Springsteen braindump

If this was in fact real life that just happened, I think I just went to my very first Bruce Springsteen concert!

- Highest density of white people I've ever seen in one place! Yes, I grew up in a nearly all-white community, but there were more people in skydome than in the whole town.

- I've never been in skydome before (for a concert or anything else) and it was bigger and louder than I expected, but I like the washroom and concession setup. You can still hear the performance while you pee.

- Thank you to the guy behind us for being such excellent DVD commentary for us n00bs!

- I can't believe how many times the pit cameras caught people filming Springsteen with their phones when they could instead have reached out their hand and actually touched him!

- He took someone's beer and then dribbled most of it down his shirt while acting like he was drinking. Waste of beer!

- Jack of all Trades + Murder Incorporated = Dude can't find a job so becomes a hitman

- The little girl who sang along with Sunny Day was entirely too confident, which made that bit of business less charming for me. However, My Favourite Little Person is totally going to grow up to be her.

- The crowd collectively knows the harmony lines to Badlands, Thunder Road, 10th Ave. and Glory Days.

- Normally, I actually do sing the harmony lines because I have a shamefully narrow vocal range and nearly all Bruce Springsteen songs are in a bad key for me. However, in this loud stadium in this giant crowd, unable to hear my own voice, I was able to sing the melody line and hit notes (mostly low) that I've never been able to hit before. I couldn't hear myself, but I have enough training to tell that I hit them by feel. Not sure what happened there.

- At the beginning, people were deliberately applauding Jake for (literally, I hear) filling Clarence's shoes, then partway through they weren't doing that so much so I was thinking the crowd got accustomed to it and that was good, then they started doing it again towards the end (triggered by Land of Hopes and Dreams).

- The video camera guys and the people who decide what to put on which screen when really know what they're doing! During any live performance, I watch what the people in the background are doing, and (as far as I could see from my half-assed seats, at least) the cameras didn't miss anything interesting.

- The anniversary couple is totally going to go home and have sex and both pretend the other person is Bruce.

- I'm surprised how many people had signs for songs that he was going to play anyway! Playlists are documented religiously! Why waste your sign on Rosalita?

- Unless their goal was to get their sign used rather than get a song that they actually want played.

- I still think Springsteen needs to cover Queen - Crazy Little Thing Called Love, We Will Rock You, Fat-Bottomed Girls, etc.

- Apparently the way to get Bruce to play your song is to draw dirty pictures on your sign.

- (Maybe that strategy could be used to get him to play Fat-Bottomed Girls?)

- I'm surprised how many children they were, and how young some of them were. Especially since they (or at least all the ones that showed up on camera) were in the pit, and the internet tells me the pit people had to be there from like three hours before the concert started.

- Songs that made me happy that I can remember: Sunny Day, Thunder Road, Hopes and Dreams, Glory Days, Jack of all Trades, Shackled and Drawn, and at least two others that are slipping my mind.

- But, of all those songs, it's Rosalita, which I don't even like, that's stuck in my head.

- I managed to time my pee break so I didn't miss any songs that it would have made me sad to miss!

- Apart from being amazed at how much energy the band has to play over 3 hours and give absolutely 100% to every single thing (including moments where I was like "I can't believe he's putting so much into that one part when I really don't think anyone would notice or care if he did it calmly), I'm amazed that they can go so long without peeing!!! I also didn't see anyone drinking water (apart from the whole collapse/sponge/water physical comedy thing), although they must have at some point.

- I'm really surprised the whole collapse/sponge/water thing played out as well as it did and for as long as it did, although by that point people would have clapped for anything.

- From my perch far above, I saw two different people with whom I'm casually acquainted and who are most likely casually acquainted with each other on different parts of the floor. I don't think they saw each other.

- Before the concert started, we had enormous fun watching crew people climb up rope ladders and scaffold and speculate on what they were doing. (Conclusion: best tree fort ever!)

- I wonder how much it would have cost to make the CN Tower lights coordinate with the stage lights.

- I'm a total n00b who's just been studying these past few weeks (I hate going into a concert not knowing the songs) and there was only one song I didn't recognize (the slow piano solo one- update: the internet just told me it's called incident on 57th street). My friend (MFLP's mommy, who really needs her own blog name because she was here first) was even more of a n00b and didn't study at all (it's like raising her child is time-consuming or something!) and she reports that the concert was awesome for her.

- MFLP's daddy and I had a disagreement over how long it takes to walk between union station and skydome. I thought a short time, he thought a long time. Turns out it was a long time, but that's not because of the distance but rather the crowds. Tons and tons of people walking slowly in clumps in front of you, with the entire population of fanexpo coming in the other direction! It would take a short time if you were the only one.

