Here we have an article exploring pedestrian-vehicle crashes “in which the pedestrian was using headphones“.

Results There were 116 reports of death or injury of pedestrians wearing headphones. The majority of victims were male (68%) and under the age of 30 (67%). The majority of vehicles involved in the crashes were trains (55%), and 89% of cases occurred in urban counties. 74% of case reports stated that the victim was wearing headphones at the time of the crash. Many cases (29%) mentioned that a warning was sounded before the crash.

This sounds a bit confused — were there 116 incidents, or 74% of 116? One wonders. Either way, 116 over seven years (16.6 fatalities a year) doesn’t seem like a lot to get excited about, given that the USA has over 30,000 fatalities annually from car crashes (did they have their car stereos on? Perhaps it’s the music that’s at fault).

One also wonders, if I count as “one”, why the headphones are being blamed here. Being a pedestrian is not in itself inherently dangerous. It’s hard to kill yourself just walking around; it’s the large vehicles with which one may suddenly come into contact that are the danger here. As a pedestrian walking around at 6km/h, I am not dangerous. A motor vehicle comprising a bunch of metal traveling at 50km/h or more is dangerous.

A train is also dangerous. If 55% of these crashes involved trains, mostly in urban areas, why is the focus not on decreasing pedestrian access to train tracks? And since when is 29% — where “a warning was sounded” — “many”?

This sort of blame-the-victim writing really ticks me off.

Again it’s time for the holiday health curmudgeons to bleat at us, disregarding mental and emotional health and a warm feeling of togetherness and community in favour of carrot sticks and abstinence.

This year they’d like us to tell our relatives they’re fat.

‘Tell loved ones they are overweight this Christmas’

Christmas may be a time of indulging for many, but health experts believe it is the perfect time to tell a loved one they are overweight.

Right, because
1. They don’t know?
2. It’s any of your business?
3. There’s not an increasing body of evidence that the connection between health and body size is not as simple as “fat = bad”?

That’ll be a really merry Christmas for everyone.

Pff. If the “health experts” are worried about people’s health, perhaps they shouldn’t give people advice that will get them punched.

Today I was watching Twitter hashtags from two separate events. Both were notionally on a similar topic, but the difference in tone was striking and it clarified something for me.

There are two kinds of events that nonprofits tend to have.

In the first, a select or invited group of people who aren’t terribly conversant with the realities of the work get together to talk about how wonderful they all are and what great work they’re doing. They know they’re doing great work because they keep inviting each other to events, and they keep getting invited so they must be doing great work because that’s the point of the events, right?

In the second, a group of people who really grok the situation get together to talk about how they can work within awkward structures and systems (within reality, really) to make things incrementally better, or at least prevent them from getting worse. This group looks at who’s in the room, is delighted to recognize very few people, worries about who’s not there, and sees its main work as turning apparent answers into better questions.

The problem is that the people at the first kind of event really need to be at the second, and vice versa.

Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

As I was sitting on an Air Canada “Express” plane last night, waiting for a “ramp crew” to produce a nonexistent ramp — the plane was a turboprop about two feet off the ground; the built-in stairs did nicely, but apparently we needed three “ramp crew” to smile at us and point us into the terminal ten metres away before we were allowed to exit the damn plane — I was pondering how “Express” has somehow become a synonym for “inferior PITA version of what used to be”.

Ford Prefect: How are you feeling?
Arthur Dent: Like a military academy. Bits of me keep passing out. Ford? If I were to ask you where the hell we were, would I regret it?
Ford Prefect: We’re safe.
Arthur Dent: Ah. Good.
Ford Prefect: We’re in a cabin of one of the spaceships of the Vogon Constructor Fleet.
Arthur Dent: Ah. This is obviously some strange usage of the word “safe” that I hadn’t previously been aware of.

Air Canada “Express”. Is this what Jazz has become? Except on Jazz you could get hot drinks, and you could gate-check your bags. Neither of these conveniences were available on this “Express” flight, so my perfectly legal carry on needed to be wedged very firmly under an empty seat across the aisle since they’ve apparently made both the overhead bins and the underseat area too small to fit normal carry-ons. And on a two-hour flight after five hours of meetings and a four-hour drive, we couldn’t have some tea, since they appear to have dispensed with all heating elements onboard. Then when we arrived we had to wait ten minutes before the “ramp crew” was able to supervise our descent of the three steps to the tarmac.

