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.

Springtime Comes Early

Today the skies are bluer in Canada. The clouds are fluffier, puppies can resume wagging their tails, the flowers can bloom again (in a few months, one presumes), and the coffee at Tim Horton's tastes a little better. Our long national nightmare is over. Last night I learned that I've been living under the crushing thumb of tyranny for the last decade or so. My goodness, I had no idea. Forget minor inconveniences like ethnic cleansing in Darfur - after listening to last night's speeches, I now understand that firearm registration was the true injustice of our time. Who knew?

Before we continue, a couple of housekeeping items. First up, I've written about my position on firearm registration before, and it hasn't changed. I'm in favour of it, because I'm in favour of firearms licencing and there's no effective way to separate the two. I've explained that before, and won't be doing so again here. I'm not particularly enthusiastic about registration, but understand its necessity. Bear in mind that I like guns - rabidly, by Canadian standards. I have a firearms licence that I carry in my wallet at all times, because you never know when you might need it. I believe that an armed society is a polite society, understand that violent crime rates drop as concealed carry permit holders increase (and more importantly, why), and am generally as big an all-round supporter of the moral right of law-abiding citizens to bear arms as you're going to find. This makes me something of an enigma on firearms matters, with various aspects of my position outraging zealots on both sides. So be it.


I'll also give advance warning of some language in this article that's a little harsher than I usually use. I figured the joke was worth it, especially since there aren't many in this post. The harsh language is nothing you can't find in the King James Bible. Oh, and I engage in a little comic-strip cussing in point 12, in case that kind of thing is too intense for your sensibilities. Be forewarned.

On to the actual topic at hand.


Canada's Parliament last night voted to pass a bill to eliminate the requirement to register non-restricted firearms, which means most rifles and shotguns. That's fine. Politicians bicker and laws change all the time, and the logical or reasonable position doesn't always carry the day.

My problem isn't with the outcome of the vote, which barely merits a shrug. My problem is that I made the mistake of tuning in the Parliamentary access channel last night, and heard some of the speeches given before the vote. Some Tories (members of the Conservative party, my usual philosophical compatriots) spoke on why the long-gun registry needed to be eliminated, and I can't remember the last time I endured such a pathetic litany of hyperbole and lies.

As a firearms enthusiast, I've made a point of educating myself on Canada's firearms laws. For the most part, they're pretty straightforward. There are some complexities and a couple of jaw-dropping idiocies (mostly loopholes) buried deep in the annals of the Firearms Act. Honest, good-faith arguments can be made against parts of the Firearms Act, but that's not what happened last night. I hate seeing bad arguments used even when I agree with the speaker's point, so listening to sheer babble about a topic on which I'm ambivalent tends to push me toward the opposite side from the speaker.

There are real arguments to be made, using real facts and logic, against long gun registration. There's no need to engage in the time-honoured rhetorical technique of Making Crap Up, but that's precisely what the empty suit opponents of registration did last night. Let's enumerate the lies and absurdities for the sake of my mental organization, which needs all the help it can get.


1. I heard a member of Parliament complain that he knows someone who was never sent notification that it was time to re-register his long guns, and so he "became a criminal" without doing anything wrong. OK, without knowing anything else about this claim, let's play fact-and-logic-check.

Q: How often does a firearms owner have to re-register their non-restricted firearms?

A: Never. Registration is a one-time process, valid for life. As long as you do not allow your firearms licence to expire - which results, logically, in your registration certificate being invalidated - you never need to re-register non-restricted firearms. Oh, and letting your licence expire while you still own firearms will still be a federal offense, even after registration is gone.

Q. OK, so let's say I let my licence expire and will eventually need to re-register. Will someone let me know?

A. Yup. By the time your licence expires, you'll already have been sent at least two previous pieces of mail: a renewal notice, including the application form, followed by a reminder a few weeks later. If you ignore both of those - and again, remember that this part all remains the same under the new law - your licence will expire, and you'll later be sent a letter explaining that because your licence expired, you'll need to dispose of your firearms (unless you get a new one).

If you get your new licence, you may later get a letter explaining that you now need to re-register your firearms. This is the only way anybody ever gets asked to renew their non-restricted registrations. Note that it requires that they ignore both of the first two letters about their licence being about to expire. It requires deliberate, active, assertive stupidity, not just an oversight.

Q: What if the MP just misspoke, and it was the licence renewal that didn't get sent to the client? Wouldn't that mean that his not renewing, and later needing to re-register, wasn't his fault?

A: First of all, if the MP was talking about the licence renewal, then his story had no place in a discussion of registration. They're two different things, and until you understand that distinction you have absolutely nothing to add to a discussion of Canadian firearms laws. Especially since, "he said yet again", the licence requirement isn't changing under this new law.

Second, no.

Any reminder sent to me that something of mine is expiring is a courtesy, not a legal requirement. If I don't receive it, it's still on me to make sure I follow the procedure to stay valid. I know it's not considered cool these days to assume any sort of personal responsibility, but a few of us still do. We're like the people at the Renaissance Faire, pining for a different era.

Q: What if he moved since getting his licence? Then it's not his fault that he didn't get his renewal form, right?

A: I can't believe I have to address a question this stupid (especially since I'm the one asking it to maintain the Q&A format), but I've actually heard this argument.

When you move, it's your (here comes that word again) responsibility to notify anybody who needs to reach you. And, lookie here, when you get a firearms licence it explains right on the letter that comes with it that you MUST, by law, report any change of address within 30 days. Your driver's licence probably came with a similar letter. I know mine did. Try moving without notification, having your driver's licence expire as a result, and explaining to the next policeman who pulls you over that it's not your fault that you're driving without a valid licence, because the DMV should have been able to psychically sense that you had moved. Good luck with that.


