Blessed by the Potato

Let’s start with the nazis: grammar and food.

For the grammar issue of the week, I bring you singular they: do you think it’s wrong to say something like “A consumer of 2012 expects their laptops to be lighter and more powerful than ever?” Or do you think the “they” referring to a single consumer is the wrong pronoun, and “him/her” should be used instead?

I’ve long been fine with the singular they: tradition was to use “him” in such cases, even where the gender was indeterminate. When that became politically incorrect, “they” seemed to be an appropriate alternative: it has some parallels in the disuse of thee/thou in favour of the singular ye/you (which then just became “you”). Many writers started to use it, and I hear it all the time in casual speech. It’s certainly a damned sight cleaner than putting in the awkward “his/her” or “his or her” compound everywhere.

One alternative I don’t care for is the idea that it’s somehow more correct to use “her” in place of “him” for a gender-uncertain third person pronoun. “A student has many books to buy at university, straining her budget.” The use of “him” in that kind of sentence has been traditional and common for so long that seeing “her” in its place makes me think that the writer must somehow know the gender — it’s not serving as an effective gender-unknown pronoun. I personally find that much more distracting than the singular they.

Like all things in life, there does need to be balance: we can’t have everyone making up their own dialect and rules, but “thou/thee” has long since slipped from common usage to anachronistic, and we’ve had to recognize that evolution. Similarly for now, writing “u” in place of you, or using numerals for homophones “to” and “for” is a disgusting mark of poor upbringing and laziness — a hopefully temporary artifact of T9 phones that will forever be forgotten with the rise of QWERTY smartphones. But I do have to accept that one day in the distant future — long after I’m dead — such usage may be commonplace. (And for all my acceptance of linguistic evolution, I will still spin in my grave if it happens.) The role of the grammar nazi is to try to keep that sort of thing from getting a foothold in the first place, not to deny the common usage long after it’s happened.

On to food/grammar nazi-hybrids: if you make a dish in a non-traditional way, does it cease to be that dish? I don’t think so: language evolves, as do tastes, yet again today I heard the old saying that “chili isn’t chili if it has beans.” Well, traditional Texican chili maybe, but I think it’s more common with than without these days, and it’s not like a totally different food either way. Or like a few years ago, when a friend of Italian descent tried to tell me that there’s no such thing as “vegetarian lasagna”, because lasagna by definition has meat in it. Well, fine, think that all you want, but my vegetarian lasagna (or as I call it, “lasagna”) is pretty damned tasty, and there isn’t any confusion over what it is I’m slopping on my guests’ dinner plates (or they’re able to surmount the seeming oxymoron). [Plus as an aside, my understanding is that the word refers to the noodle, not the dish.]

I made cinnamon rolls today — kick-ass ones, I might add — and someone asked if I put raisins in them. No, as a matter of fact, I did not, nor would I ever. Raisins are gross, and I think putting raisins in your cinnamon rolls represents a serious lapse in judgement… but they do not cease to be cinnamon rolls by the addition of the raisins and their dark influence.

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Blueberry has been getting big so quickly. I’m finding that she’s already getting heavy and tough to carry around: though to be fair I had a lot of years of training with an 8-lbs cat, so when she was ~8 lbs I was well inside my comfort zone; now she’s pushing me into the feats of strength zone.

It’s amazing how fickle she is: perfectly content to screaming banshee in a second flat. And just as often, back again. I know that movement helps to settle her, so I hold her and walk, or do a little baby rain dance. I got tired today after just a few minutes of the baby rain dance, and it made me wonder if I had missed striking the right balance in terms of when to have kids: too young, and well, you’re too young: not ready, not able to handle them. Too old, and you can’t keep up.

Then she started crying again, and I lost that train of thought. I plodded on, doing laps of the house.

Singing turned to pleading. Pleading to soft moaning. “Pleeaaasseee. Hushushushushshhhhh.” Then I thought perhaps this is how the zombie apocalypse would feel: zombies shuffling across the face of the earth without end, moaning while being gummed by a smaller, unhappy zombie.

I’ve always been a little dubious about the effectiveness of advertising: even as a kid without leaving the house, I’d be exposed to hundreds of ads a day just by watching TV. Sure, advertising is needed in some cases, particularly for new products (how else would I have become hooked on Special K cracker chips, or know what’s coming soon to a theatre near me?). But the amount of spending on advertising is something I’ve had trouble wrapping my head around: so very much is ad-supported, especially on the internet, yet how effective can it really be in the end?

