Things They Should Invent: standardized deprovocation procedure

With the arrival of the G20 in Toronto, all the usual concerns are coming up about authority figures planting agents provocateurs in with the protesters.

So what we need is standardized, universally-agreed-upon way of de-escalation any provocation. Anyone who suspects they are witnessing provocation should engage in the standard deprovocation procedures, and anyone who witnesses the standard deprovocation should also engage in the deprovocation procedure. This will prevent the provocateur from having influence, and might also draw attention to any provocateurs.

The standardized deprovocation should involve being calm and quiet, and should involve some easily visible sign that you are currently engaging in deprovocation. There also needs to be a generally agreed-upon social standard that having one's behaviour deprovoked is not a personal diss, for people who aren't agents provocateurs but just get over-excited by the energy of the crowd.

So how would a deprovocation work? Here's an idea as a starting point: when you witness something you believe might be provocation, you stop, turn away from the provocateur with your arms crossed like a Klingon discommendation ritual, and stay still and silent for 10 seconds. Then you proceed just like you were before, as though nothing had happened. If you witness someone else deprovoking, you also stop, turn in the same direction as the deprovocateur with your arms crossed like a Klingon discommendation ritual, and stay still and silent for 10 seconds. Once the deprovocation is over, forget about it. Don't scold or start a witch hunt for the original provocateur.

This particular method does have its flaws and I'm sure people could think of a better way, but you see what it achieves. The provocation cannot escalate or be interpreted as escalation if everyone is still and silent. Turning away from the provocateur eliminates their audience, so they cannot provoke. It is a visible gesture to witnesses and cameras that you, personally, are actively trying to de-escalate.

If a method can be agreed upon and used by a critical mass of people, it should make it impossible for anyone to successfully provoke and allow benign crowds to peaceably self-police.

What if we don't care enough about the environment because our country is so big?

So I've been playing with IfItWasMyHome.com, which projects the oil spill on a map so you can see how big it is in comparison to an area you're familiar with. So I projected it on Toronto, and yeah, they're right, it's really big.

Then I projected it on London.

Holy fucking shit.

It is wider than ENGLAND! It's about the same size as Belgium and Netherlands combined! It could swallow Wales whole without leaving a trace, and they have their own language!

When projected on a map of Southern Ontario it does look big, It would swallow the world as I know it and then some, but that's just a tiny little corner of our country. Anything that would be lost if we disappeared is reproduced similarly enough in other parts of Canada and/or the US. But in Europe the same amount of land contains whole cultures with histories that go on for centuries (millenia?) beyond anything of which we can conceive.

What if this is making us too blasé about the environment? What if we're subconsciously less motivated to protect our land and water because we have so much of it? I never even realized just how much water we have in the Great Lakes (proportionately speaking) until I saw that the oil spill is a bit smaller than any one lake, but it's as wide as all of ENGLAND!

Being a polyglot makes me sheltered

A while back, I found a clip on YouTube of a Japanese a capella group singing Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?



Watching this, I was struck by how the only thing I understand are the lyrics to Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. I don't understand the spoken introduction, I don't understand the signs, I don't understand the various other spoken words. If put in that environment, I couldn't buy a coffee or a train ticket or even ask for help, unless someone there happens to speak my language.

That concept is terrifying! Like paralyzingly, can't-breathe terrifying! I have never in my life been in an environment where I don't speak the language! Sure, I've been in the presence of conversations in a language that I don't understand, but I've always been able to read the signs and address any random passers-by in the default local language. The idea of not being able to makes me feel helpless, like when I was 2 and fell asleep in the car seat and my mother decided to take the groceries into the house first and then come back for me and I thought she'd forgotten all about me.

Then I realized: I have never been in an environment where I don't speak the language! Isn't that weird? People travel to places where they don't speak the language all the time, but I'm so used to knowing languages that I find the prospect terrifying.

