. I'd really like to be privy to how her mind dealt with that scenario.

He looks normal enough. Let's hope he's a Smith.
"Have a good day Mr..."

Let's see here ... Mc ... oh sh**. I can only do McDonalds and McGregors. Maybe if I mumble the last part he'll think he just didn't hear me properly.
"Mc hmmmghhnmg"

Okay, now finish strong. I can get past this!
"Would you like help with getting your bags to your car?"

Aw goddammit, this next guy has a turban. I'm going to need a drink on my lunch break.

¹I did a substantial amount of editing on my desktop computer once I got to work because, brilliant as it is, typing on an iPhone is really frickin' tedious.

Back in the saddle...

That title works on so many levels. I've been up for 19 hours now, having woken up at 4:00(EDT) with a sinus headache brought on by my head cold readying to exit my body via my nose. For that reason, I'm kind of ambivalent about runny noses: on one hand, they're damn irritating; on the other hand, they invariably seem to signal the end of the plague of the day. Unfortunately, the runny nose hit full steam as I was driving through Gary, Indiana at around 9:30, and there was nary a Kleenex to be found. The truly observant reader will have done a double-take just then. "He woke up in the Eastern time zone. Isn't Gary, IN in the Central time zone?" Aye, there's the rub. As my aunt observed, I have become an extreme commuter, having woke up in London, ON and made it in to work in Chicago, IL before noon. Unfortunately, even at my right-brainiest, I cannot come up with a way to spin that sort of protestant work ethic on to my academic resume.

I do lots of inventing when I am engaged in monotony. I can't tell you how many lawn and gardening related inventions I have come up with while cutting the grass over the years. Look for a better bum cushion to hit the shelves in the next 18 months.

The hiccup that I was experiencing with the Facebook blog import appears to have resolved itself since last week. But you should still consider visiting the original site because the imported version strips out some of the formatting as well as some embedded content, like youtube videos.

Speaking of which, if you haven't seen this yet, this is the most wonderful piece of comedy ever:



See, unless you go to the original site, you have no idea what the heck I am on about.

Let them eat cake

A few years back, I wrote this blog entry (the previous incarnation of this blog).

Four years have passed, but some things have not changed: it's still the Canadian thanksgiving long weekend, so there's food. Even more than usual, because there will be multiple birthday celebrations and Make's wedding is tomorrow. They have cake at those, right? So, the 5 day forecast looks something like cake, cake, cake, cake and leftovers (probably including leftover cake).

I think I gained 5 pounds just writing that. That's alot of sugar, which we know to be bad for you. Like cigarettes, right? That reminds me of a funny thing I saw yesterday on the Chicago television station. There was a commercial where a woman is walking down the soft drink aisle of the grocery store, complaining that the government is proposing slapping a tax on soft drinks, sports drinks, et cetera -- basically the sorts of beverages that list high fructose corn syrup second only to water on the list of ingredients. And, according to the copy that the woman was reading, "government shouldn't be telling Americans what they should be putting in their grocery carts" (the commercial also implied it was just a money grab, so I'm getting mixed messages). Now, you can take it as a given that I disagree with their position. But what struck me as funny was that the very next commercial was for a website that moms can go to for parenting advice -- including, I would assume, advice about how to raise healthy children.

So, just to be clear, Americans have no problem with any random idiot telling them how to run their lives, so long as that idiot is not an elected official. So my question is, are Americans hypocrites, or is the electoral system set up to elect a sample of the population that is more idiotic than the national average?

Playa

I got to do a little detective work yesterday. I was waiting at the bus stop at the end of the day when I noticed a blue cell phone sitting on a concrete ledge. Nobody was anywhere near it, and by the time the bus rolled up to the stop, it was apparent that it had been lost. I know what kind of person I am, and I figured that the owner was better off having the phone in my hands than leaving it there for the next random person to find. So I grabbed the phone and tossed it into my backpack and boarded the bus.

Shortly after getting home, I took the phone out so I could try to get a hold of the owner. I encountered two problems. First, the device was unfamiliar to me, and, despite my proficiency with general purpose computers, when the functionality of an electronic device is limited to making phone calls, I am flummoxed. I would have been able to overcome the first problem more easily had it not been for the second problem: the owner of the phone was clearly proficient enough in Spanish to select that as the language in which all menu items were displayed.

Worst case, we have an undergrad in our lab who is a native Spanish speaker, but I felt that it was too early to give up, and fumbled around the menu. Fortunately, there are enough Spanish cognates of French and English that I was able to make enough sense of the interface to find the address book.

