Les Bonnes Choses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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'm suspending my blog posts for the foreseeable future.

Fortunately, I seldom plan past the end of the week, which is when I'll be marking some assignments that will hopefully not cause me to cringe. Thus, the foreseeable future may be upon us sooner than you might think.

I also really hope that things go well for K and me. I had originally written 'K and I' and was about to explain that 'K' was an initial, whereas 'I' was being used as a pronoun to refer to myself, but then I realized that it would have been ungrammatical, thereby saving me the extra effort of having to issue a clarification. Except that I then went ahead and wrote about it.

Oh, I did want to announce that I am now up to 2 lost friends reclaimed via the internet. The first was Vivian. Sitting on our picture shelf at the top of the stairs is a photo of me, Bill Hodgetts and Nicole Anderson, on the day of our graduation. I knew that Nicole had gone off to grad school at Mac after that, but previous efforts to track her down via the email addresses on her publications were for naught. Fortunately, she saw a comment of mine on the facebook group dedicated to critiquing the abysmal state of research funding in Canada and contacted me. Fait accompli!

See, nobody out there gives me feedback except for good old K, and maybe the odd nudge from C (I have taken to using initials because that's what K does, though in my line of work, when people are referred to by their initials, it's usually because they have brain damage). As a result, that's who's calling the shots. However, I'm going to try to swing the topic around to a proto-rant that's been forming in my head. I think you'll find it flows nicely, though.

A bunch of whiners have recently petitioned Ottawa to try to get their hands on some Can-con funds for internet media. As the argument goes, there is such a fund to ensure that Canadian music and TV gets produced, so why not require ISPs to pony up some cash to fund Canadian-made content that appears on the internet? Please allow me to outline why I think that's a stupid idea:

• Canadian media producers have repeatedly demonstrated an inability to produce anything that people might want to watch. Our niche seems to be derivative works from the Anne of Green Gables mythology and Just For Laughs specials.


• Who exactly would qualify for this money? I'm Canadian. I'm writing original content to appear on the internet. I'd never see a dime. This fund would just get tacked on to your monthly internet bill and either get frittered away by some bureacracy, or else fund Wind up my Backside: the Flash game


• Most damningly, we all know that the internet is really just a vehicle to deliver porn. A Wall Street Journal piece reported that 69% (yes, this was the real figure) of all paid sites were porn related. How much of this porn was created in Canada? Like, zero. And you know why? Because it's too bloody cold. Regardless of how well funded it may be, Canada will never be a porn superpower as long as we have to contend with goosebumps and shrinkage for 8 months of the year.

QED.

A request has been made for me to hurry up and get on with writing another blog entry. However, as I just got back from an intimate little conference in Niagara Falls, formerly the Honeymoon Capital of the World, but now the Schlock Capital of the World, I haven't had much time to reflect on the sorts of issues that allow me to deliver the kind of hard-hitting pieces to which you have become accustomed.

So I thought I'd take advantage of my lack of direction and make this a little exercise in creativity. I decided to pick my topic by selecting an article from Wikipedia using the random article link. So, without further ado, I present to you my thoughts on ...

Ingolfiella longipes

Hmm. I can't say much about it, aside what we can all read from the wikipedia page. It turns out I'm not really as good at this as I thought I might be. It took me a couple passes to read the name though. That species name looks alot like long-pipes. Really, this fun-loving crustacean has a name that could be a character from a Harry Potter novel or something. Ingelfella Longpipes, that quirky defense against the dark arts instructor, who's always fumbling about his magical pockets for his tin of tobacco.

I don't think I'll try this exercise again.

...for anyone left standing with a AAA credit rating.
I was just reading an article in Slate about how Sirius XM satellite radio is in a very bad place. I agree with the author: considering the ubiquity of portable music players like the iPod, satellite radio is pretty lame. The author talked about getting out of the satellite business and just market their programming over the internet. Okay, maybe. But what about those 7 satellites they have floating up there? If they're up to the task, snapping those things up in a fire sale to offer satellite internet access would be sweet.

Okay, it's a half-baked idea, but more than once have I left an idea in a half-baked state, and someone else comes along a few years later, throws it in the oven at 350° and makes a mint. It's irritating.

I realize I haven't posted in over a week (by a few hours), so I should probably hastily jot some thoughts down.

No, I really have no thoughts. I am somewhat agitated about hearing back about either of the postdocs to which I have applied. I may have to endure a longer than strictly-necessary wait to hear about the San Diego job because I learned that there may be a policy that requires the position to be externally advertised, even if the position has effectively been filled. Still no word about the Brown one. And I have yet to apply for the one in Amy's lab. Also K (she uses initials to refer to her colleagues in her blog) is making me agitated by osmosis with her recent musings on the prospects of finding employment.

I'm sorry this entry isn't more amusing; more Tony Hawks-ish, as Carrie would call it. Unfortunately, I haven't found my thoughts to be especially amusing lately. Maybe I should read more light-hearted fare. I tend to introduce elements of the writing styles of authors that I am reading at any given time.