Power has been restored at Yonge & Eg

The hydro electrical power outage at Yonge & Eglinton this morning (i.e. June 1) was apparently fixed around 11:30. Why yes, I am front-loading this post with keywords. I couldn't find anything when I was googling from work to figure out if I should go home, so I'm making a blog post in the hope that it might help someone else.

Eddie braindump

I just got back from seeing Eddie Izzard again!! This isn't at all cohesive, but I want to write stuff down before I forget. I know at one point in the show I was doubled over with laughter struggling to breathe at some throwaway line, and I can't for the life of me remember what it was any more!!!! Plus at least two brand new blog posts were inspired by this show, and I can't remember them either.*

- The experience was far less intense for me because it wasn't the first time. Last time I was agog and in awe of the simple fact that he's real. This time that wasn't there. Similarly, some of the lines I didn't laugh out loud and viscerally at because I knew they were coming. I'm wondering if a significant portion of the audience had also been there at previous shows, because we didn't standing O his entrance this time. Which is unfortunate - I wanted to do it on principle - but maybe we weren't collectively feeling the sheer awe that he is real and right there because we had already been through that just a few weeks ago. Maybe this is a bad idea though, maybe we should have forced ourselves to react like it's new, because we certainly don't want Eddie to think he has to wait another seven years before he comes back so he'll get a proper welcome.

- The show is less scripted than I expected. The set pieces were there, loosely plotted, and the key beats were there, but everything in between was just Eddie being Eddie. I'd thought that more of it was scripted in a way to make it sound unscripted, but it seems it's mostly just Eddie. Which is fantastic, because that's what I'm here for - to spend time inside Eddie's brain.

- Eddie was wearing jeans that were so tight that they showed off his post-marathon leg muscles nearly as well as fishnets. Not jeggings, actual jeans. Regardless of how you feel about that as a fashion statement, you have to admire it as a design achievement! In addition to the expected collection of inappropriate thoughts, I want to have a girl talky conversation with Eddie about these jeans. Precisely how comfortable or uncomfortable are they? (They had some stretch to them, but looked like they had the potential to be uncomfortable.) How many did he have to try on to find that exact look? Were they altered? How often does he wash them? Can he sit in them? Does he really need that belt?

- With Eddie wearing makeup and heels this time (along with the same boy-mode costume, but this time with the astoundingly tight jeans), I noticed that his hairdo is masculine. I had never before in my life consciously realized that short hair styles can be gendered! I've always just parsed them as Other and irrelevant and moved on.

- I just noticed this time around that the giant squid is writing a TripAdvisor review with INK! Yeah, because you can totally send handwritten reviews to websites. (Why yes, that is the most egregious of all plot holes in that bit.)

- The seats in Massey Hall are SO uncomfortable! They make me want to sit with my legs rather wide apart, but I can't do that because the seats are close together and the strange older man beside me is rather large and wearing shorts, and I'm just not going to open my legs while wearing a shortish skirt and rub my bare leg against a strange man's bare leg. Most comfortable would have been to sit knee-crossed-over-ankle, but there simply wasn't room to do that (even if I was willing to be improper and invade personal space), so when I got home I had to spend some time in triangle poses. If it's this bad for me, imagine how bad it would be for people with stiff joints, or especially tall people! Dear Massey Hall, please fix this!

- I don't care what anyone says, there are few sights more beautiful than Eddie making himself laugh

- At one point, Eddie dares God to prove his existence by showing himself, and then offers him various bribes to do so (cash, smoothies, etc.) Today he also offered him 12 virgins, then 23 virgins, then 72 people with experience. My thought: are there 23 (or even 12) virgins in this room, like at all?

- I noticed today that whenever Eddie did his write-on-his-hand oops-not-funny thing, it was always in cases where I wasn't laughing, but I wasn't not laughing because it wasn't funny. I wasn't laughing because I was waiting with rapt anticipation and bated breath to hear what he'd say next. I wish there was some way to communicate "Yes, and...?" to the person on stage.

- (In retrospect, putting my purse between my knees might have helped with the uncomfortable seats.)

