As I waited in line at the ATM at Yonge & Eg., I overheard a passing child:

"Mommy, how much more walking until we get to the CN Tower?"

The kid couldn't have been more than five. Fuck, I hope he was misunderstanding the situation and they weren't making him walk from Eg. down to the CN Tower! That's the kind of parenting that produces people like me who absolutely dread summer!

An interesting philosophical and moral exercise: think about activities that are illegal and/or generally considered to be "wrong". Think about the activities from this list that you do not engage in. Now try to figure out why, exactly, you do not engage in these activities. Try to get beyond "it's wrong" or "it's illegal", try to get down to the core essential reason(s), the factors that are dealbreakers. If these factors were eliminated, you would not hesitate to engage in these activites. Is the punishment meted out by the law the real deterrent, or is it something else?

Is a Sgt. Major a kind of Sergeant or a kind of Major?

My Harmony book currently has me working on Classical ornaments. It
discusses, in practically mathematical terms, how exactly an ornament is
supposed to be played, and the exercises consist of showing me an ornament
and having me write it out in full, or showing me a big mess of black note
and having me write it with ornament symbols.

For some reason I find this terribly interesting. In my formal music
education I was always taught how to play ornaments on a case-by-case basis,
and I never realized they had such a precise meaning. Plus there's a lot of
subdividing involved, as you try to fit a sextuplet of thirty-second notes*
into an existing measure. It's amazing how mentally relaxing subdividing
can be after eight hours of translation!

*If I'd only been taught music using British terminology, I could have said
"a sextuplet of demisemiquavers" here. Curse RCM for denying me the
opportunity to use the word demisemiquaver in my daily life!

Minority Governing for Dummies Canadian Political Parties:

1. Think of the one single reason why voters who vote against your party are likely to vote against your party. Then make a pledge to address that issue, and stick to that pledge for at least one year. For example, the Liberals could commit to massive transparency, the Conservatives could commit to not actively pursuing any policy that would limit existing rights, the Bloc could commit to not actively pursuing separatism, and the NDP could commit to not actively pursuing any policy that would put Canada into deficit.

2. Look at all the policies in your platform, find the policy that is furthest away from anything any of the other parties have in their platforms, and put it on hold for a period of one year.

3. Compare the platforms of all four parties, and find the one policy on which you agree the most closely, in principle if not in quantitative details. Pursue that policy with a mind to finding a happy medium rather than stubbornly getting your way.

4. Repeat step 3 as needed.

I am now on MSN instead of ICQ. My MSN username can be found in my ICQ profile, or you can contact me at my personal email address to get it. If you don't know my personal email address, this message is not intended for you.

I want to make it perfectly clear that this was NOT my idea. I'm not the kind of person to abandon a perfectly good instant messenging platform, especially a pioneer like ICQ, just because some corporate behemoth has become trendier. However, all the most important people, the ones who merited alerts when they came online and who got to see me when I was in invisible mode, they all abandoned me and went to MSN, so I must either begrudgingly follow them or spend my days staring at a dead contact list.

Old School by Tobias Wolff is the story of a student at a New England boarding school. The school has writing competitions where the winner gets to meet a famous writer, and the story follows his entries in these competitions and the consequences thereof.

I really enjoyed this book. Part of the reason is doubtless because books about boarding schools have always, inexplicably, appealed to me. Part of the reason is that the kids in this book acted like kids. No angst, no drama, no unrealistic gratuitous sex just so the author can write a sex scene, no "look at me, I'm smoking and drinking, I'm so fucking edgy" (They did smoke and drink, they were just reasonable and unpretentious about it).

The plot itself is small, nothing huge and earth-shattering, but I think this adds to the quality of the novel. Huge and earthshattering things don't happen when you're 17, and the book doesn't pretend otherwise. Robert Frost, Ayn Rand and Ernest Hemmingway all show up, and the protagonist has little to no interaction with them. (Although the book does do me the favour of explaining through its first-person point of view why reading Ayn Rand tends to turn people into assholes, if sometimes only temporarily). It's refreshing to have a protagonist who DOESN'T get to become personally acquainted with the famous personages who pass through his life. There is a decent story arc with a bit of a twist at the end, but nothing superlative happens at all. That's why I enjoyed it, it felt realistic. (As realistic as a period piece in an era and location that I've never been in can be).

The best thing to do about the whole Speaker debacle would be to make Independent MP Chuck Cadman speaker of the house, and give him the right to vote freely. As a normal MP his vote would only be useful in case of a tie, so this is a way to appoint a speaker without putting anyone at an actual or perceived disadvantage. I suppose the only problem would occur when he wants to present a private member's bill, but perhaps they could have someone else as acting speaker while he presents the bill, and then put them all back in their normal places when they vote?

How do they know that dog treats are yummier for dogs than normal dog food?

A Game to Play on the Tracks by Lorna Jackson was unanimously well-reviewed,
but I didn't enjoy it. The author deliberately under-informs the reader in
a way that doesn't contribute to the overall novel and leaves the reader
paging backwards to see whose viewpoint we're reading now. The recurring
imagery seems deliberate and there for its own sake (Look ma, recurring
imagery!), and the characters aren't deep enough to make me care about them.
The overall impression I get is that of an amateur writer using devices that
she's seen other authors use, without actually knowing when and why to use
them. It seems that she had some great epic saga in her head, but she
couldn't get it through to me.

I don't think the Globe and Mail and its editors and letter-writers are being very fair to Chandler Powell.

