Jackson 5 vs. Kid Rock

I want You Back All Summer Long - Calmucho Presents Jackson 5 & Kid Rock

Psychoanalyze this

Last night I dreamed I had to go camping with a bunch of fat people. I didn't want to go because I hate camping (I prefer activities involving more indoor plumbing and internet access and fewer bugs, thank you very much), but everyone kept saying that I was discriminating against fat people. It had nothing to do with the fat people, it was just that I didn't want to go camping, but no one believed me and I quickly gained a reputation as being biased against fat people.

Analogy for why I didn't convert to another xian denomination

In the past, people have suggested that my leaving catholicism for atheism was rash and closed-minded, and that I should have tried other denominations of xianity first.

As I've blogged about before, I view catholicism as an abusive ex. I view the other denominations of xianity as his brothers. Now we all know that siblings don't always have a lot in common. We all know that's it's very possible for one sibling to be a complete asshole while all the others are perfectly nice guys. And there is room for the possibility that your abusive ex's brother might be a perfect match for you. However, that doesn't mean that your first step should by default be to date your ex's brother. Most people would agree that the reasonable step at this point would be to spend some time being single, or to date someone who is completely unlike your ex. Even in a Jane Austen matchmaking-über-alles world, it is by no means closed-minded or judgemental or indiligent to move on to someone completely else rather than systematically trying out every brother.

If you don't see the fallacy of this xiancentric approach, look at it from the other perspective. Suppose you have a real asshole of a brother who is abusive to his spouse. His spouse finally leaves him. Do you expect the spouse to start dating you? Do you feel personally dissed if they don't automatically start dating you to see if you're a better match than your brother?

I wonder if dogs are good investments for homeless people

I'm inclined to give more generously to homeless people who have dogs, just to make sure the doggie doesn't starve. It occurs to me that I'm probably not the only person who does this. So I wonder if, from a cold economic perspective, owning a dog has a good ROI for homeless people?

Things They Should Invent: slipcovers for bra straps

Sometimes your bra straps are going to show. Even if it isn't on purpose, even in a sleeveless but modest outfit, sometimes they wander out. This means that you have to worry about what your bra straps look like, and take this into consideration when choosing a bra.

The problem is there are also other factors when choosing a bra - structural engineering issues, how well the material and texture of the cups works under your clothes, how well the bra achieves the intended effect once your clothes have come off. So sometimes you find yourself in a situation where you have a bra that works perfectly under your fierce little black dress, but the straps are fugly and beige. Having a black strap wander out from under a little black dress is within the range of acceptable human error, but a beige strap just completely ruins the effect.

What we need is something to cover the bra straps in a different colour of fabric, so your straps will match your outfit even if your bra doesn't.

Childfree for Dummies: Part III

Think about porcupines. They're cool and interesting and can be cute, especially when they're little. If you're walking down the street and you see one, you totally give it a second look and maybe even stop to interact, and as long as nothing goes egregiously wrong it's a pleasant experience that makes a good story to tell when asked how your day was.

However, you don't particularly want one of your own. If you found one, it would never occur to you to keep it. If one popped up in your house one day, you'd probably get rid of it. And you certainly don't feel at all deprived for not owning a porcupine.

How you feel about porcupines here is the same as how I feel about children.

Acquaintances

From the Toronto Police Sex Crimes Unit (PDF)

According to Statistics Canada, 2003, in cases reported to police, 80% of sexual assault survivors knew their abusers. About 10% were assaulted by a friend and 41% were assaulted by an acquaintance, 28% were assaulted by a family member, while the remaining 20% were assaulted by a stranger.

The Canadian Panel on Violence Against Women found that 38% of sexually assaulted women were assaulted by their husbands, common-law partners or boyfriends.

I'm not sure how the 38% corresponds with all the previous numbers. Maybe because it's a different survey? Maybe husband/partner counts as family member and boyfriend counts as friend? But that's not my point here.

My point is the large percentage for acquaintance, because personally I find the acquaintance dynamic the most difficult to manage in terms of saying no. Friends/lovers/partners/family members you know well enough to have assessed for yourself, and you trust them or not on their own merits. Strangers are strangers and you owe them nothing socially. But acquaintances you generally know through someone who knows them better. So it's not just the not-terribly-relevant-to-you acquaintance you might be dissing, but also the judgement of someone who's closer to you.