- Things I learned about skydome/rogers centre: the gate on your ticket is important! We tried to walk in the first door we came to, and the guy made us go around to the gate on our ticket number.

- The only negative of the whole experience was Roger's Centre's bottle lid policy. I came in with a 330 mL sealed commercial brand water bottle in my purse. The purse searching lady said I could only bring it in if I gave her the lid. So then I was stuck with an open bottle. I drank some water, my friend drank some water, but an open bottle is a really inconvenient thing to have so I threw it out. Then I noticed the people walking up and down the aisles hawking water didn't confiscate the lid - which is such bullshit because the bottles they were selling were twice as big as the bottle I wanted to bring in! - and doubly bullshit since they sell beer in cans which are also bigger than the bottle I wanted to bring in and also made of metal and also explode if you shake them! - but I was too far from the aisle to attract their attention. However, halfway through the show I got thirsty, so I bought a bottle from one of the concessions (for $4.75!!!!) - and the guy confiscated the lid before he handed it over! So I was stuck with an open bottle again, and spent the vast majority of my very first Bruce Springsteen concert trying not to spill my water when I should have been uninhibitedly jumping up and down like an idiot! Dear Rogers Centre: you need to either give us water in cups with lids, or install cupholders on the seats, or let us bring fricking water bottles in like grownups! This quite seriously hindered my ability to uninhibitedly enjoy my very first Bruce Springsteen concert, and that's simply not acceptable!

Theme song to The Bubblies

The theme song from The Bubblies is as follows:

Come back, come back,
Come back to Bubbly Town
Seems like such a long time
Since you were around
While you've been away
We've waited for the day
When you'd come back, come back,
Come back to Bubbly Town

I can't find the theme online in English, but here it is in French.

I'm blogging this because, even though it's already answered on the internet, I couldn't google up the name of the show when I didn't remember the key word in the title.

I googled things like "Come back come back come back to * town" and "come back come back come back" "town seems like such a long time", and nothing came up. I wasn't sure whether it's "since you were around" or "since you've been around" and "while you've been away" or "while you were away", but no permutation produced the results.

Finally, @amyrhoda and @bwinton helped me figure it out on Twitter, so thank you to them! And now I'm blogging it in the hope of making it more googleable.

Anyone know how synesthesia works?

In one form of synesthesia, letters have intrinsic colours. I remember reading about a child with synesthesia learning her letters and having trouble with the fact that you can add a line to a P to make it into an R. She saw how adding the line changed the shape, but didn't understand how to turn it from a yellow letter into a red letter. (It turned out when she added the line, the colour changed automatically.)

The thing is, any written letters already have a colour, i.e. the colour of the font. The letters you're reading right now are black.

So are synesthetes blind to the colour of the font, or do they somehow see both at once? What if you change the colour of the font? Could you confuse a synesthetic child just learning to read by writing P in the colour in which they perceive R, or writing b in the colour in which they perceive d?

Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

I was rather surprised how many people lauded Eric Idle's performance of Always Look on the Bright Side of Life in the Olympic Closing Ceremonies. I don't dislike it myself (and took childish delight in the fact that Eric used the word "shit" in the Olympics), but I always figured it had reached the status of cliché. It seemed liked it was hamming it up and expecting people to be delighted with it like a 12-year-old who has just learned to say "NI!" If I'd been in on the planning and someone had brought up the idea of including Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, my response would have been "The audience will never go for it. They'll just roll their eyes." But my entire Twitter feed and all the media coverage I saw were unanimously delighted.

I felt the same about the use of Always Look on the Bright Side of Life in Spamalot - and about Spamalot in general, actually. I went into Spamalot expecting a pastiche of Python that will make us smile and nod in familiarity, and was very pleasantly surprised to find that it was genuinely entertaining in and of itself, to hardened Python fans and Python newbies alike.

So it seems I think the general public has a higher threshold of entertainment than it actually does. Not sure what to do with that.

Although I still think the Olympics should have ended with the giant foot.

Analogy for gun people

I recently tweeted: "The weird thing about gun people is they seem to assume that the bad guys are less competent and more chicken than the good guys."

Much pro-gun sentiment seems to be based on the idea that if you have a gun and some bad guy starts doing something bad near you, you can threaten him with your gun and he'll run away, or you can shoot him to stop him from shooting people.