I’m fond of Holiday Inn Express hotels, but they’re inarguably the inferior, less nice version of Holiday Inns.

Lately my wine club has instituted an “Express” line for members. Before this line, I could walk up to the (enclosed, covered) warehouse loading dock, hand them my pick-up notice, wait three or five minutes then walk away with my wine. Now I have to go into an office, wait in line, have someone peruse my ID, wait for that someone to fuss about on the computer, and eventually be sent outside to a distant door far past the loading dock to wait outside in the rain for my wine. I have yet to spend less than twenty minutes on this “express” process.

“Express”. Feh.

Not relatively minor chickenshit — full-on full-size bullshit. If I could pitch the entire Fraser Institute off a cliff for even thinking up the term I would do it.

So, yes, the Fraser Institute is going on about how June 6 is “Tax Freedom Day” this year — the day after which “Canadians finally pay off their taxes for the year and can start working for themselves”. And CBC, shame on them, feels the need to pay attention to their pathetic bleating.

As if paying taxes wasn’t already “working for yourself”, your family, your neighbourhood, your country. As if there’s no value at all to the services provided by all our levels of government. As if we’d be better off without those services. As if civilization doesn’t depend on them. As if you could provide them cheaper by yourself instead of taking advantage of massive economies of scale. As if the people whining about them haven’t benefited massively from the services that have been provided to them; as if those taxes didn’t pay for the educational institutions and infrastructure that’s put them in such a privileged position that they’re now free to spend their time whining instead of doing something useful.

I’ll indulge in a lengthy but topical quote from Heather Mallick’s “Tax is not a dirty word” here:

Traffic lights, military graveyards, restaurant kitchen inspection, best-before dates on cheese, transport-truck safety, passports, immunization, filtration standards for urban cremation chimneys, crosswalk-painting, drainage, bank deposit insurance, child-support enforcement, prison guards, chiropractor regulation, bridges, tunnels, flag design, auditors-general, airwaves usage, census-taking, postal codes, organ donation, courts, clean water, weather history, alcoholism treatment, classrooms, assisted reproduction, at-risk species registration, forest-insect slaughter, fish conservation, Olympic training, vehicle registration, name change, international child abduction search and rescue.

Take a deep breath, class.

Building codes, nature trails, mental health treatment, Ontario cemetery finding, Toronto bike lockers, maps, vehicle sensors, P.A.T.H., apartment standards, First Nations statistics, land claims, bankruptcy, Polar Continental Shelf tracking, veterans, fence disputes, fraud and waste hotline, leaf pickup, snow removal, urban forestry, Hydro, pesticide regulation, Great Lakes pilotage, litter collection, committees of adjustment, army and navy, autism assessment, behavioural therapy, border guards, serial-killer tracking, copyright, Supreme Court appointments, governors-general, access to information, adoption records, critical infrastructure protection.

And another breath.

Air-bag safety, student loans, agricultural income stabilization, immigration, embassies and consulates, parole, postage stamps, streamlined customs clearance, the national do-not-call list, forest-fire mapping, petroleum and natural gas lands administration, canola dealer licensing, hunting and snaring licences, fisheries, elections, pensions, money-minting, aviation museums, polar ice-watching, police college, social assistance, unemployment insurance.

And that was just a taste, a smattering, of what Canadians do and have done for them, the stuff that makes you want to kiss the sweet Pearson tarmac when you get home from the bloody dust of Afghanistan and never leave this good-natured civilized paved place until whatever-awaits-us extends its bony hand and says “Follow me.”

Perhaps the Fraser Institute should relocate itself to, say, Somalia, if it feels taxes are so valueless. Fine. Go live somewhere without them. Work “for yourself”. (Here’s your AK-47, son. You’ll need it.)

Or perhaps Syria. A friend, posting the link to the blog of an out lesbian in Damascus who was just abducted off the street noted:

My friends blog about books and cycling and writing for TV, and then they go on with their lives. We are all extremely lucky.

