Question I wish I could ask religious people

Suppose there's someone who is completely unable to believe in your deity, despite all the convincing evidence otherwise. They just can't, any more than they can lick their own elbow.

Would your deity prefer that person pretend to believe, going through all the motions in order to convince the people around them (and the deity) and they are in fact a devout member of your religion? Or would your deity rather that person live honestly as an atheist?

Canadian figure skating drinking game

There's a figure skating drinking game! (via Ice Charades, found on Xanboni's Twitter feed (a.k.a. the source of all the answers to my bizarre and obscure figure skating questions!))

Problem: it's very US-centric and assumes you're watching US TV.

So I made a Canadian version, at least for those of us watching in English. (Malheureusement, je n'en ai pas regardé assez en français pour créer une version pour celles et ceux de parmi vous qui regardent RDS.)

Drink when:

- The announcers between segments get way over-dramatic about something (e.g. "Heroes and villains!" in ski-jumping)
- Rod Black compares something happening on ice to something experienced by one of the figure skaters in the booth with him. Two drinks if you can think of a better figure-skating analogy.
- Someone falls. (Two drinks if they fall doing something you yourself can reliably do.)
- Someone has the same music as a previous skater. (Five drinks if they have the same dress.)
- Someone's costume has more flesh-coloured fabric than regular fabric.
- The in-rink announcer doesn't use French. (Finish the bottle if they use French but not English.)
- A commentator says "For those of you who are new to figure skating" and then proceeds to explain something that even people who don't watch figure skating know.
- The phrase "the new judging system" is uttered. Two drinks if it's by Jamie Salé or David Pelletier
- The phrase "final flight" is uttered.
- Elizabeth Manley's 1988 silver medal in Calgary is mentioned. (Two drinks if the reference is made by Elizabeth Manley. Finish the bottle if the reference is made by Elizabeth Manley but she isn't even working the booth that day.)
- The audience starts clapping along to the music. Two drinks if the clapping isn't quite in rhythm with the music, or is emotionally/thematically inappropriate.

And every time Therese Rochette is mentioned or alluded to, say a prayer for or send positive vibes to Joannie.

Parenting FAIL

In the mall, there's a big gorgeous doggie (kind of weimaranerish) tied to a railing, presumably while his humans stepped into a store. A couple pushing a toddler in a stroller comes up, squees at the doggie, and stops to pet it. But they park the stroller off to the side, as though it's an unimportant shopping cart, and don't involve the kid in the doggie interaction at all!

Aren't you supposed to show interesting animals to your small child whenever the opportunity presents itself? Shouldn't you be saying to your kid "LOOK! It's a DOGGIE! Look at the DOGGIE!" and taking him out of the stroller to interact with the doggie under your careful supervision? Even if you don't want to have your kid pet the dog since the dog is taller than your kid and the dog's humans aren't around, shouldn't you turn the stroller so your kid can watch and learn from the doggie interaction rather than turning him towards the wall?

How did we get here?

I was talking to my grandmother, and it came up in conversation that she didn't get a pension from her job. This surprised me, because I had perceived her workplace as somewhere that would be progressive about labour relations and employee benefits. It turns out that a significant majority of the employees didn't want a pension, because their husbands had pensions. (Apparently it was an all-female workplace.) I sat there stunned and baffled for quite some time, and then asked "So did husbands not lose their jobs in those days?"

Apparently they didn't. Apparently job security was so great in those days that the fact that your spouse happens to be currently employed in a job that currently offers a pension is a good enough reason to go around declining the employer's offer to set up an employee pension plan!

So how did we get here?

Everyone wants a better life for their children - certainly no one wants life for their children to be worse. No one cradles their newborn baby and dreams of them having to work until the age of 80. So how, in two generations, did we get from a place where you can just turn down a perfectly good pension to a place where it's considered an obscene luxury to be eliminated?

How the former Reform MPs can keep their pensions with the full support of the public

In 1993, MPs from the then-Reform Party (now part of the Conservative Party) spoke out against MPs' pensions and said they would refuse to collect these pensions themselves. It has recently been revealed that 11 of these MPs are now in line to collect six-figure (defined-benefit, indexed) pensions.

