Too late, you looked! Bust out that wallet!

No doubt that you're aware of the scale of the disaster resulting from the level 9 earthquake and resulting tsunami that's devastated lives in Thailand, Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, Maldvives, and other places. As of the latest toll I've seen, over 60000 people are dead. Hundreds of thousands of people are homeless and have had their homes and livelihoods wiped out in a part of the world that wasn't exactly super high on the "crunch all you want, we'll make more" scale. Poor people, and now poorer.

Unicef, Direct Relief International, World Vision, and the Red Cross are doing humanitarian efforts in these areas, but they need help.

Which is where you come in. Got that twenty bucks that grandma gave you? Saved some money by buying that tv on Boxing Day? Excellent! Be a member of civilization and perform your moral obligation.

Both Unicef and World Vision take monetary donations which allow them to meet the food, medical, and shelter needs of those affected. Direct Relief International takes monetary and product donations. The Red Cross is currently only accepting financial donations, but you can donate online or by calling 1-800-HELP-NOW.

And since you don't want to stay bummed out (but you feel better after donating, right? Right?!), check out this car that turns into a dancing robot. I miss the days when I used to watch the Transformers.

If you've ever watched Law and Order (and who hasn't), it's sad to see that Jerry Orbach died on Tuesday. I figured that since I was surprised to find that article tucked away, maybe some of you out there are unaware of it too.

Hmmm, I find myself with nothing else to say. Enjoy it, since it's rare. :P

Turkey writing about turkey

Well, I'm glad to see that two out of three of my commenting readers agree that weirdness is afoot at my job site, and it wasn't all just an artifact of biorhythm upset caused by staying up all night every night in a place with zero stimulation. Thanks Jay and Fictional Correspondant!

I relieved that guy when I started my shift last night. He was in a much better mood, but wouldn't leave! Am I such an exciting and dynamic guy? He seemed hungry for conversation from me or something. I told you the site lacked stimulation!

Oh, and one of the bike patrol guys said that they never noticed this new guy leave the office and do rounds. But I know he did at least once, because every door in the building was unlocked! Sheesh. :P

He also, on his report, noted the time he did his last patrol. Which is odd, because I was on the site by then, and that guy didn't move. Honestly, am I the only one whose report reflects what's actually done? :P

I mentioned having to deadbolt all those doors in my report, and when my S/S came in three quarters of an hour early to relieve me (a surprise that normally would have been great, but I was meeting the 'rents at a specific time and so couldn't really take advantage of it) I mentioned as a joke that the new guy apparently lived in a quantum state that let him do two different things at once. His response?

"I don't care as long as nothing happens."

Oh, that's swell. Carte blanche to be a jag-off unless something happens? But that means when something does happen (and it will, eventually), you're unprepared and unable to do your job properly.

In fact, you're not even doing your job in the first place, since the job isn't "sit there and get paid for doing jack shit". I find this attitude incredibly irritating. So it all goes into my notebook for the day I have to defend myself.

So this morning my mom and stepdad were waiting for me as I got off the SkyTrain. Sounds ominous, non?

Fortunately, they weren't there to ambush me. They'd brought me a "care package" since I wasn't there for Christmas. Now, I didn't really pay any attention to what mom hauled into my kitchen, but I just went and had a look now. Sheesh!

Apparently I'm playing garbage disposal now, since there's a bag of turkey that I could curl and get my biceps up another size. There's some ham in there. Buns. An entire sealed package of pepperoni sticks (definitely stepdad's contribution), cookies, butter tarts, buns, and candy and chocolate enough to put me into a sugar coma.

Also, some highly suspicious bananas that need to be eaten now.

So how am I supposed to get by on merely sullen resentment with all this food in the house? I guess I'll bulk up instead. :P

I've been following the news (like everybody else who's not been rendered completely insensitive by the woes of the world for the past fifty years) about that quake and successive waves that killed so many and destroyed so much. And it's awful.

That said... things like this have their uses for the living. Now hear me out, because this is tenuous and likely to be explained badly.

Australia has said that they'll immediately begin studying to see if it's feasable for them to build a sensor network and warning system in the area. Because a part of the reason for such a high mortality rate was that nobody called anybody else to say "Yo, mondo wave coming your way! RUN!"

There's not even any protocols in place for that.

But if that changes, that will (in a very minor as far as day-to-day operations go) bind a bunch of countries together in a way that they weren't before. And that's pretty important, in my opinion. The more mutual interest conditions that varying people share, the more people are at least willing to listen to each other, and possibly even to work with each other.

And I think the world needs more of that.

And hopefully such "we versus me" thinking will extend itself to more and more of day to day affairs.

There used to be something called the McDonalds Peace Principle or some such. Basically that no two countries that both had McDonalds restaurants had ever gone to war with each other. I'm not sure if it's still valid, but it wasn't that low quality food and green shakes on St. Patrick's Day somehow promoted peace, it was that democratic controlled-capitalist countries tend to have more to gain by working with each other than by going into conflict beyond the negotiation table.

And about diplomacy, and even national politics... how sometimes the various sides will appear to be stalemated over a single issue that gets blown way out of proportion. Gay marriage and "family values" in the recent US campaign. Kasmir between India and Pakistan. Who's got the biggest dick, between Russia and Chechnya.

In physics, when you're attempting to describe something so you can apply a "fix" to it, you bracket parts you can't immediately deal with and work around them, hoping they'll resolve themselves or a solution will appear as a result of the work you do on the rest of the equation. I'm aware that human interaction on any level beyond the lever and pulley motion of walking appears not to be an exercise in physics, but how about bracketing some of these problems guys, and just working on the stuff you can do. Don't get an F on the test because you get stuck on question two, you know?

From The Onion, an opinion poll of Canadian immigration under fire in the US. I love these things. :)

Come on, United States. Learning to accept change is a sign of maturity. Enjoy spending your future begging for it on the corner. Kidding! I'm such a kidder! ;)

And finally, people bitch and complain about national health care here. People here complain that it costs too much money (morons, while it might become more cost effective, health is priceless), and people down south across the border talk about it like it's a bad idea and offers less quality (true, although good care for all is better than spectacular care for a few).

On the other hand, when healthcare is on a pay basis only, you end up with leading paragraphs like this:

"MIAMI-December 27, 2004 — A shared quest for external beauty took a macabre twist when a financially squeezed doctor who lost his medical license injected himself, his girlfriend and another couple with the paralyzing botulism toxin instead of the low-dose derivative Botox."

Read the rest here, at Botched Botox Paralyzes 3.

Fog, inside and out

Christmas night, when I went back to work to start my six day on cycle again, I got there and the FNG (Fucking New Guy) we brought on to take over some of my shifts (seven days on, and sometimes more than eight hours a day, all of it at night wears on a person) was there, yapping on the phone. I thought it was weird, but continued on inside to relieve the guy who'd been on all day.

He told me that the other guy was here because he thought he worked at 2300 (there are no shifts starting at 2300, except for his first day we told him to come in an hour early) and was pissed off that I was working the graveyard instead.

He apparently was bitching on the phone to Ops that they ruined his Christmas et cetera. The guy I was relieving apparently told him that he was never supposed to work today, to which the guy replied "I know when I work."

Then I looked at the roster, which we sign as we finish shifts. Shows the schedule for up to two weeks in advance. After his initials for his first shift, it quite clearly shows that he doesn't work for quite a while, and he initialed it. Hard to be sympathetic when you don't bother to read what you sign.

Anyway, I'd had to leave him my keys for the building when I went off shift last, as we don't have any spares for the temp guy. So I lock them in the only locking cabinet in a room full of cabinets, the rest of which aren't ours anyway, and that's that.

I come back to work, unlock the cabinet... no keys. Fortunately he's still in the lobby bitching on the phone, so I go out and ask him where my keys are. He glares at me and says "They're in the fucking cabinet". Well, hello to you too. :P

So I go look again. The other guy looks. We remove everything from the cabinet. Nothing. So I go back out to ask him where the keys are.

He's gone. Shit.

It's pouring rain and I'm in a t-shirt and jeans. I run out and down to the road, and wouldn't you know it the guy is already half a kilometer and moving like a gazelle.

Soooooooo, since I haven't signed on duty yet, I borrow the bike of the bike patrol guy from the other company, who's warming up in my lobby. And out into the rain I go, moving full speed!

I'm in shape enough to pull some serious acceleration, at least in the short term. However, I wear glasses and the rain was pelting down. Add a significant forward momentum and blindness ensues. Nevermind there are no fenders on the bike so I'm getting a wet lash up the front, and one up the back. Lame.

I caught the guy (we measured it later) 800 meters from the site and said "Hey man, we've emptied the cabinet and there are no keys. Where are they?"

Still being kind of a dick, he says "I put them in the cabinet, look again." I said "As much looking has been done as is going to be. They're not there. So check your pockets."

"Well, which cabinet did you look in?"

"The same one I left them for you in. The only locking one."

"Oh, I don't think I put them in a locking cabinet." Then he spins on heel and starts walking. Asshole.

Ah well, I'm wet and irritated and really I can just take the other guy's keys if I can't find mine. And then write this dumbass up and see to it he doesn't come back to my site.

So I bike back. Walk inside. The warm air hits me and only enhances the feeling of being soaked. Yay.