Yes, we are lucky, extremely lucky. And in part we make our own luck by paying our damn taxes so that we can continue to live in a civilized country where people living peaceful lives don’t, as a rule, get snatched off the street.

/soapbox.

In previous years we’ve had warnings about Santa’s fatness setting a bad example and how we should all abjure cookies and eggnog and subsist on carrot sticks and water at holiday parties. This year it’s eating leftovers and Santa’s sleep (or lack thereof) habits that are under fire:

Surely Santa will feel jet-lagged at the end of his trip! To deliver presents at exactly mid-night all around the world he will have to spend 24h in trans-meridian travel with rapid changes in time zones and little time for his body clock to adapt. He will travel in darkness all the time, so he will be more likely to fall asleep. Catch-up sleep helps to recover from the short-term tiredness and fatigue, but will not help avoid the long-term consequences of sleep deprivation. If he were to do this all year round, he would definitely run the risk of dying prematurely.

How cheerful!

The thing the Expert Curmudgeons always overlook, and I think this is a real issue, is that health is about more than sleep hygiene and carrot sticks. Health is also about having a good time with friends and family, relaxing, enjoying yourself and enjoying eating and drinking yummy seasonal treats.

Western concepts of health and medicine should take a page or two (or, hell, the whole book) from the Aboriginal Medicine Wheel concept, in which health comprises physical, emotional, mental and spiritual health all together. Eggnog, cookies, gravy, friends and family may not be absolutely helpful to our physical wellbeing, but they’re a very important part of the total picture of what makes us happy, content and — therefore — healthy in a more inclusive, absolute sense. You can go to a party and eat carrot sticks and drink water and feel all virtuous and abstemious, or you can go to the same party and actually enjoy yourself: which is better for you as a whole? I’d argue a certain amount of seasonal indulgence is good for the soul. It’s a long, cold, dark winter and we’re in the darkest bit: eggnog and cookies are perfectly reasonable coping mechanisms.

At this point I will link back to a post from four years ago with much better holiday tips.

This biologist says drink the damn eggnog, eat the damn cookies, sleep in (or get up early, whatever floats your boat) and enjoy yourself. So you might gain a pound or two or suffer the odd hangover. So what. Your emotional, mental, spiritual self will probably thank you. Your physical self can correct any lingering issues in January.

This is a good start, but I think I need another couple points on the far left. I’m not sure I could work up enough energy to punch morning in the face.

How I hate it when people live up to stereotypes.

I look at the G20 coverage and that’s all I see. We had people marching peacefully for good causes, whose messages will now never be heard. We had the riot-helmeted cops marching in rows. We had idiots who like to break things and nobody stopped them despite 900 arrests — at a billion dollars of security, that’s $1,111,111 per arrest, never mind that the vast majority had charges dropped and were released in short order. We had media covering the people who break things instead of the people with interesting things to say. We had protest-tourists who stood around uselessly watching things go pear-shaped, tweeting and snapping photos. And we had millions of us who just stayed home and let it all happen.

I hate it all — well, all except the folks who were marching peacefully and using their democratic right to have their say. I’m fully in support of peaceful demonstrations.

But how can the Toronto police, who normally let small children pat the noses of horses in riot gear, who line Yonge and high-five a million people and politely confiscate open beers whenever we win any sort of sports thing, who happily close off part of University Avenue for two weeks while Tamils have their say in front of the US Consulate, have allowed themselves to be such immense jerks?

How can anyone — dressed in name-brand black outfits (note Fila pants) and Kevlar body armour — have such an overwhelming sense of entitlement that they think randomly smashing up other people’s stuff is either fun or OK?

How can anyone — given the presence of fifty or more other nearby observers — stand there blinking like sheep and watch someone smash stuff up? I mean, look at these people in the background; they’re pretending it’s TV:

Shame, shame. Also, as we would say in college: WEAK. Dudes, whatever kind of society you’re advocating for, count me the hell OUT. That kind of crap is why I stayed home.

