Guess the Sport

This young man is taking a break from what annual sport in Spain?

Water, Water Everywhere...

I’ve written before about being brought up in an environmental household where conservation of energy was a priority. As a family, we did (and still do) all of David Suzuki’s Nature Challenge suggestions before they were identified as “necessary”. I try to live my life as greenly as possible.

I cannot, however, ride my own locally sourced organic cotton coattails. There is always room for improvement in terms of lessening my environmental footprint. Moving schools so that I can now walk to work and imposing an air travel ban for the past year are two ways I have made change. My next step is something that is all over the media right now: bottled water.

Suzuki spoke out against bottled water earlier this year, some religious groups have labelled bottled water “immoral” and Justin Trudeau refused a proffered bottle after coughing during a speech at McGill with the words: “I try not to.”

There has also been much written on the topic of bottled water, its true benefits and environmental impact. The Trudeau anecdote was taken from Judith Timson’s column in today’s Globe and Mail. In it, Timson argues that the omnipresent water bottle is about hydration and oral fixation: it’s a socially acceptable thing to have in our hands (and mouths) at just about any event (Timson relates an anecdote of water bottle swilling at a funeral).

Certainly hydration, and all the beautiful benefits that come with it was the main impetus for the explosion of bottled water sales. Back in the early 90s, in the era of the Supermodel, gorgeous, fresh-faced girls with large bottles of Evian were the first to be seen with portable water. And just as that spring water you’re imbibing trickles down the mountain side, so did the trend trickle down into the hoi polloi. Having water available in bottles is now de rigueur in homes, offices and public places around the world.

But that’s another issue with this whole bottled water thing (and a point that Timson briefly makes in her piece) – in the Western world, we pay more per litre for water (a resource, I don’t need to point out, that is basically free in this country) than gas, yet there are more than a billion people around the world who do not have access to safe drinking water. And to really put this Western life in perspective, the previous link informs us that “[a] person living in Sub-Saharan Africa uses 10-20 litres a day; on average, a Canadian uses 326 litres a day.”

Water, which accounts for the make up of over two-thirds of our bodies and our earth, is an important environmental and world issue. So what to do?

I am giving up water in plastic bottles. I originally began buying spring water because I could easily stick it in the fridge. I grew accustomed to the taste as well as the ease with which you could take water with you. And even though I was reusing the same plastic water bottle for a week or so at a time (filling it up from another plastic bottle I kept in the fridge), I was still creating quite the mountain of recyclable waste, while ignoring the first (and most important) of the 3 Rs: reduce.

And so I have bought one of those aluminum water bottles (not the plastic kind, which have suffered the same criticism as regular water bottles: chemicals leaching into their contents), a trend that Timson doesn’t see as “catching on”. On this point, I whole-heartedly disagree. Many of my friends carry this type of water bottle (it was in discussion with two of them that I decided on this course of action) and I am seeing them more and more in the hands of the young and funky (and well-informed) around the city.

I even thought about buying my parents aluminum water bottles. But they're already ahead of me. They drink tap water out of a glass - something they've done even before David Suzuki suggested it.

We’re Goin’ Str--king!

Earlier this month, police in Britain sought an order prohibiting serial str--ker M--k Rob--ts from taking his clothes off during public events. Roberts, who has an impressive 380 str--ks under his unnecessary belt, has run naked across the playing fields at most major sporting events: the FA Cup final, Wimbledon, Royal Ascot and the Superbowl in 2004, which already had its share of exposed bodies (thank you, Janet & Justin). Funny that the nipple slip was much more scandalous than the starkers Brit taking to the field for the second half.

The judge in the case denied the order, saying "What Mr Roberts does may be annoying but, in my opinion, it does not amount to antisocial behaviour." Writing in the Guardian, Zoe Williams earlier this month asked whether or not the very definition of antisocial behaviour is being annoying. But is the brief diversion of a str--ker running across your view any more annoying than a rain delay at Wimbledon? And really, you’re there for a show – a str--ker is just an unbilled act.

Williams also wondered if str--king was an act of male aggression or “as taste-free but innocuous as a cucumber sandwich”?

Male nudity can harbour aggression when the nakedness is sexualized and imbued with power – I’ve been on the unintentional viewing end of several public masturbators (mostly in Italy, though some in France) and certainly felt quite uncomfortable and intimidated in those situations. But when it comes to running naked in front of thousands, pursued by beefy security guards, I’m not sure Roberts’s display was about male aggression. By being naked, he was stripped bare, defenseless. Many prisoners throughout the shady human rights parts of history were kept naked for this reason.

When you watch the reactions of the spectators during a str--k, they don’t seem to be offended or disgusted, a point that Williams indicates in her piece. Someone running naked before thousands is humourous, light-hearted. People (the American public, specifically) seemed to be more shocked at Janet Jackson’s nipple being exposed than Roberts’s half-time show. Is there a difference between male and female public nudity?

Er-ca R-e famously str--ked at Twickenham in 1982 during an England vs. Australia rugby match. She was only topless, but her spectacle made her £8000 in modeling and television appearances afterward. Was this because she was female and her sexuality was commodified, or was it because she was female and str--kers are generally male, making her an oddity?

I've never seen a real live str--ker, but I've watched with great captivation the people who rushed the field after Toronto FC's first win at BMO Field. It was at the end of the match and provided a tempered end to a tense and exciting game. I watched the rushers, probably about 8 in all, run onto the field and dodge the security guards who tackled them like linebackers, the crowd cheering the more agile of the runners. And I have to say, that brief and unexpected spectacle was better than any nipple-slip half time show the Superbowl could provide...

Reducing Plastics

On the inevitable back-to-school shop (it is NOT the most wonderful time of the year, Staples Business Depot), I found myself thinking very carefully about what products I would buy. I ignored plastic expandable file jackets in favour of paper ones – I figure those paper ones will biodegrade eventually, whereas the plastic ones have a long life ahead of them. I did, however, balk at the thin plastic the file folders were wrapped in.

The over-packaging of products has always been frowned upon by environmentalists and many people have avoided purchasing some over-packaged products in favour of more meagerly wrapped items. But with hygiene and what have you, product packaging is sometimes unavoidable, but still an area that needs to be addressed by companies.

The drug store was my next port of call; the purchase of a toothbrush, my objective. Which is when I thought of another way we could greatly reduce the amount of plastic we throw away every day. Why not have toothbrushes with reusable handles, but changeable heads? Instead of throwing out the entire shaft of the toothbrush along with the withered bristles, why not just pick up a new head? You could somehow attach it to the handle, just like you do with razors.

This could also work for dish brushes, toilet bowl brushes and any number of other household items.



I posted a picture of the garbage the sea was spitting back to Mumbai several weeks ago. I recently found the photo above of children wading through more marine refuse that washed ashore beneath their stilt houses in Papua New Guinea. Both photographs made me sad at the state of this world. People are starting to wake up to the idea of global warming and change their way of living to a greener way of life, but those of us in the Western world don't have the same immediate evidence of the toll we are taking on this earth. We have a long way to go.

