Today is International Translation Day

So here's Eddie Izzard on learning French:



Monty Python's Italian lesson:



Monty Python's Latin lesson:

Is this actually a once in a lifetime economic crisis?

This economy thing that's going on, that I don't quite understand. I've heard it described as a once in a lifetime crisis and compared with the Great Depression.

I would love for that to be true. It's not the severity part that I'm excited about, it's the once in a lifetime part.

Even if it is like the Great Depression and we're in for 10 years of grinding poverty, if it's a once in a lifetime thing we may as well get it over with! A decade of devastation, and then everything is uphill for the rest of our lives!

If only it worked that way.

Dreams of things falling on my head

Last night I dreamed I had a car - an adorable little blue Mini! It was parked on the street in front of my building (not allowed IRL, perfectly legal in the dream) even though the street was also a construction zone with like six cranes lifting heavy stuff. (IRL, there's a construction zone with four cranes further down the street.) One of the cranes dropped a tree, almost killing me, so I ran inside to figure out what to do to protect my car.

Even though I went up the elevator in the same glass building I live in IRL, my apartment was a dark, dank underground hole. It was also in New York City, even though the outside of the building was in Toronto. It had these sort of diagonal windows (like greenhouses) at street level, but it was such a deep dark hole these served as skylights. So I was chatting with Poodle, trying to figure out if I'm allowed to put my car in the garage because I only have a G1 licence, when suddenly a bad guy came crashing down through the window into my apartment, looking for drugs and getting quite erratic when we didn't have any. So I subdued him (luckily he weighed literally nothing) tied his arms and legs in a knot and handed him back out the window to a passing fireman.

Then suddenly I was in the ravine behind my parents' house with my mother. It had been raining heavily, and the ground was literally swollen with water - it was like walking on a giant waterbed. All this rain caused the trees to wake up and start walking around - turns out they were really Ents. Then the Ents started dropping coconuts on our heads (there are no coconut trees in this ravine, it's a temperate zone) because humans used that part of the ravine to smoke marijuana (true IRL).

So I ran away to where the President of the United States was giving a speech in this same ravine. Except it wasn't the real president, it was the fictional one from the Covert One novels. And my mission was to protect him. So I jumped into a LAV with all the other people whose mission was to protect the president (but we left the president outside, apparently at the mercy of the Ents) and started driving around. Then the same bad guy came crashing through the windshield. But I woke up before I could find out what he wanted this time.

So that's two trees being dropped on my head, two bad guys breaking through glass to come crashing down on my head, and an ongoing drug theme (I haven't done any drugs IRL). I wish I knew how to analyze dreams.

Comedy in lieu of content

I got nothing today. I've been working on updating my voter's resources post (should be up within the next couple of days) and putting together my 10 to the 100 submissions, and suddenly it's Sunday and it's dark out and I haven't even read the paper yet and I'm way behind on housework.

So here's the Kids in the Hall on the importance of keeping on top of your life:

Tax incentives

Do tax incentives (or taxation as a deterrent) work on you? Do they cause you to change your behaviour at all?

I'm wondering because they don't work on me. I don't even think about it.

But then I must either not make very much money or have my life arranged in an unusual way, because I find my tax burden negligible. If all the money I paid in taxes ended up in my pocket, it wouldn't be enough to improve my quality of life. My savings account might be a bit bigger, I might be able to pay off my mortgage like a year sooner once I get a condo, but overall I wouldn't notice the difference.

For those of you who do notice your taxes, do tax incentives or deterrents work on you?

So this is why I don't know any rich men

Last week there was a study that found that men who think women should stay at home and raise the kids earn more money than men who are egalitarian. I wondered at the time about cause and effect (could the more sexist men be more attracted to higher-earning occupations, or the less sexist men less attracted to these occupations?) but it didn't seem worth blogging.

But it just occurred to me that this might explain another phenomenon I've noticed.

A while back, someone mentioned to me that a lot of people have the tacit assumption that men necessarily make enough money to support their family single-handedly, and want to make policy based on that assumption. I kept an eye out for that assumption, and I have seen it around underlying other discussions. For example, the whole Mommy Wars construct assumes that your husband can make enough money to support the whole family, and when people complain about single mothers on welfare they're assuming that the baby-daddy earns enough money to bring the family out of welfare, or enough that they'd be better off than on welfare.