I think that was probably our collective mistake, giving in to the imposed fear and inconvenience and failing to say “eff it, I’m a Canadian, this is my city, and I’m going to continue to live my life,” going to our offices and restaurants and shows and walking our dogs and generally continuing life downtown despite the lack of transit or the presence of eleventy-gazillion police in riot gear or whatever. After all, what’s the point of inflicting house arrest on ourselves in the name of security? Would this all have unfolded differently if we-the-people in our millions didn’t collectively abdicate our responsibility to be ourselves, thus leaving downtown a howling wasteland / combat zone where everyone present fell into one of four or five stereotypical roles? What if we kept the focus squarely where it belongs in a democracy such as ours: on freedom-to instead of freedom-from?

It makes no sense. None of it makes any sense. And it’s all very disappointing, to put it mildly.

THIS is my Toronto: police marching WITH today’s anti-brutality protestors.

This is also my Toronto, courtesy of a friend on Facebook (and if anyone runs across a link to the video, which was apparently on tonight’s news, I’d love to add it) edit – here it is:

…just saw what is probably my favourite video of the mayhem in Toronto this weekend: Some guy in a black shirt & bandana smashes the window of downtown electronics store and grabs something. This Joe walking by in a polo shirt & knapsack tackles him, takes away the thing, throws it back in the store, then just gets up and continues walking the direction he was going.

Thanks, Joe. You may have been the only honorable person in Toronto this weekend.

– maybe hospitals should be nicer to midwives.

I gave birth at Women’s College Hospital, and of all places I fully expected them to support my midwives. But they were unspeakably awful to them — rude, dismissive, demeaning, the whole gamut of bad behaviour. They topped it off by ignoring me (I was admitted unplanned, following a complication; midwifery patients usually go home shortly after the birth) as totally as they could, unless they were calling me by a name I don’t use and rolling their eyes at me. I was, to put it mildly, unimpressed that a hospital that purports to support women’s health behaved so badly to an entire profession that not only purports to, but does, support women’s health..

Nursing moms need more support: Toronto

A study by Toronto Public Health of 1, 500 first-time mothers in this city found that while most new moms try breastfeeding in the hospital, only about 63 per cent are still doing it exclusively by the time they’re discharged from hospital.

Six months down the road, only 17 and a half per cent of moms are not supplementing their child’s diet with formula, the study titled Breastfeeding in Toronto – Promoting Supportive Environments found.

Breastfeeding takes support. Serious support, from the new mom’s partner, family, and all health practitioners and support staff. If you have a hospital that cares so little about women that it rolls its eyes at midwives and ignores their patients, how well supported in breastfeeding do you suppose women who give birth there tend to feel? And that’s the hospital that’s theoretically most sensitive to womens’ needs.

Yeah. No surprise there. No wonder that only 63% are breastfeeding by the time they leave hospital — probably less than 36 hours after giving birth. Shame on the hospitals.

(For the record, with my midwives’ support, I breastfed my daughter for a year.)

Pamela Cross has already said everything I would say (and more) about this sad anniversary, so I’ll just point you to her post.

Her post ends with a poem. I’ll also offer a poem, although not such an optimistic one. This one’s by Susan Griffin:

An Answer to a Man’s Question,
“What Can I Do About Women’s Liberation?”
Wear a dress.
Wear a dress that you made yourself, or bought in a dress store.
Wear a dress and underneath the dress wear elastic, around
your hips, and underneath your nipples.
Wear a dress and underneath the dress wear a sanitary napkin.
Wear a dress and wear sling-back, high-heeled shoes.
Wear a dress, with elastic and a sanitary napkin underneath,
and sling-back shoes on your feet, and walk down Telegraph Avenue.
Wear a dress, with elastic and a sanitary napkin and sling-
back shoes on Telegraph Avenue and try to run.

Find a man.
Find a nice man who you would like to ask you for a date.
Find a nice man who will ask you for a date.
Keep your dress on.
Ask the nice man who asks you for a date to come to dinner.
Cook the nice man a nice dinner so the dinner is ready before
he comes and your dress is nice and clean and wear a smile.
Tell the nice man you’re a virgin, or you don’t have
birth control, or you would like to get to know him better.
Keep your dress on.
Go to the movies by yourself

Find a job.
Iron your dress.
Wear your ironed dress and promise the boss you won’t get
pregnant (which in your case is predictable) and you like to
type, and be sincere and wear your smile.
Find a job or get on welfare.
Borrow a child and get on welfare.
Borrow a child and stay in the house all day with the child,
or go to the public park with the child, and take the child
to the welfare office and cry and say your man left you and
be humble and wear your dress and your smile, and don’t talk
back, keep your dress on, cook more nice dinners, stay
away from Telegraph Avenue, and still, you won’t know the
half of it, not in a million years.

