What to do when your pre-teen daughter wants to remove her body hair

There was recently a letter in the Globe and Mail's Ask A Pediatrician column from a parent whose 8-year-old daughter wants to start shaving her legs. As a former hairy 8-year-old myself, I felt compelled to respond.

Short version for busy parents: Anyone who has body hair is old enough to remove said body hair. In my personal experience, a No!No! is the best hair removal method for beginners. For more information on how I arrived at this reasoning, keep reading.

My credentials

You're probably thinking "You don't have kids, what do you know?" What I know is what it's like to be a hairy little girl. I have more body hair than most women, and started puberty earlier than most people. I seem to remember more clearly than most people what I thought and felt as a child, and I can now articulate those feelings with adult vocabulary and nuance, and without feeling the need to hide or sugarcoat anything like a younger girl might out of awkwardness or shame. I also have 20 years' experience managing my body hair, and have tried literally every home hair removal method currently in existence.

When you should let your daughter start removing her body hair

Short answer: as soon as she has body hair that she'd like to remove.

Your first thought is probably "But she's too young!" But when it comes to taking care of our bodies, we have to work with what our bodies are actually doing, not what they theoretically should be doing. If your daughter started menstruating, you'd provide her with feminine hygiene products and make sure she knows where babies come from. If she began developing breasts, you'd provide her with the foundational garments she needs to maintain her comfort and modesty. If she started having strange vaginal discharge, you'd get her gynecological care.

In fact, her young age makes having prominent body hair even worse, because she and her peers aren't accustomed to this, and might not even know that it's normal. (One of the greatest humiliations of my life was being the only person, male or female, with hairy armpits at the Grade 5 pool party. Neither I nor any of my classmates knew at the time that hairy armpits were a normal part of puberty. It took until adulthood for my self-esteem to recover.) She's likely the hairiest person in her class, male or female. If her mother removes her body hair, and if her sisters are either young enough that they don't have prominent body hair or old enough that they remove their own body hair, then your daughter probably thinks she's the only person in the world who has this very visible, very humiliating problem. Her self-concept will be defined by it. And, because for her entire hairy life she has not been permitted to remove her body hair, she cannot help but to feel like she will have to spend the rest of her whole life experiencing this humiliation.

However, being able to remove your body hair gives you control over this. You aren't sentenced to be the ugliest person in the room any more. You are no longer defined by your hair. You once again have control and sovereignty over your body and can look as feminine as you feel. I am telling you from my firsthand experience as a hairy girl, it is outright empowering!

Because your daughter specifically asked you about shaving, we know that she is bothered by her body hair and that she knows you can provide her with a solution. If you do provide her with a solution, she will learn that if she goes to you with questions or concerns about her changing body, you will give her solutions that make her feel empowered. However, if you tell her that she's too young, she will feel even more ashamed of her body hair, as though she's being bad just by being hairy at too young an age. The shame compounds: she feels ashamed because she has ugly masculine hair, and she ashamed at having hair at an age you consider too young, and she feels ashamed at wanting to remove the hair when you think she's too young. Again, these bad feelings are even worse for especially young kids, because they still want to Be Good rather than rebelling against their parents. You can save her from this shame spiral and reward her for coming to you with her concerns about her changing body simply by providing her with the solution she came to you for, which what any good parent does when their kid comes to them with any problem.

While it is normal for a younger kid to go to their parents for permission to do something to or with their own body (and such permission is often also logistically necessary), we all know that it's really a question of sovereignty over one's own body. Denying her this sovereignty will introduce the idea that it's normal for authority figures to overrule her sovereignty over her own body. Do you want to take that risk? Then, as she gets older and starts thinking about it, she'll extrapolate that your rules are arbitrary and lack credibility, and will proceed to do whatever she wants without consulting you.

In summary, letting your kids remove their body hair as soon as they want to will increase their self esteem, empower them, assert their sovereignty over their own body, increase your credibility in their eyes, and teach them that coming to you with any concerns they might have about their changing bodies gets good results. Not allowing them to remove their body hair has the opposite effect.

At this point, you're still thinking "But what if she hurts herself with a razor or hot wax? And I don't want her to have to commit to a beauty routine for the rest of her life, not at such a young age!" That brings me to...

Why I recommend the No!No!

If you clicked on the link above, you're probably thinking that the No!No! looks expensive and infomercially. It is a bit pricier than parents normally spend on pre-teens (although you can often get deals on ebay) but it does do the job. Here's why I like it, and why I think it's especially suitable for particularly young users:

1. The No!No! is safe. It's impossible to injure yourself with it. The only harm can come from if you get loose skin caught in it, and the one time I did this (I ran it over my elbow with my arm straightened instead of bent, so the skin wasn't anywhere near taut) I got a red line on my skin that disappeared the next day. No blood, no pain, no scar, just a red line. It's contraindicated for genitals and breasts, but can be used on the rest of the body, including the face.

2. The No!No! is easy. It's just as fast as shaving, but without any of the mess. You don't even need to be in the bathroom to do it. (I do mine in my bedroom - no water required!) Even in cases where it doesn't get every single hair, you always finish with fewer hairs than you started with. It's never a frustrating waste of time.

3. The No!No! is painless. It doesn't pull the hairs out, it zaps them in place. You feel a slightly warm thing passing over your skin, and that's all.

4. The No!No! can be used on all types of hair. It works on stubble and on longer hairs. You don't have to wait for the hair to grow to a certain length like you do with many epilatory methods. You can do it every day or once a week. It doesn't work on full-length pubic hair (you need to trim it down first, and it is contraindicated for the genitals anyway, although it's okay for the outer bikini line), and I, personally, struggle to make it work for armpit stubble (have never tried it on virgin armpit hair), although I struggle with all epilatory methods on my armpits because the layout of my breasts makes it difficult to get the skin taut. People with smaller breasts who carry less towards the outside tend not to have this problem, although I don't have any testimonials specific to the No! No! It does work on my leg stubble, as well as on regrown waxed hair and virgin arm and face hair.

5. You can stop using the No!No! whenever you want without any unpleasant regrowth phase. This is the reason why I so strongly recommend it for younger users specifically. Hair removed with a No! No! doesn't grow back as stubble. It isn't prickly. It doesn't get all ingrowny. It simply grows back as a kinder, gentler version of your own hair. Not every single follicle regrows, some regrow more slowly, some regrow finer or paler. Virgin hair (i.e. hair that has never been removed before) regrows looking even more virgin. I have used it on my forearms and on my face (mustache, sideburns, chin whiskers), and I have gone up to a month in between treatments. Apart from the fact that each day I have marginally more hair there than the day before, it doesn't look at all like hair regrowth.

When I was a hairy preteen, I alternated between wanting to remove my ugly body hair, and resenting the fact that I had to keep removing my ugly body hair. But if I stopped, I'd get stubbly and itchy. The No! No! eliminates this dilemma. Your daughter can remove her hair every day in the summer and stop in the winter. She can remove her hair once and then decide it's not worth the trouble, and then revisit it a year later. She can remove her hair only for special occasions. She can experiment with removing hair from another area of her body without any drama.

In summary, the No!No! addresses every concern a parent might have about a pre-teen removing their body hair. It's possible you might have to supplement with a razor for armpits, tweezers for eyebrows, or clippers for longer (i.e. longer than an inch or two) hair, but I highly recommend the No!No! as the best starting point.

Wherein my late grandfather predicted the current state of Canadian politics over 50 years ago

One of my grandmother's treasured possessions back in the old country was her family crest from her family of origin. It had been handed down for generations since before memory. You see, my grandparents lived in an area of what is now Poland that had, for as long as anyone could remember, been passed back and forth from one oppressor to another, and the family crest reminded them of where they really came from and who they really were, regardless of who the occupying force of the day was.

I was recently trying to google up a picture of the family crest so we could make a new one for my grandmother to put on her wall, and I stumbled upon an interesting factoid. It seems that the presence of a family crest likely means that we are the descendants of szlachta, a long-defunct type of nobility. Our noble ancestors would have been deposed in the late 18th century by the conquering empire of the day, but if we could just figure out how to trace our genealogy back another 100 years past where we've got it now, we'll likely turn up noble lineage dating back as early as the 1300s. Kind of cool, although obviously doesn't apply to us any more after generations of war and oppression. My grandparents were raised on farms and worked in factories to support their children, my parents were the first generation in living memory to scramble their way up to white collar, and my generation is hanging onto that white collar by our fingernails.

When my grandparents decided to pack up their worldly possessions and get on a boat for Canada, my grandfather insisted that my grandmother had to leave the family crest behind. For reasons that none of us understood, he thought that having the crest among their possessions might be frowned upon, or even get them turned out of Canada.

My grandfather passed away nearly 12 years ago. But it turns out he was a very prescient man.

