Sheet music

In classical music, standard practice is for musicians to use sheet music while performing. In rock music, that would be laughable. In jazz, sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't.

So at what point in musical history did it become normal not to use sheet music, and why did this happen?

Britney Spears vs. Amy Winehouse

I love thematic mashups!

I'll verb anything as long as it's concrete

Stephen Fry says:

New examples [of nouns becoming verbs] from our time might take some getting used to: ‘He actioned it that day’ for instance might strike some as a verbing too far, but we have been sanctioning, envisioning, propositioning and stationing for a long time, so why not ‘action’? ‘Because it’s ugly,’ whinge the pedants. It’s only ugly because it’s new and you don’t like it. Ugly in the way Picasso, Stravinsky and Eliot were once thought ugly and before them Monet, Mahler and Baudelaire.

I hate actioned, and it is ugly. But I don't hate it because it's ugly or because it's new, I hate it because it's abstract and non-specific. I'm fine with googling, blogging, commenting, twittering, youtubing, facebooking, texting, zaprudering, microwaving, dustbusting, shower-massaging, swiffering, PDFing, mp3ing, vasectomizing, tubalizing, essuring, LOLing, ROFLing OMGing WTFing and puppy-head-tilting. In every one of those cases it is completely obvious what the verb means, and in most cases it can only mean one thing (googling is obviously searching with google, although facebooking could be doing any number of things on facebook).

But with action as a verb, it's not clear at all what you're doing. In fact, it varies widely depending on context. It feels like the writer doesn't want to give any thought to what exactly needs to be done, so they're sticking the word "action" in and making me figure it out myself. I once received an email containing some information, followed in close succession by another email saying "That first email was for information only, you don't have to action it." Boy was I glad I didn't have to action it, because I had no idea how I might have "actioned" that email. It wasn't clear to me at all what might have needed to be done.

Now I'll be the first to admit that I may well be feeling this way because I'm a French to English translator. French verbs tend to be far more abstract than English verbs. In many cases (e.g. effectuer, favoriser, intervenir), you can't even translate the French verb or things will get ridiculous. You have to read and understand the entire situation and describe it in clear English, with the verbs being no more helpful than the blank in a game of mad libs.

After spending your entire workday making abstract verbs more concrete and vague verbs more specific, the last thing you want to do is go action something!

No smoking, no drinking, no talking

The year is 1994. I'm about to start Grade 9. High school, all new, Big And Scary.

One day, shortly before school is to start, my then-best friend calls me. "We have a problem," she announces. "The gym teacher...is a lesbian."

I was shocked and horrified. She's a lesbian! She likes girls! But she's allowed in our locker room??? Apparently her OFFICE is IN our locker room???? Why is this even allowed? I felt like someone should tell a grownup or something, but I didn't tell my parents for fear they might lock me in my room forever for knowing what a lesbian is or for having a course schedule that puts me in the general vincinity of an alleged lesbian or something.

So off I went to my doom. Not just high school, not just gym class, but high school gym class with a lesbian. And when we got there she...taught us gym. And then the next day she taught us gym. And every day after that she taught us gym, perfectly competently, with the occasional glimpse of humanity. Then the semester was over and I never took gym again and she became irrelevant.

Other things were happening around that time, in the background, in the media. On Friends, Ross's ex-wife was a lesbian. And she was...there, sometimes, when the plot demanded it. Ellen DeGeneres came out, and she was...there, on TV, I wasn't paying much attention. I found out Graham Chapman was gay, and that...didn't change anything, actually. And so it continued, every once in a while I'd find out someone was queer, and, except for the people who ended up being my friends, they'd just go on being ultimately irrelevant, like most people in the world end up being.

This is why the situation in California surprises me so much.

I can see how people who have never been exposed to same-sex marriage might arrive at the visceral "OMG THAT'S WRONG!" reaction. That's how I thought in Grade 9, and the reason I thought that was was because homosexuality had only ever been presented to me as a problem, so I had no reason to think that it might be anything other than a problem. What it took for my homophobia to go away was not happy rainbows and sensitivity training, but rather the sheer innocuousness of every queer person that I ever encountered IRL or in the news.

