My colleagues and I settled into our VIA trip yesterday. The snack cart went by, then the conductor came by to collect our tickets, perhaps 30 minutes out of Windsor. Just as the conductor was returning our ticket stubs his radio squawked: “Uh, we just hit something, over”. “OK” responds the conductor tersely, disappears. The train stops. Hm, I think, maybe I misheard that. I am constructing hopeful mental scenarios involving fallen branches on the tracks or maybe a stray dog.

We’re sitting in some fairly picturesque bit of landscape — Lake St. Clair on our left, some pretty cottages on the shore, some nicely-kept bungalows on the right, sun on fresh snow.

We sit there for a while, then there’s an announcement that there’s “been a serious incident with a pedestrian”. We could be delayed up to three hours. I’m not paying much attention up to that point; too busy fighting with the very spotty onboard wireless Internet to do a bit of work which nobody who was actually in the office that day was available to do. But “pedestrian” definitely catches my attention.

People in reflective vests check the outside of the train on both sides, front to back.

The Windsor Star shows up.

We sit there and sit there. The conductor wanders back in and the women sitting across from us ask if the “pedestrian” is OK. Don’t know, he says. Still alive? Don’t know.

Our student nurse wonders if she should’ve offered her help, and wonders how she would respond in a real emergency situation. We chat about that for a while: I say that I’m sure she’d be just fine, that in my experience you step up and do what’s necessary at the time, then once it’s over and you have time to sit down and actually process it a bit, the shakes and the panic start. I mention that after one spinal rescue I helped with at camp that all of our hands were shaking too badly to open a packet of coffee grounds (why we felt stimulants would help I have no idea, but we did) and we had to go find someone else to make the coffee for us. I also recall — but do not mention — being pulled out of lunch once to look for someone’s big toe after he did something foolish with a lawnmower, eventually concluding it had been more destroyed than severed, helping one fierce Scottish camp nurse talk the other rather wimpier camp nurse into giving him a decent whack of painkillers (“I’ll just give him a bit.” “No! It’s an hour to the hospital! Give him as much as you’d want for yourself!”), packing him and his mangled shoe full of blood (and, we hope, what’s left of his toe, but we’re SO not looking) into a car to the hospital, and then the deep strangeness of heading back to lunch. I don’t recall whether I ate anything else. I bet not.

It feels discordant to be sitting there looking out at the sun shining on the pretty lake.

Eventually it’s announced that in order to move again we need two new engineers and “clearance from the Coroner’s office”. Well, that answers that question, then. How are the engineers doing, we ask. Shaken up, says the conductor.

VIA announces that snacks are free for the rest of the trip and we all get a travel credit worth half the value of our tickets for the inconvenience of the delay, even though it’s not the slightest bit their fault. We compare this to Air Canada’s typical screw-you response to delays. More discordance as we munch free chocolate bars and debate whether we should risk the stinky train bathroom or whether our bladders might hold out until Union Station. No luck there. We risk the loo. The onboard Internet connection gets less spotty for a while and I finally get the unavoidable bit of work done.

More people in uniforms walk up and down the sides of the train.

After two hours the Coroner concludes there was no evidence it was an accident. Someone deliberately stepped in front of the train, it seems. Of course since it was deemed a suicide there is no news coverage.

I wonder if people who decide to step in front of trains recognize that there are real people driving them who’ll feel responsible for their deaths, or whether they just focus on the train itself as a source of oblivion?

Quotation of the Day for February 25, 2008

“Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allow us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts.”

- Rebecca Solnit, from her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking.

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?

