Sibling rivalry

A writer in the Globe and Mail proposes that parents shouldn't mediate their kids' sibling conflicts, instead leaving the kids to work it out themselves.

Here's what I want to know: how exactly does he think the kids are going to work out their conflicts? Because when I was a kid, I didn't have any secret conflict-resolution skills that I was lazily not using - I seriously had no idea whatsoever how to get my sister to leave me alone. In fact, even with my adult interpersonal skills, I still have no idea how I could have gotten her to leave me alone within the limitations placed on me as a kid.

As an example, let's look at the most annoying and pervasive sibling problem I had: my sister would keep opening the door when I was in my room with the door closed. It didn't matter what I was doing, it didn't matter if there was a risk that I was changing clothes, it didn't matter if I had just gone into my room and closed the door specifically to get away from her, she would keep trying to open the door. If I blockaded the door, she'd keep pushing at it trying to get in. Countless hours were wasted pitting my superior mass against her superior strength, trying to get her to leave me the fuck alone so I could have a moment's peace. (This also meant I could never let my guard down even when in my own room with the door closed because I never knew when she'd come by and open the door, so if I wanted real privacy I had to physically barricade the door, which was also difficult because I'm not strong enough to move the larger pieces of furniture single-handedly.

So how would Mr. Wolf have my adolescent self solve this problem?

My adult self can think of a number of approaches. The first thing I'd do if this happened to me today is say "Well, if you aren't going to respect my basic need for privacy, I'll just be going home then." Then I'd go home. But as a kid I didn't have my very own apartment in an access-controlled building, conveniently located in another city. If someone was trying to open the door to my apartment despite my attempts to keep them out, I'd call the police. I think I could even make an argument for calling the police if I had a housemate who was trying to open the door to my bedroom despite my attempts to keep them out. But calling the police because your little sister is bugging you is considered frivolous, and even if it was an option I didn't have a phone line in my room or a cellphone of my own. Another thing I could do as an adult is install some locks on the door to my room, but when I was a kid my parents wouldn't let me do this. I suppose as a last resort, my adult self would go and crash elsewhere, with a friend or at a hotel, but as a kid I couldn't do this either.

But even now, pushing 30, passing as a competent adult in a professional work environment on a daily basis, having even taken conflict resolution training, I still haven't the slightest idea how my adolescent self could have resolved that situation with all the restrictions placed on her, short of going "Moooom, make her leave me alone!" So I'd love to know how exactly Mr. Wolf thinks adolescents are going to resolve their own sibling rivalry.

Talk shows

Some sources say that Leno, Stewart, Colbert, etc. aren't allowed to write their own material during the writers strike.

Thing is, they can't stop them. And I'm not trying to imply that talk show hosts are going to flaunt union rules. Even if everyone wants to obey the union rules to the letter and the consequences are as severe as humanly possible, they are still going to write material for themselves, whether they want to or not.

Why? Imagine this: you're going to be on TV tonight. There's no getting out of it. And no one is going to provide you with the script. Just you, the cameras, and thousands (millions?) of viewers.

You're mentally writing material already, aren't you?

It's humanly impossible not to write for yourself under these circumstances.

This whole situation also has me wondering how talk shows work. Under normal circumstances, do the shows seek out the guests, or do the guests seek out the shows? Because getting a really good guest is a coup for a talk show, but being on a talk show is a coup for an unknown. So who's chasing whom?

What should I do with an unwanted lightbulb?

I bought a specialty lightbulb for this lamp I have that takes weird bulbs, but it turned out to be the wrong kind of lightbulb. I don't want to return it to the store because I bought it at a supermarket and it only cost a couple of bucks (and they don't have the kind of bulb I really need, so I'd be tying up the customer service line during rush hour for a refund that isn't even enough for paper money).

So now I just have this weird lightbulb that no one in the world uses. I don't and never will have any use for it, but I don't want to just throw a perfectly good lightbulb in the garbage. Any thoughts on what I can do with it?

My new favourite lego animation

Okay, I was (and still am) impressed by the Lego Eddie Izzard sketches, but this is even better. A Lego version of Weird Al's White & Nerdy!