Sunnybrook, August 10th

Lyla enters from the back, walking past nurses in scrubs and administrators in suits, their identification tags clipped to the bottom of their jackets. They sit on picnic tables scattered about the criss-cross of roadways used by off-duty ambulances and delivery trucks. There is the low buzz of a place that is always open, which quickly becomes background noise as Lyla enters the hospital.

She’s never liked hospitals, with their shiny floors and light-coloured walls. Sometimes you can be lulled into a sense of normalcy with doctors striding by, people in suits on official business; only to be pulled back by someone in a wheelchair, covered only by a gown, leaning against the armrest, with a dangling IV bag in tow.

Lyla finds the elevator and takes it to the sixth floor, just above the tree tops of the valley that surrounds the hospital. She walks quietly down the hallway, feeling somewhat like an intruder, ready to be stopped at any point and asked what her business here is. The most she gets is a raised head from the nurses’s station, eyes that don’t linger long enough to assess her motives.

Entering the room, Lyla smiles briefly at the couple at the first bed: the woman lies completely back, looking up toward the ceiling, unmoving. The man sits on a chair beside her, a magazine in his hands. The man smiles briefly back, but it is a smile full of warmth that spreads to his eyes and chin. Turning, she moves towards her grandmother’s bed, which is propped up, although her grandma’s eyes are closed.

Lyla stands for a moment, unsure of where to place herself, and her grandmother’s eyes open. They take a second to focus on Lyla, but when they do, a smile breaks across the old woman’s face.

“Hello, dear!” she says in her soft Dublin accent. “How are you?”

“I’m fine, Granny,” says Lyla, leaning in to kiss her grandmother on the cheek. “How are they treating you here?”

“Very well, very well,” says her grandmother, still beaming.

Lyla pulls up a chair next to the hospital bed and answers all the questions her grandmother can think of. As they talk, there are stirrings from across the room.

“Hello, Alice,” calls out Lyla’s grandmother from behind the half-drawn curtain that obscures her view of Alice.

“Hello, Eileen,” comes the response from the bed.

“My granddaughter’s come to visit me.” The man with the magazine is beaming at Lyla, perhaps providing the visual part to the conversation.

“Oh, lovely,” says Alice.

“This is Lyla,” says Lyla’s grandmother.

“Pleased to meet you. I’m Gerald,” The man rises and comes quickly over, hand extended in greeting. “That’s my wife, Alice over there.” He turns and nods toward the bed, still grasping Lyla’s hand.

“Nice to meet you,” calls Alice, head still unmoving on the pillow.

“It’s nice to meet you both,” says Lyla, releasing Gerald’s hand and craning her neck slightly to see Alice.

Gerald stands for a moment, just smiling, his eyes flitting from Lyla to the curtain, then back to Lyla. He turns to look at his wife, who still lies still, eyes looking up to the ceiling.

“Well, I’ll let you get back to your visit,” he says after a brief moment, “lovely to meet you.”

“And you,” smiles Lyla, watching him move back to his wife’s bed and sit back down in his chair. He picks up his magazine and begins to read it.

Lyla turns back to her grandmother who is reaching for a brush on her table tray.

“Lyla, would you be a love and just brush the back of my hair?” she asks.

“Sure!”

As Lyla brushes the thin grey hair, pressed against her head from hours against a pillow, she listens to the quiet murmurings from across the room.

“Do you want to hear an elephant joke?” asks Gerald, his voice slightly muted.

Lyla can barely hear Alice’s reply and can’t make out the components of the joke as her grandmother thanks her for the minor grooming. What she does make out is the eruption of laughter that comes from Alice when Gerald finishes: whole-hearted and from the belly. Lyla’s eyes dart across the room: she can see Alice’s body heaving, Gerald’s hand resting on her arm beneath the covers, his face lit up while watching hers.

Lyla and her grandmother lock eyes, their mouths breaking into smiles simultaneously.

On Woodbine Beach, Things Left Behind

(Or, another reason I should always bring my camera with me to say these thousand words that I can only put into a few.)



Two abandoned shoes: one sandal, one running shoe lodged in the green lakeweed that collects amid the stones and pebbles at the shoreline. Further down is a scuba mask, perhaps abandoned after a day of searching for curiosities that exist below the surface.

A waterbottle, condensation on the outside, water still cold on the inside, turned into the sand. Beside it, an overturned piece of note paper, held down with pebbles on either side, obscuring the words I'm sure are there. Uncharacteristically, I ignore this piece of mysterious communication because there is a couple moving toward the assemblage: it is their found item.

Three girls sitting on the edge of the large rocks by the edge of the lake, looking down into the water, the wind flapping their long hair at the sides of their faces. I wonder if they are talking, figuring out how to be women, just a little further back on the journey than I am.

Harry Potter and the Pre-order of the Deathly Hallows

Now that Harry Potter mania has died down (presumably because everyone has finished the last book and seen the latest movie), and I am on page 350 of the 600-odd pages of the penultimate book (I’m always behind in most areas of my life), perhaps now I can comment on the insanity.

Why is it that everyone goes so crazy over Harry Potter? Why are there midnight release times, pre-order options on a myriad of websites and newsworthy reports of security breaches of the manuscript?

J.K. Rowling, who conceived of Harry Potter on a train ride between Manchester and London, combines a set of factors that have worked together to make the series as popular as it is.

Escapism, Pure & Simple

The first book in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, was published in 1997, so I can’t link its creation to any post 9/11 desire for escapism. But there was certainly the interim after the first invasion of Iraq and some gruesome stuff going on in Kosovo. But regardless of world politics, the Harry Potter series provided a magical other-world full of spells, fantastical creatures and mysterious secrets. As any good book should take you into another reality, Harry Potter’s world of wizards and witches took readers into an entirely different realm of magic with its characters and curiosities. A realm that although it functioned differently from ours, still maintained…

Relatable Characters & Experiences

I’m seeing this more and more as the series progresses. Especially in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which I’m reading now. Although Harry is imbued with exceptional powers (even when measured against those in the wizarding world), he still falls victim to such teenage afflictions as jealously, most notably when he catches Ginny Weasley kissing Dean in the corridor and we read Harry’s internal monologue, mulling over whether or not it is brotherly love, or something else, that makes him want to smash poor Dean in the face. The love played out as anger and bitterness between Hermione and Ron is another example of real-life situations that readers can relate to. And the character Luna is a wonderful sketch of those awkward, slightly-removed-from-reality-type kids we had in our classes growing up – and how lovely is Harry’s empathy and acceptance of her.

Wicked Wordsmithery

This is one of J.K. Rowling’s greatest talents: making up new words and interesting names: Dumbledore evokes quiet power and sagacity. Voldemort sounds like menacing thunder booming. Harry’s Herbology class is filled with such onomatopoeic plants as Snargaluff (requiring protective gloves to handle), Whomping Willows (requiring speed, agility and perhaps a helmut to avoid injury) and Bubotubers (decidedly less dangerous than the previous flora, but its pus can still cause painful boils, nonetheless). Some other fabulous locutional concoctions: Ambrosius Flume (a businessman), Budleigh Babberton (a charming village), Barnabas Cuffe (editor of The Daily Prophet), Mundungus Fletcher (a shady member of the Order of the Phoenix) and St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries (self-explanatory, no?).

