How to get a wax cork out of a winged corkscrew

A while back, I had a bottle of wine (I forget the brand) with a wax cork.

The internet told me to open it with a corkscrew just like I would a regular cork, which worked nicely.

Problem: the wax cork got kind of smushed and misshappen and stuck in my winged corkscrew, and the internet had no useful advice on how to remove it.

So, for future googlers, here's the solution: hot water.

I boiled some water in the kettle, put the corkscrew with the stuck cork in a glass measuring cup that I knew could handle boiling water, and poured the water over it. This softened the wax cork enough that I could easily manipulate the shape and get it off the corkscrew. 

 

You might be able to do this with your hands or you might need whatever tools you have around to grab/pull/cut/manipulate, but in either case make sure you wear oven mitts or something similarly heat proof on your hands, since metal corkscrews and metal tools conduct the heat from the boiling water.

"And also" is the key to appreciating the little things in life

I blogged previously about the idea of "and also", which helps reconcile the fact that we live in a complex and imperfect world. 

 

I'm also finding lately that "and also" makes the idea of living in the moment/looking on the bright side/appreciating the little things in life more palatable.

 

For most of my life, the conventional wisdom I've received has been "Yeah, the world is on fire. But look on the bright side - we have delicious peaches!"

Which makes no sense whatsoever! The fact that it's peach season cannot possibly mitigate the fact that the world is on fire!

But consider: "The world is on fire. And also, we have delicious peaches."

Clearly, the sensible thing to do is eat and savour the peaches!

It doesn't claim to fix, mitigate, or outweigh the problem. It is simply another thing, separate from the problem, that comes with a logical course of action.

 

Some days, that makes it easier to get through the day.

Where I'm at on social media (literally and philosophically)

I now have a Bluesky account (@ImpudentStrumpet.bsky.social) and a Mastodon account (@ImpudentStrumpet@mastodon.social), and I continue to be on Twitter (@ImpStrump).

I've tried to move my follows over, but if I missed you it wasn't intentional.

 

I haven't made any decisions about which I'm going to use or how or how much. My communities seem to be leaning towards Bluesky, but its interface doesn't play nicely with my post-head-injury eyes and brain. I have discovered various web clients (turns out you can just search github for things you're wishing someone would code!) but nothing is consistently comfortable.

 

(I use a combination of GoodTwitter2 and Minimal Theme for Twitter to make Twitter comfortable. It looks like this. I'd welcome any tips on how to achieve this with Bluesky or Mastodon.)

***

I have been finding Twitter less useful lately. Either there are fewer tweets or I'm seeing fewer tweets. Quite frequently I pop in, idly scroll, and quickly reach the point where I last left off. (That hasn't happened for years!)

Previously, if I heard a weird noise or something outside, I'd search for "Yonge and Eglinton" (my neighbourhood) in Twitter and get other people tweeting about whatever weird noise I'd just heard. (e.g. they'd be saying something like "Why's there a helicopter circling Yonge and Eglinton?" and then I'd know it's a helicopter). Now, I just get real estate listings.

 

I'm finding more pornbots in my mentions and fewer actual people. I'm finding TV livetweeting hashtags less active. Basically, it's just not meeting my needs as well.

 

If my needs were just entertainment, I wouldn't be worrying about this. However, after nearly 15 years of curation, I've gotten to a point where my Twitter feed effortlessly provides me with new information that I didn't even know I needed and would never have thought to proactively seek out. 

From what it means when someone asks "What are your pronouns?" to the fact that COVID is airborne and can be mitigated with robust HEPA filtration, important things I didn't even know that I didn't even know reached me as I was idly scrolling for weather updates and puppy pictures, and I'm a more informed person better able to function in society because of it.

I fear that my social media might be doing that less well now, and I might not even notice.

(I'm also noticing something similar with Reddit - of stuff that's reaching me organically, the ratio of people who are less informed that me to people who have something to teach me is worsening.)

***

And the scary thing is how easy it would be for me to live in ignorance. I'm older. I'm established. I'm comfortable. I have leeway and credibility and social capital. I'm intrinsically pessimistic and secure in my flaws.

If someone asked me "What are your pronouns?" and I didn't know what they meant, I'd be flummoxed and baffled. Someone would explain what they meant, I'd tell them "she/her" and apologize with grace for not knowing what they meant on the grounds that I'm a milquetoast middle-aged lady. I wouldn't suffer any long-term consequences, and might even get credit for handling it with grace rather than harrumphing over it. 

And I wouldn't even realize I'd missed something - I'd just think this is yet another thing that didn't reach me until it reached me.

 

If I didn't know that the COVID protections currently being required by public health were insufficient and ended up contracting COVID as a result, I would shrug my shoulders and figure "Well, bad things happen. People get sick. Why shouldn't it happen to me?" Even if I developed Long COVID, my head injury has already taught me that life-altering medical consequences can happen for reasons completely outside your control. 

 

I'd be miserable, my life would be worse every day, and I wouldn't even realize I'd missed something - I'd think this is yet another bad thing that happens to people.

I'm sure there are already tons of things I'm missing, but I fear that the enshittification of Twitter is exacerbating it compared with if Twitter had continued to be run with the same competence as before the takeover.

***

I've also been thinking Tumblr a lot. 

Tumblr was bought out for a ridiculously high price in 2013 by disruptive management that made a lot of unpopular changes. It bled users, and was sold in 2019 at a massive loss. 

Conventional wisdom is that Tumblr is dead, but the fact of the matter is the community is still there.

I'm not on Tumblr (the interface and format never really met my needs), but I follow some people's Tumblrs in my feed reader, and a lot of Good Omens fandom happens there so I do keep an eye on it.

And the community is still there, still thriving, still being weird with their blorbos and their Goncharovs. They outlasted the occupiers and drove them off.

Maybe we can do the same thing with Twitter?

***

I've quipped that I don't call Twitter "X" for the same reason that I don't call Gdańsk "Danzig".

