Humour and stoplights

Here’s some advice for you: if you’re looking to buy a humour book, there’s an easy way to tell whether a book is likely to be bad. If you can tell from the title of the book what its comic premise is, it’s probably not worth buying.

For example, 103 Uses For A Dead Politician is likely to be bad, whereas Three Men and a Boat is more likely to be good (which it is).

For a pedestrian, the corner of Broadview and Danforth is very frustrating. If you just miss a light, you have a long wait ahead of you. For example, if you’re standing on the southwest corner waiting to cross Danforth:

• First, there’s the advance green from Danforth to Broadview. During rush hour, this is long enough to send about 10 to 12 cars through the intersection.
• You then have to wait a long time as the through traffic travels on Danforth before the light finally changes.
• Then, there’s another advance green for traffic turning left from Broadview towards the viaduct.
• If a streetcar is going through the intersection on the advance green, the advance green won’t change until the streetcar is through, even though the streetcar isn’t turning.
• Finally, the light goes green on Broadview, and pedestrians can cross. Though not for very long.

It’s a minor annoyance, I know. But a lot of people cross Broadview just north of the lights, and I’m convinced that part of the reason for this is that the light takes so long to navigate.

Wandering books and drunken Torontonians

Yesterday, I was eating breakfast at a diner on the Danforth, and somebody gave me a book that had been deliberately left there as part of a project called BookCrossing. The idea is this: if you don’t want a book any more, you assign it a unique number, leave a note in it, and then “release it into the wild”.

If you find a wild book, you can enter its number into the BookCrossing registry and learn who left it and when. The book I got is a copy of Pierre Berton’s “The National Dream”, which is the first of a two-part history of the building of the first Canadian transcontinental railroad. I’ve read it, but a long time ago, so I am reading it again.

In passing, the book describes the Canada of the 1870s. Apparently, there wasn’t much to do but work, argue about politics, go to church and drink. Especially drink. According to Berton:

Alcohol in the [1870s] was both the national pastime and the national problem. Half of all arrests in the Dominion were for offences connected with liquor. Toronto had more than five hundred saloons, dispensing whiskey at two cents a shot. Barn raisings, picnics and work “bees” of all kinds were lubricated with barrels of what the flourishing temperance movement was calling “demon rum”. Delirium tremens was a common ailment. Special police were needed in the cities to trundle staggering workingmen off to jail, while others were left insensible or prostrate in the mud of the streets.

Since Toronto in the 1870s had a population of roughly 50,000, this meant there was one saloon for every one hundred people.

More from Vonnegut

This morning, I ran across an article from the Guardian books page discussing Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and his death. It mentioned another of Vonnegut’s quotations: “We are put on earth to fart around. Don’t let anyone tell you any different.”

The article also links to an excerpt from Vonnegut’s last book, A Man Without A Country. In this book, Vonnegut notes that the country he loved and fought for in the Second World War has been taken over by C-students from Yale, white supremacists masquerading as Christians, and people with psychopathic personalities. As he puts it:

In case you haven’t noticed, as the result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida, in which thousands of African-Americans were arbitrarily disenfranchised, we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war-lovers with appallingly powerful weaponry – who stand unopposed.

For more on Vonnegut, you can check out his Paris Review interview (in which, basically, he was his own interviewer). And, if you haven’t read any of his books, I’d recommend Mother Night or Slaughterhouse-Five as a good place to start.

It’s a phenomenomenomenon

Lately, it seems like all of my friends and acquaintances are joining Facebook:

• In December, I had one Facebook friend.
• In early January, I had three.
• At the start of March, I had 23.
• As I write this, I’m at 73.

And it’s not as if I’m a social butterfly or anything like that – I’m less sociable than average (to put it mildly). The only advantage I might have is that I have been involved in the Toronto comedy scene off and on for a few years, so I’ve met a bunch of people there. But I spend far too much time in the comfort of my own home, typing away in the “controllable and non-threatening world of my computer” (to quote from Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs).

Somebody – presumably, Mark Zuckerberg, who is credited at the bottom of each page – is going to get very rich when Facebook is sold to Yahoo or Google or Microsoft or maybe Apple. But I really hope it doesn’t become Microsoft Facebook.

Speaking of Douglas Coupland: I’m sure I’m not the only person who thinks of Microserfs and JPod as mirror images of one another. Microserfs describes the world of computing as it was in the late 1990’s (and before): people believed that they were building a bright new computer-aided future. JPod describes today’s world: more global and a lot harder to live in.

Blah, revisited

I got a copy of Louann Brizendine’s The Female Brain out of the library today, and found this fascinating statement:

Just as women have an eight-lane superhighway for processing emotion while men have a small country road, men have O’Hare Airport as a hub for processing thoughts about sex whereas women have the airfield nearby that lands small and private planes. That probably explains why 85 percent of twenty- to thirty-year old males think about sex every fifty-two seconds and women think about it once a day – or up to three or four times on their most fertile days.

