The tale of the 13th floor poltergeists

My old apartment was on the 14th floor of a highrise building that's most likely concrete slab construction.  When the temperature dropped below -20, the building would settle really loudly.  Specifically, I'd hear these big loud cracking noises in the floor under me, loud enough to wake me up - often right under my bed when I was sleeping!

My current apartment is on the 12th floor of a highrise building of concrete slab construction.  When the temperature drops below -20, the building settles really loudly.  Specifically, I hear these big loud cracking noises in the ceiling over my head, loud enough to wake me up - often in the ceiling right above my head as I'm sleeping!

During the recent cold snap the loud noises started up again, so I started googling around the idea and couldn't readily find any reports of concrete slab buildings settling loudly in cold weather.  There were plenty of reports of wooden buildings settling loudly, but nothing about concrete. (And I know for certain there's no wood in the construction of my current building because I watched it being built.)

Then I realized: neither of these buildings have a 13th floor - both skip straight from 12 to 14.  So in the ceiling of the 12th floor and the floor of the 14th floor we have the ghost 13th floor.  Obviously those sounds I hear are the poltergeists that live there!

My condo is on the 8th floor.  If it doesn't settle loudly in -20 temperatures, we'll know that this theory is true.

The benefits of low self-esteem

Scott Adams asks whether there are any benefit to low self-esteem.

As someone with low self-esteem, there is a benefit I have noticed: I'm quite often delighted, and very rarely disappointed.

I try to do something and I fuck up: no surprise there.
I try to so something and succeed: what an awesome surprise!I can't believe that worked!

I shop in a fashionable store and am treated rudely: no surprise there
I shop in a fashionable store and receive good service: I can't believe how nice they were to me!

I invite a friend to do something and they decline: no biggie, I'm sure they have more important things to do.
I invite a friend to do something and they accept: I feel so lucky to have friends I can go do things with!!

I'm introduced to a puppy or a baby or some other small adorable interesting creature and they don't like me: I don't blame them, I'm just a big weird stranger
I'm introduced to a puppy or a baby or some other small adorable interesting creature and they like me: My day is made!!  Hell, my week is made!!!

At this point you might be thinking "But you've been successful at quite a surprising number of things over the course of your life.  Doesn't that lead to you start expecting success at some point?"  Yes, it does.  But, because I have low self-esteem, when that success is followed by failure, I just assume "Meh, I was due for it. That's what happens when you get cocky. The other shoe had to drop eventually." And, until then, I'm walking around with a smile on my face and dancing when no one is watching at the shocking quantity of good fortune I'm enjoying.

As I read this over, I realize it sounds like one of those gratitude or optimism approaches to life that people write self-help books about, so I want to emphasize: this is not at all deliberate or mindful in any way.  Unlike what Scott Adams suggests, this isn't a strategy. It's simply where my emotions land naturally.  But it's certainly not without its benefits.

How Google can fix the internet in one easy step

There's an article circulating called The Year We Broke the Internet.  The way we "broke the internet" is by being so quick to share things via social media that ultimately turn out to be hoaxes.

Google can fix this problem in one easy step: introduce a reverse sort by date feature.

Google already allows you to search results by date, so you see the newest first.  Therefore, its databanks must already have the pages organized by date.  By adding a reverse sort by date feature, to simply reverse the order in which the results display so the oldest is first, Google will allow anyone to determine the original internet source and origin of anything in a single click.

This would be especially helpful for reverse image search. I find that if I'm doing a reverse image search of an image that has been heavily reblogged on tumblr, the first several pages of results are just tumblrs that have recently reblogged it without context.  A reverse sort by date would let us see the source quickly and easily without having to dig through pages and pages of tumblr purgatory.

If a computer system can sort, it has the ability to sort bidirectionally just as easily as it can sort unidirectionally. You can see this in any kind of table with headers that you can click to sort.  All Google has to do is give us an interface item that can activate this functionality, and it would be taking a huge step towards fulfilling its mission of organizing the world's information and making it accessible and useful.

Teach me how to store my earrings

I have a lovely wooden jewellery box.  It's lined in velvet or some reasonable facsimile thereof, with all kinds of neat little compartments.  And it's utterly unsuitable for the jewellery I actually own - the sizes and shapes of the compartments simply don't correspond with the sizes and shapes of the jewellery, so my jewellery is currently all sitting in a tangled pile on top of the compartments, making it impossible for the box to close.