Classic Narrative Devices

And of course, as many critics have pointed out, J.K. Rowling employs all those plots and characters we’ve seen before: good vs. evil and their inherent connection (hello Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader), orphans unraveling their pasts, the journey from boy to man, and political allegory. (I hear that there is more than a hint that the political climate in Deathly Hallows mirrors what was happening during World War II. And having just seen the most recent movie, the Ministry taking over Hogwarts and instituting curricular change and teacher evaluations rings true of educational reforms of the past.)

So there are several factors that contribute to the wild success of Rowling’s magical narratives. Put together, these provided a series of books that saw ridiculous security over the official release date of the latest publication (imagine suing people over the release of On Chesil Beach, an excerpt of which I’m sure I read prior to publication – isn’t it in keeping with protocol to release an excerpt?) and saw the book in people’s hands across this city and around the world during the last week of July. And all these factors will keep me going for the next 250 pages of The Half-Blood Prince. After that, I'll need a serious Potter break before attempting the final 700+ page installment that may toll the end of Potter Mania.

1989

1989, the number, another summer (get down)
Sound of a funky drummer…
Our freedom of speech is freedom or death
We gotta fight the powers that be.

- Public Enemy

I’ve been thinking a lot about 1989 recently. It is the picture of the lone protester in Tiananmen Square that started it, brought up in conversation with a friend of mine. The Unknown Rebel, unmoving in front of a column of angry tanks, sidestepping into their path each time they tried to go around him. A single man representative of a huge fight that was happening around the world at that time.



1989 was a year of struggle, as evidenced in the lyrics of Fight the Power by Public Enemy. While Public Enemy continued to document and sustain the struggle for black equality started in 1960s, a decade synonymous with mass social change, elsewhere around the world was seeing tremendous change in human rights and freedoms.

The 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, a revolution based on basic human freedoms - Liberté, égalité, fraternité, ou la mort! (Freedom, equality, brotherhood, or death!) - saw the fall of several repressive regimes in eastern Europe. Poland saw its first free parliamentary elections since the war; Ceausescu’s dictatorship was ended in Romania (he was later executed); the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia saw the overthrow of the Marxist/Leninist government; the Republic of Hungary was declared; and in August, 2 million people across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania joined hands across 600 km to demand freedom and independence from the Soviet Union.

1989 was also the year that the Berlin Wall came down – physically and symbolically. I can remember watching the event on television – hundreds of people climbing over the wall, yelling and celebrating, and battering it down with decades’ worth of suppressed anger and frustration at their lack of freedom, fractured families and silenced voices.

The silenced voices of South Africa experienced an administrative shift in 1989 (and this is not to say that black South Africans allowed their voices to be silenced: many raged against apartheid since its inception after the National Party’s win in the 1948 elections). Newly elected president F.W. de Klerk scrapped the Separate Amenities Act (an act which segregated the races in all areas of life – from white beaches to black universities) and in early 1990, released Nelson Mandela from his 27 years in prison for his determined refusal to allow his voice to be silenced. I am still amazed to this day at the winds of change that persisted so, allowing a political prisoner to become South Africa’s first black president just 4 years later.

South America also experienced its share of newfound freedoms: Chile held its first free elections in 16 years, ultimately ousting Augusto Pinochet who was later tried for human rights abuses, from his protracted presidency. Brazil also saw its first free elections after 25 years of a ruling military regime.

1989 witnessed the end of Soviet occupation of Afghanistan; the release of the Guilford Four (a group of people wrongfully convicted of blowing up an English pub during the Troubles – their case was one of police manipulation and disinformation – see the film In The Name Of The Father); the Exxon Valdez spill (perhaps a key event in the raising of our environmental awareness); and of course, the series of protests from April to June in Tiananmen Square.

There is no real answer as to what happened to the Unknown Rebel, the man that stood alone in front of the tanks bearing down on him and his country’s freedom. There are some claims he was executed – a brutal ending to such an inspirational action. I prefer to believe what Jan Wong writes in her book Red China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now: he is still alive and in hiding in China. And I have to believe that if I am to still hold onto the hope that the winds of change in 1989 have not died. We came a long way that year, but the fact that the man in front of the tanks has to be in hiding (or indeed, was executed) tells us that we have a long way to go still.

Epilogue

Perhaps at some point I will further explore the fact that Seinfeld and The Simpsons, two popular, long-running and highly-acclaimed comedy shows, made their debuts in 1989. Interesting that these two shows broke away from the happy family comedies of the 80s, so content with the status quo.

Homer, Boners and a Pagan Rain Dance

In Dorset, in the southwest of England, there lies the outline of a sexually aroused Celtic warrior, carved out in chalk. Known as the Cerne Abbas Giant, it is thought to be an ancient symbol of spirituality and fertility. And now the promoters of the new Simpsons film have gone and painted a similarly-sized impression of Homer Simpson, naked but for his Y-fronts, offering a doughnut to the club-bearing giant (no really - he's actually holding a club).

Members of The Pagan Federation were not impressed with the depiction of the much loved cartoon character, daubed on the hill with water-based biodegradable paint: "We'll be doing some rain magic to bring the rain and wash it away," said Ann Bryn-Evans, joint Wessex district manager for The Pagan Federation. And judging from the torrential downpour that swept across the UK yesterday, the Pagan Rain Dance worked...

Posh: Reality Living in America

Along with the rest of the closeted Spice Girls fans across the land, I watched Victoria Beckham: Coming to America last Monday. I will fully admit to an odd fascination with the lives of a few celebrities: I followed Kate Moss’s torrid love affair with Pete Doherty, I’m still intrigued by Suri Cruise (along with Katie Holmes’s outfits) and I love seeing pictures of Victoria Beckham in impossibly high heels and tiny get-ups, carting around her three boys – how does she do it?

The special, originally planned to be a series of six episodes, was shortened when producers were left with little material after Victoria flew back to the UK early to see her football start husband, David Beckham. Producers scrambled and made it into a one-hour special, attracting a mediocre 4 million viewers in the U.S. on Monday.

Like most reality TV shows centred around celebrities, the show was about publicity – and warming Americans up to Victoria, who consistently wears a scowl (and those sky-high heels) in paparazzi shots in papers and on the internet. The show is carefully crafted to show Victoria, though always gorgeous and flawlessly dressed, as a down-to-earth mum who misses her kids, incurs traffic violations, and sometimes drinks too much at afternoon socialite parties.

As with other shows that document the lives of celebrities like The Osbournes and Nick & Jessica: Newlyweds, the editing is deft, frequently poking fun at the show’s subjects. From Ozzy’s exasperated interjections during his children’s squabbles to prolonged shots of Jessica as she tries to figure out if chicken really do live in the sea, we are made to laugh at the follies of the rich and famous.

And this is why we like these shows: they bring celebrities down from their airbrushed spot on a Louis Vuitton pedestal and show us that yes, they are just like us: Ozzy and Sharon have to deal with clearing up dog poop in the house, Nick has to deal with the olfactory aftermath of Jessica’s visit to the bathroom. And while Victoria Beckham is never brought down to this basest of human functions, we are shocked to see her having to step out of her car in [gasp] flats!

