Bad influence

You stay away from that boy!  He is a BAD INFLUENCE!

How many of you heard *that* from a parent when you were young?  Even if you haven't, that line is a mainstay of sitcom parenting.  Honestly I don't recall hearing it myself, mostly because I was a geek who was friends with other geeks.  When your buddies just want to sit around eating junk food and rolling dice it is unlikely to get your parents all worked up...  I suspect, though I can't prove, that it is far more often 'stay away from that boy' than 'stay away from that girl', though that is largely due to parents being overprotective of who their daughters date.

I figured that as a parent I wouldn't bother with such statements.  Why bother telling a kid to stay away from the bad kid when that will likely just cause them to want to hang out with the 'rebel' even more?  Does the line ever actually work?  What I didn't plan on was wanting to use the line when my child was a mere five years old; I was really pretty sure there would be no temptation until she brought home a biker with a criminal record.

The best laid plans rarely come to pass though, particularly when they are made with little to no information or experience.  Elli is having difficulties recently with another kid who is getting her in trouble.  I already had to have a one to one talk with the vice principal about Elli misbehaving and listen to her teacher lecture her about not letting other people drag her into their mischief.  Isn't this supposed to come along a LOT later?  Of course you can't just shift the blame to somebody else all the time.  It may have been the other kid's idea but that roll of toilet paper didn't throw itself.

I have to really clamp down on my lunatic impulses.  I want to shout "There are good kids at school!  That one, over there.  She is good!  Follow her around instead!" but obviously that tack is going to get me absolutely nowhere.  The lure of mischief and being the centre of attention is too strong and Elli cannot seem to extricate herself.  I am reminded of another parent who was floored because she had prepared long and hard to protect her child from bullying and to deal with tears but had no idea how to handle her child *doing* the bullying.  If only they would stop being so unique and just fit into a nice, clean pattern things would be so much simpler.

The naturalness of being straight

One of the foolish, misguided, and factually challenged things that homophobes use to denigrate homosexuality is that it is unnatural.  The claim is that in the natural world homosexuality is nonexistent and only the perversity and sinfulness of mankind leads us to accept homosexual behaviour.  Of course this is nonsense and easily disproved by rampant homosexual behaviour in many species, particularly other primates.  Unsurprisingly heterosexual behaviour is by far the norm (that whole needing to reproduce thing) but the natural world certainly leads us to think that homosexuality is a thing that happens.  Last night I found the most wonderful thing in the newspaper that takes these discoveries to a whole new level:  Gay parents adopting children in nature.

Not only is this a picture of cute penguins, it is also a picture of two gay male penguins in a long term relationship who adopted a abandoned penguin egg.  That's right, gayness is busy 'ruining' the institution of marriage and the process of child rearing at the South Pole just like it is in the rest of the world.  It makes me smile to read such things.  Not that logic is likely to have the slightest effect on bigotry of course but I find great joy in reading about unexpected situations like this and silently cheering.

TV time

Since Wendy and I have been sick so much these past weeks we have been watching a lot more TV than ever before.  Of course we don't have a TV nor any other way to generally access the programming everyone else relies on so we had to employ a different strategy that combined information gathering techniques and petty larceny.  Here is the plan:  First off, you find a bunch of people who watch TV and have good taste.  Then you ask them to tell you what the best series on TV is that is at least 3 seasons old.  After that, you borrow their copies of the series and watch all of it back to back!  It turns out their answer goes something like "Well, obviously you have seen Arrested Development, so I guess the second best is Community..."

This week we are addicted to Community.  It is a well crafted comedy but I find it particularly engaging because it reminds me so poignantly of my university years.  The group that the series focuses on isn't exactly the same as my group of university friends (the lack an old, dementia ridden, racist, sexist lunatic for one thing) but the shenanigans they get up to take me back.  Just the culture of having immense reserves of time, plenty of energy and imagination, and a lack of anything resembling a long term plan sure strikes a chord.  It doesn't hurt that a couple of the actresses in the group are hot, hot, hot either.  They manage to be 30 years old and still convincingly play 18 year olds... makeup can do wonders?

Having decided that we need to consume season 2 in a serious hurry Wendy and I began to investigate Netflix and I was pretty astounded at the price.  How is it that cable companies manage to get $60 a month from people and Netflix only costs $8?  I guess it is just sports programming and the news that draws in the cable crowd?  I can't figure any other reason to fork over so much money when so much slightly dated but awesome programming is just sitting there waiting to be consumed with gusto.

The voting booth is the not the key

Everywhere I turn today I see election coverage.  The resounding message is "Get out and vote!"  Of course plenty of people will happily tell you to vote for their candidate over any other and they obviously want to say "Please vote if you are voting for my guy, otherwise... die?"  The trouble with this silly rhetoric is that getting people out to vote isn't doing much for anybody.

Getting people to learn about the issues, challenge politicians, and force the powers that be to be accountable for their BS... now that is a goal worth reaching for.  Getting a bunch of people out to polling stations doesn't help anything at all unless those people use their voting power to actually get something useful done.  There is a fundamental missing of the point going on here that needs to be corrected.  We should not be desperately trying to get people to the polling stations.  We should be creating a political system where an individual vote matters and encouraging people to use that leverage as a springboard for learning and activism.

My vote in the last election here in Canada was immaterial.  Never mind that I have a vanishingly small chance to cast the deciding vote even in a close election, my riding was completely certain to go Liberal and it did.  If we had a system like proportional representation I could at least know that even in a landslide my vote helps the people I vote for to some small degree.  I could stop voting strategically to support corrupt behemoths and instead look at who I actually want calling the shots.  Maybe I would go crazy and vote Pirate, or Communist, or whatever, but at least I could tell the big parties that they actually need to convince me to vote for them and not just against their biggest competitor.