- The black-market merch guys were still out there (different guys, same set-up) so I guess that means they did make enough money last time. Either that, or they had a bunch of extra merch left over from the last run and this was their best chance to move some of it.

- At one point, Eddie was on a tangent about how the word sheep doesn't pluralize, and a bunch of all different people in the audience shouted out "MOOSE!" And I was thinking that too, I just didn't shout it out because it didn't seem the moment. But it was just so interesting that so many people were thinking exactly the same thing at that point. There are other words that don't pluralize, but we all thought of the same one, to the extent that probably 7 people felt the need to shout it out (and this at a point in the show where he wasn't asking us to shout things at him).

- The interesting thing about sitting close to the stage (Second row centre!!! Best seats I've ever had for anything in my life!) is how the audience feels different to me as an audience member. The audience as I was experiencing it was me and Poodle, the very enthusiastic group of die-hards in front of us, and the older couple next to me who kept repeating funny lines to each other. The reaction of the audience as a whole was travelling to Eddie in waves over our heads, not touching us at all.

- Overall, the show as a whole was looser and more relaxed than the previous one. I think a significant portion of the audience had seen it before, but even without the surprise it was still entirely entertaining. I would very happily do this once a month at the same price point for a very long time.

"I'm very good at pure logic. I have to be - I'm a transvestite!" - E. Izzard.

*Oh, I just remembered: the line was supposed to be "everyone take a frog and put it on your head" (plot point in Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt) but Eddie either accidentally or deliberately-repeating-a-previous-mistake-that-had-humour-value said "everyone take a frog and put it on one of your heads" or something like that, then took rather a circuitous route back in a way that alluded to Inspector Tiger. I'm obviously not communicating the humour here, but for some reason it just killed me.

Things They Should Invent: shyness drugs

From today's Miss Conduct:

Two of my co-workers are expecting. One of the women is friendly to everyone. The other will walk by me without replying to a hello. She does this to many people and only talks to her select friends. One of her friends has planned a dual shower for both (it is suspected that this is the only way people would go to a shower for the second woman). I am not attending because of a prior commitment. I had planned on buying a gift for the first woman and giving it to her at a different time, but some people are planning to buy a joint gift for the second woman. I know I am not the only one who feels uncomfortable buying a gift for someone who does not make any effort to be friendly to everyone.

I've seen this sentiment a number of times before, and what shocks me and baffles me and makes me want to weep every single time is that people think this is snobby and malicious, and don't see that it is so obviously a sign of shyness. (Although props to Miss Conduct for recognizing that in her answer!)

Apparently there are a lot of very loud people out there who have no idea what it's like to be shy. They don't know that eye contact is physically difficult. Seriously, it feels incredibly intense and your first instinct is to look away. They don't know that it would literally never occur to us that a stranger/casual acquaintance might want a hi how are you from us, because they're obviously cool people with their own lives so why on earth would they need us? It's not malice, it's a desire to quietly keep out of everyone's way!

And having it interpreted as malicious makes it even worse for the shy person (and, consequently, even worse for the co-workers who do want an eye contact hi how are you). I do eventually unshy once I feel safe in a particular context, with particular people, but it takes time and external validation. Having it considered malice just makes it worse and puts the barrier towards unshying further and further out of reach. If I were the shy woman in the letter, I wouldn't have thought anything about not getting as many gifts as my colleague. Obviously she's cooler and better-liked, that only makes sense. My feelings wouldn't even have been hurt, I would simply have seen that as the natural order of things. However, because that is so obviously the natural order of things, it would lead me to renew my pattern of eyes down don't disturb anyone. That isn't passive-aggressive, that's just the only response that would ever occur to me. However, if I got just as many gifts as the other woman and was treated as an equally valued member of the team, that might make me feel like they do actually want me and are actually interested in me, which would make me more likely to say hi to them.

