If you feel the need to make a friends forever pact, you're too immature to get married

I am the same age as Elizabeth Patterson, so I can tell you on the best of authority that this is not age-appropriate behaviour.

I do have a few very awesome friends with whom I very much hope to remain friends forever, and I cannot imagine any circumstances under which we'd be moved to make a friends forever pact. Occasionally we do sit back and marvel at how long we've been friends, but we'd never make a pact about being friends in the future. We just do it.

Actually, maybe that's what this is commenting on. A friends forever pact is the sort of thing you'd find in like Baby-sitters Club, where they can't imagine a bigger world than the one they inhabit now, but you know they'll have gone their separate ways by the end of grade 9. Come to think of it, Elizabeth hasn't seen Dawn and Shawna Marie on camera outside their own weddings (although we don't often get to see her IM/email conversations) so maybe they aren't as friends as they think they are, and maybe, despite her sojourns to university and on the reserve, her world hasn't gotten bigger yet.

What if a can-do attitude leads to consumerism?

I've been feeling insecure lately, and that has me considering trying new beauty products/techniques, generally at increased expense (in terms of money and/or time) compared with my usual regimen.

Conventional wisdom is that this is because the media has created an unattainable image and then the fashion and beauty industries are exploiting the resulting insecurities for profit.

But I find myself wondering if this is partly because our society values the whole can-do, self-help, Protestant work ethic attitude? You can do it, you just have to put work hard! If you want something badly enough, the universe will give it to you! Stop whining and take charge of your life by making the 10 quick and easy changes listed in this magazine article! You just have to make an effort!

I can see how working hard and making an effort could translate into a time-consuming skin-care routine, or how taking charge of your life could translate into biting the bullet and going to that expensive hairdresser, or how a person who believes that if they want something badly enough the universe will give it to them could see the prominent display of a brand new high-tech foundation as the universe giving them a solution to their problem.

Maybe if our culture as a whole was more zen about things, more "it is what it is" rather than "with hard work and the right attitude you can achieve anything!", maybe we'd be less susceptible to consumerism. (Assuming, of course, that being less susceptible to consumerism is a good thing - the consumerism in which I do indulge does makes me happy, although I try to indulge mindfully which is why I'm writing right now instead of shopping for beauty products.)

Would abortion patients actually care if abortion had a negative impact on their health?

Salon debunks the idea that having an abortion has a negative impact on women's health.

Which got me thinking: even if it did, who cares?

You get an abortion, you go insane. You get an abortion, you get breast cancer. You get an abortion, you become infertile. Even you get an abortion, you go to jail.

All of those are so incredibly negligible compared with the alternative of going through an unwanted pregnancy and bringing an unwanted child into the world!

If someone actually thought "Well, I've thought it through thoroughly and determined that it's best for this child to be spared the misery of existence. Oh, but wait, if I did that then I'd have to take Paxil for a little while! We can't have that!" then they'd be entirely too selfish to have a child anyway.

Added Aug. 15 11:30 pm: Some people aren't going to like or grok or agree with this post because it's about abortion. But I just realized it isn't really about abortion at all. I wrote about abortion because the article that triggered these thoughts was about abortion, but it's bigger than that.

So reread the post, but cross out the word abortion and replace it with whatever your personal family planning goal is right this minute. For me, that's never becoming pregnant. For other people, it is becoming pregnant. Or perhaps having four kids. Or perhaps getting a vasectomy. Or perhaps adopting kids. Whatever your goal is, replace the word abortion with your goal and reread the post.

See how all those potential health effects are so completely negligible?

How insecurity works

I looked good as I was leaving for work today. My makeup worked, making my complexion look smooth and my eyes look big and bright and my teeth look white. My hair was clean and shiny and mostly obediant, staying in a sleek and flattering style. The cut and colour of my clothes was just right, and my undergarments were doing their job very nicely underneath.

That was 16 hours ago.

Now my hair is starting to look oily again. It's braided in a way that's completely unflattering but good for sleeping. I'm wearing no makeup, there are splotches of zit cream on my zits and wrinkle cream on my wrinkles, and the circles under my eyes are darker than usual. I'm wearing an old t-shirt in an unflattering cut and colour, mostly because it's convenient to sleep in. My upper lip is hinting that it might want to be waxed sometime soon, and my teeth are suggesting that I ask the dentist about the whitening options available.

