Phaedron Rising

Phaedron's Offal Pie

2010-04-24T22:58:00.004-04:00

This is the recipe for an organ-meat pie I made that happened not to suck. I didn't take a single measurement, so all the numbers here are only slightly better than a wild guess. This was done using a slow-cooker and made from scratch. Since it turned out well when simmered for 18 hours in a slow-cooker, and likely needs half that time at least, it's probably best to prepare the ingredients to begin simmering at night, the evening before you want it to be finished.

Ingredients:

1/3 Whole Heart, Beef
1lb Kidney, Lamb
1lb Liver, Chicken
1-2 Onions
8-10 Potatoes
1-2 cups Frozen peas
1-2 cups Frozen corn
1-2 cups Diced carrot*
1mf† Flour
1 mf† Olive oil
Vegetable boullion (could easily substitute beef, chicken or any other to taste)
Garlic, to taste
Salt, to taste‡
4-5 eggs

* I did not use carrot, but I would have if I hadn't forgotten to pick some up at the store. It would have worked very well with the recipe.
† mf=metric fuck-ton
‡ Sea salt or kosher salt is best, though table salt would likely do.

Step 1: Preparing the meat
Preheat slow-cooker to "Low"

Liver

1) Halve or quarter the livers.

2) Lightly salt the liver, and season with boullion

3) Liberally dust with flour

4) Sauté with some of the onion in olive oil

Kidney

1) Soak in cold water and rinse several times

2) Separate and halve down the middle.

3) Remove any tough, white tissue inside. Kidney has a strong uric smell and slight flavour unless simmered for an extremely long time (as I did) or boiled with vinegar and water beforehand (as I would have done had I consulted google beforehand instead of just winging it with strange organs I'd never cooked with before)

*Consult google. I didn't know do do it at the time, but it may be worth treating with vinegar at this point, or even before splitting the kidneys.

4) Dice into 1-2 cm chunks and dust liberally with flour.

5) Half-sautée with some of the onion in olive oil. You should be somewhere part-way between browning the meat and fully sautéing it.

Heart
If you get the heart from the meat section of a grocery store, it will likely already be cleaned of the tough fat, the veinous parts, the membrane and the connective tissue. If the heart is fresh and untouched, as you might get it from a custom butcher, you may need to do this yourself:

a) With a sharp knife, cuf the heart into three equal-ish pieces.

b) Cut away the hard fat from the outside

c) Remove veinous tissue

d) Remove membranous tissue as you would filet a fish.

e) Use 1/3 of a whole heart for the recipe (or more, if you fucking feel like it). The rest can be set aside for braising, or frozen for later.

1) Dice heart into 1x2cm pieced

2) Salt liberally and season liberally with boullion and any other seasonings to taste.

3) Dust liberally with flour.

Deglaze the skillet with water and boullion to add to the crockpot
4) Sauté the rest of your onion and brown the meat. When browning heart, use medium-high heat and liberal oil. Once browned, remove immediately from skillet ot else the heart will become tough and chewy.

Step 2: Making the Stew

I) Add deglaze and boullion to crockpot, along with all the meat you've prepared.

II) There should be enough liquid to incorporate the vegetables later on, but not so much that it will overflow when they go in. Add however much water and boullion stock is necessary to make this happen.

III) Simmer on "Low" for 10-18 hours

IV) 2-3 hours before removing time, add vegetables and diced parboiled potatoes

V) When the meat is tender, it should look and smell like a really delicious soup.

V-optional) Enjoy a delicious bowl of soup

VI) When the vegetables are cooked and tender, thicken into a stew with beurre manie:

Flour is used to thicken a soup into a stew. Adding flour to hot liquid, however, will give you big clumps of flour. Beurre manie allows you to add thickening flour into the mix without clumping. I've heard, though, that cornmeal, arrowroot, and instant-mashed potato mix make good thickening alternatives. Here's how to make the beurre manie.

1) In a mixing bowl, combine 1/2 cup flour with 1/4 cup softened butter or margarine.

2) Mix thoroughly until the butter or margarine is "saturated" with flour, and cannot be mixed with anymore without leaving dry flor exposed.

3) Add beurre manie to the soup. As the butter or margarine melts, the flour will be released into the liquid to thicken it. Make and add more to desired consistency, but remember that it's best to try and maximize the ratio of flour to butter/margarine.

VII) Mix thoroughly and salt to taste.

VIII) Salt to taste and simmer (optional) for 20-60 minutes. It should look and smell like a really delicious stew.

VIII-optional: Enjoy a delicious bowl of stew.

Step 3: Everyone likes pie.

If everything has made it past the soup and stew stages without being eaten, you can now make it into meat pies.

Preheat oven to 425F and set rack to 1/3 height from the bottom.

http://www.cooks.com/rec/view/0,1738,144182-243200,00.html

DOUGH FOR MEAT AND POTATO PIE
5 c. flour
1 tsp. salt
1 c. cold water
2 eggs
5 level tsp. baking powder
1 1/2 c. Crisco
2 tbsp. lemon juice
Mix like regular pie crust, sifting flour, baking powder and salt. Then adding other ingredients. Makes a 2 crust pie.
I didn't use any lemon juice, and substituted Crisco with Margarine. Butter is likely best, but it should be cold and finely chopped.

Wrap the dough in tin foil or saran wrap and toss it in the freezer for 10-15 minutes.

At this point, you need to decide what kind of pies you want to make. You can probably make about 2 massive pies, 4-8 serving-size pies in ovenproof bowls, 12+ snack-sized meat pasties (see images, http://outofthegarden.files.wordpress.com/2006/10/pasties-cooling.JPG) or, as I did, a combination of all three sizes.

Roll out the pastry dough to appropriate width and thickness. I'm trusting that if you've this far, and have mastered basic literacy skills, you're smart enough to figure these sizes out on your own. Roll it out until it's at two inches thicker than the bowl you plan to cook in, and however thick you feel a perfect meat pie crust should be.

Line the inside of your bowls with the bottom crusts and coat the inside with egg wash (This helps to keep the crust from getting soggy against the stew). Fill the bottom crust with meat stew as far as you can without spilling over the edge.

Cover with the top crust, crimp it tightly to the overhanging exposed bottom crust, and coat the top liberally with egg wash to get that nice browning. Pole a few holes in the top to prevent steam from inflating your pie.

Bake at 425F for 35-55 minutes to taste, depending on what size your servings are, and how well done you like your pie crusts. Again, I'm assuming that you're not an idiot here; cook it, keep an eye on it and poke a hole or two if it begins to inflate, and take it out when it looks ready to you.

And you're done. It's not a quick recipe by any stretch, but most of that time - by far - is spent simmering in a slow-cooker without active input from you while you sleep, study, work, or consume drugs. It's worthwhile to make because of the sheer massive amount of food that comes out of it: you end up with a week's worth of dinner entrées for one person. Just make sure to refrigerate whatever you'll be eating within the following day or two, and freeze whatever you plan to keep for longer than 48 hours. It's also incredibly cheap. Most offal costs a small fraction of other meat cuts, and you're unlikely to spend more than $15-20 for all of the ingredients for this recipe, meat included.

Lastly, this isn't exact, and this was only my first time making it. Fuck with the recipe; use it as a template and see what else works. Let me know if you find anything good.

Keb' Mo' - Dangerous Mood

2009-11-18T20:58:00.001-05:00

Summer 2010: A bit of a hiking trip!

2009-10-20T00:48:00.002-04:00

Here's the route:

View Larger Map

It's still - clearly - in the "pipe dream" phase: to walk, over the course of several weeks, from New Orleans to Chicago. Still, my friend Nez might be up for it.

1,571 km total (976mi)

Averaging between 3.5km/h and 4.0km/h on foot, 8 hours per day, that's 30km per day. Not an excruciating day's walk. So:

30km per day
6 days per week

That 52 travelling days. Taking one day off per week to rest and adding half a week's buffer in case of a minor setback, that's 65 days. 65 days on foot from New Orleans to Chicago.

This isn't a wilderness trip, so we don't need to take extensive supplies with us. We'll need to be carrying clothes, a tent, packs, water, cooking equipment, and a day or two's worth of food. We could easily keep our pack weight down below 35lbs.

We could actually do this. It's just surreal.

The best break up. Ever!

2009-10-04T00:54:00.001-04:00

Chi, Woo, Kung Fu and God

2009-10-01T04:47:00.009-04:00

Truth isn't everything.

It's an almost counter-intuitive thing for a skeptic to say, but in some cases truth can be outweighed by the benefit of a lie. The main arguments that I usually see for certain ways of faith-based thinking seem to pivot on the crux of two things:

1) The belief is objectively true: God does exist; vaccines cause autism; the your future is predicted in the stars; a supernatural Chi force runs through meridians in your body.

2) You're objectively better off believing that it's true: A life with religion is more full; believing in Chi flow can help you break concrete with your bare hands.

By the way I have categorized these things, it's clear that I'm operating on the assertion that the things listed above fall under the category of magical thinking. The focus of this post isn't to show the fallacy of believing in the objective truth of these kinds of claims; many people have gone into the minutiae of each issue in much greater detail, and with much more powerful logic than I would. This post is about the second category of argument: that there can - in some cases - be a demonstrable and objective benefit to believing in something that is not objectively true.

The martial art of Kung Fu - among many others - focuses on channeling the flow of a magical force, Chi, to do things would normally be considered to be impossible. Practitioners can often break wood and concrete with their bare hands, rest their weight against a sharpened spear by their throats, and hammer nails into wood with their bodies.

Does that prove that Chi exists? No, of course not. Now we understand the Newtonian concepts of force, acceleration, and kinetic energy. The fact remains, though, that a doctorate in Physics rarely bestows a professor with the ability to smash concrete with his forehead. Chi, it seems, proves to be a useful sort of cognitive shorthand for the massive amount of equivalent mathematical calculations for applying force with your own body. Chi may not exist, but Kung Fu can help you to do things normally considered outside of the range of human capabilities.

You could even test it experimentally. A double-blind study would be effectively impossible, because the experiment's subjects would obviously know whether they were practitioners of a martial art or whether they were the control group. But seeing as how the main purpose of a double-blind experiment is to compensate for placebo effect, I think we could write it off as superfluous; you've either got a broken piece of concrete, or a broken hand - placebo don't enter into it. A simple blinded study, however, would have pretty predictable results: Shaolin Monks can fuck shit up.

In short, Chi isn't real, but it can still help you.

I think there's a valid argument to the idea that truth isn't everything, and that the benefit of believing something that is objectively untrue can make that belief worthwhile. However, it would still be fallacious to conflate proof of a belief's benefit with proof of its veracity.

In this way, kung fu seems to represent an enormous outlier among the many other forms of magical thinking, in that the benefit of its belief can be objectively measured. Nobody would argue with the fact that if your goal is to break a brick with your body, you're better off knowing kung fu than not knowing it.

How do other forms of magical thinking such as religion, homeopathy, and astrology compare against kung fu? Not well. "Natural Medicine" and Astrology can and have been easily subjected to controlled study, and both have failed, with flying colours, to show any efficacy beyond the Placebo/Barnum effect and random chance. Astrology is nothing more than vague cold-reads guessing at random chance. No atheists that I know lead any less happy a life for their lack of superstitious belief in a god. Controlling for medical history and lifestyle, you're statistically about as well off going to a homeopath as you are doing nothing, and substantially less well off than going to see a real doctor who knows what he or she is talking about.

The funny thing about homeopathy is that the reverse used to be true. Before the advent of germ theory, vaccination, and basic procedures of hygiene and sanitation, mainstream medicine once did more harm than good. Common now-debunked treatments for various physical and mental illnesses once included bloodletting, lobotomy, electroshock (which has been discontinued in all but a select few rare cases where it can actually potentially help), and avoidance of bathing. If you lived in the 18th century, you'd often be better off having a homeopath playing magician and effectively doing nothing than you would going to a doctor and being bled by unsanitized equipment.

Eventually, though, the mainstream of medicine came to test treatments ojectively. Those treatments that did not prove to be effective were discarded, and those that worked were incorporated into the canon of modern medicine. Homeopathy is still making things up and doing nothing, and so has been surpassed by modern medicine as the treatment of choice for any reasonable person who wants to deal with something like AIDS, cancer, or internal bleeding.

It's 5:45am right now, so I'll get to my point.

I'm not a practitioner of kung fu, but if I wanted to break things in cool and objectively measurable ways, I'd be better off it I were.

I'm not a denizen of the 18th century, but if I were, I'd be better off going to a quack doctor selling me water and snake oil that did nothing than I would going to a doctor who wanted to open up my blood vessels with a dirty needle.

It's mostly a rhetorical point, but a belief doesn't need to be true for it to be a worthwhile one; it needs to be either true or demonstrably beneficial. I feel extremely confident in saying that in the modern world, most forms of magical thinking (god, zodiac signs, homeopathy, &c.) fail in both regards. Kung Fu (believing in Chi flow) and homeopathic medicine (when - and only when - compared to the mainstream medicine of a couple centuries ago) are not the rule, but the exceptions.

Queer Idol is hetero-friendly.

2009-09-16T01:08:00.001-04:00

I just applied to audition next month. This should be awesome. I'd probably get past the first round just by virtue (you know what I mean) of being the only straight man there.

Random thought: Blues Pilgrimage to Chicago.

2009-09-15T19:10:00.002-04:00

Toronto to Chicago. I bet I could walk it in a month.

That's all.

Jenny McCarthy is an idiot. A really hot idiot.

2009-09-12T21:21:00.004-04:00

I've been away. Maybe I'll make it up to my imaginary readers.

Friend and blogger Tall Penguin recently wrote about some amazing travels that she's considering, and her concerns about the vaccines that she needs for the trip:

With two years of possibly not having to work spread out in front of me, I am entertaining ideas of travel. This became a very real possibility this past weekend when a friend offered to show me India in November when he goes there for his sister's wedding. I am excited about this prospect. But it's raised a fear in me that I didn't realize I was going to have to confront. Vaccinations.

If I'm going to experience world travel, there's a whole lot of shots I have to get. And it's not that I'm afraid of the needles. It's my fear that vaccines could be somewhat damaging to my long-term health. Having got hit with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in my teens shortly after having a Polio vaccination, I have had a hard time shaking the idea that the two may have been connected, even though there is much scientific research to dispel any connection.

I have done a fair amount of research on the vaccination issue and feel that while vaccinations are generally safe, there are risks involved. So, I'm going to book myself an appointment with a travel doctor and learn all I can about the vaccinations I'd require to travel abroad, the benefits and the risks. All said and done, I am of the opinion that there are always risks involved in any choice and I can't keep myself back from fully experiencing my life just because of the potential risks.

Don't swallow the alternative-medicine snake-oil, Penguin, no matter how much water it's diluted with.

Here's where I tell you where I stand, based on my understanding of the facts. Take it or leave it.

Immunize. Vaccinations are probably responsible for saving more lives than anything else in the history of medicine, with the possible exception of basic sanitary procedure.

Things like measles, smallpox, and polio are just far-away ideas now, and they don't seem all that scary. The reason they're not all that scary is because vaccinations have effectively eliminated smallpox from developed countries, and all but decimated many other diseases which once killed people in huge numbers.

India is country with first-world areas within a literal stone's throw from people living in medieval conditions - dying of medieval diseases. Black Death still exists there, and there have been outbreaks of it within the last two decades.

For Canadians like us with little actual exposure to crippling and lethal epidemic diseases, it's easy not to get worried about them. They're still out there, though. They're only not here because of vaccination programs initiated in the Western world within the last few generations.

Weighed against the enormous life-saving benefit of vaccinations are the mainly unsubstantiated claims that there is a link between immunization and long-term physical or neurological health problems. The loudest rants come from people like your commenter "V," and former Playboy model/celebrity anti-vaccine activist Jenny McCarthy, who are convinced that there is a link between modern medical vaccination programs and Autism Spectrum Disorders.

There have been numerous medical studies that have shown that there is no realistic link between vaccination and ASDs, and every time a study comes back and shows no causative link, anti-vaccine activists will either scroll down the vaccine's list of ingredients and pick out another chemical boogeyman, or else argue that "there's more to understanding your health than controlled, double-blind medical studies."

It's bullshit. The first vaccine ingredient to be touted as the cause of an "Autism Epidemic" was Thimerosal. There was no real evidence for a link, but it was removed anyway from just about all vaccines but influenza's. This happened over a decade ago in Canada, and ASD diagnoses haven't gone down.

I spend half of this last summer working with kids on the Autism spectrum, and I saw many parents and otherwise superb colleagues who bought into this frightened mob-think.
There's nothing to lose by getting vaccinated by getting immunized before going to India, and everything to lose by skipping the vaccines.

I'm solidly with Umlud and CyberLizard on this one, and I'll happily second Umlud's suggestion that you check out Orac over at his "Respectful Insolence" blog (http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/). He's a surgeon who has written extensively on the subject.

My advice is to be skeptical of anyone who touts "alternative" medicine. The main reason alternative treatments are alternative is because they can't go through a controlled study showing anything more than placebo effect. Most treatments and medicines that can pass such a test are incorporated into the canon of mainstream medicine. There's no mainstream conspiracy to disprove things like homeopathy; if there were anything to it, Big Medicine would be more than happy to make money off of it, and would push for its full acceptance.

The medical community is about as embroiled in controversy over the safety of vaccinations as the scientific community is about the controversy of the origin of the human species - that's to say, an overwhelming majority standing on the side of the evidence, with a small handful of degreed whack-jobs getting attention for being "mavericks."