It seemed to be one of those perverse arms races where no one really believes advertising is effective, but that they can’t stop advertising as long as their competitors are flooding the airwaves, billboards, and internet banners. So many people had such a vested interest in keeping the advertising dollars flowing that no one stopped to think about it.

I had a chance to try out some internet advertising recently: Google Ads gave me a free credit to give them a whirl. So I picked out some key words, spruced up the landing page for my book, and let the ad campaign rip.

Maybe the problem is I’m too much an educator, and not enough a salesman, so even having the ads drive people to my page wasn’t enough to sell them on the book. A big case of TL;DR. Or maybe all the hits were from bots trying to scam Google and the advertisers of their money so the probloggers can make some “passive” income.

What I know is this: it took only a few days to blow through $100 in free advertising, and I made one $5 sale (and that’s the gross!). That’s not a good return on investment: not even close enough to start down the path of “maybe if I optimized my key words or reconfigured the layout of the landing page or…” That’s just awful.

This is a monthly update from the Blueberry Portfolio. The events I talked about below happened approx 8 months ago.

Well, it’s been about a month since I started managing the Blueberry Investment Portfolio. In that time, the TSX has swung way down (12%), then most of the way back up, ending down just 2.5%.

The broker is reporting the portfolio as down just 0.3%, which I call a win, but given that the money was safely ensconced in a savings account before that, any loss can perhaps be viewed with derision.

This of course was not the case even just a few days ago. In the initial discussions of where to put the money, a planned core holding was going to be Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate controlled by Warren Buffett. Unfortunately I didn’t figure out how to buy US-listed securities in time, and some good news came out that drove the stock up over 10%. Though it may still be a good investment at 10% more, I didn’t feel like chasing it, and besides, buying in the US does add some complications.

Another missed opportunity was Armtec: once a darling stock in that magical “infrastructure” business that was supposed to get a boost from government stimulus spending, Armtec actually stumbled of late, and after suspending dividends started to trade like it was going out of business completely. I had just started to do my due diligence on it one Friday, planning to finish on the weekend. I didn’t get around to it that weekend, but figured I’d have plenty of time to finish over the next week. Unfortunately sometimes the market doesn’t give you the benefit of time, and by the middle of the week Armtec had jumped 120%. There’s no way to know if I would have felt comfortable buying it after doing my reading, but it still feels like a miss.

So we missed a few good opportunities.

We also had some rough luck with the stocks we did buy, finding Superior Plus melting away roughly 20% after buying it at what had already looked like bargain-basement prices. Even what I thought were solid names like Canexus and Futuremed were nearly as bad this month. The worst though was Daylight Energy, which dropped 32% over the course of the month.

However, our biggest loser turned into our biggest winner this week as a takeover offer for Daylight came through. Though we could have collected a few more percentage points by waiting until the closing date, I thought it might be prudent to sell into the market, and did just that last week, generating our first realized profit (and also bringing the portfolio almost back up to even).

And of course Daylight is an exemplary case to use in demonstrating that even when you get it all right in the market and end up making money, you certainly don’t get there by experiencing the market go straight up. We had to ride through some pretty gut-wrenching declines before we made it to today.

Speaking of take-overs, another large position in the portfolio is Capital Power Income Fund, which has received a take-over offer from Atlantic Power Corp. The deal is a little strange in that you have the option of either getting cash for your shares, or shares in the purchasing company, Atlantic Power. What’s really strange though is that about half the people will have to choose shares, or they’ll run out of cash. So odds are good that since the Capital Power shares were trading at a big discount to the take-over price, everyone will want cash. Thus, everyone is likely to end up with a mix of about half shares and half cash (though the default option is shares, so anyone who doesn’t bother to read their mail will get stuck with shares).

When we bought, Capital Power was trading as though you were just going to get shares, and at a discount to cash — but since we should get at least half as cash, we should do better than that. It works out to about a 2% return, which in just about 4 months is pretty decent (~6% annualized, with very little risk, and as much as 12% annualized if we get all cash). And that isn’t including the healthy dividend, either. Today, the Atlantic Power shares have traded lower, so even though Capital Power is still in the same place, it’s as though the discount has gone away (if we were proper arbitraguers, we would have shorted ATP).

The CBC recently ran an editorial titled “Cool science, but is it news?”

I was prepared to rant and rave and dump all over it for pages and pages, but I suspect that it’s meant to manufacture controversy.