I had assumed, given the ratio of female to male names in the phone book, that the phone belonged to a female student. I didn't want to invade the owner's privacy more than necessary, and the owner's sex was irrelevant to my task anyways, so I didn't look elsewhere on the phone to find out. I tried calling a couple numbers with mobile phone icons, figuring that I'd be more likely to immediately get a hold of someone whose phone would reveal the identity of the mystery owner. Everyone had their cell phones turned off, it seems. I left a message with someone called "Dad".

Eventually, the phone's owner called the phone, and I was able to direct him to my house to retrieve his phone. I suspected the owner was an athlete, given the number of coach so-and-so entries. I'm not sure what sport he plays, but the guy was about 6' 2", and looked like he was from a Nautica billboard. No wonder he's got so many girl's numbers in there. I wonder how many of them know about the entry "bootycall".

Kids these days.

Bueller? Anyone? Anyone?

Every now and again, I happen to be near a networked computer when an idea for a blog topic hits me, but I do not have the time to properly formulate an entry. This would be exceptional, as the usual conundrum I face is the pressure I feel to write something, while having nothing in particular to say. When the kernel of an idea does hit me, I try to at least jot down something about it so I can revisit the idea on a day like today, when I can see some of my buddies have checked in and left disappointed.

Going back to mid-August, I see that this story caught my attention. Fortunately, it was still available on the CBC website. In the event that it gets deleted some time in the future, or that you just can't be bothered to read the article, it was about a group of parents in midwestern Ontario who are concerned that "the wifi" is giving their kids unexplained illnesses.

When I first saw the article, I was probably thinking that the blog entry I wrote would be one in which I mock this group of parents for their lack of knowledge about the electromagnetic spectrum and effects it has on the human body at the sort of levels that require you to hold your laptop over your head while standing in a steel door frame in order pick up a signal strong enough to allow you to check your email. Especially considering their kids are getting more radiation exposure when sitting in front of the television.

But that would be unfair, because not everyone has the resources to get informed. No, instead, I will mock the parents on their lack of knowledge about... well, their kids. From the article:

"...the children's symptoms all disappear on weekends when they aren't in school."

Yes, I suppose one interpretation is that something in the school is making the kids ill. However, I don't appear to have suffered childhood amnesia to the same extent that these parents have, and vividly recall the sort of techniques that one can employ to get the day off school. Number one on the list: feign illness.

Sick
"I cannot go to school today,"
Said little Peggy Ann McKay.
"I have the measles and the mumps,
A gash, a rash and purple bumps.
My mouth is wet, my throat is dry,
I'm going blind in my right eye.
My tonsils are as big as rocks,
I've counted sixteen chicken pox
And there's one more--that's seventeen,
And don't you think my face looks green?
My leg is cut--my eyes are blue--
It might be instamatic flu.
I cough and sneeze and gasp and choke,
I'm sure that my left leg is broke--
My hip hurts when I move my chin,
My belly button's caving in,
My back is wrenched, my ankle's sprained,
My 'pendix pains each time it rains.
My nose is cold, my toes are numb.
I have a sliver in my thumb.
My neck is stiff, my voice is weak,
I hardly whisper when I speak.
My tongue is filling up my mouth,
I think my hair is falling out.
My elbow's bent, my spine ain't straight,
My temperature is one-o-eight.
My brain is shrunk, I cannot hear,
There is a hole inside my ear.
I have a hangnail, and my heart is--what?
What's that? What's that you say?
You say today is. . .Saturday?
G'bye, I'm going out to play!"
-Shel Silverstein

No-Bakes: Iron Chef Edition

I can see from the hits to yon blog that I'm overdue for an update. Nothing is sadder than seeing Sherbrooke, PQ, hit up the same entry twice.

Today I will treat you all to a snapshot of my highschool years, while preserving one of the best recipes ever for all time in the carbonite that is teh interwebs.

Back in the day (and this is several days back, I warn you), a merry band roamed the Forest City. In a sort of Robin Hood-esque way, they would crash parties, rob from the pantries, and give to the revelers. Often times, they would leave the party goers wondering who the hell just showed up at their party, not-baked some treats and left.

Okay, so maybe we -- I mean, the merry band -- were more like culinary vandals. Regardless, the following recipe is why this merry band are now remembered as folk heroes of legend. We folk heroes had a reunion this past weekend, and stayed up late eating no-bakes and having the kind of conversation that would have given anyone else an excuse to not stay up late. I present to you the recipe for No-Bakes: Iron Chef Edition. What relation does the recipe have to the Iron Chef competition? A secret ingredient. There must always be a secret ingredient, and it must be something on-hand.

