Extreme commuting: when trains attack

Approximately 12 commuters die every day on the Mumbai rail system in India, a third of them from falling after losing their grip on the train that they tried to hang onto the outside of when they couldn't squeeze themselves inside the sardine-like accommodations. According to the article, most of the rest die from strolls along the tracks, although I bet there was a bit of train interaction involved somewhere in the proceedings.

I can't imagine what it'd be like for it to be a regular occurrence to have a fellow passenger fall off the train and cease to exist. In the first four months of the year, 1,146 commuters died and 1,395 were injured on the system.

This is quite different from my relatively comfortable GO Train experience, although I wonder what will happen if gas prices continue to go up and train capacity does not keep up with the exodus from behind the steering wheel: our commuter rail system is more of a cottage industry to supplement the highways than a headline story of people movement in the Greater Toronto Area.

For now, I suppose I can be thankful that I get on at the start of the line.

Technorati: Mumbai, railway deaths

F--- you. Now, give me credit because all means of expression are equally valid.

In contrast with my comment yesterday about The Economist's old-school British interest in being grammatically correct, there is an example below, from a Star article, of the new-school Britain (and I'm not joking when I say that this genuinely represents a lot of what's wrong with today's Britain):

A British high school student has received credit for writing nothing but a two-word expletive on an exam paper because the phrase expressed meaning and was spelled correctly.

Because all means of expressing yourself are equally valid, I'm sure. It's all relative, and who are we to say what's right and wrong?

The student received 2 marks out of 27 for the response, and could have scored higher with a small adjustment:

Buckroyd told the Times that it "would be wicked to give it zero because it does show some very basic skills we are looking for, like conveying some meaning and some spelling."

Buckroyd says the student would have received a higher mark if the phrase had been punctuated.

Technorati: swearing, exam

Choosing to eliminate choice: political segregation and a connection to an earlier post

Last year, I wrote a post about how the tendency of the Internet to encourage virtual communities of like-minded people has the potential to maximize and lend validity to the significance of trivial issues and thereby reinforce them in the minds of the beholders. In doing so, this may force people into the comfort of virtual hugging, tissue-passing, and shared experience and rob their actual, real, physical communities of the diversity that they need to maintain moderation and a well-rounded view of the world.

It seems that I'm not alone. Last week's issue of The Economist, in an article called "The Big Sort", documented an increasing trend toward political segregation of the population in the US -- people choosing to live amongst like-minded people. In this, they reference books and studies suggesting that, as people receive fewer challenges to their views, they obtain momentum from this and gravitate toward more embellished versions of these views. They gradually become more extreme:

There is a danger in this. Studies suggest that when a group is ideologically homogeneous, its members tend to grow more extreme. Even clever, fair-minded people are not immune. Cass Sunstein and David Schkade, two academics, found that Republican-appointed judges vote more conservatively when sitting on a panel with other Republicans than when sitting with Democrats. Democratic judges become more liberal when on the bench with fellow Democrats.

It seems that, the more choices many of us have, the freer and more likely we are to choose things that most match the way we already see things and to reduce our tolerance for opposing points-of-view:

Voters in landslide districts tend to elect more extreme members of Congress. Moderates who might otherwise run for office decide not to. Debates turn into shouting matches. Bitterly partisan lawmakers cannot reach the necessary consensus to fix long-term problems such as the tottering pensions and health-care systems.

And, in America -- the world capital of free choice -- people are less likely than anywhere else to encounter alternative opinion:

Over time, this means Americans are ever less exposed to contrary views. In a book called “Hearing the Other Side”, Diana Mutz of the University of Pennsylvania crunched survey data from 12 countries and found that Americans were the least likely of all to talk about politics with those who disagreed with them.

And, ironically, the more educated you are, the more insulated you are likely to be because of the greater mobility that education allows:

Intriguingly, the more educated Americans become, the more insular they are. (Hence Mr Miller's confusion.) Better-educated people tend to be richer, so they have more choice about where they live. And they are more mobile. One study that covered most of the 1980s and 1990s found that 45% of young Americans with a college degree moved state within five years of graduating, whereas only 19% of those with only a high-school education did.

When someone with education flees the ghetto in search of people that they can more frequently see eye-to-eye with, a double-edged sword is wielded: they remove the diversity that they brought to their former neighbourhood while reinforcing the lack of diversity in their new neighbourhood.

As I said in my earlier post, the Internet makes it worse because it allows people of all stripes to eschew controversial dialogue in their real communities in favour of dialogue with symmetrical folks in virtual communities. Tolerance becomes a matter of "you live your life; I'll live mine -- just let's not talk about it". Everyone becomes concerned only with their home and with private space; culture evaporates as ambivalence about public space materializes and manifests; and the individual and collective soul are diluted because of it.

Technorati: political segregation, tolerance, virtual communities

Bigfoot sighting: a correct use of the word "moot" in last week's Economist

In reading last week's edition of The Economist, I set my sights on the modern literary equivalent of bigfoot: correct usage of the word "moot" in an article entitled "The Future of Energy":

Some, indeed, think alternative energy will be the basis of a boom bigger than information technology.

Whether that boom will happen quickly enough to stop the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reaching dangerous levels is moot. But without alternative energy sources such a rise is certain.

There you have it: correct usage of the word "moot", which does not mean irrelevant or closed, but rather means inconclusive and open for debate. Despite popular usage, a "moot point" is not an irrelevant point: "moot" is not a minor variation of "mute" any more than "gout" is a minor variation of "goat". It describes an argument that is contentious, and whose conclusion is not yet settled. The contrast of popular vs. genuine definition would be enough to make the user of the popular definition look a fool viewed through erudite lenses, as the delta significantly transforms the meaning of a sentence.

The Economist, of course, is old-school British in their editing: they care about the nuances of the English language, and this is frequently apparent. Such attention to detail is passé these days, and I even find instances of "then" when "than" is meant in the modern Toronto Star. With the relativist attitude of the Star, though, I wouldn't be surprised if their editors considered you a nerd for pointing it out. Despite this, though, I continue to subscribe in the interest of an open mind and moot points, even though my hardened, calcified attitude toward the paper is not moot at all.

Technorati: moot point, correct usage, grammar, The Economist

Does life imitate art, or does art imitate life?

Q: "Does life imitate art, or does art imitate life?"

This isn't puzzling in the least to me. Life imitates art. The end.

Well, not quite. Art is about concentrating the things we find most poignant about life into a focused product, with all of the dead weight removed. While it most definitely draws from life as an inspiration, it doesn't imitate life -- it doesn't try to be like life. It doesn't imitate life because being an imitation of life would be the antithesis of art: art says that life isn't good enough, and offers an alternative proposition. It may contain elements of life, but everything other than the car chase is removed. If it doesn't contain the perseverance through boring interludes on the road to mastery of those good times, it does not imitate the life experience.

Life, on the other hand, looks to art for ideas about how to try and craft what its holders perceive to be a more worthwhile or interesting way of living. I don't have much time for art in this regard. People who watch a popular movie like "Sideways", for example, figure out afterwards that they've always liked Pinor Noir and just didn't know it. And women who look to "Sex & The City" for life improvement ideas quite quickly figure out that art does not imitate life, for example: there are drastic emotional consequences to living like those women do that are airbrushed out of the picture. And if you have a high-paying job, you rarely have that much leisure time.

Life frequently tries to imitate art and often fails. But, in terms of the question offered above, life is the one that tries to imitate art and not the other way around. Art does not even try to imitate life because very few people would be interested in it if it did.

In a dilemma, though, I'd pick life every time.

Technorati: life imitating art, art+imitating+life

Why I don't use Firefox, and why this hasn't changed even with Firefox 3

There is one rather simple reason that I don't use Firefox and prefer to stick with Internet Explorer.

The reason is that Internet Explorer saves bookmarks as individual .URL files, and the primary benefit of this to me is that they can be easily indexed and searched for outside of the browser. I never launch bookmarks from the browser anymore, and haven't for years. I just throw all of my bookmarks into one folder, making sure that their titles have enough keywords in them to help me recall them in future; and then I use instant search at the OS level to find what I'm looking for.

In the following screenshot, for example, in Windows Vista I can find my rattan furniture bookmarks (I don't own any rattan furniture, so don't get funny ideas) by pushing the Start button on the keyboard and typing the keyword "rattan". I don't have to touch the mouse, and I don't have to go into the browser. The browser is pretty much invisible to me in this workflow because I don't interact with it much.


This is how I work with documents in general -- not just bookmarks -- and the fact that IE saves bookmarks as .URL files allows me to work consistently with all types of documents. Without this functionality, bookmarks are the odd ones out. (As an unrelated aside, a program I like very much for storing web clippings and web content, and organizing the same -- Web Research Pro -- has just added the ability to search within its databases from the Vista search dialog. This is a great feature and made the upgrade price a worthwhile deal).

I don't really think about the browser very much these days, and so the browser I use really doesn't matter that much to me. I find many of the available Firefox add-ons appealing, though; particularly the ones that let you navigate a web page with the keyboard -- without having to take your hands off the mouse to move around a page. Things like Hit-A-Hint. I don't think there's anything comparable available for IE. I bet it'd be great to have this available on a notebook computer.

So, I gave the new Firefox 3 a look to see if there were any new options along these lines. There aren't. I leave Firefox installed to give it a try once in awhile, but almost always use IE7.

