General

My childhood fear: everything!

A few weeks ago I was discussing phobias with a friend and realized that I have or had about a million of them. Most, I think, can be traced back to some kind of childhood trauma. Let’s have a look!

Acrophobia (fear of heights): I love rollercoasters. This actually doesn’t present much of a problem even for someone afraid of heights, though looking down while climbing the first hill tends to heighten (ho ho) the white knuckle aspect. I can possibly trace this fear back to my older half-brother who grew up with my father’s ex-wife. After a car accident, he was left partially brain-damaged and to most people would seem a little “off”. We were visiting him at the hospital, though this was long after the accident, so it may have been a hospital of the mind, not body. I was maybe 7 or 8 years old. It was a sunny afternoon in Victoria and we were either on a balcony or standing on a stair landing. In either case, we were well above the ground below. My half-brother thought it would be a hoot to pick me up and dangle me upside down over the edge. I did not agree but was not in a position to argue, so dangle away I did. I believe my hollering resulted in one or both of my parents halting this activity. I can’t say I was afraid of heights before this but I’ve never been crazy about them since.

Claustrophobia (fear of enclosed spaces): This could stem from one or two incidents. The first was being at a hospital in Victoria (a recurring theme, it seems — oddly, I have no phobias of hospitals). I don’t recall the specifics of why we were there, I just remember the elevator failing somewhere between floors and being stuck for a good while.

The second incident happened when a cousin and I went into the second closet of my bedroom. We were too young for hanky-panky so this was just “exploring”. Two of the bedrooms in the old house on St. Julian Street featured walk-in closets that had small closets in back, nestled in the space under the eaves. We had a flashlight so to better create a spooky cave feel, my cousin shut the main closet door. That was when the door knob fell off, landing somewhere on the bedroom floor. We could not get the door to open without it. A parent finally freed us after some stereo screaming.

Hydrophobia (fear of water): I never learned to swim properly as a kid. I could dogpaddle, sort of, but mostly I floundered and kept to the shallows. When the Moose Lodge installed a swimming pool, it was an exciting event for the town of Duncan. They had a pumper truck filling it and everything. No sane kid could ignore this spectacular new form of recreation, so I gingerly made my way down the ladder and into the shallow end. Somehow I managed to intake enough water to simulate a kind of pseudo-drowning. My dad fished me out. I don’t recall swimming in that pool again.

The follow-up to this occurred in January of this year when I attempted swimming lessons and discovered that water kind of creeps me out once it gets above my waist. I’ll go back. Someday.

Agoraphobia (fear of open spaces): This fear is best illustrated by a nervousness I’d feel if walking through a large field. I can’t think of how this came to be a fear. Maybe by that point in my childhood my mind just found it easier to fear everything rather than to pick and choose from a list. I still feel a tinge of this sometimes but it’s mostly gone now, so hooray for the list shrinking slightly.

And I should point out that a lot of these fears could be pushed aside by necessity. For example, I once lived on the 15th floor of a tower downtown. I tried using the stairs. Once. After that, the fear of closed-in spaces like the elevator got promptly ignored. I’d just “la la la” while getting whisked up to that 15th floor. Still, there’s little denying I was quite the basketcase-in-waiting as a wee one. I’m much better-adjusted now. Really!

Time to bash The Province (and general public) again, whee! Part 2

Today’s Province:

HORRORS!

Scary!

Perhaps they are priming their readership for Halloween and getting in the spirit of all things ghoulish by presenting three unrelated stories about various bad people who are ON TRAIL, ON TRIAL or ARRESTED as noted above. Why are these three individuals lumped together and slapped on the front page of one of the city’s daily newspapers?

I don’t know.

Maybe it is because fear sells. Or it could be more prurient than that — there is a fascination with bad people and The Province is simply tapping into that for the public’s benefit. Certainly, there could be no news actually worthy of the front page in an urban area of two million people and a province of over four million, so it’s understandable the paper would have to scrape the bottom of the barrel, as it were, to put this motley crew front and center.

Speaking of the public, it’s time to poke into the brackish depths of reader comments on cbc.ca’s website again to see what nuggets of wisdom are being passed along by the people who voted the BC Liberals into power three times in a row.

In a story titled Tory logos on federal cheques draw fire we learn that several disbursement cheques of the novelty oversized photo-op variety were presented with not the Government of Canada logo but the Conservative Party logo. This is a no-no as it’s not money provided by the Conservatives but the federal government. Now, the common sense take on this is the Conservatives have demonstrated a penchant for what might be called sleazy, American-style campaigning and tactics, with an emphasis on negativity and doing things like this in the hope that they won’t be caught outright so that little logo can do its subliminal thing of associating the Conservatives with “free” money. This is a cynical line of thought but not particularly conspiratorial. They’re basically seeing what they can get away with and willing to shrug off whatever fallout may occur. Heck, they’re leading the polls, after all.