But in California, they already have this. They had legal same-sex marriage for several months. And, after a brief flurry of "OMG George Takei! OMG Ellen and Portia! OMG octogenerian lesbians!" it just became irrelevant to everyone who isn't immediately involved. So why do they still care after months of evidence that it's harmless?

I thought I understood the thought process, but this has me flummoxed. They do know that it isn't mandatory, right?

How to use the strike at York to your academic advantage

I was at York during the 2000-2001 strike, which lasted about three months, and here's what I learned:

Keep doing your coursework.

Even though you have no classes, keep doing the same number of hours of homework a day no matter what happens. (If you don't plan your work that way, half an hour of work per class per day is a good guideline, at least it was back in my day.)

Get caught up on all your assignments (it's November, you're feeling the crunch now anyway), study the fuck out of your December exams, then start doing next semester's reading for your full-year courses. Don't stop until you've finished every single word of reading and assignments that you can possibly extrapolate from your syllabuses and studied all the material so well you're certain you'll get 100% on every exam.

You obviously don't have enough information to identify every bit of work you'll have to do between now and April, but you have some of it. So do the part that you have now, and it will ease the workload when you go back to class. Those of us who did this during our three-month strike found that it was like taking a half courseload in terms of stress and busy-ness and time to dedicate to each class. And for those of you who are worried about the school year being extended and thus cutting into your summer job time, getting ahead now will let you do your year-end assignments ahead of time, so worst case you can just leave early at the end of the year.

Teach me about non-bankable sick leave

Apparently the City of Toronto wants to stop making workers' sick leave bankable, and according to the comments on the article (I know, I know) that's apparently a bizarre and outrageous thing that doesn't happen in The Real World.

This has me flummoxed. Every job I've ever me that has sick leave has bankable sick leave. Not all jobs have sick leave, of course, with some jobs you lose a day's pay if you stay home sick. But my jobs, my friends' jobs, my family's jobs, the jobs of the grownups who were around me when I was growing up, they all either had bankable sick leave or no sick leave whatsoever. I have never in my life encountered the middle ground.

So talk to me about how this works. What happens if you get hardcore sick? With bankable sick leave, the understanding is you aren't going to use all your assigned sick leave in any given year, but you save up the extra and then years from now when you get cancer you'll have weeks or even months banked. Or even what if you get the flu and you need a week off, but you're only allocated one day for that particular month. What happens then? Doesn't the fact that you haven't taken any sick days for the past eight months count for anything?

New Rule

Everyone in California who voted to eliminate people's right to marry anyone of any sex is hereby required to change their name to Doris.

Things They Should Invent: TVs that turn on automatically when something of interest happens

My eyes are killing me and I don't know if anything else I'm interested in seeing live is going to happen. I wish I could just go to bed and have my TV make the decisions for me.

For anyone who needs a laugh

Explain US politics to me please

1. Is it normal to have hours-long line-ups to vote? If so, why don't they get more people or equipment? If not, what's up today?

2. What's up with voter registration? Why does everyone need to be registered, and what is complicated about the process that they need organized drives to do it? (Where I'm coming from: I'm automatically registered via my income tax return, and if I don't show up on the list for some reason I register on election day by showing them appropriate ID.)

3. From Joe Fiorito's latest column:

I know a woman who lives in Mississauga. She is an American. In order to vote she said she had to go to her embassy where, after supplying her ID, she had to state whether she wanted a Democratic or a Republican ballot.

Huh?

Exactly: huh? Or, since the Star is a family newspaper and this isn't a family blog, WTF? Why can't they put everyone on one ballot? What if you want to vote for an independent/fringe candidate? What if you want to vote for some reps and some dems (I think they're generally voting for more than one office)? What if they run out of one kind of ballot?

4. There's this yes/no to Prop 8 thing rattling around the blogosphere, and every time I read about it I have to pause and scrunch up my brain and try to figure out which side is which. So why don't they give the Prop (Proposition? Proposal? Propeller? Prophylactic? Propaganda?) a descriptive name so the answer will be obvious?

5. What's up with the people who are against elitism also being against wealth redistribution? If you're not elite, you don't have wealth and therefore would benefit from wealth redistribution. If you would be hurt by wealth redistribution, you have wealth and therefore are elite. What am I missing?