Technorati: Firefox 3, Internet Explorer, comparison

Crème fraîche

Yesterday, I tried making crème fraîche. Crème fraîche is French for "fresh cream", but I'm not sure why. What you are doing is souring the cream, but not so much that it's as sour or as heavy as sour cream.

Supermarket sour cream isn't all that related to real soured cream these days (Gay Lea sour cream has the following, for example: 14% MF Regular: Milk Ingredients, Modified Corn Starch, Guar Gum, Carrageenan, Locust Bean Gum, Sodium Citrate, Bacterial Culture). For crème fraîche, there are two ingredients: cream and buttermilk.

So, I said I "made" it, but there's not really much to it, which is surprising considering how much this stuff costs if you buy it in the supermarket. I saw some in Whole Foods once for something like $8.99 for a very small tub. On the other hand, cream is expensive -- real cream, anyway.

Making crème fraîche is really this simple: put fresh cream in jar, add buttermilk at the rate of about 1 tbsp. per 1/2 cup of cream, stir, cover, and let sit at room temperature for at least 12 hours. The buttermilk cost me $2.49 for 1L (of which I only needed 1 tbsp. -- I'll have to look for recipes to use the rest). I used organic whipping cream (which is 100% real cream, unlike the non-organic whipping cream), which goes for $5.69 for 500mL. As I was experimenting, I only used half a cup of cream. 4 cents for 1 tbsp. of buttermilk and $1.42 for the cream means it cost $1.46 for half a cup of finished product... a bit pricey, but you don't use much. Of course, I still have most of the ingredients I bought leftover (which I wouldn't normally buy, yet spent $8.18 on in total): 75% of the cream and nearly all of the buttermilk leftover for other mischief.

Here are some pictures of the finished product:







I don't know why, but making this thing takes a small amount of guts. As with yogurt and cheesemaking, what you're doing is adding bacteria to a milk product and encouraging it to grow inside the milk product until it changes the milk product into something else. With yogurt, for example, you add bacteria to milk and keep the milk at a warm temperature that bacteria like so that they'll multiply. In going about their business, they digest the lactose in the milk for their food and propagate themselves in strands, thickening the yogurt. But they also digest the lactose, so the product is more agreeable for lactose-intolerant people. You put them in the fridge to slow down their activity -- they don't work as fast at lower temperatures -- but they are still alive. The yogurt starts to go bad when the bacteria have exhausted the supply of lactose and have nothing left to live on.

All of this bacterial activity in milk is supposedly safe -- the good bacteria exist to an extent that they crowd out any bad bacteria that want to join the party -- but I can't help but feel a bit of danger and excitement in eating a bacterial culture that I fostered myself.

Anyway, 12 hours later, the crème fraîche had thickened and tastes like cream with a very subtle sourness to it. Scrambled eggs are calling.

Technorati: creme fraiche, recipe

Investing in my life (or death): buying and selling life insurance policies

I don't know if I'm just naive, or whether it really does go a bit too far when there exists a trade market for life insurance policies.

There are many ideas involved in this racket, one of which is that an investor may offer to continue to pay the premiums on a policy that a policyholder has decided that he can't afford to make the payments on anymore and may otherwise allow to lapse. The shrewd investor would come along and agree to pay the premiums as well as a token amount to the policyholder in order for him to continue to maintain the policy. When the policyholder dies, the investor get the money due from the policy.

Another idea in the scheme is to approach people that are near the end of their life and are having serious problems paying for their medical treatment and offer them a deal: in exchange for signing over the life insurance policy, the shrewd investor offers an advance to the poor cancer patient to help with the medical bills so that they can stay alive a little bit longer -- but not too much longer, hopefully. When they finally do croak, the investor gets a nice, fat cheque.

But where the wheels really come off is when investors host free cruises for seniors willing to take a medical exam and apply for new life insurance with the investor as beneficiary. He or she needs only apply for the policy and the investor will take care of the payments, and even give the person an ongoing fee for their co-operation. Another approach is to organize a telemarketing effort to call seniors at home and offer them a regular cheque in exchange for their acquisition of an insurance policy on behalf of the investor -- effectively using the living body of some poor old man or woman as a balance sheet business risk, betting on whether or not they'll die before the policy payments start to make it a bad investment.

Despite everything that goes on in the markets these days, I was still surprised to learn that this type of thing takes place. It's not even new, apparently, because it was all the rage back in the 1980s to buy up the insurance policies of AIDS patients. Now that drug cocktails keep those particulars pummelling around for a lot longer than they used to, I suppose it's time to look elsewhere... especially now that the securities markets are so volatile and interest rates are so low.

Of course, regular, uninvolved people suffer from this. Because insurance companies depend somewhat on a certain percentage of insurance policies lapsing in order to pay out the ones that don't, the introduction of investors picking up the slack means that fewer policies will lapse because investors target those whose policies are about to lapse and offer to keep them going until the holder dies, in exchange for a small fee. To the insurance companies, this means that it will cost more money to pay out the redeemable policies because of a significant increase in rates of payout -- meaning, naturally, that it will start to cost more money for seniors to buy and hold life insurance policies. It gradually tends toward no longer being insurance and instead is more of an ambigious savings vehicle where you get out only what you put in. When the possibility of no redemptions is removed or reduced, there is diminished room for anyone to receive a payout exceeding their contribution.

All so that a bunch of investors can get a little bit richer. In "The Sociopath Next Door", it's estimated that 4% of the North American population are sociopaths. These are the people that ruin most trust-based systems for the other 96% because they are willing to go several steps further in their contravention of the social contract, and they have no shame or conscience. They are aided by people who are not sociopaths but who seek to imitate them in an attempt to get ahead.

Technorati: life insurance, policies, market

I don't think Taleb's black swan metaphor is original or all that useful, but I like what he has to say

Over the past couple of years, I've heard a number of trendy, Web 2.0 types mention Nassim Nicholas Taleb's concept of the "black swan". I first heard about this concept on a podcast of one of Mr Taleb's Poptech seminars that a friend pointed me towards a few years ago.

The idea of the "black swan" seems very simple (and I'm not sure that Mr. Taleb meant it to be anything original or pseudo-revolutionary, but just intended to make a point; and others have made it more than it is). The idea is simply that, for a long time, everyone assumed all swans were white and that it was just taken for granted for a period of time, until a black swan was discovered, thereby upsetting people in certain circles whose worldview had been tampered with. It is meant to be a metaphor for unexpected, unpredictable, earth-shattering occurrences that change people's concept of the way the world works.

Mr. Taleb is a very entertaining speaker and has some very valid criticisms of economics and market theory, but the ingenuity or originality of the "black swan" theory never sat very well with me. First of all, I don't think that the discovery of a black swan is a suitable metaphor for catastrophe because it simply isn't that alarming. He used the September 11th attacks as an example of a black swan, but it's hard to imagine that the discovery of a black swan would have had the same impact as those attacks, and it's somewhat insulting to the families of the victims, I think. I don't think it's a very good metaphor.

But, beyond that, it's nowhere near new (and, to be fair, he notes that it is not his own idea -- J.S. Mill first put forward the metaphor). Embarrasingly, I couldn't figure out exactly why I had a problem with it until the past few weeks, and it wasn't important enough to me to go and do any digging about it. But, this week, I've been reading well-known investor George Soros's book on his philosophy around why current economic theory is invalid, and the interim discussion in the book reminded me of why I don't find much value in the "black swan" idea as a freestanding metaphor: it is an age-old point of contention in the field of philosophy of science.

In the 1930s, Karl Popper published his book, "The Logic of Scientific Discovery". In this book, he challenges the idea of verifiability held by the logical positivists -- a movement that formed in the 1920s. The problem with verifiability, he says, is that you can never ultimately prove something to be true. No matter how many times you demonstrate that something is true, you can never prove it to be eternally true because you can never be sure that you've tested every possible permutation of events and interactions surrounding the object of your assertion. Note that this is, essentially, the idea behind the black swan theory. Popper instead proposes that science would be better moving forward with the question of falsifiability: that a theory can be held as bring true, or "true enough", as long as there are no instances proving it to be false. By allowing this, it allows a much broader application of science but also leaves many of those applications hanging at various stages of completion. Unfortunately, I think that one of our biggest problems in modern times is that we aren't very good, as individuals, at discerning the natural sciences from the social sciences, and the mature sciences from the immature sciences. But, that's an aside.

So, what "black swan" adds to the above -- if anything -- is some consideration of the impact of having something unexpected occur because of an over-reliance on falsifiability. And, again, while "black swan" is a reasonable metaphor for the unexpected, I'm not sure it's an appropriate metaphor for the fallout of catastrophe because, no matter how hard you try, it is difficult to realize the discovery of a black swan as catastrophic.

I briefly studied the philosophy of science in university and it was one of my more memorable bouts. Thomas Kuhn's ideas about paradigms and the orderly progression of scientific revolutions, in my humble opinion, is very important for everyone to read as a part of any balanced literary diet. In fact, I think that it should be required learning for someone entering a society that is romantically involved with science and therefore can't always see it for what it really is.