The concept of a man earning enough to support his family single-handedly isn't foreign to me. Most of the households in my extended family have done this at one time or another, including my own parents. However, it always seemed unreasonable to me to use it as a basis for policy, because I don't know anyone - not one person - who a) is male, b) would make a compatible mate for me, and c) earns enough money for two (to say nothing of children - although children would make them an incompatible mate).

And I'm using a broad, arranged-marriage type definition of compatible mate. Within the xkcd age range, shares basic core values, we can have a conversation without boring or infuriating each other, and there is at least one sexual activity that we would both enjoy doing (i.e. with each other). I know absolutely no one who meets these criteria, is male, and earns enough to support a couple.

So maybe this recent study explains why. I don't get along with men who think women should stay at home and raise the kids, and they don't get along with me - and we seem to mutually get this vibe before we even know how the other person feels about these issues. Even men who think this subconsciously - who would never say this out loud but when they picture what life will be like when they have kids, there's a stay-at-home wife in the picture. Even among family members and other people who aren't prospective mates, we grate on each other. They vaguely dislike me, I vaguely dislike them, even before we've discussed our respective family statuses. Even on the internet, if they're not disregarding me they're flaming me, and I write off their posts when I see the name at the top.

So maybe these two things are related?

When to screen for the breast cancer gene

They're debating whether minors should be screened for the breast cancer gene. They seem to be looking at it in terms of what the potential screenee could do at that particular point in their lives to prevent breast cancer.

But they seem to be missing one key point: the breast cancer gene is hereditary.

Therefore, people should be screened before they become sexually active, so they can make fully-informed decisions about family planning. Some will argue that potential for increased breast cancer risk is no reason not to have kids, but actual carriers of this hereditary gene have first-hand knowledge of what it's like to live with this hereditary gene and the ensuing risks, so they are the best people to make that decision for themselves.

I think the optimal time for testing is when it starts to occur to a person that they might want to have sex one day, so they're at a point where they can see the necessity of having the information, but they still have a bit of time to let it fester before they have to make any decisions. However, this puts the kid in the awkward position of going to their parents and saying "It occurs to me that I might want to have sex one day," with the ensuing potential for parental overreaction. If we have to pick a specific age, I'd say when the kid starts high school would be most appropriate, although some parents will worry that this would give kids tacit permission to have sex starting in high school. The other option would be menarche. Speaking as someone who had early menarche, I would have found the knowledge terrifying at that age (although I also found menstruation and bras and armpit hair terrifying) but people with a family history of breast cancer might feel differently.

At any rate, they're doing people a disservice by not allowing them to be tested before they're sexually active just because they're too young for a preventive masectomy.

Can I has a crystal ball plz?

I wish I knew how much time in my life as a whole is going to be spent unemployed. I'm trying to make decisions about increasing how much money I spend to upgrade quality of life - ongoing operational expenditures, not capital investments, and it is kind of a luxury although most people reading this (of the people I know) will tell me I deserve it. As long as I'm employed at my current job, I can easily afford it and it isn't an issue. But bag lady syndrome keeps kicking in and I keep thinking that instead of spending money on an ongoing luxury, I should be saving up the money to tide me over for whenever I lose my job. The optimist contingent tells me that with my skills I should be able to find another job no problem and that surely my job search wouldn't outlast my savings, but I cannot agree with them based on my own experience looking for work. Members of the optimist contingent who don't have a job like mine tell me that my job is perfectly secure, but from where I'm sitting I don't feel anywhere near as confident.

I just wish I knew, right now, how much of my life is going to be spent unemployed. I don't need to know when it will happen or even whether it will all happen in one big chunk or a month or two here and there. I just want to know how long in total. Then all I have to do is save up enough money to cover that period of time, and after that I can splurge on whatever I want.

I wonder if people's parental status affects their opinion about Omar Khadr

I have no basis for this theory, not even anecdotal evidence, but it occurred to me as something that some people might think.

