I've got someone's dream job right here

From an article about the Cancon porn channel:

Northern Peaks would also have to ensure it close captions all of its programs.

Ladies and gentlemen, right now, at this very moment, somewhere in our great nation, there is a job opening for a close captioner of pornography!

Weirdest thing ever

This sounds like something from The Onion, but I just saw it advertised on TV. Is it wrong if I laugh hysterically?

And once again, children provide perspective

So I finally got off my ass and did my errands. Behind me in line at the grocery store was a lady with two small children - I'd estimate their ages at 2 and 4* - who clearly needed some food and a nap. Mein Gott what I have to do is easy in comparison - in comparison to both the mother and the children!

I can go about life without ever having to worry about someone else's Dora the Explorer doll, and if all I want to do is go home and curl up with my favourite stuffed animal I can just go and do that. I can buy what I need at the grocery store without someone wheedling for some junk food every two seconds, and if I want some junk food I can just throw it in the cart without asking anyone's permission. I don't have to organize my life around someone else's bladder needs, and if I have to go to the bathroom I can just go without someone telling me to hold it or scolding me for not going earlier.

All I have to do is put on some music, pour a glass of wine, and tear through 3,000 words of translation. (Don't worry, it gets carefully revised tomorrow without the influence of music or wine, it's just most efficient to do the first draft by brute force and the distractions make that go easier.) Compared with grocery shopping with a 4-year-old and a 2-year-old, dead easy!

*Most people I know who are in a two-child family spaced two or three years apart think this is a bad spacing. The eldest is old enough to get used to being an only child, but too young to really appreciate (both in the sense of "think is little and cute" and "empathize with the greater needs of") a baby, and still needs a lot of parental attention that might take away from the baby's needs. With a wider spacing, like five years, the older sibling is more independent and more able to appreciate a baby. And apparently (or so I've heard) with really close spacing the older sibling doesn't become accustomed to or remember being an only so they don't resent the lack of full parental attention or the need to compromise to accomodate the younger sibling. And yet so many people continue to space their children at two to three years. I wonder why? Perhaps no one tells them. (I certainly couldn't think of a tactful way to tell someone to space their children differently.) Perhaps they grew up in different family configurations themselves. Someone should do a study on how the configuration of the family in which people grew up affects their later family planning as an adult.

The problem with introversion

Introversion is inefficient. I've spent the better part of today inside my head, maybe eating or drinking coffee or experimenting with my hair, but mostly inside my head. But the problem is I have 3,000 words of overtime this weekend, plus I have to go to Dominion and Noah's and the LCBO and the library and Futureshop and BSO and Beddington's, plus my apartment needs probably about 10 hours of housework, plus I have to exercise enough not to lose momentum and there's about six things I want to blog and a dozen things I want to watch on youtube. (Watching youtube or TV or anything is external stimulation. It entertains me, but doesn't give me those inside-my-head hap hits.)

All of this would be so much easier if I actually found it more interesting to do things than to do nothing and spend time inside my head. But not only is getting all this stuff done work, it's also more boring than doing nothing.

Times like this I wish for an extrovert pill.

How to save the planet with one simple rule

I think we can solve all our environmental problems if every human undertaking from this moment on follows one simple rule: everything must be made easier for people using less-polluting modes of transit than for people using more-polluting modes of transit.

Whether you are building a building or opening a business or planning an event, it must be easier for pedestrians than cyclists, easier for cyclists than transit users, and easier for transit users than for drivers. All other rules intended to directly or indirectly promote or discourage use of any particular mode of transit are void. You can do whatever the fuck you want, it just has to be easiest for pedestrians (always using the skirt/heels/handbag standard)and hardest for drivers.

So go ahead and build a drive-thru on a busy, high-density thoroughfare. However, you must arrange things so that the cars in the drive-thru don't get in the way of pedestrians, and so that it's faster to walk in than go through the drive thru.

Go ahead and build a Walmart in the middle of a giant parking lot right on the waterfront. But arrange things so that people don't have to dodge cars to get to the door from the sidewalk or the bus stop (but it's fine for cars to have to wait for buses to get out of the way).

Go ahead and move your office from an expensive urban transit hub to a cheap industrial park in the middle of nowhere. But you must do something to make the commute easier for non-drivers than for drivers, for exampe provide a free shuttle from the old, convenient location for transit-using employees (or multiple shuttles to accommodate people's flextime) and pay for the service by charging employees for parking Or if employees decide to move closer to the new office so they can bike to work, you must compensate them for their moving trouble and expenses.

Shout-out to the plastic bag wars: make a rule that you can have your purchases bagged or you can have your parking validated, but not both.