 

Gdańsk has, obviously, been through some shit over the centuries. Irrevocable harm was done, many did not emerge unscathed (to put it mildly).

And yet, today, it is unquestionably called Gdańsk. Not Danzig.

 

I haven't given up hope that we can do the same with Twitter.

But I've also hedged my bets and secured my pied-à-terre elsewhere.

Good Omens subtitle translations: "They are toast: T-O-S-T...E!"

This post contains exactly one (1) line from Good Omens Season 2, which technically makes it a spoiler that should be tagged under the fandom's robust spoiler tagging policy.

 

At one point in the second season of Good Omens, the demon Shax, who is already established as a poor speller, says "They are TOAST! T-O-S-T-...E!"

Naturally, I started thinking about how you might translate that.

Fortunately, there are subtitles in 29 different languages, so I decided to write them down.

(I originally braindumped this on Twitter, but given that it's no longer reliable or googleable, I'm also putting it here.)

Additions, analysis, commentary, and transcriptions of the languages I can't do myself are more than welcome! 

Languages I know:

Canadian French: "fichus: F-I-S-H-U" 

France French: "cuits: C-U-I-S" 

German: "töte: T-Ö-H-T-E" 

Latin American Spanish: "fritos: F-R-I-T-O-S" (no error ) 

Spain Spanish: "muertos: M-U-R-T-O...S" 

Polish: "po nich: P-O N-I-C-H" (no error)

 

Languages I don't know:

Bahasa Melayu (Malay): "mati: M-A-T-E" (I think - I'm not certain about the morphology) 

Catalan: "Fregits: F-R-E-J-I-T-S" 

Dansk (Danish): "kaput: K-A-P-U-D"

Euskara (Basque)): "akabatu: A-Q-A-B-A-T-U" 

Filipino has her spell out "P-A-T-A...I", but I don't see that combination of letters in the preceding sentences. I don't know enough about the language to provide more info.

Indonesia: "celaka: C-E-L-A-G-A" 

Italian: "fritti: F-R-I-T-T..I: 

Magyar (Hungarian): "kampec: K-A-N-P-E-C...Z" 

Nederlands (Dutch): "klos: C-L-O-S" 

Norsk Bokmal (Norwegian): "ferdige: F-R-E-D-I-G...E"

Brazilian Portuguese: "fritos: F-R-I-T-O...Z" 

Portugal Portuguese: "ares: A-R-E-S...E" (the whole segment is "vão todos pelos ares" - I have a hunch "ares" might not contain all the meaning) 

Romanian: "praf: F-R-A-P"

Suomi (Finnish): "mennyttä: M-E-N-Y-T-A" 

Swedish: "döda: D-Ö-D-D-A" 

Turkish: "kizartirium: K-I-Z-A-T-T" (the letters I've transcribed as "i" are actually the dotless Turkish I, but I don't know how to type that)

Cestina (Czech): "napadrt: N-A-P-A-T-R-T" (There's a diacritic on the T that I don't know how to make) 

Greek is available, but I don't know how to transcribe or transliterate it. 

Russian (my transliteration): "kayuk: K-O-YU-G"

Ukrainian: the word is (my transliteration) "kinets" with a soft sign at the end, and she spells it out as (my transliteration "K-I-N-E-TS" without the soft sign at the end. 

There are also Hebrew and Arabic subtitles, but I can't read, transcribe or transliterate them.

Things I Don't Understand: people who value health labour but don't value COVID protections

I blogged before about the labour of health.

Some people value health labour. They value doing it themselves, and/or they value being seen to do it, and/or they believe other people should do it.

A baffling phenomenon I've observed is people who value health labour, but don't value (and sometimes outright object to) COVID protections!

I grew up surrounded by people who value health labour (that's why I'm inclined to push back against it myself), so I'm familiar with many different motivations for valuing, engaging in or advocating for health labour. And COVID protections align with every single one of the motivations I can think of.

Some people value and engage in health labour because they themselves want to be healthy. They want to live longer, or have quality of life for longer, or simply avoid the unpleasantness and inconvenience of poor health. And COVID protections help achieve all this.

Some people value and engage in health labour because they believe sufficient diligence will save them from distressing outcomes. And COVID protections are a form of diligence that reduces the likelihood of distressing outcomes.

 

Some people value, engage in, and advocate for health labour because they believe people have the responsibility to their fellow taxpayers to reduce the healthcare they need and therefore the healthcare costs they incur. And COVID protections will reduce the amount of healthcare people need and the healthcare costs people incur. 

Some people value and engage in health labour because they want to be seen to be A Healthy Person, walking around with a yoga mat and instagramming their smoothies. And this can also be done with COVID protections, walking around in an N95 and instagramming your efforts to build a Corsi-Rosenthal box.

Some people engage in or advocate for health labour out of a sense of smug superiority. Doing this labour makes them feel like they're better than other people who aren't doing it, or calling out other people's failure to do this labour lets them position those people as Less Than. And many COVID protections are also things you can do, or call out other people for not doing, for both your individual health and for general public health.

 

Some people value, engage in and advocate for health labour because they value individualism and personal responsibility. They value making personal efforts to take care of yourself and your loved ones without any expectation that the systems and structure of society will do so. And individual COVID protections like masking and vaxxing and providing good indoor air quality everywhere you can align with this. It really seems like the people who vociferously tout individualism in other aspects of health labour should be the ones lugging a Corsi-Rosenthal box everywhere they go!

Some people advocate for health labour because they're profiting from it. They sell nutritional supplements and fitness programs and such. And this can also be done with COVID protections, selling masks and air purifiers. You could get an additional revenue stream while also keeping your clients healthy enough to continue working and earning enough to keep buying your regular products!

I've heard some people say that this comes from a place of eugenics - people thinking that you'll only be affected by COVID if you have inferior genetics, and having superior genetics means you'll be safe from COVID. 

