First sign of impending old age

You know you're not as young as you think you are when a little thing like staying up until 4 in the morning wipes you out the next day. The wine? That couldn't have had anything to do with it. Unpossible.

The performance was good, the dinner was delayed, but the conversations afterwards were worth hanging around for. Elizabeth bailed at midnight — clever of her, actually — but I somehow stayed awake and talkative for a little while longer.

The after-performance gathering wasn't quite a cast party, nor quite a going-away party, but had sufficient elements of each to satisfy the two different groups of participants. It was Brendan's final party in Stratford, as he's taken a job that will require him to move to Brantford . . . not too far away in actual distance, but quite some way in travel time if you don't have a car.

QotD: Bureaucrats

The problems with the actual good bureau'rats (the 'c' is silent) are:

a) their good efforts are often overshadowed by the effects of the nasty buggers, who really know how to play the system to worst effect — and as we know, a single bad experience wipes out a world of OK and good experiences in the mind of the 'consumer'.

b) everybody in a department might be a hardworking, efficient saint, but if what they are doing is not needed or is actively harmful in its conception and its implementation, then all the good will in the world won't suffice to put lipstick on that pig. Think Gun Registry.

I won't even get into the subclass of bureau'rats who are "true believers" — they can sometimes be worse than the malicious ones.

Kevin McLauchlan, personal email, 2008-05-02

Trespassers, beware

A few weeks back, Roger Henry posted this to one of the mailing lists I'm still gettting caught up on reading:

In tropical, North Queensland, the Barron River plunges over an escarpment (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barron_Falls ) A diversionary weir sends most of the water off to a hydro-plant and only a trickle tumbles down the rocks. Being more of a slope than a cliff the rocks are very tempting to rock-climbers, despite numerous warnings that operation of the power plant may, without notice, cause water to be restored to the falls. A siren alerts people that this is about to happen.

I asked a tour guide about the siren and if it was to give any climbers time to escape.

"No" he laughed "The water would arrive in a minute or two and climbers would not be able to get clear. The purpose of the siren is to give tourists a chance to prepare their cameras"

"And the climbers?" I enquired.

"Ahh. They would be swept away and certainly killed. No concern of ours. There are warning signs everywhere. The climbers have to get over a fence and trespass. Up to the police and relatives if they want to search for bodies".

That was many years ago™. Doubt if such candor would be PC today.

QotD: Defining the word "obvious"

More often than not, guys interpret even friendly cues, such as a subtle smile from a gal, as a sexual come-on, and a new study discovers why: Guys are clueless.

More precisely, they are somewhat oblivious to the emotional subtleties of non-verbal cues, according to a new study of college students.

"Young men just find it difficult to tell the difference between women who are being friendly and women who are interested in something more," said lead researcher Coreen Farris of Indiana University's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.

This "lost in translation" phenomenon plays out in the real world, with about 70 percent of college women reporting an experience in which a guy mistook her friendliness for a sexual come-on, Farris said.

Some might think the results come down to "boys being boys," and so even the slightest female interest sparks sexual fantasy. But the study, to be detailed in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science, also found that it goes both ways for guys — they mistake females' sexual signals as friendly ones. The researchers suggest guys have trouble noticing and interpreting the subtleties of non-verbal cues, in either direction.

Jeanna Bryner, "Clueless guys can't read women, study confirms: Why women's friendly cues get interpreted as sexual come-ons", MSNBC, 2008-03-20

The "Real Doll" for the maternally oriented

I don't know about you, but I found this particularly creepy:

Behind placid suburban facades, in seemingly normal neighborhoods, restless housewives are dismembering and enucleating babies, baking them in ovens in pursuit of that gently throttled look, then selling them to strangers. And, no, it's not Satan who's making them do it — it's eBay.

Thanks to a recent British documentary, My Fake Baby, the world at large now knows about the "reborning" community, a mostly female subculture of artisans and collectors organized around vinyl infants who begin life as inexpensive, plain-looking dolls and, through the meticulous craft of maternal Dr. Frankensteins, metamorphize into super-realistic creatures that look and feel just like genuine lifeless babies. The rarest specimens fuel high-stakes eBay bidding wars that can reach upwards of $5000.

Snowplow amateur hour

I was very late in to work this morning, partly because I had an appointment with my dentist, and partly because it was amateur hour for snow plow operators on highway 401 today. We had a moderate snowfall last night and into this morning, somewhere in the 10-15cm range, which wouldn't be too much trouble on its own. What was a problem today was the ineptitude or maliciousness of one or more snow plow operators on the stretch of the 401 from the 404/DVP interchange to at least Yonge Street.

The driver in question had managed to create nigh-on impenetrable ice-walls across the on- and off-ramps for Leslie Street and Bayview Avenue. It was so bad that drivers were up on top of these temporary ramparts trying to shovel their way through using snow brushes and ice scrapers!

Half-a-dozen notions lacking in importance and relevance

This is my best attempt to satisfy the outrageous demands of Chris Taylor and Damian "Babbling" Brooks who conspired to tag me with this meme.

Chris mentions his dislike of monkeys, and I'm with him on that: my best friend in grade 6 had a spider monkey at home . . . what a ghastly little monster. My feelings for the other members of the primates never recovered from that meeting. Chris also has this thing about cold pizza . . . I'd have to say that once it drops to room temperature, pizza is no longer human food. Chris must also be a writer, rather than a mathie, as I'm tagged as number 7 in a list of 6!

Damian, on the other hand, can't stand watching people embarass themselves. I'm absolutely with him on that. There are a large number of recent "comedies" I'll never bother to watch, as even the trailers were inducing that sort of sympathy cringe in me. I'm also down with Damian's reluctance to eat meat off the bone . . . it's just wrong in ways I can't describe, but are overwhelming to me.

So, what are my odd quirks? While I could be described as a walking encyclopedia of quirks, not all of them are uncommon enough to qualify for this meme. That'll take some head-scratching.

1. Aside from NFL football, I rarely watch television. I can't stand to have a TV on in the same room while I'm trying to do something. Elizabeth and Victor both have the ability to carry on normal life with a TV set blaring away, but it literally drives me out of the room.

2. I hate driving a car with automatic transmission. I cannot stand having the car make the decision for me on when it's time to change gears — even if modern automatics are technically "better" in the sense of being more fuel-efficient than manual transmission models. My most recent vehicle purchase was very quickly narrowed down to the few in my price range which still offered stick shift. (Yes, of course the Quotemobile is standard transmission.)

3. I'd be perhaps the best subject for market studies of the long-term viability of new products: if I like it, it's in trouble. If I love it, it's dead.

4. I always have dozens of books on the go at the same time. It's rare that I manage to read one book from start to finish without having also started at least one more book in the meantime.

5. I'm a collector by nature ("accumulator" is perhaps a more accurate term: collectors tend to be organized in their collections). I now try to avoid starting to collect something because I'll feel impelled to "complete" the collection, even after the original interest fades away. It's a sickness, I tell you!

6. I'm learning to dislike auto-flushing toilets and urinals: we've just had the washrooms at the office "upgraded" to use them. Far from being more ecologically friendly, they appear to use close to twice the amount of water that the older units do . . . and they operate at the most inconvenient moments.

No point in tagging anyone for this, as I think I'm usually among the last dozen bloggers on the planet to get most of these tag-memes passed along, but feel free to pretend I tagged you if you'd like to adopt the meme without being tagged with it.

I'm working on it . . .

With both Chris Taylor and Damian "Babbling" Brooks tagging me with this meme, I guess I'll have to come up with something vague and disappointing . . . er, I mean keep in with the cool blog-kids.