I think I have the weakest nickel allergy in the world

At least I assume it's nickel. When I spent an extended period of time holding my cellphone, and when I wear one of my necklaces made of an anonymous (and presumably cheap, since they were $2 each) silver-coloured metal, I get vaguely uncomfortable. Really, that's the best description, vaguely uncomfortable. My muscles tense up a bit. I get a touch edgy. My joints crack a bit louder than usual. I find myself sort of idly mindlessly scratching - I don't feel actively itchy, I'm not uncomfortable, I don't see any discolouration on my skin, but when my hands are unoccupied they end up lazily scratching. Then I put down the phone or take off the necklace and it stops.

It does piss me off that cheap jewellery is an irritant though. I want to wear jewellery, but I'm no good at it. I have no sense whatsoever of what works and what doesn't, so I have a lot of experimentation to do and I can't afford to experiment with real jewellery. Once I've gotten my look together I'll totally buy better stuff, but right now I'm still at the "Hey, this necklace length doesn't work with my bone structure. Who knew that could be a problem?" stage.

Plus, lurking over all this in the shadows, is the problem that with some metal allergies you can't get Essure...

Childfree for Dummies

Suppose I was standing before you with a pregnant belly, or with three preschoolers like my grandmother had at my age, or with my 10-year-old daughter like someone I went to high school with has right now. Wielding my sprog, I announce "I know what's best for my children!" A critical mass of humanity immediately rallies behind me, don't they?

That's exactly what I'm doing now. I do know what's best for my children, and that's that I don't have any children.

Suppose I have a child, and I put arbitrary limitations on this child in order to protect them. They have to be in bed by 8:00. They can only go trickertreating on these two streets and they have to be back by 7. They can't go to a friend's house unless I've met that friend's parents. Even if these limitations might seem overprotective or potentially hinder their fun, it's still being a good parent, isn't it? After all, I'm the grownup, I know more about what the world is like than they do, and it's my job to calculate the risk. I only want what's best.

That's exactly what I'm doing now. Knowing what the world is like, I've made the decision to keep my ova inside my ovaries. It is true that there is more potential for fun outside the ovaries, but I'm the grownup, I've calculated the risk, and they're staying inside my ovaries. I only want what's best.

Of all the people in the world, I'm the one who knows the most about my genetics, my personality, my strengths and weaknesses, and everything else about my reality. After all, I live inside it every day, while everyone else is just looking in from the outside. I am the most qualified person to decide whether this is a situation worth subjecting an innocent child to.

And if for whatever reason you think my judgement is so bad that I can't evaluate my reality nearly as well as you can, why on earth would you want an innocent child completely at the mercy of my judgement for at least nine months, with repercussions that would last their entire lifetime?

Things They Should Study: who establishes the greeting protocol?

I have some family members with whom I hug and/or kiss as a greeting. This wasn't my idea, I was never consulted, and I don't hug or kiss other family members with whom I have the same degree of relationship (some of whom have the same degree of relationship as me to the huggers/kissers).

Someone should do some research into how these things develop.

Pissed off

If I could change just one fact of life, I would make it so that whenever you put time or effort or resources or hard work into doing something, it always ends up better than when you started. There are few things more frustrating than trial and error situations where you still have to put in all the work but the end result is worse than if you had done nothing at all.

Things Google Blog Search Should Invent: search only in blog entry contents

Google Blog Search seems to be getting increasingly polluted by results where my search terms appear elsewhere in the blog other than in the entries, like in the tag cloud or the blurb or the title of the blog itself. This is problematic. If a blog has one of the search terms I monitor regularly in its tag cloud, for example, that blog turns up in my Blog Search results every time it is updated, regardless of whether the updates have anything to do with the subject in question.

They should fix this.

For the record

On Ugly Betty, I find Betty's neighbour-boy's interactions with her presumptuous. The way he borrowed her umbrella a propos of nothing (although keeping your umbrella in the hallway is weird too) and the way he insisted on helping her bring her groceries into her apartment both seem very Gift of Fear to me. I don't know if anything will come of this or if the writers are just being lazy in establishing a realtionship, I'm just posting it for bragging rights in case I end up being right.