You want people to vote?  The best way is to make their voting be important and convince them to become invested in the process.  The actual getting to the voting booth will take care of itself.

5 Fracking weeks

I have been sick for five weeks today.  After three weeks I went to the doctor who told me that there is a bug going around that lasts 3-4 weeks and I felt a little better about my extended illness but now I am beginning to doubt once again.  I guess this is where I insert my 'I got the flu shot and got sick' sob story and get out my tinfoil hat.  The problem with being sick so long is not the physical impairment but rather the morale problems that eventually crop up.

Will I ever be well again?
Why me?
What did I do wrong?

Humans, having evolved for quite some time around the concept that the only really dangerous predator out there is other human beings, look for reason and stories everywhere.  My brain desperately wants there to be a reason that I am sick, a perpetrator in the shadows, some kind of plot.  It really isn't well programmed to accept that tiny creatures have infected me and that sometime in the reasonably near future my own tiny creatures will karate chop them into oblivion.

I assume it is the same kind of desire to find patterns and meaning in events that leads us to search for blame and plot behind a simple cold and also to posit a God.  Unfortunately although desperately searching for patterns probably saves us regularly when someone is actually scheming it leads us down the wrong path all the time.  Evolution leaves us with traits that are good for survival and reproduction but unfortunately not traits that are well tuned for seeking out the truth.  We aren't well equipped for dealing with raw chance and impersonal randomness that may wipe us out or lavish rewards upon us for no reason whatsoever.  Unfortunately for our hunter / gatherer equipped brains the world really is just random.

Believe in America

The American election is front page news everywhere.  The BBC has been covering it nonstop for half a year now, devoting a permanent chunk of their news page just to American election coverage.  I would suspect in fact that they give more coverage to the American election than to their own.  The Globe and Mail here in Canada felt obligated to publish an endorsement of Obama and around the world news sources and even leaders have chimed in and thrown their weight around.  Clearly the American election is potentially very important for other nations because America is so critical to both world finances and world peace.  That is, they are likely to start bombing random nations and be a major force *against* world peace.  However, I think that just by paying so much attention to them we are actually propping up their unsustainable system.

One of the most outrageous occurrences in world finance occurred some time ago when the American credit rating was lowered.  Everyone expected that the value of their bonds would drop since of course if they are less likely to repay then the value must go down; the principles of economics are clear on this matter.  Instead the value of their bonds went *up* after the credit rating hit because everyone was so terrified of a crashing market they ran to the safest investment in the world - American government bonds.  If this were any other nation their value would have started plummeting and the absolutely outrageous deficit spending would have come to a screeching halt... but not America!  The belief in an invincible superpower and their eternal reign is still strong and that belief causes all kinds of ludicrous behaviour.

Just imagine if the world decided that it was time to stop loaning America money it obviously will never repay.  (It might print a gazillion dollars to repay the loans and cause a currency collapse, but the value will never be returned.)  Their budget would have to be slashed by a solid 40% just to get back to par and that sort of action would undoubtedly create a massive crash in revenues, requiring further cuts, etc.  The only thing preventing instant and total collapse is the irrational belief that America, and by extension the current fiscal order, is impregnable.  It isn't.

So what you really need to worry about is not that the wrong person gets elected in America.  What you really need to worry about is the rest of the world no longer caring who gets elected in America.  When that happens you know they are headed for a collapse that makes the recent hard times look like a birthday party and the rest of us are going to experience a whole lot of that pain too.  As long as we all maintain this fiction that American hegemony is everlasting and inevitable they will continue to abuse it to maintain an even greater bubble that the one that so recently burst.  All stories end; we just don't know how many chapters this one has left.

Put in pot, cook

There is a book I should write for people like me.  That is, a book about how to cook when you need to cook a lot and don't particularly care for cooking or how food looks but do care about how healthy your food is and how it tastes.  The book would be titled "Put in pot, cook" and would basically be a bunch of recipes that entail chopping up ingredients, putting them in a pot, and cooking them.  Nothing complex, nothing that displays well, and chock full of healthy and tasty.  When my parents were teaching me how to cook they really tried to emphasize the importance of making the dinner look presentable and keeping colour in mind but it absolutely didn't take.  I will happily eat grey sludge as long as it is tasty and healthy.  I recognize that I place importance on one sense (taste) and none on another (appearance) and that this is entirely arbitrary.

The trouble with my curmudgeonly ways when it comes to food is that Wendy gets very excited about new recipes that look good.  She likes reading food blogs and buying recipe books and ends up all pumped up about a new recipe she wants me to try because it looked so delicious in the pictures.  I, on the other hand, just get irritable that I need to figure out a new recipe, keep new things stocked in my kitchen, and in general do something outside of my rut.  I *like* my rut, dammit!  I am aware that I deserve no sympathy whatsoever for my plight of having to cook new and interesting dinners once in awhile but since the internet seems mostly about having a forum to bitch about nothing...

The obvious solution to the problem is to have Wendy be the cook and me work.  She could be creative, or boring, or whatever when it comes to food and I would just be happy to have something to eat.  It is a little more complicated than that though because she cares about other things too like having a career, and doing things that matter, and getting out of the house.  Those things just don't mesh well with sitting around the house cooking.  Sitting around home building games nobody will ever play, on the other hand, has some very nice synergy with getting meals on the table in time.

Science fiction sometimes suggests that in the future we will all eat grey, featureless nutrient cubes and real food will be considered an anachronism.  Most people, I suspect, would have a lot of trouble with that and would really miss the physical experience of eating.  Not me though.  Sign me up for some food cubes and give me more time to do things!