Imagine you're out somewhere and you need a ride home. You didn't arrange a specific ride because there are dozens of people there that you're close enough to that they'd be happy to give you a ride. Your brother is there, your best friend is there, your boyfriend is there, you've done this without a specific ride dozens of times before, you're certain you're not going to be abandoned. But life and logistics are complicated. So when it comes time to go home, your brother says "I can't give you a ride, but my former roommate is going your way." Or your best friend says "I can't give you a ride, but my neighbour here has room." Or your boyfiend says "I can't give you a ride, but my co-worker totally can." So now you're getting a ride from a strange man. Your brother/best friend/boyfriend totally trusts this dude and if you were to protest "WTF I'm not taking a ride with a strange man!" they'd be all "That's not a strange man, that's Steve!" and might even be insulted.

Most of the times I've been alone with a strange man have been because there's some presumption of acquaintanceship, i.e. we have been Properly Introduced. When I was a kid sometimes I might end up getting a ride home from a friend's father. When I worked on campus doing tech support I'd often go alone to profs' offices and students' res rooms. Sometimes in my apartment-dwelling life my super or a contractor might come into my apartment to do work while I was in there. Nothing ever did go wrong, but I had no way of knowing that going in. If I had refused any of these things - if I had insisted on getting a ride from a female adult or my own parents, if I had refused to go alone into male profs' offices and male students' rooms*, if I had insisted on the presence of the female super when there was one or that the work wait until I could have someone else in my apartment with me, it would have been a Big Hairy Deal and I'd be inconveniencing everything and perhaps insulting some people.

With strangers you're under no obligation, and we all learn from an early age not to talk to strangers so you're perfectly justified in snubbing them. With friends and family you know them well enough to use your own judgement unapologetically. But with acquaintances, especially acquaintances to whom you've been Properly Introduced, you have to thin-slice and then do a whole etiquette dance with the person who introduced you if you don't trust the new acquaintance.

We need a workaround.

*I did once refuse to go to a male student's room because I wasn't comfortable with him as an individual. He had invaded my personal space on the pretense of casual chitchat, and had repeatedly dissed my boyfriend. It was no big deal - I just said I wasn't comfortable going into this individual's room so another (male) tech went instead - but it would have been very high-maintenance and inconvenient if I had issued a blanket refusal to go into strange men's spaces.

School makes teenagers annoying

Walking past the local high school on the way to the subway, I was getting rather frustrated at the clumps of kids who would block the whole entire sidewalk, as though it never occurred to them that other people might be in a hurry and trying to get by.

Then I realized, it's quite possible it's never occurred to them that other people are in a hurry and trying to get by. I'm not saying that they're too stupid to understand this or anything, but when I think about it from the point of view of a high school student, it's quite possible they've never in their lives walked past the school. They walk to the school. You only walk past the school if you're going from one of maybe a dozen buildings straight to Yonge. If they don't live in these dozen buildings (most of which tend towards one-bedroom apartments), this sidewalk has been a thoroughfare for them. To them it's just the area in front of their school.

And it may have never occurred to them that other people are in a hurry because they aren't in a hurry themselves. In a school, classes always start at the same time and everyone is in a hurry at the same time. You don't have some people starting at 8:30 and some people starting at 9. So they may well have never been in an environment where they're in a hurry but other people aren't.

So I'm thinking maybe a lot of the seemingly inconsiderate behaviour of large groups of teenagers is really the result of the fact that they've spent the vast majority of their lives in the institutional environment of school. In school, you're never alone trying to do something different from the people around you. You're always in groups, you're always doing the same thing as the other people around you, you're always on the same schedule as the people around you. So it doesn't occur to the clumps of kids blocking the sidewalk that I might be in a hurry to get past because they've never been in a hurry to get passed. It doesn't occur to the throngs in the foodcourt that I might have to grab my lunch in a hurry and get back to the office because they've never had to finish their lunch and get back before the rest of the throng. It doesn't occur to the cluster blocking the entire grocery store aisle deciding what kind of pop to get that I might want to get past and grab something real quick because they've never done a quick grocery run knowing precisely what they need.

Unfortunately I don't have any solutions, other than saying "Excuse me please." (And they do always apologize and move.)

Things They Should Invent: if a store doesn't accept returns, leave the merchandise with them anyway

I'm in the midst of an ongoing battle with my hair, trying to convince it to hold a curl. I've already bought quite a few pieces of equipment that are supposed to curl my hair, only to find that they just don't. So not only have I spent all this money on stuff that doesn't work, but I have it all cluttering up my apartment. And you can't return hair equipment because it's a personal care item and it's been in my hair.

