Last year (2021) in searches

I know. “2021 in searches” is a little late in coming. And there will be another one in two months. I get it. These were all popular Google searches in 2021.

This is the last calendar year in searches, by category:

    1. General searches: Australia vs India
    2. News: Afghanistan (seconded by AMC Stock)
    3. Actors: Alec Baldwin (#5: who is Armie Hammer?)
    4. Athletes: Christian Eriksen
    5. Foods: Birria Tacos
    6. Games: PopCat
    7. Movies: 1) Eternals, 2) Black Widow, 3) Dune
    8. Passings: DMX (professional name of rapper Earl Simmons)
    9. People: 1) Alec Baldwin, 2) Kyle Rittenhouse
    10. Songs: Driver’s License, Olivia Rodrigo
    11. Sports teams: Real Madrid CF
    12. TV Shows: Squid Game

Searches at all time highs, in no particular order:

    1. power outage
    2. amanda gorman (most searched poet)
    3. mittens
    4. doomscrolling
    5. sea shanties
    6. affirmations
    7. Meghan and Harry interview (compared to other interviews
    8. impact of climate change
    9. What is a hate crime
    10. suez canal
    11. sustainability
    12. how to maintain mental health
    13. what is a meme stock
    14. ugly sweaters near me
    15. who was ryan white

Visits: 104

E-Bikes

The Devinci E-Cartier

I admit that after being made into a lump by covid, it was considered a breath of fresh air to commute to work with my e-bike. I own a Quebec-made E-Cartier. The distance is one that I wouldn’t normally have time to cover on a daily basis, except this bike made it happen. This bike has a motorized assist built into the pedal assembly. And as an “assist”, it does just that; it helps you. If you stop pedalling, the bike just coasts. You do, in fact have to put effort into your pedalling, contrary to stereotypes, and yes, it can amount to a pretty good workout.

The external battery and the motor add greatly to the weight of the bike. When the battery loses its charge, you are left with lugging an unusually heavy bike. I have been pretty good about recharging the battery in a timely fashion, so power outages are rare. In normal circumstances, if you started as an out-of-shape lump like me, the bike can still give a good workout, even  with the assist. Of course, you can be in control of how much assist you want: turn down the level if you want more of a workout, or turn it off altogether. When turned off, the battery can still power the instrument display, consisting of a digital odomoeter, speedometer, and battery level indicator. It can also show how much assist you are getting.

The bike was about CAD$3000 when new. It was neither the cheapest E-bike, nor the most expensive.

The VanMoof s5 E-bike

But I have heard from the New York Times that there is a new, sleeker bike in the CAD$4800 range that has much of the bulky and unsightly stuff such as cables, batteries, and even lights embedded inside the frame. So, that leaves the bike free of unsightly tech stuff. At that price point, you can expect to find a lot of innovation. For one thing, it is one of the only bikes that have automatic gear shifting. It is called a VanMoof, from The Netherlands.

But like much of what I read from NYT, it is full of breathless adoration for the shiny new bike, and not really looking at some of the downsides. For one thing, batteries have an end-of-life, and you can only charge them so many times before they need to be replaced. Now this can be a matter of a few years, but contrast this to decades for a normal bicycle with no batteries. Can batteries on the VanMoof in fact be replaced? Replacing batteries embedded deep in the frame sounds like a hell of a job. Few reviews of E-Bikes ever mention this.

If you can’t replace the batteries, we are left with a very heavy bike whose automatic shifter likely depended on the battery. In addition the innovative anti-theft system would no longer be functional; neither would the front or back lights, also embedded inside the frame. So are we expected to dispose of the whole bike? I feel that is even a concern for my E-Cartier, since even with the external battery, I have noticed that in recent models, they seemed to change the way the battery is mounted to the frame. It is possible that batteries may not be transferrable across bikes of different model years, by that reasoning.

One gets the feeling that these are not the kinds of questions we are allowed to ask. Just give the salesperson your money. This is the reason I am leery of fully electric cars as well. Once their batteries lose their ability to hold a charge, the entire car is junk. I have driven cars that are more than 25 years old. You can’t do that with any fully electric car on the market. My fear is that the same logic is being applied to the VanMoof.

Visits: 163

Brief comments on Jean Vanier

Jean Vanier

Jean Vanier (1928-2019) was founder of L’Arche, an international organization to help people with disabilities. He was also a philosopher and theologian, who is influential in helping me develop my thoughts on such concepts as forgiveness, which was a last main topic of a series of five Massey Lectures given in 1998 on the program Ideas, on CBC Radio One. I just did a search, and free online audio is available on his series Becoming Human, which has those five lectures. But he keeps coming back to his discussion of L’Arche, and how it is used to teach him about how we overcome our loneliness, fear and anxiety to become more fully integrated into our communities.

While I understand from a CBC report in 2020 revealed allegations of sexual abuse, I feel that this should not be allowed to overshadow his contributions to the humanities and theology.

Visits: 160

Laws of Life 6

Some military “Laws of life” that translate to real life. From Scott Rainey’s page.

If it’s stupid but it works, it isn’t stupid.

Self-explanatory, I guess. It is the rejoinder to malcontents assigned a task that, in thier narrow and limited view, doesn’t appear to have a point.

Never go to bed with anyone crazier than yourself.

… But then that means that if you are following this saying, then you have to always be the crazier one. … Which means … they shouldn’t be going to bed with you.

The important things are always simple; the simple things are always hard.

It is important to know you shouldn’t smoke. That’s simple. Quitting smoking is the part that is not easy. I think that is the sense of the saying.

Killing for peace is like screwing for virginity.

Oliver’s Law: Experience is something you don’t get until after you need it.

A related saying, called the Vern Sanders Law: Experience is a hard teacher because it gives the test first and then the lesson.