When I look in the mirror now, I can't see the person who was looking back at me 16 hours ago. But when I looked in the mirror 16 hours ago, I could still see the person who's looking back at me now. And when I picture myself in a situation where I need to look good, it's the now version that comes immediately to mind, oily and oozing in a big old t-shirt surrounded by perfectly coiffed beautiful people.

Things Wikipedia Should Invent: stop trying to be encyclopedic

I love Wikipedia. It always seems to contain exactly the scope of information I'm looking for. However, its attempts to be encyclopedic are undermining its usefulness. For example, apart from protecting living persons, I don't think the notability rule should exist. Apart from obscure translation-related purposes, the most use I get out of Wikipedia is finding small information. Who was this song written about? What is the significance of this pop culture reference? Most of this isn't Notable, but it is what I'm looking for.

I also wish they'd stop eliminating trivia sections. Even when the trivia sections don't contain the precise information I'm looking for, they (and things along the same spirit) are the parts of Wikipedia that are most likely to make me go "This is AWESOME!" (as opposed to "Yes, I see.")

Storage is dirt cheap, text has a negligible effect on bandwidth, there's room to make Wikipedia infinite. While I do see the point of being encyclopedic in style, using encyclopedic standards to limit content simply is not an improvement.

Does Google localize its search results?

Help me test Google please.

1. Where are you (geographically)? You can post anonymously if you don't want to reveal your location.

2. Google solutions. Just the word solutions. Is the first result www.solutions-stores.ca? If not, what do you get?

3. Google the unicorn. No quotation marks, but make sure you get the the in there. Is the first result www.theunicornpub.com? If not, what is it?

Why am I asking this? Because those two searches worked for me, producing exactly what I was looking for as the first search result, even though they seem far too vague to work. But those two businesses are also located right in my very neighbourhood. So is Google a pure genius, or is it a genius because it's localizing search results?

Why do I care if it's localizing as long as it's producing results? Because localization is great for normals under normal circumstances, but it's a real PITA for translation research. If I'm trying to confirm terminology or phraseology, I need my results to be neutral.

We already know that it localizes linguistically, which is problematic for translation research. If I'm using English-language Google (which I do by default beause it's both my and Google's first language) and I google an expression that contains a French word that's spelled the same in English, it will favour English results. (Elephant in English Google, elephant in French Google And yes, Google is supposed to be diacritic-blind.) As a translator, I find this problematic because it's more likely to lead me to use calques or faux amis. As a lazy Anglophone I find this problematic because I have a poor memory for diacritics and prefer to type on an English keyboard like I originally learned to type on, so sometimes I like to google up a foreign-language word without diacritics then copy-paste the proper spelling into my text. (This is especially useful with Polish, because my computer won't do all the Polish diacritics.)

I did send Google a feedback about this, but I don't know if it will help. Linguistic and geographical localization are still helpful to normals, even if they are problematic for translation research. But then again, I sent Google a feedback a while back asking for multilingual Google News search results (which, again, are generally not useful to normals) and now that option is there.

Get rich quick scheme

So apparently someone is suing someone for loss of faith.

So if this lawsuit works and the legal precedent is set, let's have a class action suit against the Vatican! They're insanely obscenely indescribably rich, and they're the world's largest producer of atheists. It's totally the next logical step!

Things They Should Invent: "when does this stop being creepy?' calculator

We already know how to calculate your datable age range based on your own age. But someone should come up with the inverse: you enter the couple's age difference, and a website automatically tells you how old they have to be to start dating.

I'm astonished that the internet hasn't invented this yet!

Deviating from the script

So I'm on my way home, carrying six grocery bags. I get on an escalator to go down to the subway platform. The guy in front of me is getting off the escalator around the same time and presses the stop button on the escalator, nearly making me fall down (and causing me to miss the train - and causing himself to miss the train because he would have made it if he hadn't stopped to press the button). I made it down to the platform in time to see him walk down the platform systematically spitting twice on each bench. He didn't seem angry or unstable or fucked up or anything, he seemed perfectly calm and cool and collected, it's just he was doing these weird things that were vaguely cruel to random strangers. I had no idea what to do! I kept an eye on him and tried to memorize his description (but he was a really nondescript white guy and I can't even tell age in men), but I was completely flummoxed. This was completely outside the range of things I thought might possibly happen, and I couldn't come up with an appropriate reaction.

This is why I don't think it's appropriate to blame the people on Tim McLean's bus for running away. I wasn't going to dignify this blame with a response, but my experience on the subway today just reminded me of it too much.