I've already worked out that I need a necklace tree for my necklaces, but that still raises the question of what to do about my earrings.  Some necklace trees have a little tray at the bottom that you can put earrings in, but I'd prefer something that keeps them more contained.  Googling around this idea, I see suggestions to use ice cube trays or egg cartons, but that would take up more room than I'd like. But, at the same time, I'd like to be able to see what I have at a glance rather than having to dig through.

I have probably between 10 and 20 pairs of earrings.  (I've never actually counted, and I keep finding ones I've forgotten about because they're currently being stored in this tangle of jewellery.)  I'd like a storage solution that enables me to acquire earrings willy-nilly without having to worry about whether I have space for them in my earring organization system. Most of my earrings are hoop or drop styles, but there are some studs in there too.  The vast majority of them are cheap; none of them are expensive.  The smallest are tiny little studs, and the largest are about 2 inches.  I don't plan for any future earring purchases to go much more than 2 inches in diameter for hoops, but I might go longer than that for dangles if they're lightweight.

Any suggestions?  How do you store your earrings?

Journalism wanted: why aren't Hydro workers electricians?

I just blogged that Hydro workers should be allowed to reconnect homeowners' equipment in order to facilitate power outage recovery.

Then I read an article about what the Hydro CEO was doing during the outage, which mentions in passing:

Meanwhile, workers report that, after finally restoring power in many neighbourhoods, they are being forced to disconnect some houses because of damage done to stand pipes, the hollow masts usually mounted on rooftops that serve as a conduit for power cables to enter a dwelling. A bent or broken stand pipe poses a risk of fire, and it’s the homeowner’s responsibility to have it fixed by a qualified electrician.

Hydro workers are not electricians.

 (My emphasis.)

So why aren't Hydro workers electricians?  They're working with electricity.  They're connecting bigger wires than electricians usually work with, so it seems like they should be able to be electricians.  Are they actually unable to do the work of electricians?  Or is this merely a certification issue?  Or is it a jurisdiction issue?

 What would it take for Hydro workers to be electricians?  Would they have to learn new skills?  Or just get an additional certification?

 I hate it when I walk away from a newspaper article with my questions than I went in with.

Things They Should Invent: allow utilities to repair equipment that belongs to homeowners

I'm fortunate enough not to have as yet been affected by the recent spate of ice-storm-induced power outages (knock wood), but I have been following developments fairly closely.  And one thing that has come to my attention is that some of the electrical equipment that's attached to the house may belong to the homeowner rather than the utility, and therefore homeowners are responsible for getting it repaired before the utility can reconnect power.

This would piss me off if I were a homeowner.  I have no power (perhaps for days!), then the Hydro people suddenly come around, only to tell me  have to hire some kind of contractor I've never heard of before, and probably can't research adequately because I don't have internet.  And if I've decided to go elsewhere until power comes back, I might not even find out for days that I need to get the bits attached to my house fixed by a different contractor, thereby extending the time to restore power.

Solution: allow Hydro workers to repair the equipment that's attached to the house, and bill the homeowner for this service, with the owner's consent.  The owner can still hire their own contractor if they want, but if the Hydro truck is right there, you can have the option of getting reconnected immediately. If the homeowner is not present and doesn't contract Hydro within a certain period of time, Hydro reconnects and bills them. (This is to prevent homeowners who decide to leave the blackout area and go elsewhere from getting caught out because Hydro can't get in touch with them and they have no idea that they need to hire a contractor.)

If this happened, some parties would probably complain that the utility is taking business away from private electrical contractors.  I think this is negligible compared with delays in restoring power, but if it does end up being a problem that needs to be addressed, Hydro could outsource this portion of the work to private contractors through a normal bidding process.

Teach me how to erase an external hard drive with a dead power supply

As I blogged about before, my old external hard drive (a Western Digital Elements) has gone through two power supplies in just over two years.  I was sick of buying new power supplies for it, so I replaced it with a external hard drive that doesn't require a power supply (which I'll blog about after I've used it for a bit).

Now I'm ready to dispose of the Western Digital. 

Problem: to erase it, I'd have to connect it to a computer.  And to do that, I need a working power supply.  And I don't much fancy buying yet another power supply to use only once just to erase a drive I no longer intend to use.