You know me. You know I'm not a conformist for the sake of conformity. It's just that there's no actual reason to skip your vaccinations, and a lot at stake if you do.

I'm not a doctor, though. Neither (clearly) is "V," and neither (presumably) are Umlud or CyberLizard. Orac is probably a doctor, but pseudonymous bloggers don't exactly display their medical degrees for the world to see.

Trust an actual doctor.

And bring me back strange and exotic forms of alcohol.

Enlarge your P3N15!

2009-05-27T02:05:00.007-04:00

So can we? Of course not. If I took all the thought that I devote to my penis, and applied it to something useful to society, there'd probably be no more cancer.

When I stumbled across an archaic post of PZ Myers' on his Pharyngula blog, my subconscious was ecstatic with glee. Finally, another excuse to focus on my penis!

The gist of PZ's post is that research seems to suggest that while across different species, sexual selection shows a consistent pressure towards larger size in male genitalia, the varying effect of natural-selection pressures will drive size down.

The burden of bearing a massive penis
A couple of recent studies in fish and spiders have shown that penis size is a matter of competing tradeoffs, and that these compromises have evolutionary consequences. Guys, trash that e-mail for penis enlargement services—they can make you less nimble in pursuit of the ladies, or worse, can get you killed.[....]

[....]The authors measured [the spiders'] peak speed in short sprints, and found that it shot up from 2.7±0.2 cm/s to 3.8±0.3. They also had impressive improvements in endurance. They'd chase spiders with a soft brush until the poor fellows collapsed in exhaustion and would move no more. Spiders with two intact pedipalps [dual spider-cocks] would flop down after 17 min 30 s±55 s. Lose one palp, and they could keep running for 28 min 30 s±45 s. Even more severe, spiders with two palps died.53% of the time after collapsing, while the unipalp runners only died 12% of the time[....]

[and now for the fish-dick portion!]
[....]Given a choice, females flirted with the large-gonopodium male 81% more often than the small-gonopodium male. You knew that would be the case, didn't you?

[...]That advantage doesn't come for free. They also measured burst-speeds in startle-escape responses, the fast tail-flick dart fishes use to get away from the lunge of predators…and the large-gonopodium fish were significantly slower. That large object hanging off the fish represents a good bit of drag, reducing speed, maneuverability, and endurance, and may also be something to catch the eye of predators.
This study went a step further and looked to see if gonopodium size has consequences in the real world. They sampled populations from lakes and ponds that were either free of piscivorous predators (the open bars in the chart below), or contained beasts that would chow down on Gambusia (the black bars), and measured gonopodium size. Males in predator-free waters had gonopodia that were on average 12% larger than their more harried conspecifics.
The lesson is clear. If you live in an environment where you can afford to be slow and lazy, sexual selection can take over: the females will preferentially mate with the fish with the larger gonopodia, driving up the average size over generations. If you have to be nimble and swift to stay alive, natural selection will cull out the males with oversized genitals.

Thinking out loud: I'm not a biologist by training - or involved in any of the sciences for that matter, so if I make a colossal error in my thinking... My bad.

Genital size can vary between localized groups within the same species based on how much pressure is exerted by natural selection and the ability to be nimble and swift.

Does that really seem to transfer over empirically to humans?

A natural hypothesis to make would be that a population's genital size would be affected by how long ago that area switched from hunting and gathering to general agriculture.

There are probably few things that exert natural selective pressure towards being nimble and swift than hunting does, and any man that's ever run naked (or commando) knows that having your cock constantly slapping your thigh is a little impeding.

On the other hand, sustained agriculture would significantly reduce the effect of natural selection on the need for speed and agility.

You would expect that, in an area where humans have engaged in agriculture for hundreds of generations, you would see that sexual selection had outstripped survival pressures.

Where hunting and gathering had been the primary means of survival, you'd expect that natural selection would have, on average, a slightly diminishing effect on genital size.

Does the hypothesis hold up? Look at the difference between averages in Africa and Southeast Asia. I don't remember where I got this, but I remember reading somewhere that the averages differ between 10% and 20% (up to around an inch).

Southeast Asia has been engaging in regular agriculture for thousands of years, whereas humans were largely hunter/gatherers in Africa until more recently. Yet it's people of African descent that average slightly more than their Asian counterparts.

Based on that alone, the hypothesis doesn't seem to hold up.

Then again, we're looking at only two data, and many potentially confounding variables. (Climate, clothing, diet, etc.)

Still, if the main factor determining male genital size really is the surival pressure of speed and agility, then you would expect that pressure to outweigh any others.

Or maybe several thousand years don't leave enough time for differences in importance between natural selection and sexual selection to affect heritable phenotype.

hehehe... Penis.

With a Little Help from my Friends

2009-05-03T01:21:00.007-04:00

I just got back from the Joe Cocker concert at Casino Rama.

Here's the thing about Joe Cocker:

The most powerful songs have this soul-slamming crescendo, the kind of note or short riff that closes your eyes, tenses every muscle in your body, and slams your throat into your stomach.

Whitney Houston hits that soul spot when she goes "...and AAAAAAAAAYIAYEEEEEEEE will always love you...."

Clapton kicks off Layla with it (The Derek and the Dominoes original, not the new unplugged crap.

It's that visceral sound that make the high point of a song, when you dig down deep and give it every ounce of your soul. Some artists find that note a few times in their career. It's tough to describe, I know. Joe Cocker lives in that crescendo. That's what makes him Joe Cocker. His power is in that range of force and verve that the best artists pull off for 3 or 4 seconds - tops- in their best songs.

The guy looks absolutely spastic once the music comes on. He'll walk on stage, introduce himself, greet the entire venue, and look perfectly normal. At the first note of music, though, his entire body winds itself into a writhing, rocking cross between what looks like Autism and Cerebral Palsy.

He's 65 now, and he has still got it!

It was about a two-hour drive up to Orillia, and about three quarters of that en route back; it was worth every mile of the trip to see the Sheffield legend perform live.

These aren't from the performance, but they're a few of my favourites:

God, the man's good.

"Zero Tolerance" is going to make spineless pussies out of my entire generation.

2009-05-01T07:10:00.003-04:00

From the Globe and Mail:

Black belt teen strikes back at bully, and rallies community against racism
KESWICK, ONT. — The 15-year-old black belt thought he was doing his tormentor a favour when he elected to fight back with his weaker left hand.
He had heard his white classmate throw an angry racial slur in his direction after an argument during a gym class game of speedball, and now the student was shoving him backward, refusing to retract the smear.

The white student swung first, hitting the 15-year-old with a punch to the mouth.

The 15-year-old heard his father's voice running through his head: Fight only as a last resort, only in self-defence, only if given no choice, and only with the left hand.
[....]

This happened in a small rural town just north of Toronto - a town that already had problems with anti-Asian racism and hate crimes. Long story short, the Korean boy broke the bully's nose. While both students are under suspension, it is the Korean student that faces expulsion for ending a fight that he didn't start.

Nearly the entire student body staged a walk-out in a demonstration against racism.

I've been in exactly two real fights in my entire life: only once have I ever thrown the first punch.

This wasn't a friend, or even a friend of a friend. It was somebody that I had no choice but to deal with at work on a regular basis. The man had a tendency to make Jew jokes. Only they weren't said in jest, and since I was the only person there with any Jewish background, they were clearly directed at me. It didn't take too long before I began to be bothered by it.

I thought back to what my parents told me about dealing with bullies: "Walk away," "tell him to stop," "ignore him," "tell the teacher." I was always told to walk softly, but never told to carry a big stick. I don't think my parents were just preaching platitudes: they probably would have followed their own advice. I didn't.

If I failed to stand up for myself, I risked communicating to everyone else that his behaviour was tolerable. It was a short-term summer job in a small town where minorities are rare, and his example wasn't the one that I wanted to see set for the dynamic of the rest of the summer.

So at one point I'd had enough, and I let him know: "One more like that and I'm going to break your nose. "

A simple "Dude, that's enough" may have sufficed, but it could just as easily have been interpreted as me registering lip-service objection. Telling the guy that it bothered me enough to want to hit him left no room for interpretation: I wanted him to stop.

The thing was, he didn't.

A few minutes later, he made a crack about how to arrange the seating for a short drive around the corner. (Something about fitting me in the ashtray.)

A few seconds after that, he was on the floor.

Then I levelled my anger at the other men in the room: "Thanks for all the help, guys."

And it exactly then that I learned something. They hadn't been letting our concussed co-worker get away with racism because they were okay with it. Far from it, they were giving him a pass because they were following my lead. The only surprise that anyone had registered was at the fact that I had waited so long to do anything. They had been noticing it the entire time, and simply responding with the same passivity that they saw me display.

In the end, we both got fired. Here's how my boss explained it to me in private:

"We have zero tolerance for violence here. If there's a problem with racism, you're supposed to file a harassment complaint."

He paused for a while.

"You're supposed to file a harassment complaint. Off the record, though, the prick had it coming. Sometimes it's better to be pragmatic, and sometimes you've just got to draw the line. I'd have done the same thing.... Off the record, mind you."

Sometimes it's better to be pragmatic, and sometimes you've just got to draw the line.

The Fine Art of the Haggle: Reprised

2009-04-28T03:59:00.004-04:00

A little while ago, I wrote about an experience I had at a sales kiosk in Yorkdale, and how the prices are far from fixed.

Well, just about everything I guessed at was vindicated when, shortly after, I ended up working a few months at a similar kiosk. I got to see the other side of the equation.

I left the job about two weeks ago, and just came across this post from SomedayNurse, whose blog I'd never read before:

Beware the Mall Kiosks of Death

You think you are safe. After all, this isn’t a dusty marketplace in Calcutta. This is a shiny indoor shopping mall blasting AC and Top 40 Muzak. Sure, there are things to buy everywhere, but they are all in safe stores were the merchandise itself may be seductive, but no one will bat an eye if you leave without buying anything.

When I think of Mall kiosks, I think of bored teenagers sitting on their cell phones in front of carts of Designer knock-off sunglasses or cell phone accessories. But these guys are slick. Predatory. Young and beautiful, with syrupy accents and hard eyes.
My sister told me about the time she was manipulated into buying a 25 dollar jar of Dead Sea salt scrub from a beautiful Israeli woman who promised my sister the skin of a goddess in five minutes a day. I laughed at her that she could be conned like that.

I am so sorry, lil’ sis. I understand now that you were powerless to resist.

I have really curly hair, and the young man at the Colourful Kitty (yes, I said Colourful Kitty) kiosk asked if I wanted him to straighten it “for fun.”. I didn’t have to stop. I never stop at kiosks. But the straightener was kind of cool. I’d never had my hair completely straight. I haven’t wanted my hair to be straight since I was about fifteen.

The straightening iron did a great job, but he wanted way too much for it. He said I should make him an offer. Even as it was happening, I was thinking how interesting it was that I that someone who considers herself as a critical thinker was allowing herself to be hustled like this.

The worst part was, I didn’t even want the stupid thing that much.

Now I have stick-straight hair and my wallet is minus a days wages. At least it’s a nice straightening iron. If I ever cut my hair, I might actually use it.

[....and in the comments section]
Phaedron Says:
April 28, 2009 at 12:57 am
I actually worked for a short time at a similar Kiosk in Toronto, Canada. It was fun: my job was practically to flirt with girls all day to pump up sales.

The funny thing is, I actually wrote about a kiosk that I encountered on my blog (http://phaedronrising.blogspot.com/2009/02/fine-art-of-haggle.html)... About a week before I ended up starting a job at a similar kiosk!

So? Here are some of the things that I learned...

There's often a colossal margin at an Israeli-style kiosk between a product's "list price" and the minimum price at which a salesperson can actually sell the product. Those prices are never listed in a way that you can browse through without talking to the salesperson.

The salesperson needs to make a lot of snap judgements about a potential customer very, very quickly. The best thing to do is offer the product at a high margin, building enough room into the sale to pay for "free gifts".

There are two main ways of dealing with a price-based objection:

1) You (well, I) would use the margin between the higher "list price" and the minimum price at which the product can be sold to pay for those "gifts".

2) The salesperson can be willing to lower the price.

The first approach is much more common, and here's why:

First, the salesperson knows that 90% of the time that the customer has a money-based objection ("I can't spend that much"), it's not true. Maybe she can't spend that much AND get that cute top she wanted. Of course, she is not going to say that, so she couches the objection as a one-dimensional issue of cost. By adding in those freebies - already paid for by the large margin of the sale - the salesperson can, in effect, sell 3 or 4 things at minimum price while letting the customer walk away with the feeling that she's gotten a fantastic value.

Second, the salesperson can lower the price. This will only happen when he truly believes that you don't have enough money to pay the higher price.

It's a sales structure that we're so unused to in Western retail - the idea that prices are rarely fixed: the price at which an item can be sold becomes, ipso facto, its real price. We're used to seeing a shining red widget on a shelf with a $42 tag on it, and everybody pays the same. In a kiosk like this, the same item will sell for $130, $50, and everything in-between throughout a salesman's day.

It's easy to jump to the conclusion that it's "unfair," but even in North America, we have a culturally accepted example of this sort of flexible-equilibrium price structure: real-estate.

The price of a house is - by definition - what people will pay for it. We're just not used to seeing hair-straighteners, nail kits, makeup or skin care sold in the same way. Our initial reaction is to think it's fair for houses, but unfair for a skin cream, and it usually stems from the fact that the item sells for more than the cost of producing it. Nobody bats an eye, though, when a house sells for more than its construction cost.

The same house could, under circumstances dependent on nothing more than the situations of the seller, the buyer, and the general market, have a $150 000 range that it could potentially sell for. It can feel unfair at a kiosk only because we're not used to the same sales structure being applied on a retail level.

That's why it's so important to make the customer feel like she has "won" the deal.

But do you want to know the most interesting thing that I found while working at a kiosk? People that bought, almost always returned for more. The hardest part is for a salesperson to get that person to make that first purchase!

And when the first sale is made at an expensive price, the customer walks away feeling like they have something extremely valuable: it's the feeling of having that $130 luxury skin cream. She won't want to go back to the $40 stuff she was getting at her local store.

Truth is, what the kiosks are great at is taking a product that's moderately better than the competition, and commanding a substantially greater price for it. Of course, the overhead on a kiosk is far lower than a store at a mall, so the kiosk *could* technically afford to sell a higher-quality product for the same price as the competition. But why would they? In the case of consumable goods like skin care or makeup: if it's sold for the same price as the competition, a customer will assume it's of similar quality to the competition's.

It's the people that you sold to at a "discount" rarely return.

Jonathan Coulton - Baby Got Back (live)

2009-04-28T03:01:00.001-04:00

Teabagging gets political

2009-04-15T15:49:00.000-04:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Don't let The Man get you down

2009-04-03T14:42:00.005-04:00

Fuck.

As I write this, I'm sitting in a ServiceOntario waiting room, counting the long minutes until it's my turn at the Drivers' License test. Surprisingly, internet access is abundant and free.

It turns out, you can't lounge in Ontario's graduated-licensing process forever. The only difference here between a G2 partial license and a full G is that with the full G, you are restricted to 0.08% blood-alcohol content. With my G2, it was set at zero.

To be honest, for all the stupid shit that I do, road beers isn't among them. That's probably why I never saw much motivation to get the final road test over with.

Well, now I'm paying for it. I've got to re-take all of the license tests from scratch. More importantly, I've got to pay for them all again. The one saving grace, I guess, is that I don't have to go through the mandatory 8 and 12-month waiting periods again.

So here I am, waiting for my vision test and written examination. What do you do at a stop sign again?

The only forseeable problem is that the test includes a million obscure road signs that I haven't studied since I was sixteen five years ago. Let's see if I'm still fit to drive.

After passing this, I'm still back to a "learner's permit" until I re-do my first road test: I can't fucking drive without an experienced driver beside me in the car.

If this messes with my plans for Miami in June, I am not going to be a happy man.

Richie Sambora - City Blues [February 11 2005]

2009-02-28T17:02:00.001-05:00

Hooray!

2009-02-26T23:30:00.001-05:00

Villagers, rejoice! I'm not drooling blood anymore.

I think I'm going to have my newly-extracted wisdom teeth set into cufflinks. That way, the next time I'm arguing with an creationist or ID'er, I can just point at my cuffs and say,

"See these? You're an idiot."

A little less wisdom: Okay, God?

2009-02-26T18:05:00.004-05:00

I just had my wisdom teeth out. It hurts like a motherfucker. The general anaesthetic and the Nitrous Oxide are wearing off, leaving only a general contempt for everything.

So, just as I sometimes whack my broken toaster on the off-chance that it will learn its lesson, I'm going to write an open letter to God on the off-chance that he exists.

As the capital G suggests, I'm addressing the god of Judeo-Christian tradition. I will, however, happily accept replies from other gods, demigods, or their non-corporeal messengers.

To: God_Allah_YHWH@gmail.com
CC: shiva_destroyer_of_worlds@yahoo.in; buddha_belly@hotmail.cn; prince_of_darkness@microsoft.com; mjollnir_man@gmx.com
BCC: Eric "Slowhand" Clapton

Why, God, why?

Why would you have given me a special subset of teeth that cause nothing but pain? Is there just a little of Job in all of us? It it a vestigial reminder of some Original Sin?

I've got to say, I'm a little vexed. I know you have a Plan for all of us, but for the life of me I can't figure out how my wisdom teeth fit into it.

Pain, I thought, was a necessary result of free will. But this had nothing to do with free will! There's no choice that I or anybody else I could have made differently that would have avoided this, save for to have had these teeth removed years ago.

