Letter to the Editor on "Made in China" hurting the local economy: Toronto Star; January 30, 2007

My "letter to the [Toronto Star] editor" was published in today's Toronto Star, and is shown to the left.

My letter was in reply to an earlier letter suggesting that Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty's suggestion to support the economy by buying a fridge would not help us much if that fridge was built in China. It also said that we don't need to be putting ourselves further into debt and that we should be reducing our consumption of things we don't need (which I obviously agree with).

Although it's disappointing that so much manufacturing is being sent to China, there are still many components of the consumer lifecycle of that fridge that remain in the province.

Further, what's more disappointing than the loss of manufacturing itself are the reasons that the manufacturing is being sent to China: fewer environmental restrictions, and a workforce so cheap that you will simply hire people to do the job that you'd build a machine to do in Canada because it's cheaper to hire people in China. Often, the only jobs assigned to a machine in Chinese operations are the jobs that are too delicate for any person to do: when you can hire a person for cents per hour, it's not even worth it to build a robot to do it if a person can do the job instead.

The letter to which I replied to, published on January 27, 2008, is as follows:

---

Premier should put his fridge views on ice
Jan. 23

Oh, that Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, he's such a comedian. Asked what people should do to prevent a recession from hitting, his suggestion is to go out and buy a refrigerator!

Oh, come on, you can do better than that. The very last thing people should do if a recession hits is to go out and buy a refrigerator, or anything else, particularly if it's mainly providing jobs in China.

What you should do is stop buying things you don't need. (Do you really need 25 pairs of jeans, or 25 of anything?) Buy Canadian to keep Canadians in jobs when do you have to spend, pay down your credit cards and boost your savings. And try to stop governments from giving out corporate welfare in the form of tax cuts and pumping money into stock markets.

But whatever you do, don't buy a refrigerator, not even to put Dalton McGuinty's mouth on ice.

Pauline Dalby, Toronto

---

Technorati: letter to the editor, Toronto Star, Chinese imports, fridge, Dalton McGuinty, Ontario, economy

Agatha Christie on "getting older"

I already know that the quote below is sound and true. The problem is that I think the quote was oriented toward those in middle age.

It's always interested me that it becomes easier to be yourself as you get older. It's most pronounced in people as they age into their 50s: they seem to just stop caring what other people think, but in a good way. They do it without breaking the social contract (or what's left of it), rather than in scorn of it as many younger people do these days.

I think it's a case of growing up, creating a character for yourself that's somewhat consistent with who you are yet even more consistent with the role that society has laid out for you in order for you to fulfill society's expectations: contribute to society through your work; raise a family. And when that's over and done with, you're finished with the character and you shed the skin (yes, yes; like a snake -- that is not my intention), exit stage west, and refamiliarize yourself with the actor that has spent his life learning the lines that only other people come to hear.

---

"As life goes on it becomes tiring to keep up the character you invented for yourself, and so you relapse into individuality and become more like yourself every day. This is sometimes disconcerting for those around you, but a great relief to the person concerned."

-- Agatha Christie

Paco Peña at Massey Hall. January 25, 2008. Brief review.

I saw one of the best concerts of my life when flamenco guitarist Paco Peña came to Massey Hall last Friday.

One of the most interesting things it did for me was to put into perspective the other flamenco performances that I've seen over the years:

• 3 x Jesse Cook
• 2 x Robert Michaels
• 1 x Jorge Miguel
• 1 x Johannes Linstead

And Paco Peña's performance was in a completely different strata above these four. Respect in the genre is such that I expect every one of the above would agree with me.

Paco Peña's style was very much traditional and perhaps closest to Jorge Miguel of the above, although the complexity of his arrangements and the eloquency of his skill was far beyond. The billing of Peña as one of the greatest flamenco guitarists in the world is justified, to the extent of my experience.

Although I've enjoyed each of the Jesse Cook shows I've been to, he's quite obviously "mainstreaming" the genre into the most catchy and energetic aspects. There's not much air or space and it always feels like he's trying hard not to lose your attention. It's an artform in itself that he should feel accomplished about, but it's not the same artform and it's not real flamenco.

Peña's concert was all about fundamentals and is what I have come to know as traditional flamenco. That may or may not be true, but it felt as though I was experiencing something genuine, rather than sugarcoated.

In comparison to Robert Michaels and Johannes Linstead... well, I don't think either of those two do what you could call flamenco. Jesse Cook's style could reasonably be considered nuevo flamenco (rumba flamenco, most of the time), but Michaels and Linstead do something completely different. It's more like adult contemporary instrumental, with flamenco influence.

Dancing

There were at least four different flamenco dancers in this performance, as far as I could tell. Three of them were male, which was a "first" for me: I've seen flamenco dancers before, but they've always been female, even in multiples. I knew that male flamenco dancers were out there because you see them associated with the genre, and I briefly worked with someone male that was involved in flamenco dancing, but I'd never seen it myself. The men had far more stage time than the woman.

The dancing was very impressive. It was also obvious that this is yet another culture that, unlike our own, recognizes and respects the equal roles of women -- equal contribution, but in different ways. That much comes out in the performance somehow, as does a respect for all elements and aspects of life. I don't think I'm reading too much into it, either.

The dancing fluctuated between tightly-controlled synchronized movements and rather fluid, uncontrolled (almost Pentecostal) interpretive dance. It was an interesting combination, and I think Michael Jackson learned a thing or two from this genre when creating his own style.

Music

Much of the music was accompanied by a male flamenco singer who did a very suitable job. This was also the first flamenco concert I've seen with a traditional flamenco singer: the others I've seen usually blend Western singers in with the flamenco, or they use a more contemporary Spanish singing style that they presumably feel won't be as harsh to adult contemporary ears.

One of the things I always noticed about Jesse Cook's concerts is that the stage performance was not as fluid as the recorded performance. It seemed a bit more stilted and mechanical, as if many takes must have been taken in order to capture the recorded performance as it was. There was none of that with Peña: everything was perfectly fluid and seemingly-unscripted (an impossibility, I know, but a master makes it look that way).

The only part I found a bit distracting were the castanets. I know they're traditional but, to me, they most overshadowed the music and I found them a distraction from what I was really trying to listen to. It may have been a mixing or acoustic issue, or it may just be something that I don't like.

Acoustics

I can easily say that Massey Hall has the best acoustics of any of the halls I've been to to hear this style of music. Considering the size of the hall, I was expecting less; but the subtleties of every note could be heard very well and there was no distracting feedback and were no annoying standing waves, at least where I was sitting. I was very pleased with the acoustics.

Audience

Seeing as this concert was in Toronto and of a more traditional type, I was expecting a more varied audience. It was quite similar to what you'd see in Oakville (which is where I've seen most of the other artists above): mostly white, and over 30. Although, there were far more singles of all ages in the audience.

Summary

So, again, this was a great performance and I could easily be convinced to go to another. I can only really compare to what I know and, as I said, this was in a class above anything else I've seen so far.

One day, I also hope to see the "other Paco" -- Paco De Lucia. I missed him the last time he was in town, so hopefully I will get another chance.

Technorati: flamenco, Paco Pena, Massey Hall, Toronto

Blog experiment: from Blogger to WordPress

I'm experimenting with a self-hosted WordPress blog at the moment, hosted on my own domain instead of on Blogger.

I installed WordPress this afternoon, created the databases, did some minor configuration, added some plugins, and imported my Blogger content as of my second-last post.

For now, I'm going to stay on Blogger but the advantages of moving to a self-hosted blog are numerous. There are also some downsides: I'd have to pay for bandwidth, for one. Also, the hosting for my domain is a cheap package and may not have the speed or resiliency of Blogger's servers.

The main advantage, to me, is that I have some control over the security of the content of my blog. Before starting the WordPress experiment, I had no backup of the content because Blogger doesn't allow you to export your posts easily, while WordPress had a Blogger import function.

Technorati: WordPress, Blogger

Less-unhealthy banana bread

I wouldn't go so far as to call a recipe a "healthy banana bread", so I'll go with the alternative. This banana bread is perhaps not as bad as a typical banana bread.

As with many recipes, it's based on a recipe of unknown origin but to which I've made some healthier modifications. You need:


Group 1

• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 cup whole wheat flour
• 1/2 cup granulated white sugar
• 3/4 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
  

Group 2

• 3 large, or 4 medium very ripe (at least some browning of the skin) bananas
• 1/4 cup yogurt
• 3/4 cup raisins
• 2 large eggs
• 90 ml olive oil
• 1 tsp vanilla extract

Pre-heat the oven to 350F. Soak the raisins in hot water.

