I just happened across an ad in a kids’ paper while I was eating lunch:

The Shining Path: Your Newest Option in Childbirth

After recovering from the spit-take I had to wonder what on earth they were thinking. Do they in fact approach the birth-support process from a Communist terrorist perspective? I suppose there are possibilities there — although one’s mind does stray into Bad Thoughts territory pretty quickly when considering what they might be — and it’s a niche market at best.

Do you suppose they will ever have a Peruvian client? My guess is No.

This, my friends, is a Cadillac Escalade hybrid. “Green by design!”

It is still a car, likely to carry only one person and a box of kleenex from point A to point B.

It is still the size of a small moon, taking up an unreasonable share of common space.

It is only 25% more fuel-efficient than a normal Escalade — so it gets a rollicking 17-18mpg based on fuel-efficiency estimates from non-hybrid Escalades, vs. say a garden-variety Yaris at ~40mpg or a Civic Hybrid at 60mpg — and yet it is being marketed as “green”.

It costs about $100k, which buys a whole lot of very nice bicycles AND a Civic Hybrid should you find your life requires a car.

It is the most ridiculous thing I’ve seen in quite some time.

7: À la Recherche du Temps Perdu – Marcel Proust

Yes, yes, he tasted a biscuit that made him think of childhood, we’ve all done that. If I want to remember my childhood I look at some photographs.

– from Richard Wilson’s 10 books not to read before you die, a list extracted from his book Can’t Be Arsed: 101 Things Not to Do Before You Die.

Very refreshing — I’m unspeakably happy to find someone else who was bored spitless by Hemingway. I disagree about Lord of the Rings, not that I ever made it past the interminable trudging through forest in the middle of the second book — but I would cheerfully go to Peter Gabriel concerts and did read Dune (which mostly sucked). And I did like Pride and Prejudice.

In sorting through various papers last night I encountered my Master’s thesis. I re-read big chunks of it and you know? It’s pretty good. Huh. Still, I am glad I didn’t re-encounter it previously; 12 years’ distance seems about right.

In other news, M’s school has not revised their class-allocation process, which I can summarize by way of a conversation I had this morning with a staff person from our daycare as we all walked to the same place.

Her: … and now I just have to go find out what class J. is in.
Me: Oh, that bit where 500 kids and their parents and small siblings and dogs all squish into the very constrained space between the shortest wall of the school and the fence, trying to peer at 12-pt-font signs on the wall to get their kid in the right line-up and the whole thing is total chaos?
Her: Yeah, that.

M’s grade 2 class looks like a good bunch of kids and an entirely decent teacher. Obligatory first-day photo:

But the school drives me nuts. Why don’t you just email me a week ahead and tell me to which exit/entrance to deliver my kid instead of inflicting this stressful chaos, at the same time thus freeing up staff to help out folks who didn’t get the emails? Why the total lack of technology? I can’t even email her teachers. I can’t email the office to let them know will be late or absent. It’s all phone and bits of paper. SO inefficient.

(Source: GraphJam)

According to the BBC and a bunch of other coverage of a study published in Human Nature, it tells us that women aren’t as likely as are men to enjoy a one-night stand:

Just under half of women who answered the internet poll, published in the journal “Human Nature”, said they felt it had been a bad idea.

Four out of five men, in contrast, said they were happy with a brief fling.

Note the manipulative presentation of the numbers. In actuality, 54% of women and 80% of men enjoyed their brief romps, but that doesn’t seem as extreme a difference as “just under half” of women regretting it and “four in five” men enjoying it. But however we phrase these results, does this lead us to conclusions about, say, the ability of men to please women the very first time they hop in the sack together? Or perhaps conclusions about people who answer Internet polls about their sex lives? No, of course not. Women’s dissatisfaction must be evolution in action.

“In evolutionary terms women bear the brunt of parental care and it has been generally thought that it was to their advantage to choose their mate carefully and remain faithful to make sure that their mate had no reason to believe he was raising another man’s child.

“Recently, biologists have suggested that females could benefit from mating with many men – it would increase the genetic diversity of their children, and, if a high quality man would not stay with them forever, they might at least get his excellent genes for their child.”