That line of thinking seems to be based on the assumption that the bad guy is likely to drop his gun if you point your gun at him, and/or that you're a better shot than the bad guy. Why would you assume that? His drawing his gun caused you to draw your gun. Why would you expect the opposite reaction from him? The argument for the good guy being a good shot is generally that people apparently practise shooting. So why would you assume the bad guy doesn't? He probably has more time to do so, since guns most likely are a bigger part of his life, whereas the rest of us have to spend time on all the business of being upstanding citizens.

This morning, my shower gave me an analogy for this concept:

I am smart. Therefore, if a bad guy ever does anything bad in my general vicinity, I'll just outsmart him.

Not that simple, is it?

Why Rich Kids of Instagram surprises me

What surprises me about Rich Kids of Instagram is that there are enough people to sustain it.

These "rich kids" are a very narrow demographic. Economically, it's limited not just to people who are rich enough to afford luxury goods, but to people who are rich enough to let their teen/adult children play with these luxury goods. They don't just have a Ferrari and Dom Perignon, they have enough vehicles and alcohol that their kids can use the Ferrari and drink the Dom Perignon.

When I was growing up, my family had a car and usually had a few bottles of wine in the house. But I couldn't use the car recreationally because we had just the one car and usually someone else needed it, and I couldn't just grab a few bottles of wine to take to the bathtub or the lake because there wasn't that big a stash and my parents were likely planning to use them on a specific upcoming occasion. This wasn't parenting, this was simply because available resources were finite. We'd have had to be in a whole different socioeconomic demographic for me to have been able to play with the car and the wine, and, similarly, the rich kids of instagram have to be in a whole different - and most likely narrower - socioeconomic demographic than people who can "just" afford Ferraris and Dom Perignon for themselves.

But, at the same time, these "rich kids" must be sufficiently unaccustomed to this level of wealth that they feel the need to remark upon it. My parents drove a Honda Accord when I was growing up, so that's my baseline idea of "car". If I had access to a Honda Accord, I wouldn't feel the need to take a picture to commemorate the event. And it wouldn't even occur to me to tag it or caption it as "This is my Honda Accord". Because it is my baseline idea of "car", I'd just say "This is my car." This isn't noblesse oblige - we haven't even arrived at considering such advanced concepts as noblesse oblige. This is just my idea of what is remarkable and noteworthy, based on the baseline environment in which I grew up.

So the rich kids of instagram must be from the very specific and narrow socioeconomic demographic that has luxury goods in such abundance that not just the parents of the family but the teen and adult children can use them for recreational purposes, and must be new enough to this level of wealth that they aren't entirely accustomed to it and therefore feel it's worth photographing and commenting on. I'm rather surprised that there are enough people who meet these criteria to support a tumblr.

Insecurity in one's own humanity?

A lot of people seem very invested in the idea of a clear divide between humans and animals.

Once upon a time, I came up with a theory that humans are actually the least advanced species, because we need to modify our environment so much, and the most advanced species must be something like lichen that survive and thrive on some desolate piece of rock. I thought it was an interesting way to look at things differently. I never would have expected the reaction I got - quite a number of people were outright offended that I'd suggest that we weren't the most advanced species!

I've recently been reading a book about how veterinary knowledge might be applicable to human medicine (Zoobiquity by Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bowers), and it keeps talking about how conventional wisdom used to be that animals don't have emotions, or don't feel pain, or don't engage in non-procreative sexual behaviours - or whatever the topic of the chapter is - and conventional wisdom always seemed to assert that these things were uniquely human and served to distinguish us from the animals. As though they're really invested in distinguishing us from the animals.

But why is this? It doesn't make sense. Why wouldn't your internal self-awareness of yourself as human be sufficient? When I first learned about the theory of evolution, I found it reassuring. Being an animal who evolved out of other animals made so much more sense than humans being special. It makes me feel like we might actually belong on this planet. Why does this need to be more special than the other creatures rather than part of the ecosystem exist in the first place?

What if food bank clients could buy extra food via food banks?

Two pieces of common knowledge:

1. Donating money to food banks is more efficient than donating food, because they can use the money to buy food bulk and/or wholesale.
2. Sometimes food banks run low on food.

Suppose you're going to a food bank because you can't afford enough food to get your family through the month. And suppose this happens to be a time when the food bank is running low on food, and they don't have enough to give you (or they don't have enough of what you need to give you). And suppose you have a little bit of money, just not enough to get through the month. What if you could give the food bank what money you have, and they could buy food for you at much better prices?

