SNOW!!!!

I am boycotting Subway because I find their policies on religious headgear unacceptable. It is not only an issue of religion, it is an issue personal modesty. Forbidding Sikhs to wear their turbans is like forbidding any of your employees to wear shirts.

If you happen to agree with me on this position, I encourage you to contact Subway and let them know. If you decide to boycott, be sure to mention it to them.

This is just to disseminate this idea to a further audience.

150402840 indeed!

So why do women think men are stupid? Because men become stupid when women are around!

If I could reorder the entire mindset of the human race and undo millenia of social conditioning, I would change the "rules" so that a person's life partner and their sexual partner are in no way expected to be the same person.

Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with marriage and monogamy - this is the direction in which I choose to lead my own life. But when you think about it, a spouse fulfills two very different functions, and when looked at detachedly they don't necessarily seem complementary.

One is the life partner - a person with whom you share your household and finances and families and the trials and tribulations of day to day life. The life partner is practically a business contract.

The other function is the lover, which is self-explanatory.

Now I know in many many cases couples manage to successfully amalgamate these two functions, but if you think about it from a detached, purely logical perspective, it's a bit extreme to expect a person who can fulfill your needs as a life partner to also be able to fulfill your needs as a lover, and vice versa. There is a certain degree of love required to trust someone enough to be your life partner, of course, but a platonic life-partner relationship could carry on quite well without the kind of love generally associated with a sexual relationship. For example, I can think of about five people I know personally with whom I could plausibly be life partners for as much of eternity as I can conceptualize at age 22. But I can only think of one person whom I would choose as a permanent sexual partner. A life partner requires so much more that has nothing to do with romance - agreeing on managing money, compatible standards of cleanliness, buying furniture, dealing with insurance, even sleeping (by which I mean sleeping) in the same bed - that it's practically unreasonable that the pool of people who can meet these requirements has to be narrowed down to people who would also make compatible lovers. Promiscuity wouldn't need to be a necessary characteristic of this society, a pair of lovers could be monogamous if they wanted and monogamy could even be mainstream. Your perma-lover simply wouldn't have to also be your life partners.

The other problem here would be what to do about children, since they originate from sex but are part of a family and household. Since we're reordering the universe anyway, I think the simplest solution would be to make society matrilineal and matriarchical. And because the concept of sexual fidelity to one's life partner wouldn't exist, the fathers wouldn't be as bothered by the fact that they're sharing the household with another man's child. Of course, there would be more people involved in the decision of whether to have a child, but we'll deal with that when we come to it.

And no, I'm not condoning adultery (unless, of course, it's by mutual consent of all parties involved, and even then I still find it distasteful). I'm talking about a hypothetical reordered society. In our current society spouses, by definition, are expected to fulfill both these functions for their partners, and anyone who doesn't want to do so shouldn't enter into that sort of relationship. In the reordered society the concept of adultery wouldn't exist for the same reason that in our society there is no word for consensual sex within a maritial relationship that has the "sinful" connotation.

I thought of a game, but I don't have a catchy name for it. It's like six degrees of separation, but you take someone you already know directly, and find a secondary route linking you and that person. The rule is that there has to be at least one person in the chain that neither of the two people at the end knows.

For example: Bob is a former co-worker. So I know Bob directly. So to find a secondary chain:

1. Bob used to go to high school with George.
2. George is friends with Mike.
3. Mike used to be in a band with Dan.
4. Dan used to go to high school with me.

Bob doesn't know Mike or Dan, and I don't know George or Mike, so this route is valid.

You have to take the shortest possible secondary route, so no inserting extra people just to have someone you don't know in there. For instance, in the example above, if I knew George directly, Mike and Dan would have to be removed, and this route wouldn't be valid because the two ends (me and Bob) would know everyone in the middle (George).

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!