And if you're going WTF, this is the original.

Things I Don't Understand: not posting prices or floorplans

I've been looking at condo websites lately, and some of them make no mention whatsoever of price, and/or don't provide floor plans for suites.

What on earth is their motivation in doing that? This is the most basic of information! Why wouldn't they want their website to answer "Should I even bother looking?" Why would they want people to come all the way to their sales centre just to find out that the building has nothing to offer them? Yes, granite countertops and a state-of-the-art fitness centre are nice, but they're meaningless if the whole building is out of your price range or if there isn't enough room in the suite layout for you to manoeuvre your wheelchair.

Things They Should Invent: transposable kareoke

You know how some songs are just in a bad key, so you either have to sing them uncomfortably high or uncomfortably low for your vocal range? They should make kareoke machines that can overcome this problem by transposing the songs at the touch of a button, so if your favourite song is in a bad key you can sing it half an octave higher.

Dispatch from behind the lines of the War on Christmas

I have a shocking confession to make. The allegations are true, there really is a War on Christmas, and I am one of its operatives. And I am here today to tell you all about our modus operandi.

I could get done for treason for confessing this, but it's a matter of conscience. Lately many innocent civilians have been accused of being our operatives, and given what happens to suspected enemy combattants these days I feel the need to protect these innocent civilians by disclosing our true methods.

Misconception: We say things like "Happy Holidays!" and "Season's Greetings!"
Fact: We say things like "Good morning!" and "Have a nice day!"

Misconception: We play music like "Frosty the Snowman" and "Jingle Bells"
Fact: We play music like "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and "Shine On You Crazy Diamond"

Misconception: We decorate with pine trees and snowflakes
Fact: We decorate with throw pillows and area rugs

Misconception: We try to convince you to buy buy buy the most perfect present ever for every single person you've ever met.
Fact: We wish you'd stop it with the fucking shopping already because we just want to pick up a carton of milk and some toilet paper without waiting in all these fucking lines!

Misconception: We're the ones suggesting that the the office or the school or whatever have a "holiday party" or a "winter party" with potluck and gifts.
Fact: We're the ones suggesting that we all pool our money and order pizza since we're all going to be working through lunch and eating at our desks anyway.

Misconception: We think that Christmas is really a pagan holiday so everyone should celebrate it regardless of how religious they feel about it.
Fact: We think that Christmas is on a Tuesday so we should watch that DVD since there's nothing on TV anyway.

So remember: If someone greets you with "Happy Holidays" while buying plastic snowmen that sing "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas" for their "seasonal celebration", they're just an innocent civilian with a questionable sense of taste. Our operatives are much more insidious than that. The people you really want to watch out for are the ones who say "Hi, how are you? How was your weekend?" while shopping for bread, eggs, and argyle socks and listening to Radiohead.

Another characteristic of the two solitudes

I've noticed that Francophones and Anglophones seem to have different relationships with their mother tongues. When I ask an Anglophone to read something and tell me about the meaning, they tell me the message they get from it first, and reach for a dictionary second. When I ask a Francophone the same thing, they reach for the Robert first and only give me the instinctive vibe they get from the text if I specifically ask them to do so. It's like Francophones are more prescriptive and Anglophones are more descriptive - for them, the language is more a set of rules that needs to be followed, and for us it's more a tool to make do what we want.

I always find it interesting when I see this characteristic manifested in the broader culture, outside my usual niche of the language professions. For example, I just saw an ad on TV for Desjardins, with the motto "conjuguer avoirs et êtres".

We could never have that in English! Could you imagine, a financial institution with a motto that's a play on words of grammatical rules? But in French, it's appropriate and decently witty!

My first thought is that this is a sign of anti-intellectualism in our culture - any mention of grammar would be seen as pretentious or elitist or ridiculously fussy - but I think it's more complicated than that. We seriously do have different relationships with our languages. Verb conjugation is more important in French because there are more things that need to happen there and more ways of getting it wrong (and, more importantly, of getting it wrong in a way that changes the meaning), while spelling is more important in English. That's why they have dictées while we have spelling bees.

