Les Bonnes Choses

A few days ago, I was complaining about the way that life begins with a Social Security number down here. You can't do anything without it, and just about everybody asks for it (though with the exception of your employer and banks, both of whom pay you money, your are not obliged to give it out to anybody). Thus, millions of Americans trust their key piece of identification in the hands of minimum wage employees every day. So there's a certain amount of schadenfreude that I experience when I read that the chairman of the fed was a victim of identity theft. It's not quite irony, because Ben Bernake doesn't administer the Social Security office, but it's kind of poetic nonetheless.

You know, there are methods, known to cryptographers, of devising sets of numbers, one publicly known and the other private, that might be useful in this sort of situation, Using something like RSA would require an overhaul of how SSNs are administered, but maybe the savings might be worth it.

Just coming in from the car to resume the home stretch of house packing, I was listening to the CBC hourly news update. I'm pretty good with identifying voices, so when I heard the voice of announcer Mike Crawley, I was 99 percent sure that my months-long quest to identify the intense, angry weather announcer had come to an end. Now if only I could ID the spacey woman, I would be complete.

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?

Post number two for the day also concerns The Ceeb. This week they have been airing a repeat of the 2008 Massey Lectures by Margaret Atwood speaking on the economy. I would ask why they hell they would get a literary figure to give a talk about the North American economic engine, but that would make me a hypocrite because I'm always spouting off on topics about which I really know little more than the average lay-person. But that just reinforces my thesis that, once you get an advanced degree, you can take it as a license to render your opinion on pretty much any topic that you want and people give you a fair amount of leeway. Anyways, it's not her credentials that are the reason for me shutting off the radio this evening; rather, it's her speaking voice. You know how they have a saying about ugly people: "a face for radio?" Well, she has a voice for newspaper, which I suppose suits her choice of vocation. Ironically, the only other person I can think of that I would find more difficult to listen give that same lecture is former head of the Bank of Canada, David Dodge, who would arguably be one of the most qualified people to talk on the subject. I would sooner have nails driven through my ear drums than listen to that man speak for more than a minute.

Update:
This didn't seem to warrant an entirely new post, but I just learned that I am SO screwed.

CBC recently announced a number of programming changes in light of their recent budget shortfall. Highlights (for me):
Changes on Radio One include:

• Cancellations of The Inside Track, Outfront and The Point.


• Reduction of regional noon-hour programs to one hour.


• Reductions in drama.

This is the best thing to happen to CBC in awhile. No more Afghanada? No more Outfront (a.k.a. the pointless depressing story show). Ontario Today will be limited to just one hour of random people phoning in with incoherent observations or questions about how to keep pests off their rose bushes? I may just end up listening to CBC Radio One even more!

I just read a headline on the CBC website:

Hundreds to be hired to process EI claims, says HR minister ...

... and promptly find themselves out of work.

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.

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.