Here is one of the cheques in question:

The story dutifully notes the expected outrage from the opposition parties and the Conservative pictured above is unrepentant. But lo, look at the first reader comment from “CAN_Becket”:

I am getting really sick of the childish behaviour from both the Liberal and Conservative Parties….in fact, ALL parties.

If you ever watch Parliament it’s like watching a bunch of 5 year olds fighting with each other.

There are more important things to worry about these days than whether a conservative logo is on a novelty cheque…..man….get back to work!!!

Sick of the childish behavior. Well, that seems reasonable enough. Politicians are never the most best-behaved people around, that’s for certain and Parliament does resemble a playground during Question Period (or circus, depending on how your preferred analogies skew). But then we get to the last part:

There are more important things to worry about these days than whether a conservative logo is on a novelty cheque…..man….get back to work!!!

And here we see the typical knee-jerk reaction, the abandonment of critical thinking. Yes, there are more important things to worry about. The beauty of a news website is that it can accommodate stories of varying importance rather than arbitrarily decide what is or isn’t worthy of public discussion. There is a disconcerting use of the ellipse here, as if it was having babies, and an all-too-predictable three exclamation points, all the better to convey the reader’s apparently agitated state. “get back to work!!!” implies that someone (the story writer? The novelty cheque maker? The Tory MP? The opposition MPs? The investigating ethics commissioner?) is doing “this” (whatever it is) instead of some kind of work. In other words, this story is a trifle and should be ignored, which is exactly what the Conservatives would have wanted. Instead, our estimation of elected officials has dropped yet another notch and I’ll tell you, there ain’t a lot of room left for more notches.

This is not a grand scandal but it is something the governing party should be held accountable for. It’s a legitimate news story and the fact that the first person (and second and others — have a read) to respond wants to dismiss it in favor of more “important” things demonstrates how far politicians have fallen from grace, that we apparently no longer need to bother with the little stuff. Boys will be boys or something. As noted above, I am prone to being a tad cynical myself but there are still lines that must be respected.

Mostly I just wish people would think more and care more. And that the people we elect wouldn’t be such self-serving, power-grabbing scumbags.

And that The Province would get drummed out of business.

And that the world would be filled with puppies and rainbows.

How to be popular with the public: Die

The American Music Awards has announced its nominees for 2009, with the winners to be determined by online vote, the show airing November 22nd. One of the Artist of the Year nominees is Michael Jackson, whose most notable achievement this year was to die.

Apparently death is now a kind of artistic achievement. In a way it makes sense, as Jackson’s death was an entertainment spectacle for a few weeks this past summer.

He will be competing against Lady Gaga, who is not currently deceased.

iCan’t change the volume on my iPod

Or Taking The Good With the Bad: The Apple Interface Story.

I’m using the 5th generation iPod nano for my running, using it in conjunction with the Nike+ sensor to track my time/distance. The setup is pretty slick and seems accurate enough. When I jog I set the iPod to shuffle so it does its random song thing and given that it’s choosing from over 2,000 songs, not all of which are suitable for running, I sometimes want to click the Next button to move on to something a little peppier than Roger Waters’ meditations on death or alienation.

When I was using the Sansa Clip it was simple. The Sansa was clipped onto my shorts, so I could just reach down and click the Next button. The “wheel” on the Sansa is not a true wheel and it isn’t flush with the face of the unit, so it’s simple enough to know where your finger is on it by touch alone.

The nano is undeniably sexy. If you hold it sideways the unit is completely flush — there is not a single bump to be seen on its sleek body. And that’s a problem. Since it has no clip, I run with it in the pocket of my shorts or jacket and it’s easy enough to reach in to access it. I can even tell bottom from top because of the wireless sensor that attaches to the unit. However, the wheel used to control volume and song selection lacks any kind of tactile feedback when you’re simply trying to figure out where your finger or thumb is on it. Menu is at the top, play/pause is at the bottom. Okay, but how do you know when your finger is in either position and not anywhere in-between? On top of this, the wheel is prone to accepting input for volume in a somewhat random manner. You have to slide your thumb along the wheel with enough force to get it to register but given how tiny the wheel is and adding in the movement when jogging, I find any adjustment to the volume is just as liable to go from too quiet to WAY TOO LOUD with one errant flick.