Of course, it's debatable whether this is ethical. Letting people buy better treatment from food banks doesn't seem entirely consistent with the spirit of food banks. But, on the other hand, saying "If they have extra money they should be donating it when the food bank is short on food!" seems very nearly victim-blamey. Perhaps the solution would be somewhere in the middle - X% of clients' donations go to general food bank coffers, Y% can be used for the donor-client themselves. But that seems a bit paternalistic, like parents who dictate how much money their kids need to give to charity.

I don't have answers, but I think it would be interesting to study and do projections (if they haven't already), and perhaps do a temporary pilot project to see what happens.

Why do they make panties in so many different prints?

I have, unfortunately, been shopping for underwear lately. One thing that surprises me is, especially at stores like La Senza and Victoria's Secret, how many different prints they make panties in. I'm seeing well over a dozen prints available, often with three or more colours in the print, and sometimes a different set of prints for each different style of panties! And sometimes, despite the many many prints available, these panties are available in very few if any solid colours, and quite often not even in the expected prints like leopard print or zebra stripes or plaid or hearts. They're random splotches of multiple colours, or multicoloured variations on the brand's logo.

I wonder why they do this?

Some people, including me, care about the colour of their panties. We want them to achieve a particular look, ranging from blending discreetly under clothes to looking sexy without clothes. If you have a particular colour in mind, a print may or may not work. If you're going for discreet blending or an exact match of your bra, a print is useless. If you want something that looks good with your red bra, the red and white print of the brand's logo with bizarre blue accents might work, but certainly isn't the first choice that comes to mind.

The market for prints is people who don't have specific criteria for what they want their panties to look like, but also care enough about what their panties look like that they don't want plain panties like you buy in a multipack. They must also think prints are significantly superior to solids, for reasons I can't begin to speculate on. And these people must significantly outnumber those who have specific criteria combined with those who don't care at all and are willing to buy multipacks.

Apart from the prevalence of prints over solids, I'm also surprised at the sheer number of different prints available. If a store had maybe half a dozen prints (in addition to a reasonable range of colours), no one would be thinking "Why are there so few prints?" But instead they have dozens and dozens. Each new print needs to be designed by someone, which adds to production costs (albeit marginally).

So why do they do it? Why is it worthwhile to them? And why does it come at the expense of solids?

Mind blown: "I have never spent a single moment of my life in fear of being sexually assaulted"

Mentioned in passing by Corey Mintz in his Fed column with Stephanie Guthrie:

No one has ever paid me less because I’m a man, and I have never spent a single moment of my life in fear of being sexually assaulted.

This blows my mind. I have spent every moment of my life in fear of being sexually assaulted, starting the day that I was 9 or 10 years old, saw the word "rape" in a newspaper article, and innocently asked my mother what it meant.

Fear of sexual assault isn't the dominant emotion at all times, of course. Most often it's shuffled pretty far down the pile, underneath things like "What's the best way to manage this enormous project I've just been assigned?" and "It looks smoggy outside" and "What else was hidden in the omnibus budget bill that hasn't come to light yet?" and "I should call my grandmother" and "When are the Cortland apples going to come out?"

But it's always present. I'm always aware of it, like how you're always aware that you might get hit by a car or lose your job or get cancer. So the idea of someone having never spent a moment in fear of being sexually assaulted is as mind-blowing to me as the idea of someone who has never, even for a moment, worried about losing their job.

Gentlemen: does this reflect your reality?

Tell me about PC Financial

I'm considering switching to PC Financial. Does anyone have any first-hand experience with them? Pros and cons? Reasons not to switch? Anonymous comments welcome. Comments from people monitoring for social media mentions of PC Financial will be interpreted as reasons not to switch.

Soybean and/or canola oil

I recently found out that someone I know is allergic to soy, and apparently soy is in many many things. So, out of curiosity, I started reading labels myself, and it turns out soy is in many many things. But the most annoying thing I discovered was "soybean and/or canola oil". I've seen this on multiple products, and it must be so annoying for people with allergies! Basically they're saying "this product may or may not contain the thing you're allergic to."

But how does this even happen? How does it even occur to someone to not use the same ingredients every time when mass-producing food? And what circumstances lead them to have to change oils so frequently and unpredictably that they can't change labels at the same time?

Complaints about baby toys: LeapFrog Learn and Groove Musical Table

My Favourite Little Person, who is now eight months old, has a LeapFrog Learn and Groove Musical Table, which you can see in action here. (I don't know the people behind the video, I just googled it up.)

It's enormous fun and I had a great time sitting down and figuring out what all the things do. I can see it having significant longevity as a baby toy, and later on being reappropriated as the control panel of a cardboard box spaceship or something. However, there are two points that I think would be detrimental if this toy does work as a language acquisition tool like it's supposed to.

