Things They Should Invent: signs indicating which crosswalk has the longer light

At intersections with an advance green, one of the crosswalk has a longer green light than the other. It would be helpful to know this, especially if your ultimate goal is to cross kitty-corner and especially if the other street is easily jaywalkable. There should be signage to this effect. Yes, sometimes you can extrapolate from the advance green signs, but the advance greens don't always have signs.

Things They Should Study: what day does it feel like?

It doesn't feel like Tuesday today. It feels more like Wednesday or Thursday. This would be unremarkable, except that a number of people hve also independently told me tthat it doesn't feel like Tuesday.

Someone should study this phenomenon. Interview random people walking down the street and see what day it feels like to them. See if there's a general consensus about what day it feels like, and try to identify factors that affect people's perception thereof.

I wonder how copyright works in the world of fashion

Does Jean-Charles de Castelbajac have to pay royalties to Jim Henson's estate (or whomever now owns the Muppets?)

Seen on Yonge St.

Walking one way is a toddler holding a cookie. Walking the other way is a doggie that has almost, but not quite, grown out of being a puppy. The two are exactly the same height.

The toddler wants to pat the doggie.

The doggie wants the cookie.

The doggie's humans and the toddler's grownups all tell the toddler that she can totally pet the doggie, but he's going to try to steal her cookie. Nevertheless, the toddler surges bravely forward.

The toddler's grownups try to take the cookie out of her hand, but she's having none of that! They're not going to trick her into giving up her cookie! The doggie's humans try to get him to sit, but he's having none of that! There's a cookie right there!

The toddler reaches the doggie and pets him. The doggie licks her face. She bursts out crying - and drops the cookie. The doggie snarfs it up.

I move along so as not to be seen laughing at what what the poor kid will one day be telling her therapist was the turning point in the development of her lifelong fear of dogs.

Unrelated bonus: a whole herd of puppies

Just cuz

(Sorry for the video, but I can't convince imeem or songza to let me do a full embed.)

Responsibility seems to be subjective

James Bow on whether helping foreclosed home owners is promoting irresponsible behaviour.

It's interesting to me that some corners are now considering buying a home with perhaps an over-leveraged mortgage irresponsible, because for my entire life up until this economic crisis I have been immersed in the conventional wisdom that not buying a home is irresponsible.

All the grownups in my family own houses. They also invest their money. I was raised with the idea that this is the responsible thing to do. As I progressed through live and learned more about finances and met more people, all my elders, everyone who knows more about money than I do, everyone I know who is financially set for life, has agreed that the thing to do is buy a home and invest your money. I've been told from all corners, by my elders and my betters, by family and friends and even random people I'd just met, that it's irresponsible - not just suboptimal, but actively irresponsible - to rent in the neighbourhood I want to live in instead of buying in the outer reaches of 905, and to keep my savings in a bank account instead of investing in stocks and mutual funds.

I didn't take any of these financial risks because I don't feel like I have enough knowledge to avoid losing money. However, I was always told - by people who know more than me, by people who are (even still today) financially secure - that I don't need to worry, housing prices always go up and the stock market goes up in the long term. But I'm not brave enough to take those risks, so I kept on renting and kept my money safe and liquid. And because of that, I haven't lost any of my savings, and my housing situation is not at risk unless I face long-term unemployment.

So I'm relatively safe because I disregarded years of advice from everyone who knows better, and because I'm too chickenshit to take risks I don't fully grok. If I were the kind of person to heed the advice of my betters and if I were willing to take on a generally-acceptable adult level of risk, I would not be nearly as safe.

So yeah, I don't think it's fair to treat people like they're irresponsible and need to be punished just because the economic crisis blew up their mortgage. It's not just desire to improve one's lifestyle, it's not just unscrupulous bankers, it's an entire lifetime's and an entire society's worth of conventional wisdom.

I don't know why I'm so low-content lately

But floppy ears are cute.

Playing dumb

I'm considering doing business with a place I've never done business with before, and that is either out of my league or just at the very topmost border of my league. So, as with all new interactions with an unknown quantity, I'm writing myself a mental script.

I've been spending some time on their website, so I'm in a position to walk in there knowledgeably and start making declarative statements. "Hi, I'm here to A, B, and C." I have enough information that I could even do it without upspeak. Unless there's an egregious disconnect between website and reality, I'm in a position to show as much confidence as I do when ordering a large double double at Tim Horton's.