Bringing celebrities down to the layperson’s level is a trend of the past decade or so. Remember back in the 80s when Robin Leach took us through the lavish and serviced homes and lives of celebrities in Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous? That programme was deftly edited, too – but it was all the boring, diurnal bits that were left out. Now, we want to see those bits. Celebrity magazines - a niche once left to the National Enquirer and News of the World, but now expanding faster than Nicole Richie’s pregnant belly - frequently run stories about celebrity cellulite and other body flaws the magic of Hollywood manages to hide. (And I use the term "stories" loosely, since much of the story is told through glaring graphics and little text.)

While Victoria Beckham does remain quite flawless throughout the special, we do see that she is followed around by her own makeup artist and hairdresser, and refuses to consume a proffered cookie from the bitchy celebrity blogger, Perez Hilton. But we also see her sweet side: stumbling over what she wants to be a polite description of a chubby, plastic, dolphin-calling socialite and dressing up a sex doll to act as a decoy so she can buy her husband a watch.

And though I never did figure out how she manages three boys whilst wearing skinny jeans and Louboutin heels, perhaps we will discover more in the near future: David Beckham has just signed on to star in his own reality series. Now, if only someone would convince Kate Moss to open up her model lifestyle to the scrutiny of the layperson…

At Capacity

It would seem that the ocean has had its fill of our frivolous trash cast thoughtlessly into its seemingly inexhaustible repository. Last week, the currents in the sea around Mumbai, India changed and spat back over 300 tonnes of garbage per day.

In Praise of the Absurd

On my way to the gym the other day, I passed a flyer stapled to a telephone pole - one of those little posters with the tear-off phone number fringe on the bottom. Ever-curious, I stopped briefly to see if I should tear off a phone number and put it in my wallet alongside all the other tear-off numbers that if I would just call, would allow me to begin my Buddhist meditation practice, continue with my yoga postures and stop smoking through hypnosis (okay, not the last one).

This poster was offering classes in levitation. I looked again, sure I must have misread it. Nope, levitation. Call the number and you, too can be well on your way to floating serenely, cross-legged, just a few inches off the ground.

This levitation poster was the first in a string of stories I have noticed lately that are wonderfully absurd. Elizabeth Renzetti wrote in Saturday’s Globe and Mail last week about her new favourite headline, courtesy of The Scottish Daily Record that reported on civilians who tried to subdue the man who drove a burning car into Glasgow’s airport: Hero Cabbie: I Kicked Burning Terrorist So Hard In Balls That I Tore a Tendon.

Today’s Globe and Mail provided two offbeat stories. The first transcribing a 911 phonecall at 3am in Newmarket:

Caller: "Hi. Umm ... We've found an elephant walking down the street near the community centre, the Ray Twinney."

Operator: "Sorry?"

Caller: "We've found an elephant walking down the street. Like the ones from, like, the circus at the Ray Twinney centre. One of them got loose and it's walking down the street."

For the next few minutes, the caller explains that there are, in fact, at least two fully grown, trainer-less elephants milling about.

The second affirms what I’ve been saying for decades: the fashion of wearing underwear increases literacy rates.

The Author Stirs...

Apologies, Blogfans.

Apologies to all my faithful readers who, day after day, logged in over the past 6 weeks to the same picture filler, the calming green background devoid of inspirational and thought-provoking words. Sorry to all of you who came to this web address, and wondered what weighty topic would finally put my fingers back on my iBook and draw me out of my blogging slump.

Well, it's the Spice Girls, ladies and gentlemen... and they're reuniting!

Oh, glory be to this 1998 revival! Bring back girl power and sparkly micro-shorts and hit factory tunes that are played in between Madonna and Kylie at gay clubs across the land! (Okay, maybe just in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver!) Bring back Christmas singles and Spice Girls chocolate bars and drunken arguments over the feminist principles of the world's most successful girl band!

But most of all, bring back my blogging already!

Can You Hear Me Now?

"Hello? No, I'm on the boat. The boat. I'm crossing the river. The river. You're breaking up..."

A man chats on his cellphone while crossing the river in Dhaka, Bangladesh. (photo from bbc.co.uk)

Cuckoo Clocks, Neutrality and the World's Most Popular Font

Who knew there could be so much buzz about a typeface?



Helvetica, the typeface used in the corporate logos of Gap, Panasonic and Tupperware, turns 50 this year. Lars Mueller has managed to write an entire book about the Swiss font and a documentary devoted to the typeface was screened back in March at the SXSW Film Festival in Texas.

According to Neville Brody, a graphic designer and typographer interviewed for an article on the BBC website:

"Typefaces control the message. Choice of font dictates what you think about something before you even read the first word. Imagine Shakespeare in large capital drop shadow. Our response would be quite different towards the content."

Perhaps this is why teachers around the world use Comic Sans as the default worksheet font (my English cousin pointed this out, rolling her eyes): it says, “Hey kids! Do this worksheet that I’ve made to look super-fun, but is actually quite boring and serves only to allow me a few minutes of quiet time at my desk.”

There is actually a Ban Comic Sans website where you can buy merchandise, sign a petition and post photos.

So what is YOUR favourite font? Is it the Helvetica rip-off, Arial? Do you like the old school typewriter feel of Courier? Do you like the impact of, um, Impact? Or do you exist in the world of Zapf Dingbats?

Or do you have better things to do than care about types of typeface?

Are You There, Allah? It's Me, Margaret...

Dear Margaret Wente

I am not a huge fan of yours on a good day. I find you oppressively right-wing, with no empathy for anyone other than white, middle class newspaper columnists.

Your column this Saturday (which, to be honest, I rarely read because of the reasons mentioned in the previous paragraph) was a loosely veiled attack on Islam, the veil being the completely inappropriate one of the killings at Virginia Tech.

Yes, I know you mentioned nothing of Islam, just jihadists. I’m sure you meant the fundamental jihadists, not the everyday Muslims who follow this pillar of Islam through non-violent interpretations. And I’m sure those Muslims would be horrified at the comparison of Cho Seung-Hui, a young man with serious mental illness, to fundamental jihadists. As am I.

How can you possibly use the commonalities of a “martyr video” and “military garb and guns” to compare the two? What you see in Cho Seung-Hui’s video is his pent up anger at a society in which he felt powerless and invisible. His “manifesto” and posturing finally gave him the power he must have felt he lacked much of his life.

The “insane regime with an army of young men to do its bidding” is about poverty and lack of education. Cho Seung-Hui’s cold-blooded killing was about depression and a sense of alienation. Young, fundamental jihadists kill because they feel part of a larger group; Cho Seung-Hui killed because he felt a complete disconnection with any kind of group.

The killings at Virginia Tech were a horrifying and upsetting event. Do not use the tragedy as a platform for criticism of a religion that you (and I) know very little about.

Sincerely,
Steph

Don't Panic, But A Husky's Head Was Trapped in a Wall Yesterday...

Either there's not much going on in the world right now, or the employees of the BBC news website are off enjoying the nice weather (London is experiencing similar conditions to Toronto this weekend). This article about a six-month-old Husky getting his head stuck in a wall in Hampshire was posted yesterday, and when I was on the BBC website this morning, the piece was in the top most read list (which begs the question, why aren't the readers of the website out enjoying the lovely weather?).

On that note, I'm off for some heliotherapy...