1. Use of vocal scat. When the toy is set to vocabulary (by turning the pages of the book in the middle), it says the word that corresponds with the action you're doing. For example, if you open the door it says "open". If you close the door it says "close". When you press the green button it says "green". When you press the red button it says "red". When the toy is set to music, each manipulable part of the table plays a little tune, with a reasonable electronic approximation of a different instrument for each one.

Unfortunately, one of the instruments they chose is vocal scat. You can see this at about 1:50 in the video linked above. When the door is opened, the toy sings "BOPbadoobadooba". The problem is that "BOPbadoobadooba" is a sequence of phonemes, just like words are. How is the baby supposed to conclude that "open" means "open" but "BOPbadoobadooba" doesn't mean "open" and is just nonsense? I'm sure the manufacturers of the toy will point out that the scat only happens on the music setting, not on the vocabulary setting, but I doubt a baby would understand that. (Can they even process they idea of music and language as two discrete entities?) After all, if babies acquired vocabulary only when we wanted them to, we wouldn't have to worry about swearing in front of them. If this toy does in fact help language acquisition like it's intended to, are we going to have a generation of children who think that "BOPbadoobadooba" is a synonym for "open"?

2. French word order. In the Canadian version of this toy (which is not the same version shown in the video), you can switch it between English and French. When it's set on French, the vocabulary function says the French equivalents of the English words used in the English vocabulary function. The problem is with the coloured shapes. When you press each coloured shape, the toy tells you both the colour and the shape (you can see this at about 1:06 in the video linked above). For example, when you press the green circle, it says "Green! Circle!"

The problem is that, in French, it says the French equivalents of the exact same words in the exact same order. In other words, when the English says "Green! Circle!", the French says "Vert! Cercle!" However, as we learned in our very first year of elementary school French class, French colour adjectives go after the noun, so the correct word order is "cercle vert".

The manufacturers would probably point out that the words aren't intended to form a phrase, and it is in fact clear from the intonation that it's saying "Vert! Cercle!", not "vert cercle". However, I question whether a baby could grasp this nuance, especially since adults tend to use funny intonation when talking to babies. Regardless, using correct word order would add value. (It's like if the English said "Circle! Green!" You'd probably be thinking "How hard would it have been to just switch the order?")

It's also possible that they chose this order to provide word-by-word French translation for Anglophone children. They might be thinking of an Anglophone child switching between the languages and learning that "green" = "vert" and "circle" = "cercle". However, this is exclusionary towards Francophone children, because they don't get to hear their language in its natural state (and, again, if this toy actually works as a language acquisition tool, it might be detrimental). French isn't an enrichment opportunity for Anglophones. It's a living language that millions of Canadians speak in the home, at work, and in everyday life, and Leapfrog is doing them a disservice by not representing it as such.

Thoughts from advice columns: passive-aggressive responses to bring your own dinnerware

Dear Miss Manners:

My husband and I have been invited to dinner at a friend's house who is very "green" conscious. After accepting her invitation, we've been asked to bring our own dinnerware since she is not sufficiently equipped as she has recently moved into the city.

She says that because she is very environment-conscious, she shuns disposable dinnerware. Although I respect and admire her efforts at being "green", I am surprised that guests will be asked to get their own dinnerware when invited to dinner.
I almost want to take my own disposable dinnerware because the idea of carrying my plates, bowls, and glasses to her house, eating in them and cleaning them and bringing them back makes me feel uncomfortable.

One's contribution towards a greener planet is their own personal choice and in this case I feel pressurized into following her ideology of being green. Will it be bad etiquette for me to take disposable plates when the hosts shuns them? Am I making a big deal out of it?

My first thought was to bring disposable, but Miss Manners vetoed it. However, a surprisingly wide assortment of other passive-aggressive responses came to mind. In order from most to least productive, (and without presuming that any of this is consistent with etiquette), they are:

1. Buy her a set of dinnerware big enough to accommodate the party as a housewarming gift.

2. Bring your own and leave it behind, leaving her with all the annoying clean-up work (and saving yourself from having to schlep dirty dishes home).

3. Bring your own, but have them accidentally get broken in transit. You get there, greet everyone, open up the bag they're in, and find shards.

4. Bring your own, but have them accidentally get cracked in transit without your noticing. So you go to pour red wine into a glass, and it leaks out of the glass through the crack that you didn't notice and dribbles all over her rug.

