Old Man Canada & Infant Israel

Conservatives often make the communications mistake of overestimating the intelligence of their audience. Not necessarily the audience that's actually in the room with them, but the wider audience that's only going to hear the sound bites that the media feeds them.

As I explained a long time ago in a blog post not so very far away, a basic truth in public communication is that when writing, whether for publication or verbal presentation, you need to assume that your audience is stupid and mean. Stupid, in that if anything you say can reasonably be accidentally misconstrued, they will do so. Mean, in that if anything you say can be manipulated and taken out of context to sound damaging, they will deliberately do so.

When conservatives are speaking, the media members in the audience usually provide the mean and trust the wider public to provide the stupid. The public rarely lets them down.

Consider the recent flap over Mike Huckabee supposedly saying that women can't control their libidos. He said nothing of the sort, of course, but if your information diet consisted of mainstream media sound bites, you'd be convinced otherwise. Here's what Huckabee actually said:

And if the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so be it. Let us take that discussion all across America because women are far more than the Democrats have played them to be, and women across America need to stand up and say, ‘Enough of that nonsense.’

Contrary to the gleeful soundbites and tweets, Huckabee is clearly not insulting women. He's just pointing out how Democrats do. To claim otherwise is disingenuous at best.

While researching the preceding paragraphs, I saw that the narrative has shifted somewhat. Now that the left-wing media is having trouble selling the lie about what Huckabee said, they're shifting to saying that they never tried to lie about it in the first place and conservatives are big meanies for claiming that they did. Yeesh.

Another great example of this was when Sarah Palin knew when the Boston Tea Party happened, and knew that her live audience knew it too, but "Gotcha"-playing left-wing activists journalists mistakenly assumed she must have been trying to cite the year of America's independence, because everybody (who went to journalism school) knows nothing else important happened in the 18th century. They jumped down her throat about it, insinuating she was stupid. If only we could harness ignorant hypocrisy as an energy source.

The attentive reader may notice that I'm not linking to liberal attack sites. That's not an accident. It isn't because they're hard to find or because I can't document sources, but because I'm not interesting in taking the chance of giving them more hits. I prefer to link to credible sources rebutting them. However, for this last item, which inspired this post, I haven't seen anyone else challenging it yet. I'm hoping it catches on, because I'd love to see Michael Coren or Mark Steyn eviscerate the writer.

Heather Mallick is a left-wing shill who writes for the Toronto Star (at the risk of repeating myself). If it's not atheist, pro-abortion, liberal, Liberal propaganda, she's against it. Stephen Harper could rescue a hundred puppies from a burning high-rise building and she'd complain that he didn't brush them and clip their nails on the way down the stairs. As a good leftist, she's also not real fond of Jews, although she spends a chunk of the column I'm describing protesteth-ing that point too much. (Protip: if you claim you're not anti-Semitic but protest every security initiative Israel takes on to defend its citizens, you're actually  arguing that Jews don't have the right to self-defence, effectively endorsing their slaughter. No sale on the whole "not anti-Semitic" thing.)

I had wanted to go point-by-point through her column correcting the logical errors, but that would take longer than I'm willing to invest right now. I don't want this piece to join my collection of half-finished posts that are no longer even remotely timely. I really need to point out one particular jaw-dropper, though. Mallick takes it as a point of faith that Stephen Harper is a bumbling, uninformed hick. She uses this example in an attempt to hammer that point home:

Here’s the most uneducated thing: Harper claimed Canada is the "polar opposite of Israel” as it has "much geography but very little history." The state of Israel is 65 years old, Canada is 147 and humans first arrived on this continent perhaps 16,000 years ago.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Wow. Just wow.

And this woman is a professional journalist. By thinking that the nation of Israel sprang into existence ex nihilo in 1948, Mallick demonstrates her place in the ranks of the painfully ignorant.

For those who don't know (which is arguably fine, as long as you don't think you're being really clever by trying to smugly rebut someone who does), the nation of Israel was established in, umm, Biblical times. Even if you reject the idea that the Bible was divinely inspired or that there was anything supernatural involved in Israel's rise and fall, there is no question of Israel's existence prior to the adoption of the calendar by which we now measure years. Israel was sacked by the Romans in 70. That's the year 70, as in one thousand, nine hundred, and forty-four years ago. Almost two millennia since it fell, and considerably more than that since it was founded.

But by all means, Ms. Mallick, please continue to impress us with how much less history Israel has than a country that's been around for about a buck-and-a-half, and how  "uneducated" Stephen Harper is.

I'm guessing Ms. Mallick didn't do so well in math class. If you insist that 1944 < 147, your teacher will probably mark it wrong.

Oh, well, for those who are terrible at math (and history), I suppose there's always journalism school.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of a bottle of something of which my wife has a bottle. And of which she took a picture.

Perfectly Ordinary Shirt Day

I'll put my hatred of bullying, and contempt for the bullies themselves, up against anyone's. I have a visceral reaction to any abuse of power or authority.

This holds true whether we're talking about bullies on the playground, or anywhere else in life. Members of Parliament who intimate that objecting to their proposal implies you're in league with child pornographers, thuggish cops whose first interaction with a distraught foreigner is to taser him to death, teachers who run screeching to the police to arrest a man because his four-year-old daughter draws a picture of a gun, or people who think it's OK to kill babies in the name of convenience, and hey, it's not like they can fight back - they're all cut from the same cloth as playground tyrants, and I want them all knocked off their high horses. Hard.

However, as much as I deplore bullying in all its forms, I won't conform for the sake of an empty gesture.

Tomorrow is Pink Shirt Day, intended to demonstrate opposition to bullying. There will probably be millions of people, including lots of them at my son's school and my workplace, wearing pink shirts under the delusion that a momentary meaningless gesture of solidarity will dispel the satisfaction that bullies get from exercising brute force. Their intentions are good, but on Thursday they'll be dressing normally and the Nelsons of the world will resume business as usual.

This display will do nothing to dissuade bullies, mainly because bullies aren't very smart. If they were, they'd be far more frightened of possible consequences of their behaviour, like the school shooting currently playing out in Ohio. Interestingly, earlier today I saw reports saying that the (alleged...) shooter was a favourite target for his school's bullies. Those seem to have now been scrubbed offline.

That's the sole upside of school shootings: the hope that somewhere a bully will furrow their unibrow and wonder whether that little spaz they torment might do the same to them if pushed too far, and back off. I'd rather they back off out of personal growth, but in the interim fear will do. And no, that tiny upside doesn't mitigate the tragic downside.

Anti-bullying has entered the fashionable mainstream. That's only because now it's politically useful to some people to call attention to some of the victims. Kids have always been picked on by other kids. Some can take it, some can't (which is not meant to denigrate those who can't, because they shouldn't have to). The awkward kids, shy kids, tall kids, short kids, fat kids, smart kids, homely kids, and yes, those kids who don't conform to the mainstream stereotypes of masculinity or femininity, as the case may be, have always gotten picked on. The worst thing a kid can be in the eyes of other kids is different. And everybody tisked and muttered about how that shouldn't be, but it went on more or less unabated for millenia.

But now it's intolerable and the greatest scourge of our society because of the fashionable (take that as a pun if you like) victims.

"It gets better" is a message for all kids, not just those in trendy subcultures.

As for me, I will not be wearing a pink shirt tomorrow, partly because I don't own one but more because I'm largely immune to peer pressure. This is closely related to my near-total lack of social skills and inability to understand normal human interaction.

This immunity has some downsides. Sometimes it's wise to go with the herd, because there be tigers in the other direction. On the other hand, not caring (or often, even realizing) what everyone else is doing lets you skip over a lot of nonsense in life. I rather like it when I look at the magazines in the supermarket checkout aisle and don't recognize any of the people on the covers.

I'm actually hoping that one of our office cheerleaders calls me out tomorrow for not wanting to play this latest reindeer game. If and when they do, I'm going to make a loud spectacle out of asking them why they're singling me out for negative attention just because I don't conform to their expectations. I'll grow increasingly (mock-) distraught as I proclaim how much they're hurting my feelings by picking on me for dressing differently from them.

Then I'll abruptly shut off the histrionics and thank them, because I feed on irony. Their lack of self-awareness is like manna to me, the sweet nectar of paradise. I may lapse into a Montgomery Burns impression for this stage of the bit.

"But Z-Dog," you may interject at this point, "if you do this to some poor unsuspecting sap, won't that make you, kind of, well... a bully?"

To which I reply, "Don't call me Z-Dog. You sound like an idiot." Also, "Yes."

The best answer to bullying, unfortunately, is a bigger bully. We live in a fallen world, wherein every last member of the dominant species is corrupted by sin. The best of us isn't very good. The best we can ever hope for is that the bully at the top of the food chain is benevolent. This is why I'm quite content with America being the dominant world power for the last few decades. Yes, she occasionally throws her weight around, but virtually always with good intentions and often to good ends.