However, I found in my mental script I kept landing on less confident-sounding constructions. I'm either hiding my knowledge ("Hi, I was wondering if you had anything like [insert description of thing that will lead me to A, B or C]") or making excuses for it ("Hi, I was looking at your website and...").

But why am I doing this? Why is my social instinct to hide the fact that I've looked at their website, to hide the fact that I have some basic knowledge of what they do and what they offer?

After thinking about this for a while, I'm wondering if maybe my childhood bullies are making me use these less confident constructions. In between time in school and time spent working customer service, the majority of my life was spent in contexts where demonstrating knowledge was discouraged. In school I'd be punished socially for uttering a five-syllable word or for showing prior knowledge of something we were being taught in class, and when working front-line customer service the customers would react poorly if my speech patterns or banter revealed that I was perhaps in their league intellectually. I ended up dropping my register by about 1.5 prestige levels just to get through the day smoothly.

So maybe because of all this, my social instincts are now telling me to walk into situations pretending to be ignorant?

Writing this, I thought of something I read somewhere on the internet once. A parent was writing about how they caught their teenage daughter playing dumb when discussing math homework with a boy, and basically told her it was unacceptable for her to do that. At the time when I read it, it occurred to me that perhaps she wasn't playing dumb specifically so he'd think he was smarter than her (with the assumption that he wouldn't want a girl who's smarter than him) but rather perhaps she was playing dumb as an icebreaker. She asks him for help, he can help her just to be nice and they have an excuse to sit together alone somewhere that's quiet with their heads bent over the same book. Then once he's explained the math, she has an excuse to give him a hug or a minor kiss to express her gratitude, and to do him a favour sometime later. Makes me wish I'd had that in my repetoire as a teenager! (Since I've always wanted prospective lovers to want or at least appreciate my brains, it never occurred to me to play dumb even as an icebreaker.) but now that I actually write about how playing dumb has been helpful socially in various scenarios, I wonder if this poor girl's social repetoire was hindered by her parent's insistence that she never play dumb.

On word choices

Antonia Zerbisias objects because some people on US TV talking about abortion chose and/or landed on the word "people" instead of the word "women."

This is really interesting to me, because I tend to say "people" instead of "women" in the same place for exactly the opposite motive attributed to the speakers here. It's something I started doing a long time ago in response to two things.

First, to avoid creating a Someone Else's Problem field, I don't specifically mention gender unless it's a case of causation as opposed to correlation.

Then, after reading some Deborah Tannen where she articulated how male tends to be linguistically unmarked and female tends to be by default Other and observing a number of interactions IRL where this manifested itself absurdly (example: a woman mentioned that she had just moved into the gaybourhood, and a man in the conversation made a stupid "don't drop the soap" type joke) I decided to deliberately make the female unmarked whenever it could be smoothly incorporated. So instead of saying "This is really dangerous, someone could fall down the stairs. If it's pregnant woman she could have a miscarriage and if it's an old lady she could break a hip!" I would say "...If they're pregnant they could fall down the stairs, and if they're postmenopausal they could break a hip!" I know it doesn't actually do anything - no one is going to think for a moment that it's a pregnant or postmenopausal man - but I'm doing it on principle and as an intellectual challenge. So far no one has noticed that I do this (or perhaps they have and just haven't said anything - in my line of work people tend to notice).

I don't really have a point here, I just think it's interesting.

Parting your hair with a ruler

I have no control over the part in my hair. It goes wherever and however it wants. One day a while back it ended up in a perfectly straight line. Someone said to me that day "Did you part your hair with a ruler?" Seemed to me a really strange thing to comment on, but some people are like that.

But it just occurred to me: can you even part your hair with a ruler? How would that work?

Wanted

Wanted: a continuous loop of the "I got soul but I'm not a soldier" part of All These Things That I've Done, maybe a couple of minutes long. Downloadable or embedded online is fine. I just wah wah whine don't want to have to edit an audio file myself.

Fun fact of the day

From a comment by Shawn Micallef in Spacing:

When Rev Brent Hawkes performed Canada’s/Toronto’s first same-sex marriage at the Metropolitan Community Church in 2001 he wore a bullet proof vest.

This is confirmed widely. (This was the one that was done by publication of banns and wasn't legally recognized.)

Same-sex marriage was legalized in Ontario in 2003 and federally in 2005. Some people made a bit of a fuss for a little while, but it very quickly became basically a fact of life. Some people probably still don't like it, but they just don't do it themselves and let other people get on with their lives. And yeah, we still kind of have the childish need to mention the genders of the happy couple when we're invited to our first big gay wedding. But overall, it's normalized.