Teach me how to edit my blog template

This template I'm using is several years old, but I haven't been able to find a newer one I like. (Recommendations are welcome in the comments.) In the meantime, I'd like to make the centre column (the beige/tan bit where all the actual content is) wider, ideally a percentage of the browser width rather than fixed pixel width to accommodate a variety of resolutions.

If this is within your skill set, could you have a look at my source code and see which values I need to change?

I've already been playing around with the template code and edited anything that looks promising, but it all made matters worse. Ideas?

In my ongoing tradition of substituting youtubes for proper blog posts...

Overtime plus time change are kicking my ass, so this weekend's basically going to have to be a write-off. Which is unfortunate, because I have some important things that I want to get blogged.

So here's Bruce Springsteen covering Creedence Clearwater Revival.

More information please: who would donate money to an organization's golf tournament, and why?

In an interview from Monday's Metro Morning on the ethics of spending money for employee morale in public organization.

At about 5:00, the guest, a forensic auditor, said that golf may or may not be an appropriate expense, but manicures certainly wouldn't, in response to which the host replied that it's interesting that golf might be considered an appropriate expense, but manicures wouldn't. In reply to this, the guest said:

"The chances of getting external money for a golf tournament are much higher." He then went on to describe the external money as "donations and so on."

The interview ended shortly thereafter and they didn't get into any details, so I'm left wondering: Who would donate money so a public organization could have an employee golf tournament? What would their motivations be in doing this? Under what circumstances would it not be a conflict of interest for a public organization to accept such a donation? (My understanding is that the scope of what constitutes a conflict of interest in the public sector is rather broad.) And why would they be moved to donate for a golf tournament but not for manicures?

Things They Should Invent: let tenants bill unresponsive landlords for maintenance

This idea originated as a solution to the maintenance problems reported at TCHC, but I think it could be useful for all tenants.

If the landlord does not respond to or resolve maintenance requests within a certain legislated period of time, the tenant has the right to hire someone to fix it and send the bill to the landlord.

The required period of time can vary depending on the severity of the issue. Urgent issues like infestation, lack of heat, lack of water, or threats to the tenant's safety would have tighter deadlines than smaller issues.

There would be two deadlines the landlord has to meet: response and resolution. Response is when someone comes and looks at it. If it's something that can be fixed easily, they would do so right away. (For example, last time I asked my super for help was because a lightbulb had burned out in a complicated lighting fixture and I couldn't figure out how to get it out. That would only require one visit, and would (obviously) fall under the non-urgent deadline.) If the problem is more complicated and they need to call in outside help or order outside parts, they'd have until the resolution deadline to solve it. The resolution deadline for something like lack of water would still be pretty tight, but it also would realistically reflect the need to call in outside contractors.

If the landlord doesn't meet one or both of these deadline, the tenant is then permitted to call in contractors unilaterally and have the bill sent to the landlord. Because tenants don't always know how to choose a good contractor, landlords would be required to provide a list of the contractors they use to the tenants. However, tenants are permitted to choose someone who isn't on the list. Tenants are also permitted to attempt to fix the problem themselves, and absolved of any responsibility for repairs gone wrong. Basically if the landlord wants it fixed their way and at the cost they've agreed to, they'd better do it on time.

In cases where a contractor has been called or a part has been ordered but there's a bit of a wait, the landlord must provide the tenant with all pertinent information - who did they call, reference number, ETA, etc. I can make arguments for and against tenants being permitted to call in their own contractor if the landlord's contractor's ETA for parts or service exceeds the resolution deadline.

If the landlord is doing their job properly, this shouldn't change anything. If the landlord is not doing their job properly, they will have to pay the cost of doing their job properly. And the tenant is no longer at the landlord's mercy for their basic living conditions.

When I was your age, I GOT to walk five miles to school!

In elementary school and in high school, I mostly walked to school. I rather liked it. I liked being able to choose what time to leave (go in early to join the pick-up soccer game, or watch another cartoon before I leave?) and which route to take (the direct route like good girls, or the back streets where we could feel transgressive by jaywalking, or through the townhouses' playground where we could feel transgressive because strictly speaking that playground was for residents only?). I liked being able to stop in at Becker's and buy candy, or pop into a friend's house, or, when I was in high school, go out of my way to Tim Horton's for a treat before heading home. In high school I liked how, when I was signed out for an orthodontist appointment, I could just kind of not go back to school for my last class of the day. I liked having private time to talk to my friends away from adults' ears, or to just walk by myself and think without parents barging in and asking me why I'm sitting there doing nothing.

However, sometimes I got a ride for various reasons, and various adults around me would give me crap about that. They'd tell me that THEY had to walk to school and I was spoiled for getting a ride. But what this sounds like when you're a kid is that I wasn't good enough to get a ride, I didn't deserve to get a ride, and I should have to walk as punishment for being such a bad and unworthy person. Of course, all this did was make me more determined to get a ride! They were talking about walking in a tone that made it sound like punishment and humiliation, and I didn't want punishment and humiliation! It was like the Tom Sawyer fence thing, but backwards.

When adults complain about Kids Today, they often use language that has that effect. They say Kids Today are Spoiled and Pampered. They say they need to Get Some Responsibility. They say parent should Make Them walk to school and get a job.

But why not say the parents should Let Them walk to school and get a job? Instead of talking about it like punishment and humiliation, why not talk about it as liberating? Because it is liberating, in an age-appropriate way. You get a bit more agency than usual. You get a bit more privacy than usual. You get to do something a bit more grownup than usual and prove to judgey adults that you can do it.

Please pay attention to the nuances here: I'm not suggesting taking things that are objectively unpleasant and just slapping positive names on them, like people who insist on calling a job loss an opportunity for personal growth. I'm not suggesting taking things that are objectively unpleasant and just telling kids they're lucky to do them, like people who tell kids they're lucky to have overprotective parents. I'm not trying to be like Calvin's father and tell you that drudgery and unpleasantness builds character. I'm just thinking about my younger self, coveting the freedom of the characters in her young adult novels, and then being treated like she's bad for not having those freedoms, or that those freedoms are humiliations.

Things They Should Invent: compressed parental leave

Maternity and parental leave currently pay 55% of your income up to $468 a week, and give you up to 15 weeks of maternity leave and 35 weeks of parental leave.

It is possible that this might not be enough money to support you in your year off work. If you're renting in Toronto and your apartment is big enough for your kid to have their own room, it might not even be enough for rent. I'm sure some parents have to go back to work earlier than they'd like simply to avoid running out of money.

Obviously the ideal solution would be to increase the government benefits to a more realistic level, but in the interim here's a zero-cost solution: allow new parents to compress their maternity and parental leave, so they get more dollars per week over a period of fewer weeks.

For example, the total maximum maternity and parental benefits payable is $468x50 weeks, which totals $23,400. For mathematical simplicity, let's say you've determined you need $1,000 a week. Under this proposed system, you'd be able to draw $1,000 a week for 23.4 weeks. So instead of getting a year off with insufficient money, you can have just over five months off with sufficient money. That would be far more useful!

This is beneficial to new parents because they can still take time to be with their new child, but they wouldn't have to worry about money. It would cost nothing to the government (it's possible they might even save a tiny bit of money by not having to send out cheques/direct deposits and do paperwork for as many weeks), and it would also be beneficial to employers because their employees might come back from parental leave earlier. Better for everyone, no cost, no downside.

Things They Should Invent: diet machine

The diet machine makes it harder to get at foods you shouldn't be eating and easier to get at foods you should be eating. If you want to eat a food you shouldn't be eating, you have to put a request into the machine. The machine then gives you instructions to eat some specific healthy food. After you've eaten the healthy food, you have to put in a second request for the unhealthy food. Then there's a 20 minute countdown (because apparently it takes 20 minutes between when the food enters our mouths and the feeling of fullness reaches our brains. After the countdown, the machine doesn't beep or anything. It just sits there quietly. If you still want the unhealthy food, you have to remember to go and put in a request a third time. Then it will release the lock on the food.

For example, suppose you're craving fries. You request fries, and the machine tells you to eat a serving of vegetables and drink a glass of water. (The vegetables and water aren't locked up by the machine and you can nibble on them whenever you want.) Then, if you're still hungry, you put in a second request and the machine tells you to wait 20 minutes. Then, after 20 minutes, you put in a third request and it releases the fries. But, of course, it's not like the fries are all sizzling hot. You still have to turn on the oven and cook them.

So ultimately what the machine does it reduces ease and impulsiveness of eating things you're not supposed to. No, I haven't the slightest idea how to actually make a device like that work.

A plot hole in my childhood

A couple of times a year, we'd go up north to visit my great-grandparents. (Three were still alive when I was born, the last passed away when I was about 13.) I found this boring. We had to sit in their house and do nothing while the grownups talked about boring things that I didn't understand, and I always felt awkward and vaguely humiliated because it seemed like they didn't want me there. So one day I asked my father (whose grandparents they were) why I had to go. It really didn't look like they needed me there, I had to just sit there and do nothing. "Because it makes them happy," he replied.