Combine "Group 1" ingredients in a large bowl so that they're blended well.

In a separate bowl, add the "Group 2" ingredients as follows: mash the bananads and add them; add the yogurt; lightly beat the eggs and add them; add the olive oil, and the vanilla extract. Drain the raisins you soaked above and add them, too. Now, thoroughly mix all of these ingredients together. I usually fold everything into each other because a lot of the ingredients are slippery.

Now, add the "Group 2" mixture to the dry ingredients in the "Group 1" mixture. You then need to fold the ingredients into each other using a spatula. Don't use anything harsher than folding because you need to keep some air in the mixture. Fold just until all of the dry ingredients are incorporated and then stop.

Now, pour the mixture into a non-stick baking pan and put it in the lower third of the oven for 40-45 minutes. After this time, stick a toothpick into the highest part of the loaf and check that it comes out clean. If it doesn't, cook for a couple more minutes at a time until this test is passed.

Remove the pan from the oven and turn the loaf out onto a cooling rack to cool down.

Once it is cooled, I store it. Since this loaf is too big for me to finish quickly by myself, I normally cut about 2/3 of the loaf into slices, wrap it in foil, and store it in the freezer in a ZipLoc bag. This way, you can take slices out as needed and put the rest back in the freezer. With the other 1/3, I wrap it in foil and keep it in the bread compartment in the fridge.

Also, Vitor said that he eats with his eyes and wants photos for my recipe posts from now on, so here is the picture of the finished loaf from today. He has tried this loaf twice and said it is pretty good:

Technorati: banana bread, recipe, healthier

1929 and 2008: the stock market then and now

After one of the largest declines in the history of the stock market in the months that made up the stock market crash of 1929, leading into the Great Depression, the following occurred:

On the evening of (October) 29th, Dr. Julius Klein, Assistant Secretary of Commerce, friend of President Hoover, and the senior apostle of the official economic view, took to the radio to remind the country that President Hoover had said that the "fundamental business of the country was sound". He added firmly, "The main point which I want to emphasize is the fundamental soundness of [the] great mass of economic activities." On Wednesday, Waddil Catchings, of Goldman, Sachs, announced on return from a western trip that general business conditions were "unquestionably fundamentally sound." (The same, by then, could not unquestionably be said of all Goldman, Sachs.)

...amongst other, even more psychological tactics:

Appearing before a meeting of motion picture exhibitors on that Tuesday, [New York mayor James J Walker] appealed to them to "show pictures which will reinstate courage and hope in the hearts of the people."

...although some could not be manipulated:

[US President] Hoover had said that "the fundamental business of the country, that is production and distribution of commodities, is on a sound and prosperous basis." President Hoover was asked to say something more specific about the market -- for example, that stocks were now cheap -- but he refused.

The footnote to this last quote identifies that the request for this comment was likely organized by the same group of bankers that had, prior to the most severe market declines, put on an overt theatrical display by buying stocks that many had lost confidence in in order to lend confidence to them. The market reacted favourably, and these stocks were unloaded by the bankers soon thereafter, prior to the real crash.

Sound familiar? You can see the same tactics at work today. This past Thursday, following significant market drops on Monday, for example:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in a rare foray into economic issues, said the U.S economy remained in shape.

"The U.S. economy is resilient, its structure is sound, and its long-term economic fundamentals are healthy," she said.

Then, as now, it was known that the market hinges almost entirely on speculator confidence and has little to do with real conditions. The 1929 crash was also kindled somewhat by an influx of easier credit, just as has been accumulating in the west of the West over the past decade or so.

This similarity does not mean, of course, that we are heading for the same situation in present times, although I would not be surprised if we ended up in bad shape when all is said and done. What is does mean is that we can't rely on the words of our leaders, our economists, or our bankers for economic guidance because, in 1929, they all tried to maintain the illusion of confidence to the bitter end, and I think it'd be quite contrarian to suggest that we're more virtuous today than we were then.

A brief study of the 1929 calamity shows that it was a relatively drawn-out ride to the bottom with small waves of instability and shaken confidence. Market drops followed by rallies and recoveries, but with an obscured, general downward trend. And then, one day, it all unravelled uncontrollably and even those that would sell at any price could not find a buyer.

All quotes above about the situation in 1929 were taken from John Kenneth Galbraith's "The Great Crash 1929".

Technorati: stock market, crash, 1929, Great Depression

Water and electricity conservation is not good for business: surprised?

I was going to post some much more interesting stuff today, about my relatively extravagant weekend so far. But, it will have to wait. It's probably far more interesting to me than it is to you, anyway!

Toronto has tried a push for conservation in both electricity and water in recent years. It's almost as if they didn't expect anyone to listen. After pushing the message of "conserve electricity and save money on your electricity bill!", and likewise for water, they are now finding that people have actually taken up on their offer and that they are now having revenue shortfalls because they are not able to bill for as much water consumption. This comes at a time when, in the case of water, revenue is badly needed in order to fund a required large infrastructure upgrade. The fact that this outcome would occur seems quite obvious, especially as the same happened with electricity last year.

When they tried this with electricity, they then had to raise rates shortly after in order to make up for the shortfall. The people who had conserved felt short-changed because their efforts were "rewarded" with a rate increase that would ostensibly not have been required had they not conserved.

And, so, we're rediscovering that which is unpopular, but which works: if you want people to conserve, raising prices will do it. Make people pay. It's hard for me to imagine how someone would push for decreased consumption without anticipating that revenues would fall as a result when billing is done based on unit consumption. In my mind, here's how you might do it better:

• set a target for conservation: for example, we want the average resident to cut their water consumption by 10%

• increase the rate charged per unit of consumption by this target percentage: if the target is 10%, the rate per cubic metre of water would go up by 10%

• market the new rate: publish informational materials explaining that, if you cut your water consumption by 10%, your bill will not increase this year. Provide examples of common ways in which this conservation can be done and the expected benefit.

And I think this works because:

• the effect on revenue should be, at worst, neutral: cut consumption by 10%, yet raise the price per unit of consumption by 10%

• some -- perhaps the majority -- will not conserve 10%: this gives you increased revenue for funding your infrastructure projects

• benefits to conservers: those that conserve 10% will not see their bills increase, yet company revenues will not be affected. The status quo hands down a punishment for conservation, as was done with electricity last year.

There is a "danger" that too many people will conserve far more than 10%, leading to decreased revenues under this plan. I don't think this is realistic, and we have not seen it happen with electricity, which is billed similarly. Even if it did happen, I don't think the effect on revenues would be detrimental, and there would be an opportunity to fix it the following year based on what was done. The first year would be a valuable learning experience.

I think the message has to go out that conservation is not an option: it's a new way of life and, though no-one will force you to comply, you will pay dearly for going against the grain. Canada, of all countries, needs to get this message into the heads of its citizens so that we can start building the future of the country around such ideas. We are one of the least resource-efficient countries in the world, and this is an easy and inexpensive way to start us thinking in the right direction.

Technorati: water, conservation, revenue, Toronto

Matt's Omelette de Unemployment(e?)

Well, I might not really be unemployed -- "employed, without a present job" might be more appropriate -- but I'm in that frame of mind at the moment. And this omelette came forth:

You need:

• 2 eggs: large, and from a hen
• 1 1/2 tbsp. butter
• 1 small clove garlic: don't need much...
• 2 large basil leaves: fresh...
• 1 slice green sweet pepper: just need a slice of a standard green bell pepper
• 2 medium white mushrooms: these are the most common mushrooms in the supermarket
• strong cheddar cheese: I'm using 3-year Balderson (relatively dry and sharp)
• ground pepper: very small amount

Pre-heat the frying pan to about medium heat. While this is doing, prepare ingredients.

Finely slice the garlic, and chop the basil. Add the butter to the pre-heated frying pan and let it sizzle down. When melted, add the garlic and basil to the pan. Toss a couple of times and let fry for about a minute.

Cut a slice of the green pepper and dice it into fairly small chunks. Slice the mushrooms (remove and eat the stalks). Add both to the pan and let fry for a few minutes. Toss periodically.

Meanwhile, beat the eggs with a fork (remove them from the shells first). When the above step is done, add the egg to the pan and move and tilt the pan around so that the egg wraps itself around all of the stuff that's already in the pan.