That's an area for further research, if it hasn't been done yet (watch me once again fall into the trap of blogging without googling). Do the language mistakes that are most likely to change meaning affect/reflect the people's relationship with their language?

Dark vs. Right?

In my post below, I mentioned the Darkness and the Demons. These are my names for complex emotions, not literal things I actually see (and completely different from what Dexter experiences). I find people either immediately identify with this and no further explanation is necessary, or they have no idea what I'm talking about and think perhaps I need some drugs (or have been taking some drugs).

The most right-wing person I know personally cannot identify with the Darkness. When presented with the Darkness depicted visually in the arts (Munch, Burton, Gorey), they say they cannot imagine how anyone could possibly ever think of such things.

This leads me to wonder if there's a correlation between a person's politics and whether they experience the Darkness. I haven't done any investigation into this at all, but it does occur to me that it would be far easier to be right-wing if you knew nothing of the Darkness.

My new year's resolution

When the darkness descends or the demons come out to play, I will not even try to work through it. Instead I will immediately reach for food, wine, music and comedy to get my mood back up, then regroup and try again. Virtuous though it may feel, ploughing through the darkness is never as efficient as preserving my energy until the light comes back, and I'm a better person when I've been laughing than when I've been crying.

How to get me to use biodegradeable garbage bags

Mr. Hartmann said Toronto should simply require biodegradable bags instead of purchasing more costly hydropulpers to remove plastic. He said Toronto residents would be willing to convert to biodegradable bags if they knew it would help the environment.

Come on, does anyone not already know it helps the environment?

I've been through this before, but I'll say it again: what they really need to do is have all stores bag people's purchases in biodegradeable plastic bags instead of the regular kind. Then we will automatically have biodegradeable bags on hand to put our garbage and organics in.

Why not buy biodegradeable bags? First of all, I currently get bags for free with my purchases - buying them is additional expense and inconvenience. Secondly, they aren't readily available within my normal travels, and like hell I'm going to make a separate trip just for garbage bags.

Why not use reuseable shopping bags? Because then I'd have to plan my grocery shopping (which introduces a completely new chore to my routine) and carry big shopping bags around all day (which doubles the number of things I'm carrying - normally I just have a purse) or go home after work, pick up the bags, and go back to the grocery store (which nearly doubles my commute).

It's a completely different story for car people - they can put the reuseable bags in their trunks, and since they travel so widely normally they tend not to consider an extra stop an inconvenience. But for those of us who choose to incur greater expenses and sacrifice space and privacy for the massive convenience of living without a car and within walking distance of most amenities, having to carry extra things and buy extra things is a significant inconvenience. For a car person, it may only be a 5% inconvenience. For me, it's like a 25% inconvenience.

Having stores bag my purchases in biodegradeable bags will ensure that I never put another plastic bag down the garbage chute and that every garbage bag I use is biodegradeable. Anything else is very unlikely to work on me.

Things They Should Research: Does the morphology of numbers in different languages affect those cultures' perceptions of adolescence?

Q: Which ages are considered "teenagers"?
A: 13-19
Q: Why?
A: Because those are the numbers that have "teen" in them.

This has nothing to do with adolescent development, does it? It's just because that's how the numbers go. But the numbers don't do the same thing in every language. Here are the numbers 10-20 inclusive in a few languages. "Teens" (i.e. morphemes deriving from 10) are bolded.

English: ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty

French: dix, onze, douze, treize, quatorze, quinze, seize, dix-sept, dix-huit, dix-neuf, vingt

German: zehn, elf, zwölf, dreizehn, vierzehn, fünfzehn, sechzehn, siebzehn, achtzehn, neunzehn, zwanzig

Spanish: diez, once, doce, trece, catorce, quince, dieciséis, diecisiete, dieciocho, diecinueve, veinte

Polish: dziesięć, jedenaście, dwanaście, trzynaście, czternaście, piętnaście, szesnaście, siedemnaście, osiemnaście, dziewiętnaście, dwadzieścia (the numbers 11-19 all formulate the same, but it isn't a derivative of 10 as far as I can tell)

