Two unanswerable questions:

1. Did previous wars undergo as much media spin as this Iraq debacle?

2. Since Star Trek characters seem to get possessed by various alien beings fairly frequently, do they teach them how to handle this situation at Starfleet Academy?

Question for people who are not afraid of bugs at all: what do you do when there's a bug in your home? (Or, if you are afraid of some, but not all, bugs, if there's a bug that you aren't afraid of in your home) For argument's sake, let's say there's no one else in the household who is afraid of bugs. Do you kill it? Do you let it outside? Do you just let it wander around and mind its own business?

Why isn't Platform 9 3/4 hooked up to the Floo Network? I know that having to get there the Muggle way often provides a nice plot device, but it's illogical and also encourages that oh-so-annoying "Cars in fanfic" phenomenon.

In other news, I have FUZZY RED PANTS!

Anyone remember those pants they had in the 80s with an elastic at the back half of the waist and no elastic at the front half? What was the point of those? I know that personally the front part of my waist expands and contracts as I eat and breathe (sometime I think I would be a lot more comfortable in my clothes if I hadn't done five years of intensive music stuff in high school, which drilled diaphragm breathing into me so much that I have to make a conscious effort to breathe from my chest), but I can't think of any factor that would cause the back of my waist to expand.

It occurs to me that I should want to write. But I don't want to write. Generally someone in my position would write as a hobby - it's a characteristic of my profession - and with my long bohemian hair pulled up in a bun with a pencil my intellectual glasses perched on my nose, sipping inexpensive red wine in my tiny shabby urban flat, the aesthetics of the situation are simply begging me to be a frustrated author. I should have the Great Twenty-First Century Novel kicking around in my head. I should have a short story and a screenplay on the go. I should have been doing NaNoWriMo. I should at the very least be taking out my frustrations with by writing fic and erotica and posting them on pathetic sites for amateur writers. But I'm not. I have no desire to write. Occasionally I come up with stuff - a scene, a plotline, a snippet of dialogue, a movie trailer - but just coming up with it makes me happy. I have no desire to flesh it out, get to know the characters, map out the plot arc, I don't even need to write it down. I think of stuff, it lives in my head, I'm happy.

So much for being an intellectual.

I feel better days when I exercise in the morning. I can think better, my joints are less stiff, the day goes by quicker. Unfortunately, I hate hate HATE loathe and detest exercising! It's annoying and bothersome and I'd much rather be asleep.

On that note, goodnight.

Happy news of the day: Enza finally got her breasts! YAY for her!

Stupidity of the day: The Ontario tories suggesting that raising the minimum wage is a bad thing because the minimum wage earners whose wages will increase will then have to pay taxes on their increased wages.

I am the most talented sleepwalker in the world - I changed my underwear in my sleep last night!

I sleep in a sweatsuit, so last night, while I was asleep, I managed to remove my pants, remove my underwear, open the correct drawer of my dresser, select a pair of underwear, put the new underwear on, and put my pants back on. When I woke up, the underwear drawer was open, the discarded underwear were on the floor, my pants were on the right way, but the new underwear was on inside out, although I did get my legs through the leg holes and the waist through the waist hole.

Upon inspection, I couldn't figure out what was wrong with the old underwear that made me discard it, but at any rate it's the most interesting sleepwalk I've ever done.

This is a poll, please answer in the comment section.

Picture a spreadsheet that's intended to be a timesheet for an employee. On one axis, you have the days of the month. On the other axis, you have the various tasks you did that day. For each task, you enter the amount of time you spent on it that day. Every row and every column totals itself at the end, so you can quickly see how much time was spent on each task in a month, and how many hours were worked in a day.

Do the days go down the side and the tasks across the top, or vice versa?

It occurs to me that if it weren't for my arachnophobia I would probably be living off the grid. The vast majority of my lifestyle choices are, directly or indirectly, made either to avoid spiders or to help cope when I do encounter one.

I'm looking for a jpg or gif of Strongbad's "Eating One Battery...Eating Five Batteries" diagram. Both diagrams in the same image. Preferably small - it's for my LJ icon. Just posting this in case anyone happens upon one before I get my lazy ass into Photoshop.

With Advent almost upon us, I'd like to remind the world of the One True Plan for Improving the Universe:

IF you are in charge of a non-religious-affiliated public space, institution, or facility, or involved in the public relations of such an organization, AND

IF your public space, institution, or facility has decided to put up seasonal decorations on its physical plant and/or use seasonal themes in its public relations material, AND

IF someone, anyone, even one person complains that the seasonal theme in your decorations and/or public relations material is not religious enough,

THEN the proper course of action is not to have any seasonal themes whatsoever in anything having to do with your organization ever again in the future.

Thank you for your time and attention.

Ugh, bad bad bad reporting in the Toronto Star today. Even for a fluff section. In ID, the issue is "to have kids or not to have kids". They address people who have kids. They address people who don't have kids yet. They address people who don't want kids yet. They don't address people who can't have kids, or people who don't want kids ever! They make the whole thing out to be "Do you want kids when you're very young, or when you're a bit older?"