However, she said that if women were designed by evolution for short-term relationships, they would enjoy them more, and the survey suggested this was not the case.

Coming down to earth from those lofty clouds of conjecture, now: what does evolution tell those of us in the reality-based community about behaviour?

Nothing. Really, really nothing. Behaviour is cultural. People’s emotional responses to circumstances — and I’m not talking about basic nervous-system, fight-or-flight-inducing circumstances, but everyday happenings — are culturally driven. You can’t conclude a darn thing from them about evolution.

Of course you can get lots of media attention if you try to do so anyway, particularly if — as in this study — you conclude that there’s something wrong with women.

Salon (Men: Score! Women: Whoops!) is so far the only media coverage of this I’ve seen that even mentions culture:

I’d sooner believe that this study illustrates the familiar stud-slut double standard. Even young women of the hookup generation — and I am one — aren’t immune to culturally commanded sexual shame; greater permissiveness toward one-night stands doesn’t necessarily make it easy for women to feel proud of their sexploits. On the same note, it’s no surprise women report less sexual satisfaction from their hookups: Plenty of women don’t exactly experience sexual shame as an aphrodisiac, and hookup culture doesn’t emphasize female pleasure so much as it does humping like bunny rabbits.

So: +1 points for Salon for addressing the culture aspect. A sharp slap with a wet noodle to Human Nature’s peer reviewers, who should not have published such a flawed study, and a big “boo, hiss” to all the science reporters who covered it without turning on their brains.

(via the lovely Melle)

A GenX call to arms against Millenials.

One need look no further than the local newsstand to see the favoritism the Millennials have received. Whereas Generation X was routinely denigrated by the press, the Millennials have been compared to World War II’s Greatest Generation. In Robert Strauss and Neil Howe’s Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, the authors state authoritatively that “over the next decade, the Millennial Generation will entirely recast the image of youth from downbeat and alienated to upbeat and engaged.”

Sure, Generation X survived AIDS, Reagan, the Cold War, Tipper Gore, and A Flock of Seagulls, but those adversities, suggest Strauss and Howe, pale in comparison to what Millennials face today. Consider the stress of having to juggle a 30-hour work week while simultaneously maintaining Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr accounts. It’s enough to make your head spin! And maybe the Millennials never faced Hitler’s forces on the beaches of Normandy, but had they been around in 1944 (and had the technology existed), you can bet they would have blogged about it.

(http://bamchallenge.wordpress.com/2008/04/01/challenge-4-beauty/)

Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession with Cosmetic Surgery
by Alex Kuczynski

The initial tone of this book is wildly uncritical — she skims quickly past the notions that half the American population isn’t comfortable with their looks and are subjected to a constant barrage of images of surgically-sculpted perfection and gets right into the how-to without a backward glance at the deeper issues. Kuczynski is a journalist, not a scientist or an investigator, and she clearly goes for sensationalism over depth or meaning. For example, she leaves uncommented this interview with Dr. Suzanne Lepine, a Manhattan specialist in cosmetic surgery for, of all things, feet:

We live in a fifteen-second culture,” she said. “That’s how long it takes, I believe, for a man to look at you and decide if he will be in love with you. That is it. And if you’re wearing stiletto sandals and your feet look like hell, he’s not even going to give you the time of day.”

A man won’t love you, Levine reasons, or even give himself the chance of falling in love with you, if you have a bunion peeping out of your $500 evening sandal. Tough town, I said.

“Tough town, that’s for sure,” she said. “It sets its own standards. People overreact. I had one woman come in who wanted me to do liposuction of the toe. I mean, that’s even over the top for me.”

What happened to the patient?

“I told her to go see a shrink instead,” Levine said.

When I left, Levine asked me if I knew any good single men.

Yikes. Talk about the need for a psychiatrist and a smack upside the head with a book on feminist theory. To be clear: if a man rejects you on the basis of fifteen seconds’ worth of gazing at your unpedicured, unsculpted toes, your foot should be applied swiftly to his ass as you boot him out the door, not taken to a surgeon. (But I digress.)

