Blessed by the Potato

Well, it’s been a slow week in the blogosphere (I can’t believe I’m using the blog jargon now… ugh).

Most of my Canadian friends/regular reads still seem to be reeling from the election (Conservatives? Balance of power in the Bloc’s hands? Seriously? What’s wrong with kids these days). I, myself had almost a week off from the web page, following having something very uncomfortable shoved in a place where things do not go back in, which was itself followed by the flu. I smell sick now, and I hate that (it also usually means I’m in for a big nasty week-long flu). That is what’s keeping me up at the moment, writing truly uninspired blog posts that will haunt my archives, forever wishing that I could expunge their uselessness. DJ_Paradise has been putting up a few entries, but still hasn’t added my live journal account to his friends list, so I still can’t post comments (though I’m not even sure live journal sent it out; I got so many errors registering and all that there). I don’t know what exactly he’s up to, but he’s talking about government forms and storing his stuff, so I’m thinking he unwittingly signed up for a military tour of Afghanistan, or he’s getting a job in another country. Netbug’s been dead silent, and we’re still waiting on Baum’s update (with pictures!) after his trip out West.

Thanks to Michael Giest (whose blog I’ve been checking weekly since I was sent there by the CBC to learn more about the Sam Bulte scandal) I found out that a Canadian record company has stood up to the RIAA prosecuting teens for downloading music in the states, offering to pay the legal fees of the hapless teenager in his fight against the RIAA. Makes me want to go out and buy that BNL Christmas album after all. In a similar vein, here’s a funny parody of the MPAA warnings prior to watching a movie on DVD. Interestingly, the RIAA is demanding that the boy, who has 600 “suspect” songs on his computer pay $9000 in damages ($4500 if he pays by a certain date, without fighting it in court). That works out to $7.50 (US) per song. I know that they like to charge more as a penalty than they would to sell legally in the first place, but that’s pretty ridiuclous. I completely disagree with their insane crackdown and abuse of the American legal system to begin with, but this is just going over the top. If they made the fees more reasonable they might actually get people to pay the royalties. IIRC, a song from iTunes runs about $1. A fine of $1-2 would not be too unreasonable, and it would have the added bonus of not requiring them to serve up the bandwidth to provide it. All they have to do is surf the user’s shared folder on Kazaa or whatever filesharing program they’re using and send them a bill. Then instead of being total dicks and suing a few kids at a time for a few thousand each, they could hit thousands of people with bills for a few hundred. At those prices, people might be more willing to pay, and they could even make the whole thing fire-and-forget (let the users decide which songs they need to pay for — after all, they might have ripped an MP3 in their shared directories from a CD they already own and shouldn’t pay twice).

Back to the topic of blogs: I’m really abusing the “uncategorized” category for my posts. I didn’t really know what I’d be talking about with this website when I was setting WordPress up, and even after having 40-some posts up now (yowzah!) I still don’t know what sort of categories I should set up. I had planned on making Rants a separate section (similar to how Recipes are handled now), but most of them have fitted neatly into “insanity”. School & Gaming are obvious, but that still leaves a lot of other uncategorized posts, and as Wayfare told me she learned in library school “everything has a classification, if you use a ‘miscellaneous’ or ‘uncategorized’ folder, you fail.” If anyone sees a pattern or three to reorganize my posts (I can resort them post hoc) feel free to let me know.

He walked down the corridor, listening to what his coworkers were saying. As he walked by Naomi’s door, she heard her talking about him. “Oh, have you seen the car he drives? He must be literally rolling in money to afford that!” He thought that they must be talking about the wrong guy, until her friend said “I don’t think he’s all that rich: he’s had that scrape on the bumper for years without getting it painted!”

That was his car, all right. He pictured it in his head. Sure, it was a very nice car for a grad student to drive, a solid piece of sensible Japanese engineering; but it was bought used and had earned nearly 100 000 kilometers since then (on top of the 90 000 it came with). Was Naomi jealous? Possible: she did drive a Jetta. Or was this some sarcastic usage that he didn’t understand due to the part of the conversation he had missed? The puzzle would have to remain unsolved, as he couldn’t get past how much he hated the way she habitually abused the word “literally.”