Russian: Десять, Одиннадцать, Двенадцать, Тринадцать, Четырнадцать, Пятнадцать, Шестнадцать, Семнадцать, Восемнадцать, Девятнадцать, Двадцать (text copy-pasted from the first appropriate website because I can't convince my keyboard to do cyrillic. Again, 11-19 all formulate the same, but it isn't a derivative of 10)

Portugese: dez, onze, doze, treze, catorze, quinze, dezasseis, dezassete, dezoito, dezanove, vinte (thank you Poodle)

Afrikaans: tien, elf, twaalf, dertien, veertien, vyftien, sestien, sewentien, agtien, neëntien, twintig(thank you Poodle)

Italian: Dieci, Undici, Dodici, Tredici, Quattordici, Quindici, Sedici, Diciassette, Diciotto, Diciannove, Venti (via Google translate)

Dutch: Tien, Elf, Twaalf, Dertien, Veertien, Vijftien, Zestien, Zeventien, Achttien, Negentien, Twintig (via Google translate)

Greek: δεκα, εντεκα, δωδεκα, δεκατρεις, δεκατεσσερα, δεκαπεντε, δεκαεξι, δεκαεπτα, δεκαοκτω, δεκαεννεα, εικοσι (via Google translate - I can't actually read Greek so I'm just identifying patterns visually)

If you have access to any other languages, please post in the comments! Google Translate also does Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, but I can't read those well enough to draw any conclusions - if you can, your contributions would be most welcome. (I know I should be using Google Translate and normally I don't but this is one of the most straightforward translations possible with no negative consequences of getting it wrong.)

Anyway, given that the change in number formulation can occur anywhere from 11 to 17 depending on the language, I'm wondering if this affects how various cultures perceive adolescence. Anyone in the market for a thesis project?

Etiquette puzzle

I'm in a conversation with two other people, A and B. A asks B a question. A and B have every reason to believe that B is the most qualified person to answer the question. However, I know at least as much as B, if not more, and have every reason to believe that I can explain it better than B.* Should I chime in, "Oh, I've translated about that! Here's how it works!"? Should I wait for an opening and then put in my two cents, if I have anything to add on top of what B says? Should I passive-aggressively ask B questions to lead them to providing the information that A needs? Or should I just shut up and let B be the expert?

*Really, this isn't ego. Something about how I learn things when translating about them seems to make me far better able to explain them to outsiders than insiders can. In other cases, I've experienced something firsthand and studied it academically, when B has done only one or the other.

Evil?

So what does a petition have to do to get into the news?

I've seen several mentions in the news of the fact that a facebook group opposing proposed changes to Canada's copyright law got something like 30,000 members in only a few days.

But the avaaz.org "stop being a dickhead about climate change" (traduction libre) petition got over 100,000 signatures in three or four days, and I haven't seen that in the news anywhere.

Sesame Street Old School!

Recently I've been watching Sesame Street Old School, old Sesame Street from the early 70s, which apparently "Is intended for grown-ups and may not suit the needs of today's pre-schooler."

So obviously I had to watch it to see what was apparently so wrong with it!

I can see a few things that wouldn't fly today. Gordon (who's a teacher - I'd forgotten that) takes it upon himself to walk a little girl who's new to the neighbourhood home from school and introduce her to everyone. Susan invites this little girl she's just met (and many other children over the course of the show) to come over for milk and cookies. And speaking of milk, they seemed really enthusiastic about milk in the first episode. There was like milk propoganda! (Seriously, five minutes on milk, on Sesame Street?) And at one point Luis decides to go out for a coffee break and leaves a small child at the Fix-It Shop with instructions to answer the phone and tell whoever calls that he'll be back in five minutes. Then he says "And if they don't speak English..." and gives her instructions on what to say in Spanish - and I think she didn't even speak Spanish!

It was fun to see early incarnations of the muppets we all know and love. Oscar the Grouch was ORANGE! Big Bird was kind of dopey and stupid at first, then he grew some more feathers on the top of his head and became more childlike than dopey. In Mr. Snuffleupagus's first appearance, his eyes were green - like even the whites of his eyes were green! Cookie Monster was this big dark hairy lurking beast who snuck up and wordlessly devoured Kermit the Frog's W. Oh, and everyone with whom I've argued about the lyrics of the "One of these things is not like the others" song: they don't sing it the same way every time! So we're all right!