This approach doesn't stop anyone from driving, it doesn't impinge on real or perceived rights or freedoms or entitlements, it doesn't impinge on free market economics (if the market dictates that cars should be accomodated you can accomodate them all you want, you just have to accomodate pedestrians a tinch more.)

If everything from now on was made more convenient for pedestrians than for cars, more and more people would reach the "not worth driving" tipping point as time goes on. With any luck, that will happen before the oil runs out.

Open Letter to the extremely attractive couple on the subway with the pointy yellow puppy

Dear yellow doggie's humans:

You have the most awesome and adorable puppy in the world. But you can't just let him wander around the subway car on a long loose lead and lie across the aisle. I see that he's harmless and I totally get that interacting with him is a privilege and a joy - seriously, it made my day when he jumped his front paws up on my lap and let me pet him.

But there are people who are afraid of dogs, there are people who are allergic to dogs, there are children who might not know how to behave around dogs, there are blind people who might not be expecting a leash stretched out against the aisle, and there are people who just don't want paws on their lap or a snout up their skirt.

Please, before anything goes wrong, make sure that when you're on the subway you keep him in a sit or down right next to you and on a tight leash so he doesn't wander around. I don't want such a happy and adorable dog to get in trouble.

Sincerely,

Someone who doesn't want to give anyone any reason to prohibit dogs on the TTC

Wherein a foreigner tells the US how to judge their politicians

I've seen a few people on the internet dis US presidential candidate John McCain because apparently he owns multiple houses. I see that this isn't the kind of thing the average person can identify with, but maybe we should be open-minded. Different people have different needs - I'm sure there are a lot of people who think it's decadent that my sister and I each had our own room growing up, even though this was probably the only reason we both survived to adulthood - and as long as he isn't hurting anyone it isn't an actual problem.

However, I might humbly suggest that a trait USians should look for in a prospective president is that they know exactly how many houses they own.

Things They Should Invent: a device that automatically separates menstrual blood from used feminine hygiene products

Yesterday we learned that they can make stem cells from menstrual blood.

So now we need an effective way to harness all the menstrual blood that people throw out every month in their used pads and tampons. We need some way to take all the used FHPs from those bins in public washrooms and throw them all in a giant machine or something and separate out the menstruation. You know how for the Toronto green bin program they came up with a way to automatically separate plastic bags from organic waste, so people could sanitarily wrap their organic waste in plastic before throwing it out? We need something similar for FHPs and menstruation. Then we'll have an infinite supply of stem cells.

Bottled water

1. Does anyone actually drink a bottle of water and then throw out the bottle? Like systematically on an everyday basis? Everyone I know refills them. Every once in a while you leave it behind or it starts tasting yucky or you start using a new one because you have a cold, but in general you refill it. I always see people at the drinking fountain refilling their water bottles. That Aquafina bottle in my purse? Full of tap water, and I use like six a year.

2. Does anyone actually consider bottled water to be a status symbol? The blamosauruses are all "OMG they're just carrying it around to show off!" (and they say the same thing about cell phones) but I can't imagine anyone actually thinking that a bottle of water that you can get at the shadiest convenience store in your neighbourhood is a status symbol.

3. Now Toronto is talking about banning bottled water. If they want to ban selling it in municipal buildings like they did in London (I think it was?) that's perfectly fine, but they can't ban it from the city. Why? Think back to the 2003 blackout. Did you have running water? People in highrises didn't. The water pumps run on electricity. So people ran around the neighbourhood until they found a corner store that was still open and bought bottled water. I'm worried that if they get overzealous with this ban, we won't be able to buy bottled water at the corner store any more. I'm worried that someone might bring up the fact that it's an emergency provision and they'll attempt to address it by making it possible to buy those big blue cooler bottles at like one Home Depot in Scarborough, which is useless if you're carfree like they're trying to encourage. (It's like how when they talk about banning plastic bags people always say "You can get biodegradable garbage bags at Home Depot," but Home Depot is a half-hour bus ride completely out of my way.) I mean yeah, we're supposed to have 72-hour kits in our homes, but that doesn't mean that people should die of dehydration if they don't manage to get it together.

Dear City of Toronto:

Whatever you do, please do not ban or make it more difficult to acquire bottled water as an emergency provision.

You can have your stem cells next Tuesday

They can make stem cells from menstruation!

It occurs to me that perhaps I should master use of the menstrual cup.