Long story short: I wish the Sansa Clip worked with the Nike+ sensor.

For the jog itself today, it was cool and cloudy and my right calf, having been tweaked a bit on the last run, felt a little tweaked again today, slowing my pace a tad. I managed to pass a guy who was jogging a good half-lap ahead of me (250 m or so) and the only way I can see that as being possible is that he must have stopped or switched to walking when I wasn’t watching because brother, I ain’t that fast. I picked up the pace as per usual for the last five minutes and at the three minute mark I knew i was off my best pace but I was determined to make the fountain. I did so just as the nice Nike lady announced the end of the run.

I tied my second best distance: 6.6 km.
I had my second best km: 4.51/km (only 0.01 seconds off my best)
I tied my second best average: 5.19/km

In short, I was the Avis of running today.

According to the Nike site, my best 5k is 26 min. 15 seconds. I’ll see if I can get that below 26 minutes.

My journal from 1987

I moved to Vancouver in August of 1986 and my first job was working at Expo 86. Five months later I began keeping a journal (I never called it a diary — the book has no lock so any ol’ person could leaf through it freely and I’m pretty sure a few certain people have). I diligently wrote in it every day, even on days when I had nothing to say. It seemed important at the time.

From time to time I’m going to post entries from way back when, to look back on what kind of bright-eyed idealistic dummy I was at the age of 22.

A snippet to start, from January 22, 1987:

Will someone put arsenic in Mariette Hartley’s Celestial Seasonings Herbal Tea…PLEASE!! After viewing her in that commercial only twice (during 20/20) I am ready to throw any number of blunt objects at the TV in the vague hope that through some weird freak of science, said objects will suddenly materialize before Ms Hartley and knock her front teeth out, thus cutting her grating, perky cute quotient down from two hundred trillion to something intolerably unbearable (which would be an improvement).

Such anger — although I think I nailed her perkiness fairly accurately. I was also gauche enough back then to use two exclamation points. Never again!

Time to bash The Province again, whee!

While the Canwest media empire struggles to keep itself afloat amidst a huge load of debt, The Province continues to demonstrate why it was the newspaper I chose to mock back when I was studying journalism in college.

Today’s front page headline:

The story is about how Google Street Views has come to Vancouver (as I noted yesterday) and the front page tries to paint some scary picture of privacy being invaded. The Google images automatically blur license plates and faces, so the privacy concerns seem minimal at best. But that’s not something you put on the front page to evoke paranoia, is it? Anytime you get cash from an ATM, fill up your vehicle with gas, stroll though a mall, train station or airport, you are already being recorded, so the notion that you have any real privacy whilst out in public is unrealistic at best. It’s not news and hasn’t been for some time. Sure, there could be a thoughtful column pondering the increasing intrusion of cameras into public life but where’s the hysteria angle in that?

While grabbing a quick snack before attending a play last night, I picked up a copy of The Province that was handy and thumbed through it, finally landing on the op-ed pages. There was a signed editorial piece about how everyone loves Stephen Harper after his musical debut at a gala a few nights back. A pro-Harper editorial. Quite the shocker, it must be said. On the opposite page was the Letters to the Editor except it’s now called Backtalk (with the B cleverly reversed; alas, I cannot reproduce the effect here). Each letter, though given the brevity, it might be more accurate to call them letterettes, is presented under a sentence referencing the original story (ie. “Council plans to install nuclear warheads on city hall roof”) and is signed by, well, whatever the person wants. One letterling was signed by Joe the Plumber. There is no indication of location, so I’m not sure if Joe hails from Vancouver, Surrey or Madagascar.

In essence, The Province letters section, apparently culled from submissions to their website, amounts to anonymous soundbites of unknown origin. I remember some years ago I had several letters to The Vancouver Sun published, back when I was a regular reader. One of them was in response to a screed by their resident homophobe, Trevor Lautens. Lautens had written a typically despicable column and being full of youth and outrage, I penned an objection that they saw fit to put in the paper. They verified my name and address first. Yes, back then, The Sun not only put your name to what you wrote, but your actual street address (the last time I checked, they had modified that to simply your city). Today in The Province the reader comments are little more than worthless filler and even the page’s name — Backtalk — seems to acknowledge an expected tone of anger or dismissal because thoughtful responses that demonstrate an open mind and critical thinking are silly!

I am not hoping for a Canwest bailout that includes saving The Province.

I can see my house from here!

Google Street View has come to Vancouver. It’s kind of weird being able to take a 3D stroll of your neighborhood.