Ah, how I love Lenore Skenazy. And STATS, who interviewed her.

Perhaps the problem needed to be approached from a different angle, she thought. What if you actually wanted your child to be kidnapped by a stranger and held overnight? How long would you have to leave him outside, and unattended for that to be likely to happen? When she asked people to take a guess, the most she ever heard was three months. Some people ventured a day, an hour, and even – implausibly – ten minutes.

…

The answer to Skenazy’s question was… 750,000 years. By reframing the way the risk was framed, she took the focus away from one, and placed it on what the chance was in real time – and 750,000 years is a far more arresting and reassuring number than one in 1.5 million.

…

“I haven’t seen horrible diseases sweeping the country as a result of any child rearing technique that we’ve been using, whether it’s drinking baby formula or using a sippy cup,“ she says. “So, rather than worry about these, I worry about cars. They are the number one way children are killed.”

There are lots of interesting statistics down the side of the article (because it is STATS, after all). I would’ve like to see similar “one in” and “x years” numbers for other forms of child mortality, particularly car crashes and injuries from toys. They do give either numbers or rates-per-million, but without numbers you can compare directly it’s hard to grasp how many orders of magnitude there are between the various risks. Some sort of graph or image, even, might help, since our brains are notoriously bad at relative risk analysis.

Anyway, great interview with Ms. Skenazy. Her blog Free Range Kids has much more.

I am facing the annual pile of forms from M’s school. I am immediately annoyed by the size of the pile. Welcome back! Let’s spend an hour filling out forms! The pile is stapled together in the bottom left corner, WTF? which heightens the annoyance, then I nearly break a nail prying out the staple so I can fill them out, which annoys me yet further. Oh, what fun. On to the forms:

• Unnumbered form about the Safe Arrival program, requiring my signature, the name, room and grade of my kid. Rendered useless by the need to return the form, thus removing any reminder of the Safe Arrival procedures from my house.
• Form 511H, Walking Excursion Form – Immediate Community. So they can take my kid outside the school fence. Requires kid’s name (twice), teacher’s name, my name and signature, date.
• Form 511K, Physical Education Information and Intramural Information/Permission. Two pages long; summary: sometimes kids get hurt. It’s not like gym is optional, so what is the earthly point of this form? Requires name (twice) and grade/class of my kid, my name (twice), signature (twice) and date (twice).
• Form 511E, Medical Information Form. Endless detail, mostly about allergies and Epipens. (Is it the school’s business if my child sleepwalks?). And yes, of course the school may call a doctor in an emergency. Sign, date.
• Unnumbered form lecturing us about lunch hour procedures (“Lunchroom supervision is provided only for those students from grades 1 to 8 who cannot go home or make other arrangements” [like what other arrangements??]). Oh, I’m so terribly sorry my kid is inconveniently present all day but you know what? The school day overlaps most people’s work days and watching the kids over lunch is a perfectly normal part of the school deal. Rather contradictorily they point out that if kids who do go home are late coming back they may be required to stay for lunch. Make up your mind, folks! Requires kid’s name, schedule, grade, teacher’s name and room number (surely one of these would do?), and my signature signifying that I’ve read their snarky lecture.
• Unnumbered Code of On-line Conduct form making me responsible for upholding the school’s policies, which are not provided for me to review. Sorry, but I am not signing this one. What my kid does during school hours on school computers under school supervision has nothing whatsoever to do with me. Also, it isn’t specified whether or not the kids are expected to follow these mysterious policies outside school, and what I let my kid do on our own computer is not the school’s business. I leave the line acknowledging that my kid will be using computers at school (like they need my permission for this) and cross out the rest.
• School year calendar listing PA days and holidays, separately.
• Class newsletter. In Comic Sans. WHY? Reiterates school hours (which seem to change every year) and which exits the kids use, as well as lecturing us about how to make a healthy lunch, lecturing us on the importance of reading, lecturing us on the importance of the mandatory ($6) planners, lecturing us about appropriate school supplies, and more. Lecture lecture lecture. Pthtththbbbbt.
• Another calendar, very hard to read. Oh good, the kids are on a 7-day cycle this year so things like gym and library are even harder to keep straight. Of course, gym and library are not marked on this calendar OR the other calendar. Eventually I find them hidden in a corner of the class newsletter. I foresee a boring half-hour with this calendar and some coloured pens.
• Unnumbered form requiring $6 for a planner. What, no signature required??
• Unnumbered general Contact Information Form, in case my name wasn’t clear enough from the previous five billion forms. Comic Sans again makes me wince. I yet again cross off Mom’s Name and Dad’s Name and replace them with Parent/Guardian 1 and Parent/Guardian 2, and add yet another short note pointing out that there may be kids in care or in gay families, and inclusion never hurts. I do this every year (I can’t possibly be the only one) and yet there Mom and Dad remain on the form. There’s just no excuse for schools to have Mom & Dad on their forms in 2009. For shame.