I've been working on doing the eye contact hi how are you thing for nearly half my life, and it's still work. Making eye contact with someone I'm not close to is like trying to push like magnetic poles together. I can do it, but I have to struggle against my natural instincts to do so. (I even have a memory of adults getting offended at my lack of eye contact when I was a preschool child. You're a preschooler, doing the only thing that it even occurs to you to do (it feels intense so you look away) and grown adults are taking offence because you're not doing the thing that is so against your every instinct that it would never occur to you. What do you even do with that? No wonder I always felt like the world had a secret set of rules that no one had told me about!) It's like doing the splits. You can train long and hard to get flexible enough that you can do the splits, and if you practice your routine enough you will eventually fall into the splits at the right point. But it will never be natural. You'll never get to a place where you're at home, with no one watching, just sprawled out reading a book, and you end up in the splits.

Anyway, my point: someone should invent drugs that make non-shy people feel shy just temporarily, like for a day or two. So people could see first-hand what it's like when your every instinct has you wanting to walk quickly by, eyes down, so they don't see you and you don't see them. Then maybe we'll all be able to understand each other better and unshy people more quickly.

(And yes, I would be interested in experimenting with the opposite drug to make me feel outgoing, but I'd probably end up becoming an addict.)

How to fix your computer freezing after the latest ZoneAlarm upgrade

After the latest ZoneAlarm update (I got it on Friday, May 28), my computer started slowing and freezing. I'm running Windows XP on a five-year-old computer, 2.8 GHz processor and 2 gigs of RAM. Not the best, but it had served me well right up until that upgrade.

Sometimes after boot-up, nothing would work. Like I'd click on something and after five minutes it still hadn't loaded, and even the Task Manager would freeze. I also started getting errors when launching Sims 3, "Application failed to initialize properly." I tried a system restore to before the ZoneAlarm upgrade, but that didn't help.

The ultimate solution ended up being to uninstall and reinstall the ZoneAlarm upgrade, but not installing all the components. Unfortunately I failed to write down the exact name of the interface items, but there's a window with three checkboxes asking what you want to install. The first checkbox is the regular firewall, I forget what the second is, and the third offers to put a ZoneAlarm security function in your Google toolbar. If you uncheck the second, the third is greyed out.

The first time around (which caused all the problems), I'd chosen all three. The second time around, I chose only the first of the three. The installation went smoothly and there have been no problems since.

So what's going on in Scandinavia?

I've seen a number of articles lately (like this) saying that the situation in Greece demonstrates that the European model of socialism is unsustainable, often implying that this means we should stop aspiring to it ourselves.

These articles focus on Greece, and also cite in passing other European countries such as Italy, Germany, France and Britain.

But I have never seen any of them mention any Scandinavian countries.

Scandinavia is most often held up as the very best example of European socialism, where the concept works better than anywhere else. But I haven't heard anything about how they're doing in this economic crisis. I know something serious happened in Iceland, which I think was related to the kinds of bad debt investments that triggered this whole thing, but I haven't heard anything about any of the other Scandinavian countries.

So how are they doing up there? And why are our media never using them as an example of anything?

Music for a relaxed and groovy Friday

Latest musical discovery, via @TravelMaus:

More information please: sound cannon edition

Toronto police have purchased four, long-range acoustic devices (LRAD) — often referred to as sound guns or sound cannons — for the upcoming June 26-27 summit, the Star has learned.

...

Of Toronto’s newly-acquired LRADs, three are handheld devices that can broadcast noise heard from 600 metres away. Their volume can reach 135 decibels, which surpasses the pain threshold of 110 to 120.

The fourth device is a larger model that can be mounted on vehicles or marine vessels and can generate noise reaching 143 decibels, audible from as far as 1500 metres.

Before we even get into the question of whether this is a reasonable/advisable approach to protesters, we have to think about collateral damage. This is a high-density area, and the vast majority of the people in the area will be ordinary people just doing their jobs and going about their lives.

What would the ratio of people targeted by the cannon to other innocent people who just happen to be within range? How many people live within range? Aren't there a number of hospitals in the area? Doesn't the subway go right under it? What happens if a subway driver suddenly feels the need to clamp their hands over their ears? Are they blocking the entire sound cannon range off to cars? If not, what happens if a street full of people driving cars all feel the need to clamp their hands over their ears? How does being near the line of fire of a sound cannon affect children? Dogs? Birds? Wildlife? The scientific experiments that are doubtless being conducted somewhere within U of T?