In summation, I hate bullying (but not the bullies themselves, a crucial distinction) of any sort as much as anyone, but I'm not interested in meaningless gestures that consist largely of leveraging peer pressure to force conformity, itself a concept dear to every bully's heart. I'll stick with knocking the feet out from under bullies at every opportunity, and encouraging others to do the same.

And I don't wait until the victims are a politically correct group.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of round Winnie-the-Pooh and Tigger dolls that look like they could be wadded into balls for easy storage. I call them Poohkemon.

Educational Fascism, Part XXIV

Homeschooling has been effectively outlawed in the province of Quebec. Those who choose not to hand their children over to bureaucratic babysitters for indoctrination are well on their way to being officially labelled enemies of the state.

Here's a brief rundown of the situation. More details are readily available online if you want to find out more. There's a family in Quebec who have four children, ages ranging from 3 to 9 ears. For whatever reason, they decided to homeschool their kids. It really doesn't matter to anyone else exactly why they made that choice. As the parents of those children, there's absolutely no reason why anyone else should have any say about it.

The "authorities" decided otherwise. Last year, representatives of the state decided that the two oldest, who were already of school age but not attending the state-run daily indoctrination camp, had to start going to public school. For whatever reason, the parents complied. Those two children are not thriving, to put it gently.

Now the "authorities" have decided that the younger two children, who are too young for school, cannot spend their weekday afternoons at home under the watchful and loving eyes of their family either. They have been ordered into state-run daycare.

This responsibility for this latest outrage falls entirely upon a judge, an unelected and unaccountable bureaucrat with delusions of grandeur named Nicole Bernier. The "honourable" Ms. Bernier decided that she wasn't convinced that these kids would be properly "socialized" if not subjected to the Lord-of-the-Flies-esque meatgrinder that is the public school system.

It's important to stop here and note that there is not so much as a whiff of an allegation of abuse, neglect, impropriety, or even academic weakness on the part of these parents. Perhaps under the mistaken impression that fascists might be reasonable, they reportedly co-operated with all inquiries and requests for the "authorities" to check out how the kids were doing. Other than one of the older ones having a hearing problem that presented some challenges (and could certainly be handled better at home than in a large group setting like a classroom), everything was fine by all reports.

Not having any actual grounds to seize these kids didn't dissuade Ms. Bernier. She fantasized that the "socialization" of children was somehow the purview of the state, and used her delusion to invent a legal justification.

The funniest/saddest (those often blur together for me) part of this is that even if we accept the premise that the state is responsible for the nebulous category of "socialization" - and we shouldn't - there is still a glaring logical error with this judicial fiat. Homeschooled children, contrary to bigoted leftist fantasies, generally do not have social problems when compared to those raised by (not "in", deliberately) public schools. The biggest difference later on tends to be that the homeschooled students tend to be more confident (in a positive way, not in the modern empty "self-esteem" sense) and comfortable when interacting with people of different ages, social cohorts, etc. The public school veterans have twelve years or so of having been confined almost exclusively with people their own age and from similar social backgrounds. They are very comfortable with other people just like themselves, but not as comfortable (as the homeschooled students) with those who are different.

Oh, and homeschooled kids wind up much better educated than their assembly-line-product peers as well, but that almost goes without saying.


This is a travesty. The family is fighting it, and they must win. The principles of parental authority and freedom of conscience are at stake. The family, not the state, is the foundational structure of society. The suggestion that these family, or anyone else, needs the permission of the state (translation: of some clipboard-toting civil servant) to homeschool their children infuriates me. It's actually quite the opposite. The educational bureaucracy needs the permission of the parents to have access to those children.

My son is in public school, for reasons I'm not going into just now. It's complicated. However, I make it crystal clear on a regular basis to every school district employee I encounter that they need to remember who is the final authority in our relationship. Many parents take the attitude that the school is responsible to educate the children, and the parents can help. That's exactly the opposite of true. It's the responsibility of parents to educate their children, and the school can help (if the parents choose to let it). I hope you see the difference there. It's a matter of who bears the primary responsibility, and who therefore is the corresponding primary authority. Parents need to explicitly assert this principle, and keep reminding representatives of "the system" of who is really in charge, until it sinks in.

This family in Quebec has chosen to fight this outrage in court. Good for them. they're being far more patient and accommodating than I would have been in the same situation. I would have ignored the initial inquiries (that lead to the two older children being drafted last year), and had the situation escalated to where theirs did, I would almost certainly have wound up spending at least a few evenings in jail for "contempt of court" (as though this court deserves anything else) for informing the judge that they didn't have a say in how I choose to educate my children, and I really couldn't care less what they have to say about it.


But back to my opening sentence. Homeschooling has already been criminalized in some countries, like Germany. Funny, you'd think Germany, of all nations, might understand that compelling children into state-run indoctrination programs doesn't always end well.

With this ruling, if it is allowed to stand, Canada is on a very slippery slope. This sets a precedent that the legal system may decree, for no good reason, that children can be forced into public school against the will of their parents. The step from that coercion being an option to being mandatory is frighteningly small. And don't think for a second that this fascism will confine itself to Quebec.

This is a camel whose nose must be pushed back out of the tent. A few years ago, the bureaucrats in my home province decreed that requiring children to enter grade one, at age six, wasn't good enough, and kindergarten for five-year-olds became mandatory. I tried to raise the alarm that it was the thin edge of a wedge, but few would hear. Now state-approved daycare is required in some places for even younger children.

The State wants control of as many children as possible, from as young an age as possible. This should alarm anyone with any knowledge of history or sense of personal autonomy. "Give me a child until the age of seven and I will give you the man" is generally attributed to the Jesuits, but it took the Communists to harness its full potential.

Daycare, kindergarten, public school - none of these are inherently good or evil, right or wrong. If you are a parent, you are free to evaluate your options and decide what makes the most sense for your family. But it must be your choice, not Nicole Bernier's.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of flowers I bought for my wife an anniversary or two ago. I was necessarily vague about my expectations, giving the florist a budget to work with but no particular specifications beyond "flowers, maybe in a vase or something." Thus, due to my cluelessness and the florist's lack of scruples, this bouquet cost in the ballpark of sixty bucks. Oh, and the card reads, "In appreciation for your years of loyal service." Really. But that part was my idea.

Reading Log: Outliers

I have several rather large stacks - well, more like an amorphous pile at this point - of books that I've finished reading but haven't written about. I had intended this blog to act as a reading log, among other things. Not writing about books that I finish doesn't contribute much to that goal.

As an insignificant token gesture toward rectifying that, here's a book that I borrowed, and which I'd like to return: Outliers: The True Story of Success by Malcom Gladwell.

This one is borrowed from the local library. I've already kept it past its due date, and renewed it, and am fast approaching its new due date. I had read it well before the first due date rolled around, but held onto it in faint hopes of writing this entry.

There's a library very close to my workplace. So close, in fact, that I can spend my lunch breaks there, and most days I do. I have a set prioritization sequence. Each day I read the newspapers (including any from past days that I haven't read yet), then any new periodicals of any interest to me whatsoever, then scan the new arrivals shelves for anything that looks interesting, then finally work my way down a shelf, in Dewey Decimal System order, at least skimming each book. I keep notes on that last method, so I can remember the shelf and book where I last left off; most days, I don't make it past the new arrivals, so I rarely resort to this method.

I'm usually content to read a new book for a few minutes to get the idea, maybe returning to it another day if it's still there. Outliers has been the only book so far for which my ten-minute skim wasn't enough. I signed it out so that I could finish it at my leisure (which took two or three days).

This books starts strong, with a chapter on a phenomenon that fascinated me: the tendency for elite athletes to have been born in the early months of the year. The author provides a few lists of professional sports team rosters, and it's immediately obvious that the players are far likelier to have been born between January and March than at any other time. Then he explains why.

It's one of those things that's so obvious, you wonder why we hadn't seen it all along: at first, in any group activity, children are grouped by age, and there has to be a cutoff. Whether we're talking about junior sports teams, school, or almost anything else, all the kids born before an arbitrary date go into group A, and all the ones born on that date or later go into group B or wait until next year. It quickly becomes apparent that some of the kids in each group are more talented than others. Those more talented kids get more attention, more opportunities, better coaching, more practice time, whatever. It's only normal to encourage and nurture talent. The less proficient kids fall by the wayside. They may get relegated to the backup team, put into a less challenging curriculum, held back for remedial work, etc.

However the truth is that those "more talented" kids may not be prodigies at all. They may just be older.

These groupings by birthdate usually happen at an early age. Five or six years old, at the latest. When grouping those children into age cohorts, you end up with some children in the group being as much as one day short of a full year older than the others. At age five or six, a gap of (effectively) a full year makes a huge difference. The child who is five years, 11 months, and 28 days old will be bigger, stronger, faster, more co-ordinated, more agile, and more intelligent than the child who is five years and 2 days old. They will be "better", by almost any measure, by a significant margin.

