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'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.

I like news headlines because their lack of critical parts of speech, such as prepositions, makes them prone to comical misinterpretation, and general hilarity. For example, today The Ceeb had the following:

Stunning 82-year-old hospital patient with Taser was justified.

Now, you might click on the link with eager excitement at the prospect of reading about an elderly invalid in a fabulous black evening gown who's got a good excuse to be carrying around a non-lethal sidearm -- but you'd be disappointed. Instead, you'd read about how Canadian law enforcement means business. Forget that polite stereotype. Around here, laying on a gurney (or wielding a stapler) is a good way to get yourself zapped, my friend.

Of course, we could also be defined by what we don't do. For example: fund research. My thin envelope from NSERC arrived in the mail today. I didn't have to be Johnny Carson to know what it said. One thing I did forget about was that it had a brochure about applying for the Industrial R&D Fellowships program.

Dear Canadian Funding Agency Purseholders,
If I wanted to work for a large multinational conglomerate, I would have spared myself the last 6 years of graduate work and tens of thousands of dollars of tuition and applied to work at a bank directly out of my undergraduate career. Then I could have been doing something that the business community finds useful for the last several years. Like help run the world's economies into the ground, for example.

A few years ago, when I held an NSERC Doctoral scholarship, it was appropriate to put a little NSERC logo on the posters when I presented my research. Because, you know, they supported me so I could do the research. I regret that, for the time being, I will have to put an unacknowledgement on my conference posters: the Canadian government had nothing to do with this discovery or innovation. Is embarrassment effective at influencing policy?

I was reading this article on Wired the other day, which was timely because it touches on a number of things that bug me about North America.

I tried to find some clips of the 1950's future of transportation spots that I think coincide nicely with where it really started to get out of hand. Disney seems to have been pretty diligent at keeping them off youtube. Some marketers got the funny idea in their heads that people would just love to take a nice long ride in their convertible to their nice suburban home in a quiet neighbourhood of well-manicured lawns. Urban planners must have seen these films because they went kind of nuts designing sprawling cities with miles of concrete to link all these neighbourhoods. (North America was born on the notion of land ownership - much to the chagrin of the aboriginal people who lived here before us - which I think is why we use land so inefficiently). So from about midway through 20th century, North America has been designed around the car. Most people are effectively obligated to own a car because there's no other practical way to get to work, do groceries for your family, etc. (it takes me 40 minutes by bus to get from home to the school; it takes me 25 minutes door-to-door by bike).

And so our economy revolves around the automobile in so many ways: oil is a big one, and we'll even go to war for it; 1 in 7 jobs are tied to the automobile industry; every kilometer of asphalt has to be maintained with taxpayer dollars as do the sewers and water delivery pipes that follow all those roads to newly developed suburbs. Not only do sewers crumble, but water pipes are not actually water tight, and I learned from a former neighbour who worked with a regional utilities managing company that something like 25% of the water pumped in from the lakes actually leaks out into the ground as it flows through those pipes: longer pipes mean more leakage.

So I'm somewhat ambivalent about the situation that car manufacturers find themselves in lately. On one hand, unless cities were radically redesigned, we're still screwed without them. On the other hand, for the reasons I outlined above, I think 'good riddance'. That's why I want my own planet. I think this one is a do-over.

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.

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.