Up in Ontario

Vasectomies All Around

So, the subject of vasectomies has been rearing its ugly head with alarming frequency in my life of late.

A few nights ago I sat in my favourite spot, cradling a fine bowl of popcorn, reading a magazine, and a letter to the editor held information about the personal experience of the child of a man who had seen his father go through a vasectomy. The letter writer's father had the procedure in the morning and intended to punch into work around noon to finish off the day.

This is not what happened. The letter writer's father's co-workers ended up gingerly helping the man into a cab to take him home in the early afternoon, once the anesthetic had worn off. One of the co-workers was sent to the convenience store around the corner to return with something, anything frozen for the man to hold to himself.

Then the following night I sat discussing anything that came to mind with a friend and he mentioned that he knew a woman who was addicted to babies. She loved them: having them, nursing them, watching them grow up. She and her husband had four little ones already, and if it were up to her they'd be working on a fifth. But instead, discretion boldly stepped in and the husband hurried off to see the doctor. One day surgery later and they don't have to worry about a fifth. I asked my friend if the husband had made a deposit, just in case they changed their minds, and my friend did not know.

Lastly, I spoke with a woman I used to carpool with to work. For those of you who have carpooled with someone, you can understand how this quotidian process of transportation can become a wonderful way to make a friend. Or an enemy, I suppose. But my experiences with carpooling have all been excellent and I have good friends from the practice. Spending half an hour in the morning and half an hour in the evening with one person, in a closed environment, on the shoulders of a stressful workday experience, can form fast friendships, which in turn lead to confidences. Therefore carpoolers tend to have a practice variously called Carpool Confidential or the Cone of Silence where they confide work information in each other, and thereby make work more tolerable without having to bore their spouse / cat / friends.

In the last three years my former carpooler and her husband have had two beautiful daughters. She and I no longer work together but we remain good friends. When I spoke with her recently she was in the middle of a daughter emergency involving body fluids, as I now imagine that all childhood emergencies involve.

In an email my former carpooler wrote, "there has been barfing and pooping a plenty over the holidays... I thought we were out of the woods when alas last eve Hannah chundered yet again! Is there no respit?" (sic, intended)

I gave her a call. We talked for about 5 minutes about the most-pressing news. One of her daughters howled in the background while the other, she told me, was down for a nap after being up all night. I asked her if she had mixed up a Gravol and NyQuil cocktail for the little one. She had not. Then I asked her when the third was on the way, and she laughed, told me that was a good one, and said that her husband was almost set for his own day surgery appointment with the doctor.

"He'll be like a Florida orange," she said. "All juice, no seed."

So they're holding at two.

And that is the end of my vasectomy stories.

Happy New Year! May you get what you wish for.

Cell Phone Etiquette and Adaptability

I have had cell phones on the mind recently. I don't have a cell phone and really don't have much desire to have one. Yet I feel like I should have one since everyone else has one. At my day job, we're trying to build websites for people to use in all the ways they want to use them, and globally the most common way to connect to the Internet is through a cell phone. Shouldn't I have some experience with this newfangled technology? Or at least that's what I've been thinking for the past few weeks.

So, with cell phones on the mind, three stories have caught my eye recently with regard to how cell phones affect behaviour and how those around cell phone users can react.

The first story is of an elderly man taking matters into his own hands when the manners of a cell phone user offended him: Cellphone vigilante gets probation, fan mail.

Bill Stevenson, 79, pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct in St. Paul, Minn., Tuesday, receiving three months of probation for trying to take the phone away from Jesse Tabor.

But Stevenson and his 74-year-old friend Sten Gerfast still believe they did the right thing.

The second story I came across in my daily troll through blog posts and news. A design company out of Chicago called Coudal Partners has invented the Society for HandHeld Hushing (SHHH - PDF). From what I can tell, the society seems loosely formed, without rules, a meeting space or schedule, and with only one abiding edict - making the world a more civilized place by eliminating cell-phone conversation spillover. At the link above you will discover their starter kit with handy handbills featuring pointed messages in support of their edict, such as The world is a noisy place. You aren't helping things.