Nevertheless, the idea intrigued him. The next day he went down to the bank and withdrew one quarter of his savings in 5 and 10 dollar bills (the smallest practical denomination the bank had on hand since the introduction of the $2 coin). He went home, and pulled the top sheet off his bed and carefully laid out the 21 $5 bills and the 32 $10 bills and proceeded to frolic and roll merrily, creating a great disorder and a bevy of colour. The noise of crinkling paper aroused the curiosity of the cat, who came to investigate. She jumped on the bed and was immediately put off by the shaking and rolling, and despite appearing to be perfectly happy with her lot in life, had no desire to frolic.

He also thought that the whole adventure was not nearly as satisfying as he had hoped — certainly not to the point where it deserved its own figure of speech. “Ah, I know what’s missing” he said aloud (he would say it was to the cat if anyone caught him at it), “there’s only blue and purple here. I should throw in a nice green twenty.” So he went to his wallet and pulled out the only twenty dollar bill in there, and neatly laid the crisp green bill right in the centre. Then, with great gusto and joyous intentions, he “steam-rolled” right from one end of the bed to the other, falling right off the other side.

Still, the experience left much to be desired. He briefly tried jumping on the bed, but found he was too worried about his great bulk damaging the bed frame, or jumping on a bill funny and ripping it, or losing money between the bed and the wall. He got down and collected the money making sure to keep all the heads facing towards him (there’s just something reassuring about the look Prime Minister Laurier gives you… and the geek in him always likes to picture him with pointy ears and a new haircut… and a tricorder, but you can’t really see that in the portrait on the bill).

After counting it three times to make sure the cat hadn’t run off with any, he tried to think of what to do with all that cash. Spending it frivulously was out of the question: it was too large a portion of his savings. But he didn’t want to go right back to the bank with a bunch of cash. He briefly considered using the money to pay his landlord, but it wasn’t quite enough for a month’s rent, and more importantly, didn’t want to give his landlord the wrong impression (who pays rent in cash these days anyway?). Which left the only reasonable alternative: put the money away in a safe place, and simply use the cache to refill the small amount he carried around in his wallet every day. It made a lot of sense, and required the least amount of effort: it even absolved him of the need to ever visit an ATM for the next few months.

As he opened his “safe” (really just a cardboard file box with something heavy on it to make it hard to open), and was rifling through the backup CDs of his master’s thesis to squirrel the money away, he had a fun idea. Taking out 12 of the $5 bills, he quickly stashed the rest away between the May 12 and June 3 backup CDs, and closed up the box. Running to the kitchen, he put a $5 bill in the Christmas coffee mug, and put it back on the shelf. Another bill he taped to the bottom of the fancy wine glasses that hadn’t been used in a year. He put one in the pockets of each of his two light rain jackets (this being parka weather, brrr). One was tightly folded and placed into the battery compartment of the remote control for the TV. He thought hard for a minute, and then raced to his bedroom, where he carefully placed two bills on the toner cartridge for the laser printer (ensuring that in that position they wouldn’t cause a paper jam): that would make a nice surprise the next time the toner ran low and he had to give it a shake and get black stuff all over his hands. He put a bill under the teddy bear his girlfriend gave him (the one he picked up and hugged tightly whenever she acted dumb and made him sad; it was very dusty, which in his mind was a good sign). Two went into drawer where the cold medicines were kept, one into the box with the tiny bottles of paint for his models, and the last one he put on top of his shorts, in anticipation of summer.

Then he trusted his memory to forget each and every one of those places, since there are few feelings better than finding money you didn’t even know you had lost.

I’m even sicker today, and really sick of being sick.

A few days ago I manged to get out and try a Quiznos sub. I had a 2 for 1 coupon that came in the mail, so Wayfare came and got one too. They were really good, almost enough to bump me up into another sandwich bracket. Tomatoes do taste a lot better toasted than raw (plus they’re probably higher quality to start with, if the price is any indicator), and I can only imagine what it does for meat.

But it was significantly more expensive than Subway. Even with our 2-for-1 coupon, it was only a dollar cheaper than our two subs would have been at Subway; about $2.50 (50%!) more for just my veggie sub. It was also sort of weird, since they had metal sneezeguards, so we couldn’t watch them make the sub. They were also even more stingy on the lettuce than Subway was, and didn’t have cucumbers at all. But it was still quite good. I’ve got a few more coupons, so I’ll probably go back one or two more times before February to give it a real shake-down.

