What if...

Suppose the opposition defeats the budget tomorrow, calls for a vote of non-confidence, and triggers an election.

Then suppose the election results in a Liberal minority with a precarious balance of power, much like we have right now.

Then what would happen?

Mmmm....politics....

Thoughts about today's political events:

The bad:

- I disapprove of MPs changing parties without the consent of their constituents. I vote for the party, not the individual, and it makes me very grumpy indeed that that can be changed on a whim.
- The Liberals seem to have a whole "Defect from the Conservative Party and get a free cabinet position!" offer going on. This is rather ill-advised on their part, as it doesn't do anything to make them look less corrupt.
- I also think it's inappropriate for media outlets to be speculating/reporting on Belinda Stronach's and Peter Mackay's relationship, whatever form that relationship may take.

The good:

- I rather like the idea of a millionaire making political decisions based on social as opposed to economic principles.
- But the main reason I was moderately asquee today is because this makes politics SO much more exciting! The score is tied one all and we're into sudden-death overtime!

Other:

Apparently the Conservatives are running an ad campaign trying to convince people of the necessity of an early election. Shouldn't they be responding to the will of the people rather than trying to change it?

Quibbling over semantics

The Crown is appealing the sentence of a mother whose toddler died of dehydration after she left her home alone overnight.

Crown prosecutor David Wright had asked for an eight- to 12-year sentence for what he called her "unspeakably evil" crime.

Call me callous, but I don't think that's unspeakably evil. I think you could get a lot more evil than that. Basically she killed her daughter through neglect. It would have been a lot more evil to kill her through a deliberate action, or to torture her, or killed more people, or something else that I'm sure people who are more evil than me could think of. I think it's maybe right on the borderline between evil and horribly selfish/stupid. Maybe I've been having too much RotS lately, but I think you've got to do a lot worse to be unspeakably evil.

Characterization of Padmé (SPOILERS for Ep. 3)

Upon rewatching Phantom Menace yesterday, I realized why Padmé's characterization in Ep. 3 bugs me. There are ten years between Ep. 1 and Ep. 2, but the character of Padmé doesn't mature significantly during this time.

Not that she's IMmature - she never was immature, she was Queen of a whole planet at 14! In Ep. 1 she showed that she was capable of being tough and making difficult decisions and holding her own with a blaster. However, she was still vulnerable and inexperienced, as demonstrated in the scene where Palpatine manipulated her into calling for a vote of no confidence in Chancellor Valorem.

Fast forward 10 years to Ep. 2, and she's still essentially the same person. There's
nothing that shows she's grown, matured, gained more political savvy, or improved herself in any way. To be sure she was sufficiently grown, mature, and savvy in Ep. 1, but 10 years a huge amount of time when you're only 24, and some personal growth and self-improvement should have happened during that time. But we didn't see it. She was exactly the same person, and her relationship with Anakin changed only because puberty was extremely kind to him

One might even argue that she grows more and more vulnerable as the trilogy progresses. I'm not entirely sure this is true, because as the trilogy progresses we also see her in increasingly intimate contexts. Our first view of her is in all her Queen regalia; our last view of her (which I'm going to rot13 because it's a major spoiler) is qlvat va puvyqovegu, univat orra orgenlrq naq zheqrerq ol gur ybir bs ure yvsr. You simply cannot compare a person's vulnerability in these two contexts.

However, we also see enough of her external self, the self she shows to the outside world, that we should have been able to perceive some significant growth, experience and maturity as compared with the first episode. There simply was not enough of this growth in the movies to do justice to the character.

St00pid consumer products!

Dear Revlon,

How DARE you cancel my powder without telling me? What am I supposed to do now? There simply is no comparable product on the market! Fuck you!

Sincerely,

Blotchy


Dear La Senza,

Why the hell don't you have any bras in black or nude? And if you're going to change the colours of your bras every season, you could at least design the bras so that they can easily be sewn back up when the wire starts poking out. What am I supposed to do now? Neon colours are fine for the bedroom, but some of us work outside the bedroom and need more subtle undergarments that won't be glaringly noticeable through our blouses.