The people who want to keep Omar Khadr on Guantanamo generally support their argument at least partially on his family's political opinions. I wonder if parents are more likely to feel this way as compared with non-parents? Parents try to instill their own values in their children, so it stands to reason that they might be more likely to think people share their parents' values and that this attitude is permanent. (I've noticed that when people become parents, they seem much less able to identify with the child half of a parent-child relationship, even though they are still someone's child themselves.) I have a theory that Omar Khadr's natural adolescent rebellion might have turned him into a moderate if he'd gotten to spend his adolescence in a more normal environment, but I've never had anyone who is a parent agree with me that this was even a possibility.

If parents are more likely to want to punish him based on his family's political opinions, it would also be interesting to see whether this changes based on the age of the person's kids.

People need to stop using the word anti-choice to mean anti-abortion

Why? Because we now need the word anti-choice to describe this guy.

Need to de-stress?

A bowl full of puppies!

Open Letter to the three ladies speaking sign language on the TTC southbound at Lawrence around 6:20 p.m.

Mesdames,

I did see you all there signing at each other (don't worry, I wasn't eavesdropping - I don't understand it well enough), I did hear the announcement on the speaker, I did realize you probably couldn't hear the announcement and would probably need someone to explain it to you, and I was going to go and try to help even though all I have is finger-spelling. But I got swept up in the tide of people leaving the subway, and by the time I was able to stop I couldn't see you anywhere. I'm sorry for not helping you and I really hope you all got where you were going all right.

Sincerely,

The girl who kept foolishly gawking at your sign language like she's never seen sign language before.

We can retire the SENTENCE game now

In my first year linguistics class, the prof mentioned in passing that you might say "I heard a new word today," but you'd never say "I heard a new sentence today." (She was making some point, I forget what it was.)

We glommed onto that and started pointing out every time someone says a sentence that we have reason to believe has never been uttered before, usually by shouting "SENTENCE!" at it.

But we can retire now. Stephen Fry has us all beat. (And I want to be in the room when this was written):



Added bonus: this is so gay!

Missed opportunity for a practical joke

I just realized my drugstore purchase included both pickles and ice cream.

Just to weird out the cashier, I should have added a home pregnancy test and wire coathangers to my basket.

Things I learned today

1. It is, in fact, possible for a black dress that looks perfectly innocuous on the rack to make me look fatter than I do naked. No, it wasn't the bad empire waist phenomenon, but I can't tell what specific aspects of its design created this effect.

2. Two Always Ultra Thin Long with Wings and three O.B. Mighty Small are nowhere near sufficient to absorb 500 mL of water spilled in your purse.

3. The face I make when I unexpectedly encounter an impossibly adorable puppy causes my earbuds to fall out.

4. Those teenage boys who walk along the sidewalk taking up the whole sidewalk so people have to step onto the road will move aside for me if I look them in the eye with a look of "Yeah right, you have GOT to be kidding me."

Phobia round-up

1. Scientists have found a correlation between political ideology and physiological response to perceived threats, which is interesting. But I wonder if they controlled the test for phobia? Two of those images mentioned would have given me panic attacks, and it is one of the more common phobias, but I think it's unrelated to what they were trying to test for.

2. There are people who think I should be indifferent to the presence of a phobia trigger in my home. Even though I have been given a professional opinion that as long as I can get rid of them somehow desensitization isn't necessary, a number of different people have told me that I should be just ignoring their presence, letting them wander around and do as they please. But the thing is, whether they make you panic or not, they are still an unwanted outside animal. If you walk into your bathroom and find a dog or a lizard or a bird or chipmunk or a worm or small pony, it's a problem, or at the very least a situation that needs to be addressed. You wouldn't just ignore it. Even if you like the animal - if I found a dog in my bathroom I'd totally keep it! - you'd do something as opposed to just ignoring it. Even if you personally think they aren't a problem because they're small or whatever, you should still at least be able to imagine why someone else might not ignore an unwanted outside animal.

Things They Should Invent: post on the CPSO website which doctors refuse to provide which services

Apparently doctors have or might have the right to refuse to provide medical treatments based on their own religious beliefs.