In later chapters Kuczynski does a reasonable job at covering the risks of surgery and gives a fairly impassioned schpeel on the need for potential clients to check the qualifications of their putative surgeons; she doesn’t skip discussion of the risks at all. Still, she doesn’t ever really address anything beyond the who, what, how, and how much money of plastic surgery — the background societal issues remain unexamined. Which, to be fair, is probably beyond what might reasonably be expected from this book: Kuczynski set out to explore the world of plastic surgery, and given that parameter she’s done a fine job. It’s a very decent factual piece which would make a respectable accompaniment to some deeper analysis.

I’m not doing Earth Hour.

Yes, obviously I’m against climate change. But I think the whole Earth Hour notion is pointless and misguided for a number of reasons.

First, it’s yet more preaching to the converted. What’s the point of an event which caters only to those already sympathetic and in the know?

Second, it’s pointless. Turning off the lights for an hour is cute, but lights are only symbolic. My furnace uses more kilowatt hours than all the lightbulbs in my house put together. So does my stove.

Third, it’s a distraction, one of those things that makes people feel they’re doing something when actually they’re not. File it with those click-for-a-mammogram, click-to-donate-rice sites which exist to suck in advertising revenue far in excess of any donations. File it with driving a Prius, which is a. hardly clean to manufacture; b. only about 20% more efficient gas-wise than a normal car; c. reliant on electricity, which may well not be cleanly produced; d. a large chunk of metal taking up public space which could better be used for other things — i.e., it’s still a car. File it with switching to those hideous flourescent lightbulbs, which mean less heat produced, which means your furnace runs more and now you have hazardous mercury-containing waste instead of normal lightbulb waste, plus you get more migraines. You haven’t changed anything with any of these actions. They’re feel-good tricks that drive people to complacency and through their very triviality distract people from paying attention to the larger issues they’re supposed to highlight.

So yeah, I won’t be turning the lights out. But since I only ever have one light on at a time anyway, I doubt it would make much difference.

…or not. That’s a picture of my front garden as it appeared yesterday afternoon.

The other day I was going through my photos looking for something else entirely and I happened across this picture (below) from March 13 2007:

Note the lack of snow covering the garden. Note the beginnings of crocuses.

Today is March 20.

Note my tappy foot (and I’m not the only one – h/t to Melle).

Hello? Spring? Please?

It’s a good thing Easter is super-early this year; at least we can console ourselves by grumpily biting the heads off chocolate bunnies.

The February challenge was to read and review a book about “heart”.

I intended to flake out with a fluffy and enjoyable romance but Telling Tales: Living the Effects of Public Policy (Sheila Neysmith, Kate Bezanson, Anne O’Connell, 2005) came up in my library hold queue and having read it I can’t think of a better book about heart.

The book is the final product of a three-year study which followed forty very diverse (in geography, income, ethnicity, generational makeup, etc.) Ontario households through the late 90s, interviewing them repeatedly and hearing in the participants’ own words the effects of the Mike Harris government’s policies on the participants’ lives. I read one of the early reports (c.1998) so I was very interested in the final results.

It’s about the lack of heart, really, and (although they don’t say so in so many words) the bloody-minded pointless punitiveness of the government of the day. They were elected on a platform of supposed fiscal conservatism and tax cuts, but let’s take one example from the book to see how that plays out for taxpayers. (Edited to add: this math and conjecture is mine; it isn’t from the book, although the book does include the descriptive bits I’ve mentioned below about Teresa’s situation.)

Teresa was a disabled young woman who had trained as a vet tech, but could no longer do that work because of her disability. Before the Harris government came in she was on welfare and was being retrained through the Vocational Rehabilitation Service as a medical secretary — IMO a good, suitable job for her. It would have built on her existing intelligence and skills and it is a job which allows part-time / temporary / intermittent work (because her disability might not permit her to work full-time).

Let us assume Teresa is 30 and let us assume that, because of her disability, she dies fairly young, say at 60. Let us also assume that for fifteen of her remaining years she is on welfare or doing her retraining, unable to work, so we only get fifteen years’ work out of her. Are we making a good investment in her retraining?