And that seems to be it for the moment. It seems choir hasn’t started yet so I don’t have the form for that — as if it’s any of my business if my kid wants to join a school program during school hours — and apparently the Pizza Day folks haven’t quite got things together yet, so we still have those forms to look forward to. Whee.

The thing that bugs me most? I fill out these forms every.single.year. So do the other 950 parents at M’s school and probably thousands and thousands more across the city. All this paper and all this wasted effort! What did they do with the other four years’ worth of forms I’ve filled out? Why on earth isn’t all this information kept in a database for the duration of my child’s stay at the school? At worst it should be printed and sent to me each year to initial or update, but really it ought to be online for me to review and update. Remind me what year it is again? Or maybe what century we’re in?

The thing that bugs me almost as much: These things are SO badly designed. Why do I have to fill out my name and my kid’s name twice on many forms? Why (at the very least) is this not all one multi-part form? If you’re going to send these things to hundreds or thousands of people, put some effort into effective design!

Thing that bugs me quite substantially: The tone. The patronizing condescension. The air of mistrust and hints of disapproval. Please. Talking to me as if I were both six and slightly prone to misbehave does not make me want to fill out your forms.

Another thing that bugs me quite substantially: The unnecessary jargon. A whole page describing a Safe Arrival Program, which I can sum up as: call the school if you’re kid’s going to be absent? Two pages for the Phys Ed/Intramural one, which is: kids sometimes fall down? And these are the people who are supposed to be teaching my child how to communicate? Gaaah! Speak like normal people already, and if you’ve forgotten do that, hire a plain-language specialist.

Thing that also bugs me: Comic Sans. Let’s ban it. Nobody over the age of ten or so should find Comic Sans even slightly acceptable for formal communications.

This pile of forms is due tomorrow, as at least three forms plus the class newsletter remind me. By now I am in such a cranky rebellious temper that I am sorely tempted to hold on to them until Tuesday, just because. But I suppose it’s a little early in the school year to be that openly antagonistic, so I shall dutifully send them off tomorrow.

And now I shall have a beer and blow off my antisocial crankiness with an extra-loud belch.

I have to say something about this desperately sad story, in which two children, non-swimmers both, drowned and died along with their mother, also a non-swimmer, who had been supervising them as they swam in a hotel pool (without a lifeguard). It seems that one or both girls somehow got into trouble and the mother then jumped in to try to save them. All of them died.

What I have to say is this: do not ever swim without a qualified lifeguard watching you. And if you do, quite literally the last thing you may do is jump in to save someone. By doing so you are worsening the emergency: now there are two people in trouble instead of one.

Drowning people don’t look like the stereotype, with lots of thrashing and waving arms and shouting and all that. People who truly can’t swim often are just below the surface. You might see their arms — they might look like they’re climbing a ladder — but they don’t come far out of the water. They’re quiet, not calling out. They’re using all their effort to try to reach the surface. They are desperate and they are not rational.

And these folks are dangerous. Unless you really know what you’re doing, you shouldn’t go anywhere near a drowning person. They are so freaked out, so detached from normal perception, so focused on their own survival that they will do anything — ANYTHING — to keep themselves at the surface. They are incredibly strong from adrenalin, and they will push you under and keep you under the surface of the water if climbing up your body will help them stay on the surface. Even a small child can drown you this way, even if you are a grown adult and a good swimmer.