Let the omelette cook until it looks done on the underside (lift slightly, periodically, to check). It may be time to flip before the topside has set properly, and the omelette will be fragile. So, either use a large turner or learn to love broken omelette. Either way, flip the omelette when ready (if the topside is runny, I would not suggest flipping it with frying pan acrobatics, as is usually do-able with pancakes).

When both sides are cooked, tip the omelette out onto a plate and use a medium grater to grate cheese over the omelette. The residual heat will melt the cheese without the cheese going dry.

Very lightly sprinkle pepper over the omelette (no salt necessary, if your cheese is good). With the pepper, you are only looking for a very light accent, so sprinkle accordingly... don't garnish with it!

That's all. Now that I think about it, some cold, finely-diced, ripe greenhouse tomatoes would go well on top, added after cooking.

Technorati: recipe, omelette

Rambo: the dog, and the movie

Today's Toronto Star carries on its front page, accompanied by a half-page photo, the story of the pit-bull named Rambo who escaped from his backyard on Christmas Day and was caught by animal control officers shortly thereafter. Rambo is a 10-month-old pitbull and was therefore born after the 2005 Ontario provincial ban was put in place. Pitbulls alive at that time were grandfathered, but new ones were not allowed to be brought into the province.

So, the situation is that the dog, by law, will be put down (pending appeal).

It's problematic enough that this is a front-page story.

But, coincidentally, the new Sylvester Stallone movie, "Rambo" comes out tomorrow. And it probably just is a coincidence, but I wonder how long it'll be before it won't be? In old-media terms, it'd be silly to think that anyone would draw a connection between a dog-in-peril and a one-man-army battling it out with Eastern fascists. But in new-media terms, there's some advantage to be had.

Context sensitive advertising is Google's main business, and Google is incredibly valuable as a company at this point in time because it's seen as a pioneer in the future of advertising. Why? Because when Google has a hook into the page you are looking at, it will deliver advertisements based on the content of whatever you're reading. This was infamously highlighted during 9/11 when stories of airplanes colliding with the World Trade Center would be accompanied by advertisements for discount airfares. Why? Because the story was about airplanes.

Likewise, stories about the dangers of SSRIs like Prozac may be accompanied by advertisements for the drug itself. And articles about suicide may be accompanied by advertisements for drugs that inhibit suicidal tendencies. Google's e-mail product, GMail, does the same. Discuss your pending acrimonious divorce in an e-mail, and you may see advertisements for legal counsel alongside.

So, is it really unreasonable to expect that, one day, things like an escaped pit bull named Rambo may be a publicity stunt?

First of all, certain newspapers will hoover it up and stick it on the front page with a half-page, full-colour photo. But, even then, this didn't have to be a front page story. It could have been buried on the page before the letters page. Could editors be coerced into giving a real story that has just-in-time marketing implications more prominence to boost advertising revenue? Compromise the integrity of the placement, but not the story itself. It may be defensible. You decide. They already overlay the front page of some newspapers with removable advertisements on some days. The problem is, people just remove them. When the story (a real story) is the advertisement (kind of), it's a lot more effective. And don't give me an earful about journalistic integrity. That kind of thing is so 1970s. We got over it in the 1980s.

Second, the name "Rambo" is unavoidably linked to the movie -- you can't think of one without thinking about the other if you've ever seen the movie, and bringing a brand to the forefront of your mind is the whole point of marketing. Find a poor down-on-his-luck trailer-dweller whose banned pitbull has just escaped and give him $10,000 to say that his dog's name was Rambo. Possible? You decide.

Third, whenever you read a story on the Web about Rambo the dog, you may well be shown an advertisement for "Rambo", the movie, through new-media contextual advertising. The advertising engine may see the word "Rambo" and make a connection with the advertisements in its database that are also tagged with that word. That's the behaviour of the poorly-crafted advertising engine (but is it poorly-crafted if it makes money? Was the pet rock a bad idea when it made millions of dollars? Of course. But I'm probably in the minority on that thought.).

And, finally, they know silly people like me are going to blog about it. Frequent blogging on a subject raises prominence in Internet search engines -- Google, in particular. Even by blogging about this on this particular day, my blog will get more traffic than normal. That's the way the system works.

I wouldn't put it past them in future. But not today. Today, I think it's an innocent coincidence. But somebody, somewhere, will see what's going on after it's hit them enough times, put the pieces together, and formulate a strategy to industrialize the whole thing. Tomorrow; not today. Or, maybe I'm naive.

Technorati: Rambo, pitbull, movie

P.S. I love the innocent-looking picture of the dog in the Star's article. It's just like the look that sociopaths give to the camera when they know they've been caught and have no other way out than to play to people's sympathies.

Celtic tiger

Given what's going on with the markets and economy at the moment, here's a timely quote from Damien Dempsey's "Celtic Tiger".

"Celtic tiger" was the name given to the Irish economic boom of the 1990s, transforming Ireland from one of Europe's poorest countries to one of its wealthiest. As usual, it did not benefit everyone equally and much of the wealth was concentrated in particular areas of the country, leaving the others outside. Here's the quote:

Greedy, greedy, greedy, greedy, greedy
So greedy, greedy, greedy, greedy, greedy

Now they say the Celtic Tiger in my home town
Brings jewels and crowns, picks you up off the ground
But the Celtic Tiger does two things
It brings you good luck or it eats you up for its supper
It’s the tale of the two cities on the shamrock shore
Please Sir can I have some more
Cos if you are poor you’ll be eaten for sure
And that’s how I know the poor have more taste than the rich
And that’s how I know the poor have more taste than the rich

Hear the Celtic Tiger roar - I want more
Hear the Celtic Tiger roar - I want more, more, more

Technorati: Celtic Tiger, economy

Yet another post on Facebook privacy, with a twist

I am sometimes amazed that I'm so stupid to have a Facebook account.

Providing the basic information that Facebook encourages you to provide is risky enough in itself, considering that many people put the type of information on Facebook that could be used to answer security questions that many sites use as a backup in case you forget your password ("i.e. What town/city were you born in?"). Your birthdate, gender, relationship status, education history, employment history, and photo albums are also up for grabs if you have provided this information. You have exposed this information to Facebook, whose internal security you probably have no idea about, and whose partnerships you are unaware of, and to the people you accept as friends (unless you open your profile to the world, which you have the option of doing). Oh, they do have a privacy policy. Have you read it? Me neither.

The next layer of risk is that many people accept people they hardly even know as "friends". Some people just accept on principle and collect as many friends as they can -- you can never have enough friends, right? So, all of these people get access to your private information. You probably don't even know what many of these people are up to these days.

On top of that, you can add "applications" to your profile. Applications are usually something as silly as sending someone a virtual screwdriver or giving someone a vampire bite. Someone tries to vampire bite you and you can only participate if you also add the "vampire bite" application to your profile. Don't, and you can't partake in the fun. In exchange for this maximum joy, you grant the author of that application near-full access to the data in your Facebook profile. I don't think you really need to provide your birthdate and employment history to the author of an application that displays Chuck Norris quotes in your profile for you, but you have to anyway, if you are to play along and receive such monumental benefit.

But there's more. Now, Jeremy Wagstaff points out that, when you add an "application" to your Facebook profile, you are not only providing access to your own data, but also to the data of your friends. So, apparently, when you signed up to Facebook, you agreed to this. I don't even need to install an application for it to have access to my data: if my friend installed it, the application can access my data by virtue of his/her friendship with me. As Jeremy comments: "who needs enemies when you have Facebook friends?"

Could I write a trivial Facebook application and have it listed for people to add to their profiles? Probably. And then I'd have access to their data and to the data of all of their friends. If I have access to it, it means I can copy it. And when I've copied it, it means that you can never delete it from my hard drive, regardless of whatever you've done over on the Facebook side to erase your account. And, so, I wonder what happens when government politicians become your Facebook friends (this is already happening), or you add an application written by the company you work for, or by the bank you deal with (this is already happening)?

Oh, and by the way... there's a bit more:

Facebook's most recent round of funding was led by a company called Greylock Venture Capital

[...]

One of Greylock's senior partners is called Howard Cox [...] who is also on the board of In-Q-Tel. What's In-Q-Tel? Well, believe it or not (and check out their website), this is the venture-capital wing of the CIA.

[...]

in 1999 [the CIA] set up their own venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel, which "identifies and partners with companies developing cutting-edge technologies to help deliver these solutions to the Central Intelligence Agency and the broader US Intelligence Community (IC) to further their missions".