What I took away from this at the time is that it makes old people happy when I'm feeling bored and out of place and awkward and humiliated.

But thinking back on it with an adult perspective, if you're an adult and it does in fact make you happy to see certain children that you're related to, wouldn't you engage with them somehow? Talk to them, ask them about their lives, offer them treats, get them to show you what they can do and praise them for being able to do it well?

At the time, I felt guilty for not knowing what to say or do to engage with them, but looking at it as an adult, they should totally have been the ones to engage with me! They had multiple children and grandchildren (obviously), they'd been children themselves, they'd been alive for 10 times as long as I had (and no, at this point they weren't losing their faculties like the other elders I've been blogging about recently). They were the ones empowered to initiate and facilitate the relationship. But they gave me less than I give my co-workers' stray children when they wander into my office.

So the question is: did it actually make them happy to see me and they had an odd way of expressing it, or was my father lying to me about that? Not that it makes much of a difference to me either way, but it's a mystery.

How to set politicians' salaries

There's been some debate recently here in Toronto about whether our city councillors should get a pay raise. On one hand, they already get way more money than most of us and the city is short on money. On the other hand, it would be morally wrong for me to oppose a cost of living increase for anyone. I don't object to politicians being paid more than me. They don't have job security, they're subject to public scrutiny, and usually have to quit (or at least take unpaid leave from) their regular job just to run for office (with no guarantee of being elected.) But there needs to be some way to make their pay reflect the average citizen's situation.

So here's what I came up with.

Each politician's salary is the sum of the following numbers:

• the median individual income in the jurisdiction they represent
  
• the median individual income of all people represented by their level of government
  
• the median individual income of the poorest 20% in the jurisdiction they represent
  
• the median individual income of the poorest 20% represented by their level of government

(For the purposes of this post, "the jurisdiction they represent" means a ward at the municipal level and a riding at the provincial or federal level. "People represented by their level of government" means everyone in the city, province, or country at the municipal, provincial, and federal levels respectively.)

If the sum of these four numbers is not within a range that's commensurate with current salaries for that particular government, then the total is multiplied by a coefficient. The coefficient is whatever number will make the average salary under the new system equal to the average salary under the old system. The coefficient will then remain constant year to year.

The result of all this is that politicians would have an immediate personal investment in the fortunes of their own constituents and their level of government as a whole. The poorest 20% receive extra weight to make sure we don't create an incentive to make the very rich excessively richer (thus bringing up averages) while ignoring ordinary people. Similarly, we're using median instead of mean because of what we learned here, although I'd accept mean if there's a sound argument for it.

Possible issue: under this system, representatives of ridings with higher incomes would get more money.

Possible mitigating factor: maybe that will just mean that their income is commensurate with the cost of living in the riding, so it might all even out.

Another possible issue: "star" candidates who are parachuted in to ridings where they don't live because the parties think they can win will have more incentive to pick richer ridings.

Possible mitigating factors: 1. Might this already be happening anyway? 2. Would it actually affect the results that citizens get?

More things I learned from my elders

Certain social conventions become detrimental once you start losing your faculties. For example, some people, if they need something, drop hints or have tacit expectations. And some people, when asked if they need or want something, say "Oh, no, I'm fine" even if they do want it. In some cultures, this is even the etiquette. The offerer offers whether they mean it or not, and the recipient declines whether they want to or not. Then, if the offerer really means it, they offer again, and if the recipient really wants it they accept.

But this causes problems when you're an elder and you're being asked whether you need help with something. When your instinct is to decline, you might end up not getting the help you need. Or, conversely, if your caregivers are accustomed to your ways, you might end up getting excessively nagged about whether you need help with something, or even getting said "help" given to you against your will, with the thought that you must be just trying to be polite. I've also seen hint-droppers, losing their faculties, who have thought they dropped hints but didn't actually.

Another thing people often do as a social lubricant is smile and nod, and then go off and do whatever they want. This often works in regular life, but it can cause problems when you're not able to entirely fend for yourself. For example, an elder in my life, who is losing her faculties, is supposed to eat a certain food item every day for various medical reasons. Caregivers noticed that her stocks of this food weren't depleting. Is she forgetting to eat them? Does she think she's eaten it already but hasn't? Is she simply choosing not to because she doesn't like it? They can't tell. They can't find the right balance between respecting her right to choose to eat healthy or not and reminding her to do things she intends to but forgets, because they can't tell what she's really thinking.

As I blogged about before, it seems that elders reach a point where they become incapable of learning new things. This includes interpersonal skills. So what I need to work in is developing, and making habitual and instinctive, the ability to ask people very directly for what I want when I want or need things, even taking the initiative in doing this. And I also need to work on always telling the truth about the extent to which I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing, at least to doctors and stuff. Then hopefully it will be in my skill set when I need it.

Things They Should Invent: unhealthy foods must always be available in single servings

Building on my last food incentives post, I'm defining "unhealthy food" to mean food where the percentage daily value of saturated or trans fat, sodium, or cholesterol (and any other bad nutrients I'm forgetting) exceeds the percentage daily value of calories. For example, a food where a standard serving contains 10% of your daily calories but 20% of your daily sodium is considered unhealthy.

For foods that meet these criteria, we introduce two rules:

1. These foods must be available for purchase in single servings wherever they are sold, a single serving being whatever size is used to calculate the per-serving value in the nutrition information box. They can be available in larger quantities as well, but single servings must always be manufactured and sold. Retailers would not be allowed to sell a six-serving package without selling single-serving packages.

2. These foods cannot be subject to bulk discounts or lower unit prices for larger packages. The six-serving package must cost at least six times as much as six single-serving packages.

This will reduce the likelihood of having unhealthy food sitting around the house because of a single craving.

For example, I absolutely adore President's Choice 7 Cheese Lasagna. No other lasagna, including homemade efforts to duplicate it by people with excellent cooking skills, has been able to satisfy that particular craving. However, it's very high in fat and sodium, so I only allow myself to have it a couple of times a year. The problem is that the smallest package it comes in is six standard servings, and my tastebuds very much want to eat the whole thing in one sitting even though I know my body will regret it. I put half of it straight in the freezer as soon as it's made, but I still end up eating it within the next few days because I can see it every time I open the freezer. So because I bought something to fulfill a single craving, I end up eating six unhealthy meals within a week.

I'd imagine this sort of thing happens rather a lot to many people. You get something and eat a reasonable amount, but then you have leftovers, and you have to eat the leftovers before they go bad. If we could buy a single serving to satisfy a craving, then we'd only have one reasonably-sized unhealthy meal instead of a giant unhealthy meal or a week's worth of regular unhealthy meals.

At first glance this sounds like it would produce far more packaging to be thrown out, but that might not be true because many people would be buying just a single serving instead of a larger package. For example, the large lasagna has a cardboard box, a tray, and plastic wrap. The single-serving lasagna would have a smaller cardboard box, a smaller tray, and less plastic wrap. Because I'm buying by the craving, I'd be buying just one single-serving lasagna to replace the six-serving lasagna. I'm not buying six single-serving lasagnas.

An argument often heard against health-based food controls is that it takes away consumer choice. This one doesn't; this one increases consumer choice. Currently, we don't have the option of buying certain foods in small amounts. This would give us the option, and would in no way prevent people from buying more than one serving.

Quick, drop everything and watch the sleepy baby bunny!

Things They Should Study: how comprehensible are phone answering scripts?

I'd say about half the time I call a business or office where an actual human answers the phone, I don't understand what they say when they answer. They just rattle it off so quickly I can't catch the information I'm looking for.

And, conversely, it's quite possible I rattle off my own phone answering script so quickly that people can't understand it. I recently had a guy repeatedly call my work number wanting help with his phone card, and I couldn't seem to convince him that I couldn't help him and he had the wrong number. In retrospect, he probably didn't catch a word of my greeting and thought he was calling the phone card place.

I think this problem might be due in part to the fact that callers don't always know how the phone is going to be answered. I could answer my phone with "Hello?" or with my name or with "Translation" (and, because it's translation, I could answer in another language that the wrong number is totally unprepared for.) But conversely, because we answer the phone several times a day, we tend to rattle it off automatically, like how most people rattle off "ThanksHaveANiceDay" at the end of a cash register transaction.

Someone should research this

Theory: insecurity in one's own philosophy is the root of all evil

I blogged recently about how various patriarchal cultures are operating suboptimally essentially as a result of the patriarchs' insecurity in their own philosophy.

It occurs to me that many of the evils of the world are the result of powerful regimes being insecure in their own philosophies.