The other guy asks me if I caught him, and did I get my keys. I tell him, and start pulling open cabinets that we're not supposed to be nosing around in. Found it on the third try.

So I wrote up the incident (and let the guy who was waiting to be relieved go home, as he works a brutal weekend) but didn't recommend that the guy doesn't come back. Bah.

Later that night, at 0400, that bike guy was busy telling me how China was going to take over the world. He's Romanian, and has a real stick up his ass about communists. He's also a racist and hates immigrants. A Romanian in Canada who's a racist and hates immigrants. It makes me laugh. :)

Anyway, he figures that China is working on a thousand year plan. I said "Are you by chance thinking of the Thousand Year Reich?" but he's not. He says you can see evidence of it on Robson street downtown. He said that a few times, and I finally asked him what he meant.

He said "You don't hear a word of english down there. When I came here, it was all white but now I never see any white faces down there." He came here eight years ago. :P

Robson street, btw, is a fashionable shopping street downtown. Lots of different people go there to shop, as suits a city with a major port in a country that's completely open to anybody who wants to stop by.

So at first he was talking about the "thousand year plan" as though it was from Mao, but when I asked him about that he said that it was older, and comes from the old Chinese dynasties.

This is the same guy that I mentioned a few post ago that figures he should get WCB for having to work nights and who thinks that aliens (other-worldly ones) are everywhere, and that the Canadian government is covering up that the polar ice is melting.

After that, he started talking about how if the US wasn't where it was, Canada would have been invaded by now.

He's currently citing China as being the main ones to invade us (yeah, because you're going to put eight million foot soldiers in container ships and send them over to... what? Steal the lumber?), possibly by dressing them in Nike sweaters and giving them fake passports and letting them fly over here until they outnumber/outbreed us (I couldn't quite follow him on this point) and then take over.

Then he tells me that Russia would have done it in the 1950's if the US hadn't been there. "They had plans for it man, you can find them on the internet!"

I'm sure they did. You're supposed to make up scenarios and then treat them as real in order to develop strategies. The US had "plans" to nuke everybody they know, including themselves, to develop the kind of thinking you need to respond to a real emergency.

Anyway, so I asked him again what would be the point of Russia invading Canada. He said "For the oil."

Other than a few arctic places, in the 1950's Canada wasn't really known for having much in the way of oil.

"They'd take Alaska back! Then they'd move on to the tar sands in Alberta! They only didn't because it wasn't economically feasable for them to take Alaska..."

Uh.... it's only been in relatively recent years that extracting anything out of the tar sands was possible without running at a loss. And it's not like you can really move troops by ground/railway across a lot of eastern Russia, and certainly not up to the point of land immediately opposite Alaska. And since that's where a lot of the oil is, if it wasn't economically feasable to take Alaska, why take Canada?

"You'd just end up being a satellite state to Russia!"

I can understand his bitterness. He's about 36-37, and remembers growing up in a very different Romania. But... if the Soviets wanted to establish a buffer of countries between it and its perceived enemies, that's one thing. And if these enemies decided to push back in Romania, the USSR could pump troops and equipment into that place, at it's a comparatively small country. Small enough that you could cover important chokepoints at the borders and such.

But... Canada? Just the border we share with the US is thousands and thousands of kilometers. It's not an easy place to hold, as everything (including the major cities) are so spread out. And there just isn't enough easy wealth here to make it worth the cost.

Plus, we're surrounded by oceans. Expensive and distant to invade.

Except for the US of course. When they get irritated enough that we're not sending down enough metal or electricity or clean water, I'm sure they'll invade and take over. Meanies!

Today I was relieved by my S/S. We compared some notes on those mass firing that happened the other week, and I found out that one of the managers up in the internet department had been let go. But the part that struck me was that his late-term pregnant wife/fiance/girlfriend, who was on maternity leave, was also axed. That's cold, man.

Not to sound excessively like a US-basher, and Canadian corporations aren't angels, but you can really tell from observing some of the changes going on around the site that it was bought by a US firm.

Riding the train home today, there was a fair bit of mist. And as I was heading east through Burnaby looking south, I caught a sight that kind of made me wish I was carrying my camera.

The train rides several meters above the highway below, so you can see a good distance. In my immediate foreground it was misty and dim, with just strings of lights from streets and the manufacturing buildings I was passing visible. Occasionally a piece of oddly-shaped industrial equipment would rear up and present a partly-seen presence.

The mist otherwise continued cleanly south until it hit the little hill that the Metrotown complex is built on. The tall buildings there reared out of the fog, looking like they were floating. There was more mist above them, and somehow they were catching just enough sunlight from the side that they looked slightly out of tune with reality.

It was as though I was in a bad fantasy novel and sighting the distant city of Lud or something. ;)

Later, when I got off the train and started trudging up the hill to my place, the mist was quite thick. But as I climbed, it thinned just enough that the sun behind me could highlight the occasional vertical plane and have it reflect a fuzzy cone of whiteness back into the mist. It's always a neat effect.

A few blocks on, a bunch of windows in a dimly-seen apartment block were blazing with sunlight in the mist. Despite me knowing that the windows all faced the same direction, they seemed to be throwing huge cones of light in all sorts of directions and angles, and as I got closer this only intensified. Eventually the building was too bright to look at, as it looked like how the movies would represent an angel or large group of angry ghosts waxing in power inside something before they exploded out of it.

Then in a few more steps it was simply an apartment building, and an unremarkable one at that.

My book quote for today comes from a character that's a British astronaut for NASA:

He warmed a tube of tea and sipped it, as well as anyone can sip from a squeeze bottle. The sun streamed in. Tea was like an unexpected warm hand in the dark. Reeling with Darjeeling, he thought, and maybe, after all, I did become an actor, finally. Icarus had been a straight bit of acting, with Providence kindly providing a busy coda of Significance at the end. And here he was for his next engagement, carefully primed, all the props in place. Opening night coming up, all the Top Secret Clearance audience clustered about their 3D sets. Best of all (until there's a leak, anyway): no critics. This actor, a well-grounded student of the Method School, is noted for his wholehearted interest in and devotion to his performance. His previous work, while controversial, has won him some notoriety. He prefers to work in productions which seem to have a moral at the end, so the audience will believe they understood it all along.

He smiled to himself. A man with his finger on the trigger can afford a few cosmic thoughts. Politics becomes geometry, and philosophy is calculus. The universe winds about itself, snakelike, events plotted along coiled coordinates with a fine, tight geometry, the scrap paper of a mad mathematician.

He raised an eyebrow at the idea. I wonder what they put in this tea, he thought.

December 25, 272

That was the first official public celebration of Dies Natalis Invicti Solis, a pagan Roman holiday that was later co-opted by the Christians to celebrate the birth of their favourite Jew.

Turning the holiday into "Christmas" (in 336 CE) was part of a pattern of the church stealing various pagan festivals and feast days.

If you're from the eastern influence of where the church is (like Russian Orthodox) you celebrate Christmas on January 6. This comes from when people started to celebrate the Epiphany - the time that Christ revealed himself to the people as the Messiah. Jesus' incarnation - when God became man - was also commemorated at this time.

Many have speculated that since shepherds were in the field the night that Jesus was born, it must have been in the spring or summer. Some said May 20, others fixed the date for April 19 or 20. Still others thought March 25 was the most likely day. Nobody actually knows, because it doesn't tell you in the bible.

Hundreds of years later, the bishop of Rome started to observe December 25 as the date for Christ's birth. Four major Roman (remember, Christianity was a cult until it got in with the Romans, who liked to pick up new ideas wherever they went) festivals were held in December, including Saturnalia which celebrated the returning Sun-god. It was easy to adapt this to Christian celebration of the coming of the Son of God.

It does, however, appear that the birth of the one now generally recognised by Christians as Jesus happened somewhere between 3 BCE and 6 BCE, depending on which criteria you use. The screwup comes from the monk that was commissioned to make the calendar, and nobody wants to change it now. And what would be the point?

Happy festival today, Mithras.

Word up, Claus

In the night of 12/24/07, though sensors woven through the very fabric of the house had thus far registered a complete absence of sentient bio-activity, I found myself abruptly summoned from a rare, genuine and expensively induced examples of that most priceless of states, sleep.

Even as I hurriedly dressed, I knew that dozens of telepresent armed-response drones would already be sweeping in from the District, skimming mere inches above the chill surface of the Potomac. Vicious tri-lobed aeroforms that they were, they resembled nothing more than the Martian war machines of George Pal’s 1953 epic, “The War of the Worlds”.

And while, from somewhere far above, now, came that sound, that persistent clatter, as though gunships disgorged whole platoons of iron-shod mercenaries, I could only wonder: who? Was it my estranged wife, Lady Betty-Jayne Motel-6 Hyatt, Chief Eco-Trustee of the Free Duchy of Wyoming? Or was it Cleatus “Mainframe” Sinyard himself, President of the United States and Perpetual Chairman of the Concerned Smart People’s Northern Hemisphere CoProsperity Sphere?

“You’re mumbling again, big guy,” said Memory, shivering into hallucinatorily clear focus on the rumpled sheets, her thighs warm and golden against the Royal Stewart flannel. She adjusted the nosecones of her chrome bustier. “Also, you’re on the verge of a major fashion crime.”