5. Cellphone call at the last minute: you got bumped on the subway and broke your dishes and now won't be able to come.

Me, I'd either get dinnerware as a housewarming gift (at about the Kitchen Stuff Plus price/quality point), or I'd say "I'm terribly sorry, I won't be able to accommodate you" when she asks me to bring my own dinnerware, or, if I was together enough to carry it off, I'd go with "Oh no, I can't possibly impose on your hospitality before you've finished setting up housekeeping. We'll reschedule for sometime after you're settled in, I insist!"

What I can't fathom - as in it doesn't compute at all and I cannot even begin to imagine how a person thought of it - is how the hostess came up with the idea of having a dinner party when she didn't have the equipment. Why doesn't her brain process the number of plates in her cupboard or forks in her drawer (or the number thereof that she can reasonably acquire by the date of the dinner party) as the maximum number of people she can have over for dinner?

Things PBS Should Invent: let donors from outside the US watch online videos

I recently nodded off while watching a documentary on PBS (the US public broadcaster), so I went looking for it online so I could see the bit I missed. I was very pleased to find that the whole thing was available for watching on the PBS website, but then I was unpleasantly surprised to discover that PBS videos can't be watched outside the US.

This surprised me because my PBS station actively embraces its Canadian audience. It brands itself as WNED Buffalo-Toronto, has a combination of the Canadian and US flags in its logo, includes some Canadian landmarks in the photos of local landmarks on its station identifiers between shows, and actively solicits Canadian donors, even allowing them to donate in Canadian dollars. This does make sense, because there are 10 times as many people in Toronto as in Buffalo, not to mention all the people between Toronto and the US border (off the top of my head, I know that Mississauga, Brampton, and Hamilton all have more people than Buffalo). It's quite possible that its signals actually reach more Canadians that USians.

But imagine how irritating it would be to have donated to this PBS station only to find that you're not allowed to watch online!

Proposal: PBS should allow donors from outside the US to view its videos online. Perhaps smaller donors could view a limited number of videos, and larger donors could view more videos.

I know the geographical restrictions have something to do with international broadcasting rights. But it seems that if it were a gift or incentive for donation, that wouldn't really count as broadcasting as much. PBS sometimes gives away DVD sets as gifts for donations, and it seems that they'd be able to do this without regard for whether the DVD is commercially available in Canada. Giving away (limited, if necessary) access to online videos as a gift should be morally equivalent.

Apparently more women are using contraception in the US than in Canada

I was surprised to see on this chart on the situation of women in different countries that 72% of women in Canada are using modern contraception, and 73% of women in the US are.

This surprises me a bit, because, at least based on the news that makes it up here, the US seems to have more policies intended to make it difficult to get contraception and seems to lack some policies that we have that make it easier to get contraception. I would have assumed that, because of this, a slightly smaller percentage would be using contraception in the US.

The article doesn't define the concept of "women using modern contraception", so it's possible it might include male condoms being used by the woman's male partner. I haven't heard anything about making condoms difficult to access in the States, what I've been hearing is more about cost of and access to medical care, which would affect access to thinks like birth control pills, IUDs, diaphragms, etc.

It would be really interesting to see numbers on a) percentage of the population who wants to use more contraception than they're currently able to, b) proportion of unwanted pregnancies, and c) percentage of the population deliberately not using contraception (either because they're "trying" or because the particulars of their private life are not going to result in a pregnancy).

Plastic bag ban vs. weak joints

I don't normally use reusable shopping bags, but I ended up doing so one day recently, and I discovered another problem with banning plastic bags: weight distribution.

On the day I was shopping with a reusable bag, my purchases turned out to be heavier than I'd anticipated when I left the house that morning. The peaches in the grocery store turned out to actually be good for the first time in ages, so I bought a couple dozen in addition to my usual produce. The frozen yogurt I wanted was only available in a 2L container. Some of the cleaning products I use regularly were on sale at an especially good price. And, right before I left the house that morning, I discovered that I'd run out of milk. All my purchases still fit in my reusable bag, but I was carrying nearly 20 pounds more than I'd planned. This extra weight was too much for my shoulder. I knew if I carried all this stuff home in my reusable bag, I would, at the very least, need to apply Icy Hot before bed.

Fortunately, plastic bags are available. I got two plastic bags and had the cashier put some of the stuff in each bag. Then I had my reusable on one shoulder, my purse on the other shoulder, and one plastic bag in each hand. The weight was distributed more comfortably, I wasn't going to do injury to any of my joints, and I could walk home like a normal person. If I'd had more stuff to carry, I could have taken more plastic bags and hung them on my elbows and forearms by the handles. The plastic bags are small enough that you can shift the weight distribution around quite easily, without having to unpack anything, without even breaking stride. None of this is news, people do this every day.