That younger child will wind up on the losing end of almost any comparison. Before long, they will be shunted off into the second (loser) division. The "prodigy", whose true main advantage was that they had several extra months of development under their figurative and literal belt, will receive better training, more resources, more opportunities, and ultimately a better outcome.

This is not to say that birthdate is the only predictor of success, that children born at the "right" time never have true natural ability, or that children born at the "wrong" time can't sometimes overcome that through true natural ability or sheer determination. However, it's clearly an important factor.

The only hockey player whose name I could immediately think of when I first read this was Wayne Gretzky. He was born on January 26.

I found this age issue mind-blowing, and I wonder how it could be overcome or, to put it more crassly, perhaps even exploited. The first thing that comes to mind is that a rival children's sports league could be started, with the age cutoff exactly six months off from that used by the current, established league. If you could get this to take hold (and you'd have to follow it up through all the age groups for such a league), I think that within a few years we would discover almost twice as many "prodigies" in the sport. The ones born in January or soon thereafter, and the ones born in July or soon thereafter. How many potential Wayne Gretzkys have gone unnoticed simply because they were a few months less developed?

That's in sports, though, about which I give not the slightest whit. It's just an area where this phenomenon is easily observed. Gladwell - among other sources we'll discuss shortly - assures the reader that statisticians have done proper studies on the matter that demonstrate a clear, strong correlation between high athletic achievement and a birthdate near the entry point cutoff.

I'd be far more interested in overcoming this in the academic world. Many a child has been pigeonholed early on by the bureaucrats in charge of the school system, and proceeded to live down to the expectations placed (or not) upon them. Just one more way in which the public "educational" system fails miserably.

I'm something of a numbers and statistics geek, so when I read about this in Gladwell's book, having never heard of it before, I thought it must be a very obscure phenomenon. Then, shortly thereafter, I read about it on Cracked.com .

I think it's safe to assume that if a research area is being discussed on Cracked (which is sometimes a surprisingly good source of information), it's not exactly a secret anymore. I was just late to the party.

The rest of Gladwell's book is still somewhat interesting, but didn't grip me like that first revelation. He debunks the myth of effortless expertise, by using such examples of Bill Gates and the Beatles. Gates was certainly brilliant, but to suggest that he was an inexperienced natural who mastered computers by sheer intuition is off the mark. He had several opportunities fall into his lap by various means that allowed him to rack up thousands of hours of programming experience at an early age. Where most of us squander our time, young Gates passionately threw himself into a hobby that turned out to have a very practical application later in his life.

As for the Beatles, they honed their craft with months of nights on Hamburg nightclub stages, playing for eight to ten hours a night, seven nights a week, for demanding audiences. They didn't get as good as they became without paying years of dues. By the time they appeared on the Ed Sullivan show, they had spent more hours onstage than most veteran performers will amass in their entire career.

The books bogs somewhat in the middle, as Gladwell spends far too many pages explaining why Jews became so prominent in the legal profession (no, really, he does). The book is well worth reading overall, but I could understand a reader setting it aside after the chapters on birthdates and "overnight success stories".

Another fascinating section comes when he compares two brilliant physicists, Chris Langan and Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer was somewhat deranged, even trying at one point to poison an associate for no comprehensible reason, but was put in charge of the Manhattan Project. Langan falls victim to a series of seemingly minor misfortunes, and winds up a footnote. The main differences between them lie in their social skills - Oppenheimer is a master manipulator, although we, as always, pretty this up by calling him "charming", "personable", or "persuasive". As such, his flaws, though at least comparable to those of Langan, are overlooked whereas Langan is allowed to drift into obscurity.

Much of life is a popularity contest.

I also appreciated the theme that raw intelligence ultimately counts for little. There seems to be a point where IQ is simply "high enough", and being any more intelligent past that threshold is insignificant. There is also a large degree to which, as in the case of Oppenheimer and Langan, raw intelligence matters less than "social skills", a euphemism for likability and capability to manipulate.

I appreciated this because I'm a guy whose IQ consistently tests in the top 1/2 of 1% of the population. It's been formally tested a few times over the years, and I've taken a few other informal but supposedly valid tests as well, and every time I've scored in that range. In real life, that counts for the exact midpoint of jack and squat.

I have a nice, nondistinguished, middle-class existence, which suits me fine. However, it's certainly not what anyone, including myself, would have predicted for me back when my elementary school tried to move me up several grades (Mom vetoed it), but settled for letting me take individual advanced classes (grade 5 English when I was in grade 1, high-school English and math in grade 3), or when universities began calling my house when I was still in junior high school. As it turned out, my academic career was solid but nothing special, and my professional life has been similar. My social skills are closer to those of Langan than Oppenheimer, so it could have been much worse, and I have absolutely no complaints about my lot in life. Still, one of my favourite TV shows was Malcolm in the Middle, because of its recurring theme: being intelligent doesn't make you smart.

Back to the book. The question I'm left with is what we can do with this information. By the end of the book we know that grouping children by age conveys a huge advantage on the oldest members of the group. We know that it takes approximately 10,000 hours of experience in anything to become an expert, and there are no shortcuts. We know that sometimes the skills acquired to adapt to adverse circumstances pay off handsomely later, when the circumstances change (the point of the section about Jewish lawyers).

So, do we stop grouping children by age? Do we devote more time to productive or educational activities, which sounds more than a bit obvious, no matter how unlikely? Do we focus more on developing our interpersonal skills? Do we contact our friendly neighbourhood psychics to ask what things will be like in twenty years, so we can start angling into position now?

The only practical action I can see is to try to provide opportunities to others. Part of Gladwell's thesis is that his titular "outliers" may not be so special in and of themselves. They may have been in the right place at the right time or willing to do what needed to be done to advance. However, many of them reached in their positions of prominence due in no small part to the largesse of others. No one really makes it alone. Bill Gates was given time in computer labs in an era when that was a rarity. A club owner decided to give the Beatles, a moderately talented garage band like hundreds of others, a shot as his house band. A blind eye was turned toward Oppenheimer's antisocial tendencies.

Help one another. Give a break to somebody who could use one.

I guess that's as good a moral to the story as any.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of my new dog, back when she really was my new dog, in every sense of the word. She's a little over a year old now, and her head alone is now much larger than those boots on the left.

Very-Nearly-Year In Review

This entry is being posted so that I can semi-legitimately say that I didn't go an entire year without posting. This post is not a farewell. It is not an announcement of a return. It just is.

I had no explicit intention of abandoning this blog. I still don't. I never made a conscious decision to stop posting. I still haven't. I just didn't post one day, then didn't post the next day, then it was 2010, then it was late August.

Now, for the last year-or-so. These are more or less random thoughts, barely sketched out.

I'm still in the same job that I've been in since early 2008. Starting that job - or more accurately, leaving my last job, or even more accurately, being informed that my last job was coming to an abrupt and unforeseen end, was part of the catalyst for starting this blog.

The new job I had thought imminent in the summer of 2009 still hasn't happened. It may or may not happen at this point. The prospective new employer took me on some all-expenses-paid training in the summer of 2009, and their hiring is proceeding on schedule, but I haven't gotten called up yet. There's at least one more wave of hiring to go on the project, so hope remains. I'm quite content where I am now, and more than adequately compensated, so I have no complaints no matter what happens, but I'd definitely switch over to this new situation given the opportunity.

Since I haven't changed jobs, I also haven't moved. We're still in the same house, which is now paid off in full, as are all our household's student loans at long long last. The house has also received some much-needed repairs thanks to a contractor who actually showed up and did his job, and a new back step and backyard patio thanks to my father-in-law.

My son is in school and doing fine. I'm not sure that the various school district employees who deal with him are doing quite so well, but that's why they get paid the big bucks. My favourite moment from a parent-teacher meeting was when I ripped into his teacher and a school district drone chaperone for his report card saying they'd like us to hold him back on his reading, because the material he was reading was getting too advanced. They hemmed and hawed and stammered trying to justify this in the meeting; first they were concerned that he might not be intellectually and / or emotionally ready for some of his preferred books (although, to be clear, it's not like we're letting him read a lot of novels on the theme of nihilism), then that his chosen material was so far beyond that of his classmates that they might have trouble relating. The truth is one of two things. Either his advanced reading makes it harder for the teacher, or he's reading material that his teacher and/or the useless suit-clad sycophants from the district office can't understand themselves.

My wife has returned to work, for the first time since before our son was born lo those many years ago. It's a pain. The logistics of childcare and other family responsibilities become exponentially more complicated without one always-available parent to cover home base. She's on a short-term contract, and we're kind of hoping she isn't offered an extension. We certainly don't need the money; she's working because she wanted to try getting back out of the house for a bit, and that experiment may have run its course. I also wanted her to have some more recent experience on her resume in case I drop dead tomorrow and she suddenly gets drafted as the primary breadwinner for the family.

We have a new dog. A female mutt, mostly black lab. I have a definite type (three of my last four dogs matched that description). She's six months old, and got spayed last Thursday. She's long since back to her goofy normal self. At this early stage, she's the best-behaved dog I've ever had, and I've had some very good dogs.