...from The Guardian.

Technorati: Facebook, privacy, CIA, applications

Great, creepy stories from weird minds: "Pick Me Up", and "Battleground" and related things

I've seen a couple of televised short stories lately that I found really interesting:

• Pick Me Up: a driver is driving along a lonely road, picking up hitch-hikers and then killing them off. Until he picks up a hitch-hiker who is trolling the same road looking for drivers to kill off. A battle ensues. From the "Masters of Horror" series.

• Battleground: a hitman is hired to take out the CEO of a toy company for some unknown reason. He tactfully breaks into the building, bypasses security, and does the job. Not long after, he receives a package in the mail -- a box of little green military soldiers and other military accompaniments with, by the sticker attached to the box, "bonus hidden surprises". A toy manufactured by the company of the CEO murdered. Shortly thereafter, the little green soldiers tip themselves and their vehicles onto the floor and begin a military operation against him inside his own apartment! From Stephen King's "Nightmares and Dreamscapes" collection.

I have no idea why I'm impressed by this stuff, but I really am! I've always been a fan of the atmospheric anthology-type story. Great, weird minds, and creepy -- not vile, immoral, and disgusting -- stories. This is what horror used to be before Generation X and Y got ahold of it.

Since one of the most frustrating things, to me, about the Internet is that it's so difficult to find genuinely good "similarity" comparisons on a set of data when done by computers (i.e. "if you like x, you might also like y") -- particularly with movies -- I am going to do it the human way and say that, if you like things like the above, you may also like:

• Tales From The Crypt: a TV show based on 1950s horror comics. Loads of creepy and weird stories that are more fun than gruesome.

• Masters of Horror: another TV series. A bit hit-and-miss, but you will find something to like if you like the above. As with "Tales From The Crypt", the stories are often done by well-known directors and capable writers. In fact, the whole point of the MoH series was to have credentialed horror directores direct a short story each.

• The House That Dripped Blood: one of the best Amicus horror anthologies from the early 1970s. It is made up of three stories, each quite creepy and revolving around the fates of people that rented a certain out-of-the-way house for a period of time. It's high quality and employs well-known English actors for each main role (Peter Cushing, Denholm Elliott, John Pertwee). Very good atmosphere.

• From Beyond The Grave: another Amicus horror anthology from the early 70s. This one revolves around the fates of four people that buy antiques from a little out-of-the-way, unassuming antiques dealer (played by Peter Cushing). Lots of atmosphere.

• Eerie, Indiana: I'm not sure if this was meant to be a children's series or not, but it is good enough to be grouped with the above. It's about a boy that collects stories about the weird things going on in the small town he lives in -- the "centre of weirdness for the universe". The most memorable episode was the first one -- about a pair of twins of questionable age because their Mom kept them young by keeping them in large Tupperware containers (beds) at night.

All of these are available on DVD. I know this because I have them all on DVD :)

If you like a good, scary campfire story (or even just the idea and atmosphere of a good, scary campfire story), you will probably find something to like in the above.

Technorati: Stephen King, Masters Of Horror, anthologies, horror

My strange connection with John Tesh: sexuality in media

I think I am going weird this week. I just found out that I have something in common with John Tesh. First, the quote (from this article); then, the explanation:

Indeed, the only subject that seems to raise Tesh's blood pressure these days is talk about the media. Describing himself as "somewhere between conservative and ultraconservative," Tesh doesn't watch much TV or listen to the radio because the sexuality and explicitness of so much programming bothers him.

"If you don't ride around with a 12-year-old daughter in your car, you don't have a right - especially right now – you don't have a right to an opinion," he says.

[...]

"I'm not going to let anything come into my eyes or my ears that's going to trip me up," he says. "If I bring ice cream into my house, I'm going to eat . . . If I listen to shock radio and the cynics on morning radio, I'm going to start to become that person. If I let my daughter have a Bratz doll or watch sexually explicit television, all of a sudden, that's going to be normal to her.

I wouldn't describe myself as "somewhere between conservative and ultraconservative", because those are pretty loaded terms; and they're relative, anyway: yesterday's liberal is today's conservative. And there's social conservatism and fiscal conservatism, and they're not particularly useful for classifying anyone's ideas because you'll rarely find someone (other than politicians in public) that subscribes to something like social conservatism as a hard-and-fast code of belief. To call myself a "social conservative" might allow me to question media sexuality, but would also put me at risk of being called homophobic. It's not helpful as anything other than an indication of leaning.

But I do think the maestro has a very good point that you have to shut out that garbage. He approaches it from a religious point-of-view, but I don't. To me, it's just sensible that if you expose yourself to a lot of anything -- religion included -- it is going to change your perception of what's normal in the world. It doesn't matter if what you're exposing yourself to is in the real world or whether it's on TV.

I don't think that people are as capable as they think they are at distinguishing between fiction and non-fiction; particularly nowadays when so many people in real life have become walking advertisements, their speech loaded with strange noises from TV and movie personalities amidst other references to pop culture. The latest trend is toward manufactured anger. Everyone is now expected to be passionately angry about so many things around them, mostly pulled from their rather small sphere of concern. Rising prices on your favourite candy at Walmart is now a cause for outrage.

Well, no thanks. I'll reserve that for what's important. And if Michael Coren's TV show was taken off the air, I'd probably cancel my cable TV.

One thing I absolutely hate about media is the frequency of sexual reference. Sexuality is obviously a useful and enjoyable aspect of humanity, but it's one that has a limited time and place. Increasingly, that "time and place" is becoming "now and everywhere". I understand why it is that way -- it's the most basic means of marketing -- but I don't understand why we don't resist it more than we do. It's not good for us.

Embarrassingly, I am going to paraphrase an idea that is over 50 years old (they seemed to know so much more about life back then than we do today). Considering that sex is like eating in that it's one of the most basic elements of human life that we do repetitively yet never seem to tire of, there's an effective analogy to be drawn: if you put a lovely buffet full of food before a man and you found that you could hardly hold him back from gouging himself non-stop, you would assume that he's very hungry and that he'd been deprived of food for some time. If he did this repeatedly, every single time he was exposed to food, you might suspect a much deeper problem. If we were constantly and consistently set afire by images of mouth-watering food and lasagna strip-teases, wouldn't you suspect that something was wrong? What are so many of us starved of that we are always so susceptible to being titillated by the media's images of sexuality?

Technorati: conservative, media

On timeless music (and John Mayer's new song)

I didn't know John Mayer had a new-new song out (new-new, as in, not appearing on any of his albums), but apparently he does. It's called "Say".

It's a bit "Celine Dion" to my ears... which is most definitely a bad thing, but I didn't like his "Continuum" album at first and I couldn't stop listening to it for months after I'd given it a few listens.

The best music that becomes timeless to me and that I can't put down for weeks and weeks at first always has to grow on me, and I rarely like it at first. The best way I can summarize it is that if I can play all of the nuances of the song back in my head very easily, I will get tired of it quickly. The longer this process takes, the longer legs the song will have, and the longer it will survive in my ecosystem of interest.

This is why heavily-produced stuff never lasts long to me, interest-wise. Everything is so precise and perfect and easy to commit to memory. There's no slow-burn subtlety. I end up playing the chorus over-and-over again in my head to the point that I'm sick of it, and the head and CD version are identical. To last longer, there has to be a nuance that I can't commit to memory so easily, so that when I listen to the real song, it sounds far better than what I'd carried in my head.

There's a good "whole foods" vs. "refined foods" analogy here, I'm sure. But that's for another day.

Technorati: music, timeless, John Mayer, Say

Piano diversion: Dawson's Creek wandering in my head

I was dutifully doing my piano practice today and got a bit sidetracked. Here's an improvised (i.e. wrong -- I did it by ear and only from memory, and I'm pretty sure the key is wrong; also, it clipped numerous times during recording) version of one of those recurring "Dawson's Creek" instrumental melodies:

http://www.buckley-golder.com/mp3/DJ.mp3

Done with Yamaha S90ES (NaturalS piano).

Technorati: piano, Yamaha S90ES

"Dark Towers": education done properly

I found something on YouTube today that I remember from my childhood: someone has put up episodes of "Dark Towers".