Things They Should Invent: let The Hunger Site hijack your browser

I try to click on The Hunger Site (and its affiliates) every day, but sometimes I forget. Back in the days of dial-up I would use it as my home page, but now that I'm always on I find myself opening a new browser way more frequently so having it as my homepage would be an inconvenience the vast majority of the time.

It would be awesome if we could have the option to let it hijack our browser if we haven't done our clicks for the day yet. Have something check to see if the cookie is there, and if it isn't it redirects to The Hunger Site. We could override it if we were in a hurry, but it would be nice to have option of making it mindless.

Things They Should Invent: wheelchairs that can take passengers

Apparently those scooter-type wheelchairs can go like 16 km/h, which is faster than most people can walk. Which must be annoying when a wheelchair person wants to go somewhere with a pedestrian - it would be sooooo bloooooody slooooow! So then the wheelchair person might be inclined to give the pedestrian a ride, but that wouldn't work if you didn't have a lap-sitting type of relationship, or if the pedestrian is bigger or heavier than the wheelchair person.

My idea: make it possible for someone to stand on the back of a wheelchair behind the seat, like on a dogsled. That wouldn't make the wheelchair much bigger (we don't want them turning into minivans) and it would maintain an appropriate physical distance while allowing the wheelchair user to drive unfettered.

Why you want to avoid double translation

Sometimes your translator might call you up and ask you to send her documents that are referred to in the text she is translating. If you're really busy that day and have a lot of things to do and not have time to dig through your files, you might be inclined to tell the translator to just translate the text as written. At this point she'll warn you that doing so might make the overt and hidden quotes in the translation come out different from the original document they were citing. You might be inclined to say this is not big deal and instruct her to just carry on with what she has.

Here's why you don't want to do that.

I don't speak Chinese (I'm not even 100% certain that language is Chinese), but it seems perfectly feasible to me that this could be a perfectly competent translation (albeit lacking in-depth knowledge of North American commercial products).

Conspiracy theory anyone?

What if the real objective of the Westboro Baptist Church is to get hate speech legislation introduced in the US?

I've always been rather apathetic about the whole hate speech vs. free speech issue. I can see where both sides are coming from, but the status quo doesn't bother me and there are many other things I'm more interested in reading and thinking and talking about.

But when they threatened to protest Tim McLean's funeral, I instantly became an ardent supporter of our hate speech laws. Nothing I might ever conceivably have to say under any imaginable circumstances is nearly as important as getting them to STFU.

What if their intention was to produce this very sentiment in a large segment of the population? What if they brought their act to Canada so people could see how much easier it is to get them to STFU in a country with hate speech laws? What if their ostensible thesis is OMG TEH GAY despite its irrelevance to the things they are picketing so that the public will support including homophobia under the definition of hate speech?

Telegrams?!?!?

I think you can still send a telegram, like for real, in real life. Check this out!

I'm so tempted to send someone a telegram sayin "OMG a telegram!"

Open Letter to my iPod

Dear iPod:

You contain 3,363 songs. About 20 of these songs are by R.E.M. I did press shuffle. So what's the deal with three R.E.M. songs in a row?

Warning: the Borat DVD is dangerous for langlings

It all started with a simple plan: I'll watch Borat on DVD. I haven't seen it yet and it may or may not end up being funny.

But it's in broken English, which means I have to watch it again with the French and Spanish subtitles to see how they addressed that.

And the DVD case and some of the captions on the DVD and in the movie are in Cyrillic letters, wich means I have to work out if it's real or fake, and if it's real which language, and if it's Russian what does is say, and is the sloppy English a logical bad translation of the Russian? (All this being complicated by the fact that my attempt to learn Russian didn't take.)

So in my original plan I'm in for two hours of movie, and maybe the extras if I feel like it. Now I'm in for six hours plus, like, learning Russian.

Edited to add: This is compounded by the problem that I don't find the movie particularly entertaining. I see what they're trying to do, and I appreciate Sacha Baron Cohen's talent in creating the character, but it just didn't entertain me. I laughed maybe three to five times during the whole thing, and the idea of watching it again for the subtitles seems like a chore (but I'm going to do it at least in places anyway.)

Things Livejournal Should Invent: Expand All Threads button

In LJ, if there are over X comments (where X might equal 50 or 100, but I'm not sure), it collapses all the threads so you can only see the first comment in each thread and have to click to see the replies. There's now a handy "Expand Thread" function so you don't have to click and wait for the page to reload, then go back to the main post to read the next thread, but you still have to expand each thread separately. I'd very much like the option to expand all the threads in one click, because most often I'm interested in seeing all the comments.

More information please

Norway knighted a penguin! Cute and funny and awesome!

But how on earth did the penguin get into this line of work in the first place?