Sometimes, drowning people don’t struggle. In a certain percentage of cases people just quietly slide under the surface. Even then if you jump in and try to grab them, if they’re still conscious they can push you under and kill you. They don’t mean to do it, but they will.

Treat drowning people like you would a wild animal you were trying to rescue. Pretend they have fangs and claws and poisonous barbs.

The usual algorithm to follow when considering a rescue is (with variations, but this is the simplest to remember):

1. Talk - sometimes all the person needs is a calming voice, reassurance and guidance to help them reach safety.
2. Reach – reach out to the person with an object — reaching pole, flutterboard, towel, paddle, pool noodle, piece of clothing — anything! If you absolutely must use your own body, lie down on your stomach so the drowning person can’t pull you in.
3. Throw – throw the person a buoyant object such as a flutterboard or ring buoy and talk them in or pull them in. If you’re using a ring buoy, don’t forget to stand on the end of the rope when you throw it so it doesn’t ALL head out to sea (I always forget this important point).
4. Row – use a boat to get to them, have them grab the stern end of the boat, and row them to shallow water,
5. Go – swim out to them with a buoyant object. Stop a few metres away. Push the object to them with your foot. Keep well away. Talk to them reassuringly and guide them to shore.
6. Tow – swim out to them with any object — a buoyant one if you can get one, but otherwise anything – piece of clothing, towel, whatever. The point is just to keep some distance between you. Have them hold one end of the object. Hold the other end and tow them to safety. If they start to come at you (by crawling up the object, for example), let go and swim a short distance away. Talk to them and see if you can get them to calm down and stop trying to kill you.
7. and then if all else fails, Carry, which you should only ever do if you are trained to do so. If you aren’t trained in how to safely touch a drowning person, don’t do it. Run for help instead.

In a pool situation, such as the one referenced above in which all three people died, there is virtually never a reason for someone who is not a trained lifeguard to go in the water to rescue someone. Pools are always equipped with reaching and throwing assists. Always. More than one. There will probably be a reaching pole on a wall, a ring bouy on another wall, and various pool noodles, flutterboards, and other buoyant objects around. Use these. Don’t lose your head and leap in.

If you have children, or if you cannot swim yourself, as a first step for everyone I recommend the Swim to Survive program, because you can never tell when you may end up in deep water. It pays to be prepared, even minimally prepared. The Star has been promoting this program recently.

As the Kaianad/Yasmin family so tragically demonstrated this week, non-swimmers should never, ever be “supervising” non-swimmers in the water. Even if you are a good swimmer, you never know when you’re going to bonk your head, inhale water unexpectedly, get tangled in seaweed, get a cramp, or any number of other minor issues that could become fatal if no help is available.

So swim only in places where you know a trained person is watching. Please.

…purely so I can use “Kiss my 83-year-old ass” as the title of a blog post.

Although anything over seventy or so works with reasonable credibility, really.

(h/t to Jan)

File under “not enough information to draw the conclusion they’ve drawn”:

Why did 90 children die?
Ontario’s child advocate was appalled to learn how many in the province’s welfare system die each year and is equally shocked at how difficult it is to get answers

First, I think we can all agree that the province’s unwillingness to cough up any useful information about the relevant cases to the child advocate’s office is inexcusable whatever the number of deaths or other issues. It’s hard to advocate effectively when you’re being stonewalled by those ostensibly working toward the same ends and I don’t blame the child advocate’s office for one second for using whatever numbers will get them the attention and cooperation they may need.

I think — hope — we can all also agree that any greater than zero number of deaths of children is very sad and horrible and such deaths are most urgently to be avoided.

What is not in this article or — just so it doesn’t look like I’m picking on this one piece, which I’m not — in any of the coverage I’ve seen, is any information that puts 90 child deaths in context for proper comparison and evaluation. How many children are there in Ontario? How many die each year, in what age groups, for what reasons? How do those population-level numbers and rates relate to the numbers and rates of deaths of children in care? Is it disproportionately high (or low, although that seems wildly unlikely), or are the rates not significantly different from rates in the population as a whole? Do the rates vary between groups — are, say, babies in care more (or less) likely to die than babies in the population in general? Small children? Teenagers? Disabled children?