Visits: 136

Education is best without any structure but yours

Education. My learning style is to open a book and learn stuff, but only when I want to and only about what I want to learn. That had guided my level of academic mediocrity throughout high school and university.

I guess if what you want to use university for is to answer your questions rather than being guided as to what questions they want you to be asking yourself, then that is the path to acedemic mediocrity. Einstein was seen as mediocre in university and had an office job issuing patents to make ends meet before he offered the world his special and general relativity theories. The same was true for Newton, seen as a mediocre math student in Oxford before the Bubonic plague kept him at home thinking obsessively about optics, gravity, and calculus.

The polite thing to say about me is that I am – ahem – not smart in the same way, but the sameness is just in how other assessors saw us. Frankly, when Covid hit, which is a firecracker next to the dynamite that was the Bubonic Plague, I was gaining weight and struggling to stay motivated and engaged with life. No scientific or math breakthroughs for me. Any assessor who thought me as mediocre back in uni would have had their every observation confirmed during Covid.

I did coach, administer and mark several math contests over the past two decades. That’s something, and it is something better than mediocre. I am now leading math clubs, along with Computer Science clubs as my school’s only full-time computer science teacher. Again, not many people would volunteer for any of that. So yes, I may appear mediocre in some circles, but when the rubber hits the road, I gravitate to what is challenging, and rise to the challenge, while urging my students to do the same.

But what about academic achievement? I had to make up for what I didn’t learn on my own, due to my following my own curiosity in any academic programme rather than follow the curriculum. I never surrendered my natural curiosity to forces from academe, regardless of the carrot of higher academic honors being dangled in front of me. In our culture, it seems that learning, even from grade school, boils down to that kind of a tradeoff. I never get a sense that there was ever room for compromise.

Most people give up their special set of questions to pursue what they are told, and it seems they end up comfortable, but losing their natural curiosity, believing that learning is hard, learning is not natural unless you have a pre-digested curriculum with pre-digested questions to answer. These are questions you are not necessarily asking; questions you are not necessarily curious about.

I was always confused as a child as to why I did so poorly in school. I would ask my counsellor why he thought it was. He said he didn’t know. So, it was unknown to science or something? These days, it seems quite simple. My will to learn was never really tamed or never really broken to conform to other’s expectations. Pursuing learning for its own pleasure was one of the few pleasures I seemed to be able to have in my teens, and the nice thing about this pleasure is that it is perennial. So, as a result, I always favoured the self-indulgence of asking my own questions, doing my own reading, and finding things out for myself.

The energy I devoted to that meant I had less energy for the course material at hand. But on some deep level I also didn’t find the idea of giving up my freedom to learn in exchange for a high mark to be that worthwhile a tradeoff. It seemed that the way the education system was set up was to make you feel less competent to do basic things in life, which ought not to be rocket science. Making easy things seem hard is not the mark of a good educational system.

Visits: 182

Quotes about social decay

Some insights into our current state of social decay, from Tim Kreider, in a New York Times article from a few weeks ago, It’s Time to Stop The American Scam.

    • It turns out that millions of people never actually needed to waste days of their lives sitting in traffic or pantomime “work” under managerial scrutiny eight hours a day. We learned that nurses, cashiers, truckers and delivery people (who’ve always been too busy to brag about it) actually ran the world and the rest of us were mostly useless supernumeraries.
    • American conservatism, which is demographically terminal and knows it, is acting like a moribund billionaire adding sadistic codicils to his will.
    • An increasingly popular retirement plan is figuring [out whether] civilization will collapse before you have to worry about it.
    • In the past few decades, capitalism has exponentially increased the creation of wealth for the already incredibly wealthy at the negligible expense of the well-being, dignity and happiness of most of humanity, plus the nominal cost of a mass extinction and the destruction of the biosphere — like cutting out the inefficient business of digestion and metabolism by pouring a fine bottle of wine directly into the toilet, thereby eliminating the middleman of you.
    • Of course, everyone is still busy — worse than busy, exhausted, too wiped at the end of the day to do more than stress-eat, binge-watch and doomscroll — but no one’s calling it anything other than what it is anymore: an endless, frantic hamster wheel for survival.
    • There is too much that urgently needs to be done: a republic to salvage, a civilization to reimagine and its infrastructure to reinvent, innumerable species to save, a world to restore and millions who are impoverished, imprisoned, illiterate, sick or starving. All while we waste our time at work.
    • (Kreider, 2012) I was a member of the latchkey generation and had three hours of totally unstructured, largely unsupervised time every afternoon, time I used to do everything from surfing the World Book Encyclopedia to making animated films to getting together with friends in the woods to chuck dirt clods directly into one another’s eyes, all of which provided me with important skills and insights that remain valuable to this day. Those free hours became the model for how I wanted to live the rest of my life.

Visits: 123

Social Media Fallout Over Iran’s Crackdown on Mahsan Amini and Recent Protests

Why cover up such nice hair?

Unless you have been living under a rock, you have by now probably heard about a young Kurdish woman named Mahsa Amini, living in Iran who was arrested on 13 September and sent to a “re-education” center by Iran’s morality police for not wearing her hijab properly. She died of a coma at age 22 on 27 September as the result of a severe beating by police. The news about this violation of Iran’s strict dress code was scooped by  journalist Niloufar Hamedi working for an Iranian newspaper called Shargh. Hamedi herself has since been arrested and held in solitary confinement. Similarly, more than 18 other Iranian journalists have also been arrested for covering the protests.

The breaking of this story was followed by protests in the streets, and most notably young women burning their hijabs and cutting their hair in protest of Amini’s arrest. Internet and social media had been disrupted in Iran to prevent news of the protest from spreading. It is noteworthy that this is a protest sparked and led by young women, and it is mostly women taking to the streets.