Give me a bit more time . . . I'm stuck at four.

Reviewing shopping guides

Jessa Crispin takes a quick look at a pair of shopping guides:

Quick: How do you tell if a woman in a movie is supposed to be intelligent? First off, she'd probably be brunette, but past that. Glasses, yes. Little to no makeup. Her hair is probably in a ponytail. Clothes she probably bought at the Gap in a size too big. You know she's the smart one because she thinks about more important things than her appearance.

It's a stereotype, yes, but it's constantly reinforced by intelligent women who should know better. Germaine Greer rallied women to taste their own menstrual blood in The Female Eunuch and then attacked fellow feminist writer Suzanne Moore by stating that "so much lipstick must rot the brain." Feminists must reject the male gaze and use those ten seconds it takes to apply lip gloss to bring down the patriarchy. (Why sensible feminists have not figured out how to band together and write press releases to disassociate ourselves from the crazy women who pretend to speak for us, I'll never understand.) Fashion magazines don't help much either. Elle talks to Ashlee Simpson. And writes down what she says. To be recorded for all time.

[. . .]

Instead of alleviating our body fears, however, so many books advising what to wear do nothing but exaggerate them. The entire structure of Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine's book What Not to Wear is built to help you define your particular version of body dysmorphic disorder. Do you think you have short legs? A big butt? Big arms? There's a chapter telling you how to dress around each perceived flaw. It's hard to walk out the door feeling hot and feisty when your entire dressing process has been focused on your main source of anxiety. If I tried to dress to hide all the parts of my body I have ever been self-conscious about, the only thing left to wear would be a hazmat suit.

[. . .]

If more fashion writing was done in the tone of smartypants Freeman, we could avoid the fear that caring about our appearance makes us a vain fool or a victim. A work colleague recently took one look at the four-inch peep toe heels I was wearing and snarled, "Don't you know why men invented high heels?" I doubted anything I said would deflect what was coming next, so I just shrugged. "So you can't run away when they want to rape you." I understand. I used to be a humorless feminist, too, complete with shaved head and my father's combat boots. Then I discovered Charles David heels and got over it. If only The Meaning of Sunglasses had existed sooner, I could have spent less time being a self-righteous twit.

Boosting self-esteem: not the solution

From a point-counterpoint article at The Guardian, Frank Furedi argues that boosting self-esteem has been a wasted effort:

In schools, decades of silly programmes designed to raise children's self-esteem have not improved wellbeing, and the new initiatives designed to make pupils happy will also fail. Worse still, emotional education encourages an inward-looking orientation that distracts children from engaging with the world.

Perversely, the ascendancy of psychobabble in the classroom has been paralleled by an apparent increase in mental health problems among children. The relationship between the two is not accidental. Children are highly suggestible, and the more they are required to participate in wellbeing classes, the more they will feel the need for professional support.

The teaching of emotional literacy and happiness should be viewed as a displacement activity by professionals who find it difficult to confront the many challenges they face. At a time when many schools find it difficult to engage children's interest in core subjects, and to inspire a culture of high aspiration, it is tempting to look for non-academic solutions. Many pedagogues find it easier to hold forth about making children feel good about themselves than to teach them how to read and count. This therapeutic orientation serves to distract pupils and teachers alike from getting on with the job of gaining a real education.

QotD: Self-Esteem

Self-esteem isn't all that it's cracked up to be. In fact . . . it can be a huge part of the problem. New research has found that self-esteem can be just as high among D students, drunk drivers and former Presidents from Arkansas as it is among Nobel laureates, nuns and New York City fire fighters. In fact, according to research performed by Brad Bushman of Iowa State University and Roy Baumeister of Case Western Reserve University, people with high self-esteem can engage in far more antisocial behavior than those with low self-worth. "I think we had a great deal of optimism that high self-esteem would cause all sorts of positive consequences and that if we raised self-esteem, people would do better in life," Baumeister told the Times. "Mostly, the data have not borne that out." Racists, street thugs and school bullies all polled high on the self-esteem charts. And you can see why. If you think you're God's gift, you're particularly offended if other people don't treat you that way. So you lash out or commit crimes or cut ethical corners to reassert your pre-eminence. After all, who are your moral inferiors to suggest that you could be doing something, er, wrong? What do they know?

Self-esteem can also be an educational boomerang. Friends of mine who teach today's college students are constantly complaining about the high self-esteem of their students. When the kids have been told from Day One that they can do no wrong, when every grade in high school is assessed so as to make the kid feel good rather than to give an accurate measure of his work, the student can develop self-worth dangerously unrelated to the objective truth. He can then get deeply offended when he's told he is getting a C grade in college and become demoralized or extremely angry. Weak professors give in to the pressure — hence, grade inflation. Tough professors merely get exhausted trying to bring their students into vague touch with reality.

Andrew Sullivan, "Lacking in Self-Esteem? Good for You!", Time, 2004-01-17

Happy Darwin Day

It's Charles Darwin's birthday (he'd be 199 today). The IHS is celebrating:

Hundreds of groups across the United States and the globe will celebrate the date as "Darwin Day" in honor of the discoveries and life of the man who famously described biological evolution via natural selection.

"Darwin Day promotes understanding of evolution and the scientific method," said Matt Cherry, executive director of the Institute for Humanist Studies. "This celebration expresses gratitude for the enormous benefit that scientific knowledge has contributed to the advancement of humanity."

The Darwin Day Celebration is a project of the Albany, N.Y.-based Institute for Humanist Studies, an international educational nonprofit that promotes reason and humanity.

As the folks at Fark say, strive not to be a Fark headline on February 13th.

Drummers deemed harmful

The original article and the Fark thread with all the drummer jokes.

[ObFarkJoke]: I have two drummers in the house right now, so I'm really getting a kick out of these replies.

A misty, moisty morning

It wasn't as bad as the fog last week, but it was certainly an "atmospheric" drive into work this morning:

Cute cat photos

Last night, trying to pack my equipment for badminton, I had to persuade a cat that he didn't really want to come along with me:

That's Harry, our youngest cat. He really thought that the badminton bag was a great place to play peekaboo.

Look out, drivers, here comes Victor!

The driving experience is about to get a bit more interesting . . . Victor just called to say he'd passed his G1 test and can now legally drive on Ontario's roads. The actual "learning how to drive" thing will take a bit longer . . .

Australian Surf

Photo and story sent along by Roger Henry.

Whipped Ocean in Australia

Suddenly the shoreline north of Sydney were transformed into the Cappuccino Coast. Foam swallowed an entire beach and half the nearby buildings, including the local lifeguards' centre, in a freak display of nature at Yamba in New South Wales. One minute a group of teenage surfers were waiting to catch a wave, the next they were swallowed up in a giant bubble bath. The foam was so light that they could puff it out of their hands and watch it float away.

Boy in the bubble bath: Tom Woods, 12, emerges from the clouds of foam after deciding that surfing was not an option It stretched for 30 miles out into the Pacific in a phenomenon not seen at the beach for more than three decades. Scientists explain that the foam is created by impurities in the ocean, such as salts, chemicals, dead plants, decomposed fish and excretions from seaweed. All are churned up together by powerful currents which cause the water to form bubbles. These bubbles stick to each other as they are carried below the surface by the current towards the shore. As a wave starts to form on the surface, the motion of the water causes the bubbles to swirl upwards and, massed together, they become foam. The foam 'surfs' towards shore until the wave 'crashes', tossing the foam into the air.