Here's how they can keep their six-figure pensions with the full support of all Canadians: create defined-benefit indexed pensions for everyone.

The Government of Canada already has expertise in administering defined-benefit indexed pensions: it's called the Canada Pension Plan. Unfortunately, the CPP pays a maximum of $934.17 a month, which isn't enough to live in with any degree of comfort or security.

So what they have to do (as I've blogged about before) is allow us to access this expertise - which is already being paid for by our tax dollars - by letting us put our RRSPs, contributions from defined-contribution plans, and any other money we care to throw at the problem into a fund from which the government will then guarantee a defined benefit. The defined benefit would be such that if you contribute your full RRSP amount, you get a return commensurate with the benefits you'd receive from a good employer-provided defined-benefit pension plan.

Based on CPP rates, I think this would be feasible. Maximum CPP benefits are $934.17, which works out to $11,210.04 a year. Maximum annual CPP contributions are $2,163.15. From this, we can conclude that the experts at the CPP can give you a pension of about to five times your annual contribution. Since your RRSP amount is 18% of your income, they should be able to get you a return close to your pre-retirement income if you contribute your full RRSP amount every year.

Contributing would be optional - if you think you can do better yourself, you're welcome to do so - but it would be there as an option for those of us who don't have hardcore long-term investing in our skill set. And I seriously doubt Canadians would begrudge a few MPs their pensions if we all had the security of commensurate pensions ourselves.

Added bonus analogy for why we need professionally-administered pensions for everyone:

Think back to when you were about nine years old. You knew intellectually that one day you'd have to get a job and make money to support yourself. You understood that concept perfectly well. However, you didn't know what to do about it. You'd never been employed or employable, so you didn't know how to make yourself employable. If you'd had to make yourself employable single-handedly, it would have been a hit and miss proposition. All you'd have is hearsay about what makes a person employable, and even if you grok and agree with someone else's assessment of what you need to achieve, you wouldn't necessarily know how to go about achieving it.

Fortunately, you didn't have to figure it out yourself. You were in school. People who knew better than you and had already gone through the process of making themselves employable (and acquired extensive training in how to turn children into functional members of society along the way) had a school curriculum all planned out, so all you had to do was keep going to school and work hard and do well. Be a good girl, and the experts will get you where you need to be.

That's what planning for retirement is like. I've never experienced long-term financial planning. Hell, I've never experienced long-term anything. Retirement is over 35 years away, and I haven't even been alive for 30 years (to say nothing of financially aware). I have some hearsay on how to do it, much of which is self-contradictory, but there's too much blind trust, too much guesswork, and even when I understand what I have to do I don't know how to go about doing it.

This is why we need a professionally-administered plan that we can pay into. We need experts who know better than us and are training in turning investments into defined-benefit pensions to make and administer a plan for us, so all we have to do is be good and pay in our designated RRSP contributions. It's simply unrealistic to expect everyone to be able to figure it out themselves, just like it's unrealistic to expect every 9-year-old to be able to figure out how to turn themselves into an employable adult.

Current earworm

How to label temperature controls for cooling devices

The temperature control on my fridge is a dial, with "MIN" at one end and "MAX" at the other end. I'm never clear on what this means. Every time, I have to dig out the instruction book to find out that "MAX" means colder.

All temperature controls on all cooling devices (fridges, freezers, air conditioners, etc.) should say "warmer" and "colder", not "min" and "max".

We also need to banish the phrase "turn the air conditioning up/down" from the language. From now on, we say "turn the temperature up/down".

Things They Should Invent: Alex Is On Fire

I just found out that the band Alexisonfire pronounces its name "Alexis On Fire". I always thought it was "Alex Is On Fire".

Therefore, someone needs to start a band called "Alex Is On Fire." I think making it four different words would circumvent the trademark issue.