I was recently in a conversation with someone who felt the need to expound at length upon why communism is bad. But none of the examples they gave had anything to do with the actual social/political/economic practises that constitute actual communism. Instead they were on about stasi and gulags and propaganda - things that communist countries did because they were insecure in their philosophy. If they had trusted their philosophy, they wouldn't have needed all this stuff that they used to hurt people and ruin people's lives. And if they weren't pouring so many resources into assuaging their insecurity, they'd have had more to put into making their actual social and economic model work.

The evils that result from religion are similar. The problems happen when religions try to force themselves on people who aren't interested, start wars with other religion, and try to colonize countries and impose their values upon legislation. If they truly were secure in their dogma, they could just quietly go about life, letting the benefits of their religion speak for themselves. And if religions didn't go around trying to force themselves on others, there fewer people would perceive other religions as threats. Even I, as a recovering catholic, think I could appreciate the beauty and history of my former religion if it would stop trying to infringe upon my life as a private citizen.

Things They Should Invent: make healthy eating faster and cheaper

Why do people eat unhealthily? Because it's cheaper, because it's easier, and/or because of personal taste. We can't do anything about personal taste, but I have ideas for addressing the other two.

1. Make healthy convenience food cheap

Convenience food is generally considered a non-virtuous luxury, and is taxed accordingly. A pre-made salad is subject to sales tax, but a head of lettuce isn't.

But there's no good reason for this. It's an unquestioned residual protestant work ethic thing, which I'd counter with the economic stimulus argument. We shouldn't be focusing on whether people are jumping through all the hoops, we should be focusing on results. Really, if the goal is to get people to eat healthy, pre-made salads and other healthy convenience food should actually be subsidized. If no one ever has to think "That salad looks yummy, but I don't think I can justify spending $5 on just a salad.", and no one ever has to think "I'd really love a salad right now, but all the washing and chopping up is so much work!", then everyone who likes salad will eat salad.

2. Healthy-only supermarket check-out lines

All items in the grocery store that meet a certain threshold of healthiness get a green sticker, and a certain percentage of the check-out lines are for people who are only buying green-stickered food. If they want to be really hard-ass, they can make it so the healthy cash registers won't even ring in food without green stickers. So now, in addition to health and money factors, people impulse-purchasing potato chips have to ask themselves if it's worth the extra time waiting in line.

My theory, which is mine

I always advise fellow translators to use a more specific preposition than "regarding" (or synonyms thereof). I feel that "regarding" forces the reader to make some effort to figure out how the two elements are related to each other, and if you can use a more specific preposition, then the reader doesn't have to make this effort.

However, I have also begun to think that using no prepositions whatsoever, by piling the elements together as a noun phrase or something similar, might make it even more effortless for the reader. This obviously wouldn't work for non-Anglophones (at least not non-Anglophones coming from Romance languages), but I really do suspect noun phrases scan more effortlessly for Anglophones. Perhaps it's because it implies to the reader that they're closely familiar with the subject matter, giving them a sort of false reassurance.

Specific (fake) example:

"The problem regarding the umbrellas"
takes more effort to read than
"The problem with the umbrellas"
takes more effort to read than
"The umbrella problem"

Strictly speaking, they all provide the same amount of information. If someone is completely unfamiliar with whatever the problem with the umbrellas is, calling it "the umbrella problem" isn't going to help them. But if they already have the information they need to understand "the problem regarding the umbrellas", then "the problem with the umbrellas" or "the umbrella problem" will be more effortless to read and understand.

Is this consistent with your experience with the English language?

(Anonymous comments welcome, non-Anglophone comments welcome, but if English is not your first/primary language please tell me what is.)

Improving anti-peer-pressure education

Last week, I blogged about how my grandmother gave me strategies for tricking your friends into thinking you're drinking when you're not, which surprised me because in what world do your friends try to get you to drink when you don't want to? But then I realized that the anti-peer-pressure education I received assumed just that.

The anti-peer-pressure education I received talked about strategies for convincing our interlocutor of our no - making excuses or distracting them - as though simply politely declining wasn't an option. I now find myself wondering if this might have actually introduced the idea that it's normal to peer pressure people, whereas in real life, in the adult world, it isn't. So have an idea for modifying peer pressure education to address this.

On the first day or two, they go through the material normally, with their usual teacher. But the next day, there's a substitute teacher. Rather than being chosen from the supply teacher pool using whatever the normal method is, the sub is very carefully cast. She's young, probably just out of teacher's college. She's attractive and dressed trendily, and very much comes across as someone's cool older sister.

The sub gets the class started off on the anti-peer-pressure exercises from the textbook, then drifts off to the side of the classroom while the students are supposed to be doing their seatwork. She settles in comfortably near where the cool kids are sitting, casually leaning against a ledge or table and looking over the exercises they're working on. Then, in a conspiratorial tone that can be overheard by the entire classroom, she says to the cool kids "I can't believe this is in your curriculum! Do they seriously think you guys are pathetic enough to be obsessing over who is and isn't drinking that day?" It isn't a massive rant, it's more of a bitching session with the students, like you'd have with your classmates when given a particularly stupid assignment. She doesn't make any sort of point of telling the students that they shouldn't smoke or drink or whatever, she instead just quietly accepts it as something people do, the same way we handle it around adults. "I mean, yeah, if you're having a beer you offer your friend a beer. But why on earth do the people who wrote this book think you'd be pathetic enough to obsess over whether they take you up on the offer?"

This will introduce the idea that it isn't cool or adult to peer pressure people, and create motivation by presenting it as something that the boring grownups don't think the kids are cool or adult enough to understand.

How to buy better school performance with one simple tweak

I've read in a number of places that one approach to improving school performance is to offer money to schools who improve, or offer the most money to the schools who improve the most.

I'm not sure whether or not that approach would work, but here's a simple tweak to maximize its effectiveness: give some of that money to the students.

All students get some money. Students who pass get more money than students who fail. The highest-performing students get more money, but the most improved students also get more money. The highest-performing student in the school and the most-improved student in the school get exactly the same amount of money. Maybe the money baseline could increase with each grade, so that you'll never that less money than last year for getting exactly the same marks (i.e. if a D student pulls their average up to B in grade 10 and gets a shitload of money for improvement, we don't want them to get less money for maintaining a B in Grade 11.)

A school can only be successful if it elicits the desired behaviour in its students. School administrators and teachers already want the students to show the desired behaviour, if only because it makes life easier. If financial incentives are effective and appropriate (and I'm not sure whether or not they are), why not give at least part of them to the group that actually front-line produces the results being evaluated?

Wherein I dare attempt to improve upon Miss Manners

I realize it's insanely presumptuous for a socially awkward dork like me to even think about improving on Miss Manners, but I think I have something that could be useful here.

Dear Miss Manners:

A client came in for tax season! We only see each other once a year. Anyway, in she came for her appointment; I came from around the corner in the office, saw her sitting/waiting, and greeted her with, "Oh! When are you due?" She looks about five to six months pregnant, but ISN'T!!!

We proceeded to discuss drinking enough water, medications, doctor visits, blood tests, etc. But the fact of the matter is she isn't pregnant.

How do I apologize for assuming? Should I apologize?

Something that might work to add as an element of the apology: "I'm so sorry! A co-worker of mine was pregnant recently, and she kept wearing a shirt exactly like that one during the stage where she didn't quite want to wear maternity clothes yet - she's such a tiny little thing that she could wear clothes in proper grown women's sizes until practically the end of the second trimester - anyway, she was wearing a shirt like that about three times a week and we were all speculating on whether she's pregnant but no one wanted to be the one to ask, and when I saw that shirt I just free-associated! In any case, you wear it far better!"

Analogy for childcare decisions

I've noticed an awful lot of people like to make sweeping declarative statements about which childcare choices are good or bad. But one thing I've noticed from watching my peers who become parents is that, in addition to the dictates of circumstance, so much depends on the personalities of the people involved. Some kids are ecstatic about going to daycare. Some (like me when I was little) would absolutely wither if forced to spend their days in a large group. Some parents find it fascinating to watch their kids every single moment of the day. Some find it outright dull, and do better once the kids are old enough to have an actual conversation.

So here's a series of analogies:

Is it a good idea to go to grad school?
Is it a good idea drink milk?
Is it a good idea to live with roommates?
Is it a good idea to retire at 65?

The answer to all of these questions is "It depends." It depends on your personality, and the personalities of the other parties involved. It depends on your financial and career situation. It depends on your state of health. It depends on your personal values. It depends on the current economic context.

The same goes for childcare decisions. And it really disturbs me that so many people who think their choice is right for everyone are going around having kids.

Things They Should Study: the origin of the neener cadence

Picture a small child taunting his friend, tongue sticking out, thumbs to temples, fingers waving, saying "Neener neener neee-ner!" or "Nanny nanny boo boo!"