Whitewash: The foam was so thick it came all the way up to the surf club. 'It's the same effect you get when you whip up a milk shake in a blender,' explains a marine expert. 'The more powerful the swirl, the more foam you create on the surface and the lighter it becomes.' In this case, storms off the New South Wales Coast and further north off Queensland had created a huge disturbance in the ocean, hitting a stretch of water where there was a particularly high amount of the substances which form into bubbles. As for 12-year-old beach goer Tom Woods, who has been surfing since he was two, riding a wave was out of the question. 'Me and my mates just spent the afternoon leaping about in that stuff,' he said. 'It was quite cool to touch and it was really weird. It was like clouds of air - you could hardly feel it.'

Kent Taylor adds more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=478041&in_page_id=1811 and http://lighthousepatriotjournal.wordpress.com/2007/12/19/myth-blaster-foam-envelopes-beach-in-new-south-wales/.

QotD: Business Schools

The danger is that this will be another jolly club, where pals appoint pals, and the odor of self congratulation extinguishes the possibility of fresh thinking. Creatives may have the Canadian problem I was talking about this week: people who are brilliant as individuals and small groups working in agency circumstances find themselves diminished by still larger groups and the scale, to say nothing of the pretensions, of university life.

I guess the real challenge is how you get the academics and the creatives to play together This is not a famously productive relationship and it will take some tremendously good mediation to make these two parties mutually useful, let alone mutually inspirational. No one has a Rosetta Stone for these two communities, and it is hard for me to imagine an ExEd program that manages to install a linga franca even over 18 months.

Grant McCracken, "B-School + B-School = C-School?", This Blog Sits at the, 2008-01-18

More eye-searing photos from the 1970's

From the decade that time wishes it could forget, photo studio outtakes (at least, the folks in them probably wish these were outtakes).

Update: Argghhh! Forgot to credit Jeff Shultz for the URL.

The secret language of cats

You suspect Fluffy is dissing you? You're probably right:

Remember that vocalizing is not your cat's preferred mode of communication. A cat's "first language" consists of a complex system of scent, facial expression, complex body language, and touch whereas we humans communicate primarily through sound. Cats soon realize that we don't understand the non-verbal signals they send to each other, so they vocalize in an attempt to communicate in our language. By observing which sounds elicit which actions from us, a cat is always learning how to make requests (or demands).

It's contribute your link day . . .

Continuing the trend to reader-suggested links, frequent commenter "Da Wife" sent this one along with the comment "I just had to smirk and shake my head":

Malaysia's Muslim men are suffering sleepless nights and cannot pray properly because their thoughts are distracted by a growing number of women who wear sexy clothes in public, a prominent cleric said.

Nik Abdul Aziz Nik Mat, the spiritual leader of the opposition Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, said he wanted to speak about the "emotional abuse" that men face because it is seldom discussed, the party reported on its Web site Wednesday.

"We always [hear about] the abuse of children and wives in households, which is easily perceived by the eye, but the emotional abuse of men cannot be seen," Nik Abdul Aziz said. "Our prayers become unfocused and our sleep is often disturbed."

I'd like to say that I, for one, don't at all object to women wearing "sexy clothes in public", and would encourage as much of that as possible . . .

Introverts, unite! Except . . . separately. And quietly.

A paean to the joys of full-blown, red-blooded, rip-snortin' . . . introversion:

Introverted children are pressured to "speak up" and "make friends" — or told they're not leaders. Introverted adults are hounded to "be more outgoing" and tortured with invitations that begin, "Why don't we all . . ." No thanks, we don't want to do anything that involves "we" and "all"; we prefer to visit you, just you, and not a dozen other people.

The 17th-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote, "The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room." Introverts do.

So let's make Jan. 2nd "Happy Introvert Day." We'll be quiet and happy. As a bonus, January's weather is on our side.

You say it might snow? Oh darn, I guess I'll have to stay home.

Before you start opening all those plastic packages . . .

Rogier van Bakel was discussing the near-impossible level of effort needed to open some of the newer packages a few years back. It's still a topical post, especially right about now:

There's customer-unfriendly, and then there's customer-hostile. A few days ago I wrote about package design. More specifically, I excoriated the plastic retail hulls that have been proliferating for a few years now. The industry refers to them as clamshells, but I've dubbed them brinkswrap (that's shrinkwrap with the over-the-top protective properties of an armored truck). The post struck a chord with one reader of this blog who took a shine to the new name.

"Brinkswrap has been a longstanding frustration of mine. My daughter got a digital camera for Christmas — and a nice cut on her hand from the brinkswrap she had to break through to get to the camera. My wife got a couple of nice knives from her father. They were packaged together in brinkswrap. As I fought through the brinkswrap to get to them, I noted the irony of how much easier it would be to get through the brinkswrap if I already had the knives I was trying to get to."

Touché. Dante forgot to create a special circle of hell for these manufacturers and designers. Nevertheless, maybe we can squeeze them in somewhere. I'd put them between the apparel makers who sew scratchy brand labels onto the inside collars of their shirts, and the inconsiderate rotter who designed those maddening multiple seals on CD jewel cases.

Fairytale of New York

Recent report on attempt to censor the song here. Common sense prevailed, thank ghu.

Winter outside the office window

The view directly outside my office this afternoon. Brrrr!

Velcro is not your friend

We had our Christmas/Hannukah/Kwanzaa/Noodlemas gathering on the weekend. It went fairly well, given the number of folks who couldn't show up for weather-related reasons. The storm didn't hit until the last of our guests were already well on the road home, so we timed it quite well.

Last year, we tried something a bit different with our C/H/K/N lights (the ones we usually string haphazardly across the front of the house). Instead of using the normal mounting method — plastic hooks snapped on to the edge of the eavestroughing — we went all high-tech with adhesive-backed velcro patches and velcro-backed hooks. It seemed to work very well last year . . . no difference in time or effort to put them up, but much easier to take down and — the bonus part, so to speak — putting them up again this year was going to be a breeze . . . just re-attach the hooks to the pre-positioned velcro patches.

And, with a minor exception, it worked exactly as advertised . . . one of the velcro patches detached from its adhesive backing, leaving an unsightly droop in the lights over the middle of the garage. Still, the job was very quick and easy . . . not an inconsiderable benefit in -9C weather.

On Friday, before the party, a few of the velcro hooks decided that they'd reached their end-of-service date and let go. By the time we got home again, over a third of them had come down. With all the other party prep going on, the lights were a pretty low priority. On Saturday, nearly half of them had fallen, but we just wrapped the trailing edge of one string around the pillar at one side of the front door and pretended not to notice . . .

Of course, yesterday we had the significant snowfall so nothing could be done about the fallen light situation, and it may well be Wednesday or Thursday before it gets seen to . . . and that will require a full re-stringing of the entire length of lights, because we now have to remove the blasted velcro hooks and replace them with something a bit more traditional and sturdy.

The problem with 'one-size-fits-all' education

David Friedman points out the big assumptions of standard educational models:

Our approach starts with the fact that I went to a good private school, my wife to a good suburban public school, and both of us remember being bored most of the time; while we learned some things in school, large parts of our education occurred elsewhere, from books, parents, friends, projects. It continues with some observations about the standard model of K-12 schooling, public and private:

1. That model implicitly assumes that, out of the enormous body of human knowledge, there is some subset that everyone should study and that is large enough to fill most of thirteen years of schooling. That assumption is clearly false. Being able to read and do arithmetic is important for almost everyone. Beyond that, it is hard to think of any particular subject which there is a good reason for everyone to study, easy to think of many subjects outside the standard curriculum which there are good reasons for some people to study.