I froze, the starched white tails of an Elmore of Shinjuku evening shirt half-tucked into the waistband of a favorite pair of lovingly-mended calfskin jodhpurs. She was right. Pearl buttons scattered like a flock of miniscule flying saucers as I tore myself out of the offending Elmore. I swiftly chose a classic Gap t-shirt and a Ralph Lauren overshirt in shotgun-distressed ochre corduroy. The Gap t’s double-knit liquid crystal began to cycle sluggishly in response to body-heat, displaying crudely animated loops of once-famous televangelists of the previous century, their pallid flanks streaked with the sweat of illicit sexual exertion. Now that literally everything was digital, History and Image were no more than Silly Putty in the hands of anyone with a BFA and a backer in Singapore. But that was just the nature of Postmodernity, and, frankly, it suited me right down to the ground.

“Visitors upstairs, chief,” she reminded me pointlessly, causing me to regret not getting her that last chip-upgrade. “Like on the roof.”

“How many?” And this was Samsung-Sears’s idea of an “expert” system?

“Seventeen, assuming we’re talking bipeds.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That Nintendo-Dow micropore sensor-skin you had ‘em stretch over the Realistislate? After those Columbian bush ninjas from the Slunk Cartel tried to get in through the toilet-ventilators? Well, that stuff’s registering, like, hooves. Tiny ones. Unless this is some kind of major Jersey Devil infestation, I make it eight quadrupeds – plus one definite biped.”

“It can’t be Sinyard then.” I holstered a 3mm Honda and pocketed half a dozen spare ampules of gel. “He’d never come alone.”

“So maybe that’s the good news, but I gotta tell you, this guy weighs in at close to one-forty kilos. And wears size eleven-and-a-half boots. As an expert system, I’d advise you to use the Mossad & Wesson bullpup, the one with the subsonic witness protection nozzles—“ She broke off, as if listening to something only she could hear. “Uh-oh,” she said, “I think he’s coming down the chimney…”

- originally published as "Cyber-Claus" in The Washington Post Book World December 1, 1991 by William Gibson

Nothing really interesting to say this week. I met a squirrel in my neighbourhood the size of a cat, and no fooling. I was really tired at that time, so I thought I might have been mistaken about the size, but then I saw it again so either my hallucinations are consistant, or this is in fact one of the gigantic tourist-robbing squirrels of which I've told a certain femme so much about. :P

I've talked to this squirrel, and while I'm not going to report any true rodent contributions to the conversation, it does seem to pay attention while I'm tch tch tching at it.

The Romanian bike patrol guy at work has been crazy this week. He's normally pretty down on the world in a way that makes me a chirpy optimist, but this week... me and the other Canadian-born guy were commenting on an article in the paper about the US's illegal tariff on Canadian softwood, and the Romanian comments "What's the big deal about it?"

I tried to explain how lumber is an important part of Canada's economy, and especially that of British Columbia, but he was in his sourpuss mood and just suggested that we "renegotiate" the deal. After explaining how that wasn't exactly the problem, he suggested we just stop selling to the US and dump all of that wood in China. :P

After explaining the sheer volume of wood, and how thousands of trucks per day is much more effective than cargo ships, he still didn't get it. But he does that, he ignores what you say and just disses how everything sucks and how The Man is trying to keep him down. Gah.

I should add that he's kind of like my heretic uncle who believes that cartoons are the incarnations of demons sent to corrupt our young. They both listen to oddball late-night radio shows and treat them as canon. The Romanian is convinced that there have been hundreds of documented sightings of close range triangular black UFO sightings in B.C. alone this year. Oh, that the polar ice is melting, but the Canadian government doesn't want you to know. So shhhhhhhh, you didn't hear it here, citizen.

He was also ranting this week about deserving government compensation for having to work nights, and having to commute (he lives under fifteen kilometers away). It was amusing, but he was quite strenuous about it.

Remember the bike patrol guy I told about that a screwed-up butt collector told "Buddah forgive you, 'cuz you ain't getting reincarnated"? We drink chai that he makes every night, and he asks me questions about life in Canada. Last night he was fascinated that I referred to "my mother's house". Because apparently a house is a family-owned thing where he's from. He also kept asking about how geographically large various countries were, and I finally had to find a world map for him to look at.

He was astonished that Britain was so small. "How did they control Canada and India from such a small place?" he wanted to know. I love talking to this guy. :)

My buddy Tursi is coming to visit sometime this week, on New Year's Eve I think. I haven't seen him for a year, and I've kind of missed him. We really need to play more games online I think. Or something.

I received the following "article" from a friend of mine via email during the week:


"Canada Goes to Hell"

Did you hear the screams? Did you feel the menacing chill? Did you see the black and ominous clouds, moving north?

Did you sense, in other words, the very presence of Satan himself as he laughed maniacally and tossed around bucketfuls of ultrathin condoms and little travel-size packets of Astroglide like confetti while riding his Harley Softail up to Toronto or maybe Edmonton to join the ghastly and sodomitic celebrations?

Because it's happened. Canada's high court just ruled that the government can, if it so desires, redefine marriage to include gay couples, which it has declared it will do almost immediately, thus solidifying Canada's place as the chilly yet mellow and gay friendly and hockey-riffic epicenter of all known hell.

It's true. It's rather amazing. Gay marriage will be completely legal in Canada very soon. It's been oddly ignored in much of the U.S. media and hasn't really been much discussed among those in the terrified red states except when, deep in the night, from their respective lumpy twin beds, they whisper to each other across the room as they pop their Ambien and stroke their portfolios and curse their very genitals: oh my God what's wrong with those freakin' Canadians?

I mean (they continue), I thought they loved red meat and brutish sports and manly hunting. Are they all just freaks and perverts now? Have they been sniffing too many elk pelts? Is it something in the clean and plentiful water up there? Something to do with those weird French-esque people in Quebec, maybe?

I knew we should've been paying more attention to that border! Didn't I say so, honey? Didn't I say we should keep an eye on those northern weirdos after they dissed the Iraq war and legalized medical pot and sort of went about their happy and calm Canadian business whilst we here in panicky red-blooded America chewed our own karmic legs off in a paranoid and jingoistic rage? Hippies and perverts, I said! Save a few bombs for Ontario, George, I say!

Let us now do the naughty math: Canada has roughly 32 million inhabitants, of whom about 75 percent are over 18, of whom it can be loosely estimated that anywhere from 2 to 8 percent are gay (depends, of course, on who you ask).

All of which translates into a ballpark figure of anywhere from 1 million to 2 million gay Canadians of legal marrying age who will now eagerly laugh and kiss in the streets and confound poor reactionary born-again George W. Bush, and they will flash their wedding rings at parties and annoy all the single people, all while proving for the umpteenth time that love knows no gender limitations or legal restrictions and will trump your whiny sanctimonious religious puling any given Sunday. Heathens!

It's getting more confusing by the minute, isn't it? I mean, Canada now has legal medical pot and legal gay marriage and universal health care and no known terrorist enemies and a relatively successful multiparty political system. They also have, according to U.N.'s Human Development Index, one of the highest qualities of life in the world. All coupled with a dramatically reduced rate of gun violence and far better gun-control legislation than the U.S., despite having the exact same per capita rate of gun ownership and gun-sport enthusiasm.

What the hell? How is this possible? Why aren't they scared to death like whiny red-state Americans? Why don't they want to kill each other along with anything that might threaten their access to televised hockey and cheap beer and yummy poutine?

Aren't they aware of what's happening in the world? Don't they know they are openly hated for their freedoms and their cafés and their vinegared french fries? Aren't they human, fer Chrissakes? Oh, red states. How confused and irritated you must be.

After all, unlike the U.S., Canada backed the Kyoto Treaty (along with 165 other heathen nations). They also spend more per capita on education and less on health-care overhead than the U.S. They have a $10 billion federal surplus, a new record. They are not, as of yet, abusing the hell out of their vast natural resources (freshwater, huge forests, oil and natural gas, mineral deposits, etc.) and embarrassing themselves on a global scale every single day and making a mockery of their constitution or their citizens' civil liberties. What the hell is wrong with them?

Yes yes, I know, Canada's universal health care is flawed and not always of the best quality, and a great many Canadians think their prime minister is a bit of a schmuck and they hate paying taxes and of course they can be all profitable and progressive when they don't have a massive bogus unwinnable war to pay for, one run by a ravenous and fiscally idiotic federal government, and they only have one-tenth of our population and one-fiftieth of our desperate consumeristic gluttony. They have it easy, right?

Remember, Canada is boring. Canada is rarely in the news. Canada has no massive belching socioeconomic engine like America does, what with our NASCAR and Hollywood and Fox News and bad porn and the absolute best medical care on the planet despite how only a tiny fraction of us have access to it while the rest languish in bloated abusive HMOs and poverty and disease and 40 percent of us have no access to health care whatsoever. Take that, Canada! Oh wait.

We hate gays and love guns and think pot is evil but hand out Prozac and Zoloft like Chiclets. Meanwhile (as "Bowling for Columbine" so beautifully illuminated), Canadians leave their doors unlocked and don't feature violence and death on every newscast and still value community and diversity and discussion over solipsism and protectionism and a general hatred of foreigners and the French. See? We rule! Oh wait.