I've subscribed to Macleans magazine, and its arrival in the mailbox is one of the highlights of my week. Usually. For the last few issues my favourite columnist, Mark Steyn, has been notably absent, but the editors claim he'll return shortly. He'd better, for my subscription's sake. Anyway, it's two bucks or so a month tacked onto my cable bill for a weekly news magazine, so it would have been tough to pass up. Plus, although it would be a massive stretch to claim that the overall tone of the magazine is conservative, it's clear that the editors are willing to at least allow conservative voices to be heard, which is near-miraculous for Canadian media.

On to geekier stuff.

My wife and I have gone through sporadic bursts of playing Magic. I also had a brief relapse into playing the Microprose Magic game, released in the 1990s, thanks to a group of wonderful lunatics who have hacked it to add lots of newer cards.

Even that, though, has fallen by the wayside thanks to Forge. Forge has almost everything I want in a Magic program: a huge card selection, adequate single-player AI, and full custom deckbuilding capabilities. I've been playing it way too much, and building way too many decks, for the last few weeks. My wife plays it too. We have two computers set up, and it's not unusual for us to each be on one of them playing Forge. The only things Forge is missing, as far as I'm concerned, are multiplayer and the rest of the cards. Yes, my ideal Magic computer game would include every card that's ever been printed. Whereas the new version of Forge added almost 400 more cards, I get the impression that the developers have the same goal.

I also finally went to Linux. I built a new PC last fall - 2.3GHz quad-core, 4 GB RAM, 1.3 TB of hard drive space. Its name, as longtime readers (if there are any of you left) may have guessed, is Levi. Levi is the most powerful PC I've ever built by a long margin, and I decided it was time to take the plunge. I set it up to dual-boot between Windows XP and Ubuntu Studio, and resolved to stick as exclusively with Ubuntu as much as I could.

I haven't booted Levi into XP in months. Well, with one exception - I tried installing a Windows program that purported to prepare a virtual machine image based on my actual XP installation. You see, I wanted to cheat. The Microprose Magic game doesn't work under Wine (a program that lets you run some Windows software in Linux), and I was going into withdrawal. I planned to set up an XP virtual machine in Ubuntu for that single purpose. However, that little program didn't work, or I did something wrong. I puttered at it a bit, and while doing so stumbled across Forge, which works fine in Linux. I now have pretty much no interest in going back to the Microprose game, or Windows.

I've found a Linux application for everything else I want to do with my computer, with the sole exception of MP3tag, which works fine under Wine. Bye bye, XP. See you when Diablo 3 ships, and probably not before.

I got my son a Wii for Christmas last year. He loves it.

I actually bought it in the early fall, and spent every evening for weeks on end at a workbench in the basement where I'd set up the Wii, hooked to a tiny old TV set. I wasn't playing games (much) - I was modding the holy jumping monkey bugs out of it. By the time he opened it on Christmas morning, it included a media player, MAME and a pile of ROMs, emulators for several other older game systems with huge ROM sets, and an external hard drive with...well, a lot of games preinstalled. Too many, actually - to this day, he's barely scraped the surface, preferring to stick with Super Mario Galaxy (1 and 2), Mario Kart, and New Super Mario Bros. Wii. I sense a theme.

I could say much more about each of these, and many other topics besides. I hear there's even stuff going on in the world outside my house. Maybe I will over the days to come. Maybe not. I really don't know.

For now, I'm stopping here in the interests of getting this up before it's officially the anniversary of my last post, at which point I fear this blog might have turned into a pumpkin if left fallow.


Is anybody still out there?


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of the middle shelf, left-hand side, on bookshelf # 1. Once again, spot the theme. For nonexistent bonus points, identify the two books that aren't strictly on-theme.

You Get More Of What You Subsidize

Lobster prices are apparently low in New Brunswick this year. The same may be true in other areas as well; I neither know, nor could be bothered to check, whether that's the case.

For those who enjoy eating lobster and live in an area where the price is down, this is a good thing. For my part, I don't care to eat underwater cockroaches, so this has remarkably little effect on my life. I always wonder two things about the first time a person ate lobster. Number one, how did they get one in the first place? Lobsters are bottom-feeding scavengers. They don't, to my knowledge, occasionally poke their eye-stalks above the surface to look around, or creepy-crawl up onto the beach for some sun.

No, it takes effort, and generally a big specially constructed wooden box, to catch lobster. I like to imagine that someone built one of those big wooden boxes and tossed it into the ocean on spec. "I don't know what'll wind up in there, but I'm eating it!"

Yes, yes. Tidal pools, accidental beachings, etc. Things that belong on the ocean floor wind up on the beach all the time. This doesn't help the case of the first person who ate a lobster they just happened to find. Take a good long look at a lobster. It looks like something that escaped from one of David Cronenberg's nightmares. The correct response of the first person who found one, not knowing what it was, should have been to run as far as they could, then dare their friends to go poke it with a stick.

This brings me to my second question about the first lobster-eating. How freaking hungry was that person? A lobster, even disregarding the possible hygiene and disgust factors of finding one lying on a beach, already dead and decomposing, is not an appetizing sight. A lobster is an aquatic earwig.

Of course, my scenario of that first lobster-finder daring their friends to go look (this, of course, assumes that finder was male) leads to another possibility. The first person to eat lobster may have done so on a dare, or possibly when bribed with the epochal equivalent of a dollar. Remember that kid you knew in elementary school who would eat pretty much anything for a buck? The first person to eat lobster was somebody who grossed him out.


Sidebar: at this very moment, somewhere out there a reader who enjoys lobster is preparing an indignant retort about how delicious it is. Save it. If it doesn't nauseate you, then by all means enjoy. The fact that I see eating lobster as pretty much equivalent to scarfing down insect-infested roadkill means all the more for you. You should be thanking me, really. End sidebar.


I have another issue, besides disgust, with eating lobster. I am neither a vegetarian nor an animal rights activist. I understand that every time I eat meat, I'm eating an animal that was killed for that express purpose, and I'm generally OK with that. However, I think that those animals should be killed in as quick and painless a manner as possible. I have a hard time seeing "dropped alive into a pot of boiling water" as humane.


Anyway, all of that was preamble to what I really intended to write today. My actual topic is the economy of lobster fishing (which should be called "lobster roaching" or something - are lobsters "fish" by any definition?).

The low price of lobster is not so good for lobster fishermen. Having learned something from the business acumen in the banking and automotive industries, lobster fishermen have responded to this downturn by asking for government bailouts:

On Thursday representatives from every wharf in the area met to discuss the issue with the hopes they can organize something to get the attention of the government, (a spokesman) said.

"We're not paid enough even to cover costs and we need help from the government."

(The spokesman) said they are hoping both the federal and provincial governments will step in to help fishermen.

Here's the problem with that line of thinking. This applies to every industry, not just fishing. The government cannot help. Oh, they can throw some money (your money and mine, by the way - the government has no money except what it takes from citizens) at a problem to try to put a band-aid on the bloody stump, but in the long term that does more harm than good. Here's how.

Let's assume there are 1000 lobster fishermen in New Brunswick who can't make any money at it this year due to low prices. I have no idea whether that number is remotely accurate, and don't care since it's only for illustrative purposes.

If the government steps in and hands them each a bag of money not to fish this year, or does anything else that has the same end effect of insulating them from any financial losses (regulating prices, etc.), then how many of them will come back and try to fish lobster again next year? Probably about 1000. Maybe more, since a government bailout means guaranteed profits.

The same problem will then repeat itself next year. And the year after that, and the year after that, ad infinitum. This is not indefinitely sustainable. At some point, an industry has to be allowed to suffer some negative consequences of economic cycles. Even if we ignore the debatable morality of the government stepping in and interfering (I'm not going there today; this is going to wind up long enough already), it destabilizes the market and leads to much larger long-term problems.

Now, consider what happens if the government doesn't interfere. Yes, it'll be a rough summer for some lobster fishermen. However, what would happen to those same 1000 lobster fishermen next year? I'll expect that by then, some of them would have found something more profitable to do. Let's say 10% of them move on to other occupations, go back to school, move to another region, whatever. That leaves 900 trying to fish lobster next year. That means less lobster on the market, which means higher prices, which means maybe the 900 can make a living at it. If not, then maybe only 700 will try the next year. Eventually, and in a shorter time than you'd probably expect, the market will stabilize and the remaining fishermen will be making money.


Sidebar for those who went to public schools in the last thirty years, or who don't see the problem with the bailout mentality: when the government keeps its nose out of things, the price of anything is normally determined by two factors: supply (how much of it is available) and demand (how much of it people want). This is called the free market, and it's a good thing for all kinds of reasons that we don't have time to go into today. Sorry to complicate this - I know those three italicized terms will be completely new and foreign concepts to a lot of people these days. End sidebar.