2. It implicitly assumes that the main way in which one should learn is by having someone else tell you what you are going to study this week, what you should learn about it, and your then doing so.

As some evidence of the failure of that model, consider my wife's experience teaching a geology lab for non-majors at VPI, probably the second best public university in the state. A large minority of the students did not know that the volume of a rectangular solid — a hypothetical ore body — was the length times the height times the depth. Given that they were at VPI they must have mostly been from the top quarter or so of high school graduates in Virginia; I expect practically all of them had spent at least a year each studying algebra and geometry.

As all students and most teachers know, the usual result of making someone study something of no interest to him is that he memorizes as much as he has to in order to pass the course, then forgets it as rapidly as possible thereafter. The flip side of that, routinely observed by parents, is that children can put enormous energy and attention into learning something that really interests them — the rules of D&D, the details of a TV series, the batting averages of the top players of the past decade.

I have to admit that I was always a bad student: it was a struggle to stay awake in most of my classes all through public school, and I still find sitting in a classroom being lectured to be a trying experience. This probably predisposes me to accept most educational reform proposals which don't revolve around classroom lectures . . .

QotD: Underachievement

I've long believed that all the hyperbright procrastinators I know, many of them underachievers, are the product of a particular mindset about intelligence. They are people who long ago internalized the notion that performance is largely based on innate talent--and are therefore putting off work because they know it won't be perfect. Procrastination delays the moment at which you find out that you aren't as talented as you hoped and believed you were.

Megan McArdle, "A for effort", Asymmetrical Information, 2007-12-05

QotD: The ever-expanding waistline

Meanwhile, there's the Disney World turnstiles problem. Uncle Walt's Florida showcase opened in 1971, and its turnstiles are sized for waistlines of that era. More than a few Americans now cannot pass through the Disney World turnstiles; when my son Spenser and I were at Disney World a couple of years ago, gate staffers were on hand to help those who needed to bypass turnstiles to enter the park. Two years ago when 300-pound defensive tackle Tommie Harris was drafted in the first round by the Bears, Harris exclaimed that he might be huge but he was fit and said the proof of his fitness was that he recently had been able to go through a turnstile at Disney World. Today, significant numbers of visitors to Disney World are bigger than a Bears defensive tackle. Something to think about.

Gregg Easterbrook, "TMQ: Ticket, Please!", ESPN Page 2, 2007-10-30

Someone has a sense of humour

The Communist Manifesto, filed in the Fiction bargain bin.

At least I didn't hit it . . .

On the way home from my badminton club last night, I nearly killed a skunk. Mr. Skunk was running down the middle of the road, in the same direction I was travelling. I came over a small rise, saw him in the way, and swerved ever so slightly so that my wheel didn't run directly over him.

He thanked me for my kindness in the usual manner.

The Quotemobile is now in desperate need of a carwash.

Good morning

I'm not used to getting up early enough to see this sort of thing.

Okay, so it's not a Kylie Minogue thing

Unlike the esteemed Major-General Flea, I don't have a Kylie Minogue fascination going. I do, however, quite enjoy listening to Bif Naked, so her pre-wedding video was of interest.

(Preview here, full clip at Bodog.)

Library Porn

Jerrie Adkins sent along a URL to Curious Expeditions:

Everyone has some kind of place that makes them feel transported to a magical realm. For some people it's castles with their noble history and crumbling towers. For others it's abandoned factories, ivy choked, a sense of foreboding around every corner. For us here at Curious Expeditions, there has always been something about libraries. Row after row, shelf after shelf, there is nothing more magical than a beautiful old library.

We had a chance to see just such a library on our recent visit to Prague. Tucked away on the top of a hill in Prague is the Strahov Monestary, the second oldest monastery in Prague. Inside, divided into two major halls, is a breathtaking library. The amazing Theological Hall contains 18,000 religious texts, and the grand Philosophical Hall has over 42,000 ancient philosophical texts. Both are stunningly gorgeous. Strahov also contains a beautiful cabinet of curiosities, including bits of a Dodo bird, a large 18th century electrostatic device, numerous wonderfully old ocean specimens, and for unclear reasons many glass cases full of waxen fruit. Our delight was manifest.

Shocked into a library induced euphoria, Curious Expeditions has attempted to gather together the world's most beautiful libraries for you starting with our own pictures of Strahov. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do.

QotD: Modern Families

Well, I would say that, wouldn't I? As National Review's in-house demography bore, you'd expect me to find in a successful single woman's $27,000 fertility treatments the flip side of the Afghan baby boom I mentioned last issue. Just as Europeans preserve old churches and farms as heritage sites so Martha has amputated the family from family life, leaving its rituals and traditions as freestanding lifestyle accessories. So okay, let me nudge the argument on a bit. Today many of the western world's women have in effect doubled the generational span, opting not for three children in their twenties but one designer yuppie baby in their late thirties. Demographers talk about "late family formation" as if it has no real consequences for the child.

But I wonder. The abortion lobby talks about a world where every child is "wanted". If you get pregnant at 19 or 23, you most likely didn't really "want" a child: it just kinda happened, as it has throughout most of human history. By contrast, if you conceive at 42 after half-a-million bucks' worth of fertility treatment, you really want that kid. Is it possible to be over-wanted? I notice in my part of the world there's a striking difference between those moms who have their first kids at traditional childbearing ages and those who leave it to Miss Stewart's. The latter are far more protective of their nippers, as well they might be: even if you haven't paid the clinic a bundle for the stork's little bundle, you're aware of how precious and fragile the gift of life can be. When you contemplate society's changing attitudes to childhood — the "war against boys" that Christina Hoff Summers has noted, and a more general tendency to keep children on an ever tighter chain — I wonder how much of that derives from the fact that "young moms" are increasingly middle-aged. I wish Miss Stewart happiness and fulfillment, but she seems a sad emblem of a world that insists one should retain time-honored traditions when decorating the house for Thanksgiving but thinks nothing of re-ordering the most basic building blocks of society.

Mark Steyn, "Homemaking for One", National Review, 2007-09-06

Amusing co-incidence

I opened Google Earth this evening, intending to try out the hidden flight simulator. Instead, I thought to zoom in on my local neighbourhood . . . and found that I can give you an exact date for when the photos of my area were taken: 5 May, 2005, because I recognized the overturned gravel truck across the road from that morning . . .

Burlington Ribfest

After delivering the layout to Burlington, my sister suggested that the four of us (Elizabeth and I, Hil and Gord) go out for dinner. We had a variety of food allergies and preferences to cope with so we ended up compromising on where to go . . . Montana's. Now that was an experience. I'm sure they'll have lifted the lifetime ban within a few years . . .

Hil didn't get into a fistfight with the manager (but it could have gone that way, and the smart money wouldn't have been betting on the restaurant employee), but it wasn't the kind of memorable experience we'd expected. To compound the awkwardness, Hil also tipped off the waiter that it was my birthday, so I got the kind of "birthday treat" I'd been able to avoid since I was about 13: having the wait staff all gather around and sing to me.

On the way out to the truck, Hil tried to get me to double-dog dare her to moon the restaurant. I valiantly resisted. It didn't help. She insisted on doing it anyway.

On the drive back, Hil persuaded Elizabeth that it would be a really good idea to go to the Burlington Ribfest.

I should point out that I'm not a fan of crowds, so I wasn't expecting to have a particularly good time on this outing. Aside from the crush at the front of the main stage (where the performers were the Downchild Blues Band), it wasn't too bad at all. This was at the back of the crowd, just within sight of the main stage:

That's Elizabeth and Gord, with Hil's shoulder just edging into the picture. Here, Hil has been trying to persuade the balloon guy to make her a balloon hat that "looks like half a peace sign":

Hil decided that a "blooming onion" was the perfect food to eat while strolling the festival. Here she's trying to get Gord to try some:

At one booth, it looked like the decriminalization movement had won:

Sadly, the other half of the sign said something like "Old-fashioned fudge".