But what was even more fun is noticing as an adult things that I took as given as a child. The blue man throws a hissy fit because his alphabet soup doesn't contain all the letters of the alphabet! The grown-ups all drop everything for a game of Follow The Leader. (Oh, and speaking of the grown-ups, they're all wearing or not wearing their own wedding rings - the rings aren't part of the costume! So Bob has a wedding ring, but Gordon and Susan (who are married to each other) don't.) Gordon (who had a fro and sideburns!) and some kids are shooting hoops, and Gordon says "Let's get a game together, but first we need to count how many people we have." So he stops and they all count everyone, then they go back to just shooting hoops. In a scene about how everyone makes mistakes, Big Bird accidentally steps on his J, and Gordon says "Oh, that's okay, don't worry about it, I accidentally step on my J all the time." When I was little, I took this as absolutely normal, and thought it was very strange that I never saw a random W just sitting there on a little brick wall IRL. When I was just starting to learn to read, my parents either made or bought some little letters made of wood so then I had letters like on Sesame Street. I don't know if this is because at some point I expressed a wish for Sesame Street letters, or if they thought of it separately.

Actually, now that I think about it, one of the educational benefits of Sesame Street is that it normalized reading and counting and talking about letters and shapes and colours. Everyone on Sesame Street from children to muppets to grown-ups sometimes just stops everything and counts to 20, or thinks of things that start with B. This would actually be very useful for children because it models these skills on a level they can understand! Because I don't think small children would associate skimming the newspaper or paying for groceries with knowing your letters and numbers. When I was little, I used to think that boys couldn't do math, because I could clearly do math (and was better at it than most of the boys - and the girls - in my class) and my mother was a math teacher so she did math, but I never actually saw my father doing math. But of course he did - my father was a programmer and had investments and did home improvement projects that involved rulers and protractors and calculators and generally functioned in adult life, but I didn't think of any of this as math. Math was textbooks and worksheets and memorizing your times tables, and I just couldn't yet associate it with balancing your chequebook or calculating how much drywall you needed for the basement. So if other children's minds work similarly, Sesame Street could be really helpful just by normalizing the idea of reciting the alphabet or counting by twos.

Solstice

Good morning! I hope everyone did their part for world peace.

Just a little something for the slow waning of the darkness:

Calling all triple threats

If you can sing, tap-dance, and play the trumpet, here's your audition piece:

Language commercial idea, free for the taking

There are commercials trying to convince people to learn another language. I'm not entirely sure why, but there are. (Examples: 1, 2, 3 (contains dirty language - don't play at work or within earshot of your parents or children).

I have an idea for another one.

Two people are in a cafe having what sounds like an intriguing personal conversation, except they're code-switching. The first language is the first language of the viewership, the second language is a language that the viewership is highly unlikely to understand. The conversation goes something like this:

A: So then he [other language]
B: With just his tongue????
A: Yes! And on top of that, he has the biggest [other language]!
B: Wow, so how did you deal with that? I mean your [other language] is kind of, you know...
A: Yeah, I know, [other language]. But it turns out he had been through this before, so he told me to just [other language].
B: You know, I never thought of that position before, but now that I picture it, it just might work!

So that's what the viewer hears. Now what they could do is if buzz picks up about this commercial but a translation doesn't become readily googleable, they could start running it with subtitles. Then the viewers will learn that the conversation is really something like this:

A: So then he kept accidentally pushing the instruments right out of my hand!
B: With just his tongue????
A: Yes! And on top of that, he has the biggest gag reflex I've seen in my 20 years as a dental hygiensit!
B: Wow, so how did you deal with that? I mean your hands are kind of, you know...
A: Yeah, I know, big, mannish, indelicate. But it turns out he had been through this before, so he told me to just recline the chair all the way back and stand right behind his head instead of to the side.
B: You know, I never thought of that position before, but now that I picture it, it just might work!

The overall effect should be funnier though, and the code-switching should be natural. But I'm too lazy to do this, so I'm giving the idea away.