Does anyone know of a way to erase an external hard drive that requires a power supply but the power supply is dead?

Why xmas is a downer

The problem with xmas is it creates deadlines.  Even if you don't celebrate it.  There are two statutory holidays and then a third for new year's, so you have to get your errands done and stock up on what you need before the stores close.  Some people you deal with (clients, friends, businesses you deal with) take time off or go away around this time of year, so you have to schedule your interactions with them around this.  If you want to get a gift for someone, you have to do so by xmas, or before you see them, or in time to ship it to them. If you're invited to a social event and decide to attend, you have to decide what to wear and have it clean for that day and get done up properly and get to the place in time.

Even if you don't celebrate, some of these deadlines may apply to you.  My apartment building had a party and my office had a party.  A friend who celebrates xmas may invite you to their party and you may wish to attend.  Your office might have a Secret Santa, or you may wish to buy a present for a small adorable child of your acquaintance whose family does celebrate xmas.

There are also various areas of life that have administrative deadlines at the end of the calendar year.  You might need to make a TFSA contribution or apply for CPP. 

For me, personally, because my birthday is also this week, I sometimes have administrative deadlines related to my birthday, such as getting my health card renewed.  My birthday also creates deadlines of its own - I spend a quiet, at-home day with indulgent food and drink, which means I need to buy the food and drink and arrange other areas of life so I don't have to go out that day.  (Not to mention that the quiet stay-at-home birthday isn't by choice, it's because everyone's too busy with their peri-xmas stuff that they don't have time to give my birthday more than a cursory acknowledgement.)

And all these additional deadlines come at the darkest time of year.  The sun rises so late and sets so early, and it gets truly cold for the first time since the previous winter, which makes me desperately want to curl up and hibernate.

I think this is genetic.  My ancestors for many many generations were peasants in cold parts of Europe. I'm made entirely out of genes that have always survived the winter by battening down the hatches, huddling around the fire, and eating potatoes. It is against the dictates of every fibre of my being (literally) to be rushing about getting things done in the cold wind and after the early sunset.

These aren't huge stresses, to be sure, but they are additional Tetris blocks.  So when the xmas decorations go up on November 1, it's just a constant reminder that these stressers, many of which I'd rather not do, are imminent.

And all this for something that isn't even meaningful to me!

Half-formed idea: fully automated text message power outage reporting

Picture this: your power goes out, so you pick up your cellphone and text your six-digit postal code to a specific number, and doing so automatically enters in the hydro company's database that there is a power outage in your postal code.

Currently, you can report power outages by phone or internet.  The problem with reporting them by internet is not everyone has internet during a power outage.  The problem with reporting by phone is that there are a finite number of people who can answer phones, so during widespread power outages, wait times to report an outage can be long.  In fact, as I type this, Toronto Hydro has just announced that its phone lines are overloaded and it only wants people to call for emergencies.  I'm not sure if a simple power outage counts as an emergency or if that's reserved for lines down and trees on lines.

Being able to text your outage directly into the database would be faster, require less human intervention, and take up less bandwidth.  It would also help you preserve your valuable phone battery if you don't have a landline, because texting takes significantly less battery power than calling.

A postal code doesn't precisely pinpoint the location of the outage, but it does narrow it down pretty well.  My current six-digit postal code applies only to my building.  In the suburban neighbourhood where I grew up, our postal code applied to only six houses.  It's possible that the postal code will be sufficient information, especially if they're getting multiple reports from a postal code or from a set of adjacent postal codes.

But if the information provided by the postal code isn't enough, perhaps the system could record the numbers that each text comes from, and a human could call or text back for further information if necessary.  It's possible no further information would be necessary because the postal code is a single building like mine, or because there's a general outage in the area, or because someone else in the postal code has already filed a full report.

In any case, automated reports by text would allow for an additional communication pathway that currently isn't available, and would let reports be made faster and more easily, with less time and battery power invested.

It seems like the technology should exist or should be creatable based on other things that already exist (like charitable donations by text message, etc.)

Horoscopes

From the Toronto Star, although I can't find a direct link to the online version. Typos are my own:

This year you often need to spend extra time at work, with an older relative or perhaps at school. Demands on you are heavy, yet meeting responsibilities opens an important door. If you are single, you could meet someone at work or out running errands. Avoid being critical and fussy. You could cause a problem in your relationships this way, which will create distance and hard feelings. If you are attached, take that special trip the two of you often talk about. The good vibes between you will help bypass a hassle or two. Virgo can get picky about details.