Shortly after the federal election was called, G&M started running a series called "Will Chandler Vote?", where they profiled Mr. Powell, a 23-year-old who wasn't sure if he was going to vote, and followed him from the election call to election day, writing a weekly column about his decision-making process.

All throughout this process, people were sending letters to the editor accusing Mr. Powell, and sometimes his whole demographic (full disclosure: I am part of this demographic) of being selfish, self-absorbed, lazy, navel-gazing, and overly introspective. Many of these letter-writers seemed extremely angry that Mr. Powell had not decided whether to vote and was going through such a complex decision-making process, some implied that this introspection and over-analysis was some shameful crime for which he should be punished by being senteced to poverty or war or oppression or hard labour. The Globe and Mail itself even wrote a scathing, scornful editorial, just after the first Chandler column appeared, slamming the fact that he had not yet decided whether to vote.

The problem is that all these people are condemning Chandler Powell for being exactly the kind of person the Globe and Mail needed to do this feature.

Each Chandler column was between 1/3 and 1/2 of a newspaper page. I word-counted a couple, and they came in just under 900 words. The election was about five weeks long. That comes to a total of almost a full two-page spread, or between 4000 and 5000 words, about Mr. Powell deciding whether to vote. Imagine if you were making a simple personal decision and a reporter was following you around, asking questions, making you expound and explain and justify and rationalize and reflect upon your decision making process until they had enough material for a two-page spread. Could you do this and not come across as self-centred, self-absorbed, navel-gazing and overly introspective?

It was particularly inappropriate for the Globe and Mail's editorial of May 27th to attack Mr. Powell for possibly choosing not to vote. On May 27th, the campaign was less than a week old, and there was still a month left. The Globe and Mail still had four or five columns to do about his decision-making process. They NEEDED him to be undecided. What would they have written 900 words a week about if he had already decided that yes, he was going to vote? If the newspaper wanted to write an editorial about how important it is that young people vote that would have been fine, but it was awfully rude of them to condemn Mr. Powell personally for essentially being a cooperative subject for their feature.

As for the readers and letter-writers who, for reasons I don't quite understand, seemed so very outraged that Mr. Powell might not vote and was thinking so much about it, taking so much into consideration, I would have expected better than for them to take it out on Mr. Powell personally. The self-centredness, self-absorption, introspection, navel-gazing and possibly-not-voting for which they condemn Mr. Powell are all necessary characteristics of this sort of feature. If the readers find that disagreeable, they should be taking issue with the newspaper itself for choosing to run such a feature, rather than with its subject for being an ideal subject.

Apparently, until 1998, in the British parliament, every time someone wanted
to raise a point of order in the House, they had to wear a hat. They kept
collapsible top hats on hand for just such occasions.

I like that rule. It reminds me of Calvinball.

Errazuriz Sauvignon Blanc does not taste like a Sauv. Blanc to me. It tastes more like a dry Chardonnay. It isn't bad, it isn't good, it doesn't seem like a Sauv. Blanc. That's really all I have to say about it.

Kitchen Stuff Plus has keychain breathalysers for only $15!

I had a dream where I was at my grandmother's. Her dog (not her current dog, her previous dog) kept tugging at the leg of my pants. (I was wearing giant bell-bottoms, probably as a plot device). I figured out that the dog wanted me to follow her, so I come along in the direction she was pulling me in. She takes me up to the attic, where there's a leak in the roof. So I start looking around for a bucket to put under the leak, but I can't find one. Then the dog wanders into the room with a giant bucket over her head. (Which is even funnier since this dog is tiny - she always weighed under 10 pounds).

Fountain at the Center [sic] of the World by Robert Newman is essentially an anti-globalization treatise disguised as a novel. The problem is that the people who are going to read this novel are already anti-globalization, or at least not pro-globalization, so it's unlikely to change any opinions. It starts out slow - I had no enthusiasm for reading more than my allotted chapter per day - but picks up as to goes on. The approach to the "villain" is very interesting, because he is introduced as the protagonist and is never explicitly made out to be "evil" - he is treated with the same neutrality as the "good guys". If it weren't for the anti-globalization rhetoric (and I use this word without its connotations) smattered throughout the novel, the treatment of the protagonist/villain could even result in it being read as a pro-globalization novel by those who are already pro-globalization.

I do have an issue with the editors, however. I, with my two half-hearted years of Spanish, could find two errors in the incidental Spanish in this book: they wrote the Italian "Signor" instead of the Spanish "Senor", and they spelled "maquiladora" with two L's, which would change the pronunciation. There were also a few uncaught typoes: "some placeelse" instead of "someplace else", for example. I caught about half a dozen editing problems in total, and when the editing is not as thorough as it should be I'm inclined to think that perhaps the fact-checking wasn't as thorough as it should be, which is an unfortunate impression for such a political book to give.

Bellingham Shiraz is a fickle fickle little wine. The first glass was very nice, creamy, berryish, spicy, everything a shiraz should be. Then I sealed it and stored it in the usual manner. When I opened it again for another glass, it was slightly tannic and a bit too sharp. Perhaps this isn't a normal standard by which one judges wine, but I like my wines to stand up even when I don't finish the whole bottle in one sitting.

I have the worst headache ever and there's something squeaky and rattly - like a really bad motor - in the apartment upstairs or on one of the balconies and it's making the most horrid noise ever. :(

I wonder how composers decide what key their compositions will be in?