All of which makes you wonder: how many more countries will it take? How many more nations will have to, for example, prove that gun licensing works, or that gay-marriage legislation is a moral imperative, or that health care for all is mandatory for a nation's well being, before America finally looks at itself and says, whoa, damn, we are so silly and small and wrong? Is there any number large enough? After the announcement that gay Chinese and gay Russians may legally marry and grow lovely gardens of marijuana as they all get free dental care, will America remain terrified of nipples and queers?

Canadians. So mellow. So laid back. So gay. So not producing any truly superlative modern-rock music or ultraviolent buddy-cop movies and not actively siccing Wal-Mart or Starbucks or Paris Hilton on the rest of the world like a goddamn cancer. They're just so ... nice. And boring. And calm. And solid. And friendly.
And they simply beat us senseless on the whole open-minded, progressive thing. Kicked our flag-wavin' butts. Trounced our egomaniacal self-righteous selves and made the red states look even more foolish and backward than the whole world already knows them to be.

They did it. Canada made the whole gay marriage issue look effortless and obvious and healthy, and a massive black rain of hellfire did not pour down upon them and the very idea of hetero marriage did not immediately explode and their economy did not unravel like all the sneering cardinals and right-wing nutballs screamed it would. We must ask, one last time: what the hell is wrong with them?

Oh wait. Maybe we should rephrase. What the hell, we should be asking, is wrong with us?

· Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. Subscribe to this column at sfgate.com/newsletters.

Sigh. After reading this prattle, I read an article I can't find right now about three people torturing a teenager to death in Ontario.

Welcome to my country. I'm going to go drink a glass of maple syrup now and whittle. :P

Some recalled holiday toys.

And a song about your penis. Yes, yours.

Hit rock bottom and people want to blast you a new floor

My body started ringing alarms that I was perilously close to using up my reserves today.

All these days of inadequate sleep and practically not eating culminated when I was walking through a mall after being awake for 29 hours and only having eaten a couple of slices of bread. So I ate a slice of pizza, and drank a bubble tea for quick energy while the pizza digested.

That bought me a few more hours before I went home and crashed for a bit. 32.5ish hours awake this time. I'm becoming slightly alarmed at my lack of sleep lately.

And I woke up to find out that now that I have the room to get it back, several years worth of "memories" has been wiped out with no explanation of why.

I had a bunch of stuff (maybe six gig, although probably a good three gig of that was four movies) that had pictures, text files, and little things that I've been carting around for a long time sitting on the drive of my ex's machine. Memories, really.

Now, she'd told me the other week she wanted to nuke her machine and install some flavour of Linux, so I had to get that stuff back.. so I just took care of that. All that was left was arranging a mutually beneficial time, since if you ignore the movies (which I would have) it would still take a while to grab three gig.

I awoke to a message in msn from her saying she needs to format her drive today, am I around to get those files? Indication on the phone that she called but didn't leave a message. And an email in my hotmail with a 6.6 meg attachment saying "My computer went kaput and this is all I could save". The .rar file with the 6.6 is corrupt too. Yay.

Since there was no reason for the loss given, I called her up to inquire. And I immediately got some attitude. I wasn't being demanding, I just wanted to know what had happened, Christ.

And when I got the attitude, it made me wonder a bit if this was all just a smokescreen because she was impatient of waiting and wanted that Linux on her machine now.

I mean, I had pictures of my dad on that computer that I don't have anywhere else. He's dead now, so it's not like I'll be getting any new ones. I'm not sure if any of the rest of my family still has them. Got pics from others that are irreplaceable too. Memories, as I said. Am I so out of line in wondering what happened?

Apparently.

So if something unexpected genuinely happened, and she attempted to save what she could, kudos to her. If she just decided that NOW was the time to nuke and pave, and to hell with my stuff, then lame. The brush-off on the phone spoke volumes for the latter version.

Who knew I could provoke a response?

The people at work are different now.

Rather than gathering in the atrium/cafeteria before work and eating and drinking and babbling on animatedly to each other, they don't socialize like that now. Strange groupings (meaning people that I don't normally associate as interacting) of three seem to be the de facto, and they stand in areas of the building that are always just around a corner, as though they want to be shielded from view on a psychological level.

Also, oddly, everybody seems to be wearing a lot more perfume/cologne.

Nothing happened last night, on my eighth straight shift in a row. Except that at about 0500 or so the air pressure outside dropped so much compared to what the environmental systems in the building create that when I'd push the release on the heavy doors, they'd BLAST open. I spent a fair bit of the last couple of hours of my shift standing by the front door and opening them for people before they got close enough to get smashed in the face, which is what would have happened.

Eventually the pressure rose I guess, since the doors didn't fly open so much. And when the time for the magnetic locks to auto-release for the day, one of the doors just sort of held itself open in the warm breeze coming from inside. I might add that I have to really push on these doors to move them, so the pressure differential was no little thing.

Had alarms from all over the building from doors that weren't shutting, or were trying to rattle free from their frames in the pressure. Damn strange.

After work, I shot down to a shoe store that my mom likes and wanted to meet me at. See if you can guess what she's getting me for Christmas. ;)

I have a fairly poor grasp of fashion, both of what's fashionable and why that's an important concept. So as long as they were comfortable, I was happy to let her and the sales attendant pick out something. Turns out that the one she really liked doesn't actually fit me, they don't have a pair that would in stock, and it's been discontinued so they can't order them. But she found something close, and they're ordering them. I'm glad that worked out. :)

But after the shoe store, as she was driving me home, it came up that she and my brother had read my blog concerning my birthday and felt I had been very aggressive and even kind of condescending about it.

Which surprised me, since that's not how I felt about it, and not how I remembered feeling when I wrote what I wrote.

The gist I was trying to get across was that yes it's appreciated when someone says happy birthday to me, but no it's not appreciated if the person saying it is going to dog me with it until I'm pumped up and excited, since I'm never going to be.

Anybody who isn't my family but knows me knows that I don't tell people when my birthday is. That isn't a ploy, it's so that nobody does anything for it. And especially so that people don't feel that they have to do something for it.

Most people are aware that my birthday is in the winter, and often they also know it's in Dismember... er, December, but rarely do they know when. So that tends to kill any of their tendencies to do anything about it.

Once my birthday is past, if they ask, I'll tell them when it was. So far, nobody has remembered the date the following year, and that's what I count on.

A quote from an email I got today, from someone that was once my girlfriend and right now is... I don't know. Both a girl and a friend, although in what combination I can't say: "I even tried extra hard to get to email for your Birthday (being one fo the few who knows it) ;) ".

She found the date because years ago I was playing pool and kept my wallet in my jacket, and it was hanging on a chair, and she was determined to find out when my birthday is. That was my girlfriend at the time. Significant others and family (and even certain friends) have a lot of leeway in this matter, since I don't bitch them out about doing my birthday, but this one definitely had a good grip on how I felt about things. She would let it go by with a couple of private words in the morning, and a present that I could open and then kiss her thanks for. I wonder if her insight came from having her birthday on Christmas Day.

I would like to say though, and this may come across a bit aggressive, that for years the same people have asked me what I wanted for my birthday, and I've very often said "nothing" or "I don't need anything you can give me". For years. And nobody ever listens.

Do they think I'm being cute? This isn't some sort of false modesty or anything, it's that I just don't want to go through all of that again. Yes, I've appreciated what I've got in the past. No, I'm not going to gush over it. And no, I probably can't give you the response that will make you feel good about what you gave me. So please, can't you guys just stop stressing me (and possibly yourselves, depending on how it goes) and not do my birthday despite me?

And you know, how do you suppose it's made me feel for all of these years that my opinion on myself is held in such low regard that I fairly consistantly say what I want for my birthday, and nobody bothers to think that I mean it? You all know better than me how I should be? Ouch.

Yes, it's nice that you got the kind of cake I've liked since I was a kid made authentically. Yes, the presents were wonderful, and I really mean that. It's great that you took me to dinner. Ever notice that when I don't get everybody else to say where they'd like to go, I often pick a ridiculously close place?

That's because less distance = less time doing the birthday thing.

Really, I find it incredibly stressful that I'm expected to participate in this thing that I just don't want to do. So say happy birthday if you want, I'll say "thanks".

Don't force it on me. I don't force you to do things, at worst I'll change things by altering my level of involvement in them. At least that's how I see it. Sorry if I've hurt anybody's feelings, that's not how it was meant.

My mom said that my brother was disappointed or hurt that he couldn't do anything/call me on my birthday. And that he said something along the lines of "Why piss him off any more?". I said that I was surprised that I didn't get a happy birthday from him, even in an email. In fact, he was one of the three that I was surprised about.

Know why I was surprised? Because although I'm sure I'll hear "I never knew you felt this way about your birthday!" from some, it isn't new. And I was surprised because since when did anybody ever take what I said about it seriously?

Comments? Matt or Fictional Correspondant, you actually reply to these things sometime. What do you think? Am I being too misanthropic here? And if you're happen to be on the applecart of those that find it's unpleasant to reply when I ask for your opinion, don't feel any stress to.