Figure skating music bunny

The Puppini Sisters' version of Walk Like An Egyptian would make good figure skating music. I could totally picture a music video for this song with people skating along the Rideau Canal or similar - skating in a "using it as a mode of transportation to get to a destination" way, not in a "let's skate around and have fun" sort of way. (Iść, not chodzić).

(As usual, the video is irrelevant, it's just the only way I could embed the song)

Things They Should Invent: contact method prioritization chart

All businesses should have a page on their website that lists in priority the best/most effective way to contact them for any given transaction (i.e. should I do it through the web site, or call them, or come in in person?)

I'm sick and tired of choosing the method that's most convenient for me only to be told that I have to do another method anyway, or it would have been way faster if I'd done another method, or having employees react to me like "WTF did you do that for?"

Things They Should Invent: Coach-less Olympics

I'd like to see an elite athletic competition where none of the athletes are allowed to use coaches. They have to figure it all out themselves. Why? Because it would be interesting to see what happens.

A (spoiler-free) quote from the latest Dexter book

Of course, for some bizarre reason, we don't have a National Registry of Who Your Friends Are.

Um, Dexter darling, it's called Facebook!

What to do if your Phillips Wake-Up Light hisses

My Phillips Wake-Up Light makes a hissing sound after I change the alarm settings. I've discovered that unplugging it from the wall and then quickly plugging it back in makes this go away. And, for some reason, if you do it quickly, the clock doesn't lose its settings.

(The internet has also suggested that this can be fixed under warranty, but I bought mine on ebay.)

Subterfuge

A while back, Language Log mentioned a book called The Big Penis Book. Before moving on to the morphosyntax of the title, the author says "I realize I don't have to defend my interest in the book...". And while he does go on to defend his interest in the book, when I was reading that for the first time back in 2008, it struck me for the first time in my life: you don't actually have to defend your interest in that book. We're all adults here, we can read The Big Penis Book if we are interested in doing so.

It does seem odd that it would take me until the age of 27 to realize that we don't need to defend our interest in whatever thing we might be interested in, but you have to remember that for the vast majority of my life, I was a child. And when you're a child, these things work differently. If you want The Big Penis Book when you're under 18, you have to justify it to your parents. Even if you can acquire it without their permission, they're probably going to ask you to explain yourself when they find it in your room. And even if your parents do allow you to keep it, your teachers at school might take it away and call your parents and try to get you in trouble. And even if you can get past all these grownups, if your classmates find out, they're probably going to call you gay and make your life a living hell. All in all, when you're a child, it really is best and easiest to resort to subterfuge.

The subterfuge becomes a habit - after all, you've never known anything else - and it does take some time and perhaps a bit of external revelation like I got from that Language Log post to realize that in adult life, if you just quietly do your thing, no one's going to judge you or try to stop you. People simply don't care if you're reading The Big Penis Book.

And that's where Adam Giambrone made his mistake.

We're an open-minded lot here in Toronto. No one would care if Adam Giambrone didn't have a partner by his side. How many people can recognize, or even name without googling, David Miller's wife or George Smitherman's husband? The only people were actually interested in Adam Giambrone's relationship status were those who think he's pretty. In any case, especially when you eliminate the demographic who wouldn't consider voting for him because of his age and/or politics, no one would care if he didn't have a partner. No one would care if he was single and enjoying "casual encounters" as they say on Craigslist. A 19-year-old girlfriend would have briefly raise a few eyebrows, but ultimately we'd shrug and go "Meh, they're all adults." No one would especially care if he were poly or in an open relationship with honesty and consent by all parties. Even if he danced down Yonge St. during Pride in a leather harness and fishnets, we'd just applaud and wolf-whistle and gloat about it when comparing ourselves to other more uptight cities in the world. But the fact that he had a long-term relationship, publicly presented himself as part of a long-term relationship - and this in a context where no one would have batted an eye if he didn't have a partner beside him - and then ended up being a cheater was the nail in his coffin.