First, let’s give her welfare at $12,000 per year for two years for her living expenses while she finishes her college course. $24,000. But since she’ll stay on disability benefits forever unless she is retrained, she would’ve cost us this $12,000 per year even if she were not going to school so it comes out even with a permanent-welfare scenario.

Next, let’s give her tuition and books at $5,000/year. Another $10,000.

But then let’s assume that when she’s working she’s either covered or able to pay for her drugs and assistive devices herself. So we don’t have to pay for drug coverage in those years. Our total investment so far is still $10,000 additional dollars of public money.

However, during the fifteen years she does work, let’s assume she makes about $18,000 a year, and that she then pays, conservatively, 10% of that — $1,800/year — in taxes. We’ve now recouped $27,000 on an investment of $10,000 for a total profit of $17,000. Not a bad deal.

Not all of those dollars will go to the province but never mind; they’re tax dollars and I the taxpayer am happy they’re being received by whatever level of government receives them. During her working years Teresa will also be spending an additional $4,200 per year ($18,000 minus $1,800 in taxes minus the $12,000 we would’ve given her in welfare) in the community and that has further positive knock-on effects for the economy.

The Tories, naturally, cancelled the Vocational Rehabilitation Service when they came into office, so this fairly pleasant scenario never happened. Instead, they changed the rules so that you could no longer receive social assistance while also receiving OSAP. And if you took OSAP (which is not enough to pay for living expenses even for an able-bodied person) you lost not only your welfare but your drug card and your access to the assistive devices fund and all other supports. Teresa had to drop out of her course and apply for permanent disability benefits in order to retain her drug- and assistive-device benefits and thus remain alive.

Now since we’re kicking Teresa to the curb to save money, what kind of costs are we looking at?

First let’s assume that for fifteen years we come out even with the retraining scenario because Teresa would have been on welfare or doing her retraining during those years anyway.

Second, let’s be cruel and assume Teresa now saves us some money and dies at 55 instead of 60, because welfare is very bad for people’s health.

So she’s on welfare for 10 years beyond the 15 in the retraining scenario.

At $1,000 per month, which is roughly the disability benefit amount, we’re in for $120,000. Add in a conservative $100/month for drugs, and add in 5 instances of assistive-device replacement at a conservative $500 each time. Total: $134,500.

Let’s compare: $17,000 in public profit and a happy and productive client vs. a cost of $134,500 and a whole lot of misery. It makes no fiscal or logical sense.

Multiply this scenario by the thousands of people who were affected by these “cost-cutting” policy changes.

As one fairly well-off study participant noted on pp.97-98,

I have come to realize that we are living in an historical context where decision-makers are saying through their actions that we — as a society — are no longer responsible for vulnerable people. I find that very disturbing. There is something wrong with that kind of society.

Oh, and about those famous, precious tax cuts? p.166:

Not a single household spoke about the benefit of tax cuts as a buffer or replacement for needed services and employment opportunities.

You see what I mean about heart?

Here are the tracks left by one of the sidewalk snow plows by a park in my neighbourhood.

You know, the plows that “won’t fit” on the sidewalks in front of people’s houses, but somehow manage to fit on the bits of identical sidewalks adjacent to city property — parks, schools, bus stops….

As Spacing says:

The real reason is that the old pre-amalgamation City of Toronto didn’t plough sidewalks, and the city can’t afford the extra equipment or manpower it would take to extend the ploughing throughout the central area. Which is fair enough, but don’t pretend it can’t be done — admit it just won’t be done.

The existing holidays are well and good, but they’re all missing something: time in which everyone else, no matter how beloved and non-intrusive, goes away and leaves one in blessed peace and silence.

Think about it. Valentine’s Day? About being with other people. Easter? ditto, but add even more sugar. Halloween? For the hordes. Christmas? New Year’s? etc.

It’s clear the extroverts have been in control of the holiday schedule.

I hereby declare January 2 to be Introvert Day. A day each person gets to spend deliciously alone, talking to nobody and reveling in a lack of human contact. Send the kids to daycare (unless they’re introverted kids who’ll enjoy their own day of hermitude), maybe skip the shower, buy yourself some excellent chocolate, dig into the pile of library books and relax those social impulses. Go for it. (I’d say “join me!” but that rather misses the point.)