Globe and Mail: 

You must define your goals clearly. You must also keep them within realistic bounds. If you can do those two simple things then what you achieve over the next 12 months will overshadow what you achieved in the previous 12 years. It’s your time to shine.

Last year was the first year when my birthday horoscopes didn't turn out to be true by any remote interpretation (they didn't turn out to be outright wrong either, they were just irrelevant), so it will be interesting to see what happens next. I'm definitely not going to meet anyone at work given demographics and hiring patterns.  I don't (to my knowledge) know any Virgos, but I don't think it's fair that they get to be picky and I don't!  And I can't imagine any clear yet realistic goals that could result in achievements that overshadow the past 12 years.

Why do they start selling xmas food so early?

I've already complained about the habit of starting with xmas decorations and whatnot at the beginning of November, but one thing that particularly baffles me is that the grocery store started with the xmas food at the beginning of November.

By "xmas food" I mean food that is intended to be served at holiday parties and food that is intended to be given as a gift - cheese platters, assorted nuts in decorative boxes, those Italian cake things, etc.

I doubt a significant portion of the population is having holiday parties in early November.  And people are going to want to serve or gift reasonably fresh food (or at least convince themselves that they are doing so) so no one is going to buy pastries nearly two months ahead of time, and they're certainly not going to buy a cheese platter that early!

Who's their target audience here?  Do these things even sell early on?

What to do about hanger bumps in the shoulders of your shirts

I have disproportionately narrow shoulders, so I always get bumps from the ends of the hangers in the shoulders of my shirts. Even using fat hangers doesn't solve this problem - it just makes bigger bumps.

But I've finally figured out a quick and easy solution:

While wearing the shirt, wet your hands, and smooth them over your shoulders.  This only takes like 10 seconds and smooths the bumps right out.  The only negative is your shoulders are damp for a couple of minutes, but if you'd rather have briefly damp shoulders than hanger bumps, this is the solution you need.

Imagine if we could see why people treat us the way they treat us

I've been pondering the fact that I've been getting better customer service in recent years, and I've been wondering why this is.  Is it because I'm older and could no longer be mistaken for a teenager?  Does my appearance perhaps somehow reflect the fact that I have more money than I did in the past?  Is it because I've been patronizing many of the same businesses for over a decade and they're starting to recognize me as a repeat customer?  Or has customer service in general improved?

Then it occurred to me that this line of thinking could be extrapolated to all human interactions.  Wouldn't it be interesting if we could see the reasons why any particular individual treats us well or poorly?  How much of it is because of what we're contributing to the interaction?  How much of it is because of how we present superficially?  And how much of it is how they would have treated any person that they were interacting with at that particular time?

To what extent is the media responsible for Rob Ford being mayor of Toronto?

Very little about this Rob Ford saga has surprised me.

I mean, I wouldn't have guessed crack and cunnilingus specifically, but, extrapolating  his public behaviour before becoming mayor, I was completely unsurprised by drunkenness, drug use, sexual harassment, and anger issues.  When rumours of organized crime affiliation first reached my ears (shortly after Gawker first reported on the crack video story - long before the official police reports started coming) my first thought was "That would explain everything!"  When the video of him ranting and raving and threatening to kill someone came out, I was rather surprised that there weren't already similar videos in public circulation.  He strikes me as having enough anger issues that this wouldn't be an unusual occurrence.  (Although maybe that's why there's no video - perhaps it's business as usual Chez Ford?)

Basically, everything that has come to light has been within the range of what I would have expected of him back when he was running for mayor.

So why did so many people not see this coming?

And to what extent it this the media's fault that they didn't?

Heather Mallick has written that perhaps the media has been too polite to Ford. But I think it's eve moreo than that. I think the problem was that the media was automatically treating him as a frontrunner in the 2010 mayoral election. As I blogged about during the last Toronto election, there were some 40 mayoral candidates, but the media treated only a handful of them as remotely viable candidates. And this handful included Rob Ford.

With 40 candidates, surely any viable position must be duplicated in there somewhere.  And, with 40 candidates, surely there must be a few people who are less problematic individuals than Rob Ford.