Iron Chef No-Bakes
3 tbsp cocoa powder
3 half-cups (that's 1 ½ cups) of sugar
½ cup milk
½ cup butter
3 cups rolled oats
½ cup peanut butter
3 tsp vanilla
Variable amount of the secret ingredient.

You will notice that all amounts are in either 3s or halves. Although this may have been coincidence, the original recipe from Martin's mom's recipe book called for 2 cups of sugar, so we reduced it because less sugar was sufficient, and also to fit the 3s and halves mnemonic, and having a mnemonic is important unless you want to bring a cookbook with you to every party. How lame would that be?

Okay, so bring the cocoa powder, sugar, milk and butter to a boil over medium heat. Once it hits a boil, let it boil for 3 half-minutes (that's 90 seconds), then remove from heat.

Stir in the peanut butter until it melts, then add rolled oats and vanilla. Finally, add your secret ingredient. You may voluntarily impose the 3s and halves constraint upon yourself, but think about what you're doing, and scale the quantity according to the ingredient. We used 1 ½ cups of marshmallows this weekend, for example. We've used raspberry jam with success in the past, but a cup and a half of jam would just be gross.

Finally, spoon your mixture on to a cookie sheet and refrigerate to cool.

Ta da! I 100% guarantee that any confusion you generate at a party will be more than compensated for by their gratitude.

I love the smell of napalm in the morning

Pardon my absence. I was back in the Forest City this past week knocking a bunch of things off my to-do list -- most notably have my 10-year-old car emissions tested as a requirement of renewing my license plate sticker. The perceptive reader will infer from this that my birthday is approaching, and by remarking on the perceptive reader's savvy, I can clue the less perceptive reader into my impending birthday without anyone losing face. All this, of course, is to afford all readers, perceptive and clueless alike, the opportunity to send me a gift (preferably monetary).

Naturally, the Ontario emissions test required that I drive the car back from Chicago. It was with some trepidation that I made the trip, for the car had been seldom-used while in Chicago (I tend to bike, walk or take public transportation where possible), and the first time it went on the road in the spring after a long winter hibernation ended with steam billowing out from under the hood and a trip to the mechanic. With that in mind, I was momentarily nervous just outside of Chicago when it smelled like my car was on fire. My first reassurance that all was well was that I had just purchased a AAA membership the day before. The second, and arguably greater comfort, was the signage that reminded me I was passing through Gary, Indiana, which unfortunately (for the residents of Gary) always smells like a tire fire being used to boil eggs.

I made the trip without further incident, and the car passed the emissions test. I also had the mechanic check out the rest of the car, in case there was anything that was missed by the unfamiliar mechanic who repaired the car back in the spring. He did catch a few problems, some left by the previous mechanic, one left by me when I replaced the battery. This would be a good place to mention that the mechanic that I feel is worth driving 8 hours to visit is Teeple Tire on Wonderland Rd. in London, Ontario. Ask for Emil. Tell him that I sent you. He'll fix you up real nice. If you live in London, you are doing yourself a great disservice if you bring your car anywhere else.

Social this 'n that

Everything is social these days. Exercise is no exception. I always found the social aspect of working out to be a strong motivator. After all, if you've got a gym buddy, odds are you're going to make it to your planned workout, even if neither of you are particularly feeling it that day (of course, the endorphins released during your workout almost guaranteed that you'd both leave quite happy with your decision). However, back in the day, social exercising meant working out with someone. Now it's a different story. Not a day goes by where I don't sign into my facebook account and see some app update about how far my friends have run. Though I may wholeheartedly approve of my friend's decision to keep active, these social network apps have, from time to time, made me feel somewhat inadequate.

Now, apparently, Nike has a social network app that automatically tracks not only how far you've run, but also where, using GPS. So, in the next week or so, I'm going to drive to a truck stop and tie a Nike running shoe to the underside of one of those long haulers.