But how would this have played out after the plastic bag ban?

Paper bags would actually have made things worse. Because they don't have handles, I would have had to carry the paper bag with my arms wrapped around it. However, because I have narrow shoulders, carrying a paper bag this way causes whatever's on my shoulders to fall down to my elbows. So my big reusable bag hanging on my shoulder with my heaviest purchases would have come crashing down onto the place where my elbow meets my forearm, and could have done some serious damage.

Buying more reusable bags from the store would be really annoying, because I already have way too many at home that I don't use and they're probably going to end up in the landfill eventually anyway. Reusables could also be problematic for people who are shorter. I'm 5'7" and, when I carry my reusable bag in my hand, it dangles down as far as my ankle bone. (In comparison, plastic bags hit not too far below the knee.) Someone who is shorter might have more trouble carrying a reusable in their hand - especially if it's heavy enough that they can't comfortably carry it with their elbow slightly bent or hang it from their forearm. Shorter tends to correlate with older and with more physical limitations. My one grandmother is 4'6". Does she even have the option of carrying a reusable bag in her hand? (I don't know, we haven't tried. When her grocery store asks her if she'd like a plastic bag, she says "Yes please, I'd like 10" and uses them for household purposes, as the finds them more practical and economical than the garbage bags commercially available.)

But the only other option would be to take everything I can comfortably carry home, empty my bag and put my stuff away, and then head back out to get the rest of the stuff. This triples my errand time if I'm doing the errand in my neighbourhood, and makes it even longer if the stuff I need to buy is in another neighbourhood.

This would be even worse for people who are less physically capable than I am. I'm not especially strong, but I'm not especially weak either. I'm not post-menopausal, I don't have recent injuries, I don't have specific diagnosed joint problems, I don't have arthritis. Other people with these problems - which will become more and more prevalent with the aging of our population - would have even more trouble with some unexpected weight, and weight distribution would become a factor when carrying even less stuff. On top of that, taking some of your purchases home and then going back to the store for the rest is more likely to be more difficult - and more time-consuming - for people with more physical limitations, who might not be able to handle as much walking in a day.

This could also be a financial burden, by making it more difficult to buy the more economical larger sizes. In the trip I described in the first paragraph, if I'd needed to lighten my burden, I would have ended up not buying the cleaning products (thus missing an opportunity to stock up while they're on sale) and/or buying 2L of milk, which costs nearly as much as 4L. If this happens often, it will start to add up - especially since there is a correlation between people with more physical limitations and people with tighter budgets.

Some people are probably reading this pointing out engineering solutions, and engineering solutions do exist. I'm not saying there's no possible way to get the stuff home, but that's not the point.

The point is that this introduces a whole extra burden of inconvenience. Not only do you have to think "Can I carry all the stuff I need?", you also have to think "How, exactly, am I going to carry all the stuff I need? What will go on my shoulder? Is it too heavy for my shoulder? What will go in my hand? Is it light enough to hang on my forearm?" And you have to decide this before you leave the house in the morning if you're planning to pick up groceries on the way home from work.

The point is that this burden of inconvenience is borne disproportionately on those with joint problems and other physical limitations, for whom the threshold where weight distribution becomes a factor is lower.

The point is that this burden of inconvenience is exacerbated by physical limitations, because not only is the weight distribution threshold lower, but, if you walk slower, taking two trips takes up more time. And this extra time, in turn, exacerbates the weight distribution problem because you have to carry the weight for a longer time.

The point is that, with the aging population, the demographic who has physical limitations - especially joint problems - will only increase, leading more and more people to have to bear this burden of inconvenience.

The point is that this burden of inconvenience also falls disproportionately on the less fortunate, because it will make buying larger, more economic sizes more difficult, because it will make stocking up when things are on sale more difficult, because those with less money tend to live in less conveniently-located housing and therefore have farther to walk (which, as mentioned above, exacerbates the physical burden by having to carry an iffy weight further, and also exacerbates the financial burden by making it more difficult to take multiple trips if you do want to stock up) and, to add insult to injury, because the remaining handled bags available in stores will be more expensive (one or two dollars for a reusable as opposed to five cents for a plastic bag).

The point is also that this inconvenience (which, remember, came in the name of environmentalism) will make people who don't drive for all their trips more likely to drive for certain trips. If you're a car owner who normally takes the subway to work and buys groceries on your way home, but, because carrying all your stuff home in your reusable would wreck your shoulder, you have to take two trips, why not just go home, grab the car, drive back to the store, and save yourself the heavy carrying?