Trains to Burlington, conclusion

As you may remember, the saga of moving an HO scale train layout to Burlington has taken a bit longer than originally planned. I'm happy to say that the final piece has been installed and is working well. Jimmy is delighted with his new model train empire.

The ceremonial first trip to the new turntable was awarded to, of course, Thomas the Tank Engine:

The installer's ceremonial wine glass was also accorded a place of honour:

Kim's management guidelines

Kim du Toit has a few management guidelines to share:

So I called in the advertising managers and the studio head, and gave them a little speech. From memory, it went like this:

"I don't know how your jobs work, and I'm not going to learn how. I'm not going to ask you for progress reports each day, and I'm never going to ask you 'How's it going?' — I expect you to keep me abreast of things, at times where it seems appropriate for you to do so, or only when you have a problem. Otherwise, I will assume you are all doing your job, and everything's running smoothly.

"Now, about problems: I'm not going to solve them for you, because once again, I don't know how your jobs work. So if you come to me with a problem, I'm going to chase you out of my office and tell you to find the solution. I expect you to come to me with a problem with two or three possible solutions, and you can't decide which one would be the best. (Obviously, if there's only one solution, you don't have to tell me anything.) If we discuss the solutions, and the 'best' solution still doesn't present itself, then I'll make the decision, because that's my job, my responsibility.

"If anyone from another department is giving you any trouble, and you can't resolve it, tell me and I'll take it up with their manager. If it's their manager who's giving you the problem, tell me and I'll try to straighten it out with him; or if I can't, then I'm going to go to my boss, and let him straighten it out after hearing my suggestions — because he too, is going to want options and not complaints.

"Don't send me memos, because I won't read them. Talk to me, and if you feel compelled to put the results of our discussion onto paper, go ahead, and put me on copy. Give the memo to my secretary and tell her to file it wherever.

"The mark of a successful manager is how long he could be dead at his desk before any of his staff notices it. I'm shooting for two weeks."

There were no questions.

[. . .]

None of this is designed to make me look like some kind of superhero manager. But it is intended to make people think about the proper way to manage people:

1. Give them responsibility to go with their accountability.

2. Force them to live up to your expectations of them. Trust them to do a good job.

3. If they make an honest mistake in an otherwise exemplary job, forget about it, and cover for them if the Corner Office starts causing trouble.

4. Don't sweat the little things. If someone needs a little extra time off to look after a sick child or have their hair done, let them go.

5. Eschew paperwork and bureaucracy (other than when mandated like for hourly workers and time cards). Show me a manager who demands constant progress reports from his staff, and I'll show you an insecure manager who doesn't trust them.

I'd have to say that, for the most part, that's the way I try to manage (I hate both giving and receiving status reports . . . just deal with the unexpected developments and deviations from the plan). I've never run an organization as big as Kim, but these guidelines can apply to any organization.

H/T to Jon, for sending me the URL.

Random PDA photos

A few Treo photos taken over the last few weeks:

Someone missed a clue here: the sign extolls the virtues of Ontario VQA wines, but all the wines on the shelves below are not VQA . . . they're not even Canadian wines!

When falling domino chains are too tame

New dog pictures

Well, despite my best judgement, we seem to be close to adopting a new dog . . . but at least Xander is happy about the new arrival:

Xander checks out the new arrival in the backyard. She's a part Yorkshire Terrier, part Shi-Tzu (we've been told). Her rescue kennel called her "Jazzie", but she doesn't really respond to that name. She is partly blind, through some genetic condition and needs several daily applications of an ointment to her eyes.

We've been told that she was picked up from the side of the road after being thrown from a truck, somewhere in Ohio.

The new dog tries to mask her scent with whatever is on the grass.

Hmmm. The new dog appears to be part Ewok.

Xander is thinking "Can I play with you if I'm this small?

Sure! Can you run away?

Stop playing . . . I've got an itch I need to scratch.

DNA testing and Ancestry.com

Ancestry.com recently announced they will be adding an inexpensive (at least compared to what it used to cost) DNA testing kit to their line-up of products and services for genealogical researchers. Slashdot thread here:

Daniel Dvorkin: Here's the worry, I think: law enforcement agencies could take a crime scene sample, run it against the entire Ancestry.com database, and decide that whoever comes up with the closest match must have done it. And in the current climate, they might well make it stick, even if the crime involves ... [gasp] pedophilia ... or [shock] terrorism ... or [falls over dead from the horror of it] record piracy.

east coast: I hate the relatives I have. Why would I want to find out that I have more?

laron: This is going to be interesting. Doctors calculate that about 5-10% of all children have a different biological father than they (and their "social" fathers) think.

John Scalzi addresses the suckitude of teenage writers

John Scalzi pulls out all the stops (again) to help teenage writers improve:

More than a year ago I wrote my "10 Things Teenage Writers Should Know About Writing" entry, which had ten bits of useful information for teen writers, the first of which was "The Bad News: Right Now, Your Writing Sucks." Because, well, it probably does: Most teenage writers, for various reasons, aren't particularly good writers (I wasn't). I thought it was important to get that bit of news out of the way, because among other things, the fact that teenage writing sucks isn't a bad thing (that's point number 2), and because I think it's not a bad thing to be honest with teenagers about this stuff. They might not listen (I probably wouldn't have), but they deserve the truth nevertheless.

The only problem with this set-up is that reading the comments to the piece, it's clear that quite a number of the teenagers reading the entry never got past the first point, in which they're told their writing sucks, before making a comment that explains why teenage writing doesn't suck — or, at the very least, why their teenage writing doesn't suck.

He's not just addressing teenagers . . . if you have any interest in writing, there are interesting and useful nuggets of information in this article and in the original he posted last year.

Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis

H/T to Nick Packwood (aka Ghost of a Flea). This is one of Elizabeth's favourite pieces of music.

Modern childhood

Hit and Run has a graphic example of one of the reasons childhood obesity is becoming more common:

Click to see full-size image

Image from this article in the Daily Mail.

Bucket status: undefined

To borrow a meme from James Lileks, my state of bucket-ness is not yet resolved. I had an interview today for one of the (now three) positions I'm potentially able to take on. At 1:30 this afternoon, while waiting at the dealership for information on why the Quotemobile's dashboard was displaying a particular idiot light, I'd have said that the top choice was no longer in play. The interview went okay, but I'd hate to play poker with the HR manager I interviewed with: I had no idea whether I was still considered a viable candidate for the position or not.

At 4:00, I got a very welcome bit of news that I'd survived the HR interview and was being scheduled for the next stage: meeting senior management at the firm. Wonderful! And yet, at the same time, a great opportunity to fall flat on my face. Let's see what wonders next week might bring . . .

You may have encountered something of the same ilk: literally on the way up the street this morning, I found that the Quotemobile's error-sensor had decided that I needed to pay attention to the tires. The friendly warning light was letting me know that I was taking my life in my hands to drive anywhere other than an authorized Toyota dealership. Having not left enough spare time for a side-trip to the service department, I drove on . . . probably setting an Ontario record for slowest maintained speed on an 400-series highway, for fear of a four-tire blowout at the worst possible moment.

Kudos to Whitby Toyota, for quickly diagnosing and fixing the problem: the spare tire pressure was just a bit lower than the other four tires, and had set off the sensor. Even more kudos for not charging me for the service.