Should the media have been covering others more prominently and treating them more seriously rather than treating Ford as a front-runner (and for far longer than a municipal election even deserves to be covered for) just because, like, they've heard of him?

But they did treat him as a front-runner, which may have led some voters to think that he must be a viable and reasonable candidate.  Toronto is a city with a lot of newcomers - both from other countries and from other parts of Canada.  We're probably more dependent on the media to contextualize our elections than other communities with fewer newcomers would be.  How many people weren't completely up on Ford's history but were led to believe that he would be a reasonable candidate because the media had placed him in the top 5 out of 40, and then in the top 30 out of 40?


Lately I've been seeing articles  being tweeted into my twitter feed proposing various people as candidates for the 2014 mayoral election.  I'm not happy about this, because the last municipal election lasted way too long and it's even earlier now.  But this also has me wondering whether this premature coverage is leading to the same kind of premature declaration of frontrunners that may have given us Ford in the first place...

How to tell if you've already read a particular library book

Sometimes I come across a book that seems vaguely familiar in concept, but I'm not sure if I've read it already or not.  I don't really care to waste my time rereading something that turned out to be forgettable, but I don't want to not read an interest-sounding or recommended book just because I might have once read something similar.

The library doesn't keep records of which books you've checked out in the past - which makes perfect sense from a privacy perspective, not to mention what a huge-ass database that would end up being.

But I've just worked out a way to figure out if you've checked out a particular book before.  And the solution is beautifully simple:

Search your email.

If you checked out the book by putting it on hold and having them send it to your local library branch, you'll have an email alert that it's ready to be picked up.  If you kept the book until nearly the due date, you'll have an email alert that it's due soon.  (Helpful hint for Toronto Public Library patrons: search your email for the call number rather than the book title, since the email notifications used to not contain the title.)

This won't work if you don't use email alerts, or if you delete your emails, or if your primary method of library use is to browse the shelves.  But if your library transactions habitually pass through your email, you can find a record of what you've taken out of the library in your email.

What I learned from Eddie Izzard

I've mentioned many, many, many times that Eddie Izzard is an inspiration and a role model to me.  I've previously described it as he made me brave, insofar as I am brave, but that doesn't articulate it as well as I'd like.


Then I found the perfect articulation in this article about the Setlist Show:

BR: Another one is Eddie Izzard who we work with a lot; he's a friend. We approached him a long time ago about doing the show, and he kept saying that he just didn't work that way. But then we were doing the Altitude Festival in Austria, and he gave in and did the show...

PP: Half way through his set he just turned to the audience and went, "This is f***ing hard!" and then went back into the set. He just owned the moment. He stepped outside it for a second, but that just gave him what he needed to go back in in an even richer way.

This absolutely encapsulates what I've learned from Eddie Izzard.  Own it.  Whatever the "it" of the moment is, own it. That's what he does when he goes on stage in clothes of any or all genders.  That's what he does when he messes up or gets knocked off track.  And that's what I did the first time I had to supervise a practicum student and had never had a student intern before. "Congratulations, you're my first student! So if I'm going too fast or too slow, skipping over stuff you don't understand or belabouring the glaringly obvious, it's not intentional. Please do let me know and I'll adapt to your needs."  And that's what I did when I bought my condo. "I've never bought real estate before and I'm mildly terrified.  Please answer my giant list of questions, and then I'll probably come back in a few days with another giant list of questions, and then once all my questions are answered I'll stop being terrified and cheerfully hand over all my money."  And that's the basis of my policy of making it clear how confident I am or am not in any statement I make.

It's given me a massive improvement in confidence, credibility, and quality of life.  I'm able to have more pleasant interpersonal interactions and get what I want more often simply by owning whatever is making me feel awkward or nervous or uncomfortable than by being a poseur pretending to be confident in the way that I imagine the people in the situation expect me to.

Google Blog Search doesn't do its job properly

Being the kind of fangirl I am, I have an RSS feed of Google News and Google Blog Search results for "Izzard" in my feed reader, so I get any new articles.

And, as you might have noticed, I also have a blog, where I've mentioned Eddie Izzard in a couple of different posts during the course of my current fandom high. (I really should start blogging about something else, shouldn't I?) But my own posts have never turned up in my feed reader!  (And my feed reader uses a completely separate log-in identity from my blog, so it would have no way to know not to feed me those because I wrote them.)