So if the government stays out of it, despite some tough times in the interim for a relatively few people, things will work out in the end. If the government gets involved, and they probably will, they'll destabilize the market and foster a cycle of dependency. Bailing out an industry to avoid a down market cycle (or even a long-term shift - if cars were just being invented now, governments would be making guarantees to buggy whip manufacturers) may prevent a little pain in the short term, but it causes a lot more in the long term. It's the equivalent of not teaching a child the alphabet, because that's an awful lot to ask of a toddler, to let them struggle through life as an illiterate adult.

And about that whole dependency thing, here's a quote from a spokesman for the fishermen, from later in the same article. He's talking about the possibility of the fishermen only running their boats for a few weeks this year: "How would you then qualify for EI?"

I'm not trying to belittle their situation. I appreciate how hard it is to find work under the best of conditions, and Atlantic Canada in 2009 is far from the best of conditions. However, I just don't see how it's the government's problem, or mine, if somebody can't work long enough this summer to qualify for EI ("employment insurance", which is what Canada calls unemployment benefits to try to put on an Orwellian happy face). Once again, maybe people should be encouraged to move on from an industry where you plan to collect unemployment benefits every year, and look for something more stable and sustainable.

For that matter, the fact that the I in "EI" stands for "insurance" makes the thought occur to me that planning to collect on insurance is normally considered insurance fraud. The law says I can't insure my house then deliberately burn it down, or take out life insurance on someone then kill them, and expect to benefit. Insurance is meant to compensate unforeseen losses. But this, again, is a whole other topic that I'll leave for today.

As a postscript, that newspaper I linked to earlier has a "public opinion" feature in their editorial section. I like to call it the Uninformed Person On The Street feature (I used to call it "Ignoramus On The Street", but decided that was too harsh). It doesn't seem to be in their online edition. Like Jay Leno, they send a reporter out to ask people in the streets what they think about various issues. The problem here is that most people haven't given most issues a moment's thought. This includes me - as I've noted before, I don't know enough about most things to form an opinion, and you can assume that the things I write about are the rare exceptions.

So the odds are that this feature will consist of a lineup of citizens expressing uninformed opinions about situations they don't remotely understand, and offering untenable solutions. Sure enough, that's almost always what you get.

In a recent edition, the reporter asked about this lobster situation. Several apparently random people were asked whether the government should step in to help the fishermen (without defining what that means - obviously, we all understand that it means "give them a pile of money").

Every single one of them said yes, most with emphatic emphasis.

I can only hope against hope that none of those people vote.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of evidence that Hostage Bunny is being mistreated in yet another way: the use of stress positions. You may notice that in every picture his body has been in precisely the same posture, indicating that his fiendish captors are not allowing him to move. Unless he's allowed to stretch occasionally, cramping is inevitable.

Watchmen

First off, yes, I normally like to give my posts "cute" titles. Usually too cute by 40% or so. I can understand why Jerry Seinfeld forbade his writers from giving episodes funny titles. It really does distract from working on the content. Truth be told, I've actually got a couple of titles that I'd like to use, but for which I can't come up with any article ideas, not that lack of ideas always stops me from posting.

If I gave this one a cute title, it would probably have to be "I Watched The Watchmen." Thus I would have appeared to join the thousands of hacks who think that level of triteness is funny. Sure, it would mean that I could write for Entertainment Weekly or pretty much any regional newscast, but I'd be forced to abandon the shred of self-respect I sometimes manage to feign.

On to the point. This week my wife and I went to see Watchmen. Not long ago she had asked if I wanted to go see it, and I answered unequivocally, unhesitatingly, and negatively. It was only after reading several thoughtful reviews and discussions that I decided I would be willing to lay down the eighteen dollars for two tickets.

My belief before the reviews started coming out was that Watchmen was essentially unfilmable. The content is so wed to the comics medium that I thought any adaptation doomed to failure. I only half-jokingly suggested that it would probably work about as well as an attempt to make a movie adaptation of a Beatles album.

From this point forward, there will be spoilers, and not just for Watchmen. I discourage you from reading the rest of this article if you plan to read any books, watch any movies or television shows, attend any plays, or listen to any limericks in the future.

Once we paid our ridiculous admission price (it always occurs to me that I could buy the DVD for what it costs us to go to a movie, and that way we wouldn't have to watch it with chattering teenagers), I wandered the lobby a bit and saw the Watchmen movie poster for the first time. What an awful poster. If I had never heard of Watchmen, there's no way I would go to the movie after seeing that poster. It looks like a really bad X-Men knockoff.

Actually, it looks like the promo / first issue cover shot of every Image Comics team book of the nineties, with a group of grimacing people posing and trying to look tough. The standard checklist of characters was used. Mysterious Guy With Full Face Mask, Guy With Gun, Cowled Batman Knockoff, Creepy Glowing Floaty Guy, and Girl With Way More Skin Exposed Than Most Of The Guys were all present and accounted for. Definitely a vintage Image-style shot, which takes us full circle to "really bad X-Men knockoff."

However, that poster also probably fools innocent passersby into expecting a standard super-hero move, which pleases me very much. I'll come back to that.

We settled into our seats, and after I loudly complained all through a commercial, we got some previews. Apparently there's a new Star Trek movie coming out. I need to get in touch with the marketing people at Paramount, because I have a perfect advertising tagline for it:

Star Trek.
If You Care, You've Probably Never Talked to a Girl.

The next preview was for Mall Cop II. Oh, wait, sorry, it was Seth Rogan's new movie about a mall cop. Observe and Detain or something. I don't remember the title and really couldn't be bothered to look it up. It's ostensibly a comedy, and looks freaking hilarious.

Oh, don't get me wrong, it looks painfully awful. However, I could enjoy it immensely if I watched it with the mindset that it was a grand perverse experiment in uncomedy, in the tradition of Andy Kaufman seeing how long an audience would tolerate him reading The Great Gatsby onstage.

This movie looks like the filmmakers deliberately set up premises that could have led to humourous punchlines, then willfully subverted them by not only not delivering, but by actually veering off in the least funny direction possible. If I watched the movie with that mindset, I'd probably laugh the whole way through it because of the sheer audacity of the experiment and consider everyone involved to be comic geniuses.

On to Watchmen. I'll start with the bottom line. I thought it was very good. If I hadn't read the book, I'd probably think it was great.

I'm not much of a movie reviewer. I'm more of a movie discusser.

The director, Zack Snyder, has been saying on his promo tour that people should watch the movie before reading the book. He's right. Since I'm a longtime comics geek, I'm deeply familiar with the source material and carried a lot of backstory into the theatre. My wife just read the book over the past couple of weeks in preparation for the movie, partly at my suggestion; that may have been a mistake.

Watchmen is definitely not for everyone. It's absolutely not for the kiddies - there's a lot of graphic violence, including an onscreen rape attempt that should make you wince at the very least, visible nipplage, both covered and uncovered (some of the movie takes place in cold locales), and some sex - consensual this time - that's surprisingly vigorous for an R-rated studio release. Oh, yeah, I almost forgot - a big blue computer-generated nuclear penis gets lots of screen time.

A more important warning is called for over the entire movie's tone. It's very, very dark, and unrelentingly bleak. This movie is a study of what it means to be human, and so it takes a long hard look at human nature. The picture isn't pretty. Lord of the Flies is just the tip of the iceberg. Once those kids grow up they can start into the real savagery.

This movie is brutal and unflinching. It amuses me to think of people going in expecting a Spider-Man type feelgood movie and coming out completely shellshocked. Too bad they hadn't waited to release it during summer blockbuster season so that even more innocent passersby could walk by the theatre, think from the poster that they were in for a popcorn movie with plenty of explosions but no ideas, and get completely suckerpunched.

The casting was quite good. There were a few actors in the cast who couldn't quite keep up with the others, and one bit player whose performance I didn't buy at all, but I don't want to dwell too much on the negatives. The big positive was that the actor playing Nite Owl was perfect. That said, a few casting notes are in order.

They didn't go with huge names for the cast. There are a few people in this that you'll recognize, but no budget-busting stunt casting. I generally prefer it that way. I also love to see Matt Frewer, a favourite of mine since his short-lived sitcom, Doctor Doctor, getting work.

I found that a couple of the cast reminded me too much of bigger names. The actor playing Ozymandias constantly reminded me of Seth Green. Not a problem, normally, since I enjoy Seth Green's work. However, Ozymandias represents the pinnacle of human physical and metal perfection. Seth Green strikes me as a very sharp-witted guy, but when I think "perfect human being", he just doesn't come to mind.

Also, the actor playing the Comedian was a dead ringer for Robert Downey Jr., so much that I kept forgetting it wasn't him. This is entirely subjective, of course - I've talked to other viewers who didn't see it at all - but it seemed pretty obvious to me. Again, I like Downey, and he could have capably played the role, so it wasn't a problem.

There were other performance issues that I can't really lay at the feet of the actors - the director, and possibly other people on the production side, have to share the blame. For instance, I found it distracting that Seth Green's - sorry, Ozymandias' - accent came and went at random.