I am enjoying Soros's book, although I admittedly find it a bit challenging in places and I'm not sure if it's because I'm not smart enough to process it, whether I'm overanalyzing (the most likely -- I do this with everything except drinking a glass of water), or whether it isn't very well written. It is more of a philosophy book than a book on economics or markets, and philosophy books have a tendency to appear to chase their own tail to those that can't or won't follow the narrative. Taleb's discussions, too, are very interesting and form a part of a growing collection of very good arguments against the insanity of an economic and social model that seems to know that it's wrong but sticks with the old because it can't articulate a good new. Here's the collection so far:

• George Soros: "The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crash of 2008 and What It Means" (book)
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb: "Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets" (book)
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Pop!Tech 2005 talk (video)
• Adam Curtis: "The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom" (documentary)

"The Trap" is a very interesting BBC documentary that, in part, studies the impact of the false assumptions behind economic theory to its applications to broader society. Specifically, it attacks the idea that society should be operated on the assumption that people are purely self-interested and perfectly rational and can be motivated with personal incentives to meet numerical targets that measure all kinds of different facets of life -- a way of thinking that has gradually been developing over the past 40 years. It's not available on DVD, but you can find it on YouTube.

Technorati: Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, George Soros, philosophy of science, economics

On finding your reflection... and then airbrushing it unti you look like a Monet

From "Family Tree" by Belle & Sebastian:

I've been feeling down
I've been looking round the town
For somebody just like me
But the only ones I see
Are the dummies in the window
They spend their money on clothes
It saddens me to think
That the only ones I see are mannequins
Looking stupid, being used and being thin
And I dont know why I hang around with them
The way they act, I'd rather be fat than be confused

[...]

If my family tree goes back to the Romans
Then I will change my name to Jones
If my family tree goes back to Napoleon
Then I will change my name to Smith
If my family tree goes back to the Romans
Then I will change my name to Jones
If you're looking at me to be an accountant
Then you will look but you will never see
If you're looking at me to start having babies
Then you can wish because I'm not here to fool around

On the potential for death by ambiguous salad green

For the past couple of years, I've been growing my own salad greens.

The first year I did it, it was just an experiment -- I took a few packages of different lettuce seeds and sowed them densely in an old oak barrel. They germinated quickly, rapidly covered the soil area, and functioned as a relatively self-sustaining unit for quite awhile, needing no weeding, very little watering, and no pest control. I did sow them perhaps a bit too densely that year, and they came up almost like a carpet that I had to harvest like sprouts. To compensate, I pulled whole plants instead of individual leaves, and the remaining plants spread out to cover the gap. That one planting provided lettuce for more than a month.

This year, I got a seed blend -- a pretentious-sounding "mesclun mix" -- that has a broader variety of greens beyond boring lettuce (lettuce is never really boring, but the word "lettuce" just sounds boring). I sowed these seeds much less densely in the same barrel and now have a small cornucopia of salad greens -- rather than a carpet -- that I can operate as a pogrom and pull individual, semi-mature leaves off each day as needed.

I've discovered a problem with the latter approach, though. Because there are a number of different types of greens, none of whose appearance I am familiar with, I can never be quite sure whether I'm eating a salad green or something that grew from a seed that was floating around in the air and just happened to land in my salad barrel around the same time that the intended seeds were germinating. I am pretty sure that I've eaten at least three weeds in my lunchtime salads since I started harvesting and am dead certain of one of those, because I saw the same plant growing in my lawn when I was out clipping yesterday afternoon.

Here I stand, though -- still alive and kicking.

But if I stop writing for a few days, please suspect the worst: that I've chewed on a young hemlock for my lunch and have suffered the consequences of trying to pretend that I can identify safe food without the help of a supermarket.

Technorati: gardening, salad greens, hemlock, horrible accident

Overheard on the GO train

Woman 1: "People should slow down. The roads are crazy in the morning."

Woman 2: "Yeah, totally. I never drive like a maniac... unless I'm on the way to daycare or something like that."

Viagra helps hamsters overcome jet lag more rapidly

On May 22, 2007, three Argentinian scientists published the results of their study, "Sildenafil accelerates reentrainment of circadian rhythms after advancing light schedules."

Moving past the complex title, this study essentially found that Viagra helped hamsters recover from jet lag faster than they would have if they hadn't been given Viagra.

Technorati: hamsters, Viagra, jet lag

The Georgetown farmer's market opens, and I am already up to no good: roughly Middle-Eastern spicy tuna pitas

Today was the first day of the Georgetown farmer's market. Unlike some of the other seasonal markets in the region, the Georgetown market opens roughly at the beginning of crop availability. Oakville's market, in comparison, opens in early May and sells things like bedding plants and shrubs until the growing season gets well underway and Ontario-grown food is actually available.

Since I moved to Georgetown, I've gone to the market most weekends when it opens in the summer from late June until mid-October. This year is a bit different because I signed up for a Community-Supported Agriculture program offered by Whole Circle Farm in Acton. The deal is that you give them some money up-front in order to give the farm some funding, and you get a share of some of the crops each week throughout the growing season. They had an option to pick up the share from the Georgetown market, which is very convenient. The other option would be to go to Acton every week to pick up your share, but that's a 10-minute drive and I walk to the market. The cost was a bit higher to pick up from the market, but it's easily worth the convenience.

My first impression of the CSA share was that it was quite sparse. 1/4 lb. of spinach, 1/4 lb. of salad greens, a bunch of radish, and "help yourself" to some garlic scapes. I didn't have any idea what to do with garlic scapes, but the nice lady at the market gave me some ideas and I ended up using some of them in what will follow. The food in the share is very natural and fresh-tasting food, though. It's better than most farmer's market stuff, and pretty much as good as you'd get if you grew it yourself in your own garden. I am growing my own salad greens in the garden at the moment, and they are being harvested every day. Luckily, the ones I am growing myself are not mostly lettuce leaves, while the CSA greens were mostly different varieties of lettuce leaves. So, I can mix the two for salads and they will complement each other nicely. The spinach is better than any spinach I've ever tasted, and the radish are...radish. Radish are a bit hot, so I find it's difficult to decipher subtleties. I'm also growing radish in the garden, but I started late and it's not ready yet.

Elsewhere at the market, I picked up some strawberries, green onions, and new potatoes. You immediately notice a difference between the local strawberries and the imported ones from California. The taste is far more complex, the fruit is softer, and there's very little bitterness (but perhaps not enough sweetness).

This evening, I did a quick mental exercise to see how I could fit the garlic scapes into dinner. Garlic makes me think of onion, and the two together make me think of spicy things. I had some pitas, which cue Middle Eastern thoughts. Some mayonnaise, cumin, smoked paprika, tomatoes, parsley, and cilantro later, I had dinner.

Here's what I used:

Cooking ingredients

• 1 tsp. cumin: not much to say about cumin
• 1 tsp. smoked hot paprika: smoked paprika is expensive, but the taste is completely worth it and this wouldn't taste the same without it. Also, make sure it's hot smoked paprika because there are also sweet versions. If you have to use sweet, you could probably use it and compensate for the lack of heat by adding about 1/2 tsp. of dried crushed red chilies at the same time as the paprika
• 1 1/2 tbsp. olive oil
• two 3/4" slices of a medium-sized onion
• 2 garlic scapes: you could probably use half a garlic clove to substitute. I was just using them because I had them.
• 1 can of tuna

Cold ingredients

• 1 whole wheat pita: about 8" diameter, cut in half and able to be used as a pocket
• Hellmann's mayonnaise: full fat -- don't mess around!
• 1 small-medium tomato: unfortunately, it was a supermarket one. I had too many supermarket ones at home and couldn't justify buying any from the market.
• 1 small handful of parsley leaves (and a few stems): from the back garden
• 1 small handful of cilantro leaves: supermarket ones; the garden ones are not yet mature enough to go picking handfuls off them

First, pre-heat the frying pan on medium heat. In the meantime, roughly chop the onion and the garlic scapes. When the frying pan is heated, add the olive oil and, after about 10 seconds, put the chopped onion and scapes into the frying pan. Move them around to get some oil on them and make sure they're spread out for proper cooking.

The onion and scapes should cook for about 3-4 minutes. While this is doing, cut your pita in half, open up the pockets, and spread a healthy amount of mayonnaise on the insides of the pita.

After the onion and scapes have been frying for 3-4 minutes, add the cumin and paprika and stir everything around to get it all coated. Let it cook for 1-2 minutes, and then add the drained can of tuna (if it's chunks of tuna, break them up into flakes with a fork) to the frying pan and get everything blended together. Let cook for another 1-2 minutes.

Remove the frying pan from the heat and carefully scoop its contents into the pitas. Finely chop the cilantro and parsley, blend them together, and layer them on top of the tuna (push the tuna down into the pita if you have to). Then, dice the tomato and layer this on top of the herbs.

That's all. I thought it was really good! The smoked paprika, in particular, made everything come to life.

And now I smell quite interesting.

Technorati: smoked paprika, pita, recipe, tuna, CSA, Whole Circle Farm, Georgetown farmers market, garlic scapes

What kind male am I?

Sometimes I wonder. Seeing as I don't like beer; I don't like cars; I don't like sports; I don't like porn; and, as a recent post hinted, I'm not much of a fan of man's best friend. And these seem to comprise the popular Western male identity.

What do I like? Reading. Cooking. Gardening. Piano. And a spot of blogging once in awhile.

Back to being a garden gnome, I suppose! Or a monk. I'll pick one or the other soon enough.