You know the exact cadence with which he's neenering, don't you? It's close to the tune of Ring Around the Rosie.

Why does everyone neener with the exact same cadence?

Someone needs to find out where this came from and why it's so universal.

My subconscious does mashups

Last night, I somehow ended up watching a bunch of Springsteen videos on youtube. Then I had dream based on the Dancing in the Dark video, where an oddly attractive young Bruce Springsteen pulls a girl (who the internet swears is Courtney Cox) out from the audience to dance with him on stage. But in my dream, they started doing Billy Elliot-style dancing (like starting at 1:30 here) in perfect unison while singing Born to Run.

I think I'd actually pay good money to see that.

(Unfortunately, that was followed by a dream where I had to stay at in university residence to do on-site training and my room was infested with scorpions, so I woke up edgy despite such entertaining dreams.)

"Forced'?

Human Resources Minister Diane Finley has accused the Liberals of wanting to revive a national child-care program so that parents don’t have to raise their own children.

“It’s the Liberals who wanted to ensure that parents are forced to have other people raise their children. We do not believe in that,” Finley said in the Commons Thursday, the same day that Liberals were promising to revive the national program scrapped by the Conservatives five years ago this week.

This has been all over the blogosphere already, but I haven't seen anyone focusing on what I think is the key word in Minister Finley's statement: forced.

When a government program is available, people can make use of it or not make use of it as they choose. They are by no means required to make use of it, and certainly aren't expected to modify their life choices to make use of it! For example, the Employment Insurance system provides maternity and parental leave benefits of 55% of your average insured earnings up to a maximum of $468 per week. People with new babies can apply for this program, or they can just not apply. However, the existence of this program does not in any way mean we are forced to have babies.

The fact that a government minister landed on the word "forced" in reference to the hypothetical availability of a program makes me inclined to take a step back and look at the other programs this government is providing. What are they trying to force us to do?

But aside from this, you know what is actually, in real life, forcing parents to return to the workforce and send their kids to childcare? Labour conditions! As I've blogged about before, if I had a child, staying home with the kid wouldn't be an option, because I'm the one whose job provides dental benefits. I would be forced to go back to work as soon as parental leave runs out because the current economic context doesn't make it possible for my partner to have a job with benefits.

Even if both partners have jobs with benefits, it still isn't necessarily safe to just leave one's job. I blogged before about my grandmother's co-workers, who voted not to have a pension because their spouses had pensions. Doesn't that sound ideal? A world in which your spouse's pension is enough to support both of you in retirement, so you don't have to worry about accumulating pensionability and can work or not depending on what best meets your family's needs? Well, it turns out many of those spouses worked for Stelco. And this is what happened to their pensions. In a context like this, it would be outright irresponsible to walk away from an opportunity to accumulate pensionability - or even to accumulate CPP eligibility! Even if one pension looks perfectly good now, who knows what will happen in the future? We will spend far more time being seniors than children spend being children, so we can't just put our ability to support ourselves in the last couple of decades of our lives at risk.

Of course, if improving employment conditions is beyond the scope of the government's influence, they could also reduce the likelihood that new parents will be forced to return to work earlier than they'd like by improving the social safety net. My issue of being the only one with dental insurance would be moot if OHIP covered dental care. Concerns about maintaining one's pensionability would be lessened if the CPP provided more than an absolute maximum of $960 a month. If OHIP covered everything we might conceivably need in terms of elder care, we wouldn't have to worry so much about being able to support ourselves in the last decades of our lives.

If this government is really concerned about new parents being forced to return to work sooner than they'd prefer, they need to create a combination of labour conditions and social safety net that makes it possible to stay home, in terms of both meeting the family's immediate needs and long-term consequences.

And, in the meantime, we need to start thinking about what would lead a government minister to conclude that the existence of a program forces Canadians to change their life choices.

Do elders lose their social skills, or just have fewer to start with?

A recent study suggested that elders have more trouble identifying social gaffes than younger people do.

What I'm wondering: does this mean elders lose the ability to identify socially inappropriate behaviour, or does this mean they had lower standards of socially inappropriate behaviour to start with?

The article suggests that the scientists think they are losing their ability, but I don't see anything in the experiment (at least not as described in the article) to rule out the possibility that they never had it in the first place.

This brought to mind a conversation I once had with my grandmother. She told me that if I go out to a bar with friends, I should always order vodka and water. That way, when I've had enough to drink and my friends are trying to get me to drink more, I can quietly ask the bartender to fill mine up with just water, so my friends won't know that difference. All of which raises the question: in what world do your friends try to make you drink more when you've had enough, to the extent that you have to trick them into thinking you're drinking???

Obviously this isn't enough of a basis to draw actual conclusions, but it does occur to me that people who think it's absolutely routine and unremarkable for your friends to pressure you into drinking more than you feel you can handle might never have had sufficiently high standards of socially appropriate behaviour.

Snow day Scrooges

Just over a month ago, many people were complaining that the True Spirit of Christmas has been lost in a sea of rampant commercialism.

Yesterday, many people were complaining that kids got a snow day even though the weather ended up not being as bad as originally forecast.

It surprised me the extent to which the two groups overlapped, because you know what a snow day actually is? The embodiment of the True Spirit of Christmas!

A snow day is a gift from the heavens and an answer to everyone's prayers. It's a day spent with one's family, enjoying the simple things in life like a nice sleep-in, building a snowman, and drinking hot chocolate, and respecting and appreciating the power and beauty of Mother Nature. Warring siblings develop temporary truces, knowing they're stuck together and wanting to get the most out of this rare opportunity. And happy memories are made that will last a lifetime.

These are the kinds of things many people in our society claim to value, and most parents claim to want their children to value. They're used to sell us trucks and Tim Hortons and political platforms, and they're what people have in mind when decrying the commercialism of life. So why throw it all away just because it might slow down the wheels of commerce a wee bit for one day?

What if non-specialist teachers taught all mandatory courses?

My high school history teacher passed away recently. I think he was a good teacher, so while trying to think of something to write in his obit's guestbook I was trying to think of why I think he's a good teacher. And what I came up with is he got the material into my head. History was neither my favourite nor my least favourite subject. I don't have any particular passion for it, and I only took the required course. But this teacher easily and painlessly got me to a mindset where, even 15 years later, the material that is relevant to whatever I'm doing or thinking about is there in my head. When we were talking about a coalition government last year, I could name-check King-Byng and modify a well-known historical quote to come up with coalition if necessary but not necessarily coalition. I knew enough about the Upper Canada Revolution that I groked and could banter with @RebelMayor. I know what the Boer War was and how Canada got caught up in it. I know why we have Catholic schools, and I know why so many of my co-workers are ex-Catholic. I can name-check all the major characters and plot points from both world wars. I know what a Bennett buggy is and what the On-to-Ottawa Trek was. I don't know everything about everything, but I have a solid grounding and know where I need to do more research. While this teacher must have had a passion for history, it didn't permeate his work - which was a good thing! In his classroom, we could simply learn the material without being expected to pour our whole heart and soul into it, and it stuck.

In comparison, my Grade 12 English teacher had a passion for literature, and that made me detest the subject matter. He loved comparing and analyzing and dissecting, and I simply don't care that much any more once the story is over. Even the few glimmers of interest that arose naturally were promptly extinguished, smothered by his constant demand. I found a Shakespearian sonnet that spoke to me, and got marked down in my analysis of it for not drawing religious parallels. I memorized and understood Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy, and lost marks for not being able to write it out with the exact same punctuation. I thought Newspeak was kind of cool and was in a headspace where I could have made a rudimentary attempt at drawing parallels with the language choices of current politicians, but we had to have a fricking debate about it in front of the whole class! Overall, we studied about half a dozen major works from generally-accepted Western literary cannon (plus poetry and ISU), learned the whole hubris-hamartia-downfall thing, and I found a few things that piqued my interest. That should have been enough for a required course, but this teacher put me right off with assignments that simply didn't work out unless you had the level of passion for the subject matter that he had and I didn't.

I've had this happen in other subject areas too. Teachers who are passionate about subjects I'm indifferent about smother any sparks of interest I might have developed, whereas teachers who are more blasé make subjects I wouldn't normally care about seem more approachable without hindering any existing interest.

So, to address this, what if all required courses in school were taught by non-specialist teachers? They didn't study the subjects in university, they don't have any particular passion for them, but they learned them in high school just like everyone else and now have to refamiliarize themselves in order to teach them. So they understand what it's like to struggle with the subject matter or to have to figure it out despite a lack of enthusiasm, and can get the basics into everyone's brains. Students who then find the subject particularly interesting can go on to study it in elective courses taught by specialist teachers who also have a passion for the subject matter, while students who don't particularly care can absorb the basics without having the subject ruined by a teacher's enthusiasm for fussy and finicky aspects of the subject matter.