What I don't get about that is why people who believe in eugenics would also value health labour so much. (I'm aware of the historical precedent, but I don't understand it.) If your genes were so superior, why would you need health labour at all? Surely superior genetics wouldn't need carefully balanced fitness and nutrition, and instead could handle whatever the natural course of modern life throws at them!

There are all kinds of reasons why people are into health labour, and they all align with prioritizing COVID protection. And yet, a surprising number of people who are into health labour seem to be disregarding, or even disdaining, COVID protection. 

I just don't understand.

Saving for a down payment is not the only barrier to housing affordability

Discourse about homebuying affordability often focuses on saving up for a down payment - which, of course, is a major, time-consuming endeavour. (It took me 10 years, and I was buying at 2012 preconstruction prices!)

 

But another important consideration is how much mortgage you quality for based on your income. A 20% down payment is insufficient if the mortgage you qualify for is less than 80% of the purchase price.

 

An example of this fallacy is this recent Toronto Star article about "starter home" affordability.

Toronto in 2021

Time to save for down payment: 20+ years

What is Toronto’s starter home of this decade? In short, it’s further from the core, harder to attain and requires decades’ worth of savings.

Looking at properties that fell around 20 per cent below the average cost in 2021, there were still some bungalows in the mix, such as a raised bungalow that hit the market in the Scarborough neighbourhood of Birchcliffe-Cliffside. A property listing describes the house’s interiors as “well maintained but dated.”

It was offered in as-is, where-is condition, meaning the seller wouldn’t be making any repairs for the new buyer. “Buy to renovate or rebuild,” it suggested.

Like so many properties across Toronto last year, it sold for well above its listing price. Four days after records show it was listed for $699,900, it went for nearly $200,000 more, with a sale price of $875,000.

To reach a 20 per cent down payment, an individual or family would be tasked with tucking away a whopping $175,000. The median household income across the city last year was $84,000 — meaning this “starter” home would take more than 20 years of savings.

This is all true, but let's also look at the mortgage situation.

Median household income last year was $84,000.

Using Tangerine's "How much can I borrow?" calculator (because that's the one I find most user-friendly), with an income of $84,000, the $175,000 down payment calculated above, and all the other settings left to default, we get a total mortgage of $432,946.

 

$432,946 mortgage + $175,000 down payment = $607,946

$875,000 sale price - $607,946 = $267,054

$267,054 / $8,400 annual savings rate = 31.7921428571

 

So it would take an additional almost 32 years, on top of the 20 years calculated by the Star article, to save up enough of a down payment to fill in the gap between mortgage eligibility and sale price. That is a total of 52 years of saving up to buy your first home!

 

Alternatively, to qualify for a mortgage that would fill the $607,946 gap between the $175,000 down payment and the $875,000 sale price, you'd need an annual household income of $116,080 - 38% higher than the median. (I arrived at this number by fiddling with the inputs in the mortgage calculator. If you know a link to a calculator that determines the income needed to qualify for a given size of mortgage - or if you know the formula for calculating this - drop it in the comments so everyone can run the numbers themselves!)

 

So yes, saving up for a 20% down payment in an over-inflated housing market is a major challenge!

 

But it is not the entirety of the challenge. The average household would still be nowhere near able to afford a "starter home" with just a 20% down payment.

 

Discourse surrounding the challenges of the housing market needs to make it clear that a 20% down payment is not the only barrier to affordability.

Cascade Complete from the grocery store is better than Cascade Complete from Amazon

I previously tried Cascade Complete, and found it subpar and ineffective.

However, I recently ran out of dishwasher detergent, and Cascade Complete was the only one I could find in store. So I bought it, thinking it's better than nothing until I can get something else.

My first surprise is that the detergent was a different colour. My previous Cascade Complete (which I bought on Amazon) was a kind of dull greyish blue. The new one from the grocery store was a bright greenish blue.

 

My second surprise was that it worked! No food left on pans, no stained teacups, my dishes were clean!

I've been using it for some time, and it's on par with the lemon Cascade I was using before!

So maybe the Cascade I bought from Amazon was a bad batch?

So far I've only tried one bottle of Cascade from Amazon and one from the grocery store so I don't know how widespread the problem is, but I'm glad to know that the most common liquid dishwasher detergent actually works when I buy it in store!

And if I ever again get a bottle of Cascade that's dull greyish blue, I'm returning it right away.

Romance novels vs. fanfiction

I recently saw someone on book twitter say that it's a convention of the genre that romance novels have to have a happy ending.

That surprised me, because when I do read romance, I'm usually metaphorically peeking between my fingers, feeling like this is all going to end in heartbreak.

Often it's not worry about whether the couple ends up together, but rather worrying that they're not right for each other. Especially in cishet romance, I'm fearing that the male lead is unsafe for the female lead. (After all, we all know that handsome and charming does not necessarily equal safe!)

Even in the In Death books, which I have been reading and enjoying for OMG 15 years now, I read the whole first book and didn't feel that Roarke was a safe partner for Eve. I only even started the second book because it had already arrived from the library and it eventually won me over. 

The problem with early In Death, which I think is also the problem with many romance novels, is the author is writing from the assumption that the couple belongs together. But as a reader, I just got here. I have no emotional attachment to the pairing, I have no reason to believe they belong together, and I'm not motivated to suspend disbelief. The author would have to win me over and actually demonstrate that they belong together, which authors don't always do.

Because of this, I don't read that much romance. 

However, I just realized this is why romantic fanfiction does work for me. In fanfiction, I already know the characters and I already agree that the couple belongs together - that's why I'm reading that pairing! So the author doesn't have to win me or the rest of the audience over. Everyone already agrees that the couple belongs together, and we can just enjoy the ride. For example, I recently read an AU where one main character (who was in a position of greater power) accidentally kidnapped the other (who was in a more vulnerable position). In original fiction, that would be appalling! But, because I already agree with the author that the couple belongs together, I'm like "Oh, that scamp, how's he going to get out of this mess?"