So we went from requiring a bullet-proof vest to "Yeah, all right, whatever, I'm cooking eggs" in the space of maybe five years. That's pretty cool.

Things They Should Invent: tester-sized mascara

The problem with trying new mascara is you don't know if it will work better than your previous mascara. Obviously they can't have in-store testers for sanitary reasons, but still it really sucks to drop ten bucks on something that ends up being worse than what you were using before (and therefore is useless).

Solution: very small tubes of mascara that sell for maybe two or three dollars. They have the same brush as the regular mascara because the brush is an essential part of the application, but the brush handle is shorter and they only contain a few days' worth of mascara. You drop a couple of bucks, test it, and if it's better you buy a full-sized tube with an easier-to-use full-size brush handle. Maybe they could even sell it at a loss, because people totally aren't going to use mascara brush with an inch-long handle for everyday.

I can think of at least three mascaras I would try if I didn't have to pay full price for them. If only one company did this, they'd be in the best position to win over new customers

Mother Nature gives us a quickie

It went up to a sunny 16 degrees today, and the wind was pushing 50 km/h. At lunch I went for a walk. With no coat on. And my hair down. Wearing my sunglasses for the first time in 2009. The wind (warm! comfortable! pleasant!) bounced off all the tall buildings and came at me from every direction, whipping my hair in front of my face, then trailing it in a ribbon behind me, then blowing it straight up in the air and making it settle in a cloud over my shoulders.

I came back to work flushed and tousled, and all was right with the world. Then I put my regular glasses back on, put my hair back up, and got back to work.

Why I love Toronto

Spacing and the Star both have lists of reasons why they love Toronto.

Here's mine: in Toronto I'm nothing special.

Growing up, I was the weird girl with the long hair and the accent. In Toronto, there's always someone around who's weirder, or has longer hair, or has a stronger accent.

Elsewhere, people tend to be impressed because I have a handful of European languages. In Toronto, they're vaguely disappointed that I don't speak, say, Thai.

Elsewhere, I've had people be impressed because I can dabble in a few musical instruments. In Toronto, there's a busker right there playing a bassoon, and the one in the other subway station was playing some strange instrument I've never seen before in my life.

Here, I never get the opportunity to develop the illusion that any of these things are special, and I'm a better person for it.

Foreplay for the brain

Video is irrelevant, just press play and listen to the music

In lieu of content

This puppy is very small.

Edit: This guy is even smaller.

Open Letters

Dear plasterer eating fruit on the subway:

If you're going to leave the pips on the train, at least drop them on the floor instead of leaving them on the seat next to you.

Dear mother of twins:

I see that you have two babies, most likely through no fault of your own, and I get that you need a stroller that can hold two babies. The problem is that your stroller is so wide that it doesn't leave enough room in the supermarket aisle for a shopping cart to pass. When the store is crowded like during evening rush hour, this messes up traffic flow in the whole entire store. When you are in an aisle, no one can get past you in either direction. You're going to have to either a) get a narrower stroller, perhaps one that has the kids one in front of another instead of side by side, or b) leave the kids at home or with a sitter while you do groceries, or c) go shopping during non-peak times. Seriously. I get that strollers and childcare are expensive and you have shitloads of things to do on very little sleep, but you're inconveniencing literally hundreds of people with that behemoth.

Dear Flash fetishists:

If you present the content of your website as image-based Flash only rather than as text, it won't get indexed by Google. This means that when the translator working on your annual report thinks "Surely all this shiny happy stuff about their history and mission and values has already been done in carefully-crafted English by their talented corporate communications people" and then goes googling to save herself some time and you some money, she will get zero hits. At this point she would be perfectly justified in translating it herself, which means you will be paying the translator to do what you've already paid your communications people to do, and the translator might (perfectly rightfully) make different choices along the way. However, if your translator is a stubborn little shit like me, she won't take zero google hits for an answer and will plow through your sea of flash until she finds the information in question. However, since your Flash is image-based instead of text-based and therefore can't be copy-pasted, you are still paying the translator's hourly rates to retype all this stuff when it could have been done in 30 seconds of copy-pasting. It's essentially advertising copy about how awesome your organization is, why not make it easy for people to find it and repeat it elsewhere?

Mystery glass

The other day I found a piece of broken glass in my dishwasher, but none of the dishes in there were broken.

I was just talking to my friend on the phone, and she said she recently found a piece of broken glass randomly lying on the floor, but nothing in the house seemed to be broken.

So if it turns out that we're in a horror movie or something, this is the clue the killer left.