Well, I just spent the past two or three hours writing this (not solid of course), shifting stuff around and editing. It still reads like I hacked it out with a machete, but that's as good as I can do. I've had no sleep for close to an entire diurn and I'm sure my brain is smaller because of it.

Perhaps later I'll post something interesting, if I find anything and I remember.

Krampus had a bumper crop this year

Seventy three people.

That's how many got terminated at my site. Five hundred overall in Canada - practically a third of their staff. And the dollars that are saved by this short-term action are funneled south to Boston, I think. Bah.

Talking to some of the employees this morning, many with tears in their eyes as they recounted the previous day, you can see the shock. They knew something would change, but not like this.

I guess what happened is that on Wednesday morning, everybody received an email at work. They were told to shut down their stations, their phones, and whatever else they were doing. And they were told a location to go to, usually one of the many conference rooms on site.

So the people in their departments or divisions or groupings, since they were uncertain and nervous, would talk to each other as they read them. "I'm going to room 105." "Me too." "Me too - I guess we're all together."

The more people in a room, the safer they felt. So when one of their number would say something like "Uh, I'm supposed to go to 305..." it was obvious what was up.

The vice president addressed the largest group of people, and apparently she broke into tears very quickly. At this point the people she was talking to didn't know if they were still employed or not. But they were.

They gathered the doomed together in a few rooms and terminated them en masse.

Of course, they got some sort of buyout package, but this was literally a no-notice sort of thing. And at this company, I've learned, there are husbands and wives, mothers and sons, sisters and brothers... many of which have had one of their number go while the other remains.

Many people seem utterly hollowed and devastated.

Also, I was told by a few people that the extra security we had on site (they were in blazers, not my neon yellow jacket) were intimidating and they would have preferred me there. That was nice. :)

They were intimidated because (as I found out when one of them came back to hold off reporters today), we had what I'd call our "combat guys" in. These are all people with many years experience in security and various martial arts to a high degree. They're all a bit on the shorter-than-average side, and they're broad. They're incredibly hard to knock over.

They also can adopt a pose and freeze like statues, faces impassive. Not to be jerks, but because it wasn't their job to talk to people except when necessary.

And that's why they were intimidating. They're nice guys though.

The receptionist I really like is gone. Remember back in mid-November I said I had to meet a woman at the door and escort her up to her office because she was afraid for her personal safety? I got to know her. She's gone.

Some departments got off relatively lightly. Others were devastated.

Wandering around in the darkened offices last night, I could see cubicles missing their personal effects. And although it might not sound like much, one in six people there is missing. You can see the holes it's left.

After a comment from my mom who read yesterday's blog, I'd like to say that in case it wasn't clear, I really was just kidding about my dad having paved over the lawn when I was a kid, or trying to give us cold resistance by opening the windows in the wintertime. All of that was stolen from a Jean Teasdale article I'd read that day. Read the original if you like, it's at her semi regular column A Room Of Jean's Own.

And the only article I'm going to offer you today is one about the police in Calgary using a new pepper spray that's seven times the strength of the usual kind. The reasoning is that the old stuff only works on about 70% of the people they use it on. This new stuff is a mixture of military tear gas, red pepper (oil taken from the placenta near the stem) and ultraviolet dye. There's not much more information than that, but feel free to read the article about the oleoresin capsicum at your leisure.

And my advice if you're sprayed - keep your hands away from your eyes, and wash it off in cold water. Good luck, protestors!

The Man is sharpening the axe!

It was my day off yesterday. Or so I thought.

The S/S called me in, and for today too. Depending on how this works out, I'll either work for eight days straight, or fifteen days straight. Gah.

This will most likely interfere with a visit from my friend Tursi when he comes up here over Christmas. But I'll have a little time to hook up with him, although Gord knows what my fatigue level will be. :P

Someone was testing security at my site last night. There'd be a BANG and I (and the bike patrol guys, if they were nearby) would go zooming around the building trying to see what it was. Never found out, and never found who was doing it. I hope we impressed them with our response time. :P

And you remember all of the posts I've made recently about the extra food at work after major meetings? Well, there is the downside to it all. Even though last night was Chinese food. ;)

There was a weird feel to the night last night. The other guys remarked on it too. It was probably a combination of barometric pressure, the probes from the potential thief/thieves, and (for me) that many of the machines in the offices were on and running, some in standby, others not.

But when the first employees started coming in, you could tell something was wrong.

And that was this: that day people were being fired.

I'd heard rumours it was going to happen before, but I guess that the guy who has been unwittingly feeding me for a couple of weeks is the rep of the corporation that bought the site I work at. He's been there assessing, and finally submitted his findings.

Everybody got an email on Monday, saying that on Wednesday there'd be a meeting.

My company put on eight additional security offices, all in suits, and that's what we do when there's going to be a round of layoffs.

Last time it was just salespeople. I don't say "just" to indicate the disposability of them, just that I can understand the cyclical nature of what they do. So not having deep roots in a given company must not be unfamiliar to most of them.

But the people that are (rumoured to be) slated for termination are the long-term always-employed-because-they're-necessary type people. The ones who've worked there for 15+ years and do specialist work and have mortages and long-term planning that's based on the premise they'll have a job in the years to come.

And as the usual early ones came in this morning, they all mentioned what would be happening during the day, and how everybody is spooked (it showed, even later on when there were several hundred people there) and why they might be terminated, and why they really couldn't be because they figure that they're needed for whatever.

And I found myself unexpectedly moved for them.

Not that I'm normally an unemotionless beast, and it's not like I've never heard of a company going through a round of layoffs, especially after an acquisition... but their fear was so palpable I couldn't help but be affected by it.

And they'd had no notice! Just an email on Monday, and today was Wednesday! Lame.

When I go in tonight, I'll find out how many were let go, and how it generally went. And most likely, like last time, there will be people who are resentful and want to throw a rock at the windows to unleash some of their stress. Or something. And they'll be drunk. At least based on last time.

And since it's the Christmas season, with all the stress that entails, I can't even anticipate how people will react.

I hope they'll all be okay. The ones that I've got to know well enough by name and a few pleasantries in the morning all seem really nice.

-----------------------------------------------

Remember all that stuff about how it wasn't so bad to be a slave I posted earlier? Here's some more:

"Benjamin Rush, MD (1746­1813), signer of the Declaration of Independence, Dean of the Medical School at the University of Pennsylvania and the "Father of American Psychiatry, "described Negroes as suffering from an affliction called Negritude, which was thought to be a mild form of leprosy. The only cure for the disorder was to become white. It is unclear as to how many cases of Negritude were successfully treated. The irony of Dr. Rush's medical observations was that he was a leading mental health reformer and co-founder of the first anti-slavery society in America. Dr. Rush's portrait still adorns the official seal of the American Psychiatric Association. However, Dr Rush's observation-"The Africans become insane, we are told, in some instances, soon after they enter upon the toils of perpetual slavery in the West Indies"-is not often cited in discussions of mental illness and African-Americans, how-ever valuable it might be in understanding the traumatic impact of enslavement and oppression on Africans and their descendants."

and my favourite:

"In1851, Dr. Samuel Cartwright, a prominent Louisiana physician and one of the leading authorities in his time on the medical care of Negroes, identified two mental disorders peculiar to slaves. Drapetomia, or the disease causing Negroes to run away, was noted as a condition, "unknown to our medical authorities, although its diagnostic symptom, the absconding from service, is well known to our planters and overseers. " Dr. Cartwright observed, "The cause in most cases, that induces the Negro to run 4 away from service, is such a disease of the mind as in any other species of alienation, and much more curable, as a general rule. " Cartwright was so helpful as to identify preventive measures for dealing with potential cases of drapetomania. Slaves showing incipient drapetomania, reflected in sulky and dissatisfied behavior should be whipped-strictly as a therapeutic early intervention. Planter and overseers were encouraged to utilize whipping as the primary intervention once the disease had progressed to the stage of actually running away. Overall, Cartwright suggested that Negroes should be kept in a submissive state and treated like children, with "care, kindness, attention and humanity, to prevent and cure them from running away. "

Dr. Cartwright also diagnosed Dysaethesia Aethiopica, or "hebetude of the mind and obtuse sensibility of the body-a disease peculiar to Negroes called by overseers-Rascality. " Dysethesia Aethiopica differed from other species of mental disease since physical signs and lesions accompanied it. The ever-resourceful Dr. Cartwright determined that whipping could also cure this disorder. Of course, one wonders if the whipping were not the cause of the "lesions" that confirmed the diagnosis. Not surprisingly, Dr. Cartwright was a leading thinker in the pro-slavery movement. Dr. Cartwright, in his article "Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race, " chided his anti-slavery colleagues by noting "The northern physicians and people have noticed the symptoms, but not the disease from which they spring. They ignorantly attribute the symptoms to the debasing influence of slavery on the mind without considering that those who have never been in slavery, or their fathers before them, are the most afflicted, and the latest from the slave-holding south the least. The disease is the natural offspring of Negro liberty-the liberty to be idle, to wallow in filth, and to indulge in improper food and drinks. "

Read the entire thing here: An Early History - African American Mental Health.