So I did some searching:

Here is a regular Google search for blogspot posts containing "Izzard" made within the past week, sorted by relevance.

Here is a Google Blog Search for posts containing "Izzard" made within the past week, sorted by relevance.

There are far more posts in the regular Google search than in the Google Blog Search, even though blogspot is just a subset of blogs!

So then I did a regular Google search for Wordpress posts within the past week, sorted by relevance, and it also contains some quality posts that didn't show up in the Google Blog Search.

Same with Typepad, LiveJournal and even Tumblr.  Most of the posts turned up aren't quality, but at the moment, there's at least one quality post (i.e. tour performance reviews or other things I'm interested in reading) in the first page of results for each of these blogging platforms that doesn't show up in Google Blog Search results!  Even if Google curates its blog search out of necessity, there are things in there that should have made it into the results.

I want to be clear, I'm not complaining because Google Blog Search isn't turning up my blog.  (Objectively, it's better if it doesn't turn up my Eddie Izzard posts because they're all fangirling rather than informative content.)  I'm complaining because Google Blog Search isn't turning up other people's blog posts that I would have liked to read.

How long has this being going on for?  And how many other, more important, searches does this also affect?

In my post speculating whether Web 2.0 makes information less accessible, I wrote:

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.

What if, all this time, the blog reviews I'm looking for have in fact been out there, but Google has made them less searchable or less findable?

It's kind of scary, the extent to which Google can influence our concept of what does and doesn't actually exist.  But, at the same time, no other search engine finds stuff as well as Google.  I just don't know if we can trust it to confirm or refute existence...

Fact-checking

Being the kind of fangirl I am, when I entered Eddie Izzard fandom I read every current and past article I could get my hands on, and continue to read every article where he's mentioned. (I have a google alert set up and everything.)

And one thing I've noticed in reading all these articles on a very specific subject with a rather narrow scope is the frequency with which they reuse quotes or statements or information from old articles, without regard for whether that information is still current.

The example of this that I find most egregious is the oft-repeated statement, most recently seen in Post City, that Eddie raised over £200,000 for Sport Relief when he ran 43 marathons in 51 days in 2010.

This statement is completely true.  And it is completely misleading.  Because Eddie did in fact raise well over £1 million with his marathons.

I blogged about it when it happened.  The now-defunct video I'd linked to in my blog (which I so wish was still alive because it would completely prove my point) was from the Sport Relief 2010 broadcast.  Eddie himself also confirmed the 1.6 million number on Twitter. There's also a BBC article with the million pound number prominently featured, an article in the UK newspaper The Guardian citing 1.8 million, and an archived Sport Relief page from when the total was 1.1 million.

The fact that the number is over a million is important, because that's commensurate with the number of Twitter followers Eddie has.  In my blog post linked above, I mentioned that it was more than the number of followers he had at the time.  There's a huge difference between raising an amount of money commensurate with your number of Twitter followers and raising exponentially less money, especially with a feat so ridiculous as 43 marathons in 51 days.  (Analogy: I have 189 Twitter followers.  If I were to attempt to raise money, raising $189 is a reasonable expectation.  However, raising $40 would not be gloat-worthy at all.  And if I were doing multiple marathons, raising $40 would be pretty much a failure.)

Eddie deserves full credit for raising an amount of money commensurate with his feat and his audience reach, but because of citogenesis (although not necessarily through Wikipedia in this case) he isn't always getting it.

And this leads me to wonder: what other defunct or misleading statements are making it into media reports, perhaps on more important subjeccts?

That thing I do where I go to see Eddie Izzard and then brainspew disconnectedly all over my blog

Most of the times I saw Eddie Izzard material for the first time were alone, in my apartment, watching YouTube.

The last time I heard Eddie Izzard material for the first time was almost 5 years ago, lying in bed in the dark listening to an audio bootleg of one of his Stripped shows.

Today, I saw new Eddie Izzard material for the first time sitting front row centre in Massey Hall with my two very best friends in the whole world!

I highly recommend it.

I repeat: front row centre. Front row centre.  Front row centre!!!