Overage

The lab in which I am presently proving my excellence now holds five postdocs with the addition of a newly minted PhD from Michigan. I remember from my undergrad studies in psychology that the dynamics of small groups was said to depend on the size of the group. For example, in a group of 3, often the members will align 2 vs 1; a group of 4 stabilizes at 2 vs 2; a group of 5: 3 vs 2. I can think of several examples where this holds true. If you're familiar with Axis & Allies, you'll know that the Allies (the good guys) were comprised of the US, Britain and Russia, and the Axis (the bad guys) were comprised of Germany and Japan. An analogous arrangement can be found in our lab where the iPhone Axis (Gill and Jerome) are opposed by the non-iPhone-carrying Allies (the other postdocs). After Gill signed a pact with AT&T and joined the Axis, aggression stepped up when Gill, in a show of Axis power, gratuitously googled something over wireless. The technologically inferior Allies scrambled for a response, but were able to muster only a feeble, "hah hah! Your attempt to 'bump' failed over wifi! Nice app, suckers!." Meanwhile, there seems to be a stalemate in the conflict. I do believe the Allies will soon have the upper hand, however, as I am the only one with a blog, which I guess would be the Manhattan Project of this conflict.



If you've ever seen any sci-fi movie or program, you'll agree that advanced communication devices are imagined to be ubiquitous in the future. There are a number of similarities between Star Trek's tricorder and smartphones like the iPhone. One could even take this as evidence that the iPhone has brought the future to the present day. Could it really be? Is a new age of peace, prosperity and discovery being heralded by this fantastic piece of technology? In a word: no. There has never been an episode of Star Trek in which any members of the away team had to check whether they were close to using up their data plan quota for that billing cycle. I can only conclude from this that the iPhone is not the technology of the future.



I expect the Axis to capitulate sometime early next week.

Give 'Em a Foot, They Take a Metre

So ends day one of this little experiment of ours to see whether we can indeed get to live in "The New House".

Over dinner, I noted a peculiar inconsistency with the way things are measured here in the USA: generally, the imperial system is used. There was a push back in the '60s for the US to get on board with the 99.9% of other countries who came to realize that a hogshead is a rather disgusting unit of measurement unless you happen to be a wicked witch. But 'Merkins will be damned if anyone is going to tell them how they're going to dole out their whiskey, so recalling the wisdom of their forefathers, replied, "and if all the other countries jumped off a 30M high bridge, would you?" and so died the metric system in the US. Or did it? One notable standout in the grocery store is the 2L bottle of soda (or 'pop', as we call it back in Ontario). This is particular only to soda, however, as you will find your sports drink or distilled water sold in fluid ounces or gallons, respectively. I am unclear how the presence of carbonation seems to make all the difference. Another curious exception is in the automotive industry (a quintessential American institution if there ever was one), where engine displacement is measured in liters (as in a 5.0 L Mustang) or cubic centimeters (i.e., milliliters), as in my late 250cc Kawasaki Ninja 250R (may he/she rest in pieces).

In all fairness, Canadians are also inconsistent in their measurement. Carpentry is typically done using imperial units, and I know my weight in pounds, and my height in feet/inches. But my driver's license lists these measurements in metric, miles are practially meaningless to me, and I feel like I'm in some kind of game show when I stand at the deli counter trying to figure out how many pounds of potato salad I want. The Celsius scale makes perfect sense to me, whereas the Fahrenheit scale just seems like they're just trying to use impressive numbers. Oooh! It's a hundred in Houston! 3-digit numbers like that are on my oven. The southern states must be populated with superhumans!. Though, it seems to me that southerners might be the ones most likely to oppose the switch from imperial units to metric units (ironically, it seems to me, as the imperial system is so named because of the British Empire) so perhaps I'm on to something. Maybe someone should introduce them to the Kelvin scale (it will be a balmy 300 °K tomorrow).

12:00 12:00 12:00

I am extremely educated. I've got a PhD, a Masters and not one but two undergrad degrees, one of which is in Computer Science. In my role as a postdoc, one of the items in my portfolio of responsibilities is to deal with "computer related issues". The lab in which I work has amassed several hundred lines of computer scripts which I have written, mostly to relieve everyone of many of the most tedious tasks, but some of them do some pretty fancy stuff. So I find it somewhat unsettling that there are some rather common pieces of technology that I just don't get -- like cell phones. I can use a cell phone to dial a 10-digit number and talk to the person at the other end. But in the extremely unlikely event that I ever became interested in [countryname] Idol, I have no idea how to text 'VOTE' to 436501.



And then there's the iPhone, or more generically, the smartphone. Rebecca hinted it might be neat for us each to have an iPhone. And my dad's wisdom came to me: "Lie down until the feeling passes," I said. I promised I'd look into it. I mean, I know several people who have them, and they're all successful. I want to be successful. Is there an app for that? So I went on to the Rogers website to look at their plans (in Ontario, Telus and Rogers carry iPhones. Bell does not. I really, really wish there were more options because I think both Rogers and Bell might be technically guilty of crimes against humanity). To me, the phone plan descriptions were like a window into a foreign world. Anyways, this all may be moot, because everyone seems to be sold out of the damn things anyways.

