Free mashup bunny

Let It Bleed vs. Bleeding Love

I think it might even work harmonically.

How to get people to buy local

If the powers that be want people to buy Canadian-made products, they need to make it easy for us to find Canadian-made products. If I want drinking glasses, for example, and I want them to be Canadian-made, all I can do is wander from store to store checking where their drinking glasses were made. No one has time to do that!

What they should do is make a website of every single product that is made in Canada - searchable and categorized - along with a complete list of where to buy these products both in person and online. Then I can go to this website, look up drinking glasses, and see what's available and how much it costs and where to buy it.

"You're so quiet! You never talk!"

When I was a kid, my peers would often say to me "You're so quiet!" "You never talk!" I had no idea what to say in response.

As an adult I'm better at thinking of clever responses than I was as a kid, but to this day I still have no idea what they wanted or expected me to say in response to that. Now I'd probably answer "You're so quiet!" with "Aren't you glad?" and "You never talk!" with "What do you want me to talk about?" (wide eyes, raised eyebrows, open hands, body language communicating that I'm ready and willing to talk about whatever it is but I have no idea what it is). But I still have no idea how they expected me to answer or what they were getting at.

Googling around this idea, I found stories of other people being asked outright "How come you never talk?" or "Are you always this quiet?" I think today I'd answer these questions with "It's either that or babble mindlessly. I suck at coming up with the appropriate quality and quantity of conversation." I've found in general that when I openly, matter-of-factly and unapologetically state my personality flaws, people act like they don't believe me or like they think I'm kidding, but it totally smooths over the potential tension from those personality flaws. For example, someone wanted to take my picture, so I said "Only if you let me fix my make-up first. I'm entirely too vain and shallow to let anyone take my picture with imperfect make-up." She acted like she thought I was kidding, but she still patiently waited while I fixed my make-up before she took the picture, which has NEVER happened before! Usually I get a candid picture taken against my will and/or a bunch of crap about being so vain and shallow as to not want my picture taken with a shiny forehead.

Things They Should Invent: everyone express all dynamic opinions dynamically

Compare:

"I don't like him."

vs.

"The more I get to know him, the less I like him."

There's a difference, isn't there? The second one has a bit more credibility, it shows that the speaker is not stubbornly set in their ways or completely ignorant of the dude's true nature.

However, if the second speaker is not explicitly trying to convey the dynamic nature of their dislike, they may well simply say "I don't like him."

I think all communication would be clearer if everyone would make a point of expressing dynamically ideas and opinions that are dynamic, and reserve static statements for static opinions.

Things They Should Invent: computer program to find the right medication based on side-effects

Claritin and Reactin make me fall asleep if I use the drowsy version, and make me a tiny bit high and spaced out if I use the non-drowsy version. Allegra keeps my brain in the right place, but raises my eye pressure (and probably my blood pressure too, but eye pressure is most obvious to me.)

I want software or a website that will extrapolate from this information to tell me which allergy med is most likely to work for me. I know doctors and pharmacists might be able to do this, but it's not like I want to actually talk to another human being.

If it's a website, it could learn from the collective wisdom of its users. People input which meds worked for them and which gave them what side-effects, and the program could use that to predict what will happen for future users.

(Barring that, I wouldn't mind having another pill to take to cancel the allergy meds. High eye pressure is better than not being able to breathe because of the cat dander, but it's an annoyance when I'm no longer in the presence of the cats and don't need to be protected from them any more.)

Puppies learning to walk!

I recently learned that puppies aren't really able to walk when they're born. Which means that puppies go through a stage where they're learning to walk. I know human babies are ridiculuous cute when they're learning to walk, so imagine how cute puppies learning to walk must be!

Fortunately, we live in the age of YouTube, and it came through with flying colours.

It seems a key developmental stage is not knowing or caring the different between stepping on the floor and stepping on your siblings.

Reusable bags that are actually useful!

While I still resent having to use reusable shopping bags even though I came up with a better idea, I am happy to that Kitchen Stuff Plus has bags that will smush up nice and small to fit into my purse (unlike those ridiculous LCBO bags that require switching to a larger purse every time I want to pick up a couple of bottles of wine.)

They fold up to just slightly larger than a deck of playing cards, but they unfold really big. Like ridiculously huge, actually. You could be photographed nude holding it in front of you and your modesty would be protected. Today I had two of those big salon shampoo bottles and a big library-type hardcover book in my bag, and it looked laughably empty and oversized. Then I added two bottles of wine, and it was maybe a third full. (Yeah, I know, the contents of my shopping bag make me look snooty and decadent. But I'm stimulating the economy and facilitating environmentally responsible behaviour among my readership, so shut up.)