My subconscious is smarter than me

In the dream I was having just before I woke up, I needed to exchange cell phone numbers with a strange man. I didn't like him, he didn't like me, but we would be needing to make some logistical arrangements later. So he reads off his cell number for me: "Four one six, five nine four, **mumble mumble mumble mumble**"

"I'm sorry," I reply, "I didn't catch those last four numbers."

With facial expressions, body language, and intonation that all suggest he is reading off the numbers slowly and clearly, he once again mutters something unintelligible.

I'm feeling kind of embarrassed now, but we do have to get this done, so I say "I'm sorry, I still didn't catch that. I don't know what's wrong with me. Maybe if you just type it into my phone yourself..."

"Oh, don't worry," he says "I was just testing to make sure you aren't a spy."

It turns out he thought I might be a spy from the country that he perceived to be his country's enemy, so he was casually reading off the numbers in the mother tongue of the country he thought I might be spying for to see if I understood.

That's brilliant! It wasn't his own mother tongue, it was the mother tongue of the enemy country. So someone from that country might have effortlessly understood the numbers and typed them in without even realizing it. I never would have thought of that! I might have thought of using my own mother tongue, but I never would have come up with using the enemy country's mother tongue.

Except that I did think of that. In my subconscious, because this was a dream I had! Spooky!

Talking to your doctor

I've blogged before about how I question the conventional wisdom that we need user fees and such for medical services because people are apparently going to the doctor for foolish things.

But then I see things like this:

The new study shows, however, that there are significant gaps in preventive care.

Only two in five people over the age of 45 reported having talked to a health professional about what they could do to improve their health or prevent illness (measures like quitting smoking, increasing exercise or limiting alcohol consumption).

Why on earth would I need to talk to my doctor about that? I already know I shouldn't smoke, should exercise more, and should probably drink less.

As I also think I've mentioned before, I've been watching my sodium intake after noticing that my body reacts negatively when I eat too much high-sodium foods. When I've mentioned this IRL, people of older generations have asked me "Did your doctor tell you to cut back on the sodium?" No, I figured it out myself. Why would I need a doctor to tell me a readily observable correlation?

Even last time I had a bad cold (lasted the better part of a week, took a day and a half off work), elders asked me if I'd been to a doctor. Why would I go to a doctor when a good night's sleep and drinking plenty of juice is slowly but surely doing the job?

Do people who are older than me have less medical self-knowledge or something? Shouldn't they have more, what with all their life experience and growing up in an era where they had to pay to go to the doctor?

If my own observations here do end up being indicative of a larger pattern, maybe medical costs will drop and our health system will become more sustainable in the long term, as the percentage of the population able to work out their own preventive and self-care increases.

Miscellany

1. In the news: they might change the law to make it easier to perform a citizen's arrest. Missing from all the coverage I've seen: how do you do a citizen's arrest anyway? I haven't the slightest idea, but all the coverage seems to be assuming that you already know how.

2. Via Slap:

The United States effected new regulations on Tuesday that finally allow gay people to have the hospital visitation rights as straight partners.

Until Tuesday, hospitals participating in the Medicare and Medicade federal programs were free to deny hospital visitation rights to gay couples because they weren’t considered family members. With the new regulations, patients are allowed to designate whomever they choose as visitors.

But this raises a big question that I haven't seen anyone mention among all the gaiety: why weren't patients allowed to choose their own visitors in the first place??? What if you want to see your best friend? What if you don't want to be alone with your abusive spouse who put you in the hospital in the first place? What if your personal hero unexpectedly drops by? How on earth could people smart enough to become medical professionals and experienced enough to rise to a level where they make policy ever think such a blind blanket policy is appropriate?

3. Apparently some kids have been throwing things and yelling homophobic slurs at people in the gaybourhood. The first thought that enters my mind: they should be banishèd. In the Shakespearean sense. If they're going to bring that particular flavour of immature closed-mindedness to the places where everyone goes to make it Get Better, they should be forced to get out of our space and go live out their adolescence in a more closed-minded place.

Of course, that isn't an appropriate reaction on my part. I'm an adult and they're not, so it's my duty to be able to understand why they're acting this way and craft an effective and compassionate response that enables them to continue enjoying the same gaybourhood privileges as everyone else while convincing them to stop ruining it for others. Two of my core values are in there: noblesse oblige by the party with more agency towards the party with less agency, and working towards making it possible for everyone to enjoy what privileges I enjoy.

But I can't do it. My brain won't bend that way. I understand intellectually that it should, but it doesn't. And the reason why my brain won't bend that way is it's still recovering from the damage inflicted by my own bullies. And so the cycle continues...

Is Web 2.0 making information less accessible?

I recently learned that an excerpt from an upcoming book I'm looking forward to is only available through an iphone app. Despite the fact that it's promotional material trying to make me want to buy the book, it isn't on the internet anywhere. And because it's specifically an iphone app, people who don't have an iphone, ipad, or ipod touch can't get it at all. (I tried installing the app on my ipod touch, but it turns out the preview is available only the US, which is a whole nother rant.)

When Eddie Izzard first started his last US tour in 2008, I could do a google blog search the day after each show and find multiple reviews of each gig, or at least what he was wearing and which wikipedia entry he looked up. By the time he got to Canada in 2010, internet trends had moved away from blogs more towards Facebook and Twitter, so you couldn't necessarily find comments on any given show. They were all buried in people's Facebook walls, ungoogleable to the outside world. Not the most important thing in the world, obviously, but it was information I was looking for and could no longer find.

Blogger blogs, like mine, are very googleable. As a result, I get a lot of hits from people googling about things like the difference between La Senza and Victoria's Secret bras or how I connected my computer to my monitor. These things are helpful to people, and they wouldn't be able to find them and benefit from what I've learned if I'd posted my discoveries on a Facebook wall or Twitter feed instead.

One of the most egregious misuses of Facebook is promotional pages (either commercial or activism) that require you to join or "like" them (or whatever they're calling it now) to access the content. Apart from its inherent ridiculousness (if you don't let me see the information about why your group is of interest to me, I'm never going to join it), it renders information completely inaccessible (and ungoogleable) to casual passers-by, especially as more and more organizations move towards Facebook as their primary/only web presence. On top of that, my employer (and a number of others, I understand) blocks access to Facebook from office computers. So if I'm translating about an organization and I need information about them, I can't get at it.

I totally understand why you might want to keep your online presence limited to a select group of people, but I'm worried that as more user-created information is put on friends-locked walls or in ungoogleable apps, we might be not only losing access to existing information, but losing the ability to determine what information exists. Even though Google can't access all existing information, it can almost always confirm that the information exists somewhere I just can't get at straight through the internet. For example, the existence of academic papers has been googleable every time I've looked, even if I have to go through a library to get them. What if we lose this ability?

Kudos to Sesame Street!

Kudos to Sesame Street for a completely non-triggering depiction of a spider! The video is here (not embedding in case there are people who trigger more easily than I do), showing Jim Parsons teaching the audience the meaning of the word "arachnid" with the assistance of a blue muppet spider.

I don't know if this is by design or just a happy coincidence, but nearly everything that triggers visceral fear has been eliminated. It doesn't descend from the ceiling, it walks on from the side. And it doesn't walk on with its eight legs (thus creating that terrifying motion), it enters nondescriptly on invisible legs as most muppets do, with the exact same movement you'd find on Grover or Kermit. It has two eyes and a toothless mouth arranged on as human a face as you'll ever find on a muppet. It's blue. If it weren't for the eight (motionless) legs on its back, it could be a ladybug. Or a hunchbacked anything muppet. I had a brief demi-second of squick when Jim Parsons touched it (because EWW! He TOUCHED IT!). But then the blue guy said "You kind of freak me out" and that made me laugh and the squick was gone. It was far better executed than I'd have thought anything involving an arachnid could possibly be.

There is a parenting theory wherein, to prevent children from developing a fear of creepy crawlies, you talk to them about how good and interesting they are and try not to show any fear yourself. During the brief time between when my parents started doing this and when I had my first phobia incident (story is #3 here), it seemed kind of phony and artificial, as though they knew something and weren't telling me. But Sesame Street actually achieves this, by doing something that's completely natural within the Sesame Street universe and portrays the spider as harmless and friendly (and this despite the fact that Jim's first reaction is to scream), without using any imagery or elements that would trigger a congenital phobia like mine.

As an easily-triggered arachnophobic, I appreciate how incredibly difficult a balance this is and I wouldn't have thought it possible to do well, so kudos to Sesame Street for pulling it off!

(Props to @BroadwayProfe for knowing me well enough to know I'd appreciate this despite the subject matter, and for presenting it carefully enough that I could make an informed decision to watch and take precautions to avoid triggering.)