2. Some MPs bloviated about long gun registration treating all firearm owners like criminals.

Then motor vehicle registration treats all drivers like criminals. Unless you stand in front of the DMV whining and waving a sign about that, shut up.


3. Several references were made to "law-abiding" people who refused to register their firearms out of principle.

If they own unregistered firearms, then they are, by definition, not law-abiding. By that standard, Al Capone was a law-abiding citizen who refused to declare some income on his tax returns out of principle. He was probably protesting the war in Iraq well in advance. He had a lot of foresight, that Capone.


4. The same doofus as in point 1 said that he knows people who wound up criminalized over typos in their address or phone number.

First up, name some names or you're making this up. Second, nonsense. To be "criminalized" implies that you were arrested, charged, tried, and convicted. Find me one person who now has a criminal record over a typo in their phone number.


5. The point was made that hunters shouldn't have to pay these outrageous registration fees.

Q: How much does it cost to register a firearm?

A: That would be zero dollars and zero cents. Free, gratis, thank you, come again.

Q: What about when I transfer the firearm to a new owner? There's a charge then, right?

A: Nope.

Q: Ahhh, but I need a licence. Is that free?

A: Nope. $60 if applying for non-restricted firearms, $80 for restricted. Good for five years.

Q: Ha! Gotcha! Registration might be free and permanent, but if I need to renew my licence every five years, then I'll still have to pay -

A: Nothing. Renewals are free. You only pay for your first licence.

Q: Umm.... never mind.

A: Okey-dokey, then. Let's move on.


6. It was asserted that failure to file paperwork - for example, not registering a firearm - should not be a criminal matter.

Ahh, now we're getting somewhere. If you're arguing that an unregistered firearm should be treated as a much less dire matter than the Firearms Act allows, then we can find some common ground. Right now, you can theoretically go to jail for owning an unregistered non-restricted firearm. No one has, but the possibility is there. I'd have no objection to that being reduced to a fine with no criminal record, akin to a speeding ticket. If the firearm got used in a dangerous way, then that's a separate matter that can be addressed separately.

On the other hand, the "not bothering to file paperwork isn't a crime" argument may not carry much weight with, say, the Canada Revenue Agency, Internal Revenue Service, or Securities and Exchange Commission...


7. The Tories have long hammered on the program's cost overruns, and last night's speeches upheld that tradition.

No argument here. The program cost far more than it was initially expected to. Although the oft-quoted initial estimate of $2 million and final cost of $2 billion are both somewhere between guesses and outright fabrication, there's little doubt that the intial cost estimates were, shall we say, ludicrously optimistic.

However, that $2 billion, even if you believe that figure (which you maybe shouldn't), is over the 17 years since the Firearms Act was passed. Under $120 million per year. That's a rounding error in the federal budget. Besides, that money is spent and gone, and the fact that it was spent has nothing to do with whether firearm registration is intrinsically a good idea.

The question now is not "is long gun registration worth the money that was spent on it?" The relevant question now is whether it's worth the amount still being spent on it. The problem is that no one seems to know quite how much that is, beyond "not much".

Oh, and you don't get to complain about the cost of the program unless you also object to the fee waivers alluded to earlier. When the registration law first came into effect, firearms owners were supposed to pay for their registrations (a flat rate of $18, regardless of how many firearms) and licence renewals ($60 every five years). Spineless politicians decided to appease the scofflaws by waiving those fees, because we all know how well appeasement works. The waiver was originally temporary, of course, but it's been extended repeatedly, and there's no reason to believe that the fees will ever be reinstated.


8. I don't remember whether one of the MPs mentioned this - probably, it kind of blurred together after the first couple of hours - but an ongoing anti-registration theme is that registration is bad because, hackers. I know a Sun News correspondent claimed the other night that the RCMP has admitted that they don't know how many times the registry database has been hacked.

I've got a pretty good idea that, once again, that number is zero. I'm betting that if the Sun News guy actually bothered to ask the RCMP, the conversation went like this:

Sun News Guy: "How many times has the registry database been hacked?"

RCMP Guy: "None."

Sun News Guy: "How do you know?"

RCMP Guy: "The security logs don't show any unauthorized accesses, and there's never been any evidence of a breach. No unauthorized person has actually produced proof that they've gotten in, for example by posting something online that they could only have gotten by getting in."

Sun News Guy: "But what if the hacker was smart enough to get past your firewallmacallits without you even knowing, and they just never told anybody? Huh? What then? How would you know then, Mister Policeman?"

RCMP Guy: "I guess you have a point, kind of. Sort of like if I asked how you'd know if somebody broke into your house every night and replaced all your stuff with exact duplicates."

Sun News Guy: "Exactly! So you admit you don't know!"

More seriously, I used to work in IT. I know people who still do, and some of them work for government agencies. They get security bulletins about hacks and hack attempts. Some of them are in positions where they would definitely have heard about a major RCMP security breach. I've made the calls and asked. It has never happened, to the best of anyone's knowledge.

Oh, it's been claimed. A Canadian hacker website I used to read had a guy loudly announce, several years ago, that he had hacked into the registry. He said he'd post again soon explaining how, and proving it by presenting some of the data he'd accessed. He never came through with any such explanation or proof, and ignored questions about it afterward. He was lying.

When it comes to claims of the registry having been hacked, the correct response is Internet mainstay, "Pics or it didn't happen."

My personal info is in there - under my real name, even - and I couldn't care less.