The only downside is that because they are so big, they might be too big for short people who want to carry them in their hand instead of over their shoulder. I'm 5'7" and when I'm in stocking feet the bottom of the bag is only like 4-6 inches off the ground when I hold it in my hand with my arm hanging straight down. However, it has wide straps so it does comfortably carry on the shoulder or the elbow. I had nearly 4 L of liquid in there plus a big book, and it was effortless to carry on my shoulder or my elbow. (A plastic shopping bag with 4L on my elbow is a little bit uncomfortable. Not unworkable and doesn't make me want to go straight home instead of stopping at another store, but it's not nothing. This bag was nothing.)

If you're in the market for a reusable that will fit in your purse, these are definitely worth looking at.

No wonder we have a national inferiority complex

See these babies?

In the US they retail for $29.99. In Canada they retail for $49.99. In the US, you can buy them from the website and they go up to size 13. In Canada, you can't shop through the website and you're very very lucky if the stores have a few random stray size 11s (and you have to go to each store to check.) In the US, they come in black and yellow. In Canada, I've seen them only in black.

On top of all this, the US website won't even ship to Canada. Not even for exorbitant shipping costs. They could totally have charged me $20 shipping on a $29.99 purchase and I would have still have come away feeling like I won. But no, they won't deign to let me buy their shoes for any price, leaving me with no choice but to wander from store to store, cap in hand, begging for a rare and precious scrap of size 11 at a 60% markup.

Things They Should Invent: dog parks for apartment buildings

There are notices up in my building telling people not to walk their dogs on this one patch of grass because it belongs to the building next door. There are a lot of dogs in my building because it's actively pet-friendly, but there isn't really a good place to walk them.

However, I think if they re-arranged the landscaping a bit, replaced some of the purely decorative bits with grass and consolidated the driveway into a more sensible arrangement, we could have a grassy area that could serve as a suitable dog park for our building. Maybe not for the German Shepherd or the guy with two Rottweillers, but it would be fine for the terriers and Shih Tzus that make up the majority of dogs living in our tiny apartments.

My old apartment building had a lot of stuff on the grounds. We shared a sort of courtyard area with several other buildings, and in it there was an outdoor pool and tennis courts and a grassy patch with picnic benches (just metres from the dumpsters!). They could totally have fit a small dog run in there, taken out the tennis courts and pool and had a decent-sized dog park. The vast majority of the time the tennis courts and pool would be empty, but there was always someone out there walking a dog!

I really think this could be desirable amenity in high-rise buildings. It would be almost as good as having a backyard! It would hardly require any maintenance - just put up a fence and maybe cut the grass once in a while - and it would have far fewer liability issues than a pool.

Why don't I type faster?

I started learning to type at the age of 9 with this computer game my parents gave me. It was slow going and it took me about a year to be able to touch type, and even then I could only do about 30 wpm. But my speed slowly increased, and by the age of 13 I was doing 100 wpm.

And to this day, I type 100 wpm.

Why hasn't my typing speed increased in the last 15 years? I type at the same speed that I did before the internet! Shouldn't it be getting faster?

Do professional dominatrixes get job training?

Broadsheet wonders why professional dominatrixes don't qualify for insurance.

Which makes me wonder: do they get job training? The article describes their services as "bondage, verbal humiliation, spanking or paddling, whipping and genital torture." I don't know about you guys, but if I were paying good money for genital torture, I'd want a dom who was properly trained in how to not cause any permanent damage.

The article isn't clear, but it makes it kind of sound like people are just wandering into dungeons saying "Yeah, I could totally do that!" But you wouldn't let someone cut your hair if they just wandered into a salon one day and said "Yeah, I could totally do that!"

PBS censors have a sense of humour

PBS is showing George Carlin. He just said "...your neighbour has a vibrator that plays Oh Come All Ye Faithful."

The censor bleeped the word "come".

Which makes it even dirtier.

Brilliant!

Why is plastic cheap?

Plastic is made from oil, which is a non-renewable resource.

So why is it cheaper than stuff made from renewable resources?

How will new Canadian citizenship regulations affect the children of existing pregnancies?

In December, Citizenship and Immigration Canada released new regulations effective April 2009 that will affect the citizenship of children born abroad to expats. If you were born outside of Canada and your child is born outside of Canada after April 2009, your child will no longer be able to automatically inherit your Canadian citizenship.