So instead I’ll just make a few rebuttal points. The big question underlying the question in the headline is what is news? I think scientific progress definitely fits most any definition of news: it can have big (or small) impacts on society, health, and business, in addition to the esoteric impact on our understanding of the universe around us. Sports on the other hand, doesn’t: locked in a continual, meaningless struggle that will be repeated anew next monday/year/whatever. I am continually baffled by professional sports in general, but at least have some inkling of the entertainment value of watching it. Reading about it the next day seems like abnormal behaviour that should maybe get looked at by a specialist — if it weren’t for the fact that so many people do it.

On the CBC’s news website, they have one screen with a varying selection of top stories, then towards the bottom 10 boxes with different categories (business, world, Canada, politics, etc). Two of those categories are different boxes for sports. Two are ostensibly science-related: technology & health, but both tend to have much less scientific stories than what is being discussed in the editorial (the latest happenings on twitter, scandals of minors doing things that may hurt them, or the tech specs of the flashiest gadget are hardly cool science). On the mobile site, fully one third of the screen space is dedicated to sports, and even then sports stories crawl into the other two panels in the default view. Science is nowhere to be found.

Science certainly isn’t being treated as news, though in my opinion it most certainly is.

Moving past that quibble, the article goes on to lament the way science stories are reported. And I have plenty of things to gripe about there. On the first day of J-school it must be drilled into journalists’ heads that they must — must! — attempt to relate science stories to some every-day impact. “This will (eventually) lead to a cure for cancer…” “Can warp drive be far behind?” “Climate doom awaits us all!” “Bacteria found in space rocks: Can invasion be far behind?” On top of that, stories have to be written for a very lay audience: often below the high-school level. So the stories don’t get to convey much, and waste a lot of column-inches on trying to catch the reader up on basic background information. Some of that should be changed, if for no other reason than Wikipedia exists. Hyperlink the big words, and accept that a certain portion of the readership will either tune out (they probably are anyway), or, after reading enough, will have managed to refresh their memories of grade 11 and caught up to a slightly higher scientific reading level.

After all, that’s the way the other sections work. The business stories just plow on through terminology like basis points, index, or leverage, and don’t even attempt to define acronyms like CEO or EBITDA. Everyone would think the sports section dull and boring if in the midst of describing something they had to break and ensure the entire audience understood, and had to lead off with a slow insertion from some random generality:

Every year thousands of Canadian youth enrol in hockey programs to get fit, make friends, and lose teeth. These programs are supported by billions of taxpayer dollars in the form of subsidies for arenas, tax credits for kids’ programs, and direct funding of government salaried referees. It may not look like an activity that would lead to preparing our kids to become productive members of society, but these kids are in it for a different reason: to gain one of the coveted spots as a ‘professional’ hockey player.

One such professional team, the Toronto Maple Leafs, played a second team composed of paid players from Ottawa, known colloquially as the “Senators” (though there is no relation to the Senate). Vladimir passed the puck — a hard black rubber disc that is the focus of the players in hockey — to Jacques, another member of the Toronto Maple Leafs team (though peculiarly enough, neither one is actually from Toronto). Jacques then skated, which is like running but on the icy surface of the hockey rink, towards the net that was defended by the goalie from the Senators. However, before he could attempt to score a goal, an unforseen result was found in the data: the referee determined that he was offside with a confidence of 95%, 19 times out of 20.

“Offside” is a state of being that makes no sense in our conventional world, but hockey experts assure us that the implications could be far-reaching, including the beginning of a whole new hockey “trial” from the face-off area. Despite this two-steps-forward, one-step-back outcome, head coach of the Toronto Maple Leafs is excited about the work done so far. “I’m really pleased with the progress we’ve made on moving the black, rubber object across the slippery surface; or as we call it, ice. This really speaks to the dedication of the team, and the value our work has for society as a whole. It’s really just one piece of the puzzle, but it’s like that corner piece that really helps orient your worldview and re-define the problem. Now instead of trying to put the puck in the net, we’ll be working to make sure the Senators don’t get the puck out of the little circle.”

Opinions are conflicted as to the real-world benefits of last night’s hockey game, but there’s a sliver of hope that if this pattern continues in further games, there could be an increase in the supply of donor teeth to the local gummy homeless population.

And I’ll conclude by linking to a very good article that I didn’t find until after I had already finished my little rant. It tears apart the science journalism tropes even better: The Unwritten Rules of Journalism

Well, I’ve been a dad for just about two months. I have to say that I like it: Blueberry’s an adorable child, and even though she’s been suffering from gas the last few weeks, she (mostly) hasn’t decided to handle it by screaming non-stop.