I can't drink alcohol, I can't have a cigarette, I can't chew solid food; I'm in pain, I'm still a little high on laughing gas, and frankly, I'm more than a little pissed.

Feel free to let me in on the joke if I'm missing anything.

Sincerely, Phaedron.

The Phone Dump

2009-02-16T14:35:00.001-05:00

Hell of an open. I fully intend to try this.

Let's Get It On, Wendy Colonna with a solo acoustic cover

2009-02-05T00:42:00.001-05:00

A great cover of one of my favourite songs.

Wendy's an amazing singer, and I just had to email her for the chords to this =p

The Fine Art of the Haggle.

2009-02-04T08:26:00.008-05:00

Some prices are fixed. Some aren't. Knowing the difference helps.

Yesterday I was at the Yorkdale, a local mall in Toronto. While sifting through the meandering populace for cute girls' numbers, I came across a kiosk booth selling cosmetic skin products from the Dead Sea.

Now, I'm not one of those prissy primping douchebags; I don't gel my hair, spray-on a tan, or spend long tracts of time in front of my mirror. I'm a man. But I do care about the way I look and I do have mildly dry skin in the winter, so when the saleswoman approached me as I walked by, I let her reel me in a little for a closer look.

We bantered a little: about what products I already use (limited to a simple pre-shave scrub and my shaving cream), and about the astonishing fact that nearly all the standalone kiosks in the mall are manned - or womanned - by full bore, to-the-core, Hebrew-speaking Israeli expats. Then she worked her pitch.

After a demonstration of a face-cleansing product, she went went into her the-list-price-is-$130-but-I'll-let-you-have-it-for-$60 routine. Here's where I was suddenly faced with options:

1) I could take it for $60. The product wasn't something that needed to be used anywhere close to daily, and it seemed to be a very good one from the demonstration. It was probably worth the $60 she pitched for it.

2) I could walk away. Sure, it was a great product, but $60 can buy a lot of beer.

3) I could negotiate.

Now, knowing when price-negotiation is an option means assessing a little bit about how the sale is structured. When a wage or salaried employee makes a sale, there's little incentive for them to enter into a negotiation: they get paid whether or not you buy what they're selling. The situation changes, however, in either of two cases: if the salesperson works fully or partially on commission, or is the salesperson owns the business and sees a perfect correlation with the profit margin on a sale and the money in their pocket.

Many kiosks like that one are either corporate or franchised, and most of the sales staff work on commission. The lady working there probably made 20%-35% commission of any sale made above cost price, so she has something to gain from any sale above that price, and everything to lose if I walk away.

It seems trivial to analyze when we're talking about a face cleanser, until you realize that the biggest financial decisions you will ever make in your life fall into the same organizational category. Buying a house or a car both entail working through either a commissioned salesman or a commissioned real estate agent. The difference is only a matter of degree.

The incentives on each side of the consumer and the vendor are important to understand. The consumer has demand for a product, and if the perceived value of that product exceeds the cost, he will buy it. If it costs more than it's worth, he'll fuck right off.

On the other side of the equation is the vendor. The vendor has a derivative sort of demand in the transaction: the revenue or commission earned from the sale. If that revenue exceeds what the product costs them, they profit from the sale. If it doesn't, they'll tell you to fuck off.

The negotiating room, in our case, is the margin between the list price ($130) and the vendor's cost (probably between $15 and $30). Within that range, the game is zero-sum. The difference in those two numbers will either end up in my pocket, or be divvied up between the sales lady and the owner - assuming it's not the same person. It's in that magical margin that negotiation takes place.

She had made the first move. The $60 pitch didn't come out of nowhere. From before we'd even made eye contact, she had began analyzing me. Did I wear clothes that indicated discretionary income or did I look like a moneyless waste of time? Did I carry myself in a way that indicates confidence or do I project insecurity and the impression that I'm a bit of a pushover? Did I seem like the type of person who would be interested in her products in the first place?

All of those calculations - and a whole lot more, I'm sure - ran through her head from the time she first saw me to the time she offered me the skin cleanser for $60. If I'd given her a different impression of myself and my interest, it could just as easily have been $100, or even $50. Maybe, if I seemed interested enough and willing to pay it, she'd have neglected to pull out the price list and offered me dermatological salvation for a mere $150.

But I wouldn't have paid $100 for it; I wouldn't have paid $75. And if I buy the product, anything less than $60 is money in my pocket.

I pushed a little, and she pushed back. I ended up walking away having traded the skin cream for $40 of my hard-earned cash.

So beyond my hefty preamble, here are a few insights I've gleaned about price negotiation.

Demand Asymmetry. When either the consumer or the vendor cares more about the transaction, they end up with less money in their pocket. If the mall were more crowded, and there were tons of potential customers strolling by with less of a spine than me, she'd have been happy to hold firm at $60, take it or leave it. If there were a competing business with a similar product nearby, and she'd have held firm at $60, I'd likely have walked.

That really is the biggest sticking point in a negotiation. You have to be willing to walk away. If you're convinced that you can't live without what they're selling, and there's no better place to get it, the salesperson will pick up on that. And you can bet your ass they'll have a high asking price. What's important to understand is that there are very few things you can't live without. She's not selling the only glass of water amidst miles of desert sand.

And you have to be willing to actually make a counter-offer. It's astounding to me how many people never do. We, in our modern Western culture, are so used to fixed prices that we take them for granted, and seldom even think to bargain. She has been doing this for a while, and has likely calibrated her price pitch very well-tailored to her assessment of the customer. Most of them - if they'd sat through the impressive demonstration - probably took the price at whatever figure she named.

Be the exception to the norm. Know how the incentives break down, and be willing to walk away. If the seller wants more than you're ready to give up, then do so: actually walk away.

If there's one piece of advice I can offer for people making a bigger purchase such as a car, here it comes. After you do some solid research on some options you're interested in (you should always do research, and never only have only one option), go to a few of your lesser choices first. Treat them as practice runs. Unless you're offered an unbelievable deal, you'll probably end up walking away from those. When you finally walk in the doors of the dealer selling the car you're more interested in, you've already internalized that I'm-willing-to-walk-away-from-this-deal-if-you-
try-to-bend-me-over-and-fuck-me-in-my-wallet frame of mind.

The salesman will pick up on that. And you'll benefit as a result.

Negotiation isn't shameful. It's the purest distillation of the free market. It's part of the economy that makes modern society possible.

Former Ku Klux Klan leader Johnny Lee Clary

2009-02-02T19:40:00.001-05:00

When Facebook Memes Attack!

2009-02-02T18:43:00.002-05:00

"The "Rules" : Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you. Copy and paste this and then go to the notes section of your profile."

1. My body's sleep schedule seems to run on a 25-hour rhythm. If I have no pressing reason to get up for an extended period of time, I'll be waking up at 9am, then 1pm, then 4pm, then eventually later, until it cycles all the way back.

2. I'm in the Army reserves. It's like no other job on this planet.

3. English is my second language.

4. I'm the only person I know that shaves with a straight razor. They've got a bitch of learning curve, but once you're through it, the result is phenomenal.

5. Apparently, I was "Most Promiscuous Brother" of AEPi's Ottawa chapter, 2007/2008. There was a vote. For once, I abstained.

6. Karaoke is my guilty pleasure.

7. I don't leave answering machine messages. There's no reason why, I just don't. I've probably left 5 in the last year.

8. I've had my M2 license since I was 16. If I don't do my final road test soon, it's going to expire.

9. I procrastinate. It's ridicu... fuck it.

10. I'm teaching myself - slowly - guitar.

11. Songs that recurringly get stuck in my head:
"Proud Mary," Ike and Tina Turner
"City Blues," Brian Wilson and Eric Clapton
"You Can't Hurry Love," either the Phil Collins cover or The Supremes' original.

12. Dvorjak and Dr Dre are next to each other in my iTunes. My taste is eclectic.

13. I've been to Israel 15 times, and I'm STILL eligible for Birthright.

14. I put all my private thoughts in a blog, but I don't share it with people I know in real life. Tried that once, it didn't go well; for their own good, nobody should ever know what I'm actually thinking.

15. When I have the time, I take hot showers that last easily 45 minutes, sometimes 60. I'm not even masturbating in there, just chillin'.

16. Questionable Content. Favourite web comic.

17. If I've got the time, the money, and the means, I have never turned down a road trip.

18. I've been to the fundamentalist Christian "Creation Museum" in Kentucky. Great shit.

19. I've been arrested.
Once.
While on a public bench.
For trespassing.

20. I love my bathrobe. It's big and purple, and I'm wearing it right now. I take it anywhere I'm staying for more than a night. I've driven across Tennessee in it, and I was the one driving.

21. I've elevated public nudity to high art, and I don't have to be drunk to streak.

22. My addiction, aside from nicotine, alcohol, and carnal sin, is raw oyster. Sit me down in front of them, and I'll eat oysters until you run out of shellfish, or I run out of money.

23. My cell phone and laptop don't get turned off.

24. I'm swearing off Hamilton Karaoke bars for at least two weeks. Those of you who were there know my reasons.

25. I am the least organized person you will ever meet. At my last place, all my floorspace went missing.

26. I'm terrible at math.

27. I'm invisible.

No Pants Subway Ride 2k9

2009-01-10T22:03:00.010-05:00

It's a given, I think, that everything's better without pants. I just didn't realize how true that was until today. Not really.

Imagine you're riding the subway. Toronto's in particular, but it could just have easily been any other in the world. The normal routine drudges on until somebody, all of a sudden, walks onto the subway car without pants.

Generally a little disconcerting, I'd guess. Until at the next stop, a few more pants-less people nonchalantly stroll onto your subway car.

And then it really starts to get wierd. People keep trickling in from platforms all along the subway line - missing their pants - until your subway car is full of dozens of people going about their afternoon commute partially nude.

You ask one of them what the hell is going on. He tells you he forgot his pants at home; hell of a coincidence about the others, eh?

And as you ride North on the Yonge line, more and more people keep coming onto the subway car wearing nothing but their skivvies from the waist-down. The tan-less tide reaches a blinding crescendo of bare legs at Davisville station, and the next thing you know, they've all gotten off the train at Eglinton. You keep going along your route. They've turned around for the return trip downtown.

So what the hell was that?

Improv in Toronto. More specifically, the Toronto chapter of Improv Everywhere, the people responsible for the notorious Grand Central Freeze: hundreds of undercover IE "agents" froze in spot, forming a two-minute tableau that just generally confused the shit out of everyone.

The No Pants Subway Ride started in Improv Everwhere's city of birth, New York, in 2002. It grew over subsequent years, spreading across the world's metropolises like a bad strain of the clap at a good Catholic school.

Today was Toronto's second year of the NPSR, and hundreds of people gathered in Queen's Park to take part. We were divided into groups, and began our march to the Queen's Park subway stop.

En route to our pre-determined platforms, we took off our pants.

I got off at Wellesley with my pants in my bag, and waited for the second train that was to collect all the participants. Whereas the first train was witness to a few dozen people spontaneously taking off their pants in the subway car, the second saw only a successive tide of half-nude commuters piling on at each stop.

When we got to Eglinton Station, we turned around and went straight back downtown.

[I'm in this photo. Find me if you can!]

A bunch of us went to the College Street Golden Griddle afterward for pancakes to celebrate our victory. Then we went to the pub next door to celebrate the fact that we still weren't wearing pants.

And it was magical.

Of course, the photos are on Facebook.

Boom De Ah Da

2009-01-05T11:50:00.003-05:00

My point? Nerdy girls are hot.

From the Huffington Post Commentariat

2008-12-30T10:13:00.009-05:00

...I think that just about sums up my views on the matter. I'm strongly in favour of a two-state solution, provided that such a Palestinian state actually held peaceful coexistence as a goal. Unfortunately, when the governing party holds as part of its constitutional charter a clause to completely eradicate the nation of Israel, with everyone in it, I have trouble imagining that party acting in good faith towards long-term peace.

Israel, on the other hand, has shown - in deeds, not just in words - that it is willing to make real concessions when across a table from a viable peace partner. When Egyptian president Anwar Sadat offered a treaty in good faith, Israel ceded the entire Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in exchange for a peace accord - a piece of land at least 2 or 3 times larger than Israel itself, and containing most of the oil that was then under Israeli control.

Israel was willing to exchange to Egypt a huge amount of land and a moderate amount of natural resources because Egypt came to the bargaining table seeking peace in good faith.

Yet Israel wants to keep the Gaza Strip - a useless little wastelend, out of territorial greed? No, it's because it hasn't seen any reason to believe that a nascent Palestinian state wouldn't become a sovereign staging ground for more attacks against nearby Israeli towns.

The Palestinians would have a state already if their leaders showed a desire for a peaceful two-state solution. I agree completely with Benjamin Netanyahu on this point: "If the Palestinians would lay down their arms there would be peace. If the Israelis laid down their arms, there would be no Israel."

For peace, concessions cannot come from only one side.

---

Edit, 30 Dec 2008, 10:51am:

A Jerusalem Post article describes a higher statistic for civilian casualties than I'd previously quoted, with UN numbers as a source. I don't know what accounts for the difference in estimates quoted by the two sources (15 civilian casualties in the Wired article v. 64 in the JPost article), but the real number probably lies somewhere in between that four and eighteen percent.

It may be a simple matter of differences in who is considered a non-civilian: do you count someone involved in transporting or manufacturing Hamas rockets, or only those who have a gun in their hands?

Even if the count lies closer to the higher quoted number, my opinion has changed very little: keeping civilian casualties below even 18% when striking military targets embedded within an urban population shows fairly clearly that Israel is devoting significant attention and resources to ensuring that civilian casualties are minimized. Those who like to say that Israel is targeting civilians should probably rethink a few things.

JibJab - 2008 Year In Review

2008-12-28T07:32:00.001-05:00

It's been a hell of a ride.

Bush Dodges Shoes Thrown by Iraqi Journalist

2008-12-15T02:22:00.001-05:00

The guy's got quicker reflexes than I'd have given him credit for!

Virgin Mary Ignites Scandal in Playboy Appearance.

2008-12-14T13:27:00.004-05:00

We all knew it was going to happen sooner or later; the little slut couldn't keep up that charade forever.

The Virgin Mary has sparked outrage in Catholic circles by appearing nude on the cover of Playboy Mexico, veiled only in a thin linen shroud.

Playboy has since apologized for the indiscretion, acknowledging a breach of contract: The Catholic Church holds all rights to The Virgin Mary, including but not limited to her likeness, publications, and album sales in perpetuity.

Still, there's a nativity scene that would sell.

Too bad Catholics can't masturbate.

Chill the fuck out

2008-11-05T01:08:00.001-05:00

Yes we can

2008-11-05T00:59:00.001-05:00

YES, WE DID!

That's all for now. I'm piss-drunk, ecstatic, and moving onto an army base tomorrow.

Bondage down under! (Crikey!)

2008-11-03T14:08:00.007-05:00

Because I often find myself with vast tracts of time and no productive way to spend it, I sometimes check the back-links to my blog. The back-links (or track-backs, or whatever they're actually called) are the recorded entry point that linked someone to a page on Phaedron Rising.

Usually, it's something fairly innocuous, like residual interest from the bookstore bible-shuffle at Pharyngula or Tall Penguin, or some passing interest in Mr Smith Goes to Washington.

Until last week, my favourite referral was the search for "cooties sex" on Google Estonia. No more.

It seems that there's something strange afoot down in the land of dingoes and stingrays; seems some Aussie was in need of either some DIY bondage advice or a good lawyer, because he turned to the wisdom of Google's algorithm for an answer to his troubles.

A fun experiment to try at home: go to Google or Google Australia and enter as your query "having problems confining a housemate to his room" either with or without the quotation marks.

Look who's result #1! I should be flattered, but I don't deserve that accolade. A pair of handcuffs and a makeshift blindfold are the closest my repertoire ever comes to BDSM, and I shy away from using them without a safe word. Nonetheless, happy strapping to my new Australian "mate."

And remember. If the cuffs are soft and fuzzy, you're missing the point.

Not even three-fifths!

2008-11-03T12:59:00.007-05:00

"Mr Rising, you're actually ineligible to cast a vote for Barack Obama."
...
"No, it's not a curtailment of your rights, Mr. Rising."
...
"Yes, but that doesn't extend to Canadians."
...
"Mr Rising, you don't get three-fifths of a vote."
...
"Mr. Rising, it's not because you're black."
...
"Because you're not black"
...
"I seriously doubt that you're black 'from the waist down,' Mr Rising."
...
"Please put your pants back on, Mr Rising. We're all very impressed."

My point is, the Man's keeping me down. You'd better cast votes for the two of us. And did you know that it's illegal to take off your pants at a voter registration kiosk?

Eh Marine Original :D

2008-10-25T04:06:00.001-04:00

Enjoy!

The prodigal son returns.

2008-10-25T03:50:00.003-04:00

Just kidding, it's only me.

To my imaginary readers, I'd like to extend my deepest apologies for my four-month hiatus: I've had a lot to deal with since going to DC in July, and my half-assed blog has been the furthest thing on my mind.

A few updates:

1. I'm on an academic suspension from Carleton. I say "suspension" because I'm probably going to get the whole thing reversed with an appeal.

2. It's over with Sophie. There wasn't a fight and nobody got dumped. The distance thing was just too much.

3. I'm up to my taint in debt, and trying to take advantage of a year off from undergrad by working and paying it down.

It's 4am, and I'm really at a loss for a way to tie this all together. In lieu of original thought, however, I offer you the above YouTube clip. Nothing to lift the spirit like a little domestic abuse!

