My latest oenological foray is Hippo Creek Sauvignon Blanc. It's very light and friendly and unassuming. With the understanding that I have no knowledge of the proper adjectives with which to describe wine, I'd describe it as fresh and bright. It doesn't seem to clash with anything and has no aspects of unpleasantness that I noticed. The taste of alcohol is less noticeable than usual, so it's almost refreshing. The only problem is that it is very easy to drink much more quickly than you originally intend.

White coat bolts straight away, without making eye contact, and flees in horror to the embrace of the rest of her pack several metres away. Tan jacket stands her ground with the boys, a hostile look on her face. So what is it with teens today, they're asked.

Delivered by one of the boys, the brush-off is immediate and absolute. "We're kind of busy," he says, with a hard look on his face. Then he turns his back.

When Gordon Neufeld hears this story a few days later, he laughs. An experienced clinical psychologist in Vancouver, he recognizes the symptoms all too well. This is a sign of what he calls "peer-orientation" or "peer-attachment disorder," which he contends is a modern blight responsible for today's dangerous teen landscape and getting worse all the time.

So Dr. Neufeld, picture this: you're idly relaxing with your friends one Saturday on your usual stomping grounds, not bothering anyone, when some stranger you've never seen before in your life comes up to you out of nowhere and demands you justify your behaviour, adding that whatever response you happen to be able to think up on the spot will be published and used to judge your entire peer group.

WTF would you do?

So apparently Stelco might lay off everyone with under 25 years of seniority. I wonder if they've considered the fact that, after they do this, their entire remaining workforce will be eligible for retirement probably within 5 years, definitely within 10.

Or perhaps they don't intend to be around that long?

I had a dream where I was time travelling through ancient China (which is strange because IRL I know NOTHING about ancient China) and I was accompanied by this old woman whose mission was to teach me about the dangers of time travel.

I then had a dream where I was in middle school for some reason. I woke up, glad that I'm no longer in middle school because the feeling of perpetual confusion is gone. I never realized it before, but the greatest characteristic of middle school for me was a feeling of perpetual confusion.

Things you can't utter in the 21st century and still be taken seriously: "...through the magic of special effects."

Anyone know how to get voicemail on a residential phone line to tell you (by which I mean verbally since I don't have a display-capable phone) the name and/or phone number of whoever just called?

I know that the voicemail "knows" this information, because if you save a message and wait a week and then log back into your voicemail it will tell you "The following message will be deleted. Message from: [name or phone number], saved Tuesday at 11:43 a.m." But is there any way to get it to cough up this information when the message is new?

So I recently finished reading The Pythons, which, as you might guess, is an autobiography of Monty Python and the members thereof. I think they interviewed all the surviving Pythons (plus Graham Chapman's partner, brother, and sister-in-law, with blanks filled in by previous interviews with Graham) and just compiled the results. It's terribly interesting to see how their memories of various distant events differed! On the whole it's quite a good read, although it would probably be very dull for a non-Python-fan. They discussed in great detail the creation and development of their work, so there's a lot more insight to the process than in previous interviews and books. The book is also full of colour pictures, old letters, cartoons, etc.

The only problem is that the book is freaking HUGE! It's only 200-300 pages, but it's a large, full colour, coffee-table-sized book, about 10"x12"! So you can't read this on the train or at the dinner table! Because of its size and the fact that every page is full colour it is probably atrociously expensive, but it's worth getting from the library. Just bring your schoolbag to get it home in!

Enlightenment from the shower: My lack of confidence in my French is due to the way I speak English. Ideas in English never occur to me in simple language; they come to me fully formed with idioms and metaphors and circumlocuction and ironic understatement. Because I learned French as an academic subject with one-to-one equivalent vocabulary, my French isn't nearly as rich.

When I'm writing, I have time to think and reduce my English ideas to something simpler that I can render in French, but when I'm speaking I don't have time to do this. The result is a total lack of confidence in my French because I can't instantly render the unnecessarily complex English thoughts that pop into my head.

I had a dream where I had paid someone to drill a hole in a piece of wood for me, but they drilled three holes instead, thus ruining it. Then my father came along and started giving me this lecture about how spoiled and ungrateful I am because I got three holes for the price of one.

Lately I've been attempting to expand my reading horizons by reading books recommended by Salon. I'm doing this because I'm simply not going to read enough of a variety if I don't follow someone's recommendations, and the bestseller lists tell me what's most prominently placed in Indigo, not what I should be reading.

The only problem with Salon is it's American, so the books it recommends are rather centred in the American experience. I don't mind reading American per se, but I just looked at my "to read" pile, and I've got 4 books set in the US and one set in various places around the world (I also have 5 books to read in 3 weeks while working full-time, but I digress). That's a bit too highly concentrated.

So what I'm looking for is a book list similar to Salon's "What to read this month", but with either a Canadian or a global English-language perspective. Book reviews in the daily newspapers don't do it for me because they either review only potential bestsellers, or absolutely everything that's released that week. And I don't want something that pushes Canlit for the sake of pushing Canlit. Just a well-rounded, not completely US-centric list of the most interesting new books released during that week or month or whatever. Preferably with a number of books on the list that a person could reasonably read in that time period, but I can cull if necessary.