Marge Simpson, cuts her trademark hair in protest of the Iranian hijab law in this depiction by aleXandro Polombo.

Since then, BoingBoing reported on October 8 that an Itialian artist named aleXandro Polombo created an wall painting just outside of the Iranian Consulate in Milan which shows Marge Simpson, a cartoon character of The Simpsons, cutting her hair in protest. The mural has since been removed by Iranian authorities.

The Simpsons has been banned in Iranian television since 2012. According to the clerics, “[the cartoons] corrode the morale of Iranian Youth.”

“What do you mean you only sell vegan pizza with pineapple?!” The host of Iran’s state TV looked flummoxed just after they were hacked.

Then there was the hacking yesterday of Iranian State TV. The usual mundane exchange between old clerics was interrupted with a masked face, followed by an image of cleric Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in flames with a target on his head. The sound was the chant heard earlier in the streets: “Women, life, freedom!”. On the bottom of the frame were pictures of four women killed or held in solitary confinement by Iranian authorities in connection with Ahmini’s death. After a few seconds, the video was abruptly cut short, followed by a host who looked helplessly at the camera, not quite knowing what to say.

The violently suppressed protests have left 154 dead. The number is likely to be low due to the suppression of social media, print media, radio and TV in the country.

Visits: 106

Coming out of the closet

Okay. I’m coming out of the closet. Brace yourself. I have to say it.

I am a rich person trapped in a poor person’s body. I knew I was “different” from other people in the way that I think that I’m better than everyone else, but have never had the standard of living to match it. This forces me to live a middle-class life where I have to make do without a large house on a few acres of land, a car collection, and a mistress. The conflict, depression, pain and suffering I feel is relentless, and transitioning to the person I always was is very difficult. I rely on my friends to give me the resilience and tenacity to keep me focused in my struggle.

From now on, my preferred pronouns are “your highness”, and “his highness”. I need you to bow before me in order to help me in my transitioning from middle class peasant to a jet-setter with a wealth and salary that disgusts people.

I need about ten million dollars, in order to feel more like myself. It would be an end to my grandiosity, because actually being grand is not the same as being grandiose. I would go from being merely delusional to becoming whole.

Visits: 88

A century of Gasoline Alley

This title card is from the mid-1960s. The comic had already been around for nearly 50 years by this time.

I see that the Toronto Star has purchased rights to publish the continuation of Gasoline Alley, a comic strip started in 1918 and originally written by Frank King, and is just over 104 years old since its first printing on November 24, 1918, around the day of the American Thanksgiving holiday.

The innovations that seemed to impress people at the time regarding this strip, is that it was one of the first to be in color, and one where King took the trouble to show its characters ageing over the progress of the comic strip.  It would then make sense that the comic strip would not have anyone recognizable from the original comic strip. The current cartoonist for this comic is Jim Scancarelli.

By the time Mad Magazine had its own parody of Gasoline Alley (Gasoline Valley), the strip was at least 35 years old.

There was a Mad Magazine parody in their 15th edition, possibly around 1954 called Gasoline Valley. Skeezix, one of the main characters from the original strip, had been renamed “Skizziks” in the parody, turning his name into a palindrome. Frank King was still writing for the comic during this time.

One of the main things Mad parodied was the ageing of the characters, climaxing by Skizziks’s shocking discovery that by his reckoning, he must be his own grandpa.

I had always wondered how King thought up the name Skeezix. It is not a common name. I have spent a bit of time looking up occurrences of the name on the internet, and there are many utterances around the ‘net. skizzix.com is a gamer website. On another website, they are referred to as a fictitious race of humans in a fantasy game. Or maybe it is a goblin wizard. On many sites, Skizzix appears as screen name for a computer nerd. But a real name of a real person? That’s much less common, and would be far from the top 10 of names for your baby.

To see the Mad parody in its entirety, Jeff Overturf has preserved the comic in excellent scans and posted images of the pages on his website.

Visits: 96

Biting the hand that feeds you, then asking to be fed: A study of Ron DeSantis

In other Hurricane Ian news, there is also the one about Hurricane Ron. Florida governor Ron DeSantis, long an opponent of government relief for previous hurricane victims and advising flood victims in Puerto Rico and other states to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and not ask for government handouts, is now asking for government handouts from Joe Biden.

Sending that planeload of immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard, the retirement home of many high luminaries in the Democratic Party as well as cottage country for the high class liberals now looks short-sighted and idiotic, to say nothing of DeSantis’s seeking every opportunity to thumb his nose at Democratic leaders. It is hard to tell how this begging Biden for funds will play out. DeSantis bites the hand that fed him, now he is asking to be fed.

But now the immigrants must feel relieved to be flown out of harm’s way. It illustrates how attempts to use immigrants as political pawns can backfire in so many ways. I get the feeling that he will bet on the short memory of the public, and try to say that he was actually doing them a favour.

Visits: 116

Kayla Lemieux

Today, I was watching a recording of Bill Maher (September 23 episode) on YouTube, and just before he went to New Rules, he had a short summary of news on a transgender shop teacher named Kayla Lemieux. This would be a boring story with a hint of spectacle if it were not for the fact that Maher, who is based in Los Angeles, was relating this story about this teacher who works in Oakville, here in Canada. Because the news travelled so far, I thought I would give this another look.

He teaches at Oakville Trafalgar High School (OTHS), a school in a tony neighbourhood located in southeast Oakville, and part of the Halton District Public School Board.

Lemieux has been transitioning over the past year, and since this school year has started, pictures of her sporting large triple-Z prosthetic breasts under a tight shirt along with bike shorts have gone viral on Twitter. Having a tight shirt over large breasts with nipples poking through would normally violate school board dress codes, but in the case of Lemieux, the Director of the Halton District School Board is defending her.