Speaking of things that came and went... boy, there's no delicate way to get into this, so I'll just dive in. When Silk Spectre / Laurie was in costume or civilian clothes, she appeared to, shall we say, amply fill out the top half of her outfit. She wore a low-cut formal outfit for an early dinner scene, and was in danger of spilling out of it at any second. However, when the same character appeared topless later in the movie, well, they weren't so much there anymore. When she got dressed again, they were back. Don't get me wrong, at no point was there anything wrong with the lady's build, but there sure seemed to be some garment-based enhancement going on when she was dressed.

Toward the end of the movie, there's a scene where the character is wearing a snug sweater and appears to have gained twenty pounds, all just a few inches south of her shoulders, since we last saw her in costume. The poor actress then had to deliver a most unfortunate line: "There's something I have to get off my chest." Yeah, I'd guess four inches and two cup sizes worth of padding. That line was the funniest thing by far in the movie (which contains very few laughs, even for cynics).

While we're in that area, Silk Spectre's costume appears to be skintight vinyl, and she doesn't seem to wear anything underneath (at least on the upper half of her body). Chafing must be an issue.

Anyway, let's move on. I apologize for the last three paragraphs, but I'm a guy. I notice these things.

Of course, being a good comics geek, I'm unhappy with some of the changes that were made from the original comics. The first example isn't even an objective change - it's just something done differently than I would have wanted. Jackie Earle Haley does a fine job as Rorschach, but he doesn't deliver some of his lines the way I "hear" them when reading the book. He's too aggressive. In the movie, Rorschach growls and barks many of his lines. Many of his sentences would, if transcribed, end with exclamation points to demonstrate his anger. In the book, at least inside my head, Rorschach delivers virtually all of his speech in a monotone, completely devoid of any affect or emotion.

The best example is when Nite Owl / Dan asked what ever happened to their old partnership. In the movie, Rorschach snaps, "You quit!" An accusation with a definite exclamation point, meant to sting. In the book, the same words are delivered with a period. No emotion, simple statement of fact. Rorschach is not hurt by his old partner's abandonment; he's incapable of feeling anything, for good or bad. This is more devastating in its way, as Dan is again confronted with the fact that he can no longer relate to his former friend. There may not even be anything left inside him to relate to. Another character later mentions, in the book version, that Rorschach's lack of vocal modulation makes her uncomfortable. Having him occasionally raise his voice to make a point misses the point altogether.

That's a change or a different interpretation, though, not necessarily a mistake. At least the filmmakers resisted the temptation to make the line, "Never disposed of sewage with toilet before" into a joke. That line is faithfully delivered with no intonation, so it doesn't come off as a standard Hollywood one-liner. Few filmmakers would have shown that restraint.

Most of the movie used the original comics as a script, with the panels as storyboard. However, there were three changes to the dialogue that really stood out to me, and not in a good way. In all three cases, the original dialogue was better.

First, when Rorshach is telling the psychiatrist about when he made the change from being Walter Kovacs to being only Rorschach, right after killing the kidnapper. In the book he says, "It was Kovacs who closed his eyes. It was Rorschach who opened them again." It's much less poetic in the movie; something along the lines of "Kovacs died that day."

Second, when the thug reaches through the bars of Rorschach's cell and asks, "What have you got?" The response is one of my favourite lines in the book: "Your hands. My perspective." In the movie, it becomes "Your hands. My pleasure." I understand that it saves the average movie viewer from loudly asking what "perspective" means, but it's far weaker dialogue, and borderline nonsensical. He "has his pleasure?" What?

Third, a minor change that harms the flow of a moment. After Veidt explains his plan to Dan and Rorschach and they state the cliche that they'll never let him get away with it, in the book he says, "I did it thirty-five minutes ago." This is one of the great moments in fiction, as the "villain explains his plans, including possible points of failure, to the heroes so they can escape and foil him" trope gets the upset it deserves. Despite what every James Bond movie has taught us, few people would ever be that stupid.

In the movie, a subtle change is made, to "I triggered it thirty-five minutes ago." To my ears, that word change hinders the effectiveness of the sentence. I realize the irony in my preferring a simpler, more succinct wording, but there are times when that's the best way to generate emotional impact. This was one of them. Exact wording matters. It's not unusual for me to spend several minutes deliberating over a word choice before moving on, often while re-reading an article before posting. My wife has often heard, "Which word is funnier in this sentence?" For the sentence under discussion, neither word was funny, but "did" was far better.

Now let's move on to non-dialogue changes. Again, these are not errors, but changes that interested me. The removal of the squid didn't, so unlike far too many nerds I won't be complaining about that.

The ending actually improved on one aspect of the book. In the book, no entirely satisfactory reason is given for Dr. Manhattan deciding to leave Earth. He's bored, and it's shown that he's satisfied that Laurie has moved on from him, but he doesn't really need to leave. The movie gives him a good reason.

The group was never called the "Watchmen" in the book. The reader was left to figure out for themselves the relevance of the question "Who watches the watchmen?" However, as already noted, the average moviegoer is considerably dumber than the average reader. Filmmakers don't have the luxury of assuming that their audience will be capable of thought. So, in order to pacify the masses, things need to be spelled out in movies that the author of a book can leave unsaid. For instance, who the "Watchmen" are.

Second, another removal of subtlety. In the movie, we actually see Roschach looming over Big Picture in the washroom. The book handles the same events more discreetly, and far more effectively.

Snyder also had to change how Rorschach killed the kidnapper. This change was mostly forced upon him. Going with the original method from the book would have lead to charges of ripping off a Mad Max movie, or, far worse, one of the interminable Saw movies. Showing Ozymandias watching a Mad Max movie later on was a nice touch.

The movie indulged one bit of comic book nonsense: the idea that a little domino mask would protect someone's secret identity. Think about it for a second: would you fail to recognize one of your friends if they showed up with a raccoon band around their eyes? The book dismissed this. When Dan and Laurie arrive at the prison, they're able to identify Rorschach by his posture and gait, even though they've never seen him without his mask. That's the way it would actually work. There's more to recognizing other people than their facial features. If you can recognize anyone you know while walking up behind them, before you can see their face, then that person would not be able to fool you by putting on a mask.

Yes, Lois Lane and Commissioner Gordon were idiots.

Believe it or not, this movie actually contains some good theology. Even before seeing it, I had been thinking about an article on "Dr. Manhattan as sermon illustration", based solely on the book. I may still write that up, since I haven't touched on what it would have said in this entry. This one is going to be long enough before it's over.

The foundational fact of Christianity, and one that is largely denied in the modern world, is that we are sinners. Every one of us is prone to commit acts of unspeakable evil when our innermost natures are allowed to run free. The western decline of Christianity is directly due to the rejection of this truth. Until someone realizes and understands that they are a sinner, they will never accept their need for a Saviour.

North American and European society have for some time now rejected this idea in favour of a vague notion that man can create his own utopia. Evil is an aberration, and if everyone would only embrace their inner wonderfulness and chant "Yes we can!", we could solve every problem and create paradise on Earth, and cancer would go away and leave us all alone to sing Kumbayah.

That's a nice idea. It's the foundational belief of what's normally described as "liberalism" these days, and it's certainly what the public educational system seeks to teach our children. The problem is that it has absolutely no basis in reality. Human beings are inherently prone to selfishness, to greed, to violence, to hatred. If you want to fight against those tendencies, which are inherent but not irresistible, you must first acknowledge that they exist. To fail to do so is to lose the battle before it begins.

Watchmen understands this. The Comedian, standing in the middle of a bloody urban battlefield, joyfully proclaims it the realization of the American Dream. Rorschach explains that God can't be blamed for atrocities, because people gleefully perpetrate them quite without His help. The characters largely agree on the fallen nature of man.

They're correct. Human nature is dark, evil, and awful. God offers a way out, and most people reject it then think themselves enlightened for doing so. This is the Gospel. Watchmen is a deeply theological film. I am tempted to call it a deeply Christian film.

Watchmen works on several levels. It is a murder mystery, action movie, sociopolitical commentary, and character study (these are without exception broken people). However, the level that most interests me is its examination of human nature.

The three main characters in the story (as I see it) are Rorschach, Dr. Manhattan, and Ozymandias. Each of them in their own way rejects their membership in mankind, losing sight of or actively abandoning their own humanity. They each move to a different level.

Rorschach sets himself below society, living in the gutters and peering into the darkest corners to hunt down murderers. He interacts with society on the micro level, intimately punishing individual criminals and avenging their insignificant (to larger society) victims. He looks into the world from underneath.

Ozymandias sets himself above the masses, proclaiming himself worthy to sacrifice others for the greater good. He looks down on the world from above. He is the inevitable product of a society that preaches self-esteem to its young. The problem is that the self-esteem taught is usually not tied in any way to merit. Veidt / Ozymandias actually is smart, strong, and capable. His self-image would be fine without any pushing. When someone is capable of actual accomplishment, they don't need constant reassurance. Heaping praise on such an individual results in what we see here - a narcissistic and arrogant god complex.