Open highways beckon...

2008-07-17T04:18:00.003-04:00

True to form, I'm staying up through the night in anticipation of the multi-leg road trip I'll be making over the next week or so.

I'm currently staving off hunger so I can pack, clean, and do laundry, and fighting the urge to drive down to the all-night diner with the sheer resolve of my laziness. It may not work much longer.

In a few short hours, I'll be on the road again - this time, en route to Amherst, NY for a conclave of undergraduate heathens. Literally: It's a conference of atheists.

It will also be my first time being in the Buffalo area during reasonable business hours (I crossed it around 4am en-route home from Boston in February), and I plan to eat every single wing place out of business. Let's see if they live up to their reputation.

I'll be leaving Amherst Sunday night, sleeping over in Pittsburgh, and arriving in Washington, DC Monday morning. Sophie's got an internship with Congress there, and the chance to finally see Washington AND Sophie in one trip was just too much to pass up. I found a convenient apartment for short-term sublet over craigslist, so I'll be staying there until I leave on Thursday. It's got a steam shower. A grown man should never feel as excited by bathroom fixtures as I am at the thought of having sex in a steam shower.

The only low point: I've got to Greyhound it back to Ottawa on Thursday.

Hitting the Mother Lode

2008-07-16T16:57:00.012-04:00

When I was a teenager, I used to take long showers. 45 minutes, an hour; until the hot water ran out, I would sit in the tub under the slowly cooling spray. I did this up to 4 or 5 times a day. I wasn't OCD, and I was never sexually abused. It was just that in my mother's house, that bathroom was the only door with a lock on it. A lock could buy me a shower's worth of time where I wouldn't have to deal with her.

The very few people who know me closely know that there isn't a force in this world that can bring out the worst in me like my mother can. Since I left her house at the age of 16, roughly one out of every six or seven times we meet, one of us ends up leaving the conversation (often at a home dinner or restaurant) in a cold rage.

We just don't get along. Not since shortly after I started high school. And while I shudder to think it, our differences have probably come about as a result of our similarities. If someone I knew were to tell me that I'm just like my mother, I'd probably hit them in the face. I'm not a hostile person, but nothing angers me more than the fact that I can see her nature reflected in myself. She can be bitter, petty, deceitful, manipulative, and delusional; cognitive dissonance is a way of life for her. She's also unwilling to compromise when challenged. So was I. Needless to say, we did not get along well after I hit adolescence.

What follows is my composite recollection of the events leading up to and following my parting ways with my mother. Though the events I'm describing took place only four years ago, they constitute memories that I spent a lot of time trying not to think about. As a result, even I take my own recollections with a grain of salt. Some of the details may be slightly off; the timeline of events may be a little jumbled. I also don't think I've talked about this, in its entirety, ever.

I guess things started shortly after I began high school. I had always been a completely obedient kid, so there was never any conflict with my mother until I started to push the boundaries.

We'd fight over little things like being out late or cleaning up my room. She could say "clean your room," and I'd have no objections: I would do it as soon as I was done whatever I was busy with at the time. This would put her into an apoplexy. DO IT NOW! It wasn't about cleaning my room or being out late, or any of those things: it was about control - about doing what she wanted, on the immediate timescale that she dictated, in the way she decided was necessary. It was about never allowing herself to be in anything less than complete control her relationship with me.

I was a raging adolescent, and I pushed back. Her trump card was always the threat to take away my allowance. It was a $12 weekly pittance, but it was the only income I had access to at the time, so whenever we locked horns, I could either suck it up and toe the line, or stand on "principle" and suffer the consequence.

Still, from what I would imagine, an arguably healthy dynamic.

Until I turned 16. At that point, I could be legally employed. And that was the beginning of the end.

I got my first job - a shitty online call-center survey gig - without telling her. As soon as I got my first paycheque, I stopped ceding ground. The next time she told me to clean up, I told her that I would finish my phone call in 15 minutes or so, and then do it. She took it like a slap in the face and started screaming. If it weren't for the fact that my phone call with my friend had been about the freedom and independence that my new part-time job would afford me, her hissy fit would have been embarrassing. Instead, I felt vindicated.

She told me that I shouldn't expect any money at the end of the week, and I told her that I was okay with it. I had started a job and had my own source of income now. I was in the 10th grade.

If she was hysterical before, by now she was barely comprehensible. To fault myself, I was no mo mature about this kind of thing than she was, because I knew exactly which buttons to push.

I said goodbye to my friend on the phone, and waited for the next discernible repetition of "Clean your room NOW!"

"If you're going to be a child about this," I responded in the most dead-pan poker face I could muster, "I'm going to go take a shower."

This, for the better part of a year, exemplified the dynamic between my mother and I. We would get into constant screaming matches over the pettiest of shit, and avoid conversation for days on end until someone admitted to being petty, apologized, and things cooled down for a few weeks. I was the one who was 16, but as often as not, she was acting like an absolute child, going off into a rage at the slightest provocation. Living in the same house as her became an agony. She used to be a government lawyer, but had to end stop practicing law early because of her developing physical disability. She was always at home, and there was no respite but the shower. Living with her became an absolute agony.

And thus began my lifetime obsession with travel: any time I spend elsewhere was time I didn't have to spend under her roof. I would take any opportunity to go to my friends' cottages for a weekend. I would work after school for an entire month, and then buy a plane ticket to Winnipeg to visit my uncle and aunt there. It didn't matter if I had five essays due the following Monday; if I had the means to get out of her house, I would.

Every family, it seems, has the cool uncle. The one who manages to be responsible without being boring or a dick. He once suspended his undergraduate degree for two years to go fuck around working in the Canadian arctic, just because it was there. When he finally graduated, he proved to have a great sense for investment, and worked his way up the small-cap mortgage fund food chain. He made himself a lot of money, without ever having to be anything other than what he wanted to be. For a long time, he was the strongest role model in my life. (I'll save the daddy issues for another post.) My uncle was also the only person I'd ever seen "break" my mother's resolve whenever she got fired up.

My uncle Marty, my aunt Robyn, and my mother were all raised in the small Jewish subcommunity of Winnipeg. Robyn moved to California, got fake breasts and a lot of perscriptions, and divorced a successful doctor. She was also batshit-crazy in the same indescribable way as my mother: if my mother were dependent on perscription drugs and plastic surgery, I'd swear their personalities would be identical. My mother moved to Toronto's suburbs after meeting my father in Israel, and stayed in the suburbs until she and my father split up when I was 7. I have no idea what the split was actually over, but I have my suspicions that they just couldn't stand living with one another.

At least once a year, my mom's entire side of family would reconvene for Passover in Winnipeg, and at least once a year, my mother and her sister would have a bitter falling-out. When my mother was being completely irrational, my uncle would pull a magic trick that was nothing less than astonishing to me: he could make her shut up and leave the room. Even as my mother lapsed into screaming hysterics (you're taking HER SIDE?), he never raised his voice. Seeing herself being the only one screaming while the object of her rage spoke in nothing but ice-calm tones must have made her feel like a fool: it only served to infuriate her until she seemed to realize that she looked like a fool in front of an entire room-full of people. Then she'd leave. Sometimes, the same treatment would be applied to my aunt, always with the same devestating effect.

This was the lesson on dealing with my mother that I took home from my visits with my uncle: when she's screaming, a patronizing calm lets you keep the moral high ground. And if cold condescension stung coming from her brother, it must have absolutely burned to have the same response coming from her son.

As the next several months progressed, I began to adopt that tactic to deal with her rages. I stopped screaming back, and began to talk to her as if she were being a child. Often, she was. When things got really bad, I'd just go take a shower.

The household slowly became toxic.

There was a time when I thought of leaving for Winnipeg on a greyhound in the dead of the night. I called my uncle at 4am and asked if I could stay with him for a little while. He told me that I was always welcome in Winnipeg, but that I should stay in Toronto and try to resolve things things with my mother.

By the time I was in the 11th grade, things were become beyond unbearable. We'd vacillate between fighting and not speaking with one another in a near-continuous cycle. We would insult each other. I stayed up late at night, and in the mornings I skipped classes, just so I could buy a few more hours of my day when we weren't awake at the same time. My grades were already slipping.

When the fall term ended, those grades came in. That led to the last fight we had while living in the same house.

It was 3am on a Sunday night, and she screamed from her room to turn off my computer and go to bed. I promptly ignored her. School had a late opening the next day, and by that time it was none of her business anymore when I went to bed when there was no school the next morning.

Mom: Shut your computer off NOW and get to bed!

PR: We did away with that insipid bedtime crap ages ago.

Mom: It's back. And you're keeping me up until all hours of the night.

PR: You keep your bedroom door open so that you can listen for me being up late. If you intentionally keep your door open, you forfeit the right to complain about being kept up.

Mom: From now on, you're doing things exactly the way I say. You've lost any right to be treated as an adult until your grades are respectable.

PR: And you've lost the privilege to be treated like the adult in this argument until you stop screaming like a child.

Mom: You immature, stupid child!

PR: I'm 16 years old. What's your excuse?

It was exactly at this moment that she grabbed my lamp - my tiny, shitty, wire-necked, unpronounceably-named Ikea lamp - and hit me with it.

There had been a lot that I'd heard her say in the past year that I would call abusive, but that was the first time she'd ever hit me with something. I mean, it didn't hurt that much. A cane-bound woman hitting you with a cheap Ikea lamp hurts about as much as getting jumped on by an overeager puppy. What stunned me was the fact that she had just hit me with a lamp.

I looked at the lamp, broken and lying on the floor. I picked it up and pulled it back to my shoulder.

"Don't you hit me!" She screamed.

And I stopped dead in my tracks. I no longer wanted to hit her back. Just seeing her - the way she had been screaming at me, the fact that my stab had provoked her into physical abuse, and her terror at the threat of a response - became nothing less than pathetic.

I smashed the already-broken lamp against the wall between us and put on my jacket.

"Where do you think you're going?"

"For a walk. You're being a bitch"

I don't remember what she said after that, because I had stopped listening.

By the time I got back, the sun was on its way up. I went to bed.

She told me that I didn't get to skip the morning's classes just because I'd been out all night. Get changed and go to school.

I told her to fuck off: I'm taking a shower.

"You don't have time for a shower. You're not going to be late for class again."

I went towards the shower anyway. She grabbed me. I pulled her hand off and locked myself into the bathroom, my one safe place. I'd forgotten my towel, but I figured it was early, so there should be enough hot water to cover an hour's sleep.

When the screaming subsided from outside my door a few minutes later, I relaxed into the tub under the warm shower spray and got ready to sleep.

Just as I was falling asleep, the cold water hit me. I could hear her saying, "The hot water's off. Now get out of that bathroom and get to school!"

I threw my boxers on and charged down to the basement, where the hot water shutoff surely was. "You stupid child. Don't you dare turn that back on!" she screamed.

"YOU STUPID WOMAN! I'VE STILL GOT SHAMPOO IN MY HAIR!"

I had lost my temper again: the first time I'd yelled back at her in a long time.

"Well that's your fault!" She shrieked. "Now you'd better get dressed and get to school."

I went upstairs. I got dressed. I packed my schoolbag.

And when I left, I didn't come back.

...righteous vengeance and furious anger!

2008-07-16T14:03:00.010-04:00

As I'm sure the imaginary followers of my blog all know, I'm leaving for CFI On Campus 2008 Student Leadership Conference in Amherst, NY tomorrow. It's a conference for freethinking students on reducing the influence of religious zealots in academia and government.

I figured that after the conference - since I'm already States-side - I'd make the trip down to DC, where Sophie has just started a Congress internship with the House Representative from her home district. Also, I've never seen Washington, and I love going to new places.

I emailed the conference organizer, Debbie G, asking whether there were any attendees coming from around the DC area that I might be able to arrange to carpool with to Washington after the weekend. She put me in touch with Frank B, who is driving through Philadelphia - a mere couple hours' bus ride from the capitol.

The exchange with Frank over facebook started simply enough. Debbie had contacted him to ask whether he had room for a stowaway en route to Philly, and he messaged me:

Frank: "do you smoke?

would you be with us both ways or what?

can you do some of the driving?"

"I do smoke," I replied candidly, "but would have no problem restricting the whole 'cancer research' thing to when we're on pit stops."

I told Frank that I'd be happy to help with the driving, though I'd only be with him for the return trip. I let him know that I have plenty of highway experience, especially in the US, and that as long as his car was automatic-transmission, I could take shifts behind the wheel.

I figured that the rest would be a simple matter of hammering out the final details (the route we're taking, how much I should pitch for gas, how he wants to arrange the driving shifts...) at the conference this weekend. Then I got this curt reply:

"I'm sorry, but I can't spend 8 hours in a car with a smoker. if you were to get back into the car after a pit stop smelling like smoke that would make me angry to the point where I could not drive safely. You'll have to find some other means of transportation to DC. You may still want to coordinate with Barry G, he also smokes and therefor will not be traveling with me."
-Frank B.

As a matter of common courtesy, I never smoke in someone's car unless they explicitly say that it's okay. Even when someone else is in my car, I make sure that they're comfortable with me smoking before I light up. If they're just saying "yes" to be nice, I can usually tell, and I'll refrain from smoking anyway.

But this is fucking rediculous. It's one thing if he's allergic to tobacco, or if I weren't willing to smoke facing downwind, but this is beyond sanctimonious. I get the impression that it's not the smell of smoke ("if you were to get back into the car after a pit stop smelling like smoke") that riles him, but the sheer fact that I smoke at all (I can't spend 8 hours in a car with a smoker).

I'm now realizing that this is a man who would have spent 8 perfectly good hours wasting my precious oxygen. He's essentially saying that the merest hint of tobacco will throw him into an apoplectic fury, rendering him completely unfit to safely operate a vehicle. Whether out of some sub-rational impulse, or sanctimonious douchebaggery, he's essentially saying that if I were in the car, he'd probably wrap it around a tree.

If I take what he said at face value, then this kind of person should not be allowed to drive. What happens if he's driving along with the windows down and the scent of cigarette smoke wafts in from the sidewalk? Will he mow down the next pedestrian in indignant rage? Does this extend to smelly and polluting paper mills and refineries?

Don't get me wrong. Smoking is a stupid, dangerous, filthy habit, and I'm in the process of cutting down my intake before I make the final push of stopping all together this fall. I'm 20 years old, and far too young to waste my life and money smoking.

That doesn't change the fact that Frank B is an idiot.

Mr Smith Goes to Washington

2008-07-14T04:19:00.012-04:00

I just watched, for the fourth time since the sixth grade, Mr Smith goes to Washington. I keep forgetting, in the years' intervals between each time I see it, how powerful it really is. To some fans of the cinema classic, it's the feeling a feeling of patriotism and pride that makes this film such a stirring one. As a Canadian who is usually not moved much by nationalistic jingo, let alone that of another nation, it's something else in Frank Capra's masterpiece that literally brings me to tears at the climactic scene.... That doesn't happen very often.

Mr Smith goes to Washington is the story of Jefferson Smith, an idealistic man - he barely looks thirty - who is selected as an honourary appointment to the U.S. Senate to replace the sitting senator who had died the previous day. The men pulling the strings behind his appointment are businessmen, congressman, and fellow senators in the pocket of a corrupt James Taylor (not the singing one), a ruthless businessman who controlls half the commercial interests in Smith's home state. Smith, the state head of the Boy Rangers is the image of naïve idealism personified; he quotes Jefferson from memory, talks nonstop about the beauty of the American midwest; and gets lost - literally lost - in awe of his first sight of Washington, DC.

He's selected because he's so young and idealistic that he seems the least likely candidate to derail a Senate Deficiency Bill that includes the construction of a dam for the personal profit of Taylor. He's mentored by senator Joe Paine, who is from the same state and was a close friend of his father's before the elder Smith was murdered for daring to challenge a mining company's right to force homesteaders off of their land.

Back then, Joe Paine and Smith's father were a lawyer and newspaper editor who championed lost causes. Yet after seeing his friend killed, and eventually entering politics, Paine allowed himself to be bought out, and became part of Taylor's machine.

The conflict comes to a head when Smith, eager to accomplish something during his short term in the senate, proposes a national boys' camp for inner-city youth - on the exact site where the dam was meant to be built. When his bill comes into conflict with the proposed dam in the deficiency bill, Smith starts to ask questions and discovers the graft scheme.

When Smith refuses to be bought out, Paine disgraces him on the senate floor and accuses Smith of proposing his boys' camp bill for his own personal profit. The Taylor machine forge documents to substantiate the charge, and the process to expel Smith from the senate is started.

In an act of desperation, Smith seizes the floor and fillibusters the entire senate; as long as Smith does not sit down or cease talking, he cannot be forced to yield the floor of the senate. With Taylor's newspapers convincing their home state of Smith's corruption, Smith refuses to budge from the senate floor until his legs give out.

"You think I'm licked. You all think I'm licked. Well, I'm not licked. And I'm going to stay right here and fight for this lost cause. Even if the room gets filled with lies like these, and the Taylors and all their armies come marching into this place."

It really is as cheesy as it sounds. But this movie came out in 1939, before every storyline had become a trite cliche. It's not about patriotism, or idealism, or the sanctity of one nation's legislature; it's about the courage of the few men who face the impossible with no hope of success, who stand by their principles with every ounce of strength that they have. It's not just about politics or civil rights; it's about the things that matter to us most: freedom, love, and the chance to stand up for what matters to you most. It's about having something that you care so deeply and passionately about that no bribe, threat, or certainty of failure will stop you from doing everything you can to make things the way they should be.