Lemieux has become the poster T-Girl of every right-wing news outlet that appears to exist, right up to Fox News where it surfaced on Tucker Carlson on September 19, where Carlson hyperbolically called the situation “an attack on your children”. It even crossed the Atlantic to Britain’s Daily Mail. About the only thing to come out of the situation is to provide a “red meat” issue for consumers of right wing media. Other media appear to be ignoring it. While Lemieux appears prominently on Know Your Meme, information is lacking as to how much this is trending, exactly. Overall, it doesn’t appear to be a big deal on the internet generally.

The protest had more police and jounralists than the actual protestor, of which there was one. (Toronto Sun)

I was able to finally find a Canadian article from The Toronto Sun, (still a right-wing publication, I know — and an opinion piece besides) where they report that the anticipated protest which was to happen at OTHS this Monday past was attended by exactly one person who would not give his name to the reporters, but eventually identified himself as a former OTHS student. The Sun columnist admits that the situation really didn’t cause much of a stir other than questions being asked of the board and administators, and that most of what could be called outrage was online. The online people may well be from out of the province and most likely from the States, where the right wing press was foaming at the mouth over it. It still didn’t stop the Sun columnist, Anthony Furey, from trying to hyperbolize it into something outrageous, even though not many people from the actual school experienced any emotion that you could say rose to the level of outrage. There were discussions, there were questions, there were concerns for sure. But it appears that is as far as it’s getting.

Overall, apart from right-wing noise coming mostly from media outlets desparate for spectacle, our culure seems pretty accepting of such people on the whole. It appears to be a lot of noise, signifying nothing. In the final analysis, Lemieux has a right to express herself as she likes, and that right is protected. About all one can accuse her of is poor taste and making a few people feel uncomfortable. The school board — and all school boards that face this situation — have to come to terms with writing a dress code that acknowledges the right for kids to learn without feeling distracted and cringey, while respecting those who lead alternative lifestyles. Where they conflict, the right of kids to learn in a conducive environment should take precedence.

Updates

  1. I take it back. The Toronto Star has been all over this story, but never naming the teacher that was implicated. There seemed to be a later, somewhat louder protest on 23 September in front of the school, but pictures I’ve seen maybe have the number of protestors at no bigger than 12 or so.
  2. A dozen protestors might be significant for a school, but of course the Star reporter would hopefully like to know who they are, and if they are actually from the region. A voice speaking into a megaphone sounded “right-wing” to the reporter; and some adults that showed up were affiliated with the People’s Party of Canada (PPC), a tiny far right Ottawa-based party whose platform advocates the restricting of immigration, and putting an end to multiculturalism. They also want to loosen the gun laws to legalize 1500 kinds of recently-banned weapons such as the AR-15, and M16, generally the kinds of weapons used at the Sandy Hook, New Zealand, Las Vegas, Orlando, Ecole Poytechnique, and Quebec City Mosque mass shootings. Only a few people at the protest were actual parents of kids at the school. The Star is not clear as to how many of them were there.
  3. More to the point, the PPC wishes to repeal Bill C-16 which was passed by the Liberals in 2018. This introduces legislation under the Canadian Human Rights Act to prevent discrimination based on a person’s preferred gender. It also adds provisions to the Crimial Code making those who target others based on transgendered identity or expression a hate crime. This also covers hate speech targeting transgenders. This bill also received the support of the opposition Conservative Party.
  4. Trustee Tracey Ehl said she has received emails from outside of Canada that apparently come from hate groups, regarding Lemieux. Any coming from her own constituents? The Toronto Star doesn’t say. More than likely because there aren’t any — otherwise, that would be newsworthy.
  5. But Halton region did in fact have meetings involving school trustees over persuading the director to make changes to the dress code; and even Stephen Lecce, the education minister, has sent a request to the standards body, the Ontario College of Teachers, to see if they could tighten the rules around a dress code for teachers.

Visits: 93

(Almost) Binge Watching Monarchy News

queen and kermit
Queen Elizabeth shaking hands with Kermit The Frog.

I can say that I have not sat in front of the television for a sustained number of hours watching all things related to the passing of Queen Elizabeth II, but I can see that the networks are trying hard to make it a reality.

Thank God I have a PVR so I can think of other things to do, but still not miss too many details over the couse of time. Most of these docs were made only in recent years before her death, but on CBC’s The Documentary Channel, here they are, all presented in one go, for a good 6-8 hours or so. So I surf to each show on the programming schedule timeline, and press Record, so that I can view them on my own time.

What can I say in these bizarre days of tribalism, global warming, political wingnuts, poverty and social decay, except that this news is the closest thing to normal I have heard about in a long time. Not that British monarchs die every day; but that I think it just connects us to a more normal past.

Visits: 155

100 New words in the OED

This is a selection of new words included in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as of March 2022 from January 2020. There are 100 words here, and I skipped way more than that. I was aiming for “woke” words, LBGTQ2S words, medical words, words we have heard in casual or ordinary speech, internet words, and generally words that surprised me for being included only now, after hearing them spoken almost since childhood.

I will make occasional remarks.