"Dark Towers" was part of a British series called "Look And Read", shown to school-aged children during the time I was going through the system, using good old-fashioned storytelling to subliminally teach language concepts. I must have been around 6 or 7 years old at the time. You forget that you're learning, and it's not frilly stuff. There were usually comprehension assignments handed out in connection to the series. I remember that the story was so interesting that doing the written assignments was fun, and I usually couldn't wait for the next class to see the rest.

It's like that computer game they used to use in schools in Canada -- "Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?" -- except that you actually learn something because it's made by people who know what they're doing. In contrast to the "Dark Towers", I remember me and my friends scheming to see if we could get on the computer to play Carmen Sandiego in school so that we could avoid doing real work. Everyone was happy, because the teachers thought we were learning -- it was on the computer, after all. They didn't even know how to use the game, and neither did we.

Regarding "Dark Towers", be warned: if you're used to Canadian programming, you might find the idea of a "girl that likes her dog more than she likes people" and the "boy who likes books more than he likes people" teaming up to solve clues in a creepy house a bit anti-social :)

I've since found the full set of episodes. If anyone is interested, let me know.

Technorati: Dark Towers

"Cloverfield": investigate them for fraud

I saw "Cloverfield" today. This is probably the worst movie I've seen in a very long time. It's similar to "Blair Witch Project" in concept, except that it cost a whole lot more money to make.

The feeling I got... it's like the letdown of Blair Witch combined with the letdown you got when you saw the aliens in "Signs". There's a reason they kept the monster a secret: it's like something from "Pan's Labyrinth", but rendered on a Commodore 64 (OK, I exaggerate... a little bit.)

It also had the marketing brilliance of "Blair Witch Project" and I suppose it's to their credit that they have fooled yet another generation of moviegoers with the same stunt.

The characters were not even mildly interesting and I could hardly tell them apart. I don't remember caring what happened to them at any point in time. I don't even remember caring about them at a human level because I had no connection to what was going on whatsoever. I disassociated myself a number of times because it was just so boring and incoherent.

And I think there should be some investigation into whether or not the IMDB ranking is fraudulent. There is no way that over 4,000 people rated this above 8.0, on average. If I was a betting man, I'd say they paid 4,000 people from China a dollar each for their votes. It's just not possible that so many people can rate it highly. Or maybe I'm just in denial about the alternative: that marketing is now so effective that it can make people genuinely feel that a movie like this is moviemaking at its finest. But it does make me wonder whether pumping up IMDB is now a part of movie marketing.

This was a B movie with an A movie's budget. And to the fellow in the theatre that let out a "that's it??" at the end of the movie, I wholeheartedly felt your disappointment.

[ update: for all the people that said this movie was "so realistic" because of the poor, shaky camerawork, I have created a message board at IMDB for you to discuss ]

Technorati: Cloverfield, review

The fate of troublemakers in a stable work environment

In follow-up to yesterday's post, I feel like recalling this post from December. The things I describe in that post were significant factors in deciding to move on, and, actually, the few weeks leading up that point were the weeks when I was starting to look for something different, job-wise.

In the same post, I had put a few things down about job stability, and whether or not an ability to find work easily by maintaining your skills and keeping yourself employable was roughly equivalent to the classic notion of "job stability" -- a single employer for life. Another thing that occurred to me yesterday (and I've been known to be a bit slow -- so maybe it is obvious to everyone except me), is that I wonder if a "stable job" will necessarily be an uninteresting one if you are someone looking to work with well-educated people trying to do the best job that they possibly can.

The reason I say this is that a "stable job" is stable for everyone around you in the organization. It's a culture of stability. It implies, to some degree, that it's very difficult to get fired, no matter what you do. This fact itself fosters a certain culture just as much as a "stable job" environment does, but it's not as positive. A stable job is great if it means that you can feel comfortable expressing your concerns about the direction of your work without feeling threatened about being fired, but it rarely means this. The only time that people lose their jobs in such environments is when they break selectively-applied corporate policy, or when an organizational shift takes place and a seemingly-random shakeup occurs. Strangely, though, these shakeups are often used to get rid of troublemakers (people that raise a lot of inconvenient truths). And troublemakers are often the most educated, conscientious, and skilled people in the organization. To see legitimate problems, after all, you have to know more than the people that are going ahead in ignorance of the problem. To raise them in the face of adversity, you have to care enough to put your own career at risk in the interest of a good job done.

Troublemakers can sometimes be difficult to distinguish from complainers. But, troublemakers are not complainers: they are people who know more than average in the organization and aren't afraid to be conscientious. Complainers, on the other hand, are often average and have no positive motivation behind their issues. Troublemakers seek the time to bring about a sound solution, while complainers just want to express their feelings.

The demise of these troublemakers comes about when the one in charge has no capacity to understand the problem and formulate a starting position for dealing with it. They get unbelievably frustrated, and it's easier to get rid of the problem by going down the coal mine without a canary; just as it's easier to cross the road if you pretend the traffic isn't there and hope that people stop anyway (they usually do, because they don't want to hit you with their car). Most of the time, it just happens to work out for them because most people just want to keep their heads down and stay out of trouble. They don't want to point out problems. They won't ask you to check your shoes for dog mess because of the unusual smell in the room: they'll grin and bear it, or learn to love the smell of dog mess. They're getting paid, after all, so what business is it of theirs whether or not what they're being asked to do is right?

The core of the problem is that the less you know, the more you know. The less you know about something, the fewer doubts you have about whether or not what you are doing is right and the more you're convinced that you know enough to solve the problem. Knowledge is inconvenient because it conveys additional responsibility. We should understand this intimately, because consumerism is built on it: protect your brain from knowledge, buy, and claim ignorance when it's revealed that the salad shooter you just bought indirectly led to the deaths of three Africans. Religion is built on it, because you can't be held accountable for sins that you didn't know were sinful. And, we see it in teenagers all the time: their brains grow before their perception of reality has caught up, and they seem to think they know everything. But we shouldn't be seeing it in adults whom you could reasonably call "professionals".

Anyway, I have no idea if it's true. I'm just saying. These are just my observations. Over the years, I've seen a number of people that genuinely care be "randomly" removed for trying to do their jobs properly. The people that don't care that much, but toe the line, survive. I can't afford, at my age, to have a closed mind yet: I've worked for one employer since I started working full-time; hardly enough to make a decision. I'm looking forward to what's next.

Aside, one of the best and most truthful books on corporate employment that I've read is independently-published: David St. Lawrence's Danger: Quicksand - Have A Nice Day. It's a free download, but also available for purchase in hardcopy. I bought the hardcopy some time ago because it's a book worthy of support, and the hardcopy is very handy for reference.

Technorati: employment, troublemakers, corporate life, complainers

Taken out like a bag of garbage: employment, and moving on

So, I quit my job today.

Two weeks' notice. The usual. Of course, I have another job starting almost as soon as the one I quit was ready to end. So, I was expecting that I would take the next two weeks to tidy up some loose ends, and I'd been thinking about what loose ends needed to take priority for about a week. The job that I was in was so chaotic that there was no opportunity under "business as usual" circumstances to do this focused work. Everyone was being pulled in too many directions to the extent that context switching -- that time it takes you to reacquaint yourself with a task after you've been interrupted from it -- was taking up almost as much time as real work. So, it had to be a matter of handing in the notice, and then immediately requesting to focus on the things that needed to be done -- things that would be more difficult for other people in the team to pick up quickly and finish if I were to leave right away. That's the point of the "2 weeks", from my perspective. Also, I had been asked to provide 4 weeks' notice, if possible, when I posed the question to HR a few months ago. So I felt a bit bad about not being able to provide that, but it wasn't possible under the circumstances.

In the end, my employer exceeded my expectations, and I was thrown out of the building within 30 minutes of handing in my notice, just in time to drive home against the rush hour that I'd come in on. So, I'm now on vacation for 2 weeks. This is a first: I have never taken two consecutive weeks off work since I started working full-time about 6 1/2 years ago.

I'm not too surprised about being thrown out. People who have been at the company much longer than I have, and who have contributed so much more, have been given the same treatment after spending their whole working lives there. It's just the way it's done.

"Thrown out" may sound hyperbolic, but nothing is ever extreme in an absolute sense at organizations like this. This is as extreme as it gets. When you are escorted to the front door in a "civilized manner", by order carrying only what you came in with that day, it is the corporate equivalent of getting a beer bottle smashed against your head in a bar fight. Different contexts, different meanings.