Patriarchy: ur doin it wrong

This train of thought started with something I heard years ago about people living under the Taliban in Afghanistan. Apparently women weren't allowed to leave the house unaccompanied by a male relative. My first thought is this has to be inconvenient for the men too, because the women can't even go to the market or do errands without a chaperone. This didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. If I had a spouse whom I saw as subservient to me, I'd totally be making them do all the errands!

Then, several years after I learned this, I was watching Big Love. Nikki (the most fundamentalist of the wives) thinks its inappropriate for her sister-wives to have jobs, on the basis that they should be taking care of the family. But that would leave Bill (the husband) with at least 10 (maybe more, depending on the season) mouths to feed single-handedly. And he's an entrepreneur! Surely it's of value for at least one of the wives to keep herself employable (as Barb, the first wife, does, being a substitute teacher) in case the business fails!

Then I saw this article on an evangelical movement where daughters are expected to stay in their parents' home until marriage and basically serve as additional homemakers rather than going to school or having a job. But how many homemakers do you need? I know that in my own family, if I thought I should be living with and serving my parents, I would be far more useful to them by bringing home my salary than by additional homemaking. Even if they had put me through university, they would have recouped their investment quickly.

They wouldn't have to completely subvert their dogma to make these changes either. The husband/father could still retain his role as head of household and decide who will work in the home and who will work outside the home, dictate or veto specific career paths, etc. It's like the men who created these patriarchies are really excessively disproportionately insecure in their dogma and their own place within that dogma. It surprises me these cultures can continue to exist for so long despite this insecurity - and it surprises me that this insecurity persists despite the longevity of the cultures.

Things They Should Invent: client-directed bank account flags

Being childfree with poor people skills and centenarian ancestors, I'm operating the assumption that I won't have anyone to help me in the last couple of decades of my life. So I've been watching how my parents are helping my grandmothers, and trying to figure out how I will do those things independently in my old age, even if I'm losing my faculties at the time.

One of the things my parents help my grandparents with is managing their money, so I've been thinking about how I could make my money manage itself as I deteriorate mentally. It would be easy enough to set up automatic deposits and payments, ensuring that I don't have to remember to pay bills and don't get myself evicted through my own forgetfulness. But how can I keep myself from spending too much money?

Currently, I don't use a tight budget where I'm only allowed to spend $X on clothes and $Y on food etc. My system is I'm allowed to spend money on whatever I want, but the balance of my primary account has to stay within a certain range. If it goes below the bottom threshold, I have to stop spending on everything but food and immediate necessities (and budget carefully on those) until it goes back up into the acceptable range. This system works well for me.

What I'd like to be able to set up to duplicate this when I'm older is have the bank's computer alert me when my account balance goes below the bottom threshold. Using today's technology as a general example, it could be a smartphone app. You get an alert when your balance gets too low, and maybe a little red light glows on your phone to remind you. If you're spending money uncharacteristically, something could pop up pointing out why this is uncharacteristic and asking if you're sure. (For example, if you're grocery shopping today even though you did a full grocery shop yesterday, this system would catch it.)

This would all be completely optional, of course. The nature and thresholds of the alerts would be entirely of each person's own choosing (and maybe they could have some presets for people who are already unable to make sensible choices for themselves.) The responses to crossing the threshold could also be customized: maybe it just alerts you, maybe it prevents you from spending that money for 24 hours, maybe it alerts your caregiver, maybe it makes you talk to a bank representative.

Beyond the problem of people who are losing their faculties, this could also be useful for people who have trouble with financial self-discipline. For some people, a little glowing light reminding them that they're running low might be enough to stop them from making that impulse purchase.

On Money for Nothing

1. I have never knowingly heard Dire Straits played on the radio in my life.

2. The version of Money for Nothing I have (origin unknown - acquired in university, back when it was briefly trendy for people to host internal FTP servers to share all their music and movies with everyone else in res) doesn't contain the offending verse, so I didn't know until just a day or two ago that this song even contained a slur.

3. I have no objection to not censoring individual words or not censoring songs based on individuals words. However, if they are going to censor based on individual words, I think slurs should be censored. I'm far more offended by slurs than by the word "fuck". I was shocked that the radio edit of Cee-Lo's Fuck You still contained the N word. Yes, I'm aware of the cultural conventions surrounding use of that word, but they changed the lyrics to circumlocute a word I use all the time while keeping a word I would never use. That doesn't seem right.

4. I've had this fricking song on my head for like 3 days straight! Get it out!!!

Some responses to the Toronto Star Public Editor survey

I've been doing the Toronto Star Public Editor survey, and for a couple of questions my answers go far beyond the scope of the yes/no provided.

10. In preparation for the G20 summit in Toronto, the Star produces a series of profiles and “Portraits of Leaders.” Do you publish this photo of U.S. President Barack Obama taken in 1980 when he was a college student in Los Angeles?

The issue is not this one photo itself, the issue is the broader context of the series as a whole. All the other photos in the series are recent, if not current. They were all taken at times when the subjects either were or could reasonably predict that they might soon be leaders of countries. It's not fair to pick on only one of the subjects by publishing a picture of him being goofy 30 years ago. Either use current photos for all, or old photos for all, or at the very least old photos for a reasonable selection.

12. A judge releases graphic photos shown in open court of convicted “sadosexual serial killer” Russell Williams. Do you publish this disturbing photo on Page 1 alongside a photo of Williams in full military uniform?

If you didn't want to click on the "graphic photos" link, it's a photo of Williams wearing lingerie belonging to one of his victims.

It's very easy to reduce this question to "Is a picture of a hairy man in pink panties suitable for a family newspaper?" But that's missing the point. The point is that Williams is a murderer.

A picture of a hairy main in pink panties is shocking, memorable, and distracting. And so, our first thought when we hear the name Russell Williams is of a hairy main in pink panties. But being a hairy man in pink panties is a far lesser sin than murder (and, frankly, if he'd man up and buy his own panties it wouldn't be a sin at all!) So this results in Williams being thought of general public sentiment as something far better than he actually is.

Another factor sometimes mentioned in deciding whether to print this picture is the "Mommy, what's that?" factor. In other words, it's really awkward for parents to have to explain to their kids what that man's doing wearing pink panties. There are arguments for and against using this when deciding whether something is appropriate for a newspaper, but, regardless, we have to think not just of the kid's question but of the parent's answer. In this particular case, it would be very very easy for a parent caught off-guard to answer "He's a bad man." And he is a bad man. That's why he's in the newspaper. In fact, the picture of him wearing the pink panties is a picture of him in the process of being a bad man - not because he's wearing panties, but because he's wearing someone else's panties without her permission. Even grown adults who are unfamiliar with the circumstances under which a man might harmlessly wear panties and repulsed by the idea of a man wearing panties are also likely to come away with the impression that panty-wearing = bad man. A causal relationship rather than a single instance of correlation.

So not only does this picture give an initial, shocking, and memorable impression that Williams is a mere panty-wearer as opposed to a murderer, it also helps promote or reinforce the idea that panty-wearing is a sign, cause, or symptom of being a bad man. It makes Williams look less bad while making innocent panty-wearing men look more bad.

This story received quite a lot of column-inches (if I remember correctly, it had a full double-page inside spread on more than one day), so I wouldn't necessarily object to them printing this picture, alongside others, on an inside page. However, out of respect for the seriousness of murder, it doesn't belong on the front page above the fold catching the eye of everyone who walks past a newsstand. They need to give people a chance to think "OMG, murder!" before they get distracted by the things like whether he went to the trouble of tucking or just has a very small penis.

Things They Should Invent: political system wherein you only have to express your opinion once for it to count

This post was inspired by this development.

A lot of activism is repeating the same message over and over and over again. You have to sign petitions and write letters to the editor and attend rallies and contact your elected representatives and repeat the same thing over and over and over.

That's inefficient. We need a system where you express your opinion once to the pertinent people, and that's sufficient. And expressing your opinion more than once gains no further reward, and perhaps even annoys people and/or is detrimental to the credibility of your cause.

Case in point: I wrote a cogent and persuasive email to the appropriate elected representatives about the importance of Transit City to me personally and to our city as a whole. But now there are people convinced that I don't really care about Transit City because I didn't attend this one rally that I didn't know was a rally, or because I sent an email instead of making phone calls, or because I didn't skip work and attend some city meeting. And meanwhile I've been spending the past month thinking constantly about what I can do to convince the powers that be that Transit City is important.

Wouldn't the world be a better place if that one email was literally all I could do, and the powers that be would give it precisely my share of all due consideration no matter how much noise the other people make? Then my attendance at the rally would be redundant (maybe we wouldn't need to go to all the trouble to have rallies at all!) and I could have spent the past month putting my thoughts and energy into a wide range of other things, all of which could also be knocked off with a single well-composed email. Politicos' offices would run more smoothly, people would feel more engaged in the political process, people could inform themselves about and commit effort to a wider range of issues, and the world would be a better, more informed, less stressful place.