The last story I came across through one of my handy RSS feeds at My Yahoo. Harper's Magazine reports in its weekly review of news how a German ornithologist discovered that urban nightingales, forced to compete with noise pollution, can sing so loud they break the law. The loudest recorded was 95 decibels, which is as loud as a chainsaw.

And by the way (btw), if you have a good cell phone recommendation for me, of handset or of service providers in Canada, or of the factors and features I should be considering in my decision, please oh please let me know. Deciphering the pricing and service schemes of the carriers - Bell, Telus, Rogers - is like chewing tinfoil.

Boxing Day Open House

Hey you,

What are you doing on Boxing Day? The presents are opened and your pants don't fit. The turkey carcass is lurking on the bottom shelf of the fridge and the garbage and recyclables sit piled at the door. Christmas is over for another year.

So how about dropping in on Monique and James on Boxing Day? We're having an open house and we think we'd like to see you!

If you're planning on shopping, finding that item that didn't appear under the tree on sale or just scavenging through the piles and under the sale signs, then lord help you.

When you're through with that self punishment, do join us for something that will soothe your jangled nerves. We'll be serving until people leave.

The Details

Monique and James' Boxing Day Rocking Horse
Boxing Day, December 26th
4 pm to 8 pm to later
Vancouver, BC, Canada
Contact James Sherrett for the location and phone number.

You're welcome to bring something to eat / drink / yes, both, if you so desire. Make it something that either you like or that you know we like or we may stretch my wetsuit out on the balcony and slingshot the whatever it is at our neighbours. If you know anyone that this invitation should have reached, please forward it on.

Big Night, la terzo

Long time Up in Ontario blog readers will be familiar with the lucious trappings of a Big Night. Modelled on and inspired by the incredible movie, Big Night, the evening is a celebration of friendship and food. Tonight is Big Night III, and here is the menu.

chi mangia bene sta molta vicino a dio

Big Night III
December 19th, 2004

ZUPPA

BBC's Bhopal Blunder

An activist group called the Yes Men sent a representative to be interviewed by British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and to act as spokeman for Dow Chemicals on the 20th anniversary of the Bhopal gas leak, one of the worst man-made disasters of all time.

The Yes Men are an activist group that makes its case for social justice by impersonating famous corporate leaders and imparting a social justice messages into the communications of those famous leaders. They call this Identity Correction. Before their interview on the BBC they ran a website critical of Dow Chemicals called Dow Ethics. Since their interview on the BBC the domain name DowEthics.com has been repossessed by Dow Chemicals through some tricky registrar loopholes and legal wrangling.

But on November 29th the Yes Men received an email at DowEthics from the BBC asking if they would like to participate in a story on the 20th anniversary of the Bhopal gas leak, where thousands of people died after a catastrophic leak at a Union Carbide pesticide plant (Dow acquired Union Carbide in 2001 and assumed all assets and liabilities). Since that leak on December 3rd, 1984, a reported 150,000 more victims have been left severly disabled, their quality of life ruined. The site in Bhopal, India that the Union Carbide plant occupied has never been cleaned up and continues to infect those who live nearby.

The Union Carbide corporation also faces criminal charges of culpable homicide (manslaughter) in India. Its CEO, Warren Anderson, fled the country in 1984 and now lives in Long Island, NY. The company has ducked any responsibility for the incident ever since. It's basically the worst-case scenario of a global, transnational corporation washing its hands of responsibility in a poor backwater, out of the public eye, whose people are voiceless and have no power.

So the Yes Men sent a fictional character to the BBC to act as a spokesman for Dow. As they explain, "Mr. Jude (patron saint of the impossible) Finisterra (earth's end) becomes Dow's official spokesperson." They pull off the hoax live on the air. Read the full report and watch the video segment of how the Yes Men turn the tables on Dow Chemical.

The great effect of the hoax is that Dow has to issue a statement denying each of the assertion of the Yes Men. No, then will not compensate any of the victims, they will not push for the extradition of Warren Anderson, they will not clean up the Bhopal site. Disinformation on the record becomes the catalyst for highlighting an injustice. The trickster instinct runs deep.