We need to know this has been given all the consideration it deserves, especially since the Toronto Police are apparently keeping these devices.

Things They Should Invent: do not disturb signs for dogs

Some people like it when random people pay attention to their dog while walking down the street. Others don't - maybe it interferes with the dog's training, maybe the dog doesn't deal well with strangers, maybe they're in a hurry and don't want to have to stop for every squeeing idiot. The problem is, as a squeeing idiot, I have no way of knowing which dogs are which. I don't want to annoy anyone or ruin anyone's training, but at the same time I love your dog and don't want to miss a chance to interact if it will make everyone happy.

So what we need is some kind of standardized, easily-visible convention for leashes or collars or something that indicates to the onlooker that the dog does not want to be disturbed, similar to how service dogs have a distinctive harness. Perhaps it could be something temporary that you could add to an existing leash setup, in case your dog is okay with being disturbed sometimes but not always.

Random idea that came to me while typing: neckerchiefs. Sometimes people put neckerchiefs on dogs (which has always baffled me - it seems random and arbitrary - but whenever I ask dog people about it they say "It looks nice!" as though it's completely self-evident). Maybe a kerchief on the dog's neck or tied to the collar could mean do not disturb.

Band bunny

Someone should come up with a band that dresses like a 60s girl group (shift dresses, heels, pearls) but plays really aggressive hardcore punk and/or metal, and is very good at it. They should be classically trained as well, so they can occasionally commit surprising acts of serious musicianship (c.f. Lady Gaga at Glastonbury)

How to give career guidance to students

From an otherwise-unrelated article:

Unemployment’s on the rise, you need a skill,” a weathered old guidance counsellor says to an androgynous male pupil in the BBC’s new biopic Worried About the Boy. “What can you do better than other people?”

I wish someone had asked me that when I was a kid! (Or, better for my introvert brain, asked me to think over a period of time about what I can do better than everyone else.) If they had asked me that, I totally would have come up with languages. If they had asked me to think about what within the field of languages came easiest and I was best at and I most enjoyed, I would have come up with translation. Then I would have been guided towards a suitable and compatible career path!

"But wait," you're thinking, "you are a translator! You did land in a suitable and compatible career path!" Yes, but I did it without (and, in fact, despite) the advice of the grownups who were supposed to be advising me.

The career advice I received fell into three general categories: 1) Do what you love, 2) Do what can't be outsourced and will make you money, and 3) Do what not enough people of your demographic are doing.

What I loved was music, but I'm no good at it. I'm technically proficient with a suitable amount of practice, but I have no soul. If the world needed session musicians to the same extent it needed typists before the invention of word processing then I would have had a chance, but in the real world it would have eaten me alive.

The most common examples I was given of something that can't be outsourced and would make me money were plumbing and dental hygiene. But I wouldn't have been especially good at plumbing because I'm not good at physical things that need to be perfect (people certainly wouldn't want their plumbing "good enough!") and I wouldn't have been especially good at dental hygiene because you need people skills.

They were also trying to encourage me to go into engineering or computer programming because it was trendy at the time to encourage girls to go into these fields. They tried to push me in this direction because I had decent marks in math and science, but the thing is about 20% of my class was ahead of me, so I wouldn't have been anything special.

In my language classes, I was always top of the class. I was in the top 10% of the candidates for translation school, and on graduation I was second in the class - but that also meant I was the lowest-ranked person in my class who got recruited straight out of uni (yes, only 2 of us got recruited) and now I am thoroughly unexceptional for a translator of my seniority and experience. If I had gone into any of the other fields into which I was being encouraged on the basis that my marks in school were decent, I would have been struggling, if not failing, by the time I hit the workplace.