There are a lot of problems with this, especially among the academic community. Most people I know who do graduate and postdoc work have to go abroad at least temporarily - we're a small country and our academic institutions can't accomodate every researcher in every field - and given the tendency of academics to beget more academics a larger-than-statistical proportion of the PhD and postdoc students I know where born abroad. And the Globe and Mail article and chat do cover the vast majority of the issues that I see here.

But there's one thing that hasn't been mentioned and seems both urgent and important: what about children who will lose their citizenship due to this change and are currently in utero?

The change was announced in December to take effect in April. That means that some of the children who will be affected had already been conceived when it was first announced. When the announcement was made, these kids already had a midwife and a birth plan and maternity leave arrangements, all of which were made with the assumption that the kid could inherit their parent's citizenship.

So now, with only a few months' notice, the expat parents have to change all their plans to arrange for the birth to take place in Canada. They have to find housing in Canada, find a midwife on short notice, start their maternity leave earlier so they can get home before they're too far along to fly. If they're following the traditional model where the mother takes mat leave and the father keeps working, the mother will have to go home to Canada by herself and maybe even be alone for the birth because they've already done all their financial planning on the assumption that the father will be staying at his job. And if, despite all the frantically re-arranged plans, the baby arrives prematurely while still in the other country but after April 2009, it will lose its right to Canadian citizenship and, if it's born in a country that doesn't have birthright citizenship, may well end up stateless.

What's going to happen to these kids? Why hasn't anyone thought of this?

Why does Michael Ignatieff's name end in -ff?

The surname Ignatieff is Russian. There is no double F in Russian.

Michael Ignatieff's Russian-born father spelled his name Игнатьев in Russian, and the standard English transliteration of the Cyrillic в is V.

So how did it end up being Ignatieff instead of Ignatiev, or even Ignatief?

Today I am ashamed of Ontario

A sexual assault victim is forced to uncover more of her body than she is comfortable with while testifying in court.

Shame on you Mr. Justice Norris Weisman.

I am so surprised to see this coming from a judge. I read a lot of court decisions for someone who doesn't work in the legal field (they're an excellent translation resource) and the usual more I read the more respect I have for judges. The vast majority of the time they come across as measured and nuanced and intelligent.

But this is just so...wrong! It's like something a 9-year-old would come up with parroting a closed-minded parent without applying critical thinking skills.

I look forward to the Superior Court overturning this decision and setting a sensible precedent.

Currently wondering

1. Is there a statute of limitations on children's drawings? Several years ago, a co-worker's very friendly and outgoing child wandered into my office and made friends and drew me some pictures, which I proudly posted on my cubicle wall. Today I realized that that kid is now a teenager and might not want her childish drawings being displayed. Should I take them down? If I take them down, is it creepy if I keep them? I like them, they're cute and funny, but it seems like the sort of thing that might not be appropriate.

2. In TV and movies, actors have a lot of lines to memorize but don't have to repeat them that much (unlike on stage). After a scene is filmed, they don't need to know those lines any more. So how long do the lines stick in their head for?

3. Inspired by the fact that London is apparently currently crippled by six inches of snow, in places where they get snow so rarely that the city doesn't own snow removal equipment, do people own snow shovels? If not, what exactly do they do with all the snow? It needs to be removed at some point.

Comparative sensitivity

I was reading a review on some random blog of a book I'd recently read and enjoyed, and I was surprised to find them describe the book as particularly dark. This surprised me because I found the book fun. It isn't complete sunshine and rainbows - it's a murder mystery - but I like the characters and they have good rapport and I enjoy spending time in that universe. So it was strange to me that someone else found it dark, because in my corner of the world I'm one of the most sensitive people I know. I don't have a very high tolerance for darkness as compared with the other people around me, I'm more likely than most people to put aside a book or turn off the TV because it's just too much, and I need more than other people to deliberately expose myself to happy stuff so my mood doesn't get too dark and mess up my ability to function.

But it seems there's this other person out there who responds sensitively to things that I find purely entertaining. So this means there's a whole nother level of sensitivity out there among perfectly normal functioning adults that I didn't even know about.

I wonder how many more there are?

Questions Ugly Betty needs to answer

Why does Hilda have customers? She's a brand new hairdresser with a chair set up in a spare corner of the family home. But she always has customers. Why? This is New York City, I'm sure there are lots of hairdressers around, the fact that she's there and she's a hairdresser shouldn't be enough to get her customers. Are her prices better? Is her location particularly convenient? Is she getting referrals? Someone should mention something in passing, because it really doesn't make sense.