...On a personal note, there's a quote that I keep with me in my wallet, right behind my driver's license. I printed out a card-sized version copy and had it laminated, and it's as close to a personal prayer as I imagine an atheist could come:

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

Theodore Roosevelt said that in 1910, in a speech in Paris. He said this just two years before the start of the most devestating war that his nation had ever seen, about the charge of good men to stand up for what they believe in.

It's the sentiment of what Teddy said that motivated the fictional Mr. Smith, and the standard to which I seek to hold myself. Nobody did anything - righted any great wrongs, made a name for themselves, found whatever it was in life that they were searching for - by sitting in the bleachers and making commentary. The kind of people that I would seek to emulate - the kind of man I want to be - are the ones who launch themselves headfirst into the arena, and fight for what you want until you've got nothing left. And if you get tossed back into the stands, you jump right back in with every ounce of tenacity you've got.

...I haven't always made the best choices in my life so far; a colossal understatement. But when I find myself at a real crossroads in my life, and I don't know what path to take, I take that little laminated quote out of my wallet and read it. I try to stay, above all, true to myself. No matter what happens.

Cooties (Reprise)

2008-07-13T19:22:00.003-04:00

Every now and then I check my sitemeter readings to see where this blog gets its meager traffic referrals. Maybe some benevolent blogging star has decided to link to my page; maybe I'm getting backlink traffic from my postings on other blogs like Pharyngula or tall penguin.

Or maybe - just maybe - someone gets referred through the great and wondrous Google Search, as did one user, who had apparently scoured Google Estonia for the search terms "cooties sex."

What he got was "Cooties," my screed on sexual education's state of affairs in red-state America. This was probably just some Estonian schoolboy who'd just been terrified by a fourth-grader that his close contact with a girl in that last game of tag may prove fatal.

I'll help this kid out: "Cooties," in contemporary English usage, can denote a broad range of afflictions that can be transferred through contact with the opposite sex, including - but in no way limited to - fun things like:

Unwanted pregnancy,
Herpes, and
Alimony.

Always be safe, little Olev, and don't let those fifth-grade girls pressure you into anything you're not confortable with.

Don't you hate pants?

2008-07-12T01:58:00.002-04:00

The convention of wearing pants, I've realized, is the deepest scourge in this painful existence. Seriously, correct me if I'm wrong on this; the worst part of any day is the moment you can't go another second without putting on those binding fetters of denim, khaki, or pink leather.

It's occurred to me that life seems to revolve around the goal of not having your pants on. I don't think that this applies only to me, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

In the morning, we hit that snooze button to savour "just five more minutes, I swear" of bare-assed bliss.

During the entire day at work and school, we count the minutes until we can get home, and begin the long process that ultimately ends with our pants on the floor [or, if you're not a complete slob like I am, the laundry hamper].

During the soccer game, you fantasize about having the cojones to make a dash across that noble field and score the winning goal sans pants.

You go to the bar with the express purpose of finding someone to take your pants off for you. If you don't find that person, you do it yourself and get removed from the establishment. Fuck them if they can't take a joke.

The best part of your day may very well be that final return to nature, the moment you get into bed, unbound by the restraints of societal conventions and mores. To sleep perchance to dream? Not I. It's the thought of my soft linen sheets that really gets me relaxed after a long day.

In all seriousness, though. We take a lot of things far too seriously. I'm not saying that we should let paedophiles run amok in our playgorunds. Just that the absence of pants isn't always inherently sexual. I should be able to step onto my front porch in my boxers without cold stares from passers-by.

As a joke, I actually once wrote an exam in my bathrobe. It was -25 Celcius [convert it yourselves, you Imperial-system savages], and my balls were somewhere in my stomach by the end of the long walk to the lecture hall. It took me a while to lose the nickname of "housecoat man."

Against my better judgement, I brought that same bathrobe [I'm assuming the two words mean the same thing] along on the trip to Alabama. At the losing end of an unsavoury wager, I ended up wearing the bloody thing all the fucking way through Tennessee on the way home. And I was driving.

And driving, it seems, is yet another thing made better when you don't have pants on.

Down to the crossroads/The road less travelled.

2008-07-08T13:02:00.007-04:00

I haven't taken calls from my family in about two weeks. I just don't know what I could say to them to bridge that gap between what they expect of me, and where I see myself at this juncture in my life. I guess it's a coming-of-age cliché that is applied too broadly, but I find myself at a crossroads in my own life, with no map and no clear destination.

Fellow blogger Tall Penguin recently prefaced a post of hers with what is probably my favourite piece of verse anywhere, Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

I honestly don't feel egotistical in saying that I consider myself one of the smartest people that I know. And yet, nearly every major decision in my life has been a turn towards the path of least resistance; not towards the route that involves the least amount of work, but rather the one that never forces me to examine my own personal flaws and shortcomings, and the dissonance between where I want to go and where I seem to be headed.

I just got notice from my university that I'm not welcome to return to my program. Pick another, you don't have what it takes for a Bachelor's of Commerce. And yet, it was never that I didn't have what it takes, but rather that I never did what it takes. If I attended more than 5 classes last semester, I would be extremely surprised. Yet none of them were particularly difficult; I learned the entire Macroeconimcs course over the span of a 48-hour study binge and came out with a 95% on the final exam. It was a matter of pride, really - a test of my own aptitute as a proof to myself that I'm not failing for lack of ability. And fail I did. Even a perfect exam score couldn't have saved me.

I'll be able to make an appeal on psychological grounds, on the basis of Major Depressive Disorder. It's a cop-out, to be sure, but the thought of a full year's gap out of school terrifies me. It's an inertia that might prove impossible to break, and I don't want to risk it.

One semester's hiatus, however, is unavoidable. I took on a lot of debt at the beginning of the summer with a failed business venture, and now I have to bite the bullet and work a few months past this coming September to pay it off. On friday, I started a job washing dishes and bussing tables at a local restaurant in Ottawa. My last frivolous expenditure for the foreseeable will be the drive down to Amherst, NY for the CFI On Campus 2008 student leadership conference, and onward to Washington, DC to see Sophie before I pull my debt-recovery vanishing act. I don't know if there's room in my life for a relationship right now, let alone something across so long a distance. That's something I'll have to figure out for myself. Whatever happens, though, she's among my closest and oldest friends, and I'll need her help and admonitions to make sure that washing dishes remains a strictly ad-hoc stopgap, and doesn't become a permanent staple in my life.

The truth is, I know that I have the intelligence, the charisma, and the tenacity to do well in my life. But it's dawning on me that aptitude alone is not enough, and that if I don't turn off the path that I'm on soon, the gap between the man that I am and the man that I want to be may one day become too broad to bridge.

Untitled (Until further notice)

2008-07-04T18:40:00.006-04:00

It's been a while since I've taken a hit of the sweet catharsis that can only come from airing my most intimate thoughts into the ether of the blogosphere. I think I'll shelve the decorum for the best summation I can make of the few weeks since my last entry:

Jesus fucking christ.

I drove to Alabama with Nez, Bryan, and J-Dogg, skipping two nights of sleep on a 45-hour, 85 mile-per-hour nonstop meander through the United States.

I went to Ken Ham's Creation Museum in Kentucky.

My ballin' blue minivan (don't fucking say it) broke down in Mountain Brook, AL, two miles from our destination.

I fixed it and got back to Ottawa a week ago.

Then I drove to Toronto a few days later. Because I felt like it.

I met up with Tall Penguin for an in-person mea culpa (here) over the bookstore bible incident (here, here, and here).

I drove back to Ottawa, making it into the city just in time to start my new job at 7am. A ten-hour shift on zero sleep is a feat made possible only through the wonders of Adderall. The perscription is mine; deal with it.

But despite the sporadic foray into my favourite rubber-stamped prescription psychostimulant, the fact remains that I haven't actually gone to sleep since Wednesday evening. Before that, Monday night was the last time my head hit a pillow.

Understandably, I'm beyond the stage of delerium. I'll be making posts on my adventures in more detail when I'm somewhere close to lucid. Until then, here's a rough sketch of the weeks to come:

Heading down to Amherst, NY for the Center for Inquiry's CFI On Campus 2008 Student Leadership Conference, an apparent coming-together of young collegiate agnostics, atheists, and freethinkers from Canada and the USA.

After that, I'll likely be heading down to Washington, DC. Sophie's there on an internship with the U.S. Congress, and I've rallied a loose fellowship of fraternity brothers for a pilgrimage to the chapter at George Washington University.

That's all for now. I need a shower badly; I smell like sex and Marlboros, dish soap, cheesecake, and the unmistakable aroma of chopped liver. Don't ask.

Sweet Home Alabama: T minus 13 hours and counting...

2008-06-19T00:26:00.004-04:00

Short post:

Ever skip a night's sleep, just to find yourself too wired to get any rest the next evening? Counterintuitive as it seems, the last time I went to sleep was about 48 hours ago, and I don't feel tired.

I wish I did. Tomorrow's going to be a hell of a day.

I'm leaving Ottawa in a few short hours with Bryan and Kyle, en route to Nez's kidnapping in Ohio, and onward to see Sophie in Alabama. Between Ottawa and Toronto, I'll also be picking up a few drifters. Two housemates I found on craigslist's rideshare, one Carleton grad from PickupPal, and my friend Rachel from a small town in the middle of nowhere (because nothing beats five straight hours of unmitigated sexual tension.)

And I've barely begun to pack.

Nonetheless, it's been a hectic 48 hours; spent, for the most part, convincing and re-convincing my friends to commit to the odyssey, and persuading their parents to support their self-actualization with cold, hard gas money.

But through bouts of vacillation, flared tempers, doubt and uncertainty, this show is finally getting on the road. In 36 hours' time. I'll be in Birmingham.

So I got fucking arrested last night...

2008-06-15T14:51:00.004-04:00

I'd type up the full story, but I'm feeling far too lazy to do all that writing this afternoon. I'll just copy and paste from the MSN conversation where I tell a friend:

Rachel - what did you do to [PR]?

PR - lol

PR - long story

Rachel - i hear there are handcuffs involved

PR - there were

PR - hold on, I'll grab a beer first

Rachel - lol

Rachel - drinking alone...oh no

PR - hey, I've earned this one

Rachel - okay dish

Rachel - I cant wait any longer lol

PR - lol I've heard that one before

PR - I'm doing this at my pace

Rachel - thats what she said

PR - lol

Rachel - fine but i get all the details

PR - okay, so one of the AEPi alums had his birthday today at the Heart and Crown on Preston

PR - I'm too broke to go drinking, but I figured I'd come over and give him my regards

Rachel - and I take it this is where it starts to get interesting

PR - you have no idea

Rachel - :)

Rachel - go on

PR - so since I'm not drinking, I saddle up the loser cruiser and head to the Heart and Crown

Rachel - ...

PR - if I were to be drinking, I wouldn't take the car

PR - but that's not relevant, so I'll keep going

Rachel - lol and you mean boat

O - boat

Rachel - and do go on

PR - so I find a parking space a few blocks away, and walk over

PR - the place is packed

PR - I find my friends, and there aren't even enough chairs for everyone at the table

PR - we're outside, and half of us are just off the property across the little metal rail

PR - so eventually I go over the rail to greet another friend who just got in from toronto

PR - about a minute later, a bouncer comes up to me and says "Are you planning to come back inside?"

PR - and I say "Yeah"

PR - "Don't bother. You're kicked out."

Rachel - wtf

PR - I know

PR - my friends were pretty stunned that I just got kicked out of the heart and crown for hopping onto the sidewalk over the rail, and they suggest I ask nicely to come back in

PR - so I go to the bouncer, and I say "Look, I didn't realize what a dick move that was back there. Is there any way you can let me back in?"

PR - "no."

Rachel - ouch

PR - yeah, but that's his right

Rachel - Im gunna grab a banana...brb...keep talking though

PR - np

Rachel - lol and Im going to eat it...nothing dirty so dont even say it

PR - so I go back to where my friends are, and just lean against the rail from the sidewalk side

PR - about 5 minutes later, the bouncer tells me to go home

PR - I say "Are you telling me that I can't be on public property?"

PR - he says "get off this sidewalk"

Rachel - wow he really had it out for you

PR - so I ask if he can legally ask me to get off of a public bench and sidewalk if I'm not causing a disturbance?

PR - and I was right

PR - so he says to my friends, "alright, I can't kick this guy off the bench, but if any part of his body crosses over that rail, you're all kicked out"

PR - "fine."

PR - and that was the last time any part of me was within their property

PR - so I stay on the bench and tlak with my friends

PR - and when the waitress comes by, I ask to speak to the manager

PR - she says that they're really busy, and that it oculd be a while

PR - *couldc

PR - *could

PR - I tell her "don't worry, I'm not in any rush"

PR - so after about 10 minutes or so, the manager comes up to me with the bouncer

PR - I told her I was sorry about hopping the rail onto the sidewalk, and would if be possible to rejoin my friends on the other side?

PR - she says no. their liquor license requires that they kick out someone who does that

PR - which isn't unreasonable for her

Rachel - yah but you were sober

PR - not a fucking sip

PR - but she was right on that point

PR - her hands were tied, and I didn't have a problem with that

PR - I wasn't going to argue

PR - then she says, "if you're going to cause a problem, we can call the police"

PR - I say "I'm not going to cause anything. If I can't come back in, then what I will do is stay on this public bench. I hope you don't call the police, but I'm not doing anything wrong. If you want to, that's your perrogative."

Rachel - lol

PR - so they leave, and I go back to talking to my friends

PR - who are pretty amazed at what just happened

PR - then Jeremy says "they're coming back with police"

Rachel - LOL are you fuckig serious

PR - I'm facing away from the cops, and I don't turn around.

PR - I just ask how far away they are

PR - "about 20 seconds"

Rachel - omfg

PR - so I keep talking to jeremy for about 20 seconds

PR - from a public bench, on a public sidewalk

Rachel - sober too

PR - keep in mind, at no point in this evening have I had a drink, lost my temper, or even raised my voice

PR - well, I had 5 drinks as soon as I got to sunnyside

PR - but again, not relevant

Rachel - lol

PR - so I keep talking to jeremy until I feel the cop grab me my the arm from behind

PR - he tells me to leave

PR - I ask on what grounds

PR - he says "tresspassing"

Rachel - wtf

Rachel - that is SUCH bullshit

PR - I tell him that I'm on a public bench

Rachel - leave it to the cops to take the side of the buisness

PR - and that I have no plans to trespass on their property

PR - and he says - and I'm not making this up - "you're in my city"

Rachel - bastard

PR - "you've got two choices: you can go home, or you can go to jail"

Rachel - wtf

Rachel - you CANNOT be arrested for that shit

PR - I ask him if he's going to arrest me for sitting on a public bench

Rachel - what an arrogant pig

PR - so he says again, "you can go home, or you can go to jail"

PR - I say "I'd like that in writing"

Rachel - lol

Rachel - o0o

Rachel - you badass

PR - so he says "hands on the railing. you're under arrest."

PR - "here's your writing"

Rachel - OMG

Rachel - no wayy

PR - way.

PR - so he puts the handcuffs on, and my friends are just in shock

Rachel - thats kind of hot though...Id like to be arrested lol

PR - lol

PR - my friend called me after to ask why I was grinning while getting cuffed

PR - I didn't realise I was grinning

Rachel - lool

Rachel - omg I WISH i could have seen that

PR - so he calls a squad car, (code 93 or something), and leads me to it

Rachel - lol tell me more

PR - sorry, back

Rachel - but really that is pretty hot...you got arrested

PR - so once we're out of earshot, he says "I'm going to tell you one more time. You can go home, or you can go to jail."

PR - sorry, my bad

PR - "You can go home, or you can go to jail and do this by the book"

PR - I tell him "I haven't done anything wrong tonight, officer. I think I'd like to do this by the book."

PR - so he puts me in the squad car and turns me over to the officer driving it

Rachel - LOL

Rachel - man I really wish i could have seen this go down

PR - lol

PR - I'm so pissed off at my friends

PR - when he said "hands on the railing"

PR - I gestured at them to get a fucking camera out

PR - and they just stood there like idiots

Rachel - LOL

Rachel - fuck

Rachel - that sucks

PR - I wanted a picture of that

Rachel - a picture would have been epic

PR - a) because it would have come in handy in court

O - and b) because it looks badass

Rachel - omg yes

Rachel - that would be a hot picture

Rachel - i dont know what it is but anything related to jailtime= hot

PR - sorry to disappoint you, rachel, but I never went to jail

Rachel - lol you coudnt handle it

PR - the second cop wasn't as big a dick. He drove me around the corner and said that I wasn't being held

PR - I told him I'd like to get everything on the record anyway

Rachel - I once found out a guy i found attractive did about 3 years in jail..and it turned me on

Rachel - lol

Rachel - i take it he just toko you home then?

Rachel - *took

PR - no

PR - after I told him. I said I wanted to be given the breathalyzer test

Rachel - good.

PR - I hadn't had anyhting to drink

PR - but that car didn't have a test machine

PR - I asked if any nearby squad cars did

PR - he said "it doesn't matter, you're not driving home, are you?"

PR - and I said that yes, I was.

PR - so he asks what kind of car I own, and where it's parked

PR - when we get to it, he lets me out of the squad car, and smells my breath

PR - which pissed me off, because I wanted an actual readout for the record

Rachel - yah

Rachel - that is SUCH bullshit!

PR - then he unlocks the handcuffs and hands me a charge citation for trespassing

Rachel - but a bunch of guys from your frat saw it happen...your a legend lol

Rachel - whatttt

PR - yeah

PR - I ask him how I go about disputing that in court

PR - he says that the info's all on the citation, and that if I challenged it, he would testify against me.