Suggestions?

If anyone cares, I'm working from home for the rest of the day. We got to go home early. YAY!

I can't see past the edge of my balcony. This is a sexy storm!

Networks don't swear for artistic integrity; they do it because it draws more paying customers.

Huh? With the exception of a few preteens, who watches TV because they contain profanity? And I'm sure preteens aren't their target audience since TV networks are always wetting themselves over the "18-49" market (another concept I've never understood - at one time that market segment contained both me and my parents). Anyone who is immature enough to watch a TV show just so they can hear a few swear words won't have any say over which channels their household subscribes to. I'm sure advertisers would prefer that the shows didn't swear - at any rate, they certainly wouldn't be more inclined to sponsor a show because it contains profanity. So who out there does the letter-writer suggest is paying money for the main purpose of hearing profanity?

Shows that contain profanity might draw more paying customers because they tend to be more willing to deal with adult or subversive topics than fluffy mainstream pablum network show are, but profanity isn't what makes people watch TV shows!

I'm dreading going to work today, and I have no idea why. Maybe because it's snowing, and when it's snowing the nicest thing to do is stay home under the covers with a cup of tea and a good book. I could call in, but I was hoping to take Friday off anyway and my long weekend will feel so much nicer if I manage to hold out through the week.

Note to self: Yellowtail chardonnay is a touch too acidic for your tastes, although it might work better with cheese. Also it has one of those stupid fake corks. What's up with fake corks in Australian wines? Do they not have real corks in Australia?

(And for the bystanders who are reading this despite the fact that it's a note to self, no, I did not sample the wine just now at 11 am. I had it last night but it just occurred to me to record my observations now.)

In MASH, the walls of the Swamp are made of mosquito netting so you can see through them, but the walls of all the other tents are made of opaque canvas. I wonder why they chose to do that? The see-through walls are sometimes used for plot purposes, but they're hardly necessary. Nothing that couldn't be worked around with a window or the fact that canvas is easy to hear through.

A quick poll for anyone reading this: To what extent did you have to ask your parents, or other grownups in your life, for help with homework when you were in elementary or high school?

I ask because I've just encountered another of those omnipresent articles about how parents are so stressed out these days because they had to help their kids with homework.

I had my mother help me with math because she used to be a high school math teacher; if she hadn't been a math teacher I wouldn't have asked for her help (although in high school I might have instead asked for help from certain cute geeky boys). I got some help with logistics/buying materials for really big projects, although I conceived the projects myself; I did most of the work myself, but sometimes a grownup would help me by showing me how to do something for the first time. And once in grade 4 I had to draw a picture of my house for French class for a stupid project, so my mother helped by drawing a couple of pieces of furniture in each room. I could have used help with English, but none of the grownups in my life were good at English.

At any rate, I did get help sometimes and there might have been stress around math exams when I gave my mother the assignment of correcting all my practice tests, but I can't recall ever having a homework load that would have caused constant parental stress. And I'm pondering whether it's the difficulty/extent of today's homework, or a culture where parents feel more obligated to be involved in every aspect of their children's education, or a culture where kids are encouraged to be more dependent on their parents, or what?

Anyway, how was your homework in elementary and secondary school?

I don't want to become one of those people who blogs extensively about her get-in-shape efforts, but I'm very proud of myself because:

a) I exercised for the last SIX days in a row (Sun, Mon, Tues, Wed, Thurs, Fri),
b) I ate breakfast EVERY day this month with the possible exception of one or two that I don't remember because I was sick (still doing spaghetti for breakfast, which is working out well), and
c)I only ate ONE serving of potato chips, and they were Lays Salt & Vinegar and I'm on my period so it's perfectly justified. And if you don't believe me on this, you try living through one of my periods, especially with messed-up post-antibiotic hormones, without Lays Salt & Vinegar chips. (But I can't promise that I won't have more tonight if I'm still hungry after having fruit and salad and a PMS sandwich).

I wonder what would happen if Google suddenly became a really bad search engine? Like Ask Jeeves used to be good about five or six years ago, but then it became shitty and totally ineffective. What if that happened to Google? I find that, both with personal and professional research, I take Google as a definitive indication of What's Out There. If I can't find what I'm looking for in Google, I don't hesitate to say "I can find no evidence that it exists." If it suddenly became bad, how long would it take us to notice? Would everyone in the world be floating for days around thinking there's no existing information on the topic they're looking for until everyone compared notes and suddenly realized that Google sucked? Would it take a really long time to notice and all of humanity just wanders around being ignorant because they can't find the info they're looking for?

I was watching on TV where a lady was having a baby, and there was a point in the process where she felt like pushing but wasn't allowed to. And apparently this is normal.

What kind of a stupid instinct is that? And if pushing when you feel like it messes up the birth process, how did the human race ever survive this far?