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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.