Conversational topics

According to the dating site Plentyoffish, here are women’s ten favourite conversational topics:

1. Hopes and aspirations
2. Hobbies/interests in general
3. Music
4. Dreams
5. Romance
6. Friends
7. Travel
8. Vacations
9. Movies
10. Entertainment

And here are their ten least favourite conversational topics:

1. Politics
2. Other dates
3. Past relationships
4. Science fiction
5. Religion
6. Celebrities
7. Science
8. Antiques
9. Money
10. History

I’m surprised that #8 is on the list. Are there a lot of people who talk about antiques on first dates – enough to include this on the list?

And the fact that #4 is on the list says something about the gender to which I belong. I’m not sure what.

Would Joe Strummer be rolling in his grave?

I was watching the baseball game last night, and hoping that the Yankees would get stomped on (alas, they are still alive). Between innings, there was a Nissan car commercial featuring background music from The Clash’s version of “Pressure Drop”, and I felt sad.

I’m not one of those purists who complain about artists “selling out”. Everybody has to earn a living, and it’s not like the music is being used to hawk weapons systems or something. I’m just sad because, once a song has been used in a commercial, I can no longer think of it without thinking of the product with which it is now associated. (Which is exactly the reason why advertisers do this, of course.) My memories are being tampered with.

Luckily for me, my age group isn’t a targeted demographic – I’m too young for ads pitched to Woodstock-era baby boomers, and I’m too old for lifestyle ads for products such as cell phones. This means that very few songs from my era have been used in ads. Mostly, it’s just “That’s What I Like About You” by The Romantics, which has been in about half a dozen TV commercials that I can recall. And, oddly enough, the Nails’ “88 Lines About 44 Women” was used in a car commercial; that was weird.

It also helps that a lot of alternative music from the late 1970s and early 1980s is not really ad-friendly. I can’t imagine, say, “Love Will Tear Us Apart” or “I Found That Essence Rare” ever becoming part of a commercial for toothpaste.

Somebody in Toronto really, really likes Gustav Mahler. On Sunday, I took the King streetcar from Broadview station to King and Jarvis; on the way, I spotted “GUSTAV MAHLER” written in large red letters in five separate places. The spray painter took care to find places where his message would draw the most attention, such as the intersection of King and Queen. It’s noticeable and startling – and it’ll be a pain in the ass to paint over. I wonder: is this particular graffiti artist (or street vandal, depending on your point of view) a member of the Toronto Mahler Society?

It’s a "bits of stuff" day, I’m afraid

This will be a “bits of stuff” day today, as I’m brain dead because I went out last night with friends and tried karaoke for the first time in ages. I learned that, perhaps, the high note from Simon and Garfunkel’s “I Am A Rock” is a bit outside my range. It’s pretty safe to say that a career as a singer was never in the cards for me.

The Globe reports that people who know two languages develop dementia symptoms later in life than unilingual people. Uh oh. I only know English (well, I know a tiny bit of French, but not enough to understand conversations). Maybe I can fend off dementia by using quite a lot of English.

The BBC web site has a list of greatest living British cultural icons, as voted on by viewers. Here’s the list, in order:

• Sir David Attenborough
• Morrissey
• Sir Paul McCartney
• David Bowie
• Michael Caine
• Stephen Fry
• Kate Bush
• Alan Bennett
• Kate Moss
• Vivienne Westwood

Imagine: Moz ahead of Beatle Paul. (I must confess that I didn’t know who David Attenborough was. I can identify everybody else on this list.)

Today, I got some spam that was Highlighted with Random Capitalized Words:

Good Day!
They are searching… They could not find you – your potential Customers.
Can this be helped? Quite easily!
Let us list your Web Site in Major Search Engines used daily by thousands.
The more Customers find you the bigger your revenues become – that’s the ABC of business world.
Now, you can find all the details here (site deleted)
Let Their Search be successful. Let them find you.

Before I go, a shout out to my friend Scott’s video blog, You, The Viewer. I particularly recommend his January 4th entry, He’s The Computer Man. I have never seen so many people without rhythm attempt to dance at one time.

What’s that smell?

Today’s fascinating story: according to the Associated Press, many property owners are protecting their trees from Christmas tree poaching by spraying them with fox urine. This, you might guess, smells rather bad – especially when the tree is brought indoors.

I can’t blame the owners of the trees for taking this preventive measure. But I have a question: whose job is it to spray the fox urine? Does this go to the unlucky slob who has the least seniority? Or is there a firm that specializes in fox urine spraying? And who is the even unluckier slob whose job it is to collect large quantities of fox urine? How do you persuade somebody to do that? How do you put this on your resume?

The Torontoist, a Toronto-based blog (as you probably already guessed), recently featured a Cover Song Catalogue. This is a collection of their favourite cover songs (you probably guessed that too). Lots of people are commenting on the list by providing favourites lists of their own, which makes the list even cooler.