Writing this out, I realized that I more often start shipping characters from movies or TV shows rather than books. Something about seeing the relationship played out visually is more convincing to me. Other than In Death, I can't think of a pairing I've started shipping after reading them in a book. But nevertheless, once the shipping is established, text continued to be my preferred medium for fanfiction.

"He's an asshole but I don't remember why": a post-head-injury phenomenon

Since my head injury, my brain behaves as though it's trying to save disk space, by deleting information it believes is no longer needed.

One such category of information is information that was used to make a decision that has been finalized and shouldn't need to be revisited.

One example of these decisions was choosing my condo finishes. I chose my kitchen counters on the basis that they were the least worst of the available options, but my brain has deleted what the problem was with the other ones. I couldn't explain to you what was wrong with them or why my current one was better.

Another example of these decisions was setting up my mortgage. I remember various questions I asked when deciding on the specifics of the mortgage and I remember that I was satisfied with the answers, but I don't remember what the answers were. I couldn't explain to you why this particular kind of mortgage meets my needs best, even though I'm confident that itdoes.

 

Another example of these decisions is deciding that someone I don't have to deal with in real life (a writer, a public figure, etc.) is untrustworthy or should be disregarded. 

 

For example, maybe people I trust on a particular topic don't trust this individual. Maybe this individual's politics are problematic. Maybe I learn that this individual is racist (as I've mentioned before, I'm bad at detecting racism myself, so I can't always tell until someone else mentions it).

 

So I decide to disregard them. I don't pay attention to the untrustworthy things they say, and instead spend my time and energy on trustworthy people. I don't read them for fear that I might unknowingly internalize their racism, and instead opt to read the people who first recognized that the problematic individual is racist.

Decision made, my brain deletes the information I used to arrive at that decision.

Then, sometime later, this individual comes up in conversation. I recognize the name as someone I've made a deliberate, informed decision to distrust for very good reasons. My interlocutor, being a decent human being, would want to know about this.

 

But all that's left in my brain is "He's an asshole . . . but I don't remember why."

***

What's super interesting is how people react to this!

 

When I can't remember or articulate why he's an asshole, people's visceral reaction is "You have no proof, therefore your allegation is non-credible!"

 

And then, they quite frequently go from "Your allegation is non-credible" to "Therefore, the person you are making allegations against is trustworthy!"

 

 

I haven't figured out what to do with this. If I were in my interlocutor's position, I'd want to know that he's an asshole. Based on what I know of my interlocutor, I also think they'd want to know.

But when I present what I know, minus what my post-head-injury brain has deleted, it often comes across as giving the asshole additional credibility.

I don't know what to do with this.

I do not recommend front fill coffee makers

I had to buy a new coffee maker last year, and ended up with a 5 cup Hamilton Beach front fill, basically because that was the first one available to me. (Mine is smaller than the one shown in the image, but the image makes it clear how much of the lid does and does not open.)

Hamilton Beach front fill coffee maker

Occasionally, I find a small puddle of water under it, as though it's leaking somewhere.

The problem is the front fill structure makes it difficult (or perhaps even impossible) to get into the reservoir and see what might be leaking. 

Googling around the idea (stymied by interference from AI-generated content, which is a whole nother blog post), I found that there might be a hose or gasket that's developed build-up or come loose or cracked, which would most likely be apparent from inside the reservoir. But, unlike every other coffee maker I've owned, it was impossible to get inside to see.

I could maybe, maybe, maybe get in there by unscrewing the base of the coffee maker (right where it says "DO NOT OPEN, NO USER-SERVICEABLE PARTS"), but I'm less than certain that it would work, or that it would be safe to operate the coffee maker after my amateur attempt to open it up and close it again.

The instructions that come with the coffee maker claim it has a five-year warranty to I might follow up on that (and if I do, I'll blog about it), but I'm not sure if it will work or will just get me another coffee maker that will leak again in a year, or if they'll require me to take the device in to a repair shop (which would mean a subway ride, time, potential COVID exposure, etc.)

My immediate solution was to order a $9 coffee maker on clearance from walmart (looking through my records, I see that my last cheap walmart coffee maker last me 7 years!) and then figure out what, if anything, to do once I have a backup and can be confident in the availability of my morning coffee.

 

(I really want to be a person who buys quality products and gets extensive use out of them, but it's a real struggle to find quality small coffee makers. The brands Consumer Reports lists as most reliable are dramatically different than what I'm used to  - different shapes, non-identical brewing mechanisms, in some cases reusable mesh filters - and I'm reluctant to pay $100+ for something that may or may not make me happy.)

But in general, I recommend avoiding front fill coffee makers because they hinder what should be standard user servicing, making what may well be a simply 10 second repair into a whole ordeal.

Explicio via absurdum

There is a logical fallacy called reductio ad absurdum, meaning attempting to establish a claim by showing that the opposite scenario would lead to absurdity or contradiction.

Sometimes I find that the opposite of reductio ad absurdum is actually helpful - using an utterly absurd or extreme example to explain a concept.

With my complete lack of Latin knowledge, I've been calling this "explicio via absurdum", but I welcome any corrections to my Latin!
 

This is particularly useful when trying explain something mathematical by a solely verbal medium, where you can't put numbers in front of your interlocutor's eyes and doing the math with plausible numbers would get you bogged down in arithmetic.

 

It's also useful when you don't know how the real numbers work, but you're trying to make the point that there's a range in which the numbers would work.

 

 

For example, I recently saw a discussion where some people seemed to think that interest rates were the major barrier to housing affordability, and didn't seem to recognize that housing prices themselves could be a barrier regardless of interest rates.

 

So here's how I would explain this via absurdum:

 

 

Imagine the house you want costs $1, and interest rates are 1000%. Can you afford the house? (Probably! You almost certainly have a dollar, and therefore could buy the house outright without a mortgage, thus rendering interest rates irrelevant.)

 

Imagine the house you want costs $1 billion, and interest rates are zero. Can you afford the house? (Probably not! Your monthly payment would be in the millions, which is well outside the scope of anyone who might be paying attention to me)

Now, I am well aware that there aren't any houses costing $1, there aren't any 1000% interest rates, there aren't any 0% interest rates, and if there are any houses costing $1 billion they're irrelevant to our reality.