Technorati: male identity

Fuel surcharges on your speeding ticket

Drivers caught speeding in a north Atlanta suburb will now have to pay a fuel surcharge on any charge involving a moving violation -- speeding tickets, for example.

It made me laugh, but it's an appropriate way to deal with the rising costs of fuel. The alternative would be to pass the cost onto property taxpayers, so, indeed, why not apply it directly to the trouble source instead? Don't do the crime if you can't pay the fine.

This move has apparently attracted a lot of interest from bureaucrats in other cities who are trying to figure out how to get such an ordinance passed so that they can avoid having to raise taxes.

Technorati: fuel surcharge, speeding ticket

Windows Media Center: from Vista, back to XP

This week, I decided to take my PVR -- a PC running Windows Media Center -- back to the Windows XP-based 2005 version, after having used the Vista-based version for about a year.

Windows Media Center is a great system, and has one of the best user interfaces I've ever seen come out of Microsoft. It is also better than most standalone PVR interfaces that I've seen. It essentially consists of a Media Center version of Windows installed on a PC, with a Media Center remote control and a USB remote control receiver so that you can control it from the couch. You then put that PC in your living room, connect it to your TV instead of a monitor, and treat and use it as you would any other piece of home theatre equipment -- from the couch, with a remote, and optionally with a nice case compatible with the look of this type of equipment.

The best feature, for me, is that, essentially being a PC, it can do PC-like things: it can be a file server, for example. My music library is stored here so that I can get to it from a number of different places. And I can access it from outside the house -- scheduling recordings from work, for example, or even watching live TV or things I've recorded from a similar remote location via the Internet (though not at work, of course!). And upgrades are easy -- whether adding hard disk space (add or replace a hard drive), or adding additional functionality, such as the ability to skip commercials or add things like YouTube to your TV menu.

I was using the XP-based Media Center 2005 for a couple of years before Vista was released. Media Center 2005 is essentially a copy of Windows XP Professional with additional Media Center functionality. When Vista came out, I bought a copy of Vista Home Premium for the Media Center and Vista Ultimate for my main PC.

After the arrival of Vista, though, I lost access to administrative shares -- the ability to access the root of each hard drive from another PC on the network. I found a number of possible solutions, including the most straightforward one. After doing that, it worked for a few minutes and then, for some reason, I lost access to the entire system on the network and was never able to restore it. This experience made me notice that it's a significant change to have made Media Center be based on "Home" rather than "Professional" functionality -- there is very little user control available in the Home edition, virtually no policy control, and very limited permission control. When Media Center was based on "Professional" (i.e. Business, in Vista terminology), the system was much more flexible from this perspective. For awhile, I didn't need this functionality because things were working. Now they're not, and I miss it terribly.

After putting so much time into trying to fix this problem, it got to the point where I firmly wanted the permissions and policies back in order to properly deal with this problem because it is a fairly trivial matter to deal with when that missing functionality is available. One option was to upgrade to Vista Ultimate. When Vista was released, I remember hearing about this "AnyTime Upgrade" functionality that would let you, for a differential fee, upgrade from one edition to another automatically -- with all required components being on the installation media of all versions, and the upgrade process being one of activating those additional components that already existed. I couldn't find this functionality in the end. I was taken to a link that offered me a comparison between the various versions, and also the option of buying the physical media of a Vista Ultimate... for the price of $199. To get back functionality that should never have been taken away? You're joking!

This hadn't been the only problem with Vista Media Center. I hadn't found the UI to be as good in Vista as in MCE2005 -- not terribly worse, but not as easy to get around and not as responsive. I'd also found it to be slower on the 3GHz Pentium 4 with 2GB of RAM that I use to run my Media Center.

So, instead of adding insult to injury and paying for an upgrade (that seemed way out of line with value) to Vista Ultimate, I instead threw away the $150 or so that I'd already put into buying Vista Home Premium and went back to the XP-based Media Center 2005. As soon as it was installed, I noticed how fast it was when compared to the Vista edition. Every aspect of the Media Center UI was faster, and it was more logically arranged to my eyes. So, my perception of order hadn't been a matter of adjustment.

Thankfully, in going back to MCE2005, all of the recordings I'd made under Vista were backward compatible -- presumably, the file format for recordings hadn't changed. I don't really see any difference in core functionality between the two versions, but the change from a vertical UI format to a horizontal one -- presumably to make better use of widescreen TVs -- doesn't make as much sense to me, especially considering that the remote is still a vertical affair ("page down" to scroll sideways a page?). It's quite a drastic change. For those who aren't used to learning new UIs all the time, I can't imagine what it'd be like to have to significantly change the way you use your TV just because of a software upgrade. But, then, maybe it's oriented toward people that like changing their UIs and this point doesn't matter.

Vista Media Center did have a tendency to take a long time to do certain things -- shutting down the TV UI, for example, and returning to the desktop would sometimes take a long time -- but, then, maybe the UI is not meant to be shutdown as often as I do? I always exit to the desktop when I'm done to avoid the relentlessly animated UI from unnecessarily consuming power. And there were a number of large pauses here and there during the operation of the UI that sometimes interrupted the flow of things in Vista. I think I had these in MCE2005, though, at various times, so it's not a big negative difference between the two, but I think their occurrence was greater in Vista than in MCE2005.

I'm not sure if I'll go back to Vista. Maybe Microsoft will throw a wrench into the whole thing, like not providing TV guide updates for XP-based versions once the support period ends. If I could get my hands on a cheap copy of Vista Ultimate, I would probably go back; but $200 is just too much -- you can buy an entire hardware-based PVR for that price!

I do still have (and like) Vista on my main PC and notebook, though. Most of the features that make me prefer it over XP are small, and not really worth the upgrade price if you look at the sum of their parts, but the reason I stay with Vista on the desktop is that, even if it does take two steps back from XP in places, on average it moves things three steps forward.

Technorati: Vista Media Center, Media Center 2005, back to XP

"But I didn't do anything illegal" may now apply to Canadian film funding

Bill C-10 was introduced by the Conservative government and was aimed at providing more discrimination about what types of film projects would be eligible to receive government funding. Should the bill pass, the Heritage Minister would have some say in how funding is to be distributed and would have the leeway to refuse funding to morally problematic content.

Post-C-10, for example, the Canadian film called "Young People F***ing" may not have received the funding it did and, because so few people would go and see it, left to its own devices it would likely never have been made. Forgive me, but I'm not about to get upset that revolting fringe TV shows like "Kink" may struggle if not for a government hand-out. I can live with that.

Going down on the perversity scale, we have things like "Show Me", a movie about a couple of squeegee kids playing a cat-and-mouse game with a woman after a hustle-gone-badly -- all the way up to cottage country in the interest of a "search for truth". And we have "The Dark Hours", which was pretty good until the requisite perverted streak was revealed near the end. Or any of Atom Egoyan's stuff -- a bit more high-brow and often well-done technically, but seemingly incomplete without some sexual strangeness thrown in. You can always count on good old Atom to give a good waggle to the poles of your moral compass. Without perverted sex, you see, Canadian movies struggle to be original.

None of the movies in the last paragraph would likely fail to get funding under C-10. But those mentioned further above likely would; and, since hardly anyone wants to see them anyway, and since they say nothing about Canada or the Canadian experience, why are they being funded with our tax dollars? Why not let things of such marginal interest be judged by their own market? Funding them with public money is going too far.

The bill has received substantial opposition (52% of Canadians apparently oppose it), and two Liberal senators in the Canadian senate have now suggested that Bill C-10 should discriminate only on the basis of the law and nothing else. In other words, as long as the content doesn't offend the criminal code then it should be able to receive funding. Another example of, "but I didn't do anything illegal!". Like educating the poor on how to put their money into our pockets, but of course we'd never steal from them.

So, since C-10 looks unlikely to pass unmodified, the funding of porn with tax dollars is likely safe and secure and the Canadian public needn't worry. But what about the permission of genuine free speech, as is currently under attack by Canada's own human rights bodies -- populated by the same types of minds that love to see the above type of content flourish?

Why would these minds condemn and try to silence people who want to publish, with their own money, opinions that simply contradict some elite minority's view of what is politically correct while, at the same time, hand out public money to projects that the same minority seem to view as possessing riveting and uniquely Canadian content? The two things are not equivalent, either: denying someone's right to say something is quite different from withholding money from them so that they have to earn capital from interested parties in order that they be able to present their message in a format of their own choice. Allowing someone to say something is quite different from actively handing out money to them in order that they be encouraged to say it.

Presumably, the view among those oddballs like Sarah Polley must be that something like "Kink" is the type of stuff that Canadians and only Canadians can offer to the world. Having lived here for quite some time, I'd have to agree: everyone else probably sees it for what it really is, if they see it at all, which is why Canadian film does not enjoy much of an audience, domestically or beyond.

Technorati: Bill C-10, human rights, movies, independent film, Canada

On the ethics of pet ownership: to the dogs and cats reading my blog, you are a waste of space

The Times reported today that veterinarians in the UK are the most profitable of small businesses, with a 37% return on capital. One explanation is as follows:

Affluent pet-owners, who once visited the vet only for worming tablets, neutering and for the administering of the last rites (for their pets), now demand heart surgery, chemotherapy and alternative medicines (for those apparently sometimes delicate pets) as well.