I won't mention the employer, of course. If you know me, you know who it is. And you may even know where I'm going next. And it doesn't matter, anyway, because this is pretty common treatment. It just feels stronger to me because I've never quit a job in my life because of a decision to move on. It's always been because of a planned exit: having to go back to school, the end of summer, and things like that.

So, I can be a bit thankful, I suppose. The kind of... "shock therapy" I received today makes it so much easier to move on without regrets.

Technorati: employment, escorted out of the building, quitting, two weeks notice

Compromised immunity: why I don't want to win the lottery

I really have no desire to win the lottery. The thought of it produces negative emotions. And now I think I understand why.

It hasn't always been like this. If you told me at age 19 that I was about to win the lottery, I'd have likely been really enthusiastic about the prospect. But, some of us grow up and we realize that it would likely only have a negative pull on our lives. To those of us who grow up having to earn a living and believe in the inherent honesty in doing so, you can't just flip a switch and begin to feel gratitude to a mysterious donor that has pledged to take care of you for the rest of your life. It leads you into a situation completely inconsistent with your character. And I don't think the innocent ideas of "oh, we'll just take care of a few bills" really pan out. I think it necessarily leads to worse things than that.

I should probably point out that, having a middle-class life, I'm not really wanting for very much. That's not to say there's no effort on my part in building such a character trait -- many people who have much more than me want so much more than I do, and I've often been subject to the temptations at various times in my life -- but you learn to keep it under control. As I said, you grow up. You learn to control your impulses and urges. You're human, and you can do it; because the ability to control our impulses and urges is one of the key distinguishing features that makes us human. But I still have to recognize that there are many people in our society just eking out a subsistence with no obvious way out, and I can understand the attraction of a lottery saviour. If they can be in that situation and not be wanting, they are better people than me in this regard.

But, back to my point. I think I now understand why I have no desire to win the lottery. It's quite simple, really: I don't want to convenience myself any further than I already am because it'd be detrimental to my ability to deal with inconvenience, and life is unavoidably inconvenient and always will be, regardless of your fiscal stature. Daily living, I mean; not life itself. Money brings the temptation to increase convenience in your life and to optimize your circumstances. I need to increase, not decrease, my immunity to inconvenience. I'm becoming more and more convinced that that's one of the cornerstones of a happy life: skillfully coping with inconvenience, rather than seeking to remove it. You build your immune system. If your immune system becomes deficient, the smallest infection can take you out.

As we are starting to see in contemporary life, we build our bodily immune systems by exposing ourselves to bacteria. We expose ourselves to harmless bacteria each and every day by simply going about our everyday lives. It's all around us. In doing so, our immune system is well-exercised in dealing with complications and, when a genuinely harmful germ or virus comes our way, it is all the more equipped to deal with it. If we stop exposing ourselves to bacteria by trying to decontaminate everything around us, we have seen that we slowly erode our immune system and get ill rather easily. Soon, we can't cope with the most trivial of germs and become a healthy equivalent of an HIV patient: any germ of significance knocks us off our feet.

And there's an analogy here in what we do when we try to continually remove inconvenience from our lives. The more we make our lives convenient, the more we reduce our ability to deal with inconvenience. We inhibit our psyche's ability to deal with things that we find annoying, and those annoyances that we are unsuccessful in removing become all the more annoying, effectively filling, if not overflowing, the gap left by the removed annoyances. As we raise our expectations about convenience, we become all the more aggravated when things don't go our way.

If I won the lottery, I think I'd use the money to try and remove the few trivial annoyances that remain in my life, and I think I'd become a worse person because of it. I'd probably move to a house with more land around it so that the little things about the neighbours that bother me weren't there anymore. I'd probably quit my job and sit around waiting for the perfect job opportunity to come along. And when I did find that job, I'd move closer to work so that I didn't have to deal with traffic jams and long commutes. In doing just these things alone -- and these are very basic things, from my perspective -- I'd reduce my exposure to the randomness that real people bring, and I'd probably end up becoming more and more accustomed to things being exactly the way I like them. Effectively, I'd be slowly destroying my annoyance immune system. When something didn't go my way, I think it'd be five times as worse because I'd simply not be used to things going my way: I'd pay it to go away.

We've already seen the features of affluence lead to increasing stress in people's lives, yet we were led to believe that these things would make life easier. They don't. They temporarily relieve annoyance, and then people, given enough time, figure out how to make them annoying again. It seems to be a human trait. SUVs let you sit above traffic until everyone has an SUV. Cell phones give you peace of mind that you're never alone until everyone has one and you're constantly reminded that you're never alone; and one day you forget it and can't find a payphone because they were deemed expendable. Cars let you cut down your commute time until everyone has one, and then it becomes feasible to adjust distances to utilize the new capability. But the acquisition, maintenance, and ownership of these things incrementally adds stress to our lives even though they ultimately never produce net benefit. They occupy mental space in our heads. Their operation causes mental friction. And we're made to feel like fools for sticking with them when the next new thing comes along. They are right of course -- we are fools -- but the correct remedy is not to become even more foolish and buy into what they're selling as a replacement.

Let's look more closely at cars and the annoyances they were responsible for alleviating. There used to be a time when car ownership was a status symbol. The poor people walked or took the tram, while the rich people got governments to build roads for them and took their personal transportation to their destination. We're now in a state where -- regardless of what is said about declining real incomes and increasing income disparity -- most people can afford to own and operate a car. And what does it really mean? Well, it means that we don't have to associate with people in our own communities anymore. We aren't obligated to associate with people that we don't want to deal with because the people we really like are only a car trip away. We aren't forced by conscience to take care of the people that live amongst us because we don't even know them and feel no connection with them. And so, we remove the random association with people that we don't like but who live next to us, and replace it with an association of convenience with people that live within car's length. And when the people we randomly happen to live next to annoy us, we can deal with it healthily far less than we could if we knew the person, knew their motives and lives, and cared about them simply because they were a part of our community. We have lost that aspect of life, and it's stressful because we've reduced our immunity to diverse negative experience.

The Internet has made the above problem worse because, not only are we able to associate with people that we like, but we are also able to easily search out and associate with people who are as similar to us as possible. We have the ability to narrow all of our discussions down to exactly what we're interested in, and the topics don't even have to be sane. We can hop from chat room to chat room, forging paper-thin "friendships" that we think are much more than they really are simply because the person on the other end seems so much like ourselves. But you don't really know them. You think you do, because you know yourself so well and they seem to much like you. But the topics of discussion are so narrow, and you only know and form a friendship with the parts of them that are most like yourself. On top of that, you hop in and out of the discussion when you feel like it, and can ignore their presence whenever it suits you. In doing so, again, you reduce your immunity to inconvenience and entropy.

And what else about the Internet, and the "information at your fingertips" that it pledges to bring? Can you imagine having to go and look at the library for the information you need these days, rather than typing it into Google and hoping to get lucky? What if you can't find the information on Google? Disappointment. The problem is that, as information becomes more accessible, we are less able to deal with the inconvenience of not being able to find what we want while, at the same time, we are expected to be able to do more simply because information is so easy to access. Making information easy to access is not simply meant to make information easy to access. It's meant to allow us to reach beyond our previous capability by removing an obstacle. If you use it simply to make your life easier, you are reducing your ability to deal with the inconvenience of it not working as you expect.

And, so, I think that if I won the lottery, I'd be far too tempted to remove annoyances and inconveniences from my life, and I really don't have many legitimate annoyances as it is. That's not what I need. I'd become a worse person, regardless of how pretty a smile I could give to the newspaper, and I'd ruin my immunity to inconvenience. What I do need to do, instead, is to learn to love entropy; to expose myself to more randomness in life; and to increase occurrences of the unexpected. If I won the lottery, there'd be no way; and so I won't even play.

Technorati: lottery, winning, convenience, entropy

The lurking dangers of piano lessons

Boy critically injured when he's shot at piano lesson in Oakland

A guitar lesson, I can understand... but a piano lesson? It's not as straightforward as it sounds, of course. A robbery was taking place across the street from the where the 10-year-old boy was taking his piano lesson, and a stray bullet from the robbery went through the wall of the building holding the piano lesson and hit the boy sitting at the piano.

The only sensible solution to this that I can think of is to ban gas station robberies.

Technorati: piano lesson, dangers, shooting

On dreams (or, "I don't think Matt is much of a dreamer.")

[ This is a (heavily) edited version of a comment I posted on b's blog, in response to her post on dreams, francophilically speaking on Paris as a gateway to further dreams. ]

Is it a luxury to live out our dreams?