And once again - it bears repeating, because so many people just don't get it - repealing gun registration and destroying the registration data doesn't get your name out of that RCMP database. As long as you have (or ever had) a licence, you're still in there. And you needed a licence to register. So, guess what, privacy freaks? This changes nothing.


9. Sing the chorus with me. Come on, we all heard it 736 times during these speeches, and continually from certain quarters over the last several years: "Criminals don't register their guns!"

The only problem is, sometimes they do. Criminals aren't your brightest specimens.

There have been lots of examples in the news over the years, for those who weren't blind to them. Here are three easy ones that spring to mind.

In Mayerthorpe, a couple of guys loaned James Roszko some registered guns and dropped him off to ambush and kill four RCMP officers. The presence of their guns led to their arrest and conviction as accomplices.

Guess how the police knew the guns weren't all Roszko's? Without registration, everyone would have assumed that all the guns at the scene were his, and there would have been no further investigation of them.

A smuggling ring was importing legal non-restricted receivers (actions - the actual workings of the firearm, that the barrel and stock attach to), then modifying them into illegal configurations by adding illegally smuggled short barrels, or illegally modifying the actions to fire as fully automatic. They were importing the receivers legally, registering them in the process.

When those illegally modified firearms started turning up at crime scenes, guess how the police were able to trace them to the initial importers?

Earlier this month, a gun store employee in British Columbia was arrested for embezzling firearms from his employer. He was transferring the firearm registrations from the business (which he was authorized to do as an employee) to himself, and taking the guns home for his collection, without paying for them of course. When the business owner figured out that a bunch of firearms were missing from his inventory, he called the police to investigate.

Guess how the police were able to figure out who the thief was and how many firearms they were looking for when they arrived with the arrest warrant?

There's a related issue in that sometimes formerly law-abiding people become criminals later. But we'll come back to that.

Of course, there is one element of truth in the constant bleating of "Criminals don't register!". Right, sometimes they don't. Habitually breaking the law, or at best picking and choosing which laws to follow, is pretty much a defining characteristic of criminals. Thinking that "criminals don't register!" is an argument against the idea of registration is like thinking that "Criminals still rob banks!" is an argument against anti-robbery laws. No. "Epic fail", as the kids say, and I could smack them in the back of the head every time they say it.


10. Let's move on to the related second mantra, heard again last night many times over: "Gun registration has never prevented a single crime!"

Good luck proving that negative.

I can easily disprove it logically, beyond any reasonable doubt. Before I do that, though, let's examine the logic of using that statement as an argument against gun registration. Once again, arguing against gun registration by claiming it doesn't stop criminals is a lot like arguing that laws against rape are pointless because rapists still commit rape.

The simple fact is that laws don't stop determined criminals. They deter casual offenders, give a legal means for penalties after the fact, and send messages about what we consider unacceptable as a society, but they do not stop determined criminals. This is true of any law.

This argument - "people are going to do it anyway, so legalizing it must the the right thing to do" - shows up all the time in discussions about drug laws, abortion, and firearms. It's mindless every single time. If you use it, please stop. If you know better than to use it, please mock those who don't until they stop. Even if you're on their side of the issue, shame them into using better arguments.

But let's move on to logical consideration of whether it can even possibly be true that long gun registration has never prevented a single crime.

First of all, we know it isn't true because of the examples I gave in the last point. Do you suppose that the firearm smugglers would have stopped on their own if the registry data hadn't gotten them busted? Or that the embezzling store employee was going to suddenly decide he had enough firearms in his basement?

Consider this scenario. Bubba the Good Ol' Boy registers his guns. He's an OK guy, maybe with a DUI or two, but not what you would call a career criminal. He would certainly never see himself as one. Bubba occasionally likes to shove the Missus around after a few beers. One particularly spirited Friday night, the cops get called. Eventually a judge decides that Bubba can't have guns anymore. The cops go by Bubba's trailer to collect them. His registration records tell them how many they're looking for. Without registration, they can only ask Bubba how many he has and take his word for it. If he "forgets" to mention that one 12-gauge in the crawlspace, well, too bad. Now Bubba has both a gun and a grudge.

Think this scenario is unrealistic, or too rare to consider? You're wrong. I was blessed to have grown up in a home that was nothing like Bubba's. However, I've known people who lived this sort of life. Bubba has kids all over, and some of them are friends of mine.

Now, do you really think that not one of any Bubba's family members, neighbours, or arresting officers have ever been spared a close encounter with a 12-gauge because the cops knew that it was there, and so they took it? The close encounter doesn't need to be someone actually getting killed. It can be as "minor" - the quotes really don't do the understatement justice - of Bubba reminding Missus Bubba that he's still got it handy in case she feels like getting mouthy again.

Prohibition orders, when a judge decides that a Bubba can't have guns anymore, simply cannot be enforced without registration. If the police don't know how many guns Bubba has, they can't be sure they got them all.

At this point, if you're reading this and thinking, "Nuh-unh! Bubba might have only registered some of his guns, so the cops don't know to take the unregistered ones", scroll back up and start re-reading at point 9. When you get back here, if you still don't get it, repeat until comprehension dawns.

Oh, and a fun response to this argument is that fire hydrants have never prevented a single house fire, ergo we should get rid of them. Just as hydrants prove their worth after a fire breaks out, firearm registration is far more useful as an investigative tool than as a preventative tool.


11. This relates to points 9 and 10. A nitwit MP from Manitoba said, and I quote (don't ask me how I can remember this verbatim, it's uncanny), "Criminals don't register their firearms." A minute or so later, after changing focus somewhat, he rather proudly announced, without a hint of irony, that he refused to register his own firearms.

Dude, you totally just called yourself a criminal. Explicitly.