Rachel - jackass

PR - once I got into my car, he drove off

Rachel - he wasnt even there

PR - I checked the 20 messages I'd gotten in the 10 minutes since I got arrested, then came back here

Rachel - omfg that is bullshit

Rachel - definately fight that

PR - I will.

Rachel - lol but [PR]...you got arrested

Rachel - how hot

Rachel - is that

PR - hey, when I was asked to leave the bar, I left. When they told me not to touch their railing, I didn't. But when a bouncer tells me to get off a public sidewalk, he can go fuck himself.

Rachel - oh definately

PR - and when a cop does the same, I made him arrest me

Rachel - that is such bullshit

Rachel - lol

Rachel - oh you badass

PR - lol fuck off

Rachel - lol

PR - I'm way too irritated right now to deal with sarcasm

Rachel - you may not find it great now but im sure its a story you will love telling

PR - oh, you have no idea

Rachel - and im serious that shit is hot

Rachel - you got arrested

Rachel - hott

PR - lol

PR - seirously though, apparently I was grinning the entire time

Rachel - you would

PR - I did.

PR - so what did you do tonight?

Rachel - I talked to Hani about how I got ditched for the black BBQ and then I tried to help him come up with a name for his team for guild wars

PR - lol

Rachel - they ended up with the same lame name they started with

Rachel - and you know i had one of those days where i take forever getting ready only to get fucking ditched

Rachel - im so pissed

PR - I think the funniest part was when I was in the squad car

PR - and I was crushing the cigarettes in my back pocket

PR - now, you obviously don't reach into a pocket to grab an unknown object while in police custody

Rachel - lol

PR - so I ask, "Officer, I'm just going to reach into my pocket to move my cigarettes to somewhere that they won't get crushed"

PR - so he says okay

PR - then he asks "What's a guy like you doing smoking anyway?"

PR - and I say....

PR - I know you've read my blog, so you probably know the answer

PR - "shiny packaging and peer pressure"

PR - sarcasm: not always the ebst approach

PR - *best

Rachel - lol

Rachel - not with cops

Rachel - its best to let them dominate

Rachel - lol

PR - whatever, I got their names.

Rachel - good

PR - I'm not going to go home because a cop threatens to arrest me. not if I haven't broken a law

Rachel - fuck that is so messed up

Rachel - but still..hott

Rachel - lol

PR - lol thanks

Rachel - how were their cuffs?

PR - left some bruises, but otherwise not bad

Rachel - damn

Rachel - I want some of those

PR - they feel the same as the ones I have, but they ratcheted them tighter than I do

...

I still can't believe it. I was never aggressive or belligerent. I never lost my temper or even raised my voice. When they asked me to leave their property, I left. When they asked me not to even touch the railing, I complied. But when a bouncer tries to order me off of a public bench on a public sidewalk, he has every right to go fuck himself; when an officer of the law does the same, I wanted that order on paper.

This isn't some third-world junta. This is Ottawa! I realize how melodramatic this kind of thing is going to sound, but our society is based on the rule of law. A police officer is granted - rightly - certain authorities over other citizens for the good and welfare of society; but a badge is not carte-blanche to give orders arbitrarily under the guise of legal authority. I got arrested for sitting on a public bench, breaking no laws, and I fully intend to make a scene over this.

I'm not a petty criminal. I'm not a menace to society. I don't have a criminal record; christ, I've never been arrested before. And even if these things were not the case, I would still be in the right.

Lavender-fresh Jesus.

2008-06-12T18:38:00.004-04:00

God bless Wal Mart.

I just got a new air freshener for my car. This is what happens when I'm allowed to get bored.

That, and it's a convenient cover for our atheistic stroll through Kentucky's Creation Museum next weekend.

Also, my exhaustive research has concluded that you cannot set fire to Genoa salami with a butane jet lighter. I'm moving up to procuitto and acetylene.

We few, we cancerous few...

2008-06-12T13:37:00.009-04:00

We band of smokers. Sucking perfectly fresh air - upwards of a dozen times daily - through the business end of a cigarette. Irrationality defined. The myriad pitfalls of what, at best, is a bad habit, can and have been extensively documented and persistently reiterated by the medical community, non-Chinese governments, NGO's, and my friends and family.

Regulation on tar, nicotine, and their biochemical compadres have had a marginal effect on the actual harms of smoking, but the perceived (read: understood) disincentive against smoking has increased exponentially in the last half-century. Where once our grandparents saw adverts in their comic books advertising that 4 out of 5 doctors recommend Marlboros for your health, we are now inundated by warnings, from friends and institutions alike, that smoking will kill you.

So why the nonchalance? Why do we, as a society, still blithely drag away at our favourite brands? Smoking rates may have decreased, but they don't seem to be going anywhere fast.

While I can't purport to speak for others, talking about myself is one of my passions; I'll stick to that. What follows is not a detachedly rational exploration of my involvement with the filthy nicotine monkey on our society's back, but rather more of a retrospective attempt at rationalizing at why I do something that's clearly not in my best interests.

...Hold on, I'm lighting my smoke.

Simple addiction is too simplistic an explanation. This is not to suggest that I'm not a nicotine addict; a few hours without my fix sets me invariably on edge. The biochemical aspect, in my personal life, is undeniable. It's the reason why quitting is difficult, but it can't fully explain the casus belli on the War on My Lungs.

With my friends, I'm consistently glib about my own smoking habit. Few of my closest friends smoke, and when one of them asks why I would ever get into such an obviously fruitless - and worse, self-destructive habit - my facetious reply is, if nothing else, consistent: "shiny packaging and peer pressure."

I announce my smoke breaks sardonically as "a trip downstairs for some cancer research." Don't forgive me, I know exactly what I do. Yet I started anyway. I used to be the most vehemently anti-smoking high-schooler I knew. I'd incessantly give my smoking friends the myriad reasons why it's a stupid fucking idea.

One of my friends, Mark, gave me an answer that, more than anything, seems brilliant in its insightfulness:

"Smoking isn't cool; smokers are cool."

I guess that just about sums it up. And I'm actually prepared, to some extent, to accept a version of this explanation. We, as a society have a double-standard regarding the associations we make with smoking. There's the contemporary one, persistently and consciously made by a rightly anti-smoking media: the smoker is the villain in the movie, the low class, uneducated, inarticulate and boorishly twattish trogdolyte. The smokers are the bad guys. Boondock saints excepted, I can't think of any smoking characters in modern film to be portrayed as smart people.

But there still persists under the surface another, older, association we make with smoking. Danger. James Dean, Marlon fucking Brando, and yeah, the Boondock Saints.

...Hold on, I'm lighting my second smoke.

We still associate, at least on some level, (and at least for myself,) careless smoking with untethered badassery. Smoking isn't cool, but smokers are.

I'm not saying it's causal, but the facts remain: studies show that people who smoke are consistently more likely to be risk-takers. We fight more wars, start more small businesses, take more road trips, and (in my seasoned experience,) fuck more people. It doesn't make sense. But it doesn't have to. I didn't start smoking because my immediate peer group and family role models did, as is the case for most smokers. I started, at at least in retrospect, primarily because they didn't. It set me apart. It made me feel different; it made me feel dangerously sophisticated; it made me feel cool.

And, in a sense, it did. The whole persona that I carefully constructed in my late adolescence was one of devil-may-care nonchalance. I was never the guy who got laid in high school. Put differently, I never got laid in high school. I had always taken my female friends' advice at face value and assumed that girls went for nice guys. It's simply not true. Nice guys finish last. Success with women may doesn't seem like the best metric for personal self-worth, but in a darwinian sense, it's our tautological raison d'être.

So I changed. I became the asshole that girls would fuck before crying on their nice-guy-friend's shoulder about it when everything went sour. In my first year of university, I was voted my fraternity chapter's "Most Promiscuous Brother." I decorate my window with my award and a phalanx of donated panties.

I was cool.

Smoking is endemic of that: girls always say they don't like guys who smoke, but I never got girls until I smoked. I'm not saying smoking is the direct cause, but it's part of the cognitive dissonance that people hold between what they want and what they think that they want.

So why do we still smoke?

Because it's still cool.

Thank you for smoking.

Sweet Home Alabama: Answers in Genesis

2008-06-07T07:07:00.002-04:00

I'm running on a cumulative 3 hours' sleep over the last two days, so bear with me. This is important. It's come to my attention that the Creation Museum, fundamentalist Christianity's answer to Poe's Law, is on the outskirts of Cincinnati, just across the Kentucky state line.

From their web site:

Walk through the Garden of Eden. The Tree of Life, central to the garden, stretches out its branches, laden with ripened fruits. Come face-to-face with a sauropod, a dinosaur of incredible dimensions. His monstrous frame moves through the low-lying thicket as he grazes on plants. Introduce yourself to our chameleons. Examine bones, a clutch of eggs from a dinosaur, an exceptional fossil collection, and a mineral collection. Walk through the Cave of Sorrows and see the horrific effects of the Fall of man. Sounds of a sin-ravaged world echo through the room. Finally, see the sacrificial Lamb on the cross, and the hope of redemption.

The themes of the exhibits resound in the theater presentations: Men in White, Six Days of Creation, The Last Adam, and Dinosaurs and Dragons. Our Special Effects Theater, complete with rumbling seats and rising mists, takes visitors on a fantastic quest to find the real purpose and meaning of life.

And I'm going. No word yet on whether that will constitute Kentucky's token streak, but I'm leaning towards taking a pass on this one. The state-to-state tour of gratuitous nudity is meant to be just for shits and giggles, and as suiting as it would be to streak through the "Garden of Eden" historical exhibit - replete with Adam, Eve, and their dinosaur neighbours - we're not really looking to spread a message. Also, it would be a phenomenally quick way to get arrested.

A tentative date has been set. My odyssey begins out of Ottawa on Friday, June 20. My housemates Bryan and Ross have all but dropped out of the coming trip, but it's looking like my pimpin' minivan will be full anyway: Zach and DK (of bible-shuffle infamy) will meet me en route through Toronto, and Sam (hereafter, Nez Deux) will join the fellowship as it passes through Dayton, Ohio.

Sweet Home Alabama: There's a road trip a'brewing

2008-06-04T04:43:00.008-04:00

Two and a half weeks.

If I could pick one thing I want to do most, it would be to see my girlfriend Sophie. She's two thousand kilometers away, and I haven't seen her since March. If I could pick two things I want to do most, it would be to see my girlfriend Sophie and go on an epic road trip.

The solution is long overdue: I'm going to Alabama to see her. I've seen her in Toronto, Boston, and Ottawa, but in the four-plus years I've known her, I've never been to her home in Birmingham, Alabama.

The idea sort of came out of nowhere. I brought it up half-seriously with my friends, with zero expectation of anything actually coming to fruition. But both my housemates, Bryan and Ross, are up for the journey.

We're driving 1250 miles. Each way. Nonstop.

Excuse the cliche, but if you looked up "epic" in the dictionary, you would find this picture:

View Larger Map

Google Maps was, of course my first stop. My sweet set of wheels (a 1998 Ford Windstar) gets anywhere between 10 and 16 L per 100km, so the cost - for the entire trip - should amount to between 400 and 650 liters of gasoline. For you non-metric savages, that's about 100-175 gallons. You do the math.

Now, the farthest road trip I've ever done was the 600-mile trip from Toronto to Boston last February, made for the exact same reason. Not only that, but I've never once been to the South. Despite my Sophie's assurances of running water, full electricity, and the rule of law, the only impression I've ever actually had of the South comes from the movie Deliverance. But I love going anywhere new, so I scrutinize Google's route to see where I'll be going, and what I'm going to see along the way. And I had a second pleasant surprise.

The road trip gods (Google's code-monkeys) saw fit to plan our route within 15 miles of Dayton, Ohio, where one of my best friends from my high school days in Toronto, Sam, is now going to university. I promptly called him up to inform him that he would be kidnapped en route to Birmingham. He chose to do things the easy way, and decided to join us for the ride.

For the record, Sam and I should never be allowed in the same car together for more than 20 minutes at a time. When in the same room, we become two of the most immature people I can imagine. And neither of us can back down from a dare. The conversation went roughly like this:

Sam: Remember that time you went to the 7/11 in your underwear to buy cigarettes? Get ready to be overshadowed.

PR: You don't have the balls.

Sam: Yeah? Well a night's bar tab says that I do, and some lucky gas station is going to see them in all their glory.

PR: Yeah, and which state are you going to be pulling this stunt?

Sam: Hell if I know. Any state between Dayton and Birmingham. You can't rush art.

PR: I can top that. How about every state between Dayton and Birmingham?

Sam: You don't have the balls.

PR: Try me.

Sam: Alright. We streak at least once in every state.

PR: You do realize that we're talking about Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama, right?

Sam: Fully aware.

PR: You're on, bitch.

I'm paraphrasing, but that was the spirit of the conversation.

So two Arabs, a Jew, and a blind guy drive into Alabama....

This can't possibly end well.

Sins of the flesh (or, "How I invoked the wrath of God")

2008-06-03T03:35:00.004-04:00

Tiring weekend, but I've earned this chance to brag.

A few weeks ago, I had a night of phenomenal, no-strings-attached sex with my friend Rachel in Toronto. It was in the basement guest room of family that I was visiting for the weekend, so we had to be careful and keep quiet.

Last Thursday, she came up to Ottawa to visit a girlfriend of hers for the weekend. And every night of her stay in the city, she ended ditching her friend to get laid. I was happy to oblige.

Before I get into the rest of the story, there are two things I need to explain to lay out the groundwork:

1) The house I'm renting with my friends at university is a dilapidated piece of shit. It's a rotting cliche of the life of a starving student.

2) I'm in an open relationship. Spare me the sanctimonious crap over the fact that I'm sleeping with other girls while the one I'm in love with is stuck two thousand miles away.

Back to it: We were waking up my housemates two, three times a night. Then again in the morning. And if you're doing your job right, this girl can get loud. By 3am of the second night of her visit, we'd already gotten two angry visits from my angry housemates, politely asking us to quiet the fuck down.

So we begin round 4. There was a thunderstorm outside, and it wasn't like we had anywhere better to be. By this point, I'm starting to get a feel for her particular sexual idiosyncrasies, and the sex is beyond good. My housemate had barely gotten back to bed by the time the entire house could hear her. So it goes.

This is round 4 for the evening, so it goes on for even longer than before. When we finally hit the ending bit, two things happen at once:

1. My housemate bangs on my bedroom door again, threatening me with an impromptu cold shower with the garden hose;

2. The eavestrough breaks free from the roof of my house, tearing the soffits off on the way down. (You know the part of the roof that overhangs past the side of your house? The soffits are the underside of that.)

So.

In conclusion:

I literally fucked a girl until the roof came down.

That is all.

On Open Relationships

2008-05-29T03:36:00.006-04:00

To start, I'm in an open relationship. If you're in the intimate cadre of my 566 closest friends, you can see this on my Facebook profile. While most people tend not to bring up the details uncovered by their 3am Facebook-creeping adventures, those few who have brought up my less-than-traditional set-up have been mostly been guys, and the question often came with a twinge of envy.

The mythical "Open Relationship" seems, to most men my age, to combine the best of all worlds: the opportunity for intimacy with someone special, the opportunity to seek sexual gratification from other sources, and the opportunity to decide for yourself how best to strike that balance.

Let me tell you: it's not all it's cracked up to be.

And no, it's not because of jealousy. While we keep the details to ourselves, my girlfriend and I hide nothing from one another. She is, completely and unequivocally, my best friend. Sophie and I were friends long before we became involved, and I began the relationship on the sole condition that it could not, under any circumstances, come at the expense of our friendship.

If jealousy were to become an issue, I should expect it to be more from her side. While our relationship is explicitly open, Sophie does not sleep around. The same is not true for me; and while this is all kosher with Sophie, every time I have sex with another woman, it still feels like cheating.

It's not like I have any moral qualms about sex. As long as it's safe, and nobody is taken advantage of, I think it's a beautiful thing. There's a broad spectrum between the gratuitous fuck and the world-changing feeling of making love. If you're just counting sex, I've had my share. My fraternity's chapter saw fit to vote me the Most Promiscuous Brother of '07/'08, mostly owing to one high-profile (within fraternity circles, that is) threesome last February. I've slept with a few girls, yes.

I've only ever made love to one.

It's a term that sounds so trite until you experience it yourself. The feeling of caring more than about your own sexual pleasure, or even someone else's, but instead about letting down all of your defenses and giving yourself completely to another person. And when it's done, holding each other close and telling all of your secrets without saying a word. My MO with girls has always been "nice guys don't get laid." Sophie is the only person with whom I've ever let myself just be... myself.

I've seen her three times.

Enter the "distance factor," stage left. She lives in Alabama. Goes to school in Boston. After meeting in Toronto over four years ago, we kept in touch over MSN and near-daily phone conversations. The friendship began to take on more intimate overtones a year or two ago, and every once in a while, we would make plans to visit one another, only to see those plans fall through. We would always put the romantic aspect of our friendship on hold whenever one of us was in a relationship with someone back home.

But she was privy to the triumphs and anxieties, the trials and tribulations of every romantic involvement I ever had. We saw one another through more then our fair share of respective first-date jitters, and break-up train wrecks. But there came a point last February when it dawned on me who it was that I wanted to be with.

When reading week started (reading week is the Canadian version of March Break, only - you know - in February), I packed up my bags and set off with my best friend on the long overnight drive to Boston.