April Showers, April Shootings

Leah McLaren, who I love to hate (and who fully stole the first seasonal reference of April being the cruellest month from me), wrote about her negative physiological and psychological reactions to spring in her column this past Saturday.

While the rest of us are coming out of hibernation and experiencing a lift in spirits, it appears that those with mental illnesses like manic depression and psychosis experience an increase in symptoms in the spring. McLaren interviewed Tatyana Barankin, a clinical psychiatrist affiliated with the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health:

"April and May are not easy months for psychiatrists," she told me over the phone between patients. "Manic behaviour and psychosis are often exacerbated by the weather. Our moods are very affected by the amount of light we get and while very often depression lifts, that does not apply to anxiety or manic behaviour."

Interesting, I thought, and continued reading the Style section.

But then yesterday, the shooting at Virginia Tech occurred. And it reminded me of Columbine, which also happened in April during my first year of university.

Of the 19 shootings in the past 10 years that have occurred in US schools, nearly half (42%) have happened in March, April or May. Compare that to 26% of the shootings occurring in September, October or November. February, June and December each have one shooting occurrence whereas January, July and August have seen no mass killings at US schools.

McLaren’s reaction was diagnosed as “anniversary reaction” brought on by the memories of exam stress. One would expect that Cho Seung-hui, the man named as the shooter at Virginia Tech, and who had been referred for counselling because of work produced in his creative writing course, perhaps had more going on.

Maybe he would have identified with the awkward and painful reawakening that Eliot writes about in the first few lines of his oft-quoted poem, The Wasteland:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

New Format, Odd Title

It’s spring and it’s time for a new look. I thought a nice soothing green would be appropriate.

And in honour of this new look, I would like to draw your attention to The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification, a book that has won for Oddest Title of the Year a prize offered by The Bookseller.

Second place was awarded to Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Dagestan and Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence came in third.

The winners were chosen by internet votes.

link to BBC story

Guess the Sports Equipment

I would have been impressed if anyone could actually guess this sport being played in Kyrgyzstan. It is the national game of Kok-Boru, and seems to be a take on polo (or, to avoid Euro-centrism, perhaps polo is a take on Kok-Boru). Can anyone guess what the players have to pick up and throw at a target?

Hodges Has His Day

Did you catch CSI tonight? Had I more faith in the North American viewing public I would venture to say that the show’s popularity is gleaned from the inventive plotlines and characterization.

Tonight’s episode did something that I don’t think has ever been done on a television drama (in my television viewing lifetime). The peripheral characters (Simms & Hodges etc.) and their plotline were brought to the forefront while the main characters (Grissom & Greg etc.) and their crime scenes were relegated to the briefest of glimpses.

The episode was akin to the brilliant Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard, a play which thrusts Hamlet’s bumbling D-list friends into the protagonistic spotlight (fully made up that word). We follow the trifling (but not inconsequential) movements of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that occur when they are not “onstage” with Hamlet. Scenes from the actual Shakespeare play that feature Hamlet’s friends are interwoven into Stoppard’s play. Tonight, CSI followed the secondary characters as they tried to solve the Miniature Killer case. The main characters’ cases, usually the focal point of each episode, served as background annoyances, slipping in and out of Hodges’s quest to find a common link between each miniature.

Brilliant.

Didn’t like the lucky day montage, though.

Stop Interrupting!

I had a conversation with a friend of mine last night about the drastic change in the amount of time I spend on the internet these days as compared to just two years ago. I can’t even think what I did pre-2003 when I didn’t have either a computer or an internet connection at home.

It is widely accepted that we’re living our lives online more and more (my previous post about web communities discusses this), from banking to information retrieval to social networking. I have a daily roster of websites and e-mail addresses I absolutely must check to feel that I am up-to-date in my life. My three e-mail addresses make three different sounds to alert me of any incoming mail, which I check promptly. And my cellphone makes a pleasing little bling-bling sound with every incoming text message, the tone filling me with joyful anticipation (Oooo! Who could this be?!) every time it goes off.

In this month’s The Walrus magazine, John Lorinc writes an article about how all the technological distractions in our society are actually making it difficult for our brains to function effectively.

To illustrate the main idea of the article: as I (try to) focus on writing this blog post, I have already had two email alerts and one phone call. For the two links above, I navigated away from my Word document and onto the internet to search for the links. Lorinc asserts that these interruptions, though minor, actually have a complex process in our brains:

“When multi-tasking, the brain’s executive processor performs a two-stage operation: the first is ‘goal shifting’ (e.g., shifting from editing a text file to checking e-mail), and the second is ‘rule activation’ (turning off the learned rules for editing on a word processing program and turning on the rules for managing the email program that’s being used).”

These shifts of focus in our brains take a significant amount of time, and when added up over weeks and months, can affect productivity. Joshua Rubinstein, a psychologist interviewed for the article, notes: “Multi-tasking may seem more efficient on the surface, but may actually take more time in the end.”

So slow and steady does win the race, it would seem. Then how do we slow down and ignore distractions in an interruption-dense, fast-paced world?

I think learning to ignore alerts, be they ringing phones or e-mail beeps, until a more appropriate time is one way. The phonecall I ignored while writing this blog post came just as I was in the middle of a thought and I knew if I stopped to answer, I’d lose it. (I did, however, jump up to check the call display, to see who it was.) I have really only realized recently that one doesn’t have to answer a ringing phone (especially if one is in the middle of a particularly intriguing plot point while viewing Lost).

I am also learning that I live a life where very few emails are so pressing and time-sensitive that I need to read and respond to them immediately (unless maybe if it’s someone offering Toronto FC v. LA Galaxy tickets). In fact, I’ve become so good at not RSVPing to invitations over email, that I’ve acquired a bit of a reputation among some of my friends.

And on MSN Messenger, an instant chat programme which allows you to type instant messages back and forth with your contacts online, I have permanently set my status to “offline”. I found if I was listed as “online” I would get several people messaging me with non-essential chat – yet another interruption when working at my computer. (Both the email and Messenger examples lead on to the question of online etiquette – how do you politely decline a Messenger conversation and how long is it appropriate to take to reply to an email?)

The ability to prioritize tasks is a hallmark of a good multi-tasker. So perhaps now the multi-tasker needs to slightly hone that skill to prioritizing their attention to communication input – do I really need to read that email right now? Is that text message going to be vital to my task at hand?

And as for me and my mild internet addiction, maybe sometimes I will sleep my computer, switch off my cellphone and float back to those pre-2003 halcyon days when the only alerts I would hear would be the slap of the newspaper at my doorstep or a soft knock on my door.

Laundromatto Al Fresco

I come from a family that has always air-dried clothing throughout the year. In the summer, sheets and dresses flap in the wind on a spinning clothesline in the sunny part of the garden. In the winter, they hang from lines erected in the basement and drying racks in the spare room. I was often envious of the Downy-scented sweatshirts of my friends and couldn’t understand my mother’s love of “that fresh scent” that clothes dried outdoors get.

My dad told me that driers use 25% of a household energy bill. According to Project Laundry List, the figure is 5-10%. And although my father and I share the trait of sometimes forgetting to cite the sources of our statistics (which always seem to support our arguments), I would guess that 25% is a good estimate for his household, which has been eco-friendly and energy efficient for decades – so adding the use of a drier regularly probably would constitute about a quarter of his household's energy use.