Sincerely,

Unsupported

I am very happy with my Polish mark

It's not polite to gloat, (and my classmates wouldn't agree that my mark is gloat-worthy), but I'd just like to quietly say "I win!"

That is all :)

Family Guy

This season's Family Guy is not nearly as good as previous seasons. It's so not living up to its potential, and that makes me v. v. grumpy.

Phantom Menace redux

I just watched Phantom Menace because it was on TV, and I wanted to see how felt knowing the exact plot of the entire trilogy. It's a better movie when you know what's going to happen in the following two, because you know what's important and why. It doesn't work nearly as well when you have to wait three years to see why various things are important. Jar-Jar is more tolerable when you know he has a purpose, although there's still no good reason for him to be characterized so stupidly. The other problem (stop reading this entry here if you don't want a minor spoiler for ep. 3) is that they didn't show Qui-Gon passing into the force, and they really should have for the purpose of continuity of the next five movies.

But other than that, it's better as part of a trilogy than as a standalone movie.

Strange ways to train your dog

Seen in front of the post office at Yonge & Eg: a big fat bald man with a little tiny chihuahua dog sitting on his shoulder like a parrot.

A poll

How many people do you know personally who have had to use homeowner's or renter's insurance to replace possessions that were stolen or destroyed in a fire or some other disaster?

Wherein road rage is transformed into a serendipitous burst of music

Two cars are honking at each other outside. Their horns harmonize quite nicely - the harmony is a bit dark, but definitely not dissonant. Unfortunately I've never developed the skill of aurally identifying harmonic intervals, but if I had to guess I'd say it's a minor third.

How to find homes for all the orphans in Kenya

A few days ago there was this adorable news story about a dog who had rescued an abandoned newborn and taken it home to her puppies. Apparently hundreds of people all around the world offered to adopt this baby. So here's the plan: contact every one of these people privately. Tell them that they can adopt the miracle baby, but they have to keep it secret so she can grow up without media attention. Then send them some random Kenyan orphanage baby who needs a home. Repeat this process every time there's a miracle baby somewhere that a bunch of people want to adopt.

Building a better brothel

Recent thoughts about the legalization of prostitution got me thinking about how prostitution could be legalized without having a negative effect on the quality of life of residents who are neither an employee nor a client of the sex industry. I have no problem with legalized prostitution itself, but I think having it all over the streetscape would devalue the whole city. I'm quite proud of the little urban niche I've found for myself, and I would be ashamed if it if it were suddenly flooded with gaudy neon like a Montreal strip club, or if they started having prostitutes standing in display windows like those patties they sell at 7-Eleven à la Amsterdam, or if cars started pulling up alongside me while I'm walking home minding my own business. Prostitution is so much classier if done discreetly.

So I got thinking: how do you fit something into the urban landscape without people noticing unless they're looking for it?

Well, what element of the urban landscape don't you notice unless you're looking for it?

Office buildings! All they have to do is model brothels on office buildings!

The first step is to make sure brothels are called brothels. Maybe not the word "brothel" because it's rather old-fashioned and may be disrespectful, but some word that isn't used for anything else. No spas, massage parlours, holistic centres, nightclubs, etc. Escort services maybe. Just make sure it doesn't have the same name as something that also exists as a non-sex-related service, so people don't accidently wander into a brothel while looking for a watchmaker or something.

Then the building itself has to be set up like an office building, as opposed to a storefront. You walk in, there's a lobby with a reception desk or signage directing you to the various services available, you go to the specific suite you're looking for, and then once you're inside it can cease to look like an office. They could make zoning rules so that certain buildings are sex-work only, much like there are office buildings that contain only medical offices. The outside of the building would have a discreet sign (no neon XXX or anything) stating in the standardized euphemism what kind of building it is. The building could have some kind of designated indoor smoking area or be set back from the street so that people leaving don't congregate on the sidewalk (if people who have just been to a prostitute are anything like people who have just been to a strip club, I wouldn't want to have to walk by clumps of them outside the building). If they feel a discreet sign isn't enough, they can advertise by mentioning their street number (or maybe even put it in their name like Club 279), and put a really big street number on their building.