It's like if he had announced, a propos of nothing, that he's working his way through the complete works of Tolstoy. The press never asked what he's reading, the only people who've asked what he's reading are people who are trying to flirt with him, but he tells people he's working his way through the complete works of Tolstoy. He also makes it known that he keeps a copy of War and Peace in his briefcase, perhaps seeing to it that he's photographed reading War and Peace on the subway. Then someone discovers that, inside the War and Peace cover is not Tolstoy's masterwork, but rather The Big Penis Book.

No one would have expected him to be reading War and Peace in the first place, it would never have occurred to anyone to think less of him for not reading Tolstoy right this minute, and no one would have particularly cared if he was seen overtly reading The Big Penis Book. But the subterfuge is the problem. It's what teenagers do when they don't want to get caught reading The Big Penis Book, and it's unbecoming an adult who would presume to be mayor of a city of millions, especially when the major barrier to his candidacy is seen as his relative youth.

It isn't about lying per se and it isn't exactly about the adultery (although I, personally, do find that distasteful and it is a large mark in the minus column). It's more about the choice to have an elaborate cover-up (i.e. camera-ready long-term partner brought into the spotlight as part of the campaign) of something that doesn't need covering up (i.e. multiple casual relationships).

All of which is terribly unfortunate, because this campaign is already skewing further right than I'm comfortable with.

Question Ugly Betty needs to answer

What happens to Hilda's fetus?

They had an ultrasound that found the baby didn't have a heartbeat. So no baby for Hilda. But there's still a dead fetus in her uterus. What happens then? Does it come out by itself? Do they need to D&C it out? Even if they don't show this on screen, they should at least mention it in passing, because it's a great big question mark for people like me who have no experience with pregnancy.

(Also, Betty, Ignacio, and Babydaddy (I forget his name) were all in the ultrasound with Hilda, and the ultrasound technician makes some comment to the effect that she's never seen that many people in the ultrasound room before. Surely it's not THAT uncommon for a patient to bring in her babydaddy and her own parents (and maybe babydaddy's parents too) to get a first look at the baby? Or for the patient to bring the baby's biological father and the baby's future adoptive parents? Or her spouse and children? I mean, I'm sure in most cases it's just the baby's bio-parents, but I seriously doubt three support people is so uncommon that a tech would never have seen it before and would feel the need to common on it.)

Worst. Poll. Ever

Today's Globe and Mail poll question:

Is this the worst U.S. Congress ever, or is the system working as intended?

I haven't been following US politics especially closely, but surely there's a strong possibility that the correct answer is somewhere between the two extremes?

"Not a real sport"

Some people like to accuse various sports of not being a "real sport".

Why does it matter? Spaghetti isn't a real sport and I still enjoy it.

Outstanding customer service from Beddington's

A week ago last weekend, I bought a beautiful new duvet and duvet cover from Beddington's (Yonge & Eg location). I love them! The duvet is fluffy and warm and I feel secure like a swaddled baby wrapped in it, and the duvet cover feels good to the touch and is high thread count and matches my existing sheets perfectly.

Unfortunately, last weekend - only a week after I bought it - the zipper on the duvet cover broke. Part of the actual slidey thing broke off, so the teeth of the zipper would no longer stay inside the slidey thing. This had the unfortunate effect of rendering the entire duvet cover useless, because with the zipper open the duvet slides right out in the night and I wake up covered in basically a sheet with the duvet on the floor.

However, I am very happy to report that, despite the fact that this was a final sale item and linens are as a rule non-returnable (understandably - no one would want to buy used sheets!) Beddington's promptly, cheerfully and without drama allowed me to exchange my duvet cover for another one. Furthermore (and important to a shy and insecure person like me), I didn't need to be assertive or negotiate or anything. I just walked in, asked politely, and got the best possible outcome, being treated like my request was eminently reasonable and no imposition whatsoever the entire time.

It is very refreshing to see a retailer (especially one at a reasonable price point!) stand behind the quality and workmanship of their products. I originally went to Beddington's because they're geographically convenient, but they've just won themselves a loyal customer.

Perhaps I've been reading The Onion too much

Actual Newspaper Story or the Onion Headline? Score: 100% (12 out of 12)