Because that's the thing that was never explicitly mentioned in all the career advice I received from my elders: you will be in competition with everyone else in this field. There are very few fields in which they merely need warm bodies, so you'd do better to look at what you're better than other people at. I sincerely hope that anyone who might find themselves giving advice to kids who are uncertain about choosing a career will take this into account.

This is new?

Today's Globe and Mail included an article deploring the fact that there are people trying to get you to sign up for credit cards in TTC stations.

My first thought: this is new? They've been doing it at the further north stations on the Yonge line for months and months - maybe even as long as a year! An ungenerous corner of my mind suspects no one made the effort to care until it started happening south of Bloor.

(So what do I think? It doesn't especially bother me, but I freely admit that that might be coloured by the fact that I already have the credit card in question, so any time they spend trying to attract my attention is entirely their loss. I'd certainly have no objection if it went away though.)

In this blog's ongoing tradition of taking credit for everything...

After thoroughly enjoying Google Pacman on my speaker-less work computer, I came home to realize it has sound. This is inconvenient since I usually leave my browser open and on Google by default, so I asked them on Twitter if we can have a mute button.

Shortly thereafter, a mute button appeared. (It's in the bottom left corner.)

I can't find any googleable or tweeted evidence of anyone noticing the presence of a mute button before I sent the original tweet.

You're welcome :)

This is not an episode of Scooby Doo!

The OED Word of the Day was Holy Ghost. In the Catholicism of my era, we called it the Holy Spirit. I have seen Holy Ghost in older schoolbooks (I strongly suspect they were Catholic schoolbooks from my parents' era, but I'm not 100% certain about this because I saw it before I was aware of different denominations), but I've never heard it in Catholicism in real life.

I can see how the same (currently unknown to me) word might be translated as both Ghost and Spirit by two different translators, but I wonder which is more accurate? Spirit makes better sense to me just logically, but I'm not fully up on my catechism, and I'm not sure if an atheist's idea of logic is applicable when translating such a religious concept.

The OED etymology only went as far back as Old English, at which time the concepts of Ghost and Spirit overlapped more than they do today. But I wonder which word more accurate reflects the original (Greek? Aramaic?) source text?

Things They Should Study: the impact of gender imbalance on future generations

A while back, I read a book called Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived without Men After the First World War by Virginia Nicholson. So many men died in WWI that there were an enormous number of women of that generation who never married because there were simply not enough men to go around. (I'm trying to find the percentage of missing men but can't - both 10% and 25% come to mind, but there's an anecdote in the book where a teacher at a girls' school tells her class that only one in ten of them will get married.) Apparently this was historically unprecedented (which seems odd to me - there have always been wars - but that's not he point of this post). The book explores the situation of the women who never married, which was rather interesting, but today I found myself thinking it would be interesting to study this situation from the opposite perspective: what impact did this gender imbalance have on marriage and then on future generations?

(To explain what I'm trying to say here, I'm going to have to make a lot of gross generalizations. I'm taking a heterocentric, heteronormative approach, I'm reducing people's appeal as a spouse and as a human being to a number on the classic 1 to 10 scale, I'm presenting as a given the assumption that people are only "worthy" of spouses who are close to them on the 1 to 10 scale, and I'm assuming that children only look to adults of their own gender as role models. I do realize that human beings and relationships are a lot more complex nuanced than that, but I'm just trying to outline the general concept that I think someone should study so it gets silly to insert appropriate qualifiers into every single sentence.)

We can assume that the missing men were distributed evenly over the 1 to 10 scale. So normally only someone who is a 9 or 10 can get with another 10. But with all these men missing, there weren't enough 10 men for all the 10 women, so 10 women ended up with men as low as 8 or even 7. But meanwhile, 10 men never found themselves having to stoop to a 9. So you've got a whole generation of marriages where there are a significant number of wives who are objectively out of their husband's league, but few or no husbands who are out of their wife's league.

The thing is, people might not notice this is happening. The pool of prospective spouses available just…is. It isn't really something you question. For example, I have never in my life met someone, even in passing, who is independently wealthy. (I know that such people exist, I've read about them in books, but I've never met one in real life.) Therefore, if I were to write down everything I want in a prospective mate, it would never even occur to me to write down independently wealthy, any more than it would occur to me to say I want someone with a flying car. That just isn't something that happens in real life.