Mailing list etiquette

I know, having run a few mailing lists in my time, that list membership varies substantially: some people sign up the day the list is opened while others drop in and out so fast they barely leave a ripple. Apparently, some folks need a little time in a corner with a cluebat, because they've completely lost the sense of how things are properly done:

Would those of you who are on AOL and who decide that you don't want to receive list postings any longer please unsubscribe instead of reporting postings as spam to AOL? I have to spend time dealing with the fallout, and you jeopardise the ability of other AOL users to receive their mail (and not just list mail; anything else that goes through that server).

That's the administrator of one of the busiest lists I subscribe to: probably at least an order of magnitude larger than any list I've ever run. It describes a lovely sense of both entitlement and petty revenge on the part of the no-longer-desiring-to-be-members. They can't be bothered just unsubscribing, so they flag the no-longer-wanted incoming email as spam and let the big guns of the ISP take care of it for them. To call that inconsiderate is a big understatement.

QotD: Life

As I grow older I am unpleasantly impressed by the fact that giving each human being but one life is a bad scheme. He should have two at the lowest — one for observing and studying the world, and the other for formulating and setting down his conclusions about it. Forced, as he is by the present irrational arrangement, to undertake the second function before he has made any substantial progress with the first, he limps along like an athlete only half trained. His competitors, to be sure, are in the same case, and in consequence his inadequacy tends to be concealed, but it is there none the less, and I sometimes suspect that it may be the main cause of the blowsy vacuity which marks so much of the so-called thinking of mankind.

H.L. Mencken, Minority Report, 1956.

QotD: High School

I had one last thing to tell them, which I didn't say. I intended it to be inspiring, but I just wasn't sure if it would come across that way, so I edited myself and left it out. I'll reprint it here, though, in case any of them stop by to read this:

This is entirely unrelated to writing, but it's something I wish someone had told me when I was your age: High school is a really important time in your life, and what you learn here and how you grow as a person will profoundly impact your adult years. But the social thing? It really doesn't matter, because after you graduate, you never have to see anyone from high school again, unless you really want to. A guy said to me yesterday, "If you win at high school, you lose at life," and that made a lot of sense to me. I'm sure you guys are a creative bunch of people, which means you have a certain degree of sensitivity, something that is usually the object of ridicule in school. Well, don't deny that because you're afraid of being unpopular. It's really not worth it. So stay focused, go to college, and thank me in your acknowledgments when your book is published. It's "Wil" with one "L."

Wil Wheaton, "on writing . . .", WWdN: In Exile, 2007-05-17

Jane Galt: fellow sufferer of bandwidth shortage

Jane Galt's main blog is down right now, and her host's blog is also down. She's got a temporary backup site running at http://janegalt.wordpress.com/.

Mouseworld, part 3

James Lileks covers the third day of their Disneyworld experience:

It's like that all over. The Disney Experience is one of the most psychologically all-inclusive and seductive thing I've experienced in years. After a while you stop thinking outside the possibilities of Disney; it absolutely drives out everything else from your imagination. It hits you from every angle. It works your soft spots and worms in through the cracks; it finds your fascinations and feeds them. [. . .]

[. . .] It's as if Mickey exists both outside time and inside its specific examples. The effect is Total Mickey, Mouse without End.

The old tired Sinclair Lewis quote gets dragged out by the professional hysterics: when fascism comes, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a bible and etc. Well, friends, this is the Corporate State, right here, a world unto itself, bigger than two US states put together. They control the horizontal and the vertical, and the utility grid. The roads are private. The lakes are private. The control is hardly total — let Disney cease to pay taxes, and watch what happens. But the enormity of the area and the totality of the control is almost unprecedented. Surely it cannot be benign. Right?

James wrote something completely appropriate to finish this thought a few years ago, which I must recycle here: "Imagine, Winston, that the future consists of a boot pressing on a face. Here's the worst part, Winston — inside the boot is" MICKEY'S FOOT!!!

Disneyworld, Lileks Style Part 2

James Lileks continues the tale of the family vacation:

When we ended yesterday’s entry, I was stuck in a small, crammed room in the dark at the Haunted Mansion, and remarked that I have been severely claustrophobic for many years. The various references to "the paper" or "my career" concern the trials of my employer, which began a several-year project of feeding jobs into the woodchipper right before I went on vacation. We continue:

The doors were shut and the lights went out and the room began to sink.

This was the test, in a way: the test of whether that evening attack in a movie theater in 1984 had any power left. I had my first panic attack — out of the blue, no hints or omens, ever — during a showing of "Vertigo." Honest. Rapid heartbeat, disorientation, fight-or-flight, the entire suite of symptoms at once. While I had to commend my condition for choosing an apt moment to assert itself, it also meant I had a difficult time convincing the emergency room nurse I wasn't just reacting to a well-crafted thriller. But it happened during the scene in the stable. Nothing was going on. Well, that's the genius of Hitchcock, isn't it? Even the most mundane moments are saturated with dread. Yes, and my shirt is saturated with sweat. Now if you could give me something.

The Lileks family hits Disneyworld

James takes the family to the secular high temple of Disneydom:

It's Disneyworld. The happiest, smiling-est, hottest, sweatiest, standing-in-lineiest place on earth. This year's motto: "The Year of A Million Dreams," which suggests they've completed Jungland: cool! I had a dream in which a large mouse was pulling my brains out my nose, and my brains were made of gold. Doctor, what does it mean? I didn't think it meant I had Disneyphobia, which makes its sufferers treat Mickey as a sin visited upon the world, a demon equalled only by that Dark God of Body-Rot, Ronald McDonald. I've always enjoyed Disney Products™ — I've just never had awestruck melty adoration of all things Mouse-related. At best, total love of this or that. At worst, shuddery dislike of some of its manifestations. For the most part, temperate admiration. I looked forward to this.

Not to spoil the story, but having spent four days in the realm of the Mouse, you could cut my wrists and I'd bleed Disney Kool-Aid. Because that's how much I drank.

Happy Mother's Day

Not much post-able activity this weekend . . . yesterday was a performance of "Taming of the Shrew" by PlayMakers (a few photos may be salvageable), and today was (finally) contacting all the team members for this year's soccer squad. Busy, but not bloggable stuff.

Modern parenting

Wil Wheaton has a bee in his bonnet about the failings of too many parents nowadays:

[. . .] I've recently concluded that there is, in fact, an entire generation of parents, about my age or just a little older, who are substituting technology for parenting. As a result, there's an entire generation of children who are overstimulated and undersocialized, and in some cases heavily medicated, because their damn parents would rather distract them with a DVD or video game than, you know, interact with them.

Is this the new way we're supposed to raise emotionally healthy and well adjusted kids? I must have missed a memo, because these people are everywhere. [ . . . ]

There's a car commercial running right now that is an unintentionally powerful and disturbing commentary on how many people in this generation of parents are raising their kids. It starts in a school lunch room, filled with kids who are jumping and running around, throwing food, and generally raging out of control. A teacher tries to get them to settle down, and is ignored, so he flips down a little display, like you'd see in a car-based DVD player, and the entire room instantly turns into slackjawed, television watching zombies. What's the message here? "If you can't get your kids to listen to you, don't worry, all it takes is a little DVD action to do it for you, so you can get back to the peace and quiet you inexplicably thought you'd enjoy when you had seven f*ing kids."

Literary erotica

I dunno, it's not the way I'd have expected 'em to raise money, but you can't doubt that it'll be more lucrative than a sale of old books:

Vienna's City Hall has launched a "sex hotline" to raise money for the capital's main public library, officials said Tuesday.