$244 to Vancouver, or $245 to Paris? Well now. Good coffee in both places, but Vancouver baguettes cannot possibly compare…

By David Rakoff

Don’t Get Too Comfortable is a series of Rakoff’s essays on the simultaneous pleasantness and embarrassing excess of modern American life — as it says on the cover, “the indignities of coach class, the torments of low thread count, the never-ending quest for artisanal olive oil, and other First World problems”. It’s presented as satire, but while he freely skewers trends and American society as a whole, he’s often surprisingly gentle to individuals (with the notable exceptions of himself and Karl Lagerfeld) — more “awwww” than “ooh, that must hurt”. On a man who has the peculiar and thankless job of working for an advocacy group of gay Republicans:

It is Guerriero who has used the word “bearable” numerous times over the course of our lunch, always to justify his remaining in the job. My delusions are of a different, somewhat patronizing variety. Looking across the table, I keep thinking that Guerriero will take off the mask at any moment. Here we are, after all, away from the dreary office, both gay, enjoying a sprightly conversation about politics without rancor or name-calling. At some point, he will see the futility of trying to fight for gay rights within the Republican Party and off we’ll go to the nearest independent bookstore (with a brief stop at the Phillips Collection to see its wonderful Edward Hoppers) to buy Al Franken’s latest tome, all the while laughingly shaking our heads at Guerriero’s misguided, delusional episode working for Satan. What I am feeling about Guerriero has been felt about intelligent, handsome, confirmed bachelors such as him from time immemorial. I am thinking: I can change him.

If it’s biting satire you’re looking for, this isn’t it. But he writes well and it’s a very pleasant read.

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.

If Mark Morford can come up with 29 things to be happy about, I imagine I can too.

1. Central heating and a non-leaky roof. I’ve spent enough time living in tents that I really grok the utter luxury that is the concept of Inside. Get wet? No problem; you can go inside where it’s warm and dry off. If you’re living in a tent it may be days before you stop experiencing pervasive shivery damp.
2. On a related note — dry feet. There are many lovely benefits to outdoors work, but the all-day-every-day wearing of sodden hiking boots and sodden wool socks is not one of them. Pull the socks off at the end of the day and casual observers seeing only your feet might place bets on how long your corpse had been underwater. Dry feet are a great, great thing.
3. xkcd
   
4. RSS. O how very much time this saves.
5. Cleo the MacBook. This is far and away the most pleasant computer I’ve ever used. Pretty, too.
6. Zappos Canada. As of this moment they have 1233 women’s shoes in a 6.5WW. As opposed to any local stores which have, in round numbers, zero such shoes.
7. The wonderful women of WNET, who tell me about things like the existence of Zappos. And who give great advice about absolutely anything. And who tell really dirty jokes.
8. Webkinz World. Totally cute and harmless little games and Sims-like rooms to decorate for the online versions of Webkinz stuffed animals. Uh, I only do it to help out my kid (hrmph).
9. Catbeasts. I mean, check out the wildly goofy expression on Elwood here as he (very inconveniently) bites through the window blind’s cord:
10. The library. The lovely library robot phones me when my holds are in, I pick them up, then when I’ve read something I can give it back instead of having to wedge it into my overstuffed bookshelves. All for free! This is very happy-making.
11. Borax. Can’t beat it for getting the euphemistic “pet odors” out of stuff.
12. Friends who blog for an entire year without once requiring the invocation of Godwin’s Law or any of its corollaries.
13. Seven years ago at work we had a videoconference link to one single other location. It cost upwards of $5k. If the video worked, the sound didn’t and vice versa. Today I can download Skype and get a great audio+video connection for absolutely free. Now we’re getting something close to acceptable 21st-century technology.
14. iPods are pretty nice bits of technology too. Thousands of songs, several dozen audiobooks, half a dozen movies, a few hundred podcasts and some random photos and mine is now barely half-full. Subway delay? OK, I’ll watch another podcast. Overseas flight? Hah, no problem. Feeling evil? Put on the Feeling Evil playlist. An iPod and a library (see above) mean you can pack a whole lot of entertainment into remarkably little physical space.
15. My local bra shop. If you are neither shy nor modest, they make bra shopping supremely efficient. Take off your top, let the woman eye and measure your goods, and hey presto she brings you a small selection of bras which magically fit and are not ruinously expensive. Next time, pull the bedraggled remnants of last year’s purchase from your purse and she is a) unfazed and b) able to both recognize it and produce a new version for your immediate purchase. Contrast: go to The Bay, wander about randomly, end up in the change room under fluorescent lights with 15 bras in various sizes, one of which fits but is ugly. Ugh.
16. Dread Zeppelin. Led Zep done in reggae style by an Elvis impersonator. Too silly.
17. CBC Radio 3 (warning: sound). No better place to hear good Canadian indie music.
18. Strindberg + helium
19. Scrabulous. If the Scrabble people have any brains whatsoever they’ll cut them a sweet licensing deal and call it good, because they’ve absolutely nailed the online Scrabble concept.
20. Common Craft’s Explanations in Plain English videos. They use markers, bits of paper, and Lee Lefever’s hands and they are brilliant.
    