Things They Should Invent: free full-time full-service advisors for entrepreneurs

On last week's Ugly Betty, it came to light that Hilda doesn't have a business licence for her salon. She just got a chair and started cutting people's hair. This makes perfect sense to me! I have looked into the process of starting one's own business (not because it interests me, but because my job search experience suggests that I can't assume employers will hire me even when I'm perfectly qualified and capable, so I may well have to go solo at some point) and I find it nearly impenetrable. I can find all kinds of government websites that link to all kinds of other government websites that give infuriatingly vague and perky advice, but there are so many types and levels of regulation involved that even if I read every word I could find, I wouldn't feel certain that I was aware of all my obligations. And I'm accustomed to reading and finding information in government websites, I use them for translation research all the time! I was initially surprised that Hilda had seemingly managed to navigate the process, and found it so much more in character that she'd just skipped it entirely. And because the process is so difficult, I wouldn't dare start my own business - not just because I prefer a steady paycheque even if it is smaller, but because if I start my own business and mess up or miss some step in the process, I'll end up charged with fraud or something.

Entrepreneurship is supposed to be a good thing. It boosts the economy and takes people off the unemployment rolls. They were really pushing it during the last recession, so I assume they'll need it again during this one. So what they should do is create a free, government-funded service of full-time advisors for entrepreneurs. Every entreprenteur would be assigned an advisor, and they can ask the advisor for any help they need during, say, the first year of running their business, and get a limited number of hours of help during, say, the next five years.

The advisors would have to be far more useful than the government websites, which is certainly quite possible and precedented when you're working one-on-one with a real person. I had my wallet stolen once, and ended up calling 1-800-O-CANADA to find out where to replace all my ID. The guy I spoke to was so incredibly helpful! He gave me specific websites and phone numbers and addresses for getting everything replaced - not just the ID under federal jurisdiction, but the province-issued documents too! - and after I'd gone through everything I could remember in my wallet, he went through a list of things that people generally keep in their wallets to make sure I hadn't missed anything. He solved my specific problem and anticipated my needs, and I completely understood what I needed to do when we were finished. They need to do the same thing for entrepreneurs. They need to be able to call someone up and ask "Do I need a lawyer? Do I need an accountant? How do I get one? And what on earth do I do come tax time?" and the advisor needs to be able to answer all these questions with specifics that pertain to the client's situation, plus anticipate things like "So you're running this business out of your desk in your living room? Okay, here's how it might impact your renter's insurance." They'd hold the clients' hands throughout the entire process until the clients find their feet well enough to take a few steps on their own.

I'm sure a lot more people would start businesses if something like that was available.

I think delayed gratification is different depending on whether you have witnesses

A while back there was a study that showed that children who could delay gratification had greater success later in life. They tested this by leaving the kid alone in the room with a treat for 20 minutes, and telling them they could have two treats if they didn't eat it until the adult came back.

My four-year-old self would totally have been able to wait the 20 minutes, but my motivation wouldn't have been the second treat. It would have been the praise from the adult about how good I was for being able to wait.

I've found I operate this way IRL. Using the broadest and pettiest possible definition of delaying gratification to achieve a goal, I'd say I succeed in 100% of the cases where my achieving the goal actually affects other people, 90% of the cases where other people will see whether or not I achieve the goal, and maybe 50% of the cases where no one but me will see whether I achieve the goal. For example, my current goals for this weekend include getting my translations done on time, buying a birthday card for a friend, and washing my windows. The translations will definitely get done because the client needs them. The birthday card will most likely get bought unless something goes egregiously wrong. The windows may or may not get washed, depends what happens. I'm not going to blow off the translations or the birthday card in favour of gaming or reading fanfic or otherwise being a lazyass, but the window washing I might.

I don't know how this affects the relationship between delayed gratification and success i nlife, but it seems like something worth studying.

My very very favourite thing about the xkcd Discovery Channel comic

Everyone has already seen this.

I just felt the need to mention that my very very favourite thing about the comic is the exclamation mark on the sign in the bakery that says "PIE!" That exclamation mark is the single most efficient supplier of teh awesome ever.