  1. adorkable
  2. adulting – One of many nouns, repurposed as a verb.
  3. all-dressed
  4. anneal – One of many scientific words that have been around for decades.
  5. anti-ageing
  6. anti-black, anti-blackness
  7. anti-gay
  8. anti-piracy
  9. anti-spam
  10. anti-vaccine – So many “anti” words! Is there anything we are in favour of these days?
  11. awesomesauce
  12. baked-in – A cooking metaphor to be used in non-cooking contexts.
  13. b-day
  14. birth stain
  15. birthing room
  16. bliss point – Also called the Goldilocks zone: not too much nor too little.
  17. body-shame (-ing, -er)
  18. bogosity
  19. bombogenesis – One of many novel weather terms to sensationalize the weather.
  20. Born-Haber – The Born-Haber Cycle, a term nearly 100 years old.
  21. bread bowl
  22. breading
  23. by-catch – A fishing term that has also been around for decades.
  24. cable tie
  25. Calvin cycle – Another term that has been in science texts for decades.
  26. chapstick
  27. chatterbot
  28. chinese checkers (chequers) – Both are the same game. This one has been around for decades, and I am surprised this wasn’t accepted as English until now.
  29. christenly, christianing, Christ Jesus, Christly
  30. code-named
  31. colonialization, colonialized, colonializing
  32. comorbid (-ity)
  33. conflicted
  34. contact tracing – One of many new English terms to come from the Covid epidemic.
  35. contactless – Another term from the Covid era.
  36. cook-chilled
  37. cooked-up
  38. cookie jar
  39. Cookie Monster – Is this not still a proper noun?
  40. cookless
  41. cookware
  42. coulrophobia – Fear of clowns have been a thing for decades.
  43. Covid
  44. Covid-19 – You saw these coming.
  45. CPAP – A medical acronym now an English word.
  46. critical rationalism – What other kind is there? So, is there a critical “irrationalism”?
  47. cross border – Apparently, we haven’t crossed borders until the last 3 years.
  48. dashcam
  49. decolonial (-ize, -ization)
  50. defund (-ing)
  51. delete, delete button, delete key
  52. demisexual
  53. denialism
  54. destigmatizing
  55. dox (-ing) with one “x” – Now we know of the proper spelling, although I sense that “doxxing” (with 2 x’s) will be soon to follow.
  56. editorialization
  57. e-waste
  58. fat-shame (-er, -ing) – Really, there is shame or there is no shame. But “shaming” (now a verb) is so ubiquitous as a form of cyberbullying that we now have to divide it into categories. Not sure how that is helpful.
  59. foreignize (-ized, -izing, -ization) – Tortured english words are becoming more accepted, I see.
  60. garbageologist, garbageology
  61. gaslighter – This term has caught people’s imaginations and has been enjoying wide use as a word. While decades-old, it has only enjoyed wide use recently.
  62. gig economy
  63. gotch – I remember hearing this word used to mean underwear when I was a kid.
  64. gut level
  65. henpecking
  66. infodemic
  67. Jeez Louise
  68. jeezly – A friend poked fun at me for using this word in a sentence. Now it is part of our accepted lexicon, and I get the last laugh.
  69. Jesusy
  70. kvetching, kvetchy – Old Yiddish terms which I have seen in general use for decades have now entered the English lexicon.
  71. media literacy
  72. Muskoka chair
  73. novichok
  74. on-brand
  75. passive aggression – A thing which seems to be generally attributable to describing the behaviour of anyone we don’t like.
  76. pay gap
  77. postcolonialism, postcoloniality
  78. price gouge
  79. R0 – That’s “R-zero”.
  80. self-isolate (-ed, -ion, -ing)
  81. self-quarnatine (-ed)
  82. self-sabotage (-ing), self-saboteur
  83. shelter in place – More covid-era terms.
  84. sixty-nine (the sex position), along with its synonym: soixante-neuf – I have to be honest, I didn’t know about “soixante-neuf” becoming so widely used in English that we had adpoted it.
  85. social distancing
  86. social isolation
  87. stink eye
  88. suicide belt – Apparently, a part of the midwestern to western United States, extending from the 49th parallel to Mexico.
  89. tat
  90. triaged, triaging
  91. vax, vaxxed
  92. virtue signal (-er, -ing)
  93. vote-wise
  94. votive candle
  95. vuvuzela
  96. wankstain
  97. womxn – English can’t get much more tortured than this. Is this word meant to be spoken?
  98. zip line, zip liner, ziplining
  99. zip tie
  100. zoomer

Visits: 150

Blake Masters

It used to be easy to find primary source information on Blake Masters until he decided to run for senator in Arizona. Masters is a big follower of Peter Thiel, having written several blog articles of his lecture notes on computer company startups while Thiel was a lecturer at Stanford. The course CS183 yielded quite a lengthy blog posting and a book entitled Zero to One on Comptuer Startups, attributed to “Peter Thiel with Blake Masters”.

When Thiel left Stanford to start and run PayPal, Masters was taken on and worked closely with Thiel.  Thiel’s businesses grew to the point where he became influential in politics, and becoming influential in Donald Trump’s administration. However, apart from tax cuts and deregualtion, Trump didn’t accomplish much else. Masters was, until his entry into politics, Chief of Operations at Thiel Capital, an investment firm owned by Peter Thiel. He resigned from the Thiel group of companies to pursue his political career, with Thiel’s blessing, moving from California to Arizona, where the political climate is more favourable for a Trumpian like himself to be nominated for candidate for the GOP senate there.

Since his declaration to run for senator, searching for “Blake Masters” on Duck Duck Go yielded results that were overrun by recent aticles by news outlets and blogs about him and his Silocon Valley style of libertarianism, his designs for presidential candidacy, and his connections with Trump. His close connections with Thiel has benefitted him in his political ambitions, in that Thiel has contributed $10 million to a Super PAC toward his candidacy.

My impression of what has been written about Masters by recent press is that he is Trump with more character and discernment. The brains behind him, it appears, will always be Thiel. Masters has seemed to align his opinions and approach to white supremacy, and his opinions on second amendment rights to Alex Jones. However, he does this by questioning our agreed-upon assumptions about racial equality and gun control. He has said that “black people, frankly” are to blame for gun violence. He advocates against gun control even to the point of including “ghost guns” – home-made, untraceable firearms which are illegal in several states.