I'm still wondering a) do any other professions have this as a capital R Right? and b) since there are so many specializations in medicine, why not just specialize in something that is completely unrelated to the areas where your beliefs limit you? If you believe birth control pills are inethical, why become a family doctor (which is most people's #1 stop for their contraception needs?) Why not become a podiatrist or an ear nose and throat specialist instead?

But if they are going to do that, they should save everyone time and hassle and give us all fair warning by posting in the doctor's profile on the CPSO website which services and procedures they refuse to provide. For example, what I want out of my family doctor (the reason I even bothered to go to the trouble of finding a family doctor in the first place) is contraception. If I go through the CPSO directory finding someone who's taking new patients, schedule an appointment, wait for the appointment, take time off work, wait in the waiting room because they're running an hour behind as usual, go in and talk to the doctor and THEN find they won't give me contraception, I've wasted a shitload of my time and gotten really pissed off, in addition to wasting the doctor's time and the receptionist's time and inconveniencing my work and making the people in line behind me in the waiting room wait marginally longer. It would be a lot easier for everyone if I could just see on the website that they won't give me contraception, so I can rule them out and scroll down to the next one.

The doctors shouldn't object to this, unless their goal is to make it more difficult for people to get contraception by sending them on wild goose chases (in which case they shouldn't be practising medicine and should probably undergo some kind of psychiatric evaluation). Doctors will still get patients whose ethics jive with their own (for example, I would happily go to a doctor who refuses to provide artificial conception because I think it's morally wrong too, and I'd go to a doctor who refuses to provide, like, circumcision because it's way irrelevant to me). If the doctor can't find enough patients because of their religious restrictions, then maybe that's a sign that they should be in another profession, or at least another specialization.

Life imitates Simpsons

From the Simpsons episode The Mook, the Chef, the Wife and her Homer:

(Homer drives home in a new red pickup.)
Marge: Homer! Where did you get that truck?
Homer: Uhhh, it fell off a truck! You know, a truck truck!
(An airhorn blasts and Bart rolls up at the wheel of an eighteen-wheeler transporting pickup trucks).
Lisa: Where'd you get that?
Bart: It fell off a truck-truck truck.
(Another airhorn, and a truck-truck truck drives past, carrying several eighteen-wheelers loaded with pickups).

Found on Fail Blog, a truck truck truck truck.

Things They Should Invent: cancon online music store

I've noticed that smaller musicians tend to release CDs, but not be on itunes or otherwise have their music available for download. This is an inconvenience for me as a consumer, because since I got an ipod I no longer want actual CDs. And sometimes I want just one or two songs, but I don't want to spend $20 and have an extra piece of clutter around to get them. (For local artists I can often find their CDs at the library, but that doesn't actually help the artist.)

I think the people who are responsible for promoting Canadian content could fix this, and promote Canadian music worldwide in the process. All we need is an online music store of literally all Canadian artists.

The store would be web-based and highly googleable, so people would land on it while looking for specific songs and artists. If it prices itself like itunes but in Canadian dollars, it will slightly undercut itunes on every sale. If they can avoid having DRM and make it open to everyone in the world to buy from regardless of which country they live in, word will quickly spread that this store is superior to itunes when buying Canadian music. This will, in turn, increase awareness of which music is Canadian and thus global awareness of Canadian culture. (I've heard that this is important in terms of international relations, although I don't grok why.)

Then if they give the store one of those ubiquitous "If you like this music, you may also like this music" functions, then people from around the world who wander in googling for mainstream music that happens to be Canadian, like Diana Krall or Nickelback, will be able to discover other Canadian artists they would never have thought of, and quickly and easily buy their music DRM-free at a price that undercuts itunes. And, of course, if the consumer would prefer a CD, they could use the website to discover new music, then purchase the CD from the artist's website like usual. Or maybe this music store could sell CDs too. If they posted lyrics on the site too, it could attract traffic from people who are googling for lyrics, and drive them to more music they might like.

Consumers get the music they're looking for, even if it's obscure, in the format they want at the best possible price. Artists get broader promotion than they could do themselves. Canadian culture gets promoted to anyone who happens to be googling for any music that happens to be Canadian. Everybody wins!