We've all given some thought about what we might do in every extreme situation we've ever thought of. We've thought about what we'd do if we saw someone being swarmed in the subway or pushed onto the subway tracks. We've thought about what we'd do if we were on a hijacked airplane, then rethought it after 9/11. We've thought about what we'd do if we walked into a bank robbery. We've thought about what we'd do if we were taken hostage. We've thought about what we'd do if we were deported to Syria. And we've thought about what we'd do if we witnessed some guy trying to kill some other guy. However, in all the mental scripts we've run through, I don't think anyone ever thought there wouldn't be any yelling or scuffling or altercation first, that you'd just wake up on a bus to a guy with a knife in his neck. They were, quite understandably, completely unprepared for that situation and had no idea how to react.

In most situations in life, if you can't think what to do and are completely unprepared for this situation, you get the fuck out of the way. The people also had their self-preservation instincts pushing them out of that bus, and Tim was already quite clearly dead.

I don't think it's fair to blame people who find themselves in a life and death situation that they never in their craziest ideas ever thought would happen at all ever anywhere or anytime in the world for not instantly pulling themselves together and saving the dignity of a dead man. Even if you think it would be appropriate to blame them for not helping if, say, a nice loud altercation had broken out first to give everyone plenty of warning, you can't expect them to have the same presence of mind under these circumstances.

So it seems I'm capable of militaristic sentiment

Have you ever seen those World War II propaganda posters that show the evil shadow of fascism lurking over cherubic children? You know the sentiment they're intended to evoke to make people run off and join the army?

The thing with the nutters at Tim McLean's funeral did that to me.

I wanted, in a very aggressive, militaristic sort of way, to run off to Winnipeg and get all in those fuckers' face with one of those hardcore Pride supersoakers. I wanted to sabotage their every movement and vandalize their cars and sexually harass the women (Q: Why? A: Because it's Teh Gay that they're afraid of) and all kinds of things that are probably illegal. If I had been there in the human wall and the nutters had shown up and mob mentality had made things turn violent, I could quite readily have been swept along and would totally have punched out a nutter at the slightest excuse.

I seriously had no idea I was capable of this kind of sentiment. It has never happened before. The furthest I've gotten before was a desire for cool calculated revenge to be followed by schadenfreude. I've never had this aggressive militaristic sort of thing happening before. I've never been in a place where I could have been swept along with angry mob mentality before. Not even about Paul Bernardo, although I can't give you a good reason for why that is.

But it looks like I do have a threshold, and it looks like it's right about at the worst people in the world. (The article is nothing new, I just like the headline.)

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with this now.

I think the funeral went smoothly

Tim McLean's funeral started 2.5 hours ago and no sign of the nutters. But there were hundreds of people (and 10 cop cars) waiting in case they did show up.

Good job Winnipeg, I'm sorry I couldn't be there to help, but I'm thrilled that you pulled it off and scared the nutters off.

The vast majority of the time I'm quite content to be a quiet, unassuming, peaceful little nation, but it feels good to know we can still get a posse together when absolutely necessary.

Edited to add: you might also consider emailing Stockwell Day to thank him for his role in helping keep the nutters out. He could have just as easily not done anything and most people wouldn't have noticed. Day[dot]S[at]parl[dot]gc[dot]ca

A mission for everyone in Winnipeg tomorrow

If you are or can be in Winnipeg tomorrow (i.e. Sat. Aug. 9), drop everything and clear your schedule. Your mission is now: a) protect the mourners, and b) make life difficult for the nutters.

How many things can you find wrong with this picture?

We've secretly replaced today's For Better Or For Worse with one of those "how many things can you find wrong with this picture?" games to see if anyone would notice.

1. I assume it's Elizabeth's wedding day since everyone is all dressed up. So why hasn't she been informed of the transportation arrangements until just now?

2. And why does her teenage sister have this information before her?

3. And didn't she already make transportation arrangements of some sort?

4. And the limo drivers are apparently picking everyone up at their homes. But in this strip we see April, Liz, Meredith, and Dawn(?) - all of whom live in different homes. Where are they right now? Are the limo drivers up on all this?

5. And why haven't they done anything at all with April's bangs? You can't do a formal updo but completely ignore the bangs!

The argument for laughing at mistranslations

Current topic of discussion is whether it's appropriate to laugh at Chinglish.

