Les Bonnes Choses

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.

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.

I've never broken any bones, other than one time playing football, where I may have cracked a rib on Ian Norman's knee as I tackled him. But I never got confirmation on that, so I'm not going to write about broken bones today. I just couldn't think of another title for this blog entry. If you feel mislead, well, that's because I have mislead you. But you still haven't given me that $5 you owe me, so let's call it even.

The crew has just left our house, following an evening of games for me to lose. I'm not too sad about it though because one of the Trivial Pursuit questions taught us about a line of IKEA furniture with a name that corresponded to a German word meaning "satisfying intercourse".

I also went through my blog entries for the past several months and assigned tags to them. I think that means I have a problem. In so doing, I noticed that several of my more brilliant posts have not been commented on. I strongly recommend that you stop what you are doing right now and go back to my first entry and make sure you haven't missed any.

Finally, as of today, I am no longer a big wuss when it comes to riding my motorcycle, as I rode it across town, taking some of London's busier roads along the way. Speed perception is strange. I found myself feeling comfortable doing almost 80 on Wonderland because there were cars that were slowly overtaking me (the speed limit is 60). When I ride around my neighbourhood, on the other hand, 40 feels ridiculously fast as I whizz by houses and parked cars.

Jeez, I'm tired. I'm going to bed now.

New day, new graphical elements. I'm the type who can never leave well enough alone, so when I stumbled across a website with free blogger templates, I couldn't resist trying one out. Unfortunately, it bunged stuff up, causing my wish lists to be discarded, and also took out the important links at the top of the page, so I ended up just finding another blogger layout that I liked. I'm not sure why I did it, other than I have been in a gitterdun frame of mind since this morning, when I rode in on my hog*. I had to change my action plan somewhat because someone from the university maintenance crew was in to fix a water valve that had leaked in the ceiling right above our fancy computer. Nothing was damaged, thankfully, but it's hard to work at a computer in a closet-sized room with plumber-butt just inches away from your face. Instead, I stayed in my office all day (when I wasn't helping Kaz rearrange office furniture) and resumed editing my manuscript for resubmission. When I got home, I set about making meatloaf and cleaning out the dryer vent, which had accumulated enough dryer lint to make a small felt coat. This should not be taken as an indication that we don't know how to properly use a dryer; rather as an indication that the fencing company that built our deck doesn't know how to properly follow a building plan, and instead of building a step-down sitting area as I had asked, instead built the deck so that it blocks off the dryer vent.

*Note: I use the word 'hog' ironically. My motorcycle would never, under any circumstances, be referred to as a hog by a knowledgeable person. I use the term ironically because I don't identify in any way with the motorcycle culture.

I've been reading. I just finished reading Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain, which was a remarkably fast and enjoyable read. I received a book called The Last Lecture, by Randy Pausch, in my stocking this past Christmas. Apparently, Carnegie Mellon had a series of lectures called The Last Lecture, where speakers were invited to pass on their wisdom for the ages, as though it were their last chance to be heard. In the case of Randy Pausch, when he gave the lecture on September 18, 2007 (my birthday), he did so knowing that it was his last lecture because he had been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. He died July 25, 2008. I'm going to go ahead and read the book, but damn, that's just the most depressing way to start off a book. It doesn't help much that the book is peppered with photos and such of him with his three young kids. I'm not sure if it's a cause or an effect of my vocation, but I very often find myself putting myself inside someone else's head. It's very useful when trying to figure out what the hell people are doing (or are going to do) when they're taking part in psychological experiments (which often require perfectly normal people to do rather bizarre things). But sometimes empathy is a real pain in the ass.

Maybe I should just read the volumes of research put out by the people I will be visiting in San Diego on Monday. I doubt I'll feel too much one way or another while reading Neurophysiological evidence for transfer appropriate processing of memory: processing versus feature similarity.

I just edited my first Wikipedia page. Okay, maybe edit is too strong of a word. I corrected the improper use of the word 'their' (when the author meant 'there' -- one of my pet peeves.). But it was really easy to do. I could see how someone with an anal-retentive streak like mine could get hooked on editing wikipedia pages. I don't know the stupid syntax - wiki uses its own markup, which gets converted into HTML so that people don't have to learn HTML. Of course, I know HTML, so you can probably see the perverseness in my learning wiki markup. And that's why I won't become a compulsive wiki editor, so you can cancel that intervention you were planning.

I failed at pizza. The other day I used a pizza kit to try to make a 'homemade' pizza. The kit, I believe produced by Kraft, contained a pizza dough flour mix (just add water and let it rise), tomato sauce, some dried herbs (just oregano, I think) and Parmesan cheese. I've tried to make a pizza crust from scratch before. I sucked then too. I can make the dough well enough. My problem is in taking the ball of risen dough and turning it into a pizza crust. I can't make a round flat crust without overworking the dough, which I think undoes the rising process by pressing all the CO2 out. I can't get the crust uniformly thick, either. Instead I get some spots that are way too thick, and others that are thin to the point of becoming holes. It's all very frustrating, and nothing like I must have learned from television in my childhood with the throwing spinning disks of dough into the air. On one hand, I could avoid all that frustration by giving up and just buying the ready-made crusts from the store. But then I'd never learn how to do it, and it bugs me that I can't figure it out. If anyone can show me how to make a proper pizza crust, I'd be happy to apprentice.