Here’s my list of favourite cover songs, starting with two I’ve mentioned here recently. I’ve probably missed some, so I reserve the right to sneak back here and surreptitiously add songs to the end of my list.

Johnny Cash, “Hurt”
Screeching Weasel, “You Are My Sunshine”
Ramones, “California Sun”
Damned, “Ballroom Blitz”
Galaxie 500, “Isn’t It A Pity” and “Ceremony”
Smashing Pumpkins, “Dreaming”
Bangles, “Hazy Shade of Winter”
Cat Power, “Satisfaction”
Devo, “Satisfaction”
Sex Pistols, “No Fun”
Clash, “Pressure Drop” and “I Fought The Law”
Social Distortion, “Ring of Fire”
Shonen Knife, “Suzy is a Headbanger”
Husker Du, “Sheena is a Punk Rocker”
Japan, “Eight Miles High”
Temple City Kazoo Band, “Whole Lotta Love”
Camper Van Beethoven, “Pictures of Matchstick Men”
English Beat, “Tears of a Clown”
Nirvana, “Where Did You Sleep Last Night”

Author Christopher Hitchens has written an article in next month’s Vanity Fair titled Why Women Aren’t Funny. Hitchens, who is described in Wikipedia as being known for his “iconoclasm, anti-clericalism, atheism, antitheism, anti-fascism and anti-monarchism”, once wrote a book that suggested that Henry Kissinger should be tried as a war criminal.

Oh, by the way, I know many funny women. Hitchens is wrong.

Changing attitudes

I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that “accepted wisdom” – the rules and mores of a culture – changes over time. I’m old enough now to have seen a few of these changes.

For instance, I remember when the third-person singular pronoun was always “he” or “him”. Nowadays, that would seem a little unusual, if not sexist, as most writers are trying to make a point of being gender neutral. Similarly, “Ms.”, as in “Ms. Joan Smith”, is now a commonly accepted title. In the 1960s, married women were not only referred to as “Mrs.”, but often were denied the right to see their own first names in print, being referred to as “Mrs. John Smith”.

Also, here’s something that people younger than about 35 to 40 would find hard to believe: before about 1980, drinking and driving was (more or less) socially tolerated. It wasn’t considered a good thing, but it was accepted that, every now and again, people might find it difficult to drive home. I am just old enough to remember when people would come into their workplace and joke about how they didn’t remember how they got home last night. Nobody would do that now. (This, I hasten to add, is a decided improvement.)

I was thinking of this when reading Bill Bryson’s memoir, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. Like all of Bryson’s books, his memoir contains a lot of fascinating facts tossed in as asides. For example, he talks about the early atomic tests conducted by the U.S. The size and scope of these tests boggle the mind. Governments were taking risks they wouldn’t dare take now.

For example, the largest of these bombs was a hydrogen bomb that was exploded underground in Nevada in 1962. The blast was powerful enough to raise the land around it by 300 feet, and left a crater 800 feet across. Bryson quotes historian Peter Goodchild, who wrote that the resulting radioactive fallout was so thick that street lights came on, in broad daylight, 200 miles away. The fallout was scattered over six states and two provinces – none of which were warned about impending radioactivity.

Bryson also describes the first hydrogen bomb test, in Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in 1954. (The bikini was named after this.) The flash was visible over 2600 miles away, and the atoll is still uninhabitable today.

Attitudes towards sex were also different back then. In the 1950s, according to Bryson, most of the United States had laws prohibiting oral sex, anal sex, homosexuality, and sex between unmarried couples. And, apparently, in Indiana you could receive up to 14 years in prison for suggesting to anyone under 21 that masturbating could, perhaps, be a good idea.

Ann Fessler’s The Girls Who Went Away, which I’ve just started reading, describes the restrictions on sex in even more detail. Here’s a few of them:

• Unmarried women who became pregnant were invariably shunned, and were shunted off to a home for unwed mothers to have their baby safely out of sight and out of mind. These babies were then put up for adoption.
• In Connecticut, a physician was arrested in 1961 for giving contraceptive information to a married woman.
• In 1967, in Massachusetts, a man was sentenced to 36 days in jail for “crimes against chastity” for giving vaginal foam to a woman after a lecture on birth control.
• Birth control was not universally available in the United States until 1972.

To make things worse: it was hard to obtain a divorce in those days, to put it mildly. According to the Canadian government archives, before 1968 a divorce in Canada required an Act of Divorce to be passed by the Canadian Parliament. A person wanting a divorce had to have an announcement published in the Canada Gazette and two local newspapers. This announcement had to contain the date and place of the marriage and the reason for the divorce petition. In the case of adultery or bigamy, a co-respondent was often listed. Six months later, if the petition was allowed, Parliament would grant the divorce.

If you’re curious, apparently you can look up divorce petitions in the Library and Archives Canada database.

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.