Before making the trip, I had ended a no-strings-attached thing I had with a friend I'd been having sex with back home, just in case things got serious with Sophie.

I was only there for one night, but it was easily the best night of my life. She seemed to want - for some unbelievable reason - for her first time to be with me. That may not count for much to some people, but that was a lot of pressure for me. I mean, I'd been the first for a girl before, but never with someone I really, truly cared about. And yet, it was a first for me too. I made love for the first time, and got hooked.

The next month, she came up to Ottawa for a week for her March break. It stands out as probably the best week I ever had. I skipped all of my classes - studious guy that I am - and practically barricaded myself in the room with her. We only had the week together, and we were going to make the most of it. My roommate hated me.

When the week was over, it was unclear when we would see each other again. I don't know how we came to it, but we made the decision that an open relationship was best for us, because we had so little opportunity to be together.

Yet sex had made its inevitable impact on us. Where once we would tell each other everything, I found myself opening up to her less. Despite the open status of our relationship, every time I slept with another woman, it felt, on an intuitive level, like a betrayal not only of her, but of myself.

So I began to spare her the details. Where once I would tell her everything that was going on in my life, now it felt wierd. How could I tell her what another woman was doing with me, while the distance that separated us kept her from doing the same?

Fast forward to two weeks ago.

I had sex with Rachel. She is a close friend of mine, and goes to the same university as me. It wasn't quite planned: it just sort of happened. She's spending the summer in Toronto, and I was there for the weekend. We met up for drinks, and one thing led to another, which led to my place. And now things are a mess.

Because even though it wasn't the same as what I have with Sophie, it was, inexorably, more than just a fuck. And striking that balance between intimacy and sex in my relationship with Sophie became a lot more complicated. Even though I'm not in love with Rachel, the sex was intimate. Having "just sex" with someone hadn't really caused any problems with respect to the open relationship. But what do I do when it's not just sex?

Rachel is coming up to Ottawa for the weekend to see me. She knows about my relationship with Sophie, and she surely understands that nothing serious will happen between the two of us. But I'm worried about whether or not I can keep this from getting unmanageably wierd. Rachel's my friend, and I don't want her to feel rejected. But I love Sophie, and need to find a way to make sure not to become romantically intimate with someone else.

That would be something that she could not forgive.

For all you guys who wish you were in my shoes, and love the idea of being able to fuck whoever you want while still being in a relationship, let me pitch in my two cents: be careful what you wish for. It might just come true.

Je m'accuse

2008-05-25T03:32:00.006-04:00

Tonight, I am ashamed to look in the mirror. I am not the kind of person that I thought I was.

Everybody, I'm sure, likes to see themselves as the kind of person who will always to the right thing, no matter the cost. For me, doubly so.

But I learned otherwise tonight.

I was leaving one of my favourite downtown Toronto sushi places, where I'd met up with an old high school friend to catch up with one another. On the way out, there was obviously some serious shit going down between several people on the sidewalk along Bloor.

At first, it looked like a fight. This was past Spadina and Bloor, and clubgoers have been known to take it outside every now and again. One guy was yelling and swearing, while another guy was advancing, yelling back, and threatening an ass-kicking.

The first guy was around my age (early 20's) and kind of emo-ish. He was wearing wrist-slitter attire - skinny red jeans and all - but he was decently built, and it looked like he could handle your average fistfight.

The guy moving in on him was pure white trash. You know the type; wannabe gansta-rapper of a caveman, trying to prove something to his trogdolyte posse. Some shrill girl cut in with "Yo, kick his ass!"

And what did I do?

Nothing.

So as the guy in the skinny red jeans vascillates between hurling insults and backing away, the caveman keeps advancing, taunting the guy to "Yo, fight me like a man." It soon became clear that "fight me like a man" really meant "me and my two friends are going to wail on you."

This wasn't some deserted alleyway. This happened on Toronto's Bloor St West, on a strip of several popular Toronto clubs and pubs. This spectacle must have been happening in front of 20 people at least.

What did they do?

Nothing.

And what did I do?

Not a whole lot more. I dialed the police.

When the three guys caught up with skinny-jeans, they made good on their threats. They grabbed him, hit him, threw him down, and hit him some more. Meanwhile, I was heroically speaking on the phone with the dispatcher suggesting that someone get over here right away.

Just a primer on myself: I'm not the type to be afraid to get into a fight. I've covered the back of a friend or two when things have gotten rough. I'm in the Army Reserves. I'm in decent shape. I've got martial arts experience. I can handle a fight. So why was I standing there on the phone while someone else was getting pummeled?

For the same reason that everyone else just stood there and looked on. It wasn't their problem - it wasn't their friend - it wasn't their fight.

When they let up on him, the guy runs across the street to where I am, then continues to shout insults at the three guys. This is fucking ridiculous. Someone else's problem is coming my way, and quickly becoming mine. So I did what every single other person on that street did. I stepped aside, and watched as they came after the guy again.

When I yelled that the police were on their way, the cave-men seemed to keep their distance. Response time would be lightning-fast in this area, and they obviously didn't want the police to arrive to the scene of them kicking the crap out of some guy.

But the victim wasn't going to let things go that easily. He charges at his assailants, and gets beaten down again. Are you fucking kidding me? It was around this time that the police car came into view. The cave-dwellers and their woman run off along Bloor Street, while the emo guy sits against the door of a closed storefront and tried to collect himself. His friend is there making sure he's alright. The same friend that, like myself and everyone else in the crowd, never once came to his defense.

I crouch down in front of him to see if he is concussed. I can see that the police, pushing their way through the dense Bloor-street traffic, are still a good 45-60 seconds away. He can count my fingers, and he knows what day it is. His name is Caleb. Good. He's feeling dizzy, and a little nauseous. Not so good. It'll take a little while to know whether that's from concussion, adrenaline, or alcohol.

The police are completely useless. Even though the assailants couldn't be more than a block away, they do nothing to pursue them. Once they are sure that Caleb doesn't have concussion, they suggest that since he's not injured, and he doesn't want to go to the hospital, he should go home immediately. I offer him and his friend a ride.

Turns out, they were literally just walking down the street when one of the three guys decided that he didn't like the way Caleb looked, or didn't like the way he looked at them. All he heard was, "Yo! Wanna fucking fight," before getting hit in the face. He took a swing back, and connected with the lead caveman's face. Then the other two cave-dwellers jumped in. Somehow, they disengaged, and Caleb decided that it was wise to make use of the distance he'd managed to place between him and the posse by calling them white trash, and calling the girl their white trash whore. His friend, the entire time, was trying to shut him up. At that point, he was provoking further confrontation, and that was when I stepped out of the restaurant.

While it wasn't immediately clear who was attacking whom, it didn't take long to figure out. Yet the most I ever did was to pick up my phone.

There were over 20 people there, so why didn't a single person intervene?
In retrospect, the answer is simple: nobody helped because there were over 20 people there. Every single person in the crowd was sure that someone would do something, so no one did.

And I feel ashamed to be one of them.

Sure, I called the police. I gave the guy a ride home after. But I did nothing - nothing! - while he was getting his ass kicked. I alone wouldn't have changed the odds much by joining the fight, but by acting, I might have encouraged others to intervene. But when the time for action had come and gone, I was left with words, and a cell phone.

So now I'm forced to question what kind of person I really am. If you had asked me, "would you step in to help a guy who is being attacked," I would have certainly said yes. So would 9 out of 10 guys. So would you.

Yet out of over 20 people standing on Bloor Street watching this man get attacked, not a single one acted.

And it makes me sick.

2008-05-23T15:41:00.003-04:00

Ugh... Off to Toronto again.

The best part about going "home" to Toronto is the tedious 5-hour drive.

I don't mean to slight the city itself. It's one of my favourites, and it would be a lot more fun to visit if my family didn't live there.

Cooties

2008-05-23T04:50:00.009-04:00

I actually kind of like this one, but it brushes on a bit of a serious topic. Cootie prevention and sex education.

Luckily for me, I grew up in sensibly secular Canada. Sex education was a mandatory part of Physical Education, which, in the province of Ontario, is a required credit for a high school diploma. Phys Ed was a ninth-grade course, so at the tender age of 14, high school freshmen learn a few things about sex.

The basic mechanics of it were fairly straightforward. By the time we entered high school, most kids my age already knew a fair bit about sex. There were probably a few in the class who were sexually active, but at that age, I would call it a fair bet that most of my classmates were probably sitting firmly at third base, if that.

Still, there was useful information to glean from Sex Ed. We got to see nasty pictures of terrifying diseases. We learned how all the parts work (not that I can honestly still remember what my vas deferens does, but no matter). Most importantly though, we learned about contraception and disease prevention. Abstinence was taught as one of the methods to protect yourself, but it was never implied that taking that route was morally superior. Trained volunteers even demonstrated how to roll a condom onto erotic vegetables.

Did I come out of that class behaving any differently than I had before? Not really. It was still another year or two before I finally got laid. But I did come out with a sense of normalcy about it.

Fast forward one year.

My Jewish youth group (hey, I wasn't born an atheist) had held that year's International Convention in Toronto. Of course, being a hormone-addled 15-year-old, I spent the entire time chatting up every single nice Jewish girl and her chest.

One girl that I had really started to fall for was this stunning blonde cheerleader from Alabama. She's actually one of the smartest people that I've met, but I didn't really know that at the time. Her name wasn't actually Sophie, but since there's a good chance that she'll feature in some more personal stories, she's going to have to remain Sophie as far as you people are concerned.

After she convinced me that she wasn't joking, there actually are Jewish people in Alabama, we actually started to hit it off. While I never worked up the courage to make a move while she was in Toronto, I did get her email address.

We kept in touch after she went home, talking on MSN nearly every night. It was only a matter of time before a conversation turned to sex. Funny how that happens when you're 15 and thinking about it constantly, eh? When I told her about my school's Sex Education sub-course the previous year, she was absolutely floored.

"Your teacher actually advocated condom use? If that happened here, they'd be fired so fast!"

I was stunned. To me, Abstinence-only sex education was something you read about, a policy that mythical fundamentalists in a far-off land taught their spawn. Yet while my classmates were learning how to play safe when the clothes came off, her classmates were instead taking a class-wide abstinence pledge.

She was as appalled as I was. She could barely believe that we Canadians, who I had always considered to be a fairly middle-of-the-pack bunch, were amazing enough to adopt such a progressive policy as teaching young adults how to safely do something that they're going to do anyway.

I was going to try and conclude with something profound and thought-provoking, but it's past 5:30am, and I'm fucking tired. Just roll that around in your head for a minute. Having your education determined by religious doctrine isn't something that happens to someone else. It happened to Sophie.

Update: Hours after writing this, I find this article in the Schenectady Gazette, via Salon.com. Turns out, there's a classroom's worth of parents who are outraged by the way their grade 7/8 snowflakes are being taught Sex Ed. They're mobilizing the suburban mommy militia, and taking torch and pitchfork to the school district administration.

The crime? While teaching students the facts about sex, the curriculum actually acknowledged the fact that we have body parts that can give pleasurable feelings. Masturbation was even mentioned!

When will school administrators realize? If we don't tell them that it can feel good, they're not going to find out! It's that simple. A doctor said so:

Dr. Michael Rochet, a physician, said the school district should search for alternatives for Planned Parenthood programming because he believes the instruction will facilitate curiosity among students. [emphasis mine]

“It will lead to more sexual activity,” he said.

Rochet said he wants parents and educators to get together and work on a program for the coming school year that can be molded to the community’s needs, as opposed to taking on programming of an organization that’s already developed.

“We don’t have to follow everybody else. Let’s lead the pack,” Rochet said.

In an effort to ensure parents would have a say in their children’s participation, the district issued forms so that parents could decide to have their children excluded from the instruction.

Here's why they should not have this option: their children will have sex. If not now - they are in middle school - then in a few years. It's a fact. Especially in Montgomery County, where the teen birth rate is the second-highest of any in New York state.

Teen birth is a greater policy issue, but it's not the reason the course should be obligatory. Disease is. If teens have a baby, their life is ruined. If someone passes on a sexually-transmitted disease, it has endangered the health and well-being of everyone within six degrees of sexual separation. For the same reason that schools can mandate vaccinations against Polio and Co,
it has a duty to mandate Sex Ed as an innoculation against stupidity. A student with Polio would be a danger to the school at large; so too, the student who might be imbued with the wond'rous gift of herpes.

Teach them when they're young, so when they start, they won't be idiots.

Who knew having housemates could be this irritating?

2008-05-21T14:49:00.008-04:00

Apologizing in advance if this post sounds incoherent. I haven't had a chance to sleep in about 48 hours, and at this point, every second between now and the evening feels like an eternity.

...On May 1st, three undergraduate students in Ottawa moved gleefully out of uni residence and into their first leased house.

Having spent 19 years counting the minutes till I could move out of my parents' homes, and the following two semesters resenting the confining rules of dorms, the move felt like pure freedom.

No ban on beer bottles. No roommate to kick out of the double when a girl comes back you your place. And university security didn't seem to like it much when I tried to get a barbeque going in the quad.

No matter.

The place is ours. Ours. After spending the better part of a week moving in and getting our respective shit in order, I drive off to Toronto for the weekend. Against my better judgement, a weekend gets railroaded into a week and a half.

Fast forward to last night. I get back to Ottawa just shy of 3am, and it's lord of the fucking flies. No clean dished left; nargila sitting in the back room for anyone to see; and the garbage clearly hasn't been emptied since we moved in.

I think I'm going to have to engrave a few commandments half an inch into the drywall.

1. If you cook yourself a meal, do the fucking dishes.

2. If someone takes over the cooking duties for the night, do the fucking dishes.

3. If you drink an entire case of my beer, don't replace it with an American import. That's just uncalled for.

4. If you have sex on furniture or surfaces in common areas of the house, have the courtesy not to tell me about it. I never told Ross about the time I hooked up on his bed while he was at a midterm. Keep it to yourself, it's a matter of respect.

5. When a girl refuses to come over because of how horrible the house is, it's time to kick into crisis mode.

6. When all else fails, the most important rule of all: don't fuck with me. The fuse box is in my room. I'm not afraid to use it.

...Long story short, I can see this going one of two possible ways...

Either we pull together, and strike a balance between personal space and shared responsibility, or we dig in our heels, and the house devolves into a petulant orgy of bitter pranks, retributions, and recriminations.

The Marketplace of Ideas

2008-05-21T06:25:00.007-04:00

I realize that with a second post on the topic of the bookstore mischief saga, I risk typecasting myself as "the bookstore guy." Still, there were a lot of responses to the whole thing on Tall Penguin's blog, and an unbelievable number on PZ's.

There's one subset of those that I'd like to address.

When DK and I moved those bibles, it was done less as a political statement or some opening salvo in a campaign of petty bookstore terrorism, but more for sheer shits and giggles. We'd just come out of Harold and Kumar 2, and were in an insolent sort of mood.

There are some, however, who feel that there's another subtopic which is more systematically misplaced in bookstores. Many comments on Pharyngula suggested that Science shelves should be bereft of such gems as Michael Behe's intelligent-design manifestos, or any any book on new-age pseudoscience.

It's with this that I must take issue. When, in my email to Dr Myers, I referred to the democratic marketplace of ideas, I was not paying lip service. It is a fundamental tenet of western democratic society that as long as nobody is literally hurt, every opinion has a right to be heard. I'm not saying that every opinion is worth the paper it's written on, just that anyone has every right to make their case. This is especially the case in the rigours of the scientific process, where any theory - new or old - is continually vetted by a process of peer review and critique.

In the case of Behe's ID idiocy and New-Age acupressure guides, they belong squarely in the science section. The questions that they address (Who are we? How did we get here? How can the flow of Chi affect my basement grow-op?) are fundamentally scientific ones. Just because a particular author's answer to a real scientific question is completely insipid does not mean that it does not belong on the Science shelf.

Call me Naïve, but I truly want to believe that in the great marketplace of ideas, theories will ultimately rise and fall on their own merits.

If you want to rid your local science section of wastes of wood-pulp like Behe's books on Intelligent Design, here's how to do it.

Let his opinion be heard.

There is only one appropriate response to a ridiculous proposition, and that response is thorough ridicule. Give Behe and his ilk a seat at the table. Engage him. Expose his ideas for the unscrupulous shams that they are. I'm not advocating that anyone treat fools with kid gloves - far from it. All I'm saying is, give these people just enough intellectual rope to hang themselves with, then help them build their gallows.

Code Indigo

2008-05-21T05:32:00.006-04:00

I got back into Ottawa about 90 minutes ago. I'm skipping tonight's sleep to try and get my schedule back into some semblance of sanity. Besides, I'd just have to wake up in two hours anyway.

In slightly more interesting news, I have a confession to make. Those of you who frequent Pharyngula or Tall Penguin - both phenomenal blogs - may have noticed the story of a Toronto-area Indigo bookstore that found its entire Bibles and Bible Study section relocated to relevant shelves around the store. That was me and DK [full name withheld to protect the guilty] on Saturday afternoon.

For those barbarians who don't frequent either blog, here's where it gets interesting:

Dr. P. Z. Myers is a professor of biology in Minnesota (I think), and author of the extremely high-profile blog "Pharyngula." He's an ardent atheist and a friend of Richard Dawkins, who wrote "The God Delusion." They were both actually interviewed (under a false flag) in Ben Stein's intelligent-design schlockumentary "Expelled."

But I digress.