So I think what I'm going to do next time I buy something that doesn't work is go into the store with my stick-straight hair and try to return it. Then when they say no, I'm going to leave it with them so they have the burden of disposing of it.

If everyone does this with everything that doesn't do its job and is unreturnable, maybe they'll start selling us stuff that actually works.

I hope they don't do Corner Gas in other languages

Today's Corner Gas is untranslatable.

Shoes on a wire

At the high school I walk past every day, someone threw a pair of running shoes tied together at the laces over the overhead electrical wires. At first I thought this was something some bully did, and I was feeling sorry for the poor kid whose shoes they are - running shoes are expensive and not everyone can afford to replace them on a whim, and you lose marks in gym class if you don't have your shoes.

But then someone told me that the shoes mean that drugs are sold there. Okay, good to know. But that raises a bunch of questions:

How do you know who exactly is selling the drugs? There are a lot of people under those shoes - it's a high school so there are hundreds of kids during the day, and there are some benches in front that random passers-by sit on sometimes.

How do you know what drugs they are selling? Not everyone is in the market for just any old drug. And how do you know how much it costs? Not everyone has an infinite drug budget.

How do you strike up the conversation? You don't just walk up to some random and say "Good evening, I wish to purchase some marijuana." There's a whole dance that you have to know that I haven't a clue about.

Despite the fact that this convenient location is clearly marked as being open for business, it's still quite obvious that outsiders aren't welcome. So basically the moral of the story is that I don't do drugs for the same reason I don't shop at Holt Renfrew.

Today needs a techno/dance sort of remix of Dolly Parton

Jolene (Divide & Kreate remix) - Dolly Parton

Things that are harder than translation

Let me tell you about my job. I am given a document. It can be about anything, I don't know what it's going to be about. It's written by someone who has enough expert knowledge to write the document and knows the entire context. Oh, and it's written in another language. I take that document and rewrite it in English. To do this, I have to study, learn and research the context and subject matter so that it sounds like it's written by an expert who know the entire context and that it was originally written in English. If there are mistakes in the source text, I correct them. If the author of the source text borrowed wording from other sources, I find those sources even if they're not cited. If the source text does not say what the author intends it to, my translation will. I do this every day, on tight deadlines, always competently and sometimes very well.

And yet I can't get my hair to hold a curl. I can't keep my apartment organized. I can't get my manicure to last a week. I can't park a car in an indoor/underground parking garage. And I really have to work up my nerve to walk into a store that's staffed by people who are cooler than I am (even though they're paid specifically to be cool, whereas I have to fit in being cool around full-time work).

Wanted: annotated translation of Afghan law

A snippet of Afghan law. I got it from a CBC article, but it's quoted widely in many news sources. Bolding is mine.

The law, which does not affect Afghan Sunnis, says that a wife "is bound to preen for her husband as and when he desires."

"As long as the husband is not travelling, he has the right to have sexual intercourse with his wife every fourth night," Article 132 of the law says.

"Unless the wife is ill or has any kind of illness that intercourse could aggravate, the wife is bound to give a positive response to the sexual desires of her husband."

One provision says a "man should not avoid having sexual relations with his wife longer than once every four months."

As a translator, my first instinct on reading this is to find the source text. There are obviously nuances in the original that cannot be fully communicated in idiomatic English. Examples:

- Preen? Not especially meaningful in English. We can guess from context, but the word itself doesn't communicate much for us. What exactly is the scope of the equivalent word in the source text?

- Travelling? Why the focus on the act of travelling rather than the (presumably implied) fact of the husband and wife not being in the same location?

- Why are being ill and having an illness presented as two separate concepts? What is the implicit difference in the source?

- Should not avoid for any longer than $FREQUENCY? Why avoid (which makes it sound intentional?) What is important about this that led to the awkward construction of any longer than a frequency rather than any longer than a period of time as is idiomatic in English?

I should heavily emphasize here that this is not criticism of the translator. The translator did perfectly well. It's a close translation, yes, but that's standard for legal language and this is legal language about concepts for which we don't have legal terminology in English. The English is for information only and not at all legally enforceable, and we already know the text is foreign by its very content so the lack of instantaneous and absolute clarity and the hint of foreignness aren't going to be disconcerting to the reader.