Project Laundry List is a website dedicated to educating “people about how simple lifestyle modifications, including air-drying one’s clothes, reduce our dependence on environmentally and culturally costly energy sources” (quote taken from Mission Statement). It showcases artists’ interpretations of the beauty of clotheslines, offers links to environmentally friendly products and offers support for communities banned from using clotheslines. I didn’t know this actually was a problem, but Cecily Ross addresses it in her article in the Style section of the Globe and Mail today, where I found the link to the website.



Ross interviews the website’s founder, Alexander Lee, who believes that “a lot of people see laundry on a line as a flag of poverty.” That was certainly one of my reasons for wanting my mother to buy fabric softener and use a drier: all my other friends had slick machines that offered up soft and fluffy, scented clothes, whereas I had to do a couple of squats to get my jeans to lose the stiff consistency of an indoor-dried garment. I felt the odd one out, not keeping up with the laundering practises of the Joneses. When I went away to university, I mechanically dried all of my clothes with abandon; fading colour and losing elasticity in the process.

Fifteen years ago, the environmentally-friendly lifestyle with its patchouli-scented products were the domain of hippies and David Suzuki followers. And people who kept their houses at a lower temperature in winter and used lights only when necessary were considered misers. Now it has become de rigueur to wear organic cotton, use unbleached tampons and clean your house with green products. There had been a huge push for LCD lightbulbs and EnergyStar appliances that use less electricity. I am hoping that this trend will spread to how we clean our laundry: a clothesline of brightly coloured attire flapping in the wind will no longer represent the home of a poor family, but the home of an environmentally aware family.

And everyone, including me, will crave “that fresh scent” that my mother so loves.

Oh, My Sweet Jesus…

A New York gallery’s inclusion of a sculpture by Canadian-born artist Cosimo Cavallaro has riled a Catholic group in the United States (link to BBC story).

The sculpture, entitled “My Sweet Lord,” is of a naked and crucified Jesus Christ.

But it is not the nudity that has got the Catholic League all worked up (Christ is usually depicted with a loincloth). Nor is it the timing of the piece’s exposition, so close to Easter where Christians around the world mark the death of Jesus and his resurrection. It is the material that Cavallaro chose to use.

The sculpture is made entirely out of chocolate.

I’m never quite sure why religious groups get all worked up over religious subjects being portrayed in non-traditional ways: In 1975, Edwina Sandys created a bronze sculpture entitled “Christa” which portrays Christ on the cross as a woman. Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” which won an award sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, is a photograph of a crucifix under an amalgam of urine and cow’s blood. And there was much controversy over the “Sensation” exhibit back in 1999 at the Brooklyn Museum of Art where the piece “Holy Virgin Mary,” a rendering of Mary as a black woman splattered with real elephant dung, was displayed.














If I was to try my inexperienced hand at deconstructing Cavallaro’s symbolic intentions, I might say that he was making a comment on the commodification of Christian holidays: most of us secularists associate Easter with chocolate eggs and the Easter Bunny, not death and resurrection. Cavallaro portrays the preeminent figure in Christianity with the medium that has supplanted all others as the substance with which Easter symbols are made. And I would venture to make the assertion that many Christian groups would agree with his thesis, if they could actually make sense of my last sentence there.

How do you think the Catholic League would react to a performance art piece where people broke off bits of the chocolate Jesus, thus actually eating the body of Christ in a Alterna-Eucharist?!

Keep On Bloggin'

Following along from yesterday’s post, this blog post in the Guardian is interesting: it seems that the creation of new blogs peaked back in October, but people are not keeping up with their wordsmithery (shut up, it’s a word in my mind). There are currently a whole bunch of untended blogs floating about in the cyber-nebula, receiving hits by loyal readers, but to no reward (I’m talking to you, mxi).

When I first entered into the blogosphere, all I could find were boring posts about what people did on a daily basis (see The Banal Blogosphere from February 2006), but soon I built up a tidy catalogue of blogs that went beyond the silly antics of the author’s cat or a blow-by-blow recount of a fight the author had with her ex-boyfriend.

So maybe this is the next stage in the evolution of the blog. Once considered a pastime or self-indulgent endeavour, blogging has been taken up by politicians, TV personalities and struggling writers exercising their wordsmithery. (I said, shut up.)

My Internet Boyfriend in Michigan

There was a time when if you mentioned you’d met someone on the internet, it was laughable (remember Napoleon Dynamite’s brother meeting his wife online?) and often questionable (it’s easy to have a perfect boyfriend if no one’s actually met him). But these days, almost all forms of internet socializing are acceptable.

I came to this realization when a friend of mine told me that she lived in the same neighbourhood as a guy we used to go to high school with and she saw him quite often. In real life, she had never stopped to say hello, but within the medium of Facebook, she added him as a friend and made contact.

Over the past few weeks that I have been signed up with Facebook, I have “added friends”* who were people I went to grade school with, people I’ve worked with, boys I’ve gone on a few dates with, friends of friends and one guy who I think I’ve said 3 words to in my life. All contact has been over the website, although I’ve had two suggestions of getting the “web communities” together at an event.

Which slightly scares me. And I don’t really know why. Maybe because you hear of all the cyber-stalking that goes on (a benign form of which I myself have indulged in on occasion – my brother likes to refer to looking at people’s Facebook profiles without their knowledge as “passive stalking”) or maybe I still harbour some Napoleon Dynamite bias, if that is the right word.

I have been reading and commenting on the insightful and perspicacious blog That Shakespeherian Rag over the past couple of months, a blog which I found through a series of serendipitous six-degrees-of-separation-esque events (okay, I dated his friend), and recently found myself in the same room with the author. Due to my aversion to meeting blog buddies in real life, I chickened out at the offer to meet face-to-face (see my comment on the Quiz Night post). I felt like my web community should be separate from my real-life community.

Which brings me to internet dating. I haven’t tried it, and I’m still not at a point in my life where I’m willing to try it. But really, being on Lavalife if you’re single is a totally normal thing. Many relationships have started on dating websites and I personally know of two marriages that have happened as a result of hooking up online.

Our lives are lived online more and more. Instead of going to the bank to pay bills, you do it on EasyWeb. Why bother buying an actual newspaper when you can read most of the articles on the online version. Memos have long been a thing of the past because information is now disseminated via e-mail. I don’t even check the weather on TV anymore: the Weather Network is bookmarked as one of my daily sites. And now, instead of wasting time and money at the bar, you can sort through hundreds of potential suitors and not end up kissing the wrong one at 3am just as the ugly lights are coming on.

But ay, here’s the rub: my real-life friends have become my online friends. So why can’t my online friends become my real-life friends?

Ignoring the choplogic, I think the answer lies in our innate sociability as humans. Sure, the internet acts as a conduit for social introductions, but it doesn’t replace the day-to-day interactions with people you know. And just as you may smile and wave at your letter carrier and leave it at that, you may poke or write a wall message to one of your Facebook friends and never really go beyond that.

And although using Lavalife as a forum to meet your partner is completely reasonable nowadays, conducting an entire courtship over the internet, without ever meeting, is still considered just plain weird.