However, these absurd examples help illustrate how it's possible for a price to be so cheap that interest rates are irrelevant, and to be so expensive that interest rates are irrelevant. Once people see this, they can see that there is in fact a range at the top and bottom of the scale (Could you buy the house outright if it cost $2? $50? $1,000? $10,000?  Would the house be unaffordable even without interest if it cost $500 million? $50 million? $5 million?)

 

Then you gradually move from absurd to reality, with the point made.

Why I'm more worried about COVID now than I was in 2020

Sometimes I hear people say they're less worried about COVID than they were in previous years. That surprises me, because I'm more worried.

Here's why:

1. I now know more about Long COVID, in particular its potential cognitive effects. In 2020 and 2021, my biggest COVID-related fear was spreading it asymptomatically and inadvertently infecting someone more vulnerable than I am. Now my biggest fear is expediting my dementia.

2. I now know that reinfection is possible. And each reinfection increases the risk of Long COVID. In 2020 and 2021, I figured if I caught it, I'd be in for a couple of weeks of misery and then either die or get on with life. Now I know that it's a perpetual risk.

 

3. With the removal of the required isolation period, the likelihood of any random person being contagious has increased. Unlike 2020 and 2021, people are now far more likely to be incentivized to work while contagious, thereby increasing the risk of contracting COVID in any random interaction or contact.

 

4. With the removal of mask mandates, these contagious people who are out and about are far more likely to be unmasked.

 

5. I now know that COVID is aerosols, not droplets, which means that the virus exhaled by these unmasked contagious people who are out and about can linger in the air for long after they have left the room. I now know that I have no way to tell whether a space is safe. 

 

6. Hospitals are under more pressure now. We didn't have ERs and ICUs closing in 2020 or 2021! We didn't have 41-hour ER wait times in 2020 or 2021! This puts everyone at risk in ways that go far beyond contracting COVID - what if you get hit by a car? What if your appendix bursts?

 

7. There's no more feeling that those in power want us to be safe, or even want society to continue functioning. There's no more "All in this together", there's no more "We'll get through this". Which is even more disheartening when we know what to do, we just have to do it! 

 

8. Given the uncontrolled spread and potential for reinfection and increased risk of Long COVID and its potential cognitive effects - and given the dearth of treatments and supports for people with Long COVID - I fear a world where people with brain fog are driving trucks and performing surgery and important things like that. 

 

9. 90% of the people I love in the world are high risk. 90% of the people I love in the world have already had COVID at least once. There is significant overlap between the two groups. Not everyone got through it okay. I fear being the last one standing. Maybe with dementia myself, and no one left who cares about me. 

 

10. In 2020, we hardly knew anything, but we took a bunch of measures. It felt like things could only improve as we learned more. Now we know way more, and we aren't doing any of it. A world where we haven't figured out how to solve the problem is nowhere near as scary as a world where we have figured out how to solve the problem, but refuse to do so.

In which I do unspeakable things to sushi

As I've blogged about before, spicy food doesn't work for me. It's physically painful in a way that drowns out the underlying flavours, so I feel nothing but discomfort and experience none of the pleasure of the food.

An example of a food that is painfully spicy for me this way is wasabi.

But whenever I mention that wasabi is too spicy for me, pedants come swooping out of the woodwork saying "Wasabi isn't a spice, it's a mustard!!" (Often as though they're trying to make the argument "Wasabi is a mustard and you like mustard, therefore you actually like wasabi!")

After hearing this pedantry one too many times, I had an idea: if wasabi is so important to the sushi experience and wasabi actually is a mustard, maybe my sushi experience would be enhanced with one of the many other mustards I actually enjoy? 

 

So the next time I had sushi, I tried it with various mustards I have on hand. Regular yellow French's mustard, honey mustard, dijon mustard, that mustard in the jar from the Polish deli...

And in each case, it tasted like the mustard. With gentle undertones of the sushi.

Which was delicious, because mustard is delicious! But the flavours didn't enhance each other or harmonize in any particular way that was greater than the sum of its parts.

So I see no need to put mustard (or wasabi) on my sushi, but I wouldn't object if, somehow, my sushi arrived with mustard (but not wasabi) on it.

And if you're thinking "But sushi isn't sushi without wasabi," you can have my share of the wasabi.

Things that are getting worse

A strong narrative early in the pandemic was also if we do the right things, we'll be okay. Mask up, stay home, be kind, we'll get through this.

 

I've been noticing lately that this element of reassuring people it will be okay is gone from the narrative. They're removing protections, but there's no "It's okay now" to it.

 

I fully realize there was a propaganda element to the messaging that everything will be fine, but now it isn't even an element of propaganda. There seems to be no more interest by those in power in having people think we'll be okay. Early in the pandemic, much of my translation work was morale-related. I haven't seen any attempt to boost or maintain morale in a very long time.

***

A similarly strong narrative when I was growing up was the idea that if you do what you're supposed to, things will turn out well. Go to school, get good grades, get a good job, you'll be able to support yourself and build a better life for your family. 

 

I'm not seeing this narrative around lately. I've even seen some voices acting like it's unreasonable to expect to be able to raise a family or even support oneself on a given job. Those in power complain that no one wants to work, while disavowing the employer's end of the bargain.

Again, I know there's an element of propaganda to the messaging that if you work hard you'll be successful. I know from Thomas Piketty that the economic success this messaging promises is specific to a brief period in the mid-20th century. But, again, it's telling that they aren't even attempting this messaging any more, aren't even hinting that there might be something better or different. It's just "Work or you're Bad and Wrong."

***

Another mid-20th-century narrative, often used in WWII, was the notion of sacrificing for the greater good. I keep thinking about this, thinking about how they used a sort of WWII narrative early in the pandemic, and how that contrasts with the current state of removing protections and asking people (especially school children!) to sacrifice for . . . nothing. 