He also appears to be a fan of the writings of Ted Kaczynski, known as The Unabomber, listing his essay “Industrial Society and Its Future” as recommended reading.

All this to say if Masters is elected, what could possibly go wrong?

Visits: 1251

A momentary distraction: simonsinek.com

Simon Sinek
Simon Sinek

There is a fella who looks like he’s in his mid-thirties, but is actually 48 years old. His name is Simon Sinek, and he had given Ted talks, written motivational books, and appears to be a great motivational speaker, judging by the videos I’ve seen.

His background in cultural anthropology has done him well. He had a BA in that from Brandeis University, and later entered law school, but lost interest and went instead into advertising.

His anthro background shows in his talks, while his advertising background shows in his self-promotion. I went to his website simonsinek.com, and  his bio read more like just another promotion. A bit frustrating, so I went to Wikipedia. There was a short bio on his background. And short it was, since most of the high points in my article above are taken from the Wikipedia article.

For all of his talk on humanism, he appears to want the public to see Simon Sinek the “brand”, not Simon Sinek the “person”. His leadership training for ICE officers and connections to the RAND Corporation seem to be downplayed. Not sure why, since these are surprisingly high connections in American government for a motivational speaker. Or maybe I just stated the problem.

I admire his sharp eye for social trends and his ability to be critical, but done in a way that is positive and constructive. Whatever connecctions he may have in high places that might make us leery, it does not diminish his message and does not diminish his gifts as a speaker. His most touching speeches have to do with what he says about today’s youth.

His website currently promotes, not speeches to youth, but keynote speeches and workshops aimed at staffs of large companies, and workplace coaching. He is the author of 5 books, the most recent is The Infinite Game, published in 2019, a book aimed at businesses.

Visits: 189

Nameless, faceless students

I am curating a list of parent email addresses for this week’s unofficial mailout to parents of their child’s progress reports. I have two — count ’em — two — students who have no parental contact information. I don’t know the kid’s home address, nor their parent’s names, nor anything about them, and certainly not their email addresses.

I am beginning to imagine that some students are taking my fully online course while living in a cardboard box underneath the 403 exit ramp, close enough to Square One Mall and the Central Library to get free wifi and charging outlets on laptops they fished out of a dumpster at Best Buy. At night, they crawl back into their cardboard boxes to sleep with one eye open should there be raccoons or other feral animals about.

To ease their psychological pain and suffering, they set up a moonshine still out of pots shoplifted from Crate and Barrel and discarded polypropylene tubing from the Credit Valley Hospital and cases of whiskey they obtained by breaking into the local LCBO.

Anyway, it actually turns out these kids are from another school disctrict, and so we have minimal information as a result. So there is nothing to worry about. In addition, their attendance and engagement in the online course has been pretty good. Nothing to see here. … Or is there?

Visits: 72

The latest on Elongate

I am conveniently renaming Elon Musk’s takover bid of Twitter from Limpgate to Elongate. Elongate was Elon’s preferred nomenclature for that time when he groped a stewardess or exposed himself, or, hell. I can’t be bothered to look that part up.

But it might be otherwise appropriate to name the Twitter takeover bid, one that has now on its way to the courts, Elongate as well. The Twitter board hopes it can force Musk to seal the deal, and frankly it is so full of missteps and stupidity, that Twitter just might get its way and either extract 40 billion out of him or at the very least, the 1 billion it will cost for Elon to walk away. Elon, being uber-wealthy, can afford tie this up in the courts for years, therby, uh, elongating his freedom from judgement in the public eye.

The reason Elon gives is that it’s about the number of bots. But I just think he wanted to buy his way into a power grab. Buying Twitter would be like buying his own printing press, allowing freedom of speech to him and his friends. Being a private company where he can do anything he wants, he can selectively “moderate” the users he doesn’t like, and allow that unfettered free speech he craves to users he does like. He is a businessman, not a philosopher. He just needs to point to users he hopes to bring back into the fold, such as Donald Trump, and point to him and say that allowing Trump unfettered access is proof that he honors free speech. The appearance of free speech is all the free speech Musk needs.

We all kind of sense this. Since when does an automaker become so passionate about unfettered free speech? Does he allow it for his Tesla employees? The truth is that the 70,000 Tesla employees in the United States are not unionized, and is the only car manufacturer in the United States to operate without any trade union representation. How he sees their rights, free speech and bargaining power is certainly obfuscated by Musk’s bravado and hubris regarding unions in his press releases (or really, his Twitter messages – same thing these days).

Now facing a stock market in freefall (Tesla’s stock has plummeted 34% since January), along with layoffs, and the economy tanking generally, we see a more compelling reason for Elon to want to pull out at the last minute. It is about profit, as it is always about profit. And now he is trying to use the courts to weasel out of the deal, hoping that Twitter will give up as legal costs mount, and the 1 billion dollar severance is no longer cost effective. I think that will take a long time.

Visits: 121

Youtube Comments on Summerhead

The Cocteau Twins were a Scottish band active between 1979 and 1997. The original lineup consisted of Robin Guthrie and Will Heggie. They added Elizabeth Fraser later on, who gave the band their signature airy, wordless, but emotion-filled vocals. The Twins first signed on to the 4AD label after being auditioned by John Peel and Ivo Watts-Russel. They first contributed to the multi-band effort It’ll End In Tears, with Song to the Siren and Another Day.