It's unusual, but it's not particularly raunchy: Callers pay 53 U.S. cents a minute to listen to an actress read breathless passages from erotica dating to the Victorian era.

I can't imagine the same thing working in, say, Peoria, somehow.

Ten times better?

Well, my Symantec license expired for my Norton anti-virus software yesterday, so I installed MacAfee in its place. The biggest difference I've noticed so far has been speed. The last full virus scan I ran using Norton went over 40 hours. Macafee took less than 4. That's pretty significant, if you ask me. As I wrote in a comment on the earlier post, "Now, admittedly, this isn't a big, bad kick-ass machine — it's only a 3GHz box with 2GB of memory, so perhaps it's underpowered for a strenuous task like virus scanning. (Tongue ever so slightly in cheek here, of course.)"

Part of why I decided to switch was the whole update problem I've encountered every time I needed to download the latest version of Norton (detailed here).

Superconducting Maglev Toy Train

H/T to Roger Henry.

Swordfighting . . . not just a sublimation of violence

According to this article, the noble art of fencing is also really good at boosting your mathematical abilities:

Mitch Slep took up fencing at the age of 14 because he wanted to improve his coordination and loved the grandeur of the sport. Aside from the aesthetics, there was an aspect of problem solving that appealed to him as he tried to psyche out his opponent's next move.

"It's a really high level of frustration and concentration," says Slep, now 26. "I just felt I was hyper-aware of my opponent's movement."

Little did he know that wielding a sword would enhance his mathematical prowess. What Slep found while serving on his high-school and college teams was that the abstract and analytical aspects of fencing heightened his skill with all things numeric.

"There's a lot of intriguing visualization of space that's involved," says Slep, who majored in math during college and is now a Microsoft software engineer in Seattle. "I haven't picked up a sport with as much technical aspects as fencing. It helped me get where I am today."

What Slep discovered is something sports psychologists are increasingly preaching to educators: Dueling with any one of the three types of fencing swords, whether the lightweight foil, the epee or the thrashing saber, can actually improve math skills.

Hmmmmm. If that's the case, then my base mathematical skills must be pre-reptilian, because I've been involved in various forms of swordplay for decades, and I'm just barely able to calculate the tip to leave when I pay the bill in a restaurant.

Basic human nature

"A sorrow shared may be halved, and a joy shared doubled, but a humiliation shared is at least cubed."

QotD: Sex-Ed's relevance

Before I start, let me say I'm no fan of abstinence based education. But the much-hyped study from HHS, showing that abstinence based education makes no difference in adolescent sexual behaviour, is not exactly a triumph for the prior consensus on sex ed. Everyone seems to have missed the explosive finding, which is that abstinence-based education makes no difference in adolescent sexual behaviour. The kids didn't have sex any later, but they also weren't any less likely to use birth control. If this study is correct, it implies that all sex-ed is useless, a result I don't find particularly surprising, actually.

Jane Galt, "I do not think that means what you think it means", Asymmetrical Information, 2007-04-16

Equestrian dance

The WEG2006 Freestyle Dressage Final performance of ANDREAS HELGSTRAND on BLUE HORS MATINE. H/T to Diane Echelbarger.

QotD: Human Nature

The more I think about it, the more I'm beginning to feel that this is the basis for all wrong-headed thinking in the world. To quote Monty Python: "Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is not a basis for a system of government." We all had a good giggle at that; and yet, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" is no less ridiculous as a basis for a system of government, because it starts off with an unreal premise: that Man is a selfless human being, will continue to suppress his innate selfishness for the sake of the greater good, and will not take advantage of the hard work of others to make his own life easier.

Kim du Toit, "Not That Way", The Other Side of Kim du Toit, 2007-04-11

No more racist, sexist, ethnic or other hurtful language

Marty Beckerman discusses the several recent brouhahas (brouhahii?) over hurtful epithets:

So when does race-based humor qualify as harmless entertainment — albeit risqué and provocative — and when does it qualify as actual racism?

With my friends of other ethnic backgrounds — and okay, I probably need some more of these — the back-and-forth of boorish jokes is simply a way to kill time, share a few laughs and ease subconscious tension: the other night I joked that my Japanese immigrant friend should have applied for a yellow card instead of a green card; he fired back that if my bad Jewish self ever walked into a brick wall with an erection, I'd suffer a broken nose. (Neither of us felt the need to file a petition with the Anti-Defamation League, although I might need to watch my back for the little guy's razor-sharp throwing stars.) The wider American culture's embrace of stereotype-laced humor serves a similar purpose to our banter: making people feel more comfortable with one another so they can get past their prejudices.

This is why Richards, Coulter and Imus landed on their faces even though Americans love to laugh at bigotry: these entertainers poured salt into centuries-old wounds with cheap punch lines-simple, worthless slurs; spiteful, desperate pleas for attention-instead of throwing our collective ridiculousness back into our faces. Their sin had nothing to do with edgy jokes; it was that instead of shedding light on everyone, they only shed light on themselves.

It really has changed the public sphere over the last generation: racist jokes were very common on the playground when I was a child, and sexist neanderthals still inhabit some niche ecosystems in the working world. Anti-gay jokes are less common — at least I encounter them far less frequently than just a few years ago, although (to borrow a term from Berke Breathed) offensesensitivity seems to be more widespread now than ever before.

There's really only one safe group to joke about: Englishmen. Not English women, certainly. And not British people in general: the Scots, the Welsh, and the Irish have been slighted sufficiently. Other Europeans have borne the brunt of more than their fair share of jokes. No other form of stereotyping will pass muster in this day and age, so stick it to the Bloody Poms . . . they're (temporarily) safe to abuse.

Peter Bagge on the homeless problem

Last month's artistic interpretation from Reason magazine, now online.

Avoid Tagged.com at all costs!

I recently received a "tagged.com" invitation from a fellow blogger, with whom I'd had friendly conversations, but who I didn't consider a close friend. I just ignored it. A few days later, another invitation arrived, telling me that if I didn't join up, the fellow blogger would feel I wasn't his friend. I emailed him directly, to let him know that I wasn't interested, and discovered just how sneaky the idiots at "tagged.com" really are:

It took some generic contact details from me, then informed me who else in my email list is also a member. I figured, sure, I will add them to the set, since they are already involved. But one thing I did NOT want to do was spam all my friends - I KNOW who my friends are and I don’t need a stupid internet network to tell me who they are. I hit send…

Then I scrolled down as I waited for the next page to load.

And discovered it had not just flagged the people in the system but flagged EVERY SINGLE PERSON I HAVE EVER EMAILED for an invitation to this stupid network!

I had messages going out to customer service departments of a dozen companies, billing companies, former clients, casual acquaintances, my PASTOR, my professors! I tried to cancel it, but it was too late.

Let's do our best to stamp out this kind of abusive practice . . . and please don't sign up with those idiots!

Deep in a hole

"Da Wife" sent along this link to a really big pit.

QotD: Self-esteem

The world is full of belligerent numbskulls; frequently, the more ignorant, the more belligerent.

It is a soppy, and dangerous, progressive cliché that lack of self-esteem among the indigent and the criminal is a cause of poor social integration. There's actually no evidence that the indigent and the criminal do have low self-esteem. On the contrary in fact, they tend to have rather too much of it.

Yeats got that. Polly Toynbee gets it too. Charles Darwin wrote, "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."