But another explanation is that the onset of availability of "pet insurance" has allowed pet owners to go after more extensive and expensive treatment for their pets:

“The advent of pet insurance has allowed owners to take gold-standard options for their animals,” David Catlow, past president of the British Veterinary Association, said.

Chemotherapy for the family pet? Organic dog food? This is where the free market and I part ways -- not everything is justifiable just because it has a market.

There was once a valid use for veterinarians: to supervise the putting down of an animal, to neuter an animal, or to give it the necessary shots or health inspections for licensing and to identify possible contagious diseases like rabies. They were also of use to farmers that depended on animals for their livelihood or to do actual work on the farm. And animals like seeing eye dogs have useful attributes that are expensive to foster and should be maintained if at all possible. But, as with most other things in Western society, we've just gone too far.

Either way I look at it, the situation with pets is obscene and immoral. How we can spend so much money bringing large domesticated animals into the world and use resources to build industries and services like dog bakeries to feed and pamper them is beyond me. How do you react when you learn that fish is exported from some countries -- away from the local populations -- to richer Western countries in order for it to be sold as cat food because the latter is more profitable?

And far too many peoples' attitudes toward animals are unhealthy in this society. When I first moved into my house, for example, I was accosted by the two dogs belonging to one of my neighbours. The owners implied that it was my fault that the dogs were upset and that I should talk to them nicely and they'd back down. I stared at them until they came to retrieve their overgrown insects and I think they got the message. And on the other side of me, there is a menagerie, one component of which is a collection of at least 3 or 4 outdoor cats -- the number never seems to go down, but the cats do change once in awhile -- who spend hardly any time indoors and spend the rest of the time crapping in my vegetable garden, killing birds, and -- and this is the reason I have not put traps down -- catching mice. Traps for the cats, I mean. By keeping the mouse population down, my tolerance wobbles on a tightrope but doesn't fall off. The owner talks to the cats as if they understand, and, knowing that I am not fond of them, that the cats will be in trouble if they go near the visible herb garden at the front of the house. She misunderstands: it is her, and not the cats, that I would hold responsible, for she as a human is the one who ostensibly has the capacity to reason.

The problem with so many resources being diverted towards such frivolous -- or, rather, actively abusive -- purposes is not that I think that the massive amount of food that goes toward dogs and cats would otherwise be diverted to human populations that are starving if they were not fed to animals. It's that, with the presence of massive numbers of starving people in the world, I think it's simply obscene to even contemplate using any food at all toward an animal population that does absolutely nothing for the world: the simple contrast of images is enough to make it offensive.

Small animals -- birds, rodents -- are not so bad. It's a small indulgence, and I think we're allowed small indulgences, and I think a connection to animals and to nature is good. And it's not that I dislike dogs or cats, per se. I just think that the sheer number of them in our society -- and the numbers seem to be increasing as affluenza spreads around the world -- is a sight that must foster resentment in any starving population that sees the big picture of how many of the world's resources are going toward feeding and servicing these creatures. And they have every right to be resentful.

Technorati: ethics, pets

The Onion's great satire on over-sexualization of pop stars

One of the best segments of The Onion movie is the "Melissa Cherry" interview.

Melissa Cherry is a Britney Spears-lookalike that they use as an interview subject to discuss her views on whether or not her music and music videos present an overly-sexualized view of young women.

Of course, she denies it against intertwined evidence and... well, what's all the fuss about? She's just an old-fashioned country girl.

The segment is below.



Technorati: The Onion, Melissa Cherry

Another move in organized Islam's aikido repertoire to be used against Western democracy

Ezra Levant has a post today on another move in the organized Islamic aikido effort against Western liberal democracy. This time, it's about copyrighting the image of Mohammed (PBUH) in Canada in order to prevent its unauthorized use by the infidels.

In aikido, the momentum of an attacker is guided in order that it be returned to sender and used against the attacker himself. In scouring the laws of Western liberal democracy for loopholes that can be used against it, radical organized Islam is doing just that.

I enjoy reading Ezra's blog because every post provides a connection between the specific issue he's writing about and the bigger picture. There's a bit of stretching here and there, but it's always clear and easy to comprehend.

Technorati: Ezra Levant, Islamophobia, aikido

Crime Stoppers: one way to generate extra income during hard times

Here's an interesting story. If you're in an area affected by recession, one way to generate extra income is to start reporting the crime going on around you to Crime Stoppers, in the hope that you'll receive a cash reward for your efforts:

The poor economy is driving people all over the country to phone in more Crime Stoppers tips, said Elaine Cloyd, president of Crime Stoppers USA.

"I think we're seeing it particularly in areas throughout the south and the west, where there are more home foreclosures and where there's higher unemployment," she said.

And it's a bonus if you can turn someone in that you owe money to, so that they can't come looking for their money. When they get out, I assume you can pay them back the money you owe them with the reward money:

McGhin said she has heard some tipsters say they are turning in people they know because they owe them money.

"I've had a couple people say, 'I wouldn't have done this, but I need the money,'" McGhin said. "Some people were very appreciative that they got a reward."

And it's relevant to Canadians, too, because all of this is providing jobs for Canadians:

Tips are received by an answering service in Canada.

Technorati: Crime Stoppers, extra income, recession

Hat politics

OK, about the hat*... this evening, I mentioned to someone who shall remain anonymous -- let's call her "The Maestra" -- that it was a pretty dumb-looking hat and that I would probably not likely be seen wearing it in public. She quite rightly pointed out that it was strange -- and I hadn't really thought of it -- that I'd put it on the Internet but would not wear it in public.

And she's right, of course. But, there's a very important (though maybe only to me) difference: being stood in front of the world wearing a silly hat in binary is quite different from being stood in realtime in front of a handful of people that probably don't care what's on my head (as long as it's not a bowl of fruit!) but who I imagine are paying close attention to how silly it looks. On the Internet, I don't have to process imaginary attention but, walking down the street, I do. Digging in the garden, I don't!

Anyway: silly hat; Matt paranoid. The end.

Technorati: hat, politics

* it's a nice wide-brimmed hat for the sun, though... here's a product link

Strange transformations: vegetable gardening, and real estate

We humans have a strange habit of changing our perception of the world to match the way we want it to be, whether or not it really is the way we say it is. We justify things to ourselves that we know are against our best interest by taking extremely optimistic views of a situation when we'd often be better off taking an equally pessimistic view and restraining ourselves instead. These justifications are difficult to listen to from the receiving end because you know that an injection of reality will put at least a small tear in the relationship. And it's even worse now that we live in an era of Facebook friends and reality TV, where people prefer to watch things that they could imagine being able to do themselves and befriend people whose capabilities they could easily see themselves taking on if they wanted to. We're not impressed by expertise anymore and we don't want to have our easily-mined wisdom threatened.

But, that's a small digression. There are two things that I want to mention -- one personal and one not -- that are strange perversions of objective reality:

My vegetable garden should be a source of energy, not a means to dispose of it
Last weekend, I was digging out another vegetable bed in the back garden. The places where I'm digging these beds is an old foundation and mostly consists of limestone chips and sand, so it's quite a tedious job. Strangely, though, one of the attractive features of this job was the amount of exercise I'd see myself getting out of it. I resisted the temptation to seriously consider the number of calories that'd be burned, but I was heading in that direction. And there's a strange inconsistency here because here I am, digging a vegetable garden which will hopefully one day produce food that I can eat -- food that I'll eat to produce energy -- and I'm worrying in advance about how much energy I can dispose of digging out the beds. If I was gardening as if it counted -- as if I needed to have a productive garden in order to survive, as many populations have in the past before oil came along about 150 years ago -- I'd be far more worried about how to expend as little energy as possible in getting the beds dug. I'd be interested in using less energy to maintain the garden than I was getting from the food that it produced. A valid concern, I think. But it's not that way anymore, is it? For anyone interested in keeping their weight down, it's about how we can go about eating what we like, when we like, and then how we can burn off the calories that we don't need afterwards.

My house is not an investment
At some point in the past 10-20 years, we started to look at the purchase of a house as an investment. I never really did, except in the most rudimentary sense of it being sensible to fix the roof over your head in place if at all possible, rather than paying someone else to hold it there for you. Beyond that, though, I bought somewhere to live and, beyond that place not being a bad value for money, I didn't give much thought to the investment angle. This is how I believe most people should buy a house because, as above, too many people become far too optimistic about potential returns on their investments when they kick themselves into storytelling mode. These days, it's hard to enter into a chat with someone about their house without the topic coming up of how much they paid for it and how much they believe it's now worth (usually based, as it should be, on how much someone else paid for a similar house in their area -- the value of real estate, after all, has nothing to do with how much you think it's worth). A lot of these people seem to calculate themselves quite clever, for some reason, even though, during a real estate boom, pretty much anyone's house in the target area will go up in value by an unreasonable amount of money. So, seeing your house as an investment is silly to me. Live in it; enjoy it; buy it according to those two measures, and anything else is a bonus.

But it has occurred to me that, with the amount of money people are now paying for the houses that they have to have, and with the lifelong saddlement of debt that they're taking on in order to do it, that they really have no other choice but to see the house as an investment. Any other point-of-view makes the whole deal unjustifiable. If you decide to finally get on with a house purchase after the age of 30, and if you're putting down 5% on a $400,000 house that you just can't do without and amortizing the other $380,000 over 40 years (the most popular mortgage option for first-time buyers), it essentially means that you will not own the home for any significant portion of your life. You'll end up paying more than the price of the house in interest before it's paid off, and for many years, most of the hard work behind your mortgage payments will be going to interest and not to moving you closer to actual ownership of the house.