So because no one notices this is happening, as everyone comes back from WWI and that cohort starts to get married, the 1 to 10 scale gradually gets realigned. 10 women keep ending up with, say 8 men, so eventually a marriage that objectively consists of a 8 man and a 10 woman is assumed to be a fair match. And, as this new normal takes over, people look at the couple, figure they're well-matched by general social standards, there's no way he's a 10 and there's no way she's an 8, so they must both be 9s.

So then some time passes and all these people have children. The children look around, see their parents and their friends' parents and the other grownups around them, and blindly accept these misaligned matches as normal because they don't know anything else. They see the woman who is objectively a 10 and the man who is objectively an 8, and unquestioningly accept that both these people are 9s. So this creates a situation where women have to be "better" than men just to get the same number of points, but this children don't realize this because the whole world has always been like this for them.

So what impact does this have on the children? Does it cause girls to underestimate their worth and boys to overestimate their worth? (Or, alternatively or in addition, does it cause society as a whole to underestimate girls' worth and to overestimate boys' worth?) What impact does it have on the mating and dating game? What impact does it have on the next generation of children?

It was beyond the scope of the book I read, but, as we know about a generation after WWI there was WWII. Did this also result in a shortage of men? If so, did this exacerbate even more this now-socially-internalized idea whereby a woman has to be objectively better to be condsidered a 10 than a man does? How did this affect their kids (i.e. the Baby Boomers)?

Writing this out has given me a theory. Not sure how good a theory it is, but it's a theory that I have. You know how they keep talking about how boys are falling behind in education, how schools aren't serving them well etc.? What if it's really this idea, internalized and multiplied over several generations? Maybe boys feel "good enough" at a lower level of achievement than girls do? Maybe boys are just as happy with a 60% as girls are with an 80% for the same reasons that a man who, just a few generations ago, would have been considered a 6 is now considered evenly matched with a woman who, the same few generations ago, would have been an 8?

I have no idea how much of this is true or valid, but it would be an interesting thing for someone to research if they could figure out a methodology.

Things They Should Invent: non-rude way for businesses to tell customers that they're not quite the target audience

Buying a condo is way too hard and stressful to do myself, and everyone advises me that what I really need is a good real estate agent.

(Which always leads to the following exchange:

Me: So how do I find a good real estate agent?
Them: Ask around!
Me: Um, that's kind of what I'm doing right now?)

I'm told a good real estate agent can take all your preferences and specifications and keep an eye open for places that are a good fit, which does sound like exactly what I need.

However, I know that real estate agents get paid on commission. I know that my budget is very small (in Toronto real estate terms) and I have quite a lot of preferences and specifications and am generally very needy. I do love where I'm renting now and don't want to sacrifice even one bit of quality of life in finding a condo. I do understand that this makes me quite a lot of work for very little return, but I don't want to sacrifice on something as important as housing.

So my concern in finding a real estate agent would be finding someone who is actually willing to and interested in finding me something that meets all my silly little needs, holding my hand, and tending to my neuroses. I don't want to be stuck with someone who is rolling their eyes whenever I show up on call display or who pressures me to lower my standards just to save themselves time. And I'm quite sure they don't want to be stuck with me.

What we need is a standard, non-rude, non-judgemental, purely informative way for businesses to inform customers that they don't think they're a good fit. This would need to be done in a way that isn't detrimental to the customer continuing to receive that product or service from that business (in case they can't find something better). You can't really do this in real life because you'd be accused of discrimination or, at the very least, poor customer service. But, as a customer, I'd really like to know when I'm not wanted. And I'm sure you can think of one or two cases where you wouldn't mind being able to do this to your own customers.

Search Strings of the Day

1. Where to buy a Victoria's Secret bra
2. If you aren't gay then why aren't you married?
3. Stripper problems and how to solve them