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…

Caption Contest! Caption Contest!

What, praytell, is the heir to the throne saying on his trip to Qatar with his new missus?

How cool is this?

Cargo has just released a lipstick line called PlantLove, the tubes of which are made from a corn derivative that is completely biodegradeable. The actual lipstick does not contain any nasty petroleum (or mineral oil, for that matter).

But I haven't told you the best part yet...




The lipstick comes in a biodegradeable package that is suffused with wildflower seeds, so if you soak and then plant the package, you get lovely flowers!