And the point is that this additional inconvenience that disproportionately burden those who already have more difficulty with the activities of everyday life was introduced impulsively, without study, without time to consult the public, without even telling the public it was coming so we could let our councillors know what we think, by councillors who, according to some reports, weren't even intending to vote for a ban. And all in the name of something that won't even achieve its stated objective of reducing the amount of plastic in the landfill, because we'll all end up buying (less useful and less convenient) garbage bags anyway.

Updated with an analogy: This is like they didn't allow taxis to park within reasonable pick-up distance of the grocery store, using the logic that taxis emit pollution. Some people never use taxis. Many people only rarely use taxis. But sometimes you have unforeseen circumstances where you need a taxi, and it's a really dick move to eliminate the option. Especially since people are still merrily driving around in their pollution-emitting cars and the taxis are only a drop in the bucket. And if it turns out there are in fact so many people taking taxis to the grocery store that it's causing a major pollution problem, that's probably a sign of some kind of infrastructure flaw that needs to be identified and fixed at its root, not by making it difficult for the people who already have the most difficulty to do their grocery shopping.

I do not recommend O.P.I. Nail Envy Sensitive & Peeling

A while back, I was given some O.P.I. Nail Envy Original nail strengthener. It totally worked and my nails got stronger and longer, but it didn't do anything about my peeling nails (which is not uncommon for products whose primary mandate is growth.) However, I discovered that they had another formula for Sensitive and Peeling nails, so I decided to give that a try.

Unfortunately, it didn't work for me. It didn't help them at all, and might even have made it worse. Most nail products, when I paint them on my nails, "glue" the peels down so they don't snag and get worse. This one didn't do that, and it also didn't strengthen my nails as well as the original Nail Envy.

Therefore, I do not recommend O.P.I. Nail Envy Sensitive & Peeling. Sally Hansen Miracle Cure continues to be the most effective product for my peeling nails, although it isn't a miracle. However, if you don't have peeling nails and just want strength and growth, I do recommend the original O.P.I. Nail Envy.

Complaints about baby toys: pianos and xylophones

My Favourite Little Person has a toy piano and a toy piano/xylophone combo. The problem is neither of them has a full octave of notes, and on one of them (I forget which) the notes don't even form a scale - they're just random notes that aren't all in the same key. The result is that you can't play any real songs on either of them. So I decided she should have a proper octave with all the notes in the same key, so she (or her grownups) can play an actual song.

You would not believe what a tall order that is!

I looked through three different stores, and found five different toys that didn't have a proper scale (in addition to the two that MFLP already owns!), and only one that did have a proper scale. Some of them didn't even have the notes in order from lowest to highest - different keys played completely random notes! Even the beautiful-looking wooden toys that fussy parents would daydream about their child playing with aren't in tune! The one that I did find (Little Tikes Jungle Jamboree Tiger 2-in-1 Piano) had a number of online reviews from people saying that they one they got was out of tune, although it also had some reviews from people saying that theirs was in tune. So I'm seeing only one attempt to even produce a proper scale, and apparently it doesn't always turn out right.

This really bothers me. It seems almost disrespectful of the children who will be playing with the toys. As though, just because all these kids initially get out of the toys is that mashing keys with their itty bitty baby hands causes noise, they don't deserve an instrument that can actually make even rudimentary music. Which seems detrimental to child development, really. Even if MFLP isn't up to playing an actual song on her toy instruments, the adults and older children in her life are. If she sees someone else play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on her toy, she'll learn that you can play actual recognizable songs on an instrument. When I was a kid we had a toy keyboard and a toy xylophone in addition to a real piano, and I remember it being a minor revelation that I could play the same songs the same way on all three instruments. Today's children deserve that learning moment!

On top of that, how hard is it to actually do it right? If you're mass-producing a product, you need to give exact specifications anyway. Someone has probably documented by now the relative bar sizes needed to produce a major scale. Take 15 minutes to look it up. Have your student intern calculate it as a project. There's no reason why a proper scale would make any appreciable difference in manufacturing costs, and it would certainly give your toy a reputation for better quality compared with the competition. It would also give the toy greater educational value and greater longevity for the end-users, because, long after "It makes noise when you hit it!" ceases to be amusing, "I can figure out how to play songs" will still be amusing. Even if you're a nefarious manufacturer who's into planned obsolescence, people whose children outgrow kiddie toy musical instruments aren't going to replace them with other kiddie toy musical instruments.

Are toy makers really that lazy that they can't get the one key usability detail right?