The general argument for why we shouldn't laugh at it is that it's arrogant and colonialist to mock people for not mastering our language. And I can see where that's coming from.

However, I might be misfiring on this, but my first thought is that it's kind of arrogant and colonialist to give them a bye. As translators we demand perfection of ourselves and fully expect to be laughed at (or reprimanded or publicly humiliated or never work again) if we mess up seriously. It seems kind of patronizing or condescending to go "Awww, but we shouldn't laugh at them, they're just poor little China! They don't know any better!" They're a proper grown-up country, they're a world power, it seems only basic human respect to treat them like they're capable of competent work.

I'm not saying we should laugh at individuals' accents or misspeaking or fumbling for words in their second (third? fourth?) language. And I'm not suggesting we paint an entire country/culture with a broad brush based on a few mistranslations. But I do think when you see a giant pink sign announcing Very Suspicious Supermarket, go ahead and laugh. When it's a giant public sign, that's like laughing at a grown adult who spoonerizes their way to something Freudian. I'm not talking huge public judgement, I'm just saying we should feel free to enjoy the humour.

Whenever you create something static and permanent for public consumption, you open yourself up to being laughed at if it goes hysterically wrong or shows your fallability. I think treating China (or any other country) with kid gloves in this respect on the unspoken basis that they're non-Western is condescending, and arrogant in its own way.

Paris Hilton is on a first name basis with Barack Obama?

I know everyone who cares has already seen Paris Hilton's presidential campaign ad.

But did you notice she calls Barack Obama "Barack" and John McCain "McCain"? Start watching about about 0:55, she totally does!

The problem with doctor/patient relations in the internet age

Doctors tend to be suspicious of patients who learn things on the internet. I guess they do get people who see some drug ad on TV or blindly trust the first google result to diagnose them even though it's from Ask Yahoo. The problem is I do know how to use the internet judiciously for medical research. I can evaluate the reliability of sources, I can google up independent confirmation, I can double check whether I'm getting confirmation bias, it's essentially my job. I wouldn't have made it past my first practicum if I had poor google judgement. So if I walk into a doctor's office with information I've found on the internet, at the minimum I've done the first level of troubleshooting myself (like when you try to reboot and system restore before calling tech support), and it's quite possible that I've gotten as far as a proper diagnosis and all I need is treatment. But I don't dare say the I-word to the doctor, because their shields immediately go up and they get suspsicious about everything I might say.

Actually, the same thing happens when I get strep throat. I get strep throat almost every year, I know what it feels like, I know I need antibiotics. But if you go into a doctor's office and say "I know what the problem is, I get this all the time, just give me the drugs" they are (understandably) suspicious.

The problem with all this is I feel like I have to play dumb every time I go into the doctor's office. I feel like I have to put on the big green eyes and little girl voice (which I'm really getting too old for and should break the habit of, but it still works more reliably with unknown interlocutors than the assertive grownup act) and describe my symptoms like all gosh golly I'm just the patient you're the big smart doctor, manipulating them into arriving at the diagnosis I've already arrived at. I hate that. It makes me feel like some one-off Sweet Valley High character trying to land a football player and being advised on flirting techniques by Jessica Wakefield. If I wanted to play dumb to convince other people they're oh so smart so they'll do what I want them to, I'd go be a trophy wife!

At this point people always tell me that I have to be assertive, but when I'm assertive that seems to get me subconsciously labelled as a difficult patient and the doctor pushes back like they're actively trying to prove me wrong. The only thing that seems to work is ditzing, and that is very hard work. I wish I could just go in as myself, a competent adult who is capable of reading and thinking and the occasional medical translation.

Things Starfleet Should Invent: a universal translator with a slight accent

When people on Star Trek are incognito on some alien planet, they depend on the universal translator to communicate. On this type of mission, they usually claim to be from some other place on the same planet (the southern continent, the other side of the ridge) that's far enough away to explain any cultural tonedeafness they might have, but close enough to be plausible.

To facilitate this, the UT should give them a slight accent in whatever language they're speaking. It's a lot easier to play at "Sorry, I'm not from around here" when your speech isn't perfect.

Wisdom

Today is artificial limbs day

Today I saw four different people with artificial limbs. Weird coincidence.

I also saw a lady in a wheelchair wearing mad crazy awesome red stiletto sandals that no human being could possibly walk in. Which is fine, because she's in a wheelchair. Makes me wonder why more people in wheelchairs don't wear awesome shoes.