Update: I googled "why the hell would I want a smartphone" this morning, and found this link, which I think describes my situation.

"I crashed my car ... but for some reason I don't care"

I came across this link on the Ceeb this afternoon about a Canadian company that is making a "Cannabis electric car". Scrolling down the page, I found great humour in the heading, Colleges to help build cars. It seems like the perfect ecosystem: a bunch of stoners fumbling their way through a liberal arts college create a demand for weed. The non-narcotic parts of the plant get used to make the vehicles that they stoners can drive to score some more weed.

Bonus CBC.ca reference: It must be a perfect storm of the low frequency of the word topples plus the context of Amsterdam, den of debauchery, but I keep reading Anne Frank tree topples in Amsterdam as a story about Anne Frank going topless. I'm no pervert, so I hesitated before I read the actual story. It would be kind of neat to get one of those tree clones, though.

Smartie Pants

Judging by the feedback I received on my blog's facebook alter ego, many of you already knew that newspaper was an effective window cleaner. I suppose that shouldn't be surprising, since so many who left comments are bordering on old age, and no doubt remember back in the day, when nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. "Gimme five bees for a quarter," you'd say. Now where was I...?

Oh yeah, so just to make a stark juxtaposition with yesterday's old-timey tip, I'm going to tell you a little something about the browser you're using to read this blog. Now, because of my background as a cyborg, I've been parachuted into many a situation where a computer needs a good fixin'. Sometimes the hardware is fried. Other times, the culprit is the dancing hamster screensaver that seemed like a good idea at the time. In most cases, however, if the computer is starting up, one thing I'm likely to do is use the browser to do something. They've gotten to be really helpful at suggesting where you might want to go, often based on your browser history. And boy-howdy, is it ever awkward when I start to type "www." only to have the browser suggest "midgetsinlatex.com/memberlogin.asp".

So, okay, that's one socially related reason to rethink whether you want your browser keeping track of your history. But I recently came across a privacy-related reason. I've always been wary of the browser history, not because I'm afraid of someone finding out I'm big into the cosplay scene (go ahead, click the link. It's safe for work, and just weird), but rather, because I'm never 100% sure that some bank-related information won't be useful in perpetrating some kind of fraud. It turns out that my hunch was right, but for a different reason. A person can belong to lots very large groups, but very few individuals will belong to a large set of groups. For example, how many males are there out there? Billions. That's a big group. How many of them are in North America? Still quite a few, but less than a billion. And of those, how many of them are Aerosmith fans? Tens of thousands? How many of those guys also watch Glee? Run marathons?

It turns out that social websites like Facebook make it quite easy to figure out who you are, especially if you visit Facebook fan sites, because your browser happily reveals to anyone whether your browser history contains any given entry. So if you've visited Farmville, checked out the Twilight fan page and then commented on Lilo's parole, your browser might be giving you away. Aside from compromising your privacy, I don't know whether being able to personally identify you is particularly useful, but if the idea of it bothers you, you should look into clearing your browser history, and making sure it doesn't record it.

And that, my friends, is my PSA for the day. Speaking of PSA... (NSFW language)

Squeaky Clean

I was unemployed for pretty much my entire high school career -- with only a brief under-the-table stint as a convenience store clerk at a very inconvenient location during the summer prior to my sixteenth birthday as the exception. Of course, I was envious of my friends who were able to gain employment (I think I was the only unemployed one of the lot of us, though we speculated that one of my friends was, in fact, enslaved). Fortunately, our hobbies were relatively inexpensive, with our largest expenditure being a $.78 a week Kool-Aid habit (had we had access to the internet, it could have been even less expensive).

It wasn't until just prior to frosh week that I picked up my first job at the now obliterated Capitol Theatre. I had an "in".



I suppose there might be sexier ways to pay for one's undergrad -- not literally 'sexier' as in becoming a stripper, though I'm sure you'll have more than covered tuition by the time you write your first midterm -- and I didn't fill out too many application forms before I realized that that option wasn't available to me at the time. Still, all-you-can-watch movies beats out many jobs that were open to me. The only downside was the interminable reconciliation of the snack bar inventory at the end of each night, and the cleaning of the popcorn popper. What kind of challenge did cleaning the popcorn popper pose? Well, first off, try typing "popcorn popper pose" three times quickly without accidentally spelling the word pooper (I wonder what kind of hits the word pooper is going to pull in from google). Second, these aren't air poppers: they use genuine vegetable oil (they switched from palm kernel oil to butter-flavoured canola early into my tenure, and man, would I love to get my hands on some of that stuff - it smelled like butterscotch). Moreover, the top half of these machines are glass -- glass that had to be cleaned to a streak free shine after getting a thorough coating of oil and salt all night long.