    
    Click To Play
21. Butterflies
22. The Shape of a Mother
23. The heated floor in our bathroom, and the programmable thermostat that makes sure it is warm by the time I get up in the morning. Worth.Every.Penny.
24. Champagne
25. Large Canadian Roadside Attractions
26. All those pocket knives and oh-so-dangerous tiny embroidery scissors confiscated by the airplane police? You can buy them in big lots on eBay. Need 40 pairs of cuticle scissors, a batch lot of corkscrews or 20 pounds of multitools? The NTSA will auction them to you for cheap, so you’ll have extras next time they nick the one you’d forgotten at the bottom your purse.
27. Online versions of old Infocom games.
28. Married to the Sea:
    
29. Chocolate. Chocolate is definitely a happy thing.

And there it is. 29 things to be happy about. Much easier to compose than 88 lines about 44 women, too.

–

*: approximately. HTML makes an exact count tricky while I’m writing, so I expect I’ll end up with a couple of quick edits to add or remove items. Or I could be less of a write-in-code person and turn on the graphic interface, I suppose.

Naaah.

(I’m a bit late with this review, but I plead work-related travel.)

The January challenge was to read & review a book on the theme of time. I rather randomly chose Madeleine L’Engle’s An Acceptable Time off a shelf of kids’ fiction at the library. I remember enjoying A Wrinkle in Time when I was a child and I am always looking for books to read to M, so this seemed it might be a good candidate. A time gate to 3000 years ago opens and a teen girl gets pulled into various dramas at both ends — could be a good story!

But no, I think not. “Ponderous” sums it up. The characters are one-dimensional. The good guys are indefatigably good, the bad guys are, you know, bad, the religious guy never loses or even questions his faith, the plot is obvious and everyone speaks in the most tortured expository dialogue.

“We need more than an encyclopedia to explain Nase’s opening a time threshold.” Mr. Murry blew through a long, thin pipe and the flames flared up brightly. “And Polly’s involvement in it. It’s incomprehensible.”

“It’s not the first incomprehensible thing that’s happened in our lifetime,” his wife reminded him.

“Have things ever been as weird as this?”

Her grandmother laughed. “Yes, Polly, they have, but that doesn’t make this any less weird.”

Mr. Murry stood up creakily. “Polly’s friend Zachary strikes me as adding a new and unexpected component. Why is this comparative stranger seeing people from three thousand years ago that you and I have never seen?”

“Nobody told him about her,” Mrs. Murry said, “so he didn’t have time to put up a wall of disbelief.”

“Is that what we’ve done?”

“Isn’t it? And isn’t it what Louise has done?”

“So it would seem.”

They get dramatically upset about minor incidents and accept major oddities in passing (a dog appears through the time gate and basically the response is “[shrug] well, we needed a new dog”. Hello?). There’s some interesting science and physics mentioned but it isn’t used to advance the plot at all; everyone’s just carried along helplessly by the plot, expounding ponderously all the while.

It’s aimed at preteens, I imagine. I’m not sure how well that would work. Perhaps it’s about right. The language is reasonably high-level and so are some of the concepts mentioned, but since they have no real bearing on the plot it doesn’t much matter if they’re fully understood by the reader. Perhaps a ten-year-old would find it Deep.