That would be embarrassing to a person smart enough to be capable of self-reflection. Fortunately for you....


12. "Registration is always a precursor to confiscation." Again, I don't remember any specific MPs saying this last night (and if they did, I doubt they used the word "precursor"), but it's one of the standard Bad Arguments Against Gun Registration.

My reply to this is always the same. I've said it to so many people in so many situations over the last decade that I can say it all in one breath now. My wife calls it Standard Rant # 53.

My car is registered. My house is registered. My freaking dog is registered. In fact, I have to re-register the car and dog on a regular basis, and pay for the privilege. And yet, no one has ever once shown up to confiscate my car, my house, or my dog. Unless you stand outside the DMV whining about vehicle registration, shut the *&%^! up about the evils of firearm registration.

Yes, at some times, in some places, under some circumstances, registration of various things has lead to confiscation of some of those things, but it's certainly not a universal maxim.

This leads nicely into point


13. "Hitler liked gun registration."

Yup. He liked dogs, sunsets, walks on the beach, and tall men with straight teeth and a good sense of humour too. Your point?

Firearm registration has sometimes been used as a precursor to governments doing Very Bad Things. So have curfews and restrictions on speech that the ruling elite don't like. The (urban legendary) "fact" that Hitler made the trains run on time doesn't make adherence to transit schedules the work of Satan.


That's the end of my points. I could, believe it or not, write a lot more on this topic. I'm an obsessive geek who likes guns, so I know a lot about them and the laws pertaining to them. I could go on about legitimate arguments against firearm registration, why Canada's firearms law failed, and what gauge shotgun makes the loudest BOOM when I pull the trigger, but those are all for other days. On to the conclusion. You're welcome, dear reader.


These speeches were absolutely appalling. Not because I disagreed with the basic philosphical positions of the speakers, but because they were using criminally stupid arguments. The ignorance expressed should not have been tolerated in our national Chamber of Parliament. The speakers, legislators who have a moral duty to understand the facts pertaining to the subject of their voting, were wrong about basic, easily verifiable facts. The logic on display wouldn't pass muster in a kindergarten discussion of which Pokemon is most awesome. No one who actually knows anything about Canada's firearms laws would have been able to sit through those speeches without having their blood pressure raised enough to burst a few capillaries.

I have to wonder whether I was seeing the chicken or the egg. Were these Honourable Members just pandering to the assumed pre-existing ignorance of their viewers, or were they actively fueling it? Either way, was it inadvertent or deliberate? Did they honestly not know any better themselves?


Dear reader, if you want to know the truth about anything, please choose your sources wisely. Don't listen to the loudmouth at the barbershop, the sensationalist "reporter", or the pandering sycophant in the legislature. Certainly don't blindly trust some pseudonymous Canadian dork with a blog. Check facts. Go to original sources.

In the case of Canada's firearms laws, it's pretty easy. Although they aren't much help with statistics or philosophies behind the law, the folks at the Canadian Firearms Program have a toll-free line (1-800-731-4000) and a website complete with an e-mail contact form (www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/cfp). One call or e-mail to them from one of last night's speechmakers would have demolished the first point I railed against above.

For me, I have a set of rules for debating Canada's gun laws with someone who wants to argue (as opposed to actually discuss, and - gasp! - maybe learn something):

-If you don't know the difference between licencing and registration, don't waste my time.

-If you want to talk about the financial costs but don't know the price (to the applicant) of licence renewals and registrations, don't waste my time.

-If you think it's somebody else's fault that they couldn't reach you after you moved without telling them, don't waste my time.

-If you think it's anyone's responsibility but your own to keep track of when your licence (or anything else) expires, don't waste my time.

-If you think that firearm registration is an infringement of your rights but haven't a peep to say about car registration, don't waste my time.

-If you think that "criminals don't register" or "Hitler!" are arguments against the idea of firearm registration, don't waste my time.

-If you don't get that "law-abiding unlicenced (or, until this bill passes into law, unregistered) firearm owner" is an oxymoron, don't waste my time.

In all of these cases, check some facts and take a basic logic course, then get back to me. Heck, I'm quite willing to try explaining some of these things to someone who honestly just doesn't know. In fact, I just spent 23,000 or so words doing it.


Let's close, for real this time, with a tasteless joke.

Vic Toews is one of the head Tory cheerleaders against firearm registration, and I've seen him use all 13 of the silly arguments above at various times. As background, after voting to pass this bill to overturn this very mild form of gun control, letting people sell firearms into the criminal black market at will and effectively removing all gun control as I mentioned way back at the top, he and many other MPs attended a self-congratulatory cocktail party to celebrate. I like to imagine that his day planner looked like this:

6:00 PM - Vote to repeal gun control

7:00 PM - Piss on the graves of victims of gun violence

Enough rambling. Here's a picture, cribbed from the Web, that eloquently expresses some of my other feelings about firearms legislation. Three cheers for acknowledging the complexity of multifaceted issues!

10 Short Thoughts Not About Glenn Gould

I just read the Maclean's year-end "Newsmakers 2011" issue. It contains a series of articles about the supposedly most newsworthy people and events of the year. With this issue, we hit a new journalistic low.

It's a given that a few people on these annual "most intriguing", "most interesting", etc., lists will be women who are there solely because of who they slept with. However, this issue features Pippa Middleton - who is on the list not even because of who she slept with, but because of who her sister slept with.

At least her sister finally got a promotion this year, after eight years of casual / temporary status as the Royal Penis-Warmer. Pippa's most newsworthy activity appears to have been showing up at the wedding.