While this is distressing for the world's more sentimental do-gooders, and seems to have had no impact at all on the growing self-esteem industry, it is an important observation, having great explanatory power, and not just for the history of idea. It is, I submit, at the core of such diverse social phenomena as gangstas, bling, Islamism, dangerous driving, the bullying petty official, the modern media health scare, the conspiracy theorist, and large chunks of the content of the web. Combined with the tendency for the assertive and persistent to get their own way, because others can't bear endless futile arguments, it is much more than a marginal nastiness. Which is distressing even to the unsentimental.

Guy Herbert, "Doctor Bickle, I presume", Samizdata, 2007-03-06

Lileks on "the new design paradigm"

It doesn't happen as often as it used to, but something caught James Lileks on the raw, and he must scream:

What really caught my eye was an interview with a University of Minnesota professor named Thomas Fisher, the dean of the U's new School of Design. It was a conversation about the new Design Economy, a term I hadn't heard before. America will compete and thrive because we design good things, like the iPod. You might wonder how a nation of 300 million can be sustained by design, but rest assured the term has broader definitions. The interview, called "Intelligent Design," focused on cities. As you might expect they are in dire need of Design, and I suspect this design will be administrated by experts. (As Dr. Johnson once said: A man who has tired of criticizing London is tired of tenure.) In order to compete, our cities need better design. No argument here — until we look at the specifics.

While it might seem a bit unsporting to take potshots at experts of this type, it can be very satisfying. Read the whole thing (after the initial refrigerator digression, that is).

Continental travel experiences

As one or two of you know, Victor went off on a school trip to Europe yesterday. His flight was delayed getting out of Toronto, so they missed their connecting flight from Charles de Gaulle Airport, and their baggage went somewhere else entirely, but the last email from the group indicated they'd successfully arrived in Montpellier and (a few hours later) their baggage was present and accounted-for.

Tomorrow, off to Nîmes!

QotD: Homophobia

Not to be too snarky about this, but at what point should a reasonable person simply assume that any minster all het up about the gays is just a step away from being a Bathhouse Billy? Because I have to tell you, at this point it's getting to be my default setting.

John Scalzi, "I'm Willing to Bet The Reporter Was Snickering His Head Off as He Wrote This Lede", Whatever, 2007-02-24

QotD: Jet lag

She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.

William Gibson, Pattern Recognition, 2003

Home in-security

"Da Wife" sent along a link to this blog posting debunking typical home security installations.

Dog meets MP3 player . . . dog wins

Victor's almost brand-new MP3 player (vintage February 2007) met an untimely end at the hands . . . well, actually the jaws of Xander:

I somehow suspect that Samsung's warranty department isn't going to accept the "My dog ate my" excuse any more than Victor's high school teachers do.

The climate change meme

Jon sent me an email from which I had to extract a lovely little mini-rant:

Speaking of which, the local theatre will be hosting a special engagement of A Convenient Bullshit Excuse For Socialist Domination, or whatever Gore's version of Apocalypto is called. Because it's "an educational film that everyone should see" (according to the theatre owner), admission to the show is significantly reduced. I expect Jamie's school to make attendance at the damn thing mandatory.

Crickey. It seems to me like this hysteria is getting a little out of hand. I prefer my hysterias to be just a little better managed, like, say, the Princess Diana thing. You have to admit that that whole thing was pretty well choreographed. This climate change freakout is just getting out of control.

You have to admit, whether you believe that global warming is a serious issue or not, recasting the issue as "climate change" allows you to use every single instance of unusual weather as "proof" that it's the end of the world as we know it. This leads directly into subtle-and-not-so-subtle calls for "something to be done", which usually entails handing control over to a small group of experts, specialists, or what-have-you. Because, of course, the problem is too big and complex for mere individuals to be allowed to make their own decisions . . .

Update: Oddly enough, L. Neil Smith alludes to the same thing in an article in the latest Libertarian Enterprise:

This is exactly the situation we're seeing lately with another false orthodoxy, that of Global Warming. Its advocates are having more and more difficulty getting people to accept it, so now they want to "decertify" meteorologists who are, in their words, "Global Warming deniers".

It's also the same dynamic that fuelled the Inquisition.

16! 16! 16! Yikes!

Today is Victor's 16th birthday.

I feel very . . . old.

Victor and his friends didn't destroy our house during the party. No calls to the police were made (or required). Only minimal damage to property was recorded. In spite of this, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves.

Those shifty IT guys

According to a recent study by CERT, the ones you need to watch carefully for sabotage are the IT workers:

The research suggests that potential troublemakers should be easy to spot. Nearly all the cases of cybercrime investigated were carried out by people who were "disgruntled, paranoid, generally show up late, argue with colleagues, and generally perform poorly."

According to the research, 86 percent of those who committed cybercrimes held technical positions and 90 percent had system administrator or privileged system access. Almost half — 41 percent — of those who sabotaged IT systems were employed at the time they did it but most crimes were committed by insiders following termination. Most incursions — 64 percent — involved VPNs and old passwords that had never been terminated, highlighting a lack of security controls and gaps in their organizations' access controls.

So, the next time you have a run-in with a surly system administrator or LAN technician (and you know it's going to happen), you can get your revenge by fingering them on the anonymous tip line as a potential saboteur. Revenge and self-righteousness in one easy package.

Or, you know, not.

Furious responses from readers who work in IT starting in three, two, one . . .

QotD: Perfectionism

The surest hindrance of success is to have too high a standard of refinement in our own minds, or too high an opinion of the judgment of the public. He who is determined not to be satisfied with anything short of perfection will never do anything to please himself or others.

William Hazlitt, 1778-1830

Reader contributions

Jon sent along a couple of photos as possible blog-fodder:

"[. . .] a tree decorated for the holidays. The tree is on Old Yonge Street in Holland Landing, just north of Newmarket. It's been like this since at least the beginning of December. Every time I passed it I meant to snag a photo — finally got around to it a few days ago."

"[. . .] a restaurant in the soon-to-be-demolished Terminal 2 at Pearson. I had breakfast there last week. Why is it that ferry terminals never have airport-themed concessions?"

I also received a couple of links from "Da Wife": Severely overdue library book returned, and Tales of corporate idiocy. Thanks for the links!

That would have to hurt

Jon sent me a link to a new item in the Lee Valley Tools online woodworking catalogue: a chainmail glove for woodcarvers. He titled the email "SCA masturbation accessory".

Just in case you need . . .

. . . some stinkin' badges:

H/T to Richard Zellich.

QotD: Disappointment

Just because it's amazing on the commercial doesn't mean it's amazing in real life

Natalie "Gnat" Lileks, as quoted by James Lileks in "Amazing commercial, not-so-amazing real life: I'll hire the guys who hyped those useless Blo-Pens!", Star Tribune, 2007-01-12

How does Symantec stay in business?

Victor's anti-virus subscription appears to have expired some time in the last month. He didn't get any pop-ups from Norton informing him of the fact until today, when it told him that he had to uninstall and re-install because of a critical error in the Norton engine. After doing that, it finally got around to mentioning that he needed to re-subscribe in order to re-install.

Okay, that was pretty sleazy, but sure. I dug up my "online use only" credit card and we started navigating the Symantec website to get him re-subscribed. To no surprise at all, just like every previous year, the route to paying for the download is very straightforward and direct. You provide the basic info, select the download you want, provide your credit card number, and badda-bing, you're done.

And just like every other year, when it comes to actually receiving the product you've just paid for . . . it gets extra difficult.

We've paid, the invoice number is provided, along with a "Download Now" button. Simple. Just copy the access key to a separate file, then click the download button. Except that when you click the download button, it invites you to download a file called "pixel.GIF", of 1 byte in size.

Call me suspicious, but I don't think this is t