Stephen Harper Goes Out On A Limb

So, Stephen Harper’s latest piece of legislation is a bill that tackles the problem of drug-impaired driving. Great, I guess: after all, it’s not like there are many people who are in favour of mixing drugs and driving. But I didn’t realize that drugging and driving was a major problem in Canada – and, even if it is, shouldn’t the existing impaired driving laws cover it? After all, if someone is in a car, and he is weaving all over the road, the police have the power (and the duty) to arrest him, regardless of whether he is drunk, wasted, tired, merely careless, or devoting too much attention to a cell-phone conversation. How does new legislation make things different?

As the Globe reports, the press conference had the look and feel of a campaign photo opportunity, complete with apple-cheeked children and Canadian flags. It’ll make a great bullet point on Tory campaign literature. Which is one of the things that bothers me so much about the Harper government: like the Ontario Tories, they seem to spend more time figuring out how to put a positive spin on their legislation than they do actually crafting it.

And I glumly predict that Finance Minister Jim Flaherty will do the same thing federally that he did provincially in Ontario: announce tax cuts, and then cut programs that benefit areas of the country that don’t vote Tory. Argh, argh, argh.

I now have a new all-time favourite spam message. I got it yesterday. It is titled “With no safe place to land”:

Hello!

Smoked six packs a day.

No, I really don’t see how.
Just think of all the energy
Just think of all the energy
We have painted all the toilets black
They said, “Today’s St. Patrick’s Day
I didn’t do my reading.
with some very painful sneezing,
School is closed now, what’s it to ya?
that I am such a slob.
Rocky Mountain spotted fever,
while munching cookies, cakes, and chips
I hope my students don’t find out
I give him all my homework,
and a patch of poison ivy,
They said, “Today’s St. Patrick’s Day
eight spider bites and hair loss,
a million, more or less.
If I don’t get it off my chest
We have broken all the blackboards
A nice warm bubble bath!
I asked, “Why are you pinching me?
Which makes my parents glad.
but the joke was lost on me.

Obviously, this is random lines from several poems jumbled together: I found a reference to one of them, which is by Bruce Lansky.

I did a Google search for “eight spider bites and hair loss”, and only got other samples of similar spam: here and here. I still think it sounds like beat poetry: I can picture the cool cats in their berets, snapping their fingers in appreciation.

If you’re looking for something to do in Toronto, here’s a good site to check out: 52 Mondays, dedicated to “exploring the lost art of stuff other than television”. I definitely have to spend some time here, as I’m seriously thinking of getting rid of my cable: in the last month, the only thing I’ve watched is Raptors basketball – and, after their last game, I might not even want to do that.

High-Rise Protocols

I have always been fascinated by the unspoken rules of behaviour that are agreed on by people in urban environments. I live in a 21-story high-rise building, and certain protocols seem to have evolved among its residents.

Most people who live here enter by the side door, which requires a key to open. A sidewalk extends about a hundred feet from the door, and then bends left towards the street. The accepted rule is that if Person A is opening the door, and Person B has reached the bend in the sidewalk, Person A holds it open and waits for Person B to arrive. If Person B is further away than the bend in the sidewalk, he or she is deemed too far away, and Person A doesn’t have to wait.

An unspoken assumption is that everybody who is entering by the side door is a tenant. Visitors wouldn’t realize that this is the most commonly used entrance.

For the front door, the rule is slightly different. People waiting for the elevators can see anybody trying to get in by the front door – but, unless the person at the door is obviously elderly or disabled, nobody opens it. After all, the front door is where visitors come in. And nobody wants a visitor to come in unless they’ve been let in by somebody who lives here. (If I ever plan on starting a burglary ring, I think I’d find a crooked little old lady and cut her in on a share of the profits. Nobody would ever suspect that Granny is here to make off with the silverware.)

Okay, now everybody’s inside. Next up is the elevator protocol. Here’s a few rules I’ve figured out:

• If you’re on an elevator that’s going down, and it reaches the ground floor, old people and women get to get off first.
• After that, people normally leave in reverse order of their arrival.
• If you’re on the ground floor, and somebody is getting on who has their hands full, the usual rule is to ask, “What floor?” But it is important to say this in a slightly off-handed way, so as not to imply that the other person is incapable of doing it himself or herself.

I’ve seen offices where the elevator protocol is more complicated, and sometimes difficult to resolve: Do older people get on first? Senior management? Your boss? At one place I used to work, the elevator would sometimes go up with nobody in it, as the people on the ground floor were too busy working out who should go before whom.

I guess it could be worse: we could live in a country like Japan, where the rules of behaviour and protocol are much more complicated. I did a Google search on “Japan” plus “protocol”, and found at least two companies that specialize in training businesspeople how to behave in Japan. (The links are here and here. There’s probably a lot more of them.) And I’m also glad that English doesn’t have formal and informal second-person pronouns: we don’t have to worry whether we know someone well enough to use the informal second-person with them.

By the way, here is a page that claims to say “thank you” in 465 languages.

While I’m here: a friend of mine sent me this link to an album cover wars video. Wow – somebody has a lot of time on their hands.