I already expressed these sentiments in a comment on my own note on Facebook, but that was before I made the return trip home. I just got back from a trip to San Diego where I am a candidate for a postdoctoral position at UCSD working with Jeff Elman and Marta Kutas -- though I quickly figured out that, in saying you work in so-and-so's lab, all you are really doing is indicating where your mail should be routed, because everyone works with everyone down there. It's like some kind of research orgy or something. Probably pays something like $88/hr (see Carrie's note if you can).

I don't travel quite as much as, say, John, or Chris, but I have made a decent number of trips into the US over the span of my postgraduate career. I can truly say that I have never before had a more pleasant trip. Sure, on the way down there was a brief period of panic when I was unsure whether I would catch my connecting flight out of Detroit. But in all my interactions with the various incarnations of what is now the Department of Fatherland Homeland Security, everyone was pleasant and non-confrontational on both ends of the trip. Compare this to the last time I went through the border crossing, coincidentally for the purpose of my first meeting with Jeff Elman. Back then, the inquisitor at the Ambassador bridge gave me quite a rough time. When asked what the purpose of my trip was, I replied that it was for a meeting. The moron actually asked, "So why doesn't he come up there to meet you? Why do you have to come here?" I still fantasize about smacking him in the face and calling him a dipshit, but that fantasy always comes to a grinding halt when I get charged with assault and barred from entry into the US in response. Apparently, my ability to fantasize is impaired by my mind's insistence on imposing realistic constraints, and so unlike most people, I fantasize about being able to fantasize.

I'm meeting Jeff for brekkie in 30 mins. I've showered and am just going through my slides again. I woke up at about 6:30, well ahead of my 7:00 wake up call, but it felt like I slept till 9, and I slept straight through (not even waking up to pee) so I feel well rested. Also it feels like my brain is firing properly, so I think I'll be fine today. To be sure, I made myself some hotel room coffee. It tastes like how Erin and my dad make it.

I'm going into the day smelling like juniper. Maybe -- that's what the soap and lotion said (I have very dry skin). The hotel at which I am staying is the Estancia Spa/Hotel. That's right: spa. So they have fragranced everything. Funny how a dude can smell like olive oil and juniper extract, and if he has an excuse like, "I've just come from the spa," then it's okay. If instead his only excuse was that he likes to roll around in botanicals, he gets the big ole stink-eye.

I know it's unethical, because he cannot give informed consent, but as my son, Pokey's life to date is a bit of an experiment. Though he is quite articulate for a 2-year-old, his language development has taken a bit of an odd turn by virtue of the fact that we often choose to use a bizarre selection of words around our house, and indeed also at his nana and papa's house. Of course, I tend to associate with like-minded people who have similarly thrown off the shackles of normalcy. One of my good friends, John, was good enough to give Jude a plush toy for Christmas a few weeks back. It's a plush Cthulhu. If you're not familiar with Cthulhu, here's what this demon devourer of souls looks like, according to the mythology:

Plush vacation Cthulhu looks a little different though. And has become Jude's favourite movie-watching buddy. It is customary for Cthulhu to dance to the opening Sheryl Crow song, Real Gone when watching the Disney/Pixar Cars movie.
All in all, Cthulhu has been a good childhood friend while on his vacation from devouring souls, though he is a bit of a shark at playing cards and dices.

Speaking as a geek, and as someone who has made excessively elabourate cakes, I can appreciate how awesome this birthday must have been for the celebrant who got this cake:



However, if you check out the rest of the flikr images associated with the cake, you might wonder whether the birthday boy and his friends realize they have allowed themselves to become caricatures.

There is a predator in Masonville Mall. She's caucasian, possibly from the Mediterranean region, about 5'4" - 5'6", 120 lbs., brown hair and very aggressive when approached.

You will find her manning the temporary booth on the first floor, selling Dead Sea skin products. I was shopping yesterday for a stand lamp for Rebecca when I was approached by this woman. It's a bit of a blur, but this is what I told the police:

She addressed me by asking whether I would like to try some lotion. My hands are presently very dry, as in the sort of condition you might expect my skin to be in if my job was to scrub floors all day. Without gloves. With lye. So I figured, 'hey, what's the harm in getting some lotion on my hands?'
She squeezed a blob of this revolutionary lotion on my hand, and I rubbed it in, only then realizing that this was a very feminine smelling product. She then told me how this lotion was made with ingredients from the Dead Sea as the final horror sunk in that I was now going to be walking around the mall smelling like a floral arrangement.

Now my mind was racing to figure out an exit strategy, so only part of my attention was focused on her - just enough to allow me to react in case she jumped at me with an avocado facial.