What brought this to mind this evening was that I was cleaning our living room window, covered in Crayola Window Writer marker. Rebecca had cleaned it once, but the window was left with a hazy film. Clearly, Rebecca had never had the responsibilities of a movie theatre usher. The trick? Newspaper. A first pass with soapy water got most of the oil off, but a second pass with newspaper and water (we used soda water) left the glass clean and streak free. My guess is that something in the newspaper ink makes a really good cleaner. Whatever the case, as I stood at the spotless window with a Lowe's circular in hand, I felt compelled to share my fond memories of my first job, and one of the best cleaning tips you will hear nowhere else.

Optimism

I'm going to group together two optimism-related posts here. The first one concerns a rather optimistic prediction of "reverse engineering the brain" in 20 years. That's one way to get your name into general consumption mainstream media: get yourself quoted making completely outlandish predictions. Willingly or not, I'm involved in this reverse-engineering program, and based on my behind-the-scenes experience, I'll happily promise to eat my hat if we come anywhere close to what this guy is predicting while I'm still working.

Ah, that's rich. Still working -- as if to imply I have a job. I guess I'm a bit of an optimist too. I'm working on training it into the next generation using a reward system. At the beginning of the summer, Jude was enrolled in a program called Book Buddies at his preschool, two weeks after the last day of the regular school year. I suspect there's a reason the year ended when it did, because it was like September all over again, and Jude was never happy to start his day there. For the first few days, he grumbled when we picked him up, but one day, I asked him whether he had a good enough day to merit a sticker. Since then, I've been rewarding him not for being good, but instead for having a good day (being generally pleasant and obedient is a necessary condition for having a good day). I've got a good feeling it's going to work.

X-Rated

If you're here, and can make sense of what I'm writing, then you've gone through the ordeal of learning to read. If you have kids or work with kids, then you've had a chance to revisit the process, as I have recently. Commonly found in the arsenal of reading primers are picture books with 26 pages of apples, bats, and cats, etc. My recent re-acquaintance with these books has stirred up a fire in my belly.

I imagine that many children have eaten apples, touched a baseball bat, and petted a cat by the time they enter kindergarten. But I suspect that the number of 4 year old radiologists in the world is rather small. Zero, I daresay. So when you hit page 24 of your picture book only to read the word "X-ray", I think it would be quite understandable if the word failed to resonate with the child. I mean, it's a crap example anyways. Why not just replace the rest of the words with things like F-bomb and Big-O and make all of the examples into useless self-references.



And what are the alternatives? Xylophone, it seems -- no doubt placed there by the percussionist lobby, because the only reason anyone has ever heard of that instrument is from those damn books. And until Black-Eyed Peas replaces Fergie with a xylophone virtuoso like Ian Finkel, that's unlikely to change.

As a letter, it's not like it does anything other letters can't do. In words like xylophone it's pronounced like a Z, and in words like exit, it could just as easily be replaced with ks. Really, the only thing X has going for it is its shape, which is kind of cool and mysterious -- taboo, even. The letter most similar in shape, the 'K', doesn't have quite the same mojo, and in any case, I don't think the porn industry would have done nearly as well with triple-K (i.e., KKK) movies. So I'm going to look to the growing Tea Party movement to see if I can get my idea out there and in the hearts and minds of voters intent on trimming Big Government and Big Alphabet, and hopefully getting the economy turned around.

Caution: This blog post contains words.

I was making a "setup" with Mr. Jude today (he often now refers to himself in the third person as "Mr. Jude", which I think is absolutely fantastic), when I noticed something on the props we were using:



Does that make me a bad parent because we give our kids choking hazards with which to play? Well, no, actually. Here's the object in question, with a standard alphabet block for reference (and the floor tiles are 1-foot squares):



Choking hazard for whom? I understand that manufacturers hire lawyers to make sure their asses are covered, but I don't think this helps. In fact, in a world where every cup of hot coffee is marked with a caution that its contents may be hot, and sleeping pills are labeled to indicate that they may cause drowsiness, we are stuck with warnings that are either obvious* or else irrelevant. Either way, can people be blamed for not bothering to read them anymore? One day, someone is going to launch a lawsuit against manufacturers for causing them to disregard warnings, resulting in injury. I think I'd be rooting for him.