So, of course you're going to look at it as an investment. We're told to wear the same glasses when faced with the skyrocketing cost of education, too -- that, stood at the price tag presenting a questionable value proposition, we shouldn't believe our lying eyes and should instead consider the possibilities of future income potential; that the return on the investment in our education makes it worthwhile. Sometimes, it can make sense.

But, it's dangerous, too, isn't it? Because when your perception of the value of a house is based more on your perception of return on your investment than of how you'll enjoy living there, you will pay more for something that you don't like living in as much as what you paid suggested you will. And when you're in the investment mindset, you're susceptible to all kinds of marketing that appeals to the real estate investor. You start thinking that, yes, maybe it's worth it to upgrade that bathroom because of the prospects for return on investment that real estate literature is full of. Or maybe granite countertops will make the investment that much more valuable. And a triple-car garage is such a unique feature that it'll pay for itself, even if you only have one car that you don't enjoy driving that much.

And then we hit an economic downturn and buyers can't knock down the mental barrier of skepticism about the value of a big house anymore. Or, we get an environmental conscience and people aren't interested in maintaining the carbon-flatulating excess of a big house anymore. Or, we see rapidly increasing energy prices and aren't interested in heating big houses anymore. Or, maybe we start to spend so much time on the congested roads that we begin to value our time with family a whole lot more and we're not interested in spending time cleaning big houses anymore. Worse yet, maybe it's multiple choice (E): all of the above.

And then, by some streak of luck, our culture shifts and we just don't want our worries about carrying such a large facility to be like the elephant in the room of our headspace that they so ever-presently are. And our concept of value shifts and vapourizes a large chunk of your equity when nobody values what you have anymore, and you're stuck. At this point, the best you hope for is that you don't owe more than your house is now worth.

You then realize that you were lied to by a bunch of real estate cowboys (and girls -- cowpeople? bullpeople? Cowgirls and bullboys?) and their co-conspirators in the racket that ended up in real estate because they couldn't make a career in anything else that required truth, integrity, and verifiable claim. But they've already made their money, and you're left holding a house-sized bag.

Technorati: real estate, bubble

A couple of things to remember about high gas prices in the GTA

Remember the following things about high gas prices in the GTA (but, really, anywhere in Canada):

• these prices include a 2% reduction in GST over the last couple of years: they are inclusive of an effective gas tax cut.
• these prices are lower than they would otherwise be because of a parity between the US and Canadian dollar. If parity had not been achieved, gas would be more expensive than it is now because it would be more expensive to purchase, in US dollars, the oil required to produce gasoline.

It's not looking good for food prices for the foreseeable future, either. It's worth noting here that, regardless of how advanced we think we are, we still depend on the weather for our food. We can buffer the consequences with stockpiles and dry storage (and we have been feeding from these stockpiles for the last decade or so, but these stockpiles are now running dangerously low), but we ultimately need co-operative weather in order produce the food to feed the huge population on this planet.

No wonder, then, that many farmers are still religious: they know first-hand that the man-made world doesn't even go halfway toward meeting their needs.

Technorati: gas prices, Canada, GTA

The difference with Inspector Wexford

Of all my favourite British detective series -- Foyle's War, Wire in the Blood, Inspector Wexford, Touch of Frost, Touching Evil -- the difference with Ruth Rendell's Inspector Wexford is that he's frequently aware of and frustrated by his own biases, which is an interesting quirk for a detective to have.

If any of the others have it, it becomes a centrepiece for a single story and begins and ends within a self-contained unit. But, I've only seen four or five Wexford mysteries and the proportion of those demonstrating this character flaw -- though a "good weakness to have" (in job interview terms) in that he challenges himself on it -- puts the ones that do into the majority.

Consider (but also consider that there are spoilers in these points):

• Simisola: in searching for a missing black girl, upon finding the missing girl he informs the parents that their daughter has been found and brings them in for an identification. It is not, in fact, their daughter, causing great anguish for the parents, and he worries that he would not have made the same mistake with a white victim because, I suppose, they are easier to tell apart.
• Put on by Cunning: he gets the idea into his head that the heiress of a murdered musician is not, in fact, the daughter and is actually an imposter being supported by a few co-conspirators. He goes so far as to travel to the USA to prove that he's right but, in the end, he finds out that the woman was, in fact, the genuine daughter.
• An Unwanted Woman: when told by an elderly man that the man was pushed from behind into a ditch while riding his bicycle, he thinks the man must just have lost his balance when he tried to check his watch while riding his bike through a field and just imagined the feeling of being pushed. But, then others start coming up with a similar story and he thinks he would have believed the elderly man had he not been elderly.

A very good series. And, the word "Wexford": there's something Irish and quaint about it, although it'd be even more quaint if it was Welsh. If I ever have children, they might end up with this in their name somewhere. They'll pray from afar that it's not their first name, I'm sure.

Technorati: Ruth Rendell, Inspector Wexford, character flaws

Abortion, demographics and, in unrelated news, Obama's high school student council presidency

Mark Steyn had a piece yesterday on the how the feminist-backed pro-choice movement is actually leading to a decline in female populations because, in many growing and populous countries, abortion is being used to abort female babies as couples express a preference for male babies. Some of the imbalances he quotes are quite worrying, and it makes you wonder what these countries will look like and how stable they will be when massive amounts of men can't find a life partner. Further, gender equality will become a curious thing when there is not an equal proportion of each gender to begin with (as much as a 15% imbalance in some countries, if their current trends continue).

Unrelated to the above, but in the same story, there's a great line about something pulled from a recent Obama speech that combines the vacuous nature of many of Obama's ideas with the humourous propensity for dead citizens to cast votes in US presidential elections:

"On this Memorial Day," said Barack Obama last Monday, “as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes — and I see many of them in the audience here today".
Hey, why not? In Obama’s Cook County, Illinois, many fallen heroes from the Spanish-American War still show up in the voting booths come November. It’s not unreasonable for some of them to turn up at an Obama campaign rally, too.

Obama is a good speaker, and he knows how to generate enthusiasm for ideas. In America, this ability is probably an important ability for a leader to have at this point in time. But, I'm always left wondering how he'll fulfill any of his promises, and I'm not sure how many people are questioning what he says to a sufficient degree. The sum of the parts of his speeches leave me with an image in my head of "kitchen sink, plus free bonus items". I recently read this, for example:

But Obama also had fighting words for John McCain on energy: "Maybe if he went to Pennsylvania and met the man who lost his job but can’t even afford the gas to drive around and look for a new one, he’d understand that we can’t afford four more years of our addiction to oil from dictators."

Obama continued: "That man needs us to pass an energy policy that works with automakers to raise fuel standards, and makes corporations pay for their pollution, and oil companies invest their record profits in a clean energy future -- an energy policy that will create millions of new jobs that pay well and can’t be outsourced. That’s the change we need."

"the man who lost his job but can’t even afford the gas to drive around and look for a new one"? Who is this man, exactly? I don't think he exists. Because if you're jobless and can't afford to operate your car, you would sell your car and look for other means of transportation. If you can't afford the gas after a 30% increase in 1 year, you can't afford the upkeep, either. The fact that he has to drive a car in order to look for a new job is the real problem.

"he’d understand that we can’t afford four more years of our addiction to oil from dictators"? It's true, but why throw in the "from dictators" clause? They can't afford four more years of their addiction to oil at all. But their country has been built on an addiction to oil, and its population has been raised on the premise of an addiction to oil, and unless you're going to rebuild and repopulate the country in a day then you'll have another four years of oil addiction regardless of who the president is.

"That man needs us to pass an energy policy that works with automakers to raise fuel standards"? So that the man who can't afford gas for his car will have to go out and buy a whole new car in order that he can afford to drive one? For many people, it's cheaper to keep driving the car you have than to buy a new one, even if what you're driving is a gas guzzler. I agree that fuel standards should be raised, but even better is to reduce our dependency on the car altogether. Also, this will take more than four years to reach market, so, again, we will have oil addiction for another 4 years if this is meant to be a pinnacle of the solution.

"oil companies invest their record profits in a clean energy future"? Record profits, nominally, perhaps. In relation to expenses, they are not that high and it's a stretch to call those profits a "windfall" because it is not a matter of them simply reaping the benefits of a huge run up in prices while their costs remain the same. And, who would say that a guy making $1,000 on his $10,000 investment should be reigned in because he's making 1000 times more than the guy that reaped $1 from his $10 investment? Oil company revenues are going up, but so are their costs. Oil is becoming harder to extract, requires expensive energy itself to produce and transport, and requires the use of increasingly scarce expertise and equipment (and the more difficult the oil is to reach, the more expensive the tools and expertise are to acquire).

"an energy policy that will create millions of new jobs that pay well and can’t be outsourced."? Hey, great idea, Obama! Why not just skip the job part and put money directly into people's bank accounts? There's a dire absence of "how to" in this idea, as with most of the other ideas.