From time to time, I indulge myself in listening to my favourite Twins tune, and this summer, it was its namesake, Summerhead, from the album Four Calandar Cafe, released in 1993. It was a song which appeared at a certain period in my life where I felt I was making a decision to go on a certain path, never to return. I was getting married, going into a stage of my life where I had to find work, and take on serious responsibilities. This song, with Fraser’s signature wordless vocals, conveyed the mood, the fear, the uncertainty, the excitement, the passion, and the heartbreak that was that new stage of my life. But I was listening to this song on YouTube, so I fell into the temptation to read the comment section. It seemed that there were lots of people whom the song hit them in a similarly powerful way. Here are their thoughts, with names removed:

  • my favorite song of theirs. the lyrics hit like a breath of fresh air. first time i heard them i was sobbing
  • One of [Elizabeth Frazer’s] most heartbreaking melodies..
  • So full of human love and loss, happiness and despair. My brain feels so much with this music than anything else I have listened to. A Cocteau Twin song is like human emotion in a bottle, being released all at once in a beautiful explosion within the heart.
  • I don’t know why, there are certain sad memories I have with this whole album, but, somehow, I feel happy with this songs. Perhaps I feel they were there to me to listen and sweep away everything else.
  • I can’t explain what Cocteau Twins do with my emotions, but they are honestly the most amazing thing that has happened to this earth.
  • I’ve never been loved by anyone but I imagine it feels like this album.

Jeff Buckley (1966-1997) and Elizabeth Frazer got together as the Cocteau Twins were breaking up, and co-wrote “All Flowers In Time Bend Toward the Sun” (unreleased, 1995-96), which I heard on YouTube as well. More comments:

  • Elizabeth Fraser didn’t think this version was ready for release, and every time I hear it, I think I’m listening in on a great secret.
  • Despite Elizabeth Fraser’s misgivings about this recording, I (and it seems many others) honestly feel that this is the perfect version of this song. Putting a whole bunch of production into a song like this would probably make it feel much less immediate and heartfelt.
  • I read an interview with Jeff where he talked about his music. I’d never heard a note of his music yet his words went straight from the page to my heart. He was playing that same night, one concert in Sydney at the Phoenician Club. I didn’t know it was impossible to find tickets for it. I never went to concerts. But I had to go to this one. To go to be with this soul. I went & stood by the entry door gazing into the Club. A man came to the door and said he had some complimentary ticket & would I like one. So I entered as if I was meant to be there. Like coming home to hear my dear beautiful heart brother sing. Jeff was real. A one in a million so rare one. I miss him.
  • Liz’s giggle at the start is heartbreaking. It then goes on to become the most beautiful duet i’ve ever heard. This is what music was always meant to be. Magical.

Lyrics to “All Flowers In Time Bend Toward The Sun” – Tim Buckley and Elizabeth Fraser (contributed by a commenter)

My eyes are
A baptism
Oh, I am fuse
And sing her
Into my thoughts
Oh, phantom elusive thing

Oh, all flowers in time bend towards the sun
I know you say that there's no-one for you
But here is one
All flowers in time bend towards the sun
I know you say that there's no-one for you
But here is one, but here is one...
Here is one

Aaah
La da dada...

Oh, all flowers in time bend towards the sun
I know you say that there's no-one for you
But here is one
All flowers in time bend towards the sun
I know you say that there's no-one for you
But here is one, but here is one...

Keep it going in me, wicked traveller
Fading farther from me
With your face in my window glow
Oh, Where will you weep for me?
Sweet willow

It's ok to be angry
But not to hurt me
Your happiness
Yes, yes, yes
Darling, darling, darling
Oooh...

All flowers in time bend towards the sun
I know you say that there's no one for you
But here is one
All flowers in time bend towards the sun
I know you say that there's no one for you
But here is one
All flowers in time bend towards the sun
I know you say that there's no one for you
But here is one
All flowers in time bend towards the sun
I know you say that there's no one for you
But here is one
But here is one
But here is one...

Visits: 110

More things to worry about

House Prices in the GTA.

Oh God! House prices are falling in the GTA! The Toronto Star has its hair on fire! The shock was never that house  prices were soaring at the 30% level per annum; the shock is that prices are falling by a maximum of 7% over the past 5 months. In Milton, where this maximum is experienced, the average house price has fallen from $1.48 million dollars to $1.37 million last month. While that, along with inflation and rising interest rates are likely to cause remorsefulness among these new home buyers who sank their life savings into their properties, it doesn’t do anything to actually make homes more affordable. If 1.5 million was far out of reach, then 1.4 million is also out of reach. These prices are out of reach for me, even at half that price. Indeed, average condos are half that, and would still need to be half of that half before I can discuss anything (and we are not even talking about condo fees).

Monkey Pox.

We now have a new disease to worry about. According to the American Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the proper spelling is “monkeypox” (one word). The proper spelling may be a tomato/tom-AH-to kind of thing, as I have seen “chicken pox” spelled as two words, which tells me that the one-word rule is not consistently applied. It turns out in the Congo, mokeypox began when they tried to eradicate smallpox. That was back in the 1970s, but incidents have been recorded as far back in 1958 in colonies of monkeys, hence the name. Cases in North America are rare, and mostly tied to people travelling from Central Africa to this continent. The first time monkeypox was observed inside North America was in a person travelling from Canada to the United States, five days ago. It is a weak virus, transmissible only by skin contact.

Elongate.

“Elongate” is what Elon Musk wants you to call that time back in 2016 when he exposed himself to a flight attendant, and was later sued by her. Just before the case went to court, the flight attendant was bought off for a quarter million so that he wouldn’t need to face a court hearing.

Limpgate.