 

Nothing is gained by allowing COVID to rip through society. It doesn't make anything better for anyone. Some people say that they're doing this for the economy, but it doesn't help the economy to have millions ill or disabled (or dead). They're actively removing protective measures that actually help the greater good, and instead making people sacrifice for nothing.

***

As a second-generation Canadian, the very premise of the origin story I was raised with was a better life for one's children. My grandparents' jobs were worse, my parents jobs were better. My grandparents' houses were smaller and older, my parents' house was bigger and newer.

But that dream stopped with my parents' generation. I've never been able to afford a house like my parents', even out in the small town where we lived. I was, for a brief period of time, able to afford a house like my grandparents', but in today's market I no longer can.

In fact, in today's market, I could no longer afford my actual condo that I actually live in if I didn't already own it. My salary is 25% higher than it was when I bought my condo preconstruction 10 years ago, but the prices of condos in my building have nearly doubled in the same period of time.

I was looking at a Twitter thread about this - people who can no longer afford to live in places where they previously lived, even though they now make more money. And there were some comments - which, as far as I can tell, were from regular people, not, like, real estate speculators - to the effect of "Welcome to real life, suck it up and get roommates."

So not only is a better life for one's children implausible, but a not-constantly-getting-worse life for oneself is so implausible that there are regular people who think it's unreasonable to be able to afford the same home you lived in when you were making less money.

***

Years ago, after I missed an unprecedented and never-since-repeated Eddie Izzard work in progress show here in Toronto, I set up a Google Alert for Eddie Izzard. I deliberately have it set to "all results" rather than "best results", which means the signal to noise ratio is not so good - it includes casual passing mentions of Eddie, not just items about her. (This blog post will probably show up in it.) But it only takes a second to scroll through in my feed reader, and I now don't have to worry about missing anything.

Recently, there has been a massive surge in transphobia in this Google Alert feed. When I started out, it often went months without any transphobia whatsoever. Now I'm seeing transphobia almost every day. Same transgender public figure, same wide-scope Google Alert, but tons more transphobia than a decade ago.

In 2010, advice columnist Dan Savage started the It Gets Better Project, with the goal of preventing suicide in queer youth by talking to them about how life will improve in adulthood. I agree with his thesis and it aligns with my experience (I can walk down the street and people ignore me!), but it also seems like it isn't happening any more, at least not on a societal/longitudinal level. Discourse is reaching me where queerness is being equated with pedophilia, which is not something I've heard since the 20th century.

This kind of thing should be an appalling horror story of the olden days that Kids Today cannot fathom, not an actual thing that's actually happening in reality!

 

***

There's a conventional wisdom that people's mental health is worsening. Some people are quick to blame remote work or online school, as though proximity to random people without regard for compatibility is some kind of mental health panacea.

But the more I think about it, the more I wonder if the root of worsening mental health is that so many things are getting worse that the idea of things getting better has become so implausible that it isn't even part of propaganda.

How the universe is mocking me

From time to time, charities I've donated to send me a fundraising letter with a small free gift, in an attempt to entice me to donate more. Usually the gift is something I can use, like a pen or address labels. But a while back, a charity sent me this reusable shopping bag.

Somehow, every single aspect of this shopping bag was irritating! It was too big to fit in my purse, while somehow also being too small to carry a package of toilet paper. The handles were simultaneously too short to comfortably put over my shoulder and too long to comfortably hold in my hand. The material had a particularly icky plasticky feeling while also not being properly waterproof. And the design contained butterflies that were unpleasantly realistic and detailed. In short, it had no redeeming qualities and I was rather resentful of the charity for sending me such an unhelpful object.

So I put it at the back of my pile of unwanted reusable bags, and proceeded with life.

Fast-forward to yesterday.

I had a few things that I wanted to take over to the charity box, and they didn't fit in the kind of plastic bag I'd normally put them in. So I dug into my pile of unwanted reusable bags, and came up with this one.

Perfect! I'd put my charity stuff in it, carry it over to the charity box, and dump the whole thing in the box, bag and all!

So I loaded up the bag, irritated once again at how it managed to have such an inconvenient shape and size and such an unpleasant texture. I carried it over to the charity box, irritated once again at how the strap is exactly the wrong length. And I dumped the whole thing into the box, bag and all, and returned home, rejoicing in the fact that I'll never have to deal with these irritants again!

 

On my way back up to my apartment, I detoured into the mailroom to check my mail. It contained a large envelope from a charity I'd recently donated to, likely containing another fundraising letter. But I opened the letter on the off-chance they'd sent me some address labels, and found...

...another reusable shopping bag, identical to the one I'd just gotten rid of!

 

(🎵 The bag came back, the very next day...🎵)

Things They Should Invent: kitchen catchers shaped like grocery bags

As I've mentioned before, I routinely use plastic grocery bags as garbage bags. However, as I've been streamlining my shopping during the pandemic, I found myself running perilously low on plastic bags, so I bought some kitchen catchers.

Turns out they're inferior in every way!

They don't fit as nicely in my kitchen garbage can, and it's harder to get the top of the bag to stay hooked over the top of the bin. The absence of handles makes it harder to tie off (even with those thingies at the top that are supposed to be for tying it off) and makes it harder to carry to the garbage chute on days when I have multiple things to carry (which is most days, because my building has a tri-sorter chute). The perforation between the bags on the rolls is imperfect, so sometimes they rip open. Also, there are sometimes manufacturing flaws so a specific bag on the roll won't open up properly, or is cut crookedly and therefore unworkable.

In short, there is nothing that kitchen catchers do that grocery bags don't do better!

Grocery bags are already being manufactured and mass produced and put in boxes and sold to grocery stores. Why not put some of those bags on the shelf for consumers to purchase at retail price as well?

Not that there's anything wrong with that

The other day I saw someone tweet that cis Gen Xers need to talk more about how homophobic society in general was in the 80s and 90s. So my Pride post this year is a story from my small town adolescence in the 90s.