There's something ironic going on here. The same people that are so eager to criticize Republican voters as dumb, witless, and uneducated are being fooled by Obama because of their own ignorance over energy issues, which have only very recently become in vogue enough to score you points at the weekend cocktail parties and so are not very well understood: it's not good enough to just turn up in a Prius anymore. Understanding energy issues does not draw from the same, familiar palette of rhetoric as does coming up with speaking points about foreign dictatorships and negative redistribution of income. These people would vote Obama anyway, of course and are not really being swayed by him, but they are quite visibly unprepared to answer challenges to his wishlist for the tooth fairy.

And, so, listening to Obama reminds me a little bit of listening to the campaigning 16-year-old trying to steer himself toward victory in the local election for high school student council president. Maybe we'll hear more as the real campaign begins. My mind is open, but I'm not sure US elections are won on the kind of detail that I'm looking for*.

Technorati: Obama, Mark Steyn, abortion, feminism

* this is no way implies that McCain is a better choice

Matt, ready for a day of digging in the sun

I can't seem to have a picture taken of me in a hat without putting on a silly face. The reason is that I don't often wear hats and, when I do, I always feel like a garden gnome.


While I was out digging today, it smelled like the beach. I was digging sand; I was wearing sunscreen on the extremities not covered by the hat; and cigarette smoke was wafting over from the chain smokers sitting out in the backyard of the house next door. The beach.

Technorati: hat, gardening, digging

Hot weather... heat wave... shock, horror!

A few years ago, the weather started to become news in advance. Radio started playing foreboding music to accompany the announcement of a borderline "severe thunderstorm watch", and newspapers started picking up anything threatening they could find on the Environment Canada website and transforming it into a headline story on their websites. In the newspapers, particularly, it seems to be a way to get new reporters to do something exciting.

The Toronto Star, today, has a story about the hardship of a "heat wave" that we are allegedly victims of at the moment. This, after not only a cold, long winter and an unseasonably cool May, but after only one day of temperatures barely over 32C (32.7C, if you happen to live near the airport). Who feels like a victim? Nobody I know. But, the Star is one of those papers that likes to conjure the inner victim out of people.

Those seeking refuge from this weekend’s scorching heat should head for the lakeshore, where the high is expected to be 26C. Near the waterfront, said Meredith, temperatures will be almost 10C lower than in the city core due to westerly winds coming off the lake.

The sudden heat wave sweeping southern Ontario has pushed temperatures higher than 30C, well beyond highs forecasted in the rest of the country.

I'm not sure how westerly winds come off the lake, when the lake is located either east or south of the city, but that's beside my point. And I'm sure it has all to do with the winds and nothing to do with the fact that the water in the lake takes longer to warm up after the winter than does air.

A "heat wave", by the way, is defined as being a state where we've had three consecutive days with temperatures over 32C. So far, we've had one that barely broke the mark. So it's a bit presumptuous to say that we're in a heat wave. They quote someone from Environment Canada in the story, too, and presumably he could have provided the definition if the Star was interested.

It wasn't their usual Environment Canada celebrity David Phillips that they quoted, though. And different people at Environment Canada seem to have different feelings. Feelings shouldn't come into science, but that's the way it goes when you can't predict the weather 5 days in advance but have aspirations beyond 3 months. A couple of years ago, I remember reading a story where Mr. Phillips was quoted as saying, about the unseasonably warm autumn, that it would take awhile for the cool weather to come because so much heat was stored in the ground from the abnormally hot summer that preceded it. A few days later, we entered a prolonged cool spell.

At the end of today's Star story, we have this lovely quote:

But this weekend’s heat wave is not necessarily a sign of things to come, Meredith added.

“Now that we’re into summer, the warm weather should continue, but things should be getting back to normal.”

Beside the fact that summer doesn't begin until June 20th and that we're not yet "into summer", just three days prior, the Star ran a story (though imported from the Canadian Press) saying that the summer of 2008 would be long, hot, and sweaty:

After an exceptionally cold and snowy winter, Canadians from coast to coast can expect yet another hot, sweaty summer, a new long-range forecast from Environment Canada suggests.

So, it's difficult to extract much guiding light from the Star on these matters. I'll continue to find 3-day forecasts useful; 5-day forecasts for general trends; seasonal trends useless. And when the weather's expected to be bad, I'll go and read Environment Canada's watch and warning statements -- the stuff produced by scientists that hasn't been massaged by journalists and celebrities.

By the radio and newspaper, I can't tell the difference between a weather watch, warning, or tornado outbreak because they're all treated with the same intonation, urgency, and seriousness and beg acceleration to the next phase before it's a serious risk.

And beside that, on the radio, they shout at me. And I don't like it.

Technorati: weather, heat wave, accuracy, Toronto

Finally: good whole wheat bread from the Zojirushi bread machine

I expect that there are a lot of people out there that, like me, bought a bread machine thinking it'd be a great way to make your own bread at home with complete control over what goes in it.

No more "modified milk ingredients"; no more "soy lecithin"; no more of the things like the following, as exist in Whole Wheat Wonder Bread:

• mono and diglycerides
• exthoxylated mono and diglycerides
• dough conditioners (sodium stearoyl lactylate, calcium iodate, calcium dioxide)
• datem
• calcium sulfate
• yeast nutrient (ammonium sulfate)
• extracts of malted barley and corn
• dicalcium phosphate
• diammonium phosphate
• calcium propionate

For the record, this is all you need to make whole wheat bread in about 4 hours:

• whole wheat flour
• yeast
• water
• sugar
• salt

But, it would not be a very nice bread to the Wonder Bread palate. It would dry out quickly, be quite bitter, be quite dense, and definitely would not be soft. The Wonder Bread contains the above, but also the further above, presumably in the interest of producing a Wonder Bread crowd pleaser while accommodating an industrial production system at the same time.

What happened after I bought the bread machine, though, was that I stopped buying bread at the supermarket, and I had been buying mostly whole wheat bread at that time. After I got the machine, I tried the whole wheat recipes that came with the machine and they weren't very good. They smelled nice and the crust was decent, but the innards were dense and the taste was quite harsh. So, I stopped making whole wheat bread at some point and went back to white. So much for the "health" angle: white flour is essentially dust with synthetic vitamins added to replace the ones that were removed in order to make it white.

I tried a few options but was not all that successful. Until recently.

Not too long ago, I picked up Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads book. I was still interested in getting the whole wheat thing going, and I liked his previous books, so I thought I'd give it a try. The book turned out to be great; far more for the discussion that takes place inside than the recipes themselves. I now have a decent understanding of why the above problems occurred and it gave me some ideas about how to fix them.

I've now reached a repeatably reliable recipe from which to make a tasty and soft whole wheat bread in the machine, on the regular cycle, while still using only natural ingredients. It does take some forethought and planning, though -- you need to get it ready about 24 hours before you plan to put it in the machine.

The recipe is adapted from the Reinhart book, and made with the Zojirushi BB-HAC10 bread machine.

24 hours beforehand

24 hours before you plan to start the machine, you need to get the biga and soaker ready. These are both very easy to do.

First, get two bowls out.

For the soaker, put 113 grams of whole wheat flour, 1/4 tsp. salt and 89 grams of milk into one bowl. Stir them until they're combined and all of the flour is incorporated, cover with a damp kitchen towel and leave at room temperature for 24 hours.

For the biga, put 113 grams of whole wheat flour, 1/8 tsp. instant yeast, and 85 grams of tepid filtered/spring water into a bowl. Stir until combined and then knead in your hands for a few minutes (the dough is so small that you can do it right in your hands). Let it rest for 5 minutes and then do a bit more kneading with wet hands for about 1 minute more. Put the bowl in a plastic bag and put the bag in the fridge for 22 hours (24 hours is fine, too, but you need to bring it to room temperature before using it in the machine, so 2 hours out of the fridge will do this).

On bread-making day

To make the bread, use a pastry scraper to cut the soaker and biga into 6 pieces each. Drop the pieces into the bread machine pan in alternating order (add a piece of soaker, then a piece of biga, etc.). To the pan, add 1/4 tsp. salt, 7 grams of soft butter, and 21 grams of honey. Then, add 28 grams of whole wheat flour (try to add it in a mound, rather than scattered evenly). Make a small well in the mound (it will not be much of a well because there's not much flour, but you just need to keep the yeast reasonably dry). In the well, put just over 1 tsp. of instant yeast.

Now, you just have to put the pan in the bread machine and start it on the regular cycle.

So, this recipe satisfies at least two important parts of whole wheat bread making: it soaks the flour for an extended period of time, allowing more of the flavour to come out and the bitterness to subside, and it softens and moisturizes the flour to allow the dough to stretch further (making it more airy). It also adds more sweetness, and you do need more sweetness in whole wheat bread than in white because it's just what's necessary to complement the flavour of whole wheat properly.

This produces a soft whole wheat bread that is great for sandwiches and OK for toast, too. When toasted, the crust crumbles rather than crackles, so it may not be to everyone's taste for that purpose. It's still better than most industrial whole wheat bread for toast, though. If you let it cool for a few hours, it will slice very nicely with a bread knife. It also freezes well.

Compared to the whole wheat recipe that came with the Zojirushi machine, it is less bitter, more evenly flavoured, has a softer crust, a nicer texture, and is far more airy and rises better.