You know, I sometimes wonder if I'm too much like my dad was. I don't remember him being an awful parent, but he did strange things. He'd leave the windows open in the winter so we'd develop a resistance to cold. He paved over our yard, because he didn't want ants infesting the house. He wouldn't let us have yo-yos in the house, because the faint sound of the string winding and unwinding against the yo-yo's axle drove him crazy. A typical Sunday afternoon consisted of my brother and me helping Dad bundle up and drop off newspapers at the recycling center for cash. Then he'd drop us off at his buddy's supper club so we could guzzle chocolate milk and colour placemats while he went over the ground with his metal detector. I thought this was all perfectly normal until a girlfriend informed me otherwise.

Just kidding. ;)

And a quote I rather liked from a book I'm currently reading. I think it'll still stand up out of context, but we'll see. The quote is coming from a total science guy, the sort who'll forget about eating and sleeping when pursuing an interest, and who will drop his organic chemistry and focus exclusively on meteorology if he finds it interesting. Not one to catch a subtle joke though:

"But no. That was analogy rather than homology. What in the humanities they would call a heroic simile, if he understood the term, or a metaphor, or some other kind of literary analogy. And analogies were mostly meaningless - a matter of phenotype rather than genotype (to use another analogy). Most of poetry and literature, really all the humanities, not to mention the social sciences, were phenotypic as far as Sax could tell. They added up to a huge compendium of meaningless analogies, which did not help to explain things, but only distorted perception of them. A kind of continuous conceptual drunkenness, one might say. Sax himself much preferred exactitude and explanatory power, and why not? If it was 200 Kelvin outside why not say so, rather than talk about witches' tits and the like, hauling the whole great baggage of the ignorant past along to obscure every encounter with sensory reality? It was absurd."

I think that's great. :) I should add that with a very few exceptions, I find poetry to be incomprehensible to me. Not the language, but the emotional impact or whatever it is that people get out of it. Chemistry too, although it makes no sense for that to be so. I can follow along a ways in materials science, but that's about it.

I'm going to go eat something now.

Melee and tea

Walking down the hill to the SkyTrain last night, I passed a couple of guys waiting at the bus stop, apparently finding that four blocks downhill are too much of a burden to walk.

And what do I hear them say as I walk by?

"I haven't tried it in a while, so I thought 'what the hell?' and then I saw that if you have five ranks in Tumble you get a bonus to your ..."

Dungeons and Dragons! Oh, how I miss playing!

I want to roll dice and carefully construct a complimentary character with specifically selected feats and skills, and lose hit points and gain experience!

My game fell apart in the middle of a dungeon back in September, and there's been nothing to take its place, damn the luck. Ah well.

On the way up the hill, heading home after getting off the SkyTrain this morning, I went into a little place across from Douglas College that sells bubble tea.

There was no board behind the counter indicating what they had. They had menus, however. No need, as I knew what I wanted.

So in one of those glass or acryllic tumblers that always looks like they're scratched, the mom starts mixing in purple powder and a bunch of hot chocolate powder. She bustles around while I pay the daughter. The signs on the wall are written in a language I couldn't identify. It wasn't Arabic, and it wasn't Chinese, Japanese, etc. It looked like Arabic to me, only with large loops at the top of many of the characters. Beats me what it was.

The mom eventually put the mix into a shaker. When the shaking was done, she took the top off, upended the little round part, and drank what was in it! Right in front of me! Day-um!

Then she squirted in some coconut syrup, dumped the mess into a cup for me, and pointed me to the straws. No chewy bubbles in it either. Guess where I'm not going for bubble tea again? :P

S dnem rozhdenija, tovarisch

Those crypto-fascists at the site I work decided to shut down the heat plant last night, or so it seemed.

Anybody who knows me knows that I'm pretty resistant to cold, and I don't have to be exercising to generate sufficient heat to stay warm, even when it's frosty out.

But normally I'm rather warm, almost uncomfortably so, in the uniform I wear, mostly because I have to wear a t-shirt underneath the white uniform shirt, as the wardobe lady threatened dire consequences if there was any yellowing from sweat on her nice uniforms. :P

I also have to wear a bright yellow jacket over that, but I've unzipped the lining and it's rather thin without that.

Last night I had to put the lining back in, and try to keep moving. I guess with the heat off (and it was an unusually chilly night anyway) the building shed enough heat and retained enough of the night's chill that it was an uncomfortable time. The bike patrol guys that usually hang out in my foyer remarked on it too - they were freezing various anatomical necessities off. The nine days of Christmas that the heat will be off will be fun, I see. :P

My birthday feast tonight - I got some Tostitos tortilla chips and some salsa and ate that. Also some baby carrots and peppercorn ranch salad dressing as dip. Gord left the country before he could experience these chips with the lime juice on them, but I bet he would have dug 'em.

Gord, I might add, is the guy that back in the day had never really had spicy food. His mom is a good cook, but her stuff just doesn't bite you and make you wrestle with it as it slides down your throat.

Anyway, he'd come over sometimes and get to have some curried chicken, or other tasty treats. And that's where he encountered the joy that is hot salsa and chips. He'd only had salsa that I would consider to be tomato sauce previously.

Anyway, I still remember how he was. He took a chip and some of the apparently benign salsa and ate it. Of course, on your first chip salsa has that lovely delay that rapidly dwindles with additional tastes.

He managed another taste or two, and his face turned red. I still remember the strangled voice calling to me up in the kitchen: "Hey, got anything to drink up there?"

Unwilling to wait, I believe he drank directly from the faucet in the sink. :P I got him some milk, as that helps with the burn, and it eventually calmed down the fire in his mouth.

And guess what? He loved it! And, that greedy pig, he pioneered research into the "if you eat another chip really fast, the new salsa will counter the burn from the previous bite and buy you an additional second".

In reality, this translated into him eating all of it and there was nothing left for me. Then he'd drink copious quantities of whatever fire suppressant was handy. Good times. :)

For happy birthday wishes, I've done pretty good this year. The folks called of course, and I got an email from some relatives back in Ontario, and that's about it. One of the sites I admin I visited when I got home from work this morning had a couple of people who offered birthday wishes, but mostly because one of them had her birthday four days previously and so mine is easy to remember for her, damnit. :P

I was suprised that I didn't get a few more, from three particular people. Either they've read my blog more religiously than I thought they would, or my years of effort has finally worked. Either way... weird. :P

I got less than three hours of sleep again today, and I woke up after having a dream in which I was visiting Russia and on the news I saw that the US had nuked Canada. Ridiculous, sure. But still irritating. Where did my harem dreams all go? :(

Susceptable to music today, it seems

I slept for a while, then woke up too early in the afternoon and did a bit of research online. As I occasionally do when I don't know what kind of mood I'm in, I drop my entire directory of mp3s into Winamp and let rip. Two songs caught my attention today:

Broken, by Seether and brought up to chart-worthy status by Amy Lee. Man, this song pissed me off. The notion that someone would attempt to steal my pain away. It's mine, you bastards! Sometimes that's the fuel that gives me drive! Damn do-gooders, at least offer to take it away, don't just take it. :P

This feeling was immediately replaced however, by Tom Waits singing The Piano Has Been Drinking. If you don't know Tom, he sings like somebody that's just swallowed a handful of hot gravel. And the lyrics of this song by a guy that's deep in his cups... the lyrics are worth posting here:

The piano has been drinking, my necktie is asleep
And the combo went back to New York, the jukebox has to take a leak
And the carpet needs a haircut, and the spotlight looks like a prison break
And the telephone’s out of cigarettes, and the balcony is on the make
And the piano has been drinking, the piano has been drinking...

And the menus are all freezing, and the light man’s blind in one eye
And he can’t see out of the other
And the piano-tuner’s got a hearing aid, and he showed up with his mother
And the piano has been drinking, the piano has been drinking
As the bouncer is a sumo wrestler cream-puff casper milktoast
And the owner is a mental midget with the i.q. of a fence post
’cause the piano has been drinking, the piano has been drinking...

And you can’t find your waitress with a geiger counter
And she hates you and your friends and you just can’t get served without her
And the box-office is drooling, and the bar stools are on fire
And the newspapers were fooling, and the ash-trays have retired
’cause the piano has been drinking, the piano has been drinking
The piano has been drinking, not me, not me, not me, not me, not me

Man, I dig that song.

Do you think slaves had Social Insurance too?

A comment from a couple of posts ago:

Matt said...

That story absolutely defies rationalization.

Money quote: "You can have two different sides, a Northern perspective and a Southern perspective."

I really hope that somewhere in the south, a rational soul has read this and groaned as loudly as I have.

Well Matt, prepare to reach extreme heights of groans with the following excerpts from Southern Slavery, As It Was:

"To say the least, it is strange that the thing the Bible condemns (slave-trading) brings very little opprobrium upon the North, yet that which the Bible allows (slave-ownership) has brought down all manner of condemnation upon the South." p. 22

"As we have already mentioned, the 'peculiar institution' of slavery was not perfect or sinless, but the reality was a far cry from the horrific descriptions given to us in modern histories." p. 22

"Slavery as it existed in the South was not an adversarial relationship with pervasive racial animosity. Because of its dominantly patriarchal character, it was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence." p. 24

"There has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world." p. 24

"Slave life was to them a life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes, and good medical care." p. 25

"But many Southern blacks supported the South because of long established bonds of affection and trust that had been forged over generations with their white masters and friends." p. 27

"Nearly every slave in the South enjoyed a higher standard of living than the poor whites of the South -- and had a much easier existence." p. 30

Well, I'm convinced. :P

Oh, and remember that clip from the Fox "news" program I posted a few days ago? Deal with it in the way it deserves to be dealt with.