 

This story does not contain any violence, hate crimes, or actual homophobic acts, but it does contain extensive descriptions of my own thoughts and feelings from back when I knew nothing other than that culture and environment, and these thoughts and feelings do not age well.

 

***

 

In the Seinfeld episode "The Outing", Jerry and George are mistaken for a gay couple, and spend the episode flailing about vociferously denying being gay, each time qualifying their denial with "Not that there's anything wrong with that!"

 

When I saw this episode at the age of 15, I was super confused: why are they saying "Not that there's anything wrong with that"?? Surely if you suggest that there's nothing wrong with being gay, people will think you're gay, and then Bad Things will happen! Why wouldn't they just say nothing??

That was literally the very first time in my whole entire life that I had ever been exposed to the idea that a person might not want to come across as homophobic. I'm not even getting as far as the fact that there's nothing wrong with being gay - I had never, not even once, been exposed to the fact that there are people in the world who might perceive you negatively if you're homophobic.

 

Absolutely 100% of life experience to date had suggested that the strategic thing to do in any situation would be to come across as homophobic. After all, my life experience suggested, if you don't come across as homophobic, then people would think you're gay! And then Bad Things would happen!

 

(I wasn't clear what these Bad Things were, but the way my classmates talked about the idea of Gay left no room for doubt that it was Very, Very Bad.)

I hadn't even thought as far as deciding whether or not to be homophobic myself. All I knew was that 100% of the empirical evidence to date suggested that it was unsafe to not be homophobic. So I proceeded accordingly.

When the Seinfeld episode ended without anything bad happening to Jerry and George, I was completely baffled. This was completely outside of my experience or frame of reference. The story seemed completely unresolved. I literally could not understand it.

And that's what 90s small town homophobia was like - it left a sheltered 15-year-old unable to comprehend a situation where people can just . . . not be homophobic, and that's okay.

***

 

What's interesting is how 15-year-old me reacted to this after giving the matter a little thought.

 

Jerry and George acted as though there wasn't anything wrong with being gay, and nothing bad happened to them! Furthermore, no discourse about this had reached me - no one was talking about how it was bad or horrible or shocking that nothing bad happened to them for acting as though there wasn't anything wrong with being gay.

This meant that maybe, for some people, in some parts of society . . . it's okay to act as though there isn't anything wrong with being gay? The characters on Seinfeld were clearly cooler than me, so maybe the parts of society where it's okay to act as though there isn't anything wrong with being gay are cooler than me?

Now, if, like 15-year-old me, you're an awkward, dorky, bullied teenager living in a small town, it can be strategic to give the impression that you have hidden depths, aspects of yourself that are way cooler and edgier than even have an opportunity to become apparent in such a limited and uncool environment than school.

This (brand new! unprecedented!) notion that there's nothing wrong with being gay provided this very kind of opportunity. Next time the idea of gay came up, I could proceed as though there's nothing wrong with it, as though it's unremarkable and not worth mentioning! Maybe I could even pretend to be confused about why people think it's a problem! Surely that would be a super edgy thing to do that vastly exceeds the cool potential of our small town!

So I tucked the idea away in my metaphorical toolbox, and proceeded with life.

The opportunity to use it arose a couple of years later.

I was sitting in the library doing my calculus homework and listening to my discman when a classmate sat down across the table from me.

I didn't know this guy very well. The periphery of his social circle overlapped with the periphery of my social circle, but we had very little in common. He had a beard, drove a pickup truck, seemed like he'd know where to buy drugs - way cooler and edgier than me, and the very demographic who is likely to bully me! But, despite these demographic indicators, he had never been unkind to me, and sometimes had been a touch more kind than strictly necessary.

He sat down across from me, pulled out his own homework, and asked me what I was listening to.

"Ani DiFranco," I replied.

"Did you know she's very popular with the gay community?" he asked.

I didn't actually know that. In fact, I hadn't the slightest clue! (My first Ani DiFranco album was Dilate, and I hadn't yet discovered the online fandom.)

I briefly panicked: Oh shit, now he's going to think I'm gay! And if I deny it, he's going to think I'm hiding being gay!!

Then I remembered: when you want to be cool and edgy, act like there's nothing wrong with it.

So I looked him dead-ass in the eye and said, "Yes, she is."

Then, with a level of savvy I didn't even know I possessed, I offered him an earbud. "Would you like to listen?"

He accepted the earbud, and we sat there doing our math homework and listening to Ani DiFranco. And no Bad Things happened.

And, in that small town in the 90s, that was what passed for progress.

The Boy Who Cried "No Wolf!"

I was talking to my doctor about the risk assessment of getting dental care (given that I'd need to remove my mask to do so), and he said that the hygiene and air quality standards for dental offices are actually high enough that it would be a safe environment to be unmasked in.

My immediate, visceral reaction was a shockingly strong "That can't possibly be true!!!"

I had in fact looked up the standards for dental offices and they did seem to have plenty of air changes, I looked up the specs of the hepafilter system the clinic I was considering going to had installed and didn't even know that level of air changes was possible, my doctor is better positioned than I am to determine what ventilation measures are sufficient . . . so why do I feel so strongly that it cannot possibly be safe?

After thinking this over a bit, I realized it's because there have been so many instances where they removed protections when it wasn't safe to do so (including, most recently, when they removed mask mandates and 90% of the people I love in the world promptly contracted COVID) that we have a critical mass of cumulative empirical evidence that "meets requirements" ≠ "safe".

It's like the opposite of Aesop's fable of the Boy Who Cried Wolf. 

 

In the fable, a boy repeatedly comes running into his village shouting that there's a wolf when there's really no wolf. Then, eventually, a wolf does come, and no one believes him.

What's happening here in Ontario is they're repeatedly telling us it's safe when it's clearly not. And if, one day, it ever is safe, I will have a very difficult time believing it.

 

 

The thing is, if everyone started doing absolutely everything absolutely perfectly in terms of COVID response, all indoor spaces would be like a dental office, with ventilation that makes it impossible for COVID to spread. And, unless something changes drastically, I don't see how I will ever be able to believe this and feel safe.