Now I wonder if my friend will stop next time she runs into her Facebook friend in her neighbourhood and make their virtual socialization into a tangible interaction…


* For those of you not on Facebook, a) what’s the delay? and b) adding a friend is when you find someone, or someone finds you, and you add them to your visual list of friends on your profile page, for everyone to see how popular you are.

Don't Wanna Be an American Idiot

I am guilty of falling prey to the beguiling allure of absolutely shit TV. I watched the first season of Canada’s Next Top Model. I got caught in the roadwreck that was the beginning of American Idol this year. I even caught myself lingering on a Best of Jerry Springer special, watching in horrified fascination the multiple bust-ups that broke out over numerous bleeped-out screaming arguments. And that was in 2006.



But I couldn’t watch Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? beyond the first show. Neither could Heather Mallick, it seems.

The show pits tertiary-educated individuals against a “class” of 5 grade five students. The aim of the well-mediated and incisively edited show is to make fun of the adults, who have great difficulty with America’s 5th grade curriculum. But this is nothing new – we make fun of the stupid and their sage comments regularly: the character Vicky Pollard on Little Britain and the show Talking to Americans with Rick Mercer are two examples. The documentary Stupidity looks at a culture with access to education and knowledge, but chooses ignorance.

Mallick asserts that the show has taken a new turn in the bankability of stupid: there is lots of money to be made off stupid people (she cites the London Sun, a British tabloid, as a moneymaking example), and there are lots of stupid people to make fun of, but Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? makes money off making fun of stupid people. Follow?

This is where I disagree with Mallick. The show is so carefully mediated that you would think the contestants are reading from a script. They um and ah, and talk through what little they remember of the subject from grade school. The external monologues build up the dramatic tension to maddening heights while we sit on the edges of our armchairs, wondering if the Harvard grad is going to know how to find the area of a triangle with a height of 6 inches and a base of 2. And just when they settle on answer c, the host takes us to a commercial break and we throw our arms in the air along with the well-educated plonker who really isn’t sure if the answer is 6, but man, winning fifty grand would be good…

Mallick worries that we will be caught in this stupidity cycle: “It's a circle of government and industry working in tandem: the Bush Administration guts the American education system, which makes Fox programming attractive to larger numbers of people, who are then ridiculed by people like me, but now also by Fox itself.”

But can the American education system be that bad if every single one of the kids on the episode I watched got every single answer right? Perhaps it is a case of the kiddies being immersed in the curriculum and remembering what they’d learned a few weeks prior, whereas the adults have not used the formula to calculate the area of a triangle since grade 10 math class.

Or maybe this interminable stream of reality shows is our culture sluicing out the last of a stupid generation, wiping the slate clean for the next generation of kids (not one of them left behind).

I’ll end with an anecdote from Rick Mercer’s Talking to Americans to illustrate my point: when asking an American woman her thoughts about grade 7 students not being able to find their home state on an unmarked map of Canada, she answers without a beat, while her son, aged 8 or 9, holds a quizzical look on his face for several seconds before announcing, “Hang on - Canada has provinces!”*



* the clip is right at the end, but the video is worth the 7 and a half minutes...

Just Because...

...it's Sunday night and I'm trying everything possible to put off the impending doom that is Monday morning. Goddamn Newfies with their St. Patrick's day holiday...

Good Beer, Good Craic

Today is St. Patrick’s Day, a day where the non-Irish among us like to dress up in silly leprechaun hats, drink green beer and dance to the Pogues. Those of us with true Celtic heritage turn our noses up at these gaudy commercialized traditions (only because we’re draining the last of our pint glass, in anticipation of the next one being poured). So in honour of this most hallowed of holidays, I present you, dear reader, with 13 facts you may not have known about Ireland:

1. St. Patrick’s Day is a public holiday on the island of Montserrat in the Caribbean, as well as in Newfoundland and Labrador. (Why? Why are we not getting Monday off here in the anti-Irish totalitarian state of Ontario?)

2. The Guinness Brewery in Dublin pays 45 Irish pounds a year as part of its 9000 year lease. (Not sure what happened when the euro became currency.)

3. Ireland is the most successful country in the Eurovision Song Contest, winning it seven times.

4. Donegal Bay has some of the biggest waves in Europe and Bundoran, a town on the bay, has recently hosted European Championship surfing competitions.

5. It is thought that the word “quiz” was invented by Richard Daly in the 1830s. The Dublin theatre owner bet that he could make a nonsense word familiar in 48 hours. Daly told his employees to write the word on walls all over Dublin. (There is some murkiness here: some etymologists maintain the word was already in use at the time. Most agree that “quiz” did not hold its current definition until later on that century.)

6. The Irish scientist John Tyndall was the first person to explain why the sky is blue. (answer here)

7. The tune of “The Star Spangled Banner” was written by the (blind) Irish harpist Turlough O’Carolan.

8. Muhammad Ali’s great grandfather was born in Ennis, County Clare.

9. Aran Island sweaters (those woolly, off-white pullovers) have distinctive “family weaves,” developed so if a fisherman drowned, his washed-up sweater would confirm him as dead and not missing.

10. The 15 main railway stations of Ireland are named after the leaders of the 1916 uprising.

11. A Eurobarometer survey has listed Ireland as the nation with the highest rates of binge-drinking in the EU.

12. Muckanaghederdauhaulia in County Galway holds the title of Longest place name in Ireland.

13. Residents of isolated areas in Ireland will soon be able to take advantage of free shuttle buses to take them to and from the local pub, paid for by the Irish government. (This sounds too good to be true, but I guess we should never underestimate the luck of the Irish, or their resolve to go for a couple rounds of drinks.)


Slainte!


Sources:
www.ireland-fun-facts.com
www.wikipedia.com
blogs.guardian.co.uk
www.bbc.co.uk

Categorizing the Quiz

So, I’m a bit of a trivia aficionado. Maybe it comes from my competitive nature, maybe my slight bent toward intellectual snobbery, but wherever it stems from, I do enjoy a good quiz night.

As you’ll find in a previous post, I cut my teeth in the quizzes of East Sussex, honing my craft in the suburbs of Sydney and am now at the top of my game at the Duke of York in Toronto.

Or so I thought. After a brief hiatus from season 5 of Pubstumpers (because I, like other mammals, go into hibernation mode in the snow and cold), I was back to parade my prowess with a slightly shuffled team.

We quickly realized that this was not to be the night of domination I had expected. But happy to enjoy a few drinks and the quizmaster’s repartee, I settled back and did a little social analyzing of the crowd. I have categorized trivia participants into the following groups:

GRAD STUDENTS

And Grad student types. These are people whose lives are based around knowledge, albeit quite specific knowledge. But people who enjoy being in school for a good percentage of their lives probably have a fairly good general knowledge base, too.

EX-PATS

I have no history on the pub quiz, but I’m pretty sure it started in Britain. So any Brits that are far from home probably find comfort in the basement of a pub, beer served by the pint, and a couple of geography questions. I counted 3 English accents this past Tuesday.

TWENTYSOMETHING GIRLS

I do not mean to dismiss or denigrate this trivia demographic – I’m sure some of these women are here for the intellectual stimulation. But I have it on good (bartender) authority that a lot of the ladies present come for the aesthetics of the quizmaster.