View Larger Map

The link above will show you exactly where I live. What’s even better is you can see Tim though the window sitting out back. Swing around and one of the neighbors is standing on the boulevard, no doubt with a “WTF?” look on her face as the camera car went rolling by.

It’s not perfect, though. At the 1200 block it suddenly jumps from the street to the alley behind our street, then at the 1100 block switches back to the street view again.

Why I generally avoid the bus

Today I was riding the bus back home and being a Sunday, the trip frequency is reduced so that means every bus is crowded. Sure enough, the #19 was packed, though I lucked out and got a seat when I got on downtown. Eventually the standing-only room fills up and this rather large gentleman ends up parked beside me. When I say “rather large” I mean he is about as overweight as I weigh in total (that being 150 pounds). His belly is bulbous in a way that suggests he has recently consumed whole and intact a small planetoid. He is wearing a powder blue polo shirt and gray sweatpants. The vast expanse of the shirt does a brave job of mostly covering his upper body but the pinkish white flesh of his gut can be spied jutting out over the protesting waistband of the sweatpants.

Let me back up a bit. I don’t dislike fat people. We each all must come to terms with our individual lifestyles. Some of us cannot lose weight due to medical conditions, others because they think fat and chocolate are recognized food groups. Hey, whatever floats your (gravy) boat, I say. I do not judge, even after discovering that a sensible diet will indeed lead you to the prescribed weight for your given body type.

If you’re fat, I only ask one thing: keep that tremendously huge gut of yours out of my face when I’m on the bus. It makes me nervous.

The fat guy pulls out a cell phone and begins talking in a very loud manner. This is hardly unusual, as most people use A VERY LOUD TONE WHEN TALKING ON A CELL PHONE IN PUBLIC. I’m hoping technology will eventually solve whatever is causing this to happen. I glance up briefly. He is holding the phone with short fat fingers and the nails on each are trimmed. I know, you’re probably wondering why I am taking in so much of a person I apparently find kind of yucky. It was just a glance, really, then I noticed that the pinky finger of his right hand did not have a trimmed nail. In fact, the nail was quite long — as long as the nail on the finger itself. The words popped into my mind instantly: the scoop. That nail was deliberately left to grow long so it could serve as a scoop that would operate in the nostril mine, digging into the lodes and pulling out deposits, to be delivered to the awaiting truck — or as we call commonly call it, the mouth.

Blargh.

He moved after a few minutes to the rear exit, a popular place for people on the bus to gather when they are not planning on getting off any time soon. Blocking the exit sticks it to the man, I guess. He puts away the cell phone and puts on some MP3 player and begins listening to music AT A VOLUME THAT EVEN PETE TOWNSEND COULD STILL HEAR. When I get off the bus, I manage to slip my skinny frame by without making body contact and in this H1N1 world, I consider it a victory.

And I think again about why I generally avoid the bus.

I’d buy that for $18.99

It was 24 years ago that I bought my first CD. It cost $18.99 and I got it at Duncan Radio & Electronics, which according to Google still exists as Duncan Electronics. Given the move to big box stores and the nature of change, I am astonished this little store has apparently made it well into the 21st century.

That CD was Songs From the Big Chair by Tears For Fears. I still have the disc today, though it’s actually a reprint with bonus songs. I am a bit surprised that the format hasn’t been replaced by something else in the quarter century that it’s been around. Oh, there have been a few attempts — the Super Audio CD and DVD Audio come to mind — but neither gained any traction, probably because a) the average person couldn’t hear a difference and b) the discs were the same format as CDs, which again leads a lot of non-technophiles to conclude “How could it be better?”

But the CD has been effectively replaced in many ways by the digital music file, typically the MP3 (or MP4/AAC format that Apple uses on iTunes). I normally kept my MP3 purchases to a few one-offs that I had a nostalgic hankering for but when Apple removed the DRM from most purchases earlier this year and doubled the bitrate from 128 to 256 (which is close enough to CD quality than anyone but an audiophile is likely to be satisfied), I started buying whole albums online. I do miss the physical media mainly due to the absence of liner notes (some albums include a PDF file which includes them, which is nice) but on the plus side,  I can get an album in a few minutes with no travel and typically pay less, as well.

I still hate that godawful faux brushed metal look on iTunes, though. Apple’s interfaces tend to be sublime or pretty awful. iTunes would fall into the latter category.

Time to write

I have declared October another”post every day to the blog” month in an effort to keep my writing flowing in some shape or form. I will even endeavor to have something worth saying on most days. We’ll see how that goes come Halloween (which has been advertised for weeks already in stores, fighting for space with the “back to school” stuff).