Now, you're thinking, if all environments become safe and make it impossible for COVID to spread, COVID numbers will drop! We'll see it in the data!

Except governments are publishing less and less data, even though the data is still necessary! We're left here squinting at the low-precision Y axis of the wastewater signal charts and trying to figure out how flaws in government-issued data might be affecting the results on various automated amateur data-viz websites. 

 

They never even restored PCR testing criteria to where they were pre-Omicron, so official R-value data is a big asterisk with "Currently, R(t) based on cases cannot be estimated accurately"

 

I think what they're trying to do is induce a feeling of "no news is good news!" in the public, but what's actually happening is they're creating a situation where promising numbers are increasingly implausible. Are case counts actually low, or is it just because of restrictions on PCR testing? Are active case numbers actually going down, or was there just not a data drop today?

***

I do realize this makes me sound like a conspiracy theorist, and that brings up something else:

It's super weird that the existing conspiracy theorists aren't thinking this way!

Long before COVID, there were plenty of conspiracy theorists who thought there was a vast government conspiracy to kill or harm people.

And, somehow, they seem to look at the current situation where the government is changing policies in a way that increases the number of people killed or infected, and . . . don't think this is part of the conspiracy?

 

 

I do see why someone might not believe there's a government conspiracy to harm us. Maybe, from where you're sitting, you don't see any evidence, and it is quite the claim to make without evidence! Maybe you find the idea just too frightening to contemplate! Maybe you look at the people who do think there's a government conspiracy to harm us and think "Those are unpleasant individuals and I don't want to be like them!"

But if you've come into the situation already believing that there's a conspiracy, how do you arrive at "But this current situation where people are being killed and harmed because of government inaction is, of course, unrelated to the government conspiracy to kill or harm people!"

Cause and effect

In 2009, City of Toronto workers, including garbage collectors, went on strike because the employer was trying to take away their sick days and leave them with a much worse arrangement.

 

Media coverage at the time (including, bizarrely, the Toronto Star, whose stated principles explicitly include being pro-labour) villainized these workers, stoking public anger against them.

Rob Ford leveraged this anger to be elected as mayor.

Doug Ford leveraged Rob Ford's apparent popularity to be elected first as city councillor, then as MPP, and eventually as Premier of Ontario.

Where he took sick days away from workers in a pandemic, among many other disastrous policies.

Here in this third year of a pandemic that those in power have no desire to end, I wonder where we as a city and as a province would be if the City of Toronto hadn't tried to take away workers' sick days.

There wouldn't have been a strike. Rob Ford wouldn't have become mayor. Doug Ford would be running a label company (or would be city councillor at worst). Ontario would almost certainly have a government better suited to the task of getting us through a pandemic. (And also, Toronto municipal workers would have a better sick day regime and therefore be better able to avoid spreading COVID.) Toronto would likely have a different municipal government as well, since it was Rob Ford's mayorality that led to John Tory being considered even remotely palatable. (Remember in 2007 when Ontario rejected him for being too far right?)

***

On a personal note, there's one vital thing that would be different:

One change made under Rob Ford's mayorality was to contract out part of Toronto's garbage collection to Green For Life.

On February 17, 2018, at 2:30 in the morning, I was in bed fast asleep when I was frightened awake by a horrific noise.

I jumped out of bed, ran to the window to see what the noise was . . . and woke up on the floor with an enormous lump on the back of my head.

Every aspect of life has been more difficult since.

The source of the noise that frightened me awake? A Green For Life contractor seemed to think 2:30 in the morning is a good time to empty a dumpster into a dump truck.

Butterfly wings.

The generic "you" is a useful tool for writing inclusively

With reproductive health in the news lately, I'm seeing a lot of people diligently endeavouring to make their statements about bodies and anatomy as inclusive as possible, including inclusive of trans and non-binary people. This leads to phrases like "birthing parent" and "uterus-havers", which sound awkward, and can make the cause of inclusive language seem less credible to people who aren't already on side.

 

This makes me think of the 90s, when adults around me would often express contempt for inclusive language by performatively making it conspicuously unwieldy. "Firemen? No, wait, that isn't politically correct...firewomen? Firepeople??" Making a big noisy fuss of how inclusive language is OMG SO HARD while completely disregarding the perfectly cromulent word "firefighters". 

I think the attempts to use inclusive language for reproductive health might sometimes come across this way. 

 

In the specific case of recent inclusive reproductive health discourse, I can tell that the speakers' intentions are benign and they genuinely want to be inclusive. Sometimes they're deliberately aiming for conspicuousness, but sometimes they can't think of a less awkward way to phrase it, and the awkwardness might distract from or detract from their important point.

 

In these situations, where you want to be inclusive but can't think of a simple way to do so, a useful tool can be the generic "you".

 

Example:

Original: "Masks are mandatory in our birth centre. Mothers can remove their masks while in labour."

Attempt to make it inclusive: "Masks are mandatory in our birth centre. Birthing parents can remove their masks while in labour."

With the generic "you": "Mask are mandatory in our birth centre. You can remove your mask while you are in labour."

This is clear. It's inconspicuous. And it's inclusive - by which I mean not just that it includes anyone who might be in labour and while not being a woman or a mother, but also it specifically includes the reader (and, thereby, includes everyone). 

 

One objection to gender-inclusive language that I hear, most often from cis women, is that they feel that excluded when women are not specifically mentioned. Using the generic "you" helps mitigate this by addressing the reader directly. How could you feel excluded if I'm talking directly to you?

 

Of course, there are cases where the right communication strategy is to be conspicuously inclusive, even if the phrasing is awkward. Sometimes the situation does in fact call for a big showy show of the fact that not everyone who gives birth is a woman.

And sometimes the right communication strategy is to be inconspicuously inclusive, to make it no big deal that someone who is not a woman might be giving birth. The generic "you" can help you do that.