Some comments:

• How did she come up with 52 seconds? That’s a startlingly precise figure. How does she know that it’s not 53 seconds, or perhaps 51?
• The 15 percent of young men who don’t think about sex every 52 seconds must feel rather bad about themselves after reading this passage.
• I feel sorry for anyone – man or woman – who only thinks about sex about four times a day at most. Thinking about sex is kind of fun.
• It’s cruel to use O’Hare Airport as a metaphor for sex. After all, everything arrives late there, and people are constantly rushing back and forth in a bad temper. (And the planes are often circling the airport waiting to land. I don’t know if I want to take that metaphor any further, thank you.)
• Small country road? Okay, Ms. Brizendine, you may be right, but I’m driving one badass car down that road.

Speaking of emotions: for some reason, I’m really kind of down today. It might be winter, or that it’s Day 6 of my cold, or that I’m in the middle of the work week, or all of the above.

One thing I’ve noticed about being down is that my brain starts sending me false information: I become convinced, for instance, that many of my friends and all of my casual acquaintances – including any women I am even remotely interested in – really can’t stand me but are just being too polite to say so. I’ve learned to tune this out – especially when events prove that my pessimistic assumptions are wrong. But it does mean that it’s hard to sort out what is actually happening in the real world. After all, if you can’t trust the data coming from your brain, how do you make correct decisions?

The Action Hero’s Handbook

I got a cool Christmas present from a friend of mine: The Action Hero’s Handbook. Here’s the back cover blurb for this awesome book:

For everyone who’s ever wanted to be as smooth as James Bond, as clever as Captain Kirk, or as tough as Charlie’s Angels, The Action Hero’s Handbook is the ultimate guide to the essential skills every action hero needs to survive and thrive in this dangerous but exciting world.

Well, yes. Chapter titles include (capitalization is theirs):

• How to Track a Fugitive
• How to Interrogate a Suspect
• How to Drive a Bus at High Speed
• How to Negotiate a Hostage Crisis
• How to Take a Bullet
• How to Dirty Dance
• How to Communicate with an Extraterrestrial
• How to Perform the Vulcan Nerve Pinch
• How to Take a Hit with a Chair
• How to Evade a MiG
• How to Win a High-Speed Chase on Foot

Not to mention the generic

• How to Be Ready for Anything

If you’re wondering how to be ready for anything, there are eight steps:

1. Be suspicious of everyone and everything, but don’t let on that you’re suspicious.
2. Always make a mental note of exits and entrances to any building you enter.
3. Be aware of what’s happening around you.
4. Control and utilize your fear.
5. Don’t get caught off guard.
6. If you must engage in a physical confrontation, attempt to stun your opponent with a finger gouge or throat chop and end the fight quickly.
7. Stay on the move.
8. Pick up useful items after you’ve disabled your opponents: these include weapons, equipment bags, walkie-talkies, uniforms, and key cards.

Cowabunga! This book goes perfectly with one I bought a few months ago because I couldn’t resist it: How To Survive a Robot Uprising. This useful guide includes the following:

• How to stop a modular robot
• How to spot a robot mimicking a human
• How to prepare for the coming uprising
• How to deactivate a rebel servant robot
• How to enhance yourself with cybernetic implants
• How to recruit human allies
• Last ditch methods for obliterating all robots

Okay. I am now in a state of total preparedness. Bring it on.

One of those days

You know those days when you feel positive and upbeat and full of energy? This isn’t one of those days for me, so I apologize in advance.

I still think that the new spiral fluorescent light bulbs are cool, but I see a potential problem showing up if they become popular: each of these bulbs contains a tiny bit of mercury. This isn’t enough to cause a health hazard, but it does mean that you can’t just throw your old CFL bulbs out – you have to take them to a special place where hazardous stuff is taken care of. If millions of consumers start buying CFL bulbs, how many of these consumers are just going to throw the bulbs out when they burn out? Will that create an environmental hazard a few years down the road?

The problem is that new inventions sometimes have unexpected uses or consequences. The telephone was apparently originally intended as a broadcast medium, not as a method of person-to-person communication. The development of universal broadband Internet access has accelerated the trend towards outsourcing – if you can send megabytes of files from North America to countries such as India (and vice versa) quickly and efficiently, outsourcing your company’s computer needs becomes more practical. And DDT, now considered lethal to the environment, was once hailed as a saviour because it reduced the threat of malaria.

The blank verse spam poetry I got in my email today is hauntingly beautiful, at least up until the ending:

Winds blow sharp, what then?
Silence. Your way of being. Your way of seeing
Allowing me to let your picture form and wake
Are muffled into silence that refuses
Preface to the 1970 Edition
III. Earliest Recorded Northern Explorers: The Greeks and the Vikings
I am sleeping, and dreaming, and wandering along
That open before me? What I see
At four, the spectators leave in pairs, off
Brush the lone giant in that somber pall.
I do not betray you, I still go forward,
Where lamps are lit: these, too,
That desire has ever built, have approached
Microsoft Windows Vista is now ready to download!

