Q & A from Health Canada on the listeriosis outbreak:
Q: The Stanley Cup was recently on tour in my town, and I kissed it. Do I have to worry about being infected by listeria?
A: You are safe. The Stanley Cup has not been in contact with any Maple Leaf product in over 40 years.
[From HabsInsideOut]
I love me some long weekends. Since we’re going away next week we didn’t really plan anything for Thanksgiving, save getting a bunch of stuff done, having a nice big turkey-less meal on Monday, relaxing and enjoying the abnormally beautiful (for mid-October) weather.
After shaking off the work week at Smokeless Joe last night and sleeping in this morning, we bought enormous amounts of produce and other groceries, dropped a bunch of stuff at Goodwill, had a beer and a bite to eat on the wonderfully sunny Volo patio, ran a few errands, bought a few things, and came home. After a quick nap Nellie was fired up to do some cleaning, and when it involves throwing stuff out I always get excited, so we did that right up until the hockey game started.
Watching the Canadiens manhandle the Leafs 6-1 (in their home rink, no less) was like watching my old cat torture mice in the yard, just swatting at them as they cowered and shook, until I went outside and killed them with a shovel. I almost felt bad for them, right up until I heard Don Cherry giving Montreal coach Guy Carbonneau shit after the game for having the gall to play his usual power play units late in the game. I watched the game. They weren’t even trying, and they still almost scored, but apparently Cherry knows some unwritten rule that used to matter 30 years ago, and this had him angry. It made me wish Montreal had scored five more goals.
More relaxation and patio-sitting to come tomorrow. Yep, I do love me some long weekends.
Dan
More than two years ago I wrote a paper on the Doha declaration on the TRIPS agreement, part of the Doha round of World Trade Organization talks. The TRIPS agreement basically reiterated the right of poor countries to reproduce low-cost versions of medications for their citizens without being subject to patent violation claims (the likes of which are discussed at WTO talks). These rights had been set out in the previous round of talks, but drug companies had found loopholes to prevent low-cost medications from being produced. This declaration was intended to remove any ambiguity or loopholes from the TRIPS agreement:
The TRIPS Agreement does not and should not prevent Members from taking measures to protect public health. Accordingly, while reiterating our commitment to the TRIPS Agreement, we affirm that the Agreement can and should be interpreted and implemented in a manner supportive of WTO Members’ right to protect public health and, in particular, to promote access to medicines for all. [Wikipedia]
The Doha round of talks have been going on since 2001 and, as the Economist reported last week, are essentially deadlocked. They’ll likely collapse some time in the next year. Of course there are hundreds of agreements, tariffs and arrangements covered in the Doha round, but this topic seemed to me to go beyond trade. The humanitarian implications are staggering, and yet the story of probable failure of the Doha round will be lost in the financial markets meltdown.
I recently finished reading God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. I loved reading it, partly because he was (heh) preaching to the choir, but also because of how eloquently Hitchens writes. He runs through the usual litany of complaints about religion, with which I agree enthusiastically, but he raises one point that, if not the thesis of the book, is probably the most compelling: “If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.”
That got me thinking about the various categories of belief that I’ve seen in people, and what I think causes the differences. I haven’t spent a great deal of time thinking about it, mind you, but now that I have an MBA I feel compelled to put things into 2×2 matrices, and I think it works.
First, I suspect that if a child isn’t raised with any exposure to religion, they rarely go on to count themselves as believers. I think that’s a rare situation though; most people I’ve ever met had some exposure, if not to church, at least to biblical teachings.
For those who did receive religious instruction as children, I think this is where the matrix comes in. Some of these people will, over the course of their lives, question their religion for some reason. This puts them on the left side of the table. If they then perceive some kind of need for their religion — perhaps a loved one is ill and prayer provides some comfort, or perhaps their church is an important organizing principle and social aspect of their life — they may not feel compelled to cast off their religious beliefs, but retain them, or least parts of them, to keep from unbalancing their own life. I would place — and this is my opinion, not their suggestion — my parents in this category I’ve labeled Traditionalist…they’re too thoughtful and rational to have never questioned their faith, but both see great value in their involvement in their local church. My mother is certainly a believer — she is/was a church trustee, plays the organ every week, leads the choir and is involved in her regional presbytery — but I’ve always thought of her as more spiritual than religious.