This bears emphasizing not just because holy shit front row centre, but because Eddie Izzard and Massey Hall deserve credit for having a system where an ordinary person with no inside knowledge and no connections, armed with nothing but a readily-googleable fan presale code, can land front row centre seats through normal, official channels!  Since I saw tickets to some of Eddie's other shows on stubhub before the fan presale even started, I was very happy to see that Massey Hall was selling properly and aboveboard and "best available" actually meant best available.

Also, I touched the stage of Massey Hall!  (Before the show, when the audience was milling around. I just stood up, took two steps, and touched it!)

The whole show went by so fast!  The first half felt like 20 minutes (it was an hour and a quarter) and the second half felt like 10 minutes (it was at least an hour). I didn't even retain any of the material for future quoting purposes because it went by so fast!  I've already forgotten and then re-remembered some parts, and burst out laughing in the subway because I re-remembered the sacrificial virgins bit.

About halfway through the first act, I hit this endorphin high where I was so close to full belly laughter than I couldn't even laugh big any more.  The show ended 1.5 hours ago, and I'm still floating there.  I've been grinning basically since 8 pm, and I'm not about to stop any time soon.

Because of the high and the rapid pace of new material and the intensity of experiencing it brand new for the first time live and in person and up close and personal, I can't even review the material!  I can't even compare it to other shows!  I'll seriously have to buy the DVD to figure out how I like it compared with other shows!

We still really need a way to communicate to Eddie on stage that we're listening with rapt attention.  When he was talking about how we use French-derived words for meat instead of the Anglo-Saxon-derived words we used for the animals (cow = boeuf = beef) we were agreeing and listening and waiting to hear what he said next, but he read the room as not following or not entertained or something.  Which isn't true!  What he was saying was true and interesting and one of my favourite things about English etymology and we couldn't wait to see what else he had to say about it, it just wasn't making us belly laugh.

I normally tweet a welcome to any visiting celebrities, but Eddie arrived right at the peak of the Rob Ford gong show, so I didn't quite feel right about welcoming anyone into this mess.  But perhaps it's good thing for a comedian, because it provides a wealth of material!  Eddie did a bit about Ford at the beginning and then had smoking crack as a callback punchline throughout.  Twitter tells me that in the earlier shows this week, he got 20 minutes of quality material out of it.  Imagine walking into a city as a comedian and it hands you 20 minutes of material that didn't exist the day before!  On one hand, maybe this will make him like us and come back!  On the other hand, I don't want my city to still be so rich in comedy material next time!

Eddie looks absolutely fantastically gorgeous during this tour!  Best I've seen him look in real time! The clean-shaven look really suits him, even when he's not going fully femme.

And my absolute favourite part of tonight was that instead of doing the stage door autograph thing, Eddie came back onstage and did a Q&A session!  He sat down right on the edge of the stage and took questions from the audience!  I vastly prefer that because you get to feel like you're part of a more intimate conversation even if you don't have anything to contribute!  I didn't have any questions, so I just sat there and enjoyed and felt like I was getting to be a part of the conversation without the risk of making an ass of myself.

Eddie is so good at including the whole room that even though we were front and centre and really really close to him during the Q&A, we didn't feel any more included in the conversation than anyone else.  He was deliberately calling on question-askers who were further back and not giving us any particular attention.  All of which was very fair and equitable, of course, I'm just very impressed that he can do that!  It's got to be difficult not to favour people who are nearly within arm's reach and within easy conversational distance!  (We still got to enjoy proximity and skinny jeans and such, so I feel like we won.)

(I'm also happy about the Q&A in my ongoing tradition of interpreting everything as being the result of my influence as a blogger.  Eddie did Q&As earlier in the Stripped tour, but didn't do them for us.  I did express my disappointment on the internet that we got stage door instead of Q&A.  And this time we got a Q&A!  Also, last time I also expressed concern that the tickets available through Ticketmaster weren't the same as the tickets available though the Massey Hall box office, with far better tickets being available through Massey Hall (Massey Hall put us in the second row when Ticketmaster was putting us on the balcony), and this time the Toronto tickets were through Massey Hall only with Ticketmaster not involved at all!)

Next time there's an It Gets Better or Letter To Your Younger Self or similar meme floating around, this evening is something that I am totally going to tell my younger self about.  This was like the pinnacle of experience for me.

Eddie did mention in the Q&A that he plans two more tours.  I look forward to him topping this.  Twice.