*Naturally, some warnings are not obvious to some people. But that's what the Darwin awards are for.

Bonus: The cone is marked unsuitable for children under 3, and for ages 4 and up, making it unclear how it relates to a 3 year old.

Foodchuck

Okay, so here is what life is like inside the mind of someone who overthinks things. I've been to a number of potlucks. I've hosted a number of potlucks. One thing remains constant: an overabundance of food. I don't know how many times I've implored people to take home some leftovers because it pains me to throw away so much food at the end of the night when there are starving people in Africa. Or indeed, pretty much everywhere. And if you're like me you've wondered from time to time just how much food is being tossed out. And if you're like me today, on the way to buy 3 dozen cookies to bring to a potluck (here's where I was), you figure out a good approximation.

Here's the thing: when someone goes to a potluck, knowing that there will be, say, 10 people there, they buy enough food to feed all 10 people. Okay, it works a little differently when people are invited as couples, or families, but the general gist is the same. Alright, so now each of the 10 people arrive at the party with 10 portions of KFC, lasagne, caesar salad or pie. That's 100 portions of food. Invite 12 people, and now there's 144 portions of food. Even allowing that each of those portions accounts for only, say, 25% of a meal (main dish, side 1, side 2, dessert), at the end of the day, the amount of food that gets wasted is exponential. When resources get wasted at an exponential rate, that's kind of a big deal.

So what's the take home (aside from leftovers)? Well, if you're a math teacher, this would be a really good 2-point question, maybe 5 points if you also ask for an appropriate number of cookies to bring to minimize waste. If you'll be attending a potluck in the near future and are either cost or waste conscious, you might rethink whether you really need to buy the family bucket of chicken. And finally, if you were thinking of hosting a potluck, you might want to cross me off your invite list, because, man, what a buzzkill.

Quick Recovery

Has my last post got you down? Well then this little vignette from my life is for you! Yesterday we went to the Brookfield Zoo. We bought a family membership late last year, and we want to make sure we get our money's worth. Getting there was a challenge because the heavy rains in the area lead to some localized flooding (thanks Make for the tip), and some of the roads in the area of the zoo were submerged (as was part of the wolf habitat). All in all, it was a good day, and I got to touch a manta ray. I drew the line, however, at paying an extra $2 to feed the damn things.

The day did go long, however, and Jude was ready to leave by the time we passed by the pachyderms. It was only the promise of a carousel ride that kept him interested in staying any longer. By this point in the day, we had long missed the Sunday evening mass, though Jude rode on a mantis in the carousel that he said was praying for something, so that's practically the same thing.

And when we got home, the good people at the Backyard BBQ Shop had assembled and delivered my new BBQ, purchased that morning -- a purchase precipitated by the Friday night power outage that left dinner half-cooked, and drove us from our house to spend the night at Amy's. Never again! It's grilled veggies and steaks from now until the end of August!

Dongle-icious

This post is more of a public awareness thing than anything else, and mostly relevant only to a small but important cross-section of the people who might read this blog -- namely the people who like to run computer programs that come with that irritating dongle copy protection scheme (cough - E-Prime - ahem).

According to this article I just read, it is now legal to circumvent this technology if, say, you're flashing your dongle around in public and someone gets alarmed, and kicks your dongle, rendering it impotent. The article says that congress now

[Allows] computer owners to bypass the need for external security devices called dongles if the dongle no longer works and cannot be replaced.

Of course, "cannot" might be the key phrase here, and can be interpreted in many ways. For example, I cannot go on an Alaskan cruise. Not because the salty sea air will kill me, but because I haven't got any disposable income to speak of.



So there you go. I don't know if this is good news for more than a handful of people I know, but if I've made anyone's day, I've done my job.

Update: This shady site that is under constructions [sic] lists quite a few computer programs that use dongles that they support, should you be kicked in the dongle. Though iTunes doesn't show up in a quick survey of the software listed, which suggests that I won't have won over any more of the kool kids with this uber-dorky post, it was nonetheless fun to use the word dongle in a sentence.