I place myself, obviously, in the Non-believer quadrant. As a child I never thought of religious teachings as anything but fables, and many years ago the lack of evidence in a god prompted me to question and reject the hypothesis. I’ve never doubted that thought process.
Of those who have never seriously questioned their faith, I think they follow the same thought process. My theory is that the default position for those on the right side of the matrix would be the Lazy category. I could just as easily have labeled this quadrant ‘Scared’, since (as Hitchens points out) the stories used to ensure compliance among children are ones of eternal damnation, not to mention hairy palms, but ‘lazy’ — as in, intellectually lazy — will do for now. Many people go to church, or don’t but still say they believe in a god, because they were raised to do so and haven’t really thought about why they do it. This isn’t tradition, like those in the upper-left quadrant, but rather habit and fear. These are the people who, when asked why they say they believe in God, answer, “Might as well, just in case.”
Finally, the upper-right: the Fundamentalists, who have never questioned their faith, and have good reason never to do so. They gain some advantage, or perceived advantage, from their religion. Some wield it to get rich or gain political power, though you could argue these are actually corrupt Traditionalists. A rare and dangerous few fuel extremist, even murderous, tendencies with it. Mainly, I think that most in this category simply have a need to feel right. I suspect a defining line between Traditionalists and Fundamentalists could be the desire to impose their beliefs on others, by recruiting, campaigning, altering legislation, etc.
Of these, I find the Lazy category the most frustrating. These people seem to think they’re religious, and speak (and vote!) accordingly, but they don’t follow most tenets of their religion. It’s peer pressure, or latent childhood fear. It’s this tragically silent majority that could make the difference in the world Hitchens speaks of.
Gmail Labs (neat but non-standard things you can add to Gmail) has come up with what might be the greatest invention ever devised for students: Mail Goggles.
When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you’re really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you’re in the right state of mind?
Brilliant. Question though: where the frack was Google when I was young and foolish?
I wasn’t able to attend Nuit Blanche (an “all-night art thing” in Toronto where art installations are found in public spaces between sunset and sunrise) in the first two years it ran, as it would have meant losing the better part of two days of MBA work time. However, this year I was determined to check it out.
Nellie and I left home around 11PM and saw some smaller exhibits near home, like Benefit of the Doubt, Don Coyote, The Greatest Falls and Corvidae Ibidem. We swung past BCE place and the Toronto Nocturnes I photo exhibit before heading down to Union Station for the Horridor installation. The line was massive, however, and we decided to come back later.
We cut back to the east to see Commerce Court, which was kind of interesting, but I find standing in that square at night and looking up to be one of the more attractive venues in Toronto anyway. We continued up toward City Hall to see Blinkenlights, passing the enormous lineup for 15 Minutes of Fame, but when we got to Queen Street it was a freaking zoo. There were a lot of very drunk, very annoying people out last night, but I doubt they were there for Nuit Blanche so much as they were just the usual drunken asses who infest Queen on a Saturday night. Still, they made it impossible to even get near Nathan Philips Square, but we did stand on the south side of the street and watch a game of Pong being played in the windows of City Hall. We decided to walk up to College Park for some zombies.
We saw the smoking, bass-pulsating garbage can that contained the Stock Extravaganza exhibit, but couldn’t get near it for stoned onlookers. One of my favourites of the night was Four Sisters, a video of the view from the Gardiner Expressway displayed on a bare wall on Bay Street, with witty subtitles all about Toronto. A few more blocks north and we entered College Park, where there was supposed to be an assembly of zombies called Zombies in Condoland. However, what we found was completely different, and very strange. There were no zombies when we arrived, but rather a guy and girl wading around in the middle of the giant pool, as the crowd exhorted them to fight (which they did, kind of), kiss (which they did), get naked (which they did not) and so on. Then more guys ran out as the girl left, and they actually did wrestle with the first guy, including some decent flips and throws. Meanwhile, everyone’s wondering where the zombies are. More zaniness ensued, as one of the later wrestlers ran out to the center of the pool to chug a bottle of (what appeared to be) Ballantine’s and chase it with a bottle of Coke, at which time a large security came out to stop him. Then two women, stripped to their underwear, ran out into the pool where they fought for a while, then fought with some guys, then made out, then went back to the edge of the pool to strip off their clothes (!) and get dressed. While that little show was happening two of the wrestlers were taunting the security guard, and the crowd exhorted the guard to kick their asses, but it didn’t come to that. Security did eventually show up and corner all these jackasses, at which point the crowd started to wander off. Through all of this there were only a smattering of zombies walking around (it was a volunteer basis…people were encouraged to show up bloody and infected) none of them acting like zombies and all wondering what was going on. Anyway…very odd.