This way the locations of newly-legalized sex work can be as unobtrusive as possible, so people who need nothing to do with it can just walk by without noticing it any more than you notice an office building that you never need to go to. This will help keep NIMBYism from hindering the legalization of prostitution, give sex workers (and their clients) more dignified working conditions, and make our streetscape much classier overall.

"...due to a personal injury at track level"

Conventional wisdom is that news media don't report it when people commit suicide by jumping in front of a subway train, because they don't want to glamourize it. However, I think is policy may be having the opposite effect. Every time anyone hears an announcement citing "personal injury at track level", they assume it's a jumper. That is a sensible assumption, but if the TTC really wanted to cover up how many people jump, wouldn't they say something else or just not cite a reason? I remember one serious delay caused by a "personal injury at track level" turned out to be a lady who slipped in a puddle of spilled coffee and fell onto the tracks. Yet hundreds, if not thousands, of people who were in the subway that evening but didn't bother to read the little blurb in the GTA section of the next day's Star went home thinking it's a jumper.

This idea of a mass cover-up of an unspecified number of cuicides seems to have developed a certain mystique. My classmates were speculating on the number of suicides per year, and the numbers they were throwing out were so high that statistically someone in that room must have had a friend of a friend who had seen an actual jumper. In another milieu, I once encountered someone who was completely convinced that all the PA codes to call supervisors and janitors ("299 Sheppard 299 Sheppard 299 Sheppard please call") were actually a way of communicating that there had been a suicide. I think if the TTC wants to deglamourize the idea of commiting suicide by jumping in front of a train, they need to do something about their policies for handling suicide before it reaches urban legend status.

Random questions that occur to me

1. Why on earth would anyone own a pager in the 21st century? Cell-phones can do the exact same job, plus you can use them as a phone!

2. What exactly is wrong with ankle bracelets? The general consensus seems to be that they're tacky, with the tacit implication that the wearer is a whore, but I don't understand why. For me, they evoke no more visceral a reaction than a normal bracelet or a pair of earrings. Were they once some kind of secret code to indicate that the wearer is up for casual sex or something?

Logistical question for parents

When people use cloth diapers, what do they do with the dirty diaper when they change the baby somewhere other than at home?

You know you're getting old when...

You know you're getting old when you start envying students their summer jobs.

He clearly doesn't remember being a student too clearly. This article makes me gleefully rejoice in all my adult responsibilities because they mean that I don't have to work with the public, I can work in air conditioning, I can wear whatever I want, and I don't have to worry about financial security for at least two years.

Sub-metering

The Ontario government is considering legislation that would force tenants to pay their electricity bills directly.

The main problem with this is that tenants don't always have the resources to make their homes energy-efficient - the landlords would have to do that. To demonstrate how drastic the changes would need to be to make some apartments energy-efficient, here is a description of the heating/air conditioning system in my apartment, taken from a longer letter I am sending to my MPP and the energy minister.
My building has central heating and air conditioning. The hot or cool air, depending on the time of year, comes out through a vent that is located on the wall, about a foot below the ceiling. The intake vent is located on the same wall, directly below the output vent, and just above the floor. The thermostat is on the same wall, in between the output and intake vents, at about eye level. The whole setup is in a corner where the wall meets the windows, about eight inches away from the windows.

Anyone familiar with the basic principles of convection can see that this is problematic.