Living out our dreams is not a luxury, but the dreams to which we think we are entitled to in this part of the world are a luxury. We dream of things that people in less fortunate circumstances would not even allow themselves to dream; or they have far higher priorities as far as dreams go, such as surviving the day, being around long enough to raise their children to adulthood, and giving their children a better life than they had themselves because such a thing is not assured.

I think that our relatively high-rolling way of life, and our luxury to postulate dreams far beyond the above, is about to come to an end, and I'll explain why. We used to have self-entitled, disinterested people on this continent providing bad customer service at a cost probably ten times higher than good customer service is now being provided by eager workers at offshore call centers. People participating in these developing economies are following their dreams, too. But their dreams consist of educating themselves in something that matters and making a contribution that matters so that their country will matter and, in turn, their children will matter. They are educating themselves in objective, useful things -- science, engineering, English (more useful to them than us -- they can translate). North Americans are going in the other direction because, for some reason, they can do the same or less than someone who may be more educated and willing in another country and make ten times as much money for it. We can now train ourselves in sports, song and dance, or even nothing at all, and still manage to work out a reasonable living for ourselves. Meanwhile, our scientists, engineers, and other hard-grind professionals are retiring and there won't be enough people to replace them because, well, it's hard. And we seem to have found ourselves a place where we don't need to do hard things to "earn" ourselves a good life. It has to end. We'll have to start doing things that matter again such as, oh, growing food and teaching and producing things of value.

I really do see the attraction in allowing everyone to express their unique talents to eke out a living. But, I put it in the same box as the ideology of the free market: a nice fairytale, and only useful with a shapeshifting dose of reality and temperance. And, after that, it's no longer the free market. It's something else. I suppose I can response to the "follow your dreams at all costs" idea by telling you how I talk myself down from such temptations. It's quite simple: is there a demand for what I want to do? If not, I ask myself how I'd access all the things I do enjoy in my life if everyone decided that they were going to seek fulfillment as a trapeze artist. I think there has to be a balance between dreams and what society expects of you. Society isn't something separate from anyone in it.

And, if you were going to study something of interest, or some culture of interest, you should work toward putting it to good use in society -- teach, produce research, write historical accounts. Leave some kind of legacy. And if you're actually a part of a culture, simply participating in it is valid enough. But, in the case of travel as a dream, to participate in a foreign culture from afar, wishing you were somewhere else and neglecting your own culture as a result, persistently indulging in the foreign culture by cooking fancy quiche and listening to April March records doesn't do anyone any good. I'm not sure blogging even counts. I don't expect any legacy to come of my own blog. Not unless I fake my own death and blog from 6 feet under as a publicity stunt.

Again, as above, I think there needs to be a balance between personal dreams and what society needs you to do. It's completely amazing to me that society -- North American society, in particular -- has been led into this idea of negative liberty, where everyone has freedom to not care about or participate in their own society at all if they don't want to, and that they can have and act out personal dreams that are completely independent of the people and things around them. It's a temporary luxury, I'm quite sure.

Clearly, I am not much of a dreamer. I don't see dreams as being valid unless they're useful, and I don't miss not having fulfilled them because, honestly, who am I to feel entitled to that, really? And it doesn't bother me or stress me at all to think this way.

Technorati: following your dreams, society, negative liberty

Pre-emptive strike for the beginning of 2008

Encouraging cinema from a younger director: "Gone Baby Gone"

I saw "Gone Baby Gone" this weekend. It's an excellent movie and has given me a new respect for Ben Affleck -- the director, not the actor; although they are one and the same. The movie, directed by Affleck, is incredibly well-made.

The screenplay is based on a novel of a similar name (it has extra punctuation because people who read books understand and use and are not intimidated by punctuation though you'd never tell it by this sentence) by Dennis Lehane -- the author of the also-excellent "Mystic River", also turned into a movie by Clint Eastwood.

I'm not going to go into the story because telling anything about the story here would ruin the movie. What I want to mention is what I found most unique about the movie. Although it felt very original to me and kept me interested, I don't think the movie uses any new techniques, and I mention some movies below that have similar blueprints. But there's an interesting use of steadicam, cold colour contrast, and fast cutting in the gritty scenes; horror techniques in suspenseful scenes; and relaxed, spaced-out pacing for the dramatic scenes. The music is well-done and always appropriate. Editing techniques are cast for each scene as appropriate just as much as the actors are cast for their character roles.

Ben Affleck's brother, Casey Affleck, is cast in the leading role and is a virtual perfect fit for the role, if only because he seems very real and natural in the shoes of his character. I'm always impressed by an actor that can act as a character forcibly pushing his own personality beyond its natural limits and pull it off successfully. Although Casey Affleck is clearly a talented actor, this is just as much a good casting decision because he's a niche actor and this role is dead-centre in his niche.

The story gets started quickly and is immediately interesting, with a broad mosaic of characters. It takes many twists and turns, spells out parts at times while leaving others for later. The pacing is a bit like that of a rollercoaster, and it all works without being tiring. It's a dramatic movie just as much as it is a thriller and has a very consistent underlying current of dark humour. It resembles a much more developed and thoughtful version of what was done on "NYPD Blue".

The movie revolves, at its core, around the mistreatment and abduction of children. From this perspective, it reminded me of two other movies, which are loosely related and both recommended. They're not only related from their perspectives on children, but also by their air of unpredictability; their refusal to follow a straight and narrow path; their willingness to sacrifice a concrete ending in the interest of provoking thought, while also providing a satisfying ending; and their portrayal of the effects of moral gravitational pull on future lives and those that are in it:

• Mystic River: written by the same author as "Gone, Baby, Gone". One of the main characters followed a very different path in life because of his abduction as a child. His relationship with those in his life was also affected by it.

• The Pledge: directed by Sean Penn, who also played a powerful role in "Mystic River". A police chief retires, leaving the case of a child killer unsolved. Not being able to rest until the case is closed, he continues to investigate into retirement.

This is one of those movies that I'm going to buy on DVD simply to support the effort. And I'm very pleased that it came from a younger director, because I was starting to think I was going to have to survive on Zach Braff movies when the older folks kicked the bucket.

Whatever your rating scale is, I'd put this in the top 10%, just as I do the other movies above.

Technorati: Ben Affleck, Gone Baby Gone, Casey Affleck, Mystic River, The Pledge, review

"Oh, she's so beautiful", but why does it matter?

I'm not sure what it is with people that like to compliment other people on how beautiful their children (usually young girls) are. What is this meant to accomplish? The way I see it, there are a bunch of different meanings behind this compliment, none of which I find very congratulatory of substance:

• Prediction of success: your child is beautiful, hence they will be successful in life. Because beautiful people have a natural leg up in modern society, regardless of their intelligence. Your child is lucky that they don't need to be intelligent.

• Congratulations to the genes of the parents: your genes must have picked the right partner for you, because your children are beautiful.

• Lack of reticence: it's true that the child is probably beautiful, and you just issue the first thought that comes to mind without really considering what it means.

• Just being vacuous: you don't really mean anything; you just don't know what else to say and this compliment is a surefire social winner.

To me, it's the kind of thing that, if you must say it, you say it when the child is not present. I take no pride in things that come naturally or easily to me, so why should I extend the same to others? I try to love others as I love myself, after all.

I suppose the main reason I have a problem with it is that the compliment is not much different from that which you'd give to a cute puppy. And we know that the animals that aren't cute really aren't cared much for in broader society. There's not much else to say about a puppy at first glance, beyond what it looks like. Ultimately, the child has no say in their own beauty and nor does the parent, outside of a few healthy-living basics: baking bread is fraught with more risk than is producing beautiful children. It either happens or it doesn't. It's not a skill. So, what is the compliment meant to convey, exactly?

Perhaps when we can genetically engineer children to all be beautiful, we could congratulate the scientists on how good of a job they've done. Or, being flexible, we could congratulate the parents in such a scenario in the same way we congratulate the buyer of a shiny new Cadillac Escalade: with hesitance, because he had no hand in designing or building the thing and his involvement was to hand over money to a car dealer, so why are we meant to be impressed?

I might have already exhausted today's negativity capital, so I won't go into "oh, he looks just like you!", having just left the womb, deep red, squinting in pain, squashed head, and all.