I haven’t read the whole report yet so this may merely be a complaint about its media coverage. Still, if I were the child advocate’s office, I would be speaking loudly in my initial press releases about both the raw numbers and, if it’s relevant and useful, the rates. Ninety instinctively seems like a big number (awful thought, to think of ninety children dying) but it needs context to have real meaning. Perhaps something like this: “90 children in care or within a year of being in care died in 2007. This is n times the rate of death for all children in Ontario. This is inexcusable; children in our care deserve better. Wouldn’t it be nice if the government shared more information about at-risk children with the Child Advocate’s office so we could help bring down this rate?” etc.

I don’t mean to disparage the great work the advocates are doing in this case. I do regret that there are numbers being thrown around for shock value with no way to assess their real meaning.

Because denying a woman choice is one step on the way to telling her what else she may or may not do while pregnant.

Because if men got pregnant, this wouldn’t even be a question.

But above all, because my body is my body and it is mine to control.

And from last year, but still apropos:

No, no, no. This is just mad:

Hybrid Cars Too Quiet For Pedestrian Safety? Add Engine Noise, Say Researchers

Important pedestrian safety issues have emerged with the advent of hybrid and electric vehicles. These vehicles are relatively quiet—they do not emit the sounds pedestrians and bicyclists are accustomed to hearing as a vehicle approaches them on the street or at an intersection. In a recent study, human factors/ergonomics researchers examined participants’ preferences for sounds that could be added to quiet vehicles to make them easier to detect.

They’re not even seeing the problem clearly. The problem here is that most cars are insanely loud, not that a very few of them are quiet. The problem is that those of us in cities have to put up with increasing levels of noise pollution. The problem is that drivers of cars (loud or quiet) don’t watch properly for pedestrians and cyclists, nor are they much good at sharing the road with them — or even recognizing that anything other than a car has any right to use our publicly-funded roads (but that’s another rant for another time).

Deliberately add noise and that compensatory human response to safety measures will kick in: my car makes a special noise, so it’s other people’s problem to get out of my way (cf. the beeping noises of trucks backing up — truck drivers never seem to bother checking behind them anymore, assuming the wretched beeps do the job).

The answer is not “make the cars louder”. It is to teach people this: if you’re silent, whether it be as a pedestrian, a cyclist, or the driver of a blessedly quiet hybrid car, pay attention. Assume you’re invisible, or assume the guy trying to cross the road in front of you is blind, or (even better) assume both of those things. You’re not a guided missile aiming for your home or your office, you’re part of the grand dance that is traffic. Try to keep in time and try not to step on people’s toes.

Actually, I’d like the folks using non-silent modes of transport to think that way too.

I really enjoyed this very plainspoken TED talk by James Howard Kunstler. The official blurb is this:

In James Howard Kunstler’s view, public spaces should be inspired centers of civic life and the physical manifestation of the common good. Instead, he argues, what we have in America is a nation of places not worth caring about.

…which makes the talk sound all dainty and idealistic. I suppose it is, but Kunstler himself is far from it, cheerfully using “clusterfuck” as a descriptor and sustaining a good rant for the whole nineteen minutes. I particularly liked his turn of phrase “the nonarticulated agony of suburbia”.

Worth the time. If you’d rather grab it to watch on an iPod or download it directly, it is here.

(If you see grey boxes saying Player 7 and Player 8, just click one to bring up the video.)

I’ve been rather depressed this week overhearing (in my office and elsewhere) a lot of “well, maybe when the old guys die off we can quit this Remembrance Day nonsense. I don’t support war, so I don’t wear a poppy.”

User Friendly nails it for me in this series of strips from this past week:

If WWI and WWII don’t do it for you and you need something more recent, perhaps contemplate Bosnia (you would prefer we left people to wipe each other out entirely?), Rwanda (ditto), Afghanistan (ditto, plus, you’d prefer the female half of the population to be violently oppressed?)…*

I don’t like war, or even the thought of war, either. But some things are worth fighting for.

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* not to disregard those who served in Korea, Cyprus, or anywhere else we’ve sent them, either.