Assuming Dr. Myers to be the kind of person who would get a chuckle out of the absurdity of the whole thing, I sent off an email:

Bookstore Mischief in the Frozen Northlands

PR. [redacted] <[redacted]@gmail.com> Tue, May 20, 2008 at 3:51 AM

To: pzmyers@pharyngula.org

Dr. Meyers,

Let me open with the a trite cliche: I'm a long-time reader, but a first-time writer.

The attached images are sent not as a triumphant head on a platter (before you recoil, I should mention that it's not to be taken in the literal sense), but as a supremely gratifying act of minor mischief.

Indigo is Canada's most prominent bookstore chain, akin to stateside purveyors such as Barnes and Noble, selling everything from political treatises to new-age acupuncture schlock. The bookstore has always represented - at least to me - the democratic marketplace of ideas, where thoughts and arguments rise and fall on their merits. These arguments were very well classified by shelf: politics, business, inspirational stories, and the rest. But something was out of place, that my friends and I couldn't help but correct. The bibles, which span so many topics in the course of their thousands of pages, were relegated to a shelf of their own, separate from all the composite sub-topics that comprise their entirety.

Whether out of civic responsibility, or out of the resolute boredom of university students with nothing but time to kill during the summer, we took it upon ourselves to rectify this error. Surely it was an error.

To make a long story short, bibles that once filled a row found their respective ways to the shelves of such relevant topics as Fiction, Humour, Sexuality, Erotica, Cuisine, Parenting, Mental Disorder, Parapsychology and the Occult. In the bibles' place, the Bibles and Bible Studies section now holds one solitary copy of Sam Harris's treatise, Letter to a Christian Nation.

If a single person can be persuaded that the answers to their questions lie not in a bronze-age text, but instead in the faculties of their own reason, then I'd consider it an afternoon well spent. If not, at least it felt pretty damned good. The accompanying photos are of the Bible shelf after our labours. Do with them as you wish; my only regret is not having the foresight to have taken a picture before we started.

Sincerely,

PR [redacted]
Undergraduate, [redacted] University
Ottawa, Canada (The bookstore itself was at Yonge Street and Eglinton Avenue, in the city of Toronto)

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And that, I'd expected, was the end of it. I probably should have known better. En route to Ottawa tonight, I got a call from DK. I hadn't mentioned to him that I'd sent the email, and he was calling to tell me that we were - and I quote - "in the fucking news!"

The "news" that he was referring to was Dr Myers's blog, Pharyngula, which posted a bemused half-chastisement for the world to see. (the actual chastising was in the form of a short "While I don't condone this..." before going on to extol how the whole stunt was, in fact, kind of funny.)

Ambitious vandalism!
Category: Humor
Posted on: May 20, 2008 8:18 AM, by PZ Myers

A couple of college students in Toronto (what is it with those ferocious godless heathens coming out of that city?) took offense at the patent absurdity of the "Bible and Bible Studies" section of a large bookstore at Yonge and Eglinton, and decided to help organize the shelves by filing their contents more appropriately. They quietly moved the contents to other places in the bookstore, like Fiction, Humour, Sexuality, Erotica, Cuisine, Parenting, Mental Disorder, Parapsychology and the Occult. Then they sent me a photo of the end result.
That's Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation sitting all alone there.

I can't really condone this kind of behavior — think of the poor clerks who have to look everywhere to find and restore the bibles to their little ghetto — but it is funny. It's also godless Canada, so maybe nobody noticed for a few weeks or months. Maybe nobody cared.
Here's the other side of the story.

...For the record, this blog receives an average of 57 000 page views per day. This posting alone received about 150 comments from readers, ranging from acclaim to irritation. The one comment that stood out, the "other side of the story," was a comment from a girl who actually works at that Indigo:

I work in that bookstore and I was the one who came upon those shelves just after it happened. I blogged about it and one of my readers just sent me the link to this site. My manager wasn't really impressed and although the scavenger hunt was fun, it ate up a lot of our time on a busy Saturday afternoon.
To the culprits: By the time I reached the shelves, the copy of "Letter to a Christian Nation" was gone. They were just empty, so your prank looked more like the work of fundamentalists. Not sure it accomplished your goal.

Posted by: tall penguin | May 20, 2008 12:13 PM

While it was a bit of an inconvenience to undo the havoc we'd wrought, she was clearly amused enough to post about it on her own blog, Tall Penguin:

Sunday, May 18, 2008

Spreadin' the Word...

In my bookstore job, I walk the floor for hours, helping customers find books. As I walk through my department I tidy up the shelves and clean up the messes the dear customers leave behind. As I was walking through the Religion department late yesterday afternoon, I noticed that two whole shelves of Bibles were missing. I immediately called my manager to see if perhaps they'd been moved or someone was working on this; unlikely considering it was a Saturday and we do nothing but sell on a Saturday. He said that it seemed likely they were stolen.

Loss Prevention was alerted and the three of us surveyed the empty shelves, wondering how someone could walk off with 40 bibles without our noticing. We each went back to our respective jobs, feeling a little dismayed that this theft had happened. And Bibles even. Granted, it is the most stolen book.

So, I'm walking through the Cooking department, and there on the shelf where the books on cocktails and alcoholic beverages are, are 3 Bibles. I smile. I tell loss prevention and the scavenger hunt begins. I put on my fundie thinking cap and set out to all the areas in the store that a Bible-thumper would think were in need of the Good Word. And sure enough, there they were. Bibles were found in Sexuality, Erotica, the Teen section, War and Sci Fi/Fantasy.

My manager was happy that we'd recovered the merchandise but was understandably a little peeved at someone's thinking that they were doing a good thing. Whether this was a fundie Christian or just someone out to play a little game, we'll never know. But it made for a very interesting night.

While she doesn't seem too upset about it, I think I might send an apology to her. She was clearly an innocent bystander, and I do feel a twinge of guilt for putting the peace and quiet of her afternoon shift in the crossfire.

....And that's all for now. I'd been thinking about starting a blog for a while (God knows I've definitely got the talent to put out something that people would enjoy reading when they should be doing something productive with their time). Being peripherally involved in a blogosphere maelstrom might be a good way to springboard into that.

All the best,
PR. [redacted]

As an afterthought, I'm kind of glad that Dr. Myers had the discretion not to post our names in his blog, or the photo with me and DK standing triumphantly in front of the vandalised bookshelf.

Rachel	-	what did you do to [PR]?
PR	-	lol
PR	-	long story
Rachel	-	i hear there are handcuffs involved
PR	-	there were
PR	-	hold on, I'll grab a beer first
Rachel	-	lol
Rachel	-	drinking alone...oh no
PR	-	hey, I've earned this one
Rachel	-	okay dish
Rachel	-	I cant wait any longer lol
PR	-	lol I've heard that one before
PR	-	I'm doing this at my pace
Rachel	-	thats what she said
PR	-	lol
Rachel	-	fine but i get all the details
PR	-	okay, so one of the AEPi alums had his birthday today at the Heart and Crown on Preston
PR	-	I'm too broke to go drinking, but I figured I'd come over and give him my regards
Rachel	-	and I take it this is where it starts to get interesting
PR	-	you have no idea
Rachel	-	:)
Rachel	-	go on
PR	-	so since I'm not drinking, I saddle up the loser cruiser and head to the Heart and Crown
Rachel	-	...
PR	-	if I were to be drinking, I wouldn't take the car
PR	-	but that's not relevant, so I'll keep going
Rachel	-	lol and you mean boat
O	-	boat
Rachel	-	and do go on
PR	-	so I find a parking space a few blocks away, and walk over
PR	-	the place is packed
PR	-	I find my friends, and there aren't even enough chairs for everyone at the table
PR	-	we're outside, and half of us are just off the property across the little metal rail
PR	-	so eventually I go over the rail to greet another friend who just got in from toronto
PR	-	about a minute later, a bouncer comes up to me and says "Are you planning to come back inside?"
PR	-	and I say "Yeah"
PR	-	"Don't bother. You're kicked out."
Rachel	-	wtf
PR	-	I know
PR	-	my friends were pretty stunned that I just got kicked out of the heart and crown for hopping onto the sidewalk over the rail, and they suggest I ask nicely to come back in
PR	-	so I go to the bouncer, and I say "Look, I didn't realize what a dick move that was back there. Is there any way you can let me back in?"
PR	-	"no."
Rachel	-	ouch
PR	-	yeah, but that's his right
Rachel	-	Im gunna grab a banana...brb...keep talking though
PR	-	np
Rachel	-	lol and Im going to eat it...nothing dirty so dont even say it
PR	-	so I go back to where my friends are, and just lean against the rail from the sidewalk side
PR	-	about 5 minutes later, the bouncer tells me to go home
PR	-	I say "Are you telling me that I can't be on public property?"
PR	-	he says "get off this sidewalk"
Rachel	-	wow he really had it out for you
PR	-	so I ask if he can legally ask me to get off of a public bench and sidewalk if I'm not causing a disturbance?
PR	-	and I was right
PR	-	so he says to my friends, "alright, I can't kick this guy off the bench, but if any part of his body crosses over that rail, you're all kicked out"
PR	-	"fine."
PR	-	and that was the last time any part of me was within their property
PR	-	so I stay on the bench and tlak with my friends
PR	-	and when the waitress comes by, I ask to speak to the manager
PR	-	she says that they're really busy, and that it oculd be a while
PR	-	*couldc
PR	-	*could
PR	-	I tell her "don't worry, I'm not in any rush"
PR	-	so after about 10 minutes or so, the manager comes up to me with the bouncer
PR	-	I told her I was sorry about hopping the rail onto the sidewalk, and would if be possible to rejoin my friends on the other side?
PR	-	she says no. their liquor license requires that they kick out someone who does that
PR	-	which isn't unreasonable for her
Rachel	-	yah but you were sober
PR	-	not a fucking sip
PR	-	but she was right on that point
PR	-	her hands were tied, and I didn't have a problem with that
PR	-	I wasn't going to argue
PR	-	then she says, "if you're going to cause a problem, we can call the police"
PR	-	I say "I'm not going to cause anything. If I can't come back in, then what I will do is stay on this public bench. I hope you don't call the police, but I'm not doing anything wrong. If you want to, that's your perrogative."
Rachel	-	lol
PR	-	so they leave, and I go back to talking to my friends
PR	-	who are pretty amazed at what just happened
PR	-	then Jeremy says "they're coming back with police"
Rachel	-	LOL are you fuckig serious
PR	-	I'm facing away from the cops, and I don't turn around.
PR	-	I just ask how far away they are
PR	-	"about 20 seconds"
Rachel	-	omfg
PR	-	so I keep talking to jeremy for about 20 seconds
PR	-	from a public bench, on a public sidewalk
Rachel	-	sober too
PR	-	keep in mind, at no point in this evening have I had a drink, lost my temper, or even raised my voice
PR	-	well, I had 5 drinks as soon as I got to sunnyside
PR	-	but again, not relevant
Rachel	-	lol
PR	-	so I keep talking to jeremy until I feel the cop grab me my the arm from behind
PR	-	he tells me to leave
PR	-	I ask on what grounds
PR	-	he says "tresspassing"
Rachel	-	wtf
Rachel	-	that is SUCH bullshit
PR	-	I tell him that I'm on a public bench
Rachel	-	leave it to the cops to take the side of the buisness
PR	-	and that I have no plans to trespass on their property
PR	-	and he says - and I'm not making this up - "you're in my city"
Rachel	-	bastard
PR	-	"you've got two choices: you can go home, or you can go to jail"
Rachel	-	wtf
Rachel	-	you CANNOT be arrested for that shit
PR	-	I ask him if he's going to arrest me for sitting on a public bench
Rachel	-	what an arrogant pig
PR	-	so he says again, "you can go home, or you can go to jail"
PR	-	I say "I'd like that in writing"
Rachel	-	lol
Rachel	-	o0o
Rachel	-	you badass
PR	-	so he says "hands on the railing. you're under arrest."
PR	-	"here's your writing"
Rachel	-	OMG
Rachel	-	no wayy
PR	-	way.
PR	-	so he puts the handcuffs on, and my friends are just in shock
Rachel	-	thats kind of hot though...Id like to be arrested lol
PR	-	lol
PR	-	my friend called me after to ask why I was grinning while getting cuffed
PR	-	I didn't realise I was grinning
Rachel	-	lool
Rachel	-	omg I WISH i could have seen that
PR	-	so he calls a squad car, (code 93 or something), and leads me to it
Rachel	-	lol tell me more
PR	-	sorry, back
Rachel	-	but really that is pretty hot...you got arrested
PR	-	so once we're out of earshot, he says "I'm going to tell you one more time. You can go home, or you can go to jail."
PR	-	sorry, my bad
PR	-	"You can go home, or you can go to jail and do this by the book"
PR	-	I tell him "I haven't done anything wrong tonight, officer. I think I'd like to do this by the book."
PR	-	so he puts me in the squad car and turns me over to the officer driving it
Rachel	-	LOL
Rachel	-	man I really wish i could have seen this go down
PR	-	lol
PR	-	I'm so pissed off at my friends
PR	-	when he said "hands on the railing"
PR	-	I gestured at them to get a fucking camera out
PR	-	and they just stood there like idiots
Rachel	-	LOL
Rachel	-	fuck
Rachel	-	that sucks
PR	-	I wanted a picture of that
Rachel	-	a picture would have been epic
PR	-	a) because it would have come in handy in court
O	-	and b) because it looks badass
Rachel	-	omg yes
Rachel	-	that would be a hot picture
Rachel	-	i dont know what it is but anything related to jailtime= hot
PR	-	sorry to disappoint you, rachel, but I never went to jail
Rachel	-	lol you coudnt handle it
PR	-	the second cop wasn't as big a dick. He drove me around the corner and said that I wasn't being held
PR	-	I told him I'd like to get everything on the record anyway
Rachel	-	I once found out a guy i found attractive did about 3 years in jail..and it turned me on
Rachel	-	lol
Rachel	-	i take it he just toko you home then?
Rachel	-	*took
PR	-	no
PR	-	after I told him. I said I wanted to be given the breathalyzer test
Rachel	-	good.
PR	-	I hadn't had anyhting to drink
PR	-	but that car didn't have a test machine
PR	-	I asked if any nearby squad cars did
PR	-	he said "it doesn't matter, you're not driving home, are you?"
PR	-	and I said that yes, I was.
PR	-	so he asks what kind of car I own, and where it's parked
PR	-	when we get to it, he lets me out of the squad car, and smells my breath
PR	-	which pissed me off, because I wanted an actual readout for the record
Rachel	-	yah
Rachel	-	that is SUCH bullshit!
PR	-	then he unlocks the handcuffs and hands me a charge citation for trespassing
Rachel	-	but a bunch of guys from your frat saw it happen...your a legend lol
Rachel	-	whatttt
PR	-	yeah
PR	-	I ask him how I go about disputing that in court
PR	-	he says that the info's all on the citation, and that if I challenged it, he would testify against me.
Rachel	-	jackass
PR	-	once I got into my car, he drove off
Rachel	-	he wasnt even there
PR	-	I checked the 20 messages I'd gotten in the 10 minutes since I got arrested, then came back here
Rachel	-	omfg that is bullshit
Rachel	-	definately fight that
PR	-	I will.
Rachel	-	lol but [PR]...you got arrested
Rachel	-	how hot
Rachel	-	is that
PR	-	hey, when I was asked to leave the bar, I left. When they told me not to touch their railing, I didn't. But when a bouncer tells me to get off a public sidewalk, he can go fuck himself.
Rachel	-	oh definately
PR	-	and when a cop does the same, I made him arrest me
Rachel	-	that is such bullshit
Rachel	-	lol
Rachel	-	oh you badass
PR	-	lol fuck off
Rachel	-	lol
PR	-	I'm way too irritated right now to deal with sarcasm
Rachel	-	you may not find it great now but im sure its a story you will love telling
PR	-	oh, you have no idea
Rachel	-	and im serious that shit is hot
Rachel	-	you got arrested
Rachel	-	hott
PR	-	lol
PR	-	seirously though, apparently I was grinning the entire time
Rachel	-	you would
PR	-	I did.
PR	-	so what did you do tonight?
Rachel	-	I talked to Hani about how I got ditched for the black BBQ and then I tried to help him come up with a name for his team for guild wars
PR	-	lol
Rachel	-	they ended up with the same lame name they started with
Rachel	-	and you know i had one of those days where i take forever getting ready only to get fucking ditched
Rachel	-	im so pissed
PR	-	I think the funniest part was when I was in the squad car
PR	-	and I was crushing the cigarettes in my back pocket
PR	-	now, you obviously don't reach into a pocket to grab an unknown object while in police custody
Rachel	-	lol
PR	-	so I ask, "Officer, I'm just going to reach into my pocket to move my cigarettes to somewhere that they won't get crushed"
PR	-	so he says okay
PR	-	then he asks "What's a guy like you doing smoking anyway?"
PR	-	and I say....
PR	-	I know you've read my blog, so you probably know the answer
PR	-	"shiny packaging and peer pressure"
PR	-	sarcasm: not always the ebst approach
PR	-	*best
Rachel	-	lol
Rachel	-	not with cops
Rachel	-	its best to let them dominate
Rachel	-	lol
PR	-	whatever, I got their names.
Rachel	-	good
PR	-	I'm not going to go home because a cop threatens to arrest me. not if I haven't broken a law
Rachel	-	fuck that is so messed up
Rachel	-	but still..hott
Rachel	-	lol
PR	-	lol thanks
Rachel	-	how were their cuffs?
PR	-	left some bruises, but otherwise not bad
Rachel	-	damn
Rachel	-	I want some of those
PR	-	they feel the same as the ones I have, but they ratcheted them tighter than I do






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