"Do you want to see something amazing?" she asked.
"Something amazing?" I repeated, estimating that she would probably not show me anything sufficiently amazing to justify what I had just endured.
"Show me your fingernails. What's your worst finger?"
'Oh my God, I smell like flowers and now she wants to give me a manicure,' I thought. "No, thanks," I replied, now walking away.
"Don't you like the cream?" she asks after me.
"It smells a little -- girly," I replied back, I'm sure with a disgusted look on my face.

Shortly after this encounter, I came across one of the members of my Cohort, Jon, who was also shopping for his wife. Wait. Let me be clear: He was shopping for his wife, and I was shopping for mine. I was not also shopping for his wife. Whatever. In any case, I could not greet him by shaking his hand because my hand smelled like Aunt Esther. It was awful.

I've blogged about my dreams a couple of times before, usually because they are funny. The other night, however, I had a decidedly unfunny dream in which I was on an airplane that hit turbulence and went into a nosedive. I mention this because it's kind of interesting how dreams can give you insight into your behaviour because one often takes the dream to be real at the time (I say often because I usually disbelieve my nightmares and take over them, turning them into movies, for example, where I can redo the scene until I get it right). Anyways, the interesting thing about this particular nightmare was the chance, however unpleasant it was, to find out what would go through my mind in the event of a plane crash. One generally only gets that chance once, and by that point, they don't get a chance to share any insight gained.

Speaking of nightmares...

Okay, not really, but I couldn't easily segue from nightmares to routers. But I was just reviewing the comments people left behind for some of my earlier posts. It turns out that Pat was able to identify the problem I was having with google going AWOL, when he suggested that the router might be to blame and likely just needed a reboot. Evidence supporting his theory was provided just before I started today's entry.

Pleasant dreams! (ooh! thunder and lightning! I love thunderstorms)

I just fielded a call from a telemarketer - sort of. The phone number showed up as 555-444-3333, so clearly the caller was masking their phone number. So I picked up, expecting a sales pitch, and enthusiastically said, "Hello?" I usually feign enthusiasm when I answer telemarketer calls. I have no idea why. I think my mom does the same sort of thing, sounding almost offensively saccharine to overhear her end of the conversation. Instead of the sales pitch, the following conversation took place:

"Mr. Smith?"
"Sorry, you have the wrong number."
"I'm sorry. Thank you. "

As soon as the other end hung up, it occurred to me that this was far from the first time we have gotten phone calls for Mr. Smith, or similar John Doe names. Then I started wondering whether companies might deliberately make random calls to John Doe names, just to see if a number is dead or not. Or maybe to see whether someone is home? I don't know, it seems sorta fishy. Or phishy. Alternately, maybe it's just the result of people providing bogus information on signup forms. I find the most straightforward explanation, that our phone number used to belong to a Mr. Smith, to be just too boring.

Last week, a couple of neighbourhood girls came to the door sometime in the early evening. When I opened the door, they asked if I would donate "to charity", and presented me with a nondescript clear plastic container containing a few coins. I asked the girl who had presented the container what the charity was.

"Um...," she said, as her face betrayed a look of horror. She exchanged glances with the other girl, who spoke up after a moment.

"For kids ... who have no clothes or any food to eat or a place to live," she said. The girl carrying the change then said something else to further embellish the charity description. I forget what, exactly, because at the time, I was thinking to myself that this was the ballsiest act I had ever seen perpetrated by a child under the age of 12. Now, I should note that, even though I am willing to bet my one-and-only liver (I estimate the black market value to be $50,000, based on the $20,000 one can get for a kidney) that they were not canvassing under the auspices of any particular charity, I cannot completely rule out the possibility that they were perhaps inspired by something that some random kid did, and were going to take that money straight to school the next day, and get some guidance from their teacher. However, even if they had figured out a rather novel, if not morally reprehensible means of making a bit of spending money, I felt that the dollar I gave them from my pocket was worth the story.

And while I am on the topic of hucksters and thinking outside the box, an idea came to me this afternoon. I received a call from MNBA, telling me about their platinum Mastercard, and how they are the first credit card to be endorsed by the UWO Alumni Association. I think the telemarketer was a bit confused when I congratulated her on that accomplishment. Anyways, after I declined the offer three times, I hung up. Then part of my brain must have gotten to work on a solution to the telemarketing problem. Here's what it came up with: How would you like to get your home phone service from a phone company that automatically redirects all incoming calls from telemarketers representing some company to the home phone numbers of the members of the boards of directors for that company. That would be sweet.

Reader John writes in from Maryland today to alert me to the following research, which contradicts my previous statement on the amazingness of grapefruit:

(Source: http://xkcd.com/388/)
Clearly, according to these data, grapefruit does not compare favourably to most other fruits. Fortunately, I have a powerful, dedicated quad-core computer available to run the statistics, so I will begin a cluster analysis of various produce on these and other dimensions to see if I can account for these results.

Thank you John for writing in. Because your email was selected from the hundreds of emails we receive here at Les Bonnes Choses each week, you will be receiving the official Les Bonnes Choses tee-shirt in the post.