"FOXBlocker is an innovative new product that filters out the FOX News network. Simply screw the filter into the back of your TV and never be exposed to right wing propaganda again (at least through FOX News). Using a proprietary technology, the FOXBlocker works to filter out FOX News from your cable lineup."

So THAT'S where it is!

On my way home today, I stopped at the mall near my place.

More specifically, I stopped at the Safeway there and bought some bread to take home. Since it was faster than going around, I walked through the length of the mall to get to my apartment. And since I needed to water the dragon, I went into the public restrooms.

This mall, in case I never mentioned it before, sucks. The stores aren't of much use to me, the layout isn't wonderful, and the people I see in there suck the life right out of me.

And it's a boring place.

Anyway, I went to the bathroom. That's at the end of a long hall behind a bunch of the food court outlets, and around a corner. In I went, took a leak, and headed back.

I was a bit tired, having just got off work, so maybe I wasn't paying close attention when I walked past it the first time... but on my way back along the long hall, which is the service entrance for all of those fast food places, out of sight of the rest of the mall... were some windows and a sign.

The windows were unremarkable, and just a bit too high for me to see in. The sign...

"Consulate of Jamaica"

o.O

How I spent my Friday

I slept. From almost the moment I came home, until the time that I have to get ready for work. Eleven hours. Sheesh.

That's pretty unusual for me, as I'm fully rested after five hours and often get by on less. Not to mention that oversleeping rarely helps. I bet I'll be groggy at work tonight. :P

And of course I didn't have time to get food or anything else done.

Also, the only dreams I can recall is finding little plastic bags of Body Shop shop amongst the debris of my possessions, and throwing them on the ever-growing (in my dream, not in real life) soap hoard. I'd really got it to quite an impressive size by the time I woke up. ;)

Also, there was something about a "Peter Frampton Flat Monitor". Dream interpretation is welcome.

Now take the time to read what they're teaching your kids if you live in what used to be the Confederate part of the US, in the article School defends slavery booklet.

Mmmm, kuchen

At my last day at work before my "weekend", I got to spend ten minutes with my S/S. So I told him about the other guy that was sleeping on the job. My rationale was that if he was being discovered by employees on the site, it was putting the contract, and thus my job, in possible danger.

Turns out that the S/S had already heard about it from an employee.

I'll see him tonight, and he'll tell me how his talk with that guy went. But I do know that my schedule is being shifted around. I'm probably going to have my weekends free now, as the S/S wants me to be the one there in the mornings when employees come in. I'm not sure what he's going to do about the two double shifts that van Winkle does on the weekends, which are sixteen hours long each. Maybe bring in a part time guy, or maybe let me split them with him, so that we each do twelve hours in a day. We'll see.

Later that same night, we had something that had the potential to be exiting, but that's all it remained: potential.

I'd let the two bike patrol guys into the cafeteria/atrium as I often do to get their hot water for tea or chocolate or whatever, and we were all sitting there between our rounds talking and listening to the rain hit the glass ceiling five stories up, when we heard a loud thumpBANG!

Two of us were on our feet in a shot, the other was a moment behind. I started checking all the areas on the ground floor, and they ran outside to check the perimeter. I'd gone all the way through the ground floor of my site without finding anything, when I got a call on the phone: "Can you come outside by the loading bay?"

So guess where I ran? Sorry, guess where I moved with deliberate speed? :P

In the parking lot of my site there's a detached building. It's not part of my responsibilities to handle it, but the people that own it also maintain an office in my building. I'm not positive what they do, but I think it might have something to do with medical diagnostic equipment.

Anyway, the two bike patrol guys were standing on opposite sides of this building in the rain, and the senior one waved me over. He pointed to the forced (and broken) window, and said "The light in there just came on as we approached."

He figured that the bang we heard was this window (reasonable) and that the person was still inside. He wanted to know if I'd help maintain the perimeter while we called the police.

At the low wage we're paid, we're not especially inclined to risk ourselves excessively. Three against x unknowns is better than two. So I stayed out there for about ten minutes (a nice surprise, as some guards have waiting for over an hour) until the RCMP arrived, then I darted back to my site and rechecked the ground floor. After all, I was away for long enough for something to happen.

All clear at my site, and I waited for the RCMP to be done with the other guys so I could hear what happened.

Turns out that they went into the building, found nothing, and none of the computers or anything appeared to be disturbed. So they wrote it up and left.

About twenty minutes later, the bike patrol swung by the building again. The same window was disturbed again, and so he went inside with his partner.

It looks like there was one guy that had broken in, and that he was hiding behind a door in the bathroom the entire time that the RCMP were in there. They evidently didn't look very well, and after they left and he (or she I suppose) determined that it was safe, they made a beeline for the window and escaped into the night.

Creepy, eh?

On my usual forays into the mass of crap that is the internet, I found this clip that amused me to no end. I suspect it's because it's G.I. Joe, but who knows? Anyway, there are porn banners all around the video clip, so if that is likely to bother you, don't click here.

A many-fragged friend of mine sent me a link to another video clip today. It contains excerpts from Fox Facts and CNN Crossfire. I'd seen the bits from Crossfire, but never the Fox stuff before. Sheesh. Check out the astonishing arrogance that gets presented sometimes on the US news.

Speaking of CNN's Crossfire, remember when Jon Stewart was on?

Well, here's his spin on it the following Monday.

And pro-life anti-stem cell research Christians taking advantage of stem cells from aborted fetuses? You betcha! Seems practical to me, to tell the truth. It's not like all of the notes from experiments on people performed by the Nazis were burned, is it?

Oh, and on Wednesday I got taken out by my mom and stepdad for lunch in anticipation of my birthday, which is in a few days. I'd told my mom a few weeks ago that I didn't really want to do anything, but she kept asking and seemed so unhappy to not acknowledge it, that I relented and said we could go to dinner before work on that day I don't remember. :P

Then I decided that rather than change my sleeping habits for something that I wasn't all keen for anyway, I called her and asked if they'd be willing to just do lunch on my day off. They were, and I had the benefit of catching them before they went off and bought me a present. Sweet! They've done more than enough for me. Although they did bring me a cake, which I managed to devour in about twentyfour hours. ;)

It seems that my years-long plan of not telling people when my birthday is until after it's passed by is working - fewer and fewer of my friends remember the date each year, as what is there to remember? When my family isn't around I don't celebrate it. It's not like I did anything that needs to be remembered on that date, so what's the dealio?

In 1996, while living with three guys in a house, I took a book and some snacks and climbed a tree out back just so I could get some peace from well-wishers and phone calls on my birthday.

Everybody expects you to be excited on it, or grateful that they're telling you "happy birthday". Thanks, but try to take the cue from me. I've let myself go along with it in the past when people want to go out for dinner and such, but truly I'd rather not. And getting presents? Save your money people - there's not really anything you can get me that I need, and Gord knows I don't need any more cutsie junk cluttering up my place. I'm well known for my complete inability to throw anything out, including broken unfixable toys from my childhood and spent batteries. So let's all try to do our part and not burden me, m'kay?

Also, my birthday is a scant two weeks before Christmas, and since most people do celebrate some form of the commercial holiday, they'd be better served by spending their money on other people for that then for something that pulls me away from the internet or my sleep before work that's really a celebration for them, and not for me.

Okay, rant off. You still don't know when my birthday is, and I'm not telling until after the fact. Enjoy trying to remember it for a year! ;)

Edited for a P.S.: Ewwwww! I just looked out on my balcony and found a folded over wad of course toilet paper stuck to the edge, and it had rained. There was a big green splat inside, I could see through the now-transparent paper. Who the hell blows their nose and throws it out their window?!

Dig this: "On the other side, it is the proliferation of suicide-bombing that has come to seem normal. Soldiers commonly risk their lives for nation, honor, or buddy -- but they will not kill themselves with forethought, in large numbers, except for the most transcendent of reasons. The United States has given itself an enemy that shows by its central tactic that it is fighting for God."

Wow. Check out the rest of James Carroll's piece "Afraid to look into the moral abyss".

Sloshing brain chemistry

On Friday night, in the same room as the heaps of sushi, there were sandwiches, chips, and mounds of cookies. Mmmmm, free food. :)

The week has been pretty uneventful, but that's possibly because I've been in some sort of fugue state lately. I work, stagger up the hill home, and sort of pass time time until I have to stagger back to work again. I sleep, but don't feel rested. I can't remember the last time I ate other than those sandwiches on Friday. I'm sure I have, but I don't remember.

The days and nights are all smearing together and I'm unsure of the date or even the time. I've done nothing social for a lonnnnnng time now, and I'm forgetting how to talk. :P

It snowed in the city for the first time today. I wish it would snow and not stop. I used to love all the snow we got here as a kid, but that's a relic of the past. Snow on the ground to stay? A rarity nowadays. And since nobody seems to be able to cope when there's just a light skiff of snow anyway, may as well go for broke. ;)

The other S/O that works at my site, not my supervisor but the guy that covers all the shifts that are left (about 48 hours a week worth, plus eleven additiona hours at another site) has been sleeping on the job. The bike patrol guys (three out of four of them, anyway) have told me about it. So have a couple of employees from the site itself. And I've heard some snide comments about "lazy guards" from knots of people as I pass. I thought they were just being assholes, but once I heard about Captain Slumber I realized what it was.