In the winter when the furnace is on, the heat is emitted near the ceiling. Heat, as we all know, rises. You can visualize the effect of this vent placement by picturing the heat as a fluid being poured into a container, except instead of flowing first to the bottom of the container it flows to the top. My apartment has to be "filled" with heat from the top down, and enormous amounts of energy are wasted heating the ceiling area before any of that heat gets down to where I am.

In the summer when the air conditioning is on, the placement of the output vent is not a problem, but the placement of the intake vent is. Because heat rises, the coolest air in the apartment is likely to be near the floor, and that air gets taken back into the HVAC system instead of being permitted to circulate around the apartment.

The placement of the vents near the windows is also problematic, because the windows are not very well sealed. They do close properly, but they are cheap and 30 years old, so there are drafts in the cracks and no attempt has been made to make the glass energy-efficient. I'm sure this results in some of the heat and air conditioning being lost by flowing directly out the window.

The placement of the thermostat is also very inefficient. Because it is so close to the window, it is affected by the weather conditions outside. For example, it may be sufficiently warm in the apartment, but a draft from the window might be blowing directly onto the thermostat, thus encouraging it to keep heating the apartment. I'm sure the fact that the thermostat is directly below the output vent and directly above the intake vent also means it gets an inaccurate reading.

The other problem with the thermostat is that it is not very precise. It is an old analog model that doesn't even mark the degree numbers on it. It is simply a knob that I can turn to "higher" or "lower", so I can't turn my temperature down a couple of degrees like so many people recommend. Even if I could, I don't know if it would make that much of a difference. Because of the location of the thermostat, on the wall directly below the output vent, directly above the intake vent, and inches away from the drafty window, it doesn't shut off when the apartment is suitably heated or cooled. One cold winter day, I did an experiment. I turned my thermostat to the very lowest level that still made the furnace be on - just one tiny increment above where the furnace shut off. It took the thermostat two days to shut off by itself, when the apartment was suitably heated within an hour or so.

With heating and cooling taking up 49.5% of the energy use in my whole life and over 2/3 of the energy use in my home (according to the One Tonne Challenge website), all the austerity in the world isn't going to make a significant dent in my energy bills. I already open my windows on cool summer nights, keep them closed through the cold of winter and the hottest part of summer days, close my curtains in the summer and keep them open in the winter, and turn on the fan above my stove to suck out hot air on hot days. What I need is serious renovation to change the locations of my vents, the quality of my windows, and the location and quality of my thermostat.

If the government insists upon passing legislation to make all tenants pay their own utilities, they must first make all landlords ensure that all rental units are reasonably energy-efficient, so that austerity measures on the part of the tenant can actually save energy.

Things They Should Invent: discontinued product early warning system.

All too often I have gone to a store to buy one of my favourite products, only to find that it has been discontinued. This can be particularly annoying in the case of hard-to-fit clothing items or cosmetics of The Perfect Colour. As a service to their loyal customers, companies should offer a service where you can go to their website and "subscribe" to a product. You just fill out a form that automatically tells a web server that this product is one of your favourites, and if the company is ever thinking of discontinuing a product, the server can automatically send out an email to all the subscribers informing them of this. That way the customers can go out and stock up before it's too late, and the company (or maybe the store, I'm not entirely sure how this works) can make some extra money by sending out this information before the stores reduce the item to a clearance price. I know I would certainly buy multiple copies of, say, my favourite concealer or bra at the full price if it were about to be discontinued, and people who didn't need it quite so badly could buy the last few items left after they go on clearance.

If it is true that discontinued items are those that don't sell so well (as opposed to companies discontinuing stuff just to piss us off), then this system shouldn't present too much of a problem because there won't be that many people running out to stock up before the item is discontinued. This system could also help companies and consumers in other ways, for example by showing companies just how many people are loyally devoted to a particular product (as opposed to those who buy it once then find out the colour doesn't work for them), or by sending out a notification to customers when a particular store in their area is having one of their favourite products on sale. I'm sure it would also provide some kind of valuable demographic information, since companies are always using air miles and stuff to see what products I'm buying where and when.