Channelling the Ancestors

The following exchange just occurred. First of all, it was based on the following Sesame Street skit that Jude likes to play (the clip begins with an old-skool animation):

Okay, so now that we're on the same page, here's how it went down. I swear I am not making this up, and this was totally unrehearsed:

Jude (just finishing eating his poached egg): Dad, say "I one the egg."
Me: I one the egg.
Jude: I two the egg.
Me: I three the egg.
Jude: I four the egg.
Me: I five the egg.
Jude: I six the egg.
Me: I seven the egg.
Jude: I ate the egg. Now say, "was it tasty?"
Me: Was it tasty?
Jude: Yes. Now say, "that was a good yolk".
Me: ... that was awesome.

Bad Parenting Vol 2

Moms and dads, when you have your television hooked up to a media center computer hooked up to the series of tubes that make up the interwebs, you're liberated from the insipid drudgery that often makes up children's programming, but also more able to inadvertently expose your kids to programming that may shape your impressionable kids in ways you may have not foreseen.

For example, Katy Perry's California Gurls video: bad idea. It might seem innocuous, especially given the Candyland theme, but that's more than offset by the fact that Ms. Perry looks the way she does in that video. It's also arguable that 4 years of age is too young for a Glee obsession. In fact, my oldest son is generally enthralled by any music video related production. He had a fit the other day, likely attributable to being overtired, but precipitated by his inability to actually live in a particular music video (it was hard not to laugh in response to his concern).



There's also a particular clip from a program called Man vs. Food that Jude repeatedly requests involving a suicide wing challenge. This gave me the idea to make chicken wings for dinner sometime in the next week or so. Coincidentally, I stumbled upon a link this morning to making chicken wings in the oven that turn out just like deep fried wings. I may try it out, though that means I won't be able to make wings before Monday at the earliest.

An Open Letter to Rogers Communications

Dear Rogers, if there were a single reason to not want to move back to Ontario, you would be it. You are the reason that the acronym DIAF has come into relatively common usage.

Bad Parenting Vol. 1

Democratically elected governments are kind of like parents - parents of a large, unruly brood of kids that constantly bicker. Take a developmental psychology class, and you will learn that there a number of parenting styles, though they generally boil down to four main styles. I'm not sure what style the current Canadian federal government is closest to because they don't seem to behave consistently. Or perhaps it's because there is no parenting style described by selectively listening to one child over another. In one of the latest political rows, the Canadian government is scrapping the long-form census. I won't get into what sort of information is collected in this one, but it should suffice to say that it provides quite a bit of information that is both very useful in making informed policy decisions, and quite valuable to research and industry alike, most notably because it is impossible to collect such a large, representative sample of information any other way because law compels recipients to provide it. Also note that, unlike phone surveys, the odds of being selected to complete this survey are one in five, and you are not obliged to carry the survey out while your dinner gets cold.



So here's the thing: Tony Clement, under the direction of Eh Steve, is scrapping the long form census. Why? Reportedly because a number of tinfoil hat wearing Canadians objected to the invasion of their privacy. Never mind that the aggregated data is anonymous. Never mind that without the data, deciding where to direct taxpayer money will be essentially a crap shoot (or, more likely, directed by whichever lobby group ponies up the most cash). Never mind that anyone with any knowledge about how statistics should be collected thinks that this is a boneheaded move.

This is where government and parenting meet. When you're serving up broccoli for dinner and one of your kids complains that they don't like vegetables, do you: a) switch to an all-hotdog diet? or b) tell them that they will sit at the table until they have either finished every gee-dee piece of broccoli on their plate or they fall asleep in their mashed potatoes? The answer, of course, is b, because kids don't know shit about anything, and shouldn't be making dietary decisions for the family. So why the hell is so much weight being given to the same paranoid segment of the population that believes that the moon landing was filmed on a sound stage?

Macho

This is a short one. I'm watching a program on Discovery Channel called Man Woman Wild. Holy crap. The wikipedia people should update their entry on douche, because I don't see Mykel Hawke's (seriously? I'm pretty sure he cribbed that name from a G.I. Joe action figure) picture anywhere on the page. Look, I'll go on record as saying that I hold a dim view on women's studies as an academic pursuit (mostly based on what I have seen decorating the doors in university departments, or reports I have heard from intrepid males and females alike who have taken the odd course to fill out their timetables), and I am only being slightly flippant when I say it would be nice if I could bitch about life and call it a special topics course, but if I have any feminist sympathies at all, this dude brings them out. But don't take my word for it -- you can watch clips from the show and decide for yourself. Every time he calls his wife "babe", it's like biting tin foil. I don't think his survival skills are going to be much help when his wife puts arsenic in his coffee.

This pithy sentiment seen adorning the halls of Wymyn's Studies departments everywhere