Dr. Manhattan's separation from humanity is obvious and explicit. He exists on a quantum level, seeing human beings as collections of atoms. At one point he openly states that to him, a living person is no different from a dead one - they're both just arrangements of molecules.

However, before the story ends, all three have made contact with their former selves. Veidt points out that Dr. Manhattan still feels far more human than he even realizes; Veidt manipulated him into washing his hands of Earth. It is significant that Rorschach removes his mask at the end, choosing to die as Walter Kovacs, the man Rorschach had already buried long ago.

Ozymandias himself is a trickier case. I think he was telling the truth when he expressed empathy for his victims ("I've made myself feel every death..."). Others (including my wife) contend that this statement was just more manipulation and he didn't mean a word of it. I think he meant it, but that he has become so detached that his empathy doesn't run very deep. He detached not by choice but because he needed to in order to carry out his plan, which, remember, he sees as necessary to save the world. He honestly sees himself as a hero. A saviour.

The book does a better job of expressing the moral ambiguity of Veidt's actions. He's a more straightforward villain in the movie, not least because his "badness" is telegraphed from early on. I've read online stories of Watchmen newbies spotting him as the villain from his first appearance, standing in front of a nightclub looking arrogant. I believe them. Personally, I probably would have figured it out at his attempted assassination if I hadn't already known. The book shows him as a much nobler, much nicer person, and so it's far more shocking when his plan is revealed.

Anyway, that's probably enough for now. I recommend Watchmen to anyone who hasn't experienced it yet. See the movie first, then read the book, or the movie will suffer by comparison. Be forewarned: both the book and the movie require the audience to think. Hopefully that's a plus, not a minus, to anyone reading this, but I think it explains the movie's sharp second-week dropoff at the box office.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of a receptacle for soiled linens.

Me Too! Me Too!

Somebody here in Canada who doesn't quite get the whole "freedom of speech" thing has filed a complaint against the owner of RightWingCanada... for daring to use Barack Hussein Obama's middle name.

Here's the e-mail that the silly person sent to the site's owner, with his misspelling of "derogatory" intact. Note the inclusion of his e-mail address, in case you'd care to exercise your freedom of expression in the direction of his inbox:

Your hateful blog
Mohammed al-Zahar
(mohammad.alzahar@yahoo.ca)
Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 5:48 PM
To: andrew@rightwingcanada.com
Mr. Lawton:

I am writing today to inform you that as of 10:27am EST this morning, I have filed a claim against you under the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Among other hateful and inflammatory remarks made on your blog, www.RightWingCanada.com, you referred to President Obama as "Barack Hussein Obama," citing that he is an Arab-American. This was made in a hateful and dirogatory manner, and such racist propaganda is forbidden under section 13(1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act.

I hope that you go down in flames like your other Nazi friends.

Ma-Z

First up, let me say for the record:

Barack HUSSEIN Obama.

Barack Obama's middle name is Hussein.

Hussein, Hussein, Hussein. That's Barack Obama's middle name, yes indeedy.

That doesn't mean anything. Even if he were of Arabic descent, and I don't know or care whether he is, so what? I've written before about how the actual racism lies in taking offense at a fact, not in the pointing out of the fact itself. To make this more clear, consider this hypothetical dialogue about my favourite whipping boys, the Freedonians:

"Did you know that (Public Figure X)'s family came from Freedonia?"

"HOW DARE YOU call (Public Figure X) one of those filthy Freedonians?!?"

Who's the racist in that scenario, kids?

I consider it a point of failure that no one has even hinted at filing a "Human Rights Commission" complaint against me yet. If it ever happens, my entire response at my hearing will be to read from a transcript of what Ezra Levant said at his. I could never top the absolute drubbing he gave them.

In a blatant attempt to rectify that, I'll be sending the following e-mail to Mohammed Al-Zahar (mohammad.alzahar@yahoo.ca) right after I finish posting this (with hyperlinks spelled out to make it easier for him):

---

Dear Mr. Al-Zahar:

I am writing to express my gratitude to you and offer some assistance.

After about a year of regular blogging, I have yet to be the target of a Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) complaint. However, your complaint against Andrew Lawton of RightWingCanada has shown me the way.

Over the past twelve months I have reposted the Mohammed cartoons, explicitly stated that I support Israel (so much for the "Nazi" accusation - by the way, why throw random, arbitrary labels around? You may as well call Mr. Layton a "soccer referee", a "harmonica", or a "Wankel rotary engine" as a "Nazi"), and said many things that could easily be construed as derogatory to Islam. I'm not going to provide direct links for you, because I could use the hits. Feel free to browse the archives and take advantage of the search functions at http://zirbert.blogspot.com to find all the evidence that you and your Orwellian Commission friends could ever hope for. I look forward to a traffic increase.

However, before today I never had the sheer audacity to publicly state Barack Hussein Obama's middle name. It never even occurred to me that doing so could offend anyone. I have now rectified that oversight, with premeditation and malice of forethought. Of course, use of his middle name means absolutely nothing, but based on your complaint it seems to be a line that must not be crossed.

I wish you good luck in your quest to erase the President's middle name from public discourse. To facilitate your task, I've prepared a list of some more entities who have had the nerve to use Barack Hussein Obama's middle name on their websites. They, of course, must all be shown their place. I look forward to seeing announcements of your CHRC complaints against each of them:

Google
Wikipedia
Biography.com
ArabNews.com
NPR
The New York Times
The Washington Post
The White House

Unless, of course, it turns out that you only drum up complaints against people you've already decided must be silenced.

I've already put this up on my blog. Come by and take a look, then peruse the archives. Be sure to bring your righteous indignation.

-Zirbert, The Irritable Saint
http://zirbert.blogspot.com (Make sure you spell it right when you file your complaint.)

---

Two other quick notes before we go:

It occurs to me to wonder whether Mohammed Al-Zahar (mohammad.alzahar@yahoo.ca) was born in Canada. If not, then I suspect a one way boat or plane trip back to his homeland would place him in a more comfortable "intellectual" climate. If he was, then he's clearly the product of either an Islamic private school or a Canadian public school "education".

Second, if there were a prominent conservative whose middle name held negative connotations (say, "Rush Manson Limbaugh" or "Ann Hitler Coulter" or "Sarah Osama Palin"), do you suppose the media would apply the same "no fair using the middle name" rule?


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of some giant neon fish.

Lead Me Not Into Temptation

My son has an ear infection. Definitely not the first, and probably not the last. Saturday night I wound up visiting the emergency room at 11:00.

The antibiotic they gave him didn't soothe the pain he was in for long, so I wound up driving around at 4:00 Am looking for pediatric painkillers. I finally found an all-night gas station that had some children's Tylenol in a display behind the counter. After asking about it, I finally had to get the two clerks to hand it to me to read the box. Neither of them could confirm whether the words "pain relief" appeared on the packaging. Not a word of lie, I honestly think that both of them were illiterate.

The best part of this story, though, came when I went to the pharmacy the next day to get his prescription for Amoxycillin (a frequent guest in our home) filled. Here's the actual conversation I overheard between the two pharmacists. Or pharmacy technicians, or whatever - all I know is they took the little piece of paper away then brought me a bottle of medicine:

"This Amoxycillin smells so good. I could just drink the whole bottle."

"That would probably kill you. You're really allergic, right?"

"Yeah, but it smells so good."

"You probably shouldn't even be handling that."


For some reason, this pleased me for the rest of the day.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of something else my wife made out of fluffy string by using pointy sticks. She informed me after the last one of these I posted that the sticks are, in fact, hooked. Such subtle distinctions are lost on me.

Best Report Card Comment Ever

Courtesy of my son's gym teacher:

"He has difficulty moving his body through space safely and with control."

This demonstrates reason # 352 why I couldn't be a gym teacher. I would have cut to the chase and used the phrase "careens like a drunken pinball."


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of my son about to careen down a slide like a drunken pinball.

Remembrance Day

I'm no poet. I have no great eloquent way to express my gratitude toward those who have put on uniforms and taken up arms to protect others. All I can say is that I kind of wish that I knew some surviving veterans well enough to go over and give them a hug without getting a punch or at least a bewildered look in return.

My attitude toward the military has shifted dramatically over the years more than once. My worldview has gone though a few major upheavals.

In childhood, during those prepubescent years when we first begin to form (what we think are) our own opinions on important matters, I was a pacifist. I remember writing a speech in the fifth or sixth grade on the terribly original subject of War. I researched and reported on the human and economic costs of war, coming to the terribly original conclusion that war is bad. It costs a lot of money, and people die.

The idea that there are worse things than war, that nobility and sacrifice are virtuous, that right must sometimes take up arms against wrong, never occurred to me.

My teacher ate it up. She led the class in giving me a round of applause, and offered me a chance to present this speech publicly in some silly forum or another. There I would stand a chance to win a ribbon or perhaps even a certificate with my name embossed on it.