Time's Arrow Passing By

A family in Argentina takes a photo of themselves on the same day - June 17 - every year. The photos of the Golberg family are fascinating as they show the passage of time, the inheritance of characteristics from each parent to each child and the styles that have changed over the past 28 years, since 1976. The pose and arrangement of each successive photo tries to emulate the previous one, so we see the same man, woman or child as they age, year after year, in what looks to be flip cards of images a year apart.

I always wondered how people could forget about the passing of time, how they were confused by their aging, how they could wake up one morning and look in the mirror and wonder who the hell was the old person looking back. Then this past weekend I was in a store picking up a few stocking stuffers for my brother and the girl ringing through my purchases asked if the items were for me or were a gift. I told her they were a gift for my brother, who was 26 and living in Victoria, and she asked me, "how many years are there between you two, eight? nine?"

"Three," I replied.

She packed my goods into a plastic bag and slid the receipt across the counter. "Umm, do you ski or snowboard?"

"I like to ski."

"Yeah, cause your face looks like it's been, you know, out in the cold and snow."

"Oh," I said and left the store with my bag of items, doing the math to find out that she assumed I was 34 or 35, not my actual youthful 29. "I still feel vigorous!" I wanted to shout. I wonder now if I won't look back on that moment as the first in my life when I said to myself, "when did I get so old?"

Reading RSS Feeds

This entry may be a little geeky, but bear with me because I believe the payoff is worth it, especially for those who spend a lot of time reading news and articles online.

For around a month now I've been noodling about with a My Yahoo account, provided by the giant search portal, Yahoo.com. Within the My Yahoo account you can send and receive email, maintain a calendar and list of contacts, synchronize these with your desktop email client (such as Outlook) and also get a customized snapshot of the Yahoo world: news and photos from wire services, weather for locations you're interested in, sports scores, movie listings for local theatres, etc. It's pretty cool to create a web page based around your interests and see it updated every time you refresh the page. But wait, there's more.

The coolest part is integrating RSS feeds into your customized My Yahoo page. So what are RSS feeds? RSS stands for alternately Rich Site Syndication or Real Simple Summary. Either way, it's a simple, machine-readable description of an article posted to a website, done up in a web language called XML that has a structure and syntax computers can understand. The Up in Ontario blog, for instance, runs on a software called MovableType, and the software automatically creates an RSS page for every article I post to the website. If you have a My Yahoo account, then you have the option of adding RSS feeds to your account, similarly to how you would subscribe to a publication or wire service. Once you subscribe, whenever I post a new article here to Up in Ontario.com you get a summary of that article, the time it was posted and a link to the full text.

If this all sounds a little cumbersome to get a handle on, don't despair. It is a little cumbersome to start out with. But once you get it up and running, and see how it works, it begins to make more sense. Since signing up for my My Yahoo account my web browsing has decreased because I now go to one location and a summary of all the sites I would have been visiting is gathered together for me. If an article interests me, I click through to read the whole thing. It's a custom-built page of my subscriptions, updated all the time. If I want to stop receiving notifications of updates from a publication, I delete that RSS feed.

Some big online media players have jumped onto the RSS bandwagon recently. The New York Times online has RSS feeds for all of its main sections, many technology-focused publications have added RSS feeds and almost all blog software has a built in capacity to generate RSS feeds for each of its pages. So if you want to subscribe to an RSS feed of Up in Ontario.com, copy this RSS feed link and add it to your My Yahoo or RSS newsreader, and you'll receive Up in Ontario every time I update it. If you're looking to see how this RSS thing works, Yahoo has a good demo that walks you through the process.

This is the end of the geeky business, for now. Once more, thank you for your continuing support.

Mooning George W. Bush

From out in the ether, comes word that the following e-mail was read by Anthony Germaine on CBC radio's Ottawa Morning this morning:

From the vantage point of my bedroom window on Queen Elizabeth Drive, I was able to moon the entourage of President George Bush as it sped along Colonel By Drive toward Ottawa International Airport, which gave me particular delight because I did it from the dandy new window I had just installed this fall.

A mooning from a 60-year-old man is not to be easily dismissed. I see this as the future of protest, far superior to all this chanting and effigy-burning. Can you imagine if I were able to get all my fellow occupants along the Driveway and Colonel By to join me the next time President Bush comes to town?

My apologies to any innocent passers-by.

Dan Turner

Fine Man
Father of K&D