To be clear, this is not meant as personal criticism of Miss Middleton. She may be a very intelligent and capable person. She may be very accomplished in the field of whatever it is that she does. However, none of that makes her particularly newsworthy.

No, this is meant to mock the media, and by extension its audience - that's us, folks - for being overly concerned with her. She isn't the problem, the people giving her undue attention are the problem. There's no discernible reason for anyone to be talking about her in "news" articles or magazine profiles.

Or in blog posts, for that matter.


Whoops.

---

Although I accept that there is truly nothing new under the sun, I sometimes strive for some semblance of originality. A while back I scrapped a drafted article / joke because I had expected "penis-warmer" to be a something of a rare term, but Google told me otherwise. I was surprised, especially by how many of the results were product listings on eBay (with optional what cozy?!?).

That said, I have high hopes for the revised term used above, "Royal Penis-Warmer". As I write this, there are no Google hits for that phrase.

Soon there will be one.

---

The Walking Dead (the comic, not the TV show) has been disappointing me of late. I'm getting a little tired of the last page cliffhanger/shocker that completely fizzles and is completely forgotten about within the first three pages of the next issue. Kirkman's going to that well just a bit too often.

---

An occasional commenter here, TB, has a blog of his own now. If you think I'm cantankerous sometimes, you should buckle up, go over there, and take a look.

---

I'm still not writing much here lately, I know. I've been posting comments some other places, though, like the Forge forums, Comics I Don't Understand, and Slashdot. I can often be found in one of those places when I'm not doing much here.

I've also been known to show up in comment threads in places like Jim Shooter's blog, Roger Ebert's blog, Crime Justice & America, and Ken Levine's blog.

That last one is probably my favourite, because Ken Levine actually responded to one of my comments in a later post (the one I linked). In this culture, getting my (fake Internet) name mentioned by a guy who knows some famous people is better than money!

---

The Supercommittee failed to reach a budget deal. By most accounts, the Democrats on the committee refused to consider any proposal that included any spending cuts, and the Republicans refused to consider any tax increases. No shocker, really. But it gave us a great chance to play Mediawatch! Here's how to play:

Think about the blurbs you heard in the media about this. The headlines, the soundbites, the text crawls at the bottom of the screen, the snarky remarks from "unbiased journalists" and late-night comedians. Notice how many of them blame the stalemate entirely on the Republicans "refusing to compromise" and completely ignore the equal but opposite intransigence from the Democrat side.

Oh, sure, some of the long articles mentioned the Democrats' equal role in one of the "continued on page 26" paragraphs - we're just talking about the short versions that are all most people will perceive.

But remember, only Fox News is biased. Well, and Sun News if you're in Canada.

Here's the scary part of playing Mediawatch. Consider any newsworthy topic of which you have some deeper knowledge. Now consider how ridiculously distorted you find the media's reporting on the matter.

Now consider that most people don't have deeper knowledge of most topics, and all they know is what the media feeds them.

Now consider that that includes you. The media usually talks about subjects where you don't have any particular insight. It's statistically inevitable, just because of the sheer volume of information on the world. It's humanly impossible to know very much about very much.

And when out of one of your comfort zones - which is most of the time - you only know what they tell you, and then usually only what was in the headline, sound bite, or crawl across the bottom of the screen.

---

Notes for historical purposes:

We got six trick-or-treaters this year, and most of those were kids whose parents specifically drove them here because they know us.

We have no snow to speak of yet. We've had flurries, and a few times enough to cover the ground (barely), but it's all melted away again so far.

My son's current obsessions are Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword and Roblox.

---

I don't like bad arguments being used in support of positions with which I agree. To that end, I wish people who oppose capital punishment - as do I - would stop saying that it has no more deterrent value than life imprisonment.

The problem with arguing about the deterrent value of capital punishment is that there's a ridiculous time lapse between a criminal being sentenced to execution and that execution being carried out. The lapse is so long that a death sentence is effectively the same thing as a life sentence.

Oba Chandler was executed recently for a crime that was committed in 1989, and of which he was convicted in 1994. 17 years after conviction, 22 years after the crime. With gaps like that, of course there's no extra deterrent value involved. Criminals know full well that execution is not a credible or imminent threat. It's too remote to be taken into consideration.

I'd be interested in seeing statistics on how many criminals die of natural causes - e.g., old age - while on death row. I wouldn't be surprised if it's more than are actually executed.

---

In all but completely informal conversation, and sometimes even then, I'm a stickler for terminology. This is because correct use of terminology demonstrates comprehension of the subject. Incorrect use of terminology demonstrates the lack of same.

---

My wife and I started watching Breaking Bad a few weeks ago, from the first episode. It's great. We have only one episode left to watch - the fourth season finale, which is the last episode to date. We'll probably watch it tonight, then commence complaining until season five begins.

I like it because it's neither formulaic nor predictable. It took me many episodes to accept that I could almost never accurately predict what would happen next. Most TV shows and movies, including my nevertheless beloved Walking Dead (the TV show, not the comic), are predictable enough that at any point I can tell you more or less how any given scene will develop and/or resolve.

Not so Breaking Bad. It's a constant stream of nothing but curve balls. The writing is so good that I'm amazed that Vince Gilligan, the series creator, worked on the X-Files. I was not a fan of the latter show, to the point where I only made it all the way through one episode (the one Stephen King wrote). I thought the X-Files was trash, frankly, nothing more than rehashes of Scooby-Doo episodes, and it was painfully obvious that the writers had no idea how to resolve any of the longer story threads. I remained aware of the X-Files because my wife liked it (she has the entire series on DVD, and still re-watches them all from time to time), and because I worked in a comic shop in the late 90s.