Then there's this crap. They start with the premise that women in their 20s, especially young 20s, are having fewer kids than they did in the past. Decent premise, backed up with statistical data. But the rest of the article is sloppy and lazy. "Talk to people in their 20s..." they begin, and proceed to interview a bunch of people who are 20, with the exception of one who's 21. Nothing wrong with being 20 or 21, but it's certainly not representative of "people in their 20s". Plus everyone they interview is a student. That's the reason for not having kids right there - it's not the people's age, it's the fact that they're students. They haven't had their first grownup job, their "permanent address" is likely still the parental home. Functionally, they haven't completely finished being children themselves. It has nothing to do with a paradigm shift or a cultural revolution, it's the fact that the U of T student who wrote this probably didn't even leave campus to do his interview (reflecting poorly on student journalists who can at least do decent research).

To further the poor impression of student journalists that this article must be giving the world, he makes statements like the following:

- "The break-up, get-together relationships that twentysomethings love, aren't really conducive to child-bearing, either". People LOVE serial monogamy and constant break-ups?

- "Now that women are rountinely able to have children into their 30s..." Women have always been able to have children into their 30s in modern history! I know doctors often encouraged people to stop at 35, but that's certainly "into their 30s"

Finally, after mentioning that in the 1950s women between 20 and 24 had babies at four times the current rate, they neglect to mention the two real causes of this!

1. In the 1950s, it was much easier to support a family on the money you could earn with a high school education! Now it is much harder to do that, so when people are finally able to support a family they are older.

2. Family planning is much easier and more widely available now. In the 1950s, people had more kids just because they likely had no mechanism in place to prevent them from producing a baby when they had intercourse. Now people have more choice.

Overall, as the target audience of this section, I'm disappointed and rather insulted. Do better next time!

A pet peeve: people who say you should learn Latin in order to understand basic grammatical theory and make it easier to learn other languages.

If you want to learn Latin for geek value, for fun, to be elite, for vaster academic purposes, that's fine. But if you want to understand basic verb tense theory in order to learn European languages, just studying any European language will do just fine! Latin does have the advantage of Romantic word origins (because I always forget if that's entymology or etymology, and the other one is very icky) in combination with Germanic/Slavic cases, but neither is that difficult to learn on its own, and if you're never going to speak a language that doesn't have cases and declension there's no point in learning one that does just to help you with your verb tenses.

The worst instance of this I've ever seen was someone asking a web community whether they should learn French or Latin. So many people advised them to study Latin, because then it would be much easier to learn other Romantic languages. Um hello, the same thing happens if you study French, plus you'll end up speaking a viable, living, European and world language!

This over-enthusiasm for Latin is akin to encouraging someone study Harmony and Counterpoint before even picking up an instrument. Or learning how to balance chemical equations before mixing baking soda and vinegar to watch them explode.

People talk about whether the arts or the sciences are harder (as subjects studied in uni), but I think the fine arts, particularly the performing arts, are hardest. Fine arts majors have to study academic subjects, AND rehearse for performances. You can bullshit an essay, you can even bullshit a lab writeup with a bit of research and ingenuity, but you can't bullshit a performance. If you haven't studied for an exam you can usually still squeeze out a passing grade with some logic and ingenuity, but you can't fake a performance you haven't rehearsed for.

I took everything in high school - english, maths, sciences, languages, social sciences, and music - and it was music that required the most effort and the most consistent effort on my part. I could usually do okay on a physics test by quickly memorizing the key formulae on someone else's study sheet in the last 10 minutes of lunch time, I could usually do okay on a French test by conjugating the verbs like similar verbs and going with the "it sounds right" rule for prepositions, but I simply could not get through a performance test in music without spending at least half an hour a day working on the sixteen notes and the tricky part and training myself not to have to breathe for twelve bars.

Monty Python randomness

John Cleese: "So in three years, you've spotted no camels."
Eric Idle: "That's right, in only three years!"

Jimmy can tech support toilets over ICQ! Ten points!

I've heard a lot of people bitching about the fact that TTC drivers get paid $20-25 per hour. Don't the realize that, in the grand scheme of things, that isn't a lot of money? It's certainly not NOT a lot of money, but if you do the math and see what that comes out to per year, it's a reasonable income, especially considering Toronto housing costs. I earn on the low end of that scale and I have no financial problems with just myself alone, but if I had a child I'd have to be on a tight budget. This isn't unskilled labour they're doing - if you take transit or drive on a street where transit vehicles run, these people are responsible for your safety. They certainly deserve a reasonable salary for that responsibility. I know that salaries are currently the TTC's biggest operating expense, but I don't think that punishing the employees would improve the situation.

Just for laughs, the stupidest proposal I've heard to address the situation: "The TTC is inefficient. The drivers make way too much money! What they should do is hire a CEO, pay him a few million dollars, and have him run it like a business!"

So I get a flu shot for the first time since I was young enough that my mother could force me to, and what happens? It turns out this year's flu shot is for the wrong strain of flu! GAH!

On the brighter side, I managed to get my health card renewed on the first try and with only 30 minutes out of my life. They say it take 4 weeks to arrive, so I might even get it before the old one expires!

Hopefully this bureaucratic good fortune will extend to Friday when I try yet again to get my G1.