RANDOM FRIENDS OF STEPH

I’m always trying to add new people to my team. I have a core group of friends who refuse because they don’t think they’re any good at general knowledge, to which I say: the last time you were called on to produce random facts was when you played Trivial Pursuit at age 14, and of course you weren’t going to do as well as your 30-year-old self who has taken Modern Western Civilization, watched a few more National Geographic shows and dated a guy with an unusual interest in comic books and/or an extensive record collection.

Next week. Next week I will break 80.

Cricket and Politics

As I write this, Zimbabwe is playing Ireland in the World Cup of Cricket, a nice little connection between this post and my last post about sports and politics. While the Ireland v. England game at Croke Park in Dublin invoked memories of political strife, this cricket match today is steeped not in memory, but in current events.

It is not the teams that make this match significant, it is the fact that Zimbabwe is competing in a world sporting event (and in the only sport in which they have any kind of international ranking) while the governments of many of its opposing teams are discussing further sanctions against Mugabe and his government.

Zimbabwe has been on a downward spiral for a while now: President Mugabe has ruled the country since 1980, maintaining office throughout several shady elections. He imposed land redistribution in 2000 in order to make owning farms more equitable after British colonialism (most farms were owned by whites), which the opposition believes destroyed what was once one of the more developed economies in Africa. Zimbabwe’s annual inflation rate is the highest in the world at 1700% and there are constant food and fuel shortages. In 2004, it was officially reported that a third of the adult population was HIV positive and there was almost no access to anti-retroviral drugs for those stricken with the disease.

The day before the opening ceremony of the Cricket World Cup, a “Save Zimbabwe” prayer meeting was broken up by police enforcing a ban on political gatherings imposed by Mugabe. One protester was killed and Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), was arrested and beaten. The photos of Tsvangirai leaving the hospital have sparked international criticism and talk of extended sanctions.

And all the while, the sporting community tallies runs and critiques bowlers. Andy Bull pointed this out in his sport blog in the Guardian today. Bull notes that a register of talented, top-of-their-game players have refused to play for their country because of its political situation and we should be asking why.

I watched my first international game of cricket in Sydney in 2001 (Australia vs. Zimbabwe), with Buck, a white Zimbabwean who had fought in the Second Chimurenga. Buck supported his team with passion, despite the fact that several of his friends were losing their farms and livelihoods with every man out. Buck said he would never live in Zim again, but he would never lose his fervour for the national cricket team.

So yes, we should be asking why. We should be keeping a close eye on Zimbabwe's human rights abuses and act accordingly as a global community. But we should also see Zimbabwe's cricket games for what they are: a uniting of countrymen within a team, and a meeting of countries within a sport; all for the love of the game. And it would be a shame to lose one of the world's best national cricket teams because players cannot play for a team whose country has forsaken them.

Paris Hilton and Other Clutter

Back in January, some enterprising individuals bought the contents of Paris Hilton’s storage unit (after she failed to settle the bill) and posted the pictures, videos and other itemsthey found inside on a website (parisexposed.com) that has since been taken down.

Now, I know that Paris Hilton is not the most appropriate of barometers with which to measure trends in our society, but an article in the Globe this weekend by Suzanne Gannon noted that the number of self-storage units in the U.S. are up by 90% since 1995.

Ninety percent.

One could argue that this is a space issue: more of us are moving to cities, city real estate is expensive, we’re buying smaller places, therefore we don’t have enough space in our dwellings to store all of our belongings.

But surely this logic doesn’t apply to Ms. Hilton, whose family owns a series of temporary storage units around the world (albeit, for human storage).

I think the more feasible answer is that we just have (and covet) more things. A simple trip through IKEA (which I made today) overwhelms you with a profusion of items you didn’t know you needed, but now you can’t live without. I picked up and put down a glass pitcher (for what? my homemade lemonade I make on sweltering March afternoons?). I mulled the possibility of bamboo shoots in a glass vase (because unlike the other plants in my apartment that are hanging on for dear life, bamboo would proliferate under my care). And yes, I even considered a collapsible storage unit to help contain my accumulating effects.

I guess humans just like to have “things”. They may represent status, memories, or, heaven forbid, actually have a function.

Maybe the guys at parisexposed.com are onto something. They've helped Ms. Hilton by taking her possessions and storing them virtually on the internet. And now she doesn't have to worry about paying that pesky bill each month - she can log in and enjoy her digital memories, along with the rest of the world...

The Sacred Art of Avoidance

So, I’m spending my weekend writing report cards (the pointlessness of which I could discuss at length with you, dear reader, should you elect to join me in sharing the pricier bottle of tempranillo at that tapas place in Kensington). Yes, it is an exercise in composition (which is supposed to be my bag), but if asked, I might compare it to repeatedly jabbing a sharpened pencil into my eye: that is, quite unpleasant.

Back in the day, when I had to complete such writing assignments as essays and lab reports (and the odd poem, god bless those Creative Writing courses), my living space would be at its cleanest because I felt I couldn’t work unless every last piece of dust and debris had been seen to. The more metacognitive individual might have referred to this process as procrastination.

Well, as I look around my apartment maintenant, it remains in a bit of a state: clothes strewn on chairs (not on the floor – yet), dirty dishes awaiting lavation, diaphanous clusters of dust bunnies secretly growing under chairs and behind electronic devices…

And my report cards, nowhere close to completion.

Why am I forsaking this oft-tested method of house cleaning?

The answer, my friends, is the internet. When I am trying to decide the repercussions of assigning little Johnny a D rather than a C in Science, all of a sudden the need to know the movements of Kate Moss and Posh Spice become of the utmost importance. So does checking to see how many people have read my blog in the 15 minutes since I last checked (oh… none). And maybe I’ll just check the BBC website to see if anything important has happened in the world since checking that news feed 20 minutes ago.

The internet, especially this high speed “always connected” form, has proven to be quite the distraction. One wonders if having the dial-up version might limit my need for the immediate gratification of answers to random questions that pop into my head (I wonder if I can find that Swiss guy I met in Alice Springs in 2000. I know, I’ll check facebook again).



The internet, generally, and facebook , specifically. I have eschewed the popular mySpace and ignored invitations to join facebook in the past, because I thought it was very high school, with its visual list of “friends” and shameless self-centredness of a webpage devoted entirely to oneself. But hell, that is essentially what this blog is, and I am my own biggest fan, so I signed up.

And so, let the addiction begin. You could spend hours getting lost in the web of friends of friends’ friends, occasionally stumbling upon a boy you liked in grade 5 (oh, Adam Purcell) or used to go out with your roommate but is now married to a girl who is friends with your friend’s little sister (yes, you, Carey Avery). There’s also the distraction of messages, friend requests, wall posts and pokes, a feature which remains unexplained, even in the FAQ section of the website.

At this moment, not only are my report cards unfinished, the demands of my household are not being attended to (nice use of the passive voice, eh?). But my knowledge of the whereabouts and associates of a number of people who I used to know has increased tenfold. And yes, I do see that in composing this post about the art of procrastination, I am actually indulging in it.

Now if only I could explain why Johnny’s knowledge of the inner workings of animal habitats and communities has actually decreased tenfold, I’d be on my way…