Things I learn from my elders

One of the elders in my life is losing her faculties, and one of the consequences is that she literally cannot learn new skills. Existing skills are still more or less present, but acquiring new skills has become basically impossible.

This struck me, because all the time I've known her she's always had the attitude that she's too old to learn anything new. And now she actually is. Food for thought for if I ever find myself falling into those thought patterns.

I keep thinking of solutions to the problems of aging that would require a computer and/or the internet. It would provide entertainment and socializing, automated reminders could be set up to compensate for lapsing memory, it would make it possible to read (by enlarging text size) as eyesight fails - some days it sounds like panacea! But we can't use them because she never became comfortable with using a computer and never learned to use the internet. And now she literally cannot learn.

I'd strongly recommend to anyone who has an elder in their life who isn't on the internet to get them there now, so they will have internalized the skills already by the time they actually need them the most.

Why are mail carriers responsible for finding and training their own replacements?

When the Canada Post carrier in one neighbourhood in Drumheller, Alta., went on vacation a week or so before Christmas, so did the mail.

That's meant for many residents there have been no bills, no cheques, no Christmas presents or even deliveries of medication for as long as three weeks.

Teresa Williams of Canada Post says it's the carrier's responsibility to find and train a replacement, but that didn't happen in this case.

WTF is the logic in that?

Everywhere I've ever worked, the employer has been ultimately responsible for replacing people who are out sick or on vacation by having an existing employee fill in. And I've never worked anywhere nearly as large as Canada Post! Why aren't they equipped to do this?

Apart from the fact that this is unfair to the employees, it's unacceptable as a public service! Canada Post is a large organization - their organization says they have 60,000 employees. Surely we, as customers and citizens, should enjoy the benefits of having our postal services provided by a large organization. And one of the benefits of a large organization is that they have a lot of people working for them, and are equipped to recruit and train more people. If one person is away, there are other trained and qualified people to fill in. If there aren't enough people, they can hire and train more. When real life affects the employees like real life does, the customers don't feel the difference. Not only are there replacements available, but they are already trained in the job and familiar with the organization's standards and requirements, rather than just being whomever the absent worker could muster up from their personal circle at the last minute.

Even the cheapest, most lowbrow companies you can think of make management or corporate responsible for recruiting and training and replacing employees who are absent. Fast food restaurants do it. Discount retailers do it. Why won't Canada Post give Canadians this most basic aspect of customer service that comes with being a large organization?

Things They Should Invent: link the gambling self-exclusion list to credit and debit cards

A Toronto Star article on how the OLG self-exclusion list isn't working includes the story of how a guy on the self-exclusion list still manages to get Visa cash advances at a casino.

Solution: when people join the self-exclusion list, they can provide their credit and debit card numbers, and the casinos can set up something so that those numbers get flagged in the system. Maybe they could even make it so the computer simply will not permit cashiers or ATMs to dispense money to those cards on casino property.

The obvious argument against this is privacy, but the exclusion list is already voluntary, so they could easily make this part voluntary too. And maybe they could even come up with a way to do it without informing the banks and credit card companies so as not to hurt people's credit scores any more than they're already being hurt by the financial fall-out of problem gambling.

Things They Should Invent: all public meetings must be justified or obsoleted

I received an email inviting me to a community meeting regarding a political issue I'm interested in. Unfortunately, it didn't say anything about why there was a community meeting. Is there new information that they can't post on the internet for some reason? Are they trying to physically carry out a specific action? They didn't say. They got my email (and, I assume, everyone else's that they copied on this) in the first place through a piece of slacktivism, so why would they think I'd put on make-up and pants and go somewhere at a set time without some hint of why this needs to be in person?

I also saw a tweet recently by someone who was attending a public meeting, and said that they wished more people could be there so they could find out all this information. But why should you have to be there to find out the information? Why can't they just post it on the internet?

It isn't always necessary for people to be in a specific place at a specific time for consultation or information dissemination or activism to happen. Often an email or a website will do the job. Instead of constantly holding public meetings, they should think critically about how much of this can be achieved online. And, conversely, if they do in fact need people to be present in person, they need to specify why.

Things They Should Invent: leave elevator doors open when parked

I'm sure you've had this happen at some point in your life: you press the elevator call button and an elevator opens right away. It was already waiting there on your floor.

So why were the doors closed?

The way elevators seem to work is they take everyone to their desired floor then either stop where they are or return to lobby level depending on the building. Then they close their doors, and you have to press the call button to open them again.

That takes up some energy, doesn't it? It takes some energy to close the elevator doors, it takes some energy to work the call button, and it takes some energy to open the elevator doors again. Not much, but some.

In the building where I work, I often see people getting out of an elevator as I approach the elevator lobby, but I can't make it there before the doors close. So I go back and press the call button, and then the same elevator opens again. Not only did it waste energy by closing, calling, and re-opening, but I had to rush past the call button in my attempt to make the elevator, then go back to the call button to make the doors open again. This is practically effortless for me, but it would be rather difficult and frustrating for people who are elderly and/or have reduced mobility, for whom crossing the elevator lobby takes a non-negligible amount of time and who might not be spry enough to make it from the call button back to the elevator doors before the doors close.

Why not make it easier for everyone and save a small amount of energy by leaving the doors open?

Did Don Cherry and the Canadian Forces put all Canadians at risk?

One of the benefits of having a military is that it makes it possible to be a civilian. The people with the uniforms and ranks and guns are the designated combatants in our society, which gives the rest of us the privilege of being designated non-combatants. In any system of prioritization or strategy, this makes us a lesser risk and threat and a less valuable target than combatants, because the enemy has no reason to believe that we as individuals will cause harm to them. Of course if they just want to kill people they're going to kill whoever's easiest to kill, but if they're thinking about efficiency or strategy they'll prioritize the people with the uniforms and weapons first, because the combatants are the ones with the training and equipment and mandate to shoot at the enemy. The rest of us are just walking around living life.

Don Cherry is a civilian. He is also 76 years old, a television personality, and a flamboyant dresser. All of these characteristics would normally mark him as a non-combatant. However, the moment he fired an actual weapon at actual people, he became a combatant. Which means that it is now completely logical for the enemy to conclude that any civilian who appears to be at least as combat-ready as Don Cherry is now a combatant.

Shawn Micallef tweeted that if Don Cherry gets to shoot a weapon, so should Anne Murray or Joni Mitchell. But it would actually be completely logical at this point for the enemy to assume that any visiting celebrities will shoot at them. Apparently it's part of the tour now! Realistically, if some of your compatriots had just been shot at by Don Cherry, why wouldn't you assume that Rick Mercer or Feist would shoot at you? And why not the other civilians on the base, like journalists and Tim Hortons employees and medical personnel? This one act of foolishness has made all civilians viable defensive targets.

On top of all this, think about how Canada got into Afghanistan in the first place. Because people who were from Afghanistan or supported by other people who were from or in Afghanistan attacked the US (i.e. one of our allies). It wasn't Afghanistan itself, it was rogue civilians affiliated or associated with or located in Afghanistan. And on this basis, our military has been occupying their country for 10 years. Our rogue civilian was clearly aided and abetted by the Government of Canada and the Canadian Forces. He was given permission to fire this weapon by military officials. The Minister of Defence was present. And, once back in Canada, he returned to his job with a Crown corporation. It really looks to me like Afghanistan, or the Taliban, or any allies thereof, could use this incident to justify any military attack on or occupation of Canada on the exact same basis that justifies our presence there.

Excellent customer service from Future Shop

I thought there was a technical problem with my video adapter (that might not have been true, but that's another blog post for after I've confirmed that my fix worked), so I took it back to Future Shop in the hope of exchanging it. I had the packaging and the receipt, but it had been opened and used. Fortunately, they allowed a quick, easy, no-fuss exchange. No interrogation, no collecting personal information, in and out in just a couple of minutes.

Second problem: when getting a replacement off the shelf, I accidentally grabbed the wrong item - I grabbed the thing next to what I needed, which looked similar but was completely useless. So I went back to the store and the same lady who'd helped me before let me swap it for the one I actually needed, again with no trouble whatsoever.

I appreciate the quick and easy exchange in the first place, but I also really appreciate them allowing the second exchange even though it was due entirely to my own stupidity. The second time I was walking around the store in the compromising position of having a packaged product in my purse with a receipt that didn't match it, and I didn't get any trouble for it whatsoever. It would have been within reasonable store policy to not take it back because it was opened and used, or to not let me swap the second one because it was entirely my own error, or to even get me in trouble for having the wrong adapter that didn't match my receipt in my purse. But instead they solved all my problems quickly and easily with no fuss. That makes me feel safe and makes me more inclined to shop there again.