I love F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to pieces. I can’t really tell you why. It’s set in the 1920s, which helps: I’ve always been a sucker for that period of history. Perhaps it’s the ending:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

I’m getting old enough that I know this feeling all too well. The Great Gatsby is in the public domain: you can check it out here or here.

Lately, I’ve been on a mission to try to get caught up on what’s new in music. I fell behind a bit after emusic.com stopped offering unlimited downloads for a fixed monthly price, but am trying to catch up now. Now, I think I’m up to what was cool about six years ago!

Three different friends of mine have directly or indirectly recommended Sigur Rós, so I got hold of a copy of their Ágætis Byrjun album. (I had to cut and paste to get the proper special characters – I have no idea how this will read on your browser.) This is perfect for a gloomy late fall day: it’s atmospheric and it kind of swoops at you.

I like moody, atmospheric bands (as I mentioned already, I’ve been listening to a lot of Slowdive lately). Given my tendency to feel gloomy lately, I should probably be listening to more cheerful songs – such as “Pop Goes The World” by Men Without Hats, which is the most fun dumb song I know – but fuck that. I’m going to save the cheerful stuff for when I feel cheerful. Besides, I’d rather feel intense emotion, even if it’s bad, than feel nothing at all. I get scared when I go numb.

Dry your eyes

Today, I have been listening to The Streets’ “Dry Your Eyes”. It’s about a man who is just discovering that his girlfriend wants to break up with him. He’s desperately trying to hold on to her – literally – but she’s already made up her mind.

If the authors of I Love You, Nice To Meet You are to be believed, the poor guy in that song didn’t stand a chance. One of the authors, Kevin Bleyer, claims that many women break up with their boyfriends without telling them. As Bleyer puts it, “When a woman breaks up with us, she’s not actually breaking up with us. The transaction happened long ago. We’re simply being debriefed. She’s just getting us up to speed.” The female half of the author team, Lori Gottlieb, claims, “Women may be guided by emotion, but when it comes to ending a relationship, we’re as cold-blooded as Saddam Hussein.” (Hey, I’m just quoting, not necessarily agreeing!)

I got this in the mail today:

Hi,

VrAGRA
CrALiS
VALrUM

web address: [deleted]

what we heed to make this prison world a thing of the past.

And I got a new bank scam message that started like this:

Dear Friend,

I wish to accost you with a request that would be of immense benefit to both of us. Being an executor of wills, it is possible that we may be tempted to make fortune out of our client’s situations, when we cannot help it, or left with no better option.

Erm… dude, you’re supposed to make this sound like a good thing.

In the news today, John Tory, the leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative party, is calling for a province-wide registry listing houses that had been formerly used as marijuana “grow-ops”. I don’t see the point of this. Does growing marijuana in a house cause structural damage to the building?

I’m off now to finally bite the bullet: I’m going to update my computer to include all of the latest Microsoft Windows XP updates. This might take ages. When I’m done, my hard drive might be a smoking ruin. If you never hear from me again, you’ll know why; tell my next of kin that I love them, will you?

Lonesome No More

One of my favourite writers, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., often writes about the importance of communities: to stay sane, human beings need to be part of like-minded groups of people. This is the theme of his novel Slapstick, or Lonesome No More.

In this novel, everyone in the United States is given, at random, an extra middle name that is composed of a noun and a number. The noun is something commonly found in the world, such as a flower, an animal, or a periodic element. The noun and number are used to assign each person to an artificial extended family. The President of the United States, for example, is given the middle name of Daffodil-11, which means that every other Daffodil-11 in the U.S. becomes his brother or sister, and everyone who is a Daffodil becomes part of the President’s family (and he of theirs).

I think about Vonnegut’s novel, and the need for extended communities, when thinking about social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Sure, these sites have their drawbacks – mostly involving men preying upon, hassling, or in some way bothering young women – but they offer a chance to form a community that was not possible in the pre-Web days.

I’ve been on MySpace since April – a friend of mine talked me into joining – and, gradually, the Toronto arts and performing community is making its way onto the site. As I write this, I am “friends” with 38 performers that I know, either well or slightly (plus 18 troupes or bands). Sometimes, when I’m feeling lonely, I can go to my site and reassure myself that I actually am not alone in the world.

It’s even better for younger people, who have been social networking with MySpace and Facebook from the beginning. As they get older, they will be able to maintain dozens, if not hundreds, of connections. This will help them in all sorts of ways – in particular, when looking for work, as studies have shown that 80% of all jobs are never posted as want ads, but are filled by friends or friends of friends.

When I was a freshly minted university grad, in the mid-1980s, I would have killed for a social networking site that provided a way to keep in touch. Back then, not only was there no World Wide Web – there was virtually no email. The only way to maintain contact with someone was to phone or write him or her – and, since people move a lot, it was hard to stay in touch. It was so easy back then to become isolated and alone – and I speak from experience.