The acting is also first-rate. When I first started watching Breaking Bad, I thought of Bryan Cranston as Hal, the goofy dad from Malcolm in the Middle. Hal is long, long gone now. There's not a trace of him in Cranston's performance by this point. It would be odd to go back and watch Malcolm reruns now, because I'll probably think of Cranston as Walter and wonder when somebody is finally going to drive that little punk Reese out into the desert and give him the bullet he deserves.

Giancarlo Esposito deserves every bit of praise he's gotten, too. He can express more with the slightest facial twitch than most Oscar winners manage in their entire career.

---

Enough rambling. Here's a picture of what it takes to get me to throw out a t-shirt. The last time I wore this shirt was to a Maplenoise show in September. It was in this condition by then. Partway through the concert, my wife suggested that I put my jacket back on. The shirt is solid black with orange and red letters - all of the light colour is a pillow I stuck in it to display the extent of its decrepitude. It's a Rez shirt, from the early 90s or so. The writing is (was) a Biblical reference ("For our God is a consuming fire, Hebrews 12:29"), written in the shape of a flame.

Crossblogging

Yes, I'm lazy about writing these days.

Well, not entirely. I'm currently in the middle of writing a multi-part series outlining pretty much my biography for the last ten years, but that will never get posted here because it contains all kinds of identifying information and matters that are far too personal to put online. I recently had a chance (or, more accurately, providential) encounter with an old friend with whom I'd lost touch. After a very quick chat due to our circumstances at that time, we exchanged e-mail addresses. When I got home, I started writing to catch him up on what I've been doing for the past decade or so.

But as far as blogging, yeah, I'm very lazy now. That's why I really should take advantage of a chance like this to get a double use out of my typing.


A pro-life lady named Kristen Walker recently attended a pro-abortion group's meeting, took notes, and wrote up a report afterward. It was appalling. Somehow the fact that this rally for death was held in a church basement sends an extra little iceball into the pit of my stomach every time I think about it.

She's posted her thought on the meeting on the Live Action blog. It's well worth reading.

I posted a couple of comments, partly in response to other peoples' comments. The useful idiots of abortion profiteers are coming out to make feeble (and often borderline illiterate) defenses of the meeting, and I felt some of them could use some help trying to get back in touch with concepts like logic and compassion.

I show up over there, and some other places where I post comments, as "Zirbert Zirbert". For some reason my Google signin has decided that Zirbert is both my first and last name, which is especially funny because it is of course neither. I'm trying to fix it - get it to show either no last name or some variation on "the Irritable Saint" for the last name - but no luck yet.

Let the shameless reposting of my comments begin:

Well done. Congratulations on making it out of the meeting without being physically sickened.

This is the most crucial part of your essay:

"I was upset because I had seen evil, and evil was mundane. Evil had a
very impressive law degree and sensible brown shoes. Evil sat in pews
around me with folded arms, feeling very concerned about the plight of
poor women, wearing pants it bought at Macy’s. Evil looked like people
you see at the grocery store. And, most terrifying of all, evil thought
it was doing good."

This is, indeed, the heart of the problem in our society at this point. So many "useful idiots", so many otherwise nice people cheerfully paving the road to Hell with their good intentions. I wish more people would watch the movie Conspiracy, a reenactment of an actual meeting where a group of very polite and cultured men sat around a table discussing how to best benefit society by exterminating every Jew they could find.

The attitudes, thoughts, words, and behaviour of pro-abortionists (I reject their term, "pro-choice" - pro-what choice? The choice for abortion? Then you're pro-abortion) are absolutely no better. They're really not even significantly different.

As a side note, if anyone reading this is one of those capable of ginning up false outrage and moral indignation over comparing abortion with the Holocaust - tough. The shoe fits. Wear it.

Those who have come here to defend the pro-aborts at the meeting, and complain about Kristen's article are a huge part of the problem. Self-reflection isn't just for monks on mountaintops.

Thank you, Kristen.

---

(Someone else wrote) "How 'bout saving your tears for the hundreds of thousands of babies born due to a lack of knowledge, choice or birth control who are already in our fine foster care system."

So, better dead then born into poverty, born to uneducated parents, or with the possibility of winding up in foster care someday. Gotcha. Nice compassion you've got there - not all hatey like the prolifers.

You know, I've met people who were in foster care at some point in their lives, and some who were even adopted. I'm grateful they made it through attitudes like yours to be here now. I've yet to hear one of them say they would have been better off dead before birth.

(The same someone else wrote) "After a kid draws its first breath, it's out of luck. And I don't see any of the pro-birth groups using their resources to build shiny, new, state-of-the-art orphanages for these kids."

Sheer nonsense. Every pro-lifer I know also supports other causes to benefit older people (i.e., "birth-and-up") as well.

And when's the last time you saw an orphanage, at least in North America? Do they still exist? I've had friends wait years - yes, years - on lists to adopt a child. I've had others adopt from overseas for a variety of reasons, including that adopting domestically just isn't feasible much of the time due to a lack of prospective adoptees.

Please stop using the "way too many children waiting to be adopted" meme. It's silly and completely fantasy-based. If you know of a way for these children to be adopted ASAP, like now, let us all know. I know families who are waiting and would LOVE to have some of these mythical unwanted children.

---

(Someone named Nanamiro posted) "This mode of thinking is what allowed the holocaust to happen in a "civilized" society. Look the other way, and look out for yourself."

(Someone else posted) "No it isn't. The mode of thinking which caused the holocaust was a group in power deciding that a particular section of society should be deleted. There is no comparison with abortion which is decided on an individual, one by one, basis with no central plan to remove a partcicular section of society."