I am imagining that this would need to be the name for the controversy over Musk’s hostile takeover of Twitter, but has now placed his purchase on hold, as he has now seen to his horror that Tesla’s stock was becoming, uh, limp, going by Elon Musk’s nomenclature. His purported reason for delaying his hostile takeover bid was because he was busy looking into the number of automated bots on that site (and thus decreasing the value of his bid to 30 billion). I think the former reason is more realistic. And on the surface, you might think that his committment to unfettered free speech is great and altruistic, but in practice, that philosophy of letting everyone post what they want without any form of refereeing is what led to toxic cesspools like 4chan and 8chan, which led to people posting depictions and comments of explicit racism and child porn. This is why Twitter, and all crowdsourced internet content needs to be moderated. I am guessing that Musk is not so much “investigating the bots” as he is being schooled on the importance of content moderation, putting a damper on his free speech ambitions. And then let’s see if this idea of a hostile takeover is, uh, pulled out at the last minute.

Derechoes.

A derecho is the name given to that storm of two days ago with heavy rain and 120 km/h gusts which extended from around London, Ontario, ripping through the Greater Toronto Area including Mississauga and Oakville, and going as far east as Quebec City. It left in its wake many dead, fallen branches, trees torn at the trunks and destroying homes and property. I would have just said it was a heavy rainstorm with high winds, but I understand that nowadays that weather reporting has become big business, they like to give each kind of storm a fancy name to spice up the reporting a bit.

Conservatives in Ontario.

The election is underway, and the Conservatives are slated to return to power, given their healthy lead in the polls. The best thing to happen to the Conservatives are the Liberals and NDP, who have had at best a clumsy leadership and not the huge following you would expect after Ford doing everything in his power to toady up to big business and his friends constructing outer ring superhighways which will take a toll on farms, The Greenbelt and other protected areas. Ford couldn’t hold his own in the most recent public debate; in addition no word of condolence for anyone whose lives were lost in the storm of two days ago, but none of that seems to matter.

There is a silver lining. There really has been no riding-by-riding polling to get a more fine-grained sense of public political preferences, and this can matter as the most persuasive campaigns are done on foot, meeting people door-to-door, or in public places. While this seems incremental, pollsters say it can make a big difference in the actual outcome of the election. Stop the Split reports that the opposition to the Conservatives would have been starker had the left (the NDP, Greens and Liberals) agreed to form a coalition. Alas, that is not in the works.

In 2018, one riding went Green, 40 went to NDP, and 7 went to the Liberals. Many of the ridings the PCs won in the last election were by thin margins, thanks to the votes being split between NDP and Liberals. If there was a coalition, the PCs would have trailed by 60 seats. But even mitigating this is that Stephen Del Duca leading the Liberals is a kind of blase leader who engenders no spark in the public realm, being seen more as an interim leader similar to Stephane Dion or Michael Ignatieff were for the Federal Liberals in the early 2000s, which extended the minority rule of Conservative leader Stephen Harper well beyond his “best before” date.

Visits: 655

The Laws of Life 5

A law of Murphy. One of many.

Murphy’s Law

“If anything can go wrong, it will.” This is the law named after aerospace engineer Edward Aloysius Murphy, Jr. (1918-1990). It is the law which encapsulates the seemingly chaotic nature of inanimate objects in the popular imagination. That wasn’t how Murphy intended to have his law interpreted. As an aerospace designer specializing in safety-critical systems, he invoked it as a philosophy of defensive design against worst-case scenarios for making durable, robust systems.

finagle’s law

Despite this, Murphy’s law has spawned many satirical and jocular interpretations over the decades. There was Finagle’s Law, for example. While there was no one named Finagle behind the law’s name, science fiction editor John W. Campbell, Jr. (1910-1971) used the law repeatedly in his commentaries. The law is a slight extension of Murphy’s law: “If anything can go wrong, it will — at the worst possible moment.” This is also often referred to as Sod’s corollary to Murphy’s Law. Not sure who “Sod” is.

resistentialism

There is Resistentialism, a jocular theory which states that inanimate objects have a “spiteful character”, and they exhibit a high degree of malice towards humans. This is probably well-known to anyone who has spilled coffee on themselves.

hanlon’s (heinlein’s ?) razor

As an antidote to the nutty Resistentialistic theories involving objects with wills of their own, there is Hanlon’s Razor, which reminds us to “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” “Hanlon” is probably a corruption of “Heinlein”. Science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, who wrote in a novel Logic of Empire in 1941: “You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity”. It turns out that it can be attributed to someone named Hanlon, however. A fellow named Robert J. Hanlon of Scranton, Pennsylvania.

I invoke something close to Hanlon’s Razor whenever I can’t find something I am looking for. Rather than thinking “someone stole it” or “someone moved it”, or “it grew legs and walked away”, I find it entirely adequate to think that I have misplaced it and it will turn up, and it usually does.

Variations on Murphy’s law

  • When you attempt to fix a minor malfunction you will cause a major malfunction.
  • It’s on the other side. This can be either Preudhomme’s Law of Window Cleaning, or the Fant Law of Searching for Keys in Your Pocket.
  • Lost articles will only show up once you replace it. This is seen by some as a confirmation of objects that grow legs and walk away, since once they “know” I replaced it, they walk right back into view.
  • The cost of the repair to a broken item is in direct proportion to its original cost. And the cheap, crappy stuff you have lasts forever.
  • Enough research will tend to support your theory. I am sure you will find a source somewhere that says inanimate objects have wills and intentions, and can grow legs. Somewhere.
  • Cargill’s 90-90 rule of software programming:The first 90% of the software project takes 90% of the time. The last 10% takes the other 90%. Where did the other 90% come from? Yeah, that’s kind of the point. And just in case you were wondering, they weren’t referring to 90% of the remaining 10%. This one was attributed to Tom Cargill of Bell labs, as to the tendency of projects to appear to meet deadlines, until they don’t.
  • Logic allows us to arrive at the wrong conclusion without being ashamed.
  • When all else fails, read the instructions.

Visits: 83