She’s not sleeping through the night yet, and that might be a few months off still, but her sleep periods are definitely getting longer, with at least one 4-hour snooze each night this week. Wayfare and I had been coping for the first few weeks by alternating responsibility: I stay up all night and do a late-night feed so she can get 5 or 6 hours of sleep in a row herself. But now that I’m at my new job, I can’t keep that schedule up, so hopefully Blueberry will be sleeping long enough at night that Wayfare won’t lose her mind from lack of sleep.

It’s amazing how many changes there have been in her over such a short time period. She’s not yet really interacting with the world (rattles and toys don’t hold her interest), but she does look at us, and is awake more than just the amount of time it takes to eat. We get to see her eyes so much more now than in the first week. She’s also so much bigger: many of her newborn clothes only got worn once before she outgrew them. And the difference between an 8 lbs baby in your arms and a 12 lbs one is huge.

She’s a very well-behaved baby: perfectly content with strangers. She’s obviously very gassy, and she’ll grunt and strain with it, but doesn’t scream bloody murder like some gassy babies will. When her diaper’s wet, she hardly even seems to notice now. She tolerates the nasal aspirator (snot bulb) surprisingly well, and even seems to be relieved to have an empty nose. And she’s very calm when we give her a bath.

Even when she does fuss, she’s good about humouring us when we try to settle her. While she’s making her hunger cry and Wayfare is still getting set up, sometimes I’ll put my nose on her lip and she’ll suck it for a second, only to stop and give me a look of (well-deserved) confusion. That little move can buy me up to a minute of silence.

We read a lot about pregnancy and delivery before the birth, but were hoping to have another few weeks of gestation to start reading the books that told us what to do after she arrived. So we’re not as over-read on what to expect with her as a baby.

One thing we didn’t read about until we saw a poster about it in the hospital was how difficult the second night can be: she barely slept at all that night, and was not quiet about being awake and unhappy. I think we would have lost it to despair (thinking that it would always be that way) if it weren’t for those 2nd night posters in the hospital. Definitely something not covered enough in the books.

Our parenting philosophy has evolved a fair bit to meet her changes through the month: for the first week or two it was all about trying to calm her as much as possible. We wanted to show her that the world is not such a horrible place when she was out of the womb. She spent most of the time naked (save for the diaper) and getting skin-to-skin contact for feedings or just snuggles, or nicely swaddled up. We were attentive to her little noises, and prepared for her to basically wake up with food in her mouth (also because she was jaundiced, so we were eager for her to wake up and eat most times, as she was sleeping the maximum recommended amount for a child that young).

Then as she got a bit bigger and the jaundice went away, we started to slow down our responses a bit. Now we let her fuss for a minute or two before feeding her, in a hopeful attempt to teach her patience (or as the books call it, self-soothing). I don’t exactly sit there with a stopwatch watching her cry, but when she does start I do take a moment to go pee, wash my hands, etc. Sometimes (maybe 1/4 of the time) she does push out the gas or whatever, and goes back to sleep.

Really, at this point we’re just striving for balance: trying to meet her needs soon with a minimum of fussing while also giving her a chance to learn to connect her sleep cycles and settle herself. To balance her needs for food now with our need to get her to sleep through the nights later.

Here are some things we found handy so far:

– Pre-cooked meals, especially for the first two weeks: we were so far behind on sleep, and so pre-occupied with feeding her, that it was super-nice to have some pre-cooked meals delivered every few days by the grandmothers. If you don’t have grandmother delivery service, then have some cash ready for delivery, or stock up on frozen dinners.

– The swing: it’s reclined enough to be safe for a very young baby, but upright enough to help her work out her gas, and of course the movement helps rock her to sleep. She spends like half the day in her swing now.

– There are a lot of books to recommend:

The Birth Partner Handbook by Carl Jones was a good one to prepare for labour (and even includes a handy “skip to this page if she is in labour now” section for the procrastinating dads-to-be). Though it’s written for dads-to-be (and other birth partners), it has a lot of good information in a fairly concise book.

Bringing up Bebe by Pamela Druckerman is part narrative, part parenting discussion/instructional. Wayfare didn’t find the second half as useful as the first, but that first half is worth checking it out at the library: it basically discusses some differences in typical French vs American parenting. In particular, it focuses on how French children tend to start sleeping through the night and eating more regular meals several months before American kids, and discusses some of the different philosophies that may help achieve that. The concept of balance and “the pause” really resonated with us.

– Wayfare has become a fan of well.ca: they stock a lot of things like nursing bra pads, and it’s handy to have ~3 day delivery when you’re too tired to leave the house to shop. If you’re interested in a referral coupon ($10 off a $40 order for new customers) just send me an email or leave a comment and I’ll send you one.