(I posted, beginning with a quotation from the last poster) "The mode of thinking which caused the holocaust was a group in power deciding that a particular section of society should be deleted." Right. Which is what Nanamiro said. Abortion is one group - a pregnant woman, her doctor, and the drum-pounding politically correct "choice defenders" - deciding that a section of society - the child in utero - should be deleted.

Your "if it doesn't hurt me, why should I care" / "if it doesn't hurt you, why should you care" attitude is amoral at best, immoral at worst. I can't share it, because I have a conscience.

---

(The same poster who didn't like the Holocaust comparison posted) "I'm well aware of the horrors of the holocaust but any attempts at comparison with abortion are totally invalid."

The shoe fits. Wear it. [Yes, I recycled material even within those comments.]

---

(Someone anonymously posted) "i have had an abortion because that was the best choice for ME. i didn't ask a stranger their opinion because it didn't matter. if you wanted me to have my baby sooo bad, you should have been sending me checks to support it because I could not afford it & didn't want to have a welfare baby which was a huge factor in my decision. if you have never been in the situation, you shouldn't look down on those that have."

Unless you were raped (which I doubt, because I'm sure it would have been in your first few sentences), you were utterly irresponsible.

However, your child was your responsiblity, and his/her father's (where was he, again?). You failed.

Have you any sense of personal responsibility at all? Why would your child be anyone else's responsibility, under any circumstances?

I am a parent. I an responsible for my child. I don't get to say " you should have been sending me checks to support" my family. That's my job. I "didn't want to have a welfare baby" either, so I got a job. Before having the child, even.

I hope you can heal from this. Sincerely. You've made a terrible, terrible mistake. Please turn your life around, if you haven't already.

---

Kristen's article was depressing but important. The same goes for the comments underneath. However, the comments show room for hope. There are more gentle souls with compassion for both mother and child posting than people who just want the kid chopped up and chucked out.

So far, anyway. Hopefully the article doesn't get linked at Huffington Post or Daily Kos, which tends to draw out the screaming lunatics. A Huffpo/Kos invasion always reminds me of a scene from one of my favourite movies, Escape From New York. "It's the end of the month. Crazies are out of food."


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of a balloon monkey trying to get into the brownies.

It's Funny Because I Didn't Know Her

Turns out that maybe Amy Winehouse should have gone to rehab after all.

I'm proud to be the 13,264,179th person in the world to do that line. It's a really cheap, easy joke, the kind I never feel really good about. It's the sort of obvious joke that I can imagine Jay Leno doing in his monologue, and it kind of depresses me when I write one of those. However, if Leno were to come out and do this particular joke this week, it would go a long way toward letting me respect his work again.

In that spirit, I'm hoping that I'm the first person to do a Winehouse joke other than the painfully obvious one. Let's give it a shot:


Right now, the Grim Reaper is berating one of his assistants. "You got the work orders mixed up! Winehouse wasn't until next week - you were supposed be at Charlie Sheen's place! This is almost as bad as that time you wrote down the wrong address and went to Phil Hartman's house instead of Andy Dick's!"


There. I feel better now.


Enough rambling. Here's another picture of my new dog back when she weighed less than sixty pounds, lo so many months ago.

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.

Yet Another Triumphant Return

I recently returned from a couple of weeks of work-related travel. I had a couple of noteworthy experiences on the trip (besides the stuff that I won't be discussing on here for various reasons).

I almost got taken down by airport security at my point of departure. Besides my checked suitcase, I had a carry-on bag. It was a backpack containing my Bible and portable DVD player, and a few other books to occupy me during the trip.

The basket containing my jacket and the stuff out of my pockets passed through the x-ray screening without difficulty, and my own passage through the metal detector was also uneventful. The backpack, however, proved to be a problem. I had to put it on the little conveyor belt, and when I went to meet it on the other side a security guard was waiting for me, already holding it.

"Do you have a multi-tool in here?" he asked, in a pleasant enough tone.

"Nope," I replied confidently.

He smiled, not unkindly. "Are you sure?"

"I was, but I'm getting less sure all the time."

He chuckled, and began unzipping compartments. "Looks like it's way down at the bottom somewhere." After a minute of digging, he produced a multi-tool in its carrying case. It was the one I carried on my belt during my IT days. When I left that job (a diplomatic way of putting it), I stuck the multi-tool into the backpack, which I haul around with me anytime I go anywhere with stuff to carry. I figured that way the multi-tool would always be handy if I was out somewhere and needed it. Of course, I forgot all about it being in there when I was packing for this flight.

"I can assure you that I wasn't trying to smuggle that onto the plane. Feel free to chuck it, or whatever you do with seized contraband."

The security guard was very nice about the whole matter. Instead of just taking it, he asked if somebody had dropped me off at the airport, and if so, whether they were still around. My wife and mother-in-law were just outside the security screening area. I pointed them out, and the guard had someone take it to them. It was waiting safely for me at home when I returned.

Good thing I speak English, or I probably would have died right there, twitching on the airport floor.


Even weirder, the same bag got stopped again by security at the airport for my flight home. Once again I put it dutifully on the conveyor belt. This time, the young lady watching the x-ray monitor (which I couldn't see) stopped the belt and looked at the monitor for a while, clearly puzzled. She was tipping her head to the side, reminding me of my dog's reaction when I used to take my video camera, record myself calling her, and play it back on the living room TV. "Wait... you're on the TV, calling me, but you're sitting over there... but you're on TV... but... now my head hurts. Good thing my walnut-sized brain means I'll forget this in ten seconds, or I'd be traumatized."