I suppose I should say something now that the election is over. It’s been a few days since my last post, but I just haven’t felt up to writing the last few days, first because I was terrified of my… “procedure” and then because I was recuperating by playing lots of video games — and it wasn’t as bad as I feared. After about 8 hours all the pain went away and I could pee again. And last night I could feel the exploratory tendrils of illness infiltrating my body, and sure enough this morning I’m fairly sick. I woke up and had all sorts of weird hallucinations and scared the cat. My throat is killing me (my tonsils are so swollen it’s hard to burp even!). The one saving grace is that my nose isn’t running.

Anyway, the election.

Obviously I’m not a fan of the Refoooooorm/Conservative party. I just simply don’t think that many of their ideas are good for Canada. We’re a great country that stands on records of strong social programs that provide a minimum acceptable quality of life and level of care for everyone, with welfare, health care, government pensions, and even a profit-sharing system for artists with a copyright levy on blank media. The cost of all this is of course, high taxes. It’s a price that for the most part, we seem willing to pay (though our tax burden would be lower if we hadn’t inherited so much debt). The Conservatives, however, seem to hate the idea of taxes; or perhaps they just want to buy votes with promises of tax cuts. Either way, they seem to possess great potential to rip out the very heart of our country for minor reductions in their tax bill.

Consider the day care issue that came up during the election. The Liberals and the NDP were both promising to work towards some sort of national day care program (setting aside the fact that the Liberals had already promised that in previous elections), but the Conservatives were instead promising to scrap the program and “give the money to you, to spend as you see fit.” Pretty much everyone I’ve talked to has seen that as a poor idea, yet people without kids, or who could already afford day care loved it (vote buying, after all). Others seemed oddly afraid that the government would be setting up creches to indoctrinate/brainwash their children behind their backs and from a very young age. While it’s a possibility, I think it’s more likely you’d see that sort of thing in a low-cost religious-based day care, or (if there is such a thing), a private day care covertly owned by neonazis. I’m not sure if the parties had settled on the form of subsidized day care yet: I know one proposal involved having the government simply pay for facilities, and getting parents to run it as a co-op (so a few parents would take 1-3 days off work each month to man the day care). In a situation like that, I doubt government indoctrination would take place (but who knows what the parents of the other kids might be teaching!).

At this point, I’d like to quote Rick Mercer:

Like so many Canadians I was appalled by Scott Reid’s comment about the proposed Conservative child care plan. In case you have been living under a rock and missed it, Scott recently quipped that under the plan parents could choose to spend their 25 dollar a week child care allowance on beer instead of child care. Clearly Scott is wrong. We all know that in this country it would be impossible to find a parent who would spend 25 bucks a week on beer. For starters a case of beer costs more than 25 bucks. A case of domestic is about 35 bucks and the trendier imports cost even more. I happen to know this because I drink beer. I don’t have kids so I have no idea what child care costs. I admit I’m surprised that 25 bucks a week will pay for daycare but what do I know

I know around election time people jump down politician’s throats for the most minor of tongue slips or blog posts, but I still don’t see what was so bad about his criticism of the Conservative plan. Their planned child subsidy is simply not sufficient: the amount of money is “beer & pizza money”, that’s the order of magnitude it’s on. I didn’t hear his whole speech so he possibly didn’t say it as I understand it, but I don’t think anyone would suggest a (good) parent would spend government money on beer instead of on their kids, but the fact is that $25/wk is not enough for day care. If you can already afford day care, then you already have money allocated there, and the government money is just a bonus in your budget that you will, in all likelihood, spend on beer & pizza (or equivalently, something frivolous for your child, like a video game every two weeks). If you can’t afford child care, then this money is not enough to make the difference between getting daycare or not. It doesn’t really give anyone “options” — it just doesn’t “discriminate” against families that can afford to let parents stay home with their kids (that is, it buys the votes of those stay-at-home mom/dads who are too selfish to pay into helping single parents get daycare).

Sure, government day care does encourage families to send both parents back into the work force to make money without having to pay for child care, but I seriously doubt that minor factor is going to tip the balance in a parent’s decision to go back to work. Odds are a dual-income family will be able to afford day care anyway, and will send their kids to a private day care (since I doubt government day care will make much of a dent in private ones — there’s always a way to improve over the free government version and get people to pay).

Anyway, back to the election as a whole.