I’m sure anyone reading this has heard my rant about Toys R Gender Apartheid. The place drives me nuts and I end up cursing myself every time I spend money there. But here’s a nice piece out of the UK’s “the f-word” that manages to say the same things but without all the swear words I inevitably insert in my rant:

It is probable that some people see past stereotypes. However, what has been established in research is that people tend to live up or down to the expectations that are communicated to them. A number of studies have revealed that there is pressure on individuals to behave in stereotyped ways and these behaviour patterns are generally equated with social acceptance. We can all remember what it is like at school, never in our lives do we feel more pressure for social acceptance. Female children are fed expectations from the toy industry daily and we cannot pretend they have no effect.

However I don’t necessarily think a particular conspiracy in the toy industry exists to repress girls, but rather that companies think only of profits. Therefore products are created that the human brain will recognise most easily and buy most readily. The toy makers and advertisers ‘amplify’ the perceived differences between the genders in order to quickly communicate with its desired audience. In an experiment where children viewed ten toy adverts once the children could identify the target audience every single time. The target audience of boys or girls are very obvious to children and make the products easy to understand and therefore easy to sell, but the unpleasant side-effect of this is there is an implication of whether the product is suitable for them or not depending on their gender.

A good seasonal reminder to give your business to small, thoughtful toy retailers, assuming you have access to some.

At M’s parent-teacher interview yesterday we asked about how they teach kids to form letters, because M does some very odd things when she prints.

“Oh, we don’t teach that anymore,” said her (absolutely wonderful) teacher, “Any which way they get the letters on the page legibly is fine.” And we all made a few cracks about “back in the day” and “…with my feather dipped in ink” and that sort of thing.

But now I’m wondering: is forming letters properly really one of those things one can learn informally?

Kids these days, etc.

I just found out that a women who used to be on a listserv with me has died at the age of 56.

She was due to retire this upcoming spring. As long as I knew her she was talking about when she’d retire, how much she was looking forward to it, all the things she’d do…

RIP Angela Wilke. This isn’t the retirement you deserved.

edit to add — Melle said it much, much better.

1. I burned my hand nastily this morning — left hand, of course; whoever burns their non-dominant hand? — and I can’t even blame anyone. It was just a stupid non-preventable accident (lid fell off the kettle [for the first time ever] while I was making coffee [not even real coffee! Just my usual pathetic decaf!] and my fingers were in the path of the resulting blast of steam). Three and a half of my fingers are red, shiny, and excruciatingly painful.
2. Hideous weather. Rain combined with snow so thick it makes a wet splat when it hits the ground. Rain, snow. Pick one. Or preferably neither. Please send me to a Caribbean island now or let me hibernate under the duvet until about April, kthxbai.
3. On a related note, Canada keeps spurning Turks & Caicos when they approach us and ask to be a Canadian territory. Why? Why?
4. We got all excited yesterday because on a whim we bought celeriac (impressively ugly, as it should be), cooked it, ate it and actually liked it. Getting excited about vegetables = middle age, for sure.
5. Can’t sleep because my throat is too scratchy. Tired.
6. Dark by 4pm today. Uuuuuuuuuuhhhhhggg.
7. Out of Grand Marnier.

I think I get a do-over for today. All in favour, say Aye.

Quotation of the Day for August 29, 2007

“I was looking at the moon last night,” Bodo said. “You can see it very well from my cell. I was looking and I thought, one day there will be people there and they will have jails there, because they will have arseholes on the moon. Wherever there are people, there are arseholes. Be careful, Guy, you never know when you may turn into one. Look in the mirror often.”

- Tibor Fischer, in Don’t Read This Book If You’re Stupid.

If you are a spammer who likes to use any of my domains as spoofed addresses for your nasty little missives, causing me to have to pick my real email out of thousands of your horrid little bounce messages, I had better not ever find out where you live, because if I do I will come right over. And I will then cheerfully disembowel you with my left thumb and a salad fork.

Grr.