I declined the invitation, taking the excuse that I would be too nervous. At the time I probably believed that, not yet understanding that my personal shyness does not translate to stage fright. I realized before much longer that I'm perfectly comfortable getting up to speak in front of groups of any size. I only panic once I set the microphone down, walk offstage, and need to try to make conversation with a single human being. Audiences are easy to deal with - actual people aren't.

My pacifism was eventually replaced with a strong militaristic streak. A couple of years later I was reading magazines like Gung Ho and Soldier of Fortune, planning to apply for ROTC with hopes of getting into the airborne and jumping out of planes, and thoroughly romanticizing all aspects of military life.

This too had faded before it actually came time to start preparing for adult life. By the time early adult life rolled around, I was back on the pacifist side of the fence, but this time because I had become a Christian and thought that Jesus demanded pacifism of his followers. I no longer think that, having since studied the Scriptures and theology in some depth. I still don't think that Christians are ever called to be aggressors, but I don't think there's any moral problem with taking up arms in defense of yourself or others.

I now think that devoting yourself to the defense and protection of others is laudable, and I deeply appreciate those who do it. I include police officers in this as well as members of the military, and think that soldiers who have never seen combat are as much to be admired as those who have. By enlisting, they are offering themselves up and saying that they are willing to die if called upon to do so.

To all those who have volunteered to protect and defend in uniform, thank you.

As for that stupid kid and untrained Christian that I used to be, I apologize for them. Not only did they not know what they were talking about, but they were each really, really sure that they did. I'm glad they had the opportunity to survive and learn, in no small part thanks to you whose service we remember today.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of my son pointing at a squirrel, who seems to be trying to hide from either him or the camera.

Post-Election Hooptedoodle

With thanks to John Steinbeck for contributing such a splendiferous word to the lexicon.


Once again I present some disjointed thoughts on Canada's recent federal election. SPOILER WARNING for those of you who haven't yet watched the election night coverage recorded on your Tivo.


I was very pleased with the election results. In fact, if I could have scripted my ideal outcome, it would have been pretty much what we got. I certainly didn't want any of the opposition parties in power. While I'm all for carpooling, the benefit of all those clowns being able to travel to Parliament Hill in one Volkswagen doesn't outweigh the damage they'd do to my country given the chance.

That said, I'm glad Harper only got a minority. I like minority governments for the exact reason that it's hard for them to do anything. As somebody said at some point in history, "That government is best which governs least." When it comes to domestic affairs, at least, I want the government feeble, inert, and afraid of displeasing the electorate.

Plus, there was a much-needed change in my own riding as the incumbent got turfed in favour of a longshot newcomer. The one I voted for, in fact, and I'd like to think that my vote made the difference. Although mathematically it didn't. I'm happy to report that my election night negativity on this score was unfounded.


Time for an I-Told-You-So dance. The new voter identification rules did indeed cause uninformed people to miss voting. I explained why that's a good thing back in that other post (I just linked to it a couple of lines back; do I need to draw a map?), and I stand by what I said then. News stories like this one and this one warm the cockles of my heart, and we all know that nobody likes cold heartcockles.

Here are my favourite quotations from those articles (one from each - I have the same journalistic ethics as CNN. I'll present two opinions from the exact same ideological position and call it balance, as long as they come from ostensibly different sources):

1. Someone who was trying to get young voters to show up described them as "People who are, like, the toughest demographic to get to come out and vote."

Yeah, like, they totally are, right? And, like, they need to know that, like, voting is groovy.

The kids still say "groovy", don't they?

Ahhh, whatta they know anyway. I just wish they'd stay off my lawn.

2. One of those aforementioned young voters, after being told to go home and get her ID: “This (is) ridiculous. If they wanted this information from me, they should have asked for it ahead of time.”

Yes, that's right. Maybe they should have run some newspaper, radio and television ads explaining the requirement. Maybe they should have had an entire section of the Elections Canada website devoted to explaining the remarkably simple concept. Maybe they should have even spelled it out on the voter information cards that were sent out to (I think) all registered voters a while before the election, then put up big signs about it at the polling station.

Note for non-Canadian readers, who may not catch the sarcasm: They did all that.

Apparently if you don't stop by this young lady's dorm room and tattoo a reminder across her lower back, she doesn't consider it advance notice.

By the way, I inserted that parenthetical "is" into her sentence to make it coherent. I really hope its absence was a typo in the original article. I give the educational system a lot of grief, but I'd like to think that college students don't really talk like Tonto.

My dream scenario for the next election is that each voter be required, on arrival at the polling station, to recite the lyrics to any one Elvis Costello song. Promote the rule heavily, including sending a copy of This Year's Model - with lyric insert - to all households with at least one registered voter. Those who show up at the polls saying they didn't know about it will be required to give their vote to someone who gets why radio stations don't like playing "Radio Radio".


Since my prediction for my own riding was thankfully wrong, and the Canadian election turned out as well as I could realistically have hoped (although an Ezra Levant write-in landslide - for every seat - would have been nice), then I'm actually daring to hold out hope for what happens in my big friendly neighbour to the south on November 4th.

McCain isn't perfect by any means, but come on. Obama? Really? An avowed communist whose own supporters unashamedly use the phrase "redistribution of wealth?" (Tip: although his supporters deny that he's a communist, the whole "redistribution of wealth" thing makes him one, no matter how much they try to weasel around it.)

Sarah Palin, on the other hand, I really like. I freely admit that she may lack some of characteristic slickness common among career politicians, but I consider that a point in her favour. The operational nuts and bolts can be learned pretty quickly. Character and integrity can't.

My real hope for the U.S. of A between now and their election is that a whole bunch of people in both parties wake up one morning, say "Wait a minute. We nominated these two? What were we thinking?" and start the whole process over from scratch. There's still plenty of time to hold primaries and a campaign of non-nauseating length, and the two new nominees could hardly be worse. A Palin / Joe The Plumber ticket would have me looking into immigration options. (Legal immigration only, of course.)


The Hey-Let's-Break-Up-The-Country Party got 50 seats. Oh, for the good old days when treason and sedition were rewarded with a noose, not a seat in Parliament.

More seriously, while I'm pretty much an absolutist for freedom of speech and would not advocate criminalizing any speech short of direct incitement of violence, how insane and selfish is it that people vote for a separatist party just because they think that party will extort more out of the rest of Canada for them?

The Bloc and their supporters remind me of the captured Russian sailors in The Hunt For Red October. They're on the deck of an American ship, watching depth charges go off. They cheer. "Yay! The captain is fighting the Americans!" I kept waiting for one of them to turn to another and say, "Umm, Boris... aren't we on one of the American ships we're rooting for him to sink?"


Now that the Liberal party has figured out exactly what most of Canada thinks of Stephane Dion, I've heard rumours of Justin Trudeau, son of longtime Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, stepping into the leadership void. If only the Liberals had noticed the leadership void in their party during the months leading up to the election, things might have gone differently.

The day after the election, some of my co-workers were speaking enthusiastically about Justin T. taking over the big chair. I offered, "By all means, he should. If we've learned nothing else from the Bush family, it's that being the son of a leader automatically qualifies you to be a great leader."

Disclaimer: despite that joke, I mean no disrespect to President Bush (either current or former). However, the people to whom I was speaking don't think very highly of "Dubya", so it was a cheap and easy way to make my point and I ran with it.


Lots of people think that there's some shady connection between Stephen Harper and American interests. I've heard tinfoil hat models talk about him being supported by everyone from the NRA to the aliens in Area 51 (and possibly Area 52, the even more secret one). These folks like to talk about foreign interference in Canadian elections being illegal, immoral, and a major contributor to childhood obesity. They would like Harper impeached (or perhaps exiled) based on their suspicions.

However, I haven't heard a word from any of those same folks about Michael Moore campaigning with and for the NDP. Odd, that. It's almost as though they apply different standards to candidates that they happen to like.


Harper may be cockier now. I hope so. I like my Prime Minister to have a little bit of swagger. It was Pierre Trudeau's one redeeming quality.

I just saw a newspaper editorial (in a dead-tree edition - sorry, no link) that called Harper's threats to make votes into confidence motions a "dirty trick". (A "confidence motion" is one that if voted down triggers a new election.)

What? That's the way the system is supposed to work. When that editor used the phrase "dirty trick", they demonstrated that they don't understand what at least one of those words means.

If I were in Harper's shoes, I'd immediately pick my pet issue that I thought would be toughest to get through Parliament, have a bill written up, and make it a confidence motion. Here's where we find out whether he's really serious about things like getting rid of firearm registration or revamping the Young Offenders Act. If he is, then they'll be on the agenda very soon, as confidence motions.

That's not a dirty trick, that's having the guts to call the opposition's bluff. "You don't like it? Then vote against it, and we'll see what the Canadian electorate thinks about it."

This is Harper's chance to show what he really wants to do. I expect the answer will be "not much".


Enough rambling. Here's another picture from our our recent church-sponsored afternoon of trap shooting. Once again, pastor on the left, attorney on the right.