Last week, I had ordered the final bits (the motherboard, for those who care) for my new computer. This was to fill the void left when the company from whom I bought the other bits (tigerdirect.ca) failed to notify me that the motherboard I had ordered from them was never going to arrive. That evening, I placed an order for a similar motherboard from another Canadian online computer bits store, directcanada.com, who had good prices and promised fast shipping. At the end of the order process, an email arrived instructing me to click some sort of link so I could receive a phone call with a verification PIN. At this point, it was late, and Jude was asleep so I decided not to go through this phone call step and to just go to bed. The next morning, I checked my order status to find it was not yet complete, and I took this to mean that it was still waiting for me to initiate the phone call step. I figured by this point, it might be just faster to by the item locally, so and after I went with Jenny to transfer over her gym membership, I went out and bought the critically missing computer piece. I spent the next day installing software and just after I got everything 'just so', the doorbell rings. Purolator. With the motherboard that I thought was in stasis. What the heck am I going to do with this thing? The motivation behind this blog entry is that after I contacted directcanada.com and explained the situation, I received an apology for the confusion and an offer to pay for the return shipping and refund the purchase. I decided that because I didn't get the screwing over that I anticipated, and because their shipping was so ridiculously fast, that I would favourably mention them in a public forum. I have no need for it now, but the next time I need to buy some computer bits, directcanada.com will probably be the first place I check.

Why all the hyperlinks? Blogger is owned by google. And hyperlinks factor in to (or at least, they did once upon a time) search engine rankings. So if someone googles directcanada.com, this should show up near the top. At least, that's my theory. And perhaps I can be faulted for having theories about search engine rankings.

Today I stayed home because I had my laptop with me, and the task for the day was to finish making the filler items for what is hopefully the final experiment of my dissertation (God, I hope it works out!)

Well, I finished creating the filler items with time to spare in the afternoon, but I was feeling pretty spry, so I decided to tackle some projects. Project 1: put some holes in the ground for 2x2 posts that will be used to support the walls of a 2-tiered raised garden bed in the back yard. Excavating a hole for a 2x2 without making it far too large is one challenge; digging in our rocky soil is another. My solution: I bought a 1" diameter masonry bit just over a foot long for my hammer drill, and basically used my drill as an auger (that's auger pronounced ogg-er, not Auger, pronounced Oh-zhay, though it might be kind of funny to imagine how to use a drill as one of those...). It wasn't quite as smooth sailing as I hoped it might be because the rocks still posed a problem, but I prevailed and suffered only a blister on my palm (I was afraid of blowing out my drill on a couple occasions). After that was done, I dug out around the boulder in the front yard to put in the edging, completing project 2, and when that was done, I attached the baby carrier seat we purchased last summer to Rebecca's bike (project 3). For my encore, I made dinner: bacon-wrapped pork tenderloin medallions (yes, that's pork-wrapped pork), BBQ roasted potato slices and steamed brussels sprouts.

Sorry, ladies, I'm taken. But feel free to try out my dinner menu, because it was tasty.


Now I take this post on a 90-degree turn and talk about the CBC Radio One programs that I like and dislike. In the like column, we have Ideas, Age of Persuasion, Quirks and Quarks, And Sometimes Y (no longer running), Spark, and Search Engine. In the dislike column, we have DNTO, Q (can't stand the hosts) and Out Front (tonight's episode was literally 20 minutes of random, unrelated sound-effects, demonstrating that the general public is not qualified to produce radio programming). I like listening to the voices of Paul Kennedy, Michael Enright, Stuart McLean, and Kate MacNamara who does the business news every odd day with an accent that I just can't place and impeccable diction. The nameless woman who reads the weather forecast after 7pm, however, speaks with the most bizarre inflection, as though she's maybe an alien infiltrator.

At the end of the day, as I was packing up to go pick up Pokey, Rebecca told me that there was a Canada Revenue Agency envelope waiting for me. Those with any sort of memory will recall that I've been in a bit of a tussle with CRA over an egregious error that resulted in them incorrectly calculating my income and arriving at an outstanding tax bill of nearly $3000. As we are now approaching the end of this year's tax season, you might imagine that I haven't been too eager to start my 2007 return until this dispute has been resolved, so I have been looking forward to receiving this envelope for some while now. I am happy to report that the re-re-reassessment has resulted in the reversal of my standing as a debtor to CRA, and, in fact, netted me an additional $40 deposited into my account.

Now, this isn't the first time this has happened. One year, as a result of a question I asked when speaking to a CRA agent about that year's reassessment, it was discovered that CRA had, for no particularly good reason, disallowed my tuition credit from the previous year (the wording on their reassessment notice left me unclear about what they were on about). The resulting correction returned a few hundred dollars to me. The moral of the story: CRA should stop reassessing me, because it seems to end up with them owing me money. Don't fool yourself, however, into thinking that I should look forward to these exercises in bureaucracy. The $40 I got back wasn't even close to worth the aggravation it caused.

Epilogue: A notice was attached that reminded me that the amount returned to me included $7 in interest which I must declare next year on my return. It is entirely possible that this marks the beginning of next year's story.

This week, Hasbro bought the rights to Trivial Pursuit, and announced that they would be taking the game in a number of new directions. What does this mean for my many friends and family members (including my wife) who are big fans of the board game genre, but do not consider themselves to be nerds? Let me tell you about the new directions Hasbro (and its subsidiaries) have taken some other games:

• They acquired Magic: the Gathering, the granddaddy of collectible card games. Some might even call it "gibberish"


• They acquired Dungeons and Dragons from TSR (or maybe just ate the whole company). Among other things, they made a collectible miniatures game out of it.


• They took the WWII strategy board game Axis and Allies, and turned that into a collectible miniatures game.


• Hasbro has always owned the Transformers brand (at least, in North America), but yes, it's a collectible card game.

My dear friends, don't be surprised if you find yourself in the not-so-distant future among the (literally) unwashed nerd masses, in some stinky comic book store buying booster packs of Trivial Pursuit questions. I hope they save the Canadian geography questions for the junk rare cards.