The problem is that the translator is working within the limits of translation. You're given a sentence of source text, you produce a sentence of translation. You use all your research and knowledge and expertise and decide that preen is the best word for the concept in question, and then all you can do is write the word preen. You could write a whole graduate thesis on why you chose the word preen, but all that translation allows you to do is put the word preen in the sentence.

I want that graduate thesis on the word preen. I want all the fun factoids surrounding, to use some entirely fake examples that I just made up with no knowledge of the source language, the information/renseignements or ser/estar situation with "being ill" vs. "having an illness", or that "travel" is perhaps a very specific concept in the Koran and would lose centuries of cultural connotations if translated into something more idiomatic in English.

It's obvious that there were a lot of difficult translation decisions made in this text, and I'd love to know what they were. I'd be very happy to see a paper on this some day.

Today needs REM singing with some Muppets

Question for anyone who's ever worked retail

What's the time-frame before closing when it's annoying for customers to come in because they're getting in the way of your closing chores?

When I worked food service we really needed an uninterrupted hour to get all our closing done, so because of that I try to avoid going into stores an hour before closing. However, it occurs to me that you might not need as much time in retail because you probably don't have as much cleaning to do. Unless, like, you do and I can't see it.

So what's the timeframe where you really want me to just go away and come back tomorrow?

Banning

I've noticed that sometimes the word "ban" is used when they really mean "not offer". For example, when the City of Toronto was talking about banning bottled water, what they really meant was not selling bottled water on city property. That isn't a ban. (Banning would be not allowing it in the city, which would be a very bad idea.) That's just not offering it. If they don't sell, say, bubble tea on city property that doesn't mean that bubble tea is banned.

A couple years back they were talking about banning the air show (I think the one at the CNE?) on the basis that it's loud and polluting and militaristic. But they didn't actually mean ban it, they just meant let's not organize an air show next year. That's really no big deal at all. People don't organize air shows all the time. I'll bet you're not organizing one right now.

"Ban" is a poor word choice in these circumstances. It's so loud and dramatic that you instinctively rebel against it if you don't think the thing being allegedly banned is necessarily a problem. If you want a water bottle and someone says "Oh, we've banned bottled water," some gut instinct has you slightly rebelling, arguing, feeling attacked, hoarding water bottles for next time. But if they just say "Sorry, we don't have any water bottles available here. There's a drinking fountain over there though," then that is what it is, no big deal.

What exactly is the relationship between the Canadian Forces and the Government of Afghanistan?

So it seems Afghanistan is passing legislation severely limiting the rights of women and Canadian politicans are acting like they're going to try to do something to stop this through diplomacy and international relations.

But no matter how hard I think about that, I can't reconcile that with the fact that Canada has troops in Afghanistan. I can't think of any situation under which we'd have troops in their country AND they'd be passing domestic policy that we don't approve of AND we'd still have a say in their policy.

In what capacity, specifically, is our military there? Are we invited guests of their government? If so, it seems kind of rude and pushy to go around telling them how to legislate even if their legislation does suck. And if we're invited guests that would mean that our presence is a favour of some sort to them, so someone should at least be mentioning the possibility of withdrawing our troops as a protest against this legislation. Besides, if memory serves, our troops were in Afghanistan before this government was set up, so we can't really be their guests.

But if we aren't their guests, then we must be an occupying force. And an occupying force wouldn't install a government that would consider this kind of legislation.

I'll admit I never understood the basis for the Afghan mission very well. Back when it first started I scrunched up my brain really hard and tried to think about it, but I couldn't get it to make sense. Time has passed since then, and I've forgotten a lot of the details (it's difficult for me to retain details when I don't see the logic of the whole.) I have the idea that it has something to do with NATO, but that doesn't make sense since Afghanistan isn't part of NATO and NATO isn't quite for invading other countries.

So here's what I've got:

If Canada and Afghanistan had normal diplomatic relations and we were expressing discontent with their legislation through normal diplomatic channels, we wouldn't have military there.

If we were an invited guest of the country, we would at least be talking about withdrawing our troops in protest.

If we're an occupying force, we wouldn't have allowed such a governmentin the first place and the Canadian politicians wouldn't be protesting the legislation through political/international relations channels.

So on what basis and in what capacity are we there? What is the official relationship between the Canadian Forces and the Government of Afghanistan?

Shoe porn

My kingdom for an excuse to wear these babies.