We walked back downtown, fighting through more immense crowds, through the rather boring Fifteen Seconds at Dundas Square, to the kind of cool Domain de L’Angle #2 where they fixed office ceiling tile and florescent lights over a garbage alley to create the situational juxtaposition, and it worked very well. My brain couldn’t decide where we were. We decided to try Union Station again; the line for Horridor was still long but we decided to wait it out and it only took about 20 minutes. It was interesting exhibit: six huge video screens, three on each side of a wide hall, each showing scenes from horror movies wherein characters scream, shriek and yell. The three screens on one side showed men; the other side women. I recognized a lot of the scenes, but the six screens changed so quickly and the sound was so piercing that my brain wasn’t really absorbing anything, just working to process the cacophony. Anyway, that was enough for us so we strolled home and crashed around 2:30.
Nuit Blanche is a very cool idea, there’s no doubt about that. I just wonder if logistical challenges are hurting it? Holding an all-night art appreciation/engagement event downtown on a Saturday night creates the immediate problem of being overrun by the very drunk and very stoned, not to mention the congestion of all the 905ers using the streets and subway to escape the entertainment district. I think that, if I do it again next year, I’ll sleep for most of the night and then go out after 2AM; by that time all the yahoos should be well out of the way and I’ll be able to examine art without having some large pony-tailed man yell “WHERE IS THE FUCKING GANJA?!?!?” in my ear.
In terms of the art itself, I thought a few entrants were interesting, but others didn’t impress me that much. I don’t seem to be the only one either; an ongoing Torontoist poll says 48% of people thought last night kind of sucked, similar to last year. The consensus seems to be that neither 2008 nor 2007 approached the quality of the 2006 debut. It sounds like the a zone to the west of downtown — Liberty Village — was the place to be.
So, I look forward to a more experienced go at Nuit Blanche 2009. For now, I’ve uploaded a few pictures from last night to this Flickr set.
Last night we needed comfort food and so went to Fieramosca, where the usual debauchery ensued. Funnily enough CBGB walked in and were seated next to us part way through the evening, even though neither of us had any idea the other would be there. We ate, drank and laughed long into the evening. Consequently neither Nellie nor I got up until after 2PM, which actually works out pretty well, since we’re heading out around midnight to take in some Nuit Blanche exhibits.
Tonight: blogging in delicious bite-sized portions.
See? Tasty!
I don’t want the American economy to get the Asian flu. Really, I don’t. It’s not good for anyone, least of all Canadians.
But at the same time, this $700 billion bailout, should it eventually pass (the US Senate is expected to approve it this evening, after a retooling following the House’s rejection on Monday) will feel like rewarding the greedy. I know it’s not, of course; if banks fail account holders suffer, and that doesn’t help anything. But these bailout packages seem to contain little in the way of punishing the financial system for getting into this mess in the first place, to say nothing of ensuring that it doesn’t happen again. Hopefully the latter would be set out in new legislation, regardless of who becomes president. I dare say that even if Phil “The De-Regulator” Gramm hadn’t already been booted off the McCain campaign, he soon would have.
So Wall Street cries out for the Senate and House to save “Main Street” by handing over $700B, but the mob doesn’t like it. Not because they won’t want to help Main Street…they are Main Street. It’s because there’s no sense of justice here. I wouldn’t recommend something so head-scratching as Michael Moore’s plan (although the idea of sticking it to the nation’s 400 richest people will hold appeal for many) but if Bernanke and Paulson would just include a tax or fine — some kind of slap on the wrist — on Wall Street in their package, they’d have more public support, and a better chance with Congress. But it won’t happen. Bailouts and other socialist ideas only apply when it’s taxpayer money; when profits are at stake everyone miraculously reverts to a laissez-faire idealist.
[tags]bailout[/tags]
Skirl | Dan Dickinson 