Of course, there's little distinction between guards. Everybody in the uniform is the same, so I'm getting a bad name from the other guy.

There's a door at the far end of the building that we lock and chain to keep dipshits from ripping them off with their truck and gaining access (actually happened). We're supposed to open it up at 0600. The young bike patrol guy who wants to be a hero that I mentioned in an earlier post told me that he had employees coming up to him at 0730 asking why they weren't allowed to use that door anymore. :P

And a receptionist actually walked in on him sleeping on another day, for Christ's sake.

And it's not like he nods off, either. He shuts off the lights, takes off his shoes, and opens a closet door to shield him from easy view. Where can I get a job where I get paid to sleep?

Today is the fifteenth anniversary of the day that Mark Lepine killed 14 women and wounded 15 others in what is, as far as I know, Canada's worst mass murder. It's been a banner event for women's rights advocates to point to, and has been used as an example for why we need various types of gun control.

The strange thing is that I have no memory of the event when it happened. I mean, I was home during the Columbine thing and watched the boring news for about six solid hours. It was boring because it was just endless live shots of the school, followed by a replay of a single evacuation over and over.

Not that it was meant to be entertaining, but I do have a memory of it. Ditto with the Challenger explosion - I was home from school and they broke in to the tv movie I was watching and I got to watch it happen about a minute after it did in real life.

There are various other events like that that bookmark various eras of my life. So why don't I have one for the shootings at Ecole Polytechnic? I've always found that strange.

Sushi and sleep

So I show up at work yesterday, and my S/S isn't in the office to brief me. I was surprised as I was only fifteen minutes early for work instead of my customary thirty, and I thought he'd be there checking his watch and tapping his foot.

He came in a few minutes later.

"Hey buddy, do you like sushi?" :)

Turns out that there'd been a meeting of the higher higher-ups in the conference room that's decked out with the good electronics, and they'd had it catered. The meeting had just broken up, and what remained of the food was going to be tossed. So I was told to help myself to whatever I wanted. Interesting.

So after saying hi to the bike patrol guys, I went off to do my rounds and had a look at the spread. Sheesh!

It looks like they'd started with about fifty rolls of sushi (at six pieces each), litres of miso, punch, a nice selection of juices and pop, bagels, chips, cookies, and candy. They'd put a respectably dent into it all, but there was still better than half left. I helped myself. ;)

Now, I like sushi. But there were two pieces left of this kind I couldn't identify, and the container wasn't labeled. It had what looked like sparkling red sprinkles/confetti on top (and no, that's not what it was), but that turned out to be what looked like tiny eggs. Nevertheless I chewed and swallowed a piece.

Not much taste to the eggs, but those little buggers would SNAP really loud as I chewed them. It was alarming, since they were so tiny, that they could announce themselves so much. I'd taken some down to the patrol guys, and they were laughing at me. SNAP! SNAP! SNAP!

Finally I swallowed it. Of course, there were some of those tiny eggs left in my mouth, so SNAP SNAP some more. Finally it was all over. Except... from in the depths of my stomach, muted but unbowed... SNAP! :P

Anyway, it was a nice change of pace. I hadn't had sushi for a while and it definitely broke up an otherwise uneventful night at work.

Speaking of which, my company Christmas party is coming up next week. I hadn't planned on attending, but I've been receiving a surprising amount of pressure to attend from various folks. While everybody seems nice and sociable enough, I frankly spend more time with those bike guys from the other company than I do with people from mine. Is it really all that important to attend these things? I've done so in the past at other places, and always found it to be a wasted evening. I work with the people, I don't want to be their friends. If I did want to be their friends away from work, I wouldn't wait for a company-sponsored event to do it. You know?

Anyway, I think the deadline to RSVP was today, so the point's moot. Maybe I can pick up some work by covering for someone that wants to attend but is scheduled to work.

Last night when I went to work for the first time from my new place, I was a little vague on just how long it would take. I mean, I knew how long it would take to ride the SkyTrain, but not how long it would take to get to the station. I walked out of my building and saw a bus coming. So I jumped on. Then I realized it was taking me to a different station than the closest one. :P

This probably wouldn't have mattered much, since all the stations connect, but I did want to know the route (even on foot) to my station. So after riding the bus as far as it went along my route, I jumped off and started walking. Then the phone rang, and since that's what I'm currently using for a timepiece, I lost track of how long it took me. Or how far it was. Bah.

However, I was determined not to repeat that this morning when I returned home. Twenty two minutes of SkyTrain dropped me at the bottom of the hill. So I started climbing.

Funny, when you've been up all night hills certainly do seem to be steep. :P

But I made it up and into my place in half an hour, so that answers that. And I rather enjoy getting to walk, since I almost never have an excuse to do it. Walking for the sake of walking has never appealed much to me, without a purpose at the far end. Getting home serves as a good purpose. ;)

When I got home, I surfed for a bit and played a solo game of Age of Mythology: Titans versus five enemies. I lost interest after I'd effectively crushed the third opponent, so I went to bed. For nearly four hours of fitful sleep. Luckily I managed to find the following guide for people like me here:

Fighting Insomnia

Insomnia - the chronic inability to fall and remain asleep - affects roughtly twenty percent of American adults. Here are some tips to get a better night's sleep:

• Although it's tempting to use liquor as a cure for chronic sleeplessness, be warned: liquor is quite expensive.
• Getting more exercise can help combat insomnia. If you suffer from sleeplessness, try shuffling from the bed to the kitchen, opening and shutting the refridgerator door, and shuffling back to bed.
• According to researchers at the National Sleep Foundation, there is an actual National Sleep Foundation. Yes, for real.
• If you are going to take pills to to help you sleep, be sure you take enough to knock yourself out. Watching Good Morning America while sleep-deprived and tranquilized is a hellish experience.
• Use your bed for sleeping only. Conduct all reading, eating, phone calls, and sexual relations on the kitchen table.
• Try counting sheep, rather than the number of of times you've failed as a wife and mother.
• If you got less than three hours of sleep the previous night, it's important to to inform everyone you meet of that fact all day long.
• If you're having night after night of hours-long jungle sex when all you really want is a decent night's rest, go cry on someone else's shoulder.
• Minimize noise, light, excessive temperature - all factors that could potentially disrupt rest - by sleeping indoors.
• Sleeping pills can and do become addictive. Before you know it, you'll be giving back-alley blowjobs for hits of Ambien.
• Remember: insomnia is only a problem if you're employed or have a reason to live.

Well, I feel better now. :P

Now, one more link and I'm going to try to get a bit more sleep. There are some popups, but I didn't put them there, so don't bitch me out about it. It's an article about those Febreze Scentstories things that you see advertised on tv. I laughed my ass off at the writing, so maybe you will too. Enjoy.

The move!

Well, I moved.

Compared to the last several moves I've had, this went fast and trouble free, except for the truck rental place opening 1.5 hours late. That kind of sucked.

But we emptied out the storage unit in record time, then went and had a leisurely lunch. :)

Then we went to my new building and took everything up, an elevator load at a time. It didn't take long at all.

Everybody left, and I slapped my bed together. Mmmmm, queen-sized goodness! Next was my desk, so I wouldn't have to surf on the floor.

Mom had left me a raspberry pie. I ate about a third of it before I went to bed. Then I woke up at about 0400 and ate some more. A few hours later, I had internet!

So I surfed for a while, and the 'rents came over. Mom went to work (at her own insistence) organizing my kitchen, and she did a good job. My stepdad went to work sitting down and reading Bizarro comics, and he did a good job of that. He also helped organize some stuff, and we shifted a couple of pieces of furniture around. Then we went to lunch.

They took off, and here I am at Rimmy Central.

I went to the nearest (and only one I know of in the neighbourhood) supermarket, and it sucks. I'm not a prolific chef or anything, but it's a rare day when I go looking for groceries and can't find a single thing. :P

I'm going to have to shop somewhere else along the SkyTrain route between here and work I guess. Ah well.

Speaking of SkyTrain, I can now drop from a two zone monthly pass ($87.00) to a one zone monthly pass ($63.00) from this place. That, and the larger-than-usual sized storage locker in the basement are the two main perks to this apartment.

Oh, and the mixed-blessing shower. It sucks because the showerhead is at about the level of my shoulders. But it's good because I could strip paint with the pressure that comes out of it. Seriously, I actually looked to see if the far wall was pitted from the droplet impacts. :P

Fucking United Statesians, to them anything goes. Of course, if someone else used napalm they'd scream bloody murder. And yet they apparently used napalm in Fallujah. Bastards.

But in good news, a vaccine appears to be effective in stopping HIV. It doesn't prevent it, but it's a step in the right direction. Read the gist of it here.

And in an odd little note, isn't it wonderful when something appears to be prescient?

"...the larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, the first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide...the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre... The presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people... On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a moron.

- H.L. Mencken, writing in The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920"

:)