I really didn’t want the Conservatives to win. Note that I don’t call them the tories (when I can help it). While that is the accepted short form for the conservative parties of the world, these simply aren’t your grandpappy’s progressive conservatives. They’re scary. I was really hoping for an NDP minority in this election, counting on a protest vote similar to what happened in the Ontario provincial race of 1990(?). The Liberals really did need a kick in the pants, too many of them have developed manifest destiny complexes after being in power for so long. I have no illusions of the other two parties being any less corrupt than the Liberals, though in different ways: while the grits siphon money to their friends, the NDP would doubtlessly throw good money after bad propping up companies that employ CAW members, while the Conservatives will certainly be giving big business, rich people, and americans as many concessions as they care to ask for… the greens might be different, simply because no one has given them enough of a chance to bother trying to corrupt them just yet. I’m sure we could get one good term out of them. But the NDP/Green vote I was hoping for really wasn’t there this time around, and it’s because so many people are just so damned afraid of the conservatives.

They got a minority government anyway. Hopefully they won’t screw things up too much before we get another shot at getting someone else in power. I also hope that they see this slim minority as a signal that they are not free to be goddamn fascists, and to hold off on most of their controversial promises. My delusional mind continues to hold out hope that the Liberals, NDP, and Bloc can form a workable coalition to keep the worst of the legislation out (and maybe even push through some of their own, such as the child care issue). Though we’ve fallen a long, long way if we’re depending on the Bloc Quebecois to save the federal government. However, if we can convince the rat bastard separatists to just abstain on everything (or equivalently, instruct half their party’s members to vote one way, the other half the other), that’ll actually put the power in the hands of Liberals/NDP, leaving Harper as an ineffectual talking head. I kind of like that plan. In fact, I’m going to write some letters to Gilles Ducepp and all the other BQ members this weekend. Hopefully they won’t throw them out just because they’re written in my heathen language.

Bloc Quebecois + Conservatives. Damn. We’re so fucked.

Anyhow, I’ve been supporting Fair Vote Canada (linkage on the right) hoping for some sort of electoral reform that will make it easier to deal with the 4 national parties we have on the go. Strategic voting is rampant, and it’s extremely difficult for new parties to move up over the years. First-past-the-post really encourages a two-party system, and while that’s what it’s boiled down to in many people’s minds in many ridings, that just doesn’t work for me. In two-party systems, it almost always comes down to who the lesser of two evils is, you hardly ever get to vote for someone you believe in, even a little. On that note, I’ve got to get me one of those “Why pick the lesser of two evils? Vote Chuluthu!” bumper stickers.

Anyhow, there are a number of better systems to chose out there. I think pretty much any of them would be better than what we have now, however, I’m not a big fan of some of the proportional representation systems. I prefer something like a single transferrable vote, because I think we should maintain the tradition of voting for people rather than parties. This is important both to punish individual members who do not represent you well, despite being in a party you believe in (or can at least live with), and because it encourages independents.

Look at the Sam Bulte issue. She was corrupt as all get-out, one of the worst Liberal offerings out there. She didn’t move to her riding, she accepted dubious donations from copyright lobbyists while she was working on copyright reform, and when she was found out and asked about it in the candidates’ debate, she flipped out and called her constituents “zealots” interested in downloading music, and later threatened to sue when evidence against her began to pile up (at one point, she quoted the CRIA verbatim, using its wrong & misleading statistics, further indicating how deep in their pockets she was). Thankfully, in this election she was tossed out in favour of NDP Peggy Nash. With a multi-member district using party lists, you might not be able to vote for the other Liberal MPs without also supporting her.

I’ve been getting into fan edits of movies lately. The Star Wars ones in particular have been fantastic; partly due to the fact that I am predestined to love any version of them no matter what editing takes place, and partly because Lucas did such a sloppy job on the prequel trilogy that there’s lots of room for improvement. The Phantom Menace (renamed “A Vergence in the Force”) is a great movie when you take out the few lines of dialogue relating to midichlorians (keep the mystic Force mystic, thanks… or at least don’t make it quite so lame), and some of the extraneous slapstick with Jar-Jar and other minor characters. Putting some deleted scenes back in helps too (such as the planning for the counterattack on Naboo, where we learn that taking out the droid control ship might just incapacitate the army… rather than having it blow up and the droids shut down. It’s still a pretty lame way to wrap the movie up quickly, and if I had the CGI abilities, I’d prefer to have the Naboo fighters do strafing runs to support the Gungans and defeat the droids legit). Even the opening crawl was cleaned up a bit.

Anyway, I just saw this trailer for “Shining” and while it’s only a minute long, it’s absolutely brilliant. I strongly encourage you all to give it a look (and while you’re at it, imagine what the audience reaction would be like if they went to watch the movie based on this trailer. Sort of reminds me of the misdirection with trailers from the Village).