Here is a picture of how it looks:

Technorati: Zojirushi, whole wheat, recipe

Music status quo in lieu of upchucked scatterbrain

Over the past few days, I came up with a number of ideas for blog posts but have either forgotten about most of them or can't articulate what I want to say well enough to bother starting (I usually start a blog post thinking it'll be about 10 lines long -- which is what I'd say if I had to talk -- and it ends up being a page when I realize the freedom to write and edit and not bore anyone with a verbal epic). Strange that -- I enjoy other people's verbal epics but assume they'll be bored by my own. That could still be true. At least on the blog, you can take it or leave it, or skip the parts you don't want.

Anyway, I could blog about roasted potatoes and tilapia and the great book on cooking I'm reading (which is not really a cookbook) that led to it. Or, I could write about the nearly-perfected long-ferment bread recipe that I've come up with for my bread machine that has made me enthusiastic about whole wheat bread again after much trial and error, but I'll wait until I've had one more episode of success with that before I risk wasting anyone's time.

So, in lieu of a peas-and-carrots upchuck of my scatterbrained state, I'm going to write a couple of short paragraphs (we'll see about that) about music.

My relationship with recorded music (here we go... already sounding pretentious) has changed over the past few months -- mostly since I started my new job. At my old job, I'd have lots of travel time in the car and I used to listen to a lot of music during the 2-hour round-trip. For a long time, I resisted getting a CD player in the car because I was worried that I'd stop enjoying silence -- that the temptation to turn it on if it was there would be too great. When the CD player's not there, you naturally start to do other things: sing your own music, think about things, look out the window, and other things that fill the gap in your mental capacity left after what's required to keep the car moving forward without hitting anything is removed. Music in the car doesn't leave much room for those things, I find. Sometimes, but most of the time not.

Anyway, when I was in that pattern I'd often go through a cycle of phases that would be variable in time and sequence, but all of the phases were there in each cycle. I'd listen to Tori Amos for a bit and not have an appetite for anything else. Then a bit of Morrissey. And then I'd listen to the indie-rock flavour of the month and find one or two that I really liked and listen to that for a week or so. And then I'd get stuck in a techno rut that usually was related to increased coffee consumption (the two go very well together -- techno is the only thing that can satisfy an overcaffeinated mind because everything else moves too slowly and takes too long to get to the point). In each of these phases, I'd not be able to stand any of the music from the other phases when I was in them.

In the new job, though, now that I'm not in the car anymore, I find listening to music to be a waste of time. Since I don't have to pay attention to the road and don't have to use my hands, I can read books. But I can't easily read books and listen to music. It seems like too much and it makes me tired. Not sure why, but it's true. So, I've taken to a preference of reading and nothing else. Consequently, these days, recorded music is not as much a part of my life as it used to be.

To make matters worse, I've picked up some kind of a virus that made me veer toward baroque music. For about a month, it was all I could listen to. And I found that I could listen to it while reading quite easily, though I still don't really do it. Even now, my palate hasn't come back into tune with the indie rock that I frequently listened to just a few months ago.

I think what happened was that I realized (and I recognize that I'm a slow learner) that baroque and classical music has done much of what modern popular music still tries very hard to do yet rarely achieves in terms of expressing a broad range of human emotions. And when you realize that this was done in the 17th and 18th century, you have to wonder what people are trying to accomplish these days. As much as I still like certain popular music, the words often get in the way. If every artist could do half an album with words and half without, I think we'd be able to filter the talent far more easily.

Beyond that, pop and indie rock music put forward a lot of emotions, feelings and ideals that I don't even really recognize as valid or important: it's far too self-indulgent and narcissistic, way too navel-gazing and existential, and much too disconnected from non-fictional reality (implying, of course, that there is such a thing as fictional reality these days). Pass. I was enjoying Matt Nathanson's music for a few weeks until I heard him open his mouth in banter during a live show on YouTube and realized that the guy is a pervert who's using his songs as some kind of cover for who he really is. Great actor, he is. Not unlike many people of his (our) age who have this fluffy romantic vision in their head of who they are that is really a polar opposite of the truth. But the smashed illusion ruined it for me and I'll have to wait for the next one. Sadly, I already bought the CD.

Right now, I'm stuck in silence as far as music goes: not listening to all that much, with a few particular tracks from a broad spectrum that are appealing to me.

I'm going to paste brief samples of each of them here. Hopefully I won't get into trouble. Have a listen, though, and see what you think.

• Bach: this first one is from the end of Bach BWV58, conducted by Masaaki Suzuki. There's so much going on and it all works. I find it very energizing.
• Vivaldi: this one is from Vivaldi RV331, and I think anyone will recognize it as Vivaldi. Played by Giuliano Carmignola.
• Royal Wood: beautiful piano closure to a song called "Siren" from his "A Good Enough Day" album. I didn't fully appreciate his work at first, but as I listen more to it I appreciate the musicianship and the relative complexity of his work when compared to his peers.
• Armin van Buuren: very unsubtle techno in a track called "In & Out Of Love". Compared to most techno, I was impressed by the complexity and harmony of the thing. This is moving more toward a progression of the Pet Shop Boys style of synth pop than of techno (which is a good thing).
• E. S. Posthumus: their recent CD is a refinement of their first one, I find. The style is similar to a high-energy film score -- string sections mixed with contemporary instrumentation (Hans Zimmer's style is the closest I can think of). The latest CD has a CD full of their instrumentation with vocals that are apparently sung in a completely fictional language. The second CD is a remix of earlier tracks. This is one that works very well, called "Odenall" -- the timing of the toms is amazing!

So, that's where I am today.

Technorati: music

On target markets and the Viagra crosshairs on my back

Lately, I've been noticing that my junk e-mail has become far more targeted and specific. I'm not sure what I did to fit this slender profile but, as you can see, it could be troubling if I took this sort of thing seriously.

I'm sure there's a human rights complaint to be made here somewhere. Compensation for hurt feelings, maybe, as the Muslims are currently doing* at the B.C. tribunal.

Technorati: spam

* "as the Muslims are currently doing" casts a wide net. But these people claim to be speaking for all Muslims, so I'll take their word for it.

Polygamy... go ahead; I don't care -- in the GTA or anywhere else

The Toronto Star has continued running with what now looks to be a series on the existence of polygamy in the Toronto area. Although I have my doubts about the quality of the paper in general, I am impressed by the courage they display in addressing this issue.

But I'm afraid that I spent all of my moral Kool Aid on the state of marriage in Canada back during the gay marriage debate. The acceptance of gay marriage in Canada, to me, meant that the social value of marriage had shifted quite radically in the following ways:

• it became clearly about the desires of adults rather than the best interests of children
• it reflected a general malaise about the institution of marriage -- "it's damaged goods; you can have it"
• it stated that it was no longer preferable as a matter of state sanction that a child be raised by their own parents and be entitled to the sense of identity that such a preference embodies

Marriage is not a human right. It is a social value celebrating the union of a man and woman for its unique capacity for procreation and to raise a child in a stable environment with the two parent gender role models present for the duration. It was an ideal that was recognized by the state and granted special privileges because it was something to aspire to. Homosexuals were never excluded from this -- a homosexual man was free to marry anyone he so chose (as long as that person met the criteria required of any other man -- that the person he was to marry was a woman, was not under-age, was not a close relative, and was not already married). The new definition removed one of those prerequisites. Maybe we could throw out a couple more?

We do have a tendency to do things like that, don't we? To make things equal by bringing both down to the level of the worse one, rather than by raising them both up to the higher standard of the better one. With feminism, for example, it was rarely suggested that men should be less promiscuous. It was suggested, instead, that women be encouraged to be as promiscuous as men if they so chose to be.

As we know, the traditional definition of marriage was thrown out the window. We lost sight of what the institution was meant to achieve. It had slowly been transforming, anyway, into something by the adults and for the adults and the debate simply gave us a chance to do a litmus test on how much we really cared about it. It had been shapeshifting for decades, but we'd simply never put it to the test. In the end, we didn't see what was so important about marriage, and so we struggled to see what all the fuss was about when asked whether its definition could be significantly changed. We thought it'd be interesting to see what would happen if the state could say that, yes, even though there is no value to society of the union of a man and a man or a woman and a woman, we should try and correct our bifocals to make it seem that this is equal to the union of a man and a woman. And we thought it'd be neat to introduce legislation sanctioning, if desired, the separation of a child from his biological parents. In other words, it's no longer ideal that a child be raised by her own parents: something else is just as good. And we hope, if we even considered it at all, that the children that are affected by this and grow up separated from their parents won't mind that we as a society said that this was perfectly OK for them and that the family environment that we setup for them as the gold standard was, in fact, equal to a situation in which they had been raised by the people that brought them into the world and who have a natural interest in doing right by them.

The personal consequence to me of the amount of attention and caring that I exhausted on that debate is that, faced with questions about the permissibility of polygamy, I really don't care whether or not it happens or whether or not it's one day made legal. Marriage, to me, is a damaged institution that no longer has much social value at all. And I suspect many others feel the same way. The people that genuinely cared about the preservation of marriage as it once existed were defeated. Would you now ask them to defend a definition of marriage that they don't agree with? The people that didn't care abstained from the debate or voted in favour because "it's all good". They will probably do the same again.

Through a series of human rights gyrations -- probably involving the Human Rights Commissions -- and a few sprinkles of trailblazing ambition by those in charge of our courts, I would not be surprised if polygamy is one day (and quite possibly one day soon) made legal in this country.

Technorati: polygamy, Canada, legal