The screener lady called a colleague over to join her for some synchronized head-cocking. Eventually they decided to send my backpack to someone else. It came out of the x-ray machine, and was promptly grabbed by a very serious looking guy, who said, "We've got to test this."

"OK", I cheerfully replied. I had lots of time before my flight.

This new guy dug through the bag, and ran a little wand over it. I don't think it was a metal detector. My theory is that it was a dowsing rod, and he suspected that my backpack contained an underground spring. In any case, after a few brow-furrowed moments, he handed me the backpack and said, "OK, you can go." This guy was just gruff enough that I decided not to push my luck by asking any questions. The folks at the first airport, which was much smaller, were a lot friendlier, and they busted me trying to sneak a weapon onto the plane.

It looks like I'll be flying again in October. Perhaps I should invest in some less suspicious carry-on luggage before then.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of the bottom shelf, left-hand side, on bookshelf # 1. On the left are a bunch of records that don't fit on my actual records rack. Most readers under 40 will have no idea what "records" are. In the middle are notebooks and photocopies of textbooks from my university days. Yes, photocopies. I was blatantly disregarding copyrights long before anyone ever heard of Napster. Photocopies were a dime each at the library photocopiers (I liked the unsupervised one in the basement), and reduction allowed two-page spreads to fit onto a single sheet while remaining legible. Even those of us who weren't math majors got pretty good at calculating whether it was cheaper to buy a textbook or just photocopy it. Finally, that pile on the right is what remains of my Rolling Stone magazine collection. I got rid of the vast majority of them long ago.

Reading Log - Mark Haddon's Clash Of Fundamentalisms

I'm back. I may talk about the trip a little some other time. For now it's Sunday, and I've got a reading log entry with potential for spiritual implications, so away we go.

One of the books I read during my exile was The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon. It's the story of an unusual young man's investigation into the "murder" of his neighbour's poodle. The young man's name is Christopher, and he's autistic or has Asperger syndrome. The book is written in first person from Christopher's perspective, and he has no interest in any labels anyone else may place on him, so his exact diagnosis is never revealed.

From here in there may be spoilers for anyone who intends to read this book but hasn't yet. If you happen to be married to me, this means you.

The book is compelling and Christopher, although a bit odd by western social standards, is a well-drawn character. He is extremely literal-minded and uninterested in emotions. The other characters in the book are not fleshed out nearly as well, but this too rings true since everything is narrated by Christopher, who isn't particularly interested in or capable of understanding what's happening inside anyone else's head.

Christopher will ring true to anyone who is close to someone on the autism spectrum (or on it themselves). He is single-minded in his quest to determine who killed the dog, finding loopholes worthy of a high-priced attorney in his father's orders to leave the matter alone (and thereby ceasing to pester the neighbours with questions about it).

About halfway through the book, there is a sudden shift. It's not a Shymalan-level twist, but something is revealed that simultaneously makes perfect sense and alters the course of the narrative. The book is no longer about what it had been about. It gets much better, although it had been perfectly good to that point.

I won't reveal the twist, or even whether Christopher solves the crime. Instead I want to shift gears, using the book as a segue to my justification for posting this on a Sunday, the day I set aside for spiritual themes on this blog. Part of the book's structure is that the chapters (which are numbered in ascending prime numbers, one of Christopher's obsessions) alternate between moving the narrative forward and Christopher explaining his take on some subject, often mathematical.

In several of the "explanation" chapters, Christopher mentions that he is an atheist, and goes into more detail in a few. He rejects the Bible as having any divine origin, dismisses any talk of Jesus as fable, and accepts the theories of the Big Bang and evolution as perfect, comprehensive explanations for the origins of everything.

In our modern, "enlightened" world he is far from alone in these positions. Many people agree with his articles of faith. They cling to Science as fervently as any other fundamentalist clings to their dogma. They consider themselves different from, and even superior to, those other fundamentalists because their beliefs are based on Science, not on the unverifiable writings in an ancient tome.

Their logical error here is obvious. When it comes to matters like the origins of physical reality or the human species, the writings in any science book are speculative. The theories are no more testable, no more provable, than Genesis. Whenever a physicist begins expounding on how the universe was created, utterly certain, utterly unshakable in their faith, I'm always reminded of Job 38:1-4:

Then the LORD answered Job out of the storm. He said: "Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me. Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me, if you understand."

No, I don't have all the answers to every question in life. I can't ultimately be 100% sure that my beliefs are correct. Neither can anyone else. The primary difference between a dogmatic materialist and any other believer is their choice of sacred text. I've chosen the Bible; others choose the writings of Darwin and their high school textbooks. I note that those schoolbooks invariably get revised. I've read several science books that had forewords explicitly stating that most of the book would eventually be supplanted by newer, more correct information. I've never seen a Bible with that sort of disclaimer, and don't expect to ever see a new edition with corrections. The Bible doesn't need it.

Here's another key difference between a hardcore materialist and other breeds of fundamentalists: the materialists tend to be much more certain that they're right, and much more smug and arrogant about the discrepancies in beliefs. If I didn't believe in the depravity of humankind, I'd probably be confused when more "enlightened" people almost invariably prove themselves less tolerant than supposedly backward believers.


Enough rambling. Here's a picture of the fourth shelf down, left side, on bookshelf # 1. I don't seem to have a picture of the third shelf, so we'll come back to it another time. This shelf is full of psychology and criminology textbooks. The black binders on the right are full of Sunday School materials that I've written over the years. Those binders contain a lot of plastic sheets for overhead transparencies, which gives an idea how old they are. Nowadays I usually don't even bother keeping a paper copy of the handouts, and just keep the OpenOffice files.