Technorati: beautiful, compliments, children

Clay pot beef stew in the Schlemmertopf

One of my most interesting Christmas gifts was a Schlemmertopf clay baker, which is a terra cotta baking dish with a glazed bottom and unglazed lid. You soak the lid for about 10 minutes in cold water, prepare the ingredients, mix them together, throw them into the dish, put on the lid, and put it into a cold oven, set the oven to a high temperature, and then cook for usually at least an hour.

So, I gave it a try today with a beef stew. I was quite pleased with the results, and I have posted "before" and "after" pictures below. To be honest, I don't think the "after" picture looks very nice, but it is one of the best homemade stews I've ever tasted (even if I do say so myself), and that's what's important! The smell coming from the oven was quite lovely, too. No oils or extra liquids were added, and the meat (stewing beef) was tender when finished.

The total time from start to finish was about 1 hour and 40 minutes, with only 20 of those minutes requiring hands-on work; the other 80 minutes was the time spent in the oven. I soaked the lid while I did the ingredient prep, and actually ended up soaking it longer than 10 minutes, so no time was wasted with the soaking. Also, since you need to put the dish into a cold oven (to avoid cracking from the harsh temperature change), you don't have to worry about pre-heating the oven.

I think I will be using this a lot!

Technorati: Schlemmertopf, beef stew

Diversity of houses in Georgetown: dormers and sloped ceilings

One of the best things about living in one of the older areas of Georgetown is the great variety you see in the houses; not only in the shapes and styles but also in the scale. Walking down King Street, as I often do, you have large houses next to small houses; bungalows next to multi-storey houses; older houses next to much older houses; brick houses next to wood siding houses next to vinyl siding houses; wooden houses with wooden porches next to houses shaded by vegetation and stone steps. This type of variety is becoming much more rare as we meet "progress". But I think there's something comforting about this kind of variety because, even as a person, you fit in. Unlike in the walk through many modern neighbourhoods, you're not the only odd-looking thing amongst a vast array of identical-looking things because everything looks odd. Things are of human scale and of human quality. You can look in any direction and imagine a story that could be told. You know that each and every house was put there for a reason at the appropriate time and place, and that nothing was put there just because it was in the development plan. Even on my own street, my own house -- built in the 1960s -- is betwixt a couple of houses built earlier in the century; and there's a story behind it.

I exclude Georgetown South in my appreciation, of course, because its houses say nothing about Georgetown. They are houses you could just as easily find in Ajax, Brampton, or North Oakville. Every house is pretty much the same, built at the same time, for the same invalid reason, and every house is ugly because of it. As much brick, asphalt and concrete is crammed into as little space as is legally allowed, and there's little vegetation to speak of (and there may never be -- the good soil is stripped away and sold before these new developments begin). It's like walking in a city, where everything is taller than you and nothing yields. You are always fully aware that you're in a completely artificial environment and, while this may make some feel safe, it is decidedly unnatural and, to me, not conducive to relaxation. So, I can't imagine why anyone would move to Georgetown for a "small town environment" and decide to hang their hat in Georgetown South. I genuinely don't understand the thought process. Maybe, like the idea that you could drive the good old SUV down the Credit River if you really wanted to, it's good enough just to know that it's there if you want it.

But, back to my original point. One of the most attractive features in a house to me are dormers -- those little protrusions out of the roof, usually holding a window, that give you a unique perspective on things. I haven't quite figured out what it is about them but, somehow, they always remind you that you're in a house. That seems like a silly thing to say, but I think it's easy to forget sometimes. But with a dormer, you feel much more like a part of the house than when it's not there. I didn't appreciate this until I bought a house that had one because, in fact, it wasn't even much of a consideration for me at the time. I just really liked it when I had one.

Something that often goes along with a dormer, though, which did hold great attraction to the house I ended up buying is the 1 1/2 storey design, where the upstairs ceilings carry the roofline so that they're sloping and angled -- like the top 5/8th of an octagon. I'd first come across these types of houses when I was staying in a university-owned house while in school. It looked like it had been built in the earlier half of the 20th century and one of the upstairs bedrooms -- the least desirable, apparently -- had a sloped ceiling above the bed. For some reason, it was instantly appealing to me, and now I have them in my own house. Despite the fact that, being on the tall side, I sometimes hit my head on them when I forget where they are, I'd much rather have them than not. They make the rooms feel very cozy and close, and they have favourable acoustics that also add to the comfort. The bedroom that I'm typing this in now has those sloped ceilings, as does the room opposite, and I'm pretty sure that, should I ever move, I would look for the same again. They remind me of the low-overhead of the classic English country cottage which, to me, is incredibly comfortable because the scale is just so appropriate and you're so encapsulated.

So, I dedicate this post to 1 1/2-story houses and modest dormers. Maybe when we can no longer afford to heat and maintain the contemporary mansions of today, we'll learn to appreciate the efficiency and modesty of these traditional offerings a little bit more and start to build them more often. But then they wouldn't be so special, would they?

Technorati: dormers, Cape Cod, sloped ceilings, half storey, Georgetown

Thoughts on where our economy is heading; mostly the Chinese effect

I think there was a time when North American business leaders correctly recognized that they couldn't completely strip the lower and middle classes of their assets and moderate incomes because these were ultimately the people that kept them where they were, in aggregate. These lower classes that would have no money to spend and no assets to borrow against would have no money to throw away on trivial consumer goods and would have little interest in investing their money in corporations via the stock market. So, as any good virus recognizes, they recognized that you can't kill the host (in this case, the prosperity of the country). If you kill the host, you die along with it because nobody will support your business ventures.

But, now the picture has changed. China has a rapidly growing economy and its sheer size, population-wise, offers incredible business opportunity. If China's 1.3 billion people each spend $10 more per year on goods, that's an extra $130 billion up for grabs, while in America it only amounts to $30 billion. And when economies are small, the growth opportunity is so much bigger because people are rapidly ramping up their lifestyles according to their new economic situation. The gains are therefore much more significant year-over-year in such a growing economy, and the population is also likely more naive to the games of the system.

So, this is the new world economy, and what is essentially means is that North American business leaders increasingly have less and less need for the support of their domestic populations because they can peddle their wares and attract their investments elsewhere... in China. And, so, now we arrive. The massive pump-and-dump scheme of the dot-com era shaved a tremendous amount of money off the savings and retirement plans of the North American population, yet the economy was saved by the booming real estate market, which began to ramp up in 2001, shortly after the dot-com crash. This was taken advantage of by scheming lenders in the subprime mortgage market, who took profits on risky loans at high interest and traded away the risk in all kinds of complex financial instruments. This real estate market is now diving in the US, ruining the financial situations of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, as they lose their houses and whatever money they have paid into them, putting their financial health in jeopardy for the rest of their lives. These people will not be consuming as much as they otherwise would have because they simply won't be able to: they won't have the money.

In parallel to all of this, of course, we had the rise of cheap goods as a result of cheap Chinese labour provided by Chinese people that were temporarily accepting a lower standard of living to improve their long-term situation. This looked very nice and pretty to us in the land of plenty, but what it essentially did was remove wage pressures on employers. If you can get your stuff cheaper at Walmart, you have less of an incentive to put pressure on your employer for a wage increase. We had a temporary period of price deflation in many areas due to this insurgence of cheap Chinese goods, and the resulting lack of wage pressure on employers revealed a reduction of real incomes on this continent over the same time period. What will follow is a slow restoration of the price gap that was removed by this temporary deflation. Not only will oil continue to increase in price, but Chinese workers will demand a larger share of their economic value, and the increased domestic Chinese consumption within the Chinese economy will then begin to consume many of the natural resources we depend on to run our own countries, resulting in further price increases. We are already seeing this in large upward price increases on corn, wheat, gold, copper, nickel, milk, and all other kinds of bare necessities of the modern world. Despite these upward price pressures, I'll bet that employers on this continent will see little reason to increase wages accordingly.

And, so, I think we're witnessing the nonchalance of the virus toward the financial health of the original host because the virus simply has the opportunity to spread to a much healthier host. Now that there is a more rapidly growing economy to move toward in China, there is not much of an incentive to keep the North American economy healthy because a decline in the North American economy simply means that there'll be fewer jobs to go around, resulting in wage declines, translating into cheaper labour to do what dirty work remains in the country: people will take what they can get, at whatever wage they can get. The North American quality of life will sputter. And it won't matter if the population won't be able to afford to buy their goods or invest in their corporations, because the Chinese will more than fill the gap that's left behind.

Technorati: China, economy, US, Canada, North America, oil price