How much are a pair of pants worth?

Apparently, US $65 million.

You read that right. Not $65, not $650, not even $6,500. $65,000,000. If there was ever a lawsuit that was the definition of frivolous, this would be it.



via Kottke

Euro-style communities in China

Re-creating European cities China's latest housing trend

Snarky responses:

-It's like living in Europe, but without all those damn Europeans.
-It goes to show that China is tops at refabricating ANYTHING.
-If England, England was ever made into reality, it'd totally be China, China.
-hooray for Las Vegas-esque mass production and commodification of experiences!

Thinking

It's been one of those weeks where I've been nicely distracted from the thought of my thesis defense by some big ideas being discussed. Like my moniker suggests, I've been absorbing tons of information but very little's been trickling out. Still, I've quite enjoyed being absorbed in my thinking through its implications.

1) At my friend's birthday dinner, there was a brief discussion about the wonders of Canada and the myth (in the grand story sense, not the inaccuracy that it's come to mean) of our national healthcare. This dovetailed into Andrew's post about the long wait for treatment for his friend's ACL,how unfortunate the current circumstances have dictated the long wait and what is to be done. Are we forever burdened with 'equal access to crap' as some claimed in the comments, or is it better than we think it is?

It seems like private delivery of some medical services seem not completely unreasonable, as long as those parameters are strictly defined. If however, some feel that private delivery shouldn't be based on 'medical necessity', then what exactly? Surely, a compromise can be achieved that doesn't completely undermine the public system. This also assumes that those resources freed by private delivery could be redirected elsewhere to other parts of the public system, instead of just having it shrivel away. Part of the problem is the fact that small-scale trials are nearly impossible. You can't create an industry only to destroy it completely if it doesn't meet your political objectives. So what are our options for testing private delivery? Thought exercises just aren't that convincing.

2) At the same time, I've been reading Reed Scowen's "Time to Say Goodbye", whose thesis is that Quebec and Canada should separate (for reasons explained in the book) and Canada can be the better for it. I'm only 2/3 of the way through, but I was struck by this line,

"Canada is a country of minorities"

and what he defines Canada to be:

"...we are in a state of mutual allegiance with everyone who lives within Canada's borders, not with the objective of achieving a common substantive purpose, but through loyalty to the structure that provide us with our freedom and its corresponding responsibilities, to 'the authority of certain conditions in acting'."

"A deeply felt commitment of mutual allegiance with all Canadians; a commitment to parliamentary rule; the search for fairness in our respect for basic human rights and freedoms; respect for local and regional values and priorities; above all, a respect for the Constitution itself - that's what you get from being Canadian. This is our common culture, our civil association. It may not satisfy my definition of what it is to be Canadian. Nor yours. It does not make us unique in this world. But that's all that we all agree on. And it's enough."

My first thought was, "is that enough to bind us all together"? My second thought, of course, was, "let's see Molson try to sell that.

3) The 'country of minorities' made me think of the Ontario's citizen's assembly's referendum to the Ontario public on whether to change our electoral system from a first-past-the-post to a mixed-member proportional representation (PR) system. As a symbolic thing, it seems appropriate to have a country of minorities governed by minority-based coalitions. There are much better arguments for and against switching to any type of PR, of course. I just wasn't thinking about them at the time. I have no idea how it'll turn out, and while I know what the pundits like, I'm eager to see what Ontarians' views are.

4) Finally, The provincial Liberal government has decided to follow New Jersey, Australia and others to ban 'inefficient' light bulbs by 2010. Some think this is a good idea; others, not so much. While it seems quite heavy-handed to me, I'm wondering whether energy consumption (among other things) can be decreased without such government intervention or drastic environmental degradation?

To run again

I started running again now that it's warmed up (I've a strange aversion to treadmills...)

Anyways, 5k in 27 min = a very low bar to overcome. When I used to run with Matt, we did it in 23 min. This is punishment for being a blob for 5 months...

New Layout

There wasn't a huge need to revamp the layout, but my eyes were hurting from staring at all the white, which probably means everyone else was too. I also had to update parts of my blogroll (thx Megan), which gave me the impetus to spend the last two hours doing this.

If I was better with HTML and CSS, it would've been done a lot quicker and with a bit more sophistication. But then, if you were looking for sophistication in this blog, you clearly made the wrong turn at Albequerque. Hopefully, these colour schemes will also be much easier on the eyes.

Top 5 Books (so far): a High Fidelity tribute

I've just finished reading "High Fidelity", and having been voraciously consuming books since I've been working at Chapters, it seemed like fun to write out my top 5 books I've read so far:

Top 5 Picks
1) The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan
Written like a travelogue, the author takes its readers through the different ways we grow our food, from our current industrial production system, to the 'industrial organic', the truly sustainable model and 'hunter/gatherer' systems. Along the way, he examines the implications for each of them and shows that separating ourselves from our food sources has really undermined our appreciation of the food we eat and the environment from which it is produced.

2) The Dodecahedron (or a Frames for Frames) - Paul Glennon
Imagine each of the 12 self-contained short stories as a face on a 12-sided polygon, where the vertices and edges represent the elements common to the 'adjacent' stories. Is that such a cool concept or what?

3) Stanley Park - Timothy Taylor
I think it helped that I read this immediately after The Omnivore's Dilemma, as I was still mentally engaged with issues about how we grow our food. This novel isn't just about food, but also about identity, roots and the meaning of 'home'.

4) Made to Stick - Chip and Dan Heath
On a recommendation from a co-worker, it's all about how to get people to remember your ideas after you've told it to them. It's effective because it's like the duct tape on the book jacket: easy to use, useful for almost any situation, and their ideas really stick!

5) The Road - Cormac McCarthy
I've already said my piece about it HERE. I may end up buying it at some point, especially to see if I can peel off the 'Oprah's Book Club' sticker on the trade paperback edition.

Not all my reads, however, were fantastic. While none of them were awful, there were some that didn't satisfy:

Top 5 Surprisingly Disappointing Reads

1) DeNiro's Game - Rawi Hage
A Governor General's Award and a Giller Prize nominee, I expected this book to be one of the best reads of the year. While I understand the motivations behind the main character, I couldn't sympathize with him at all. I just thought he was a giant dick for a lot of the novel.

2) Colour of Magic - Terry Pratchett
Another co-worker recommendation. It's very fantastic and well-conceived world with its own internal logic. I just didn't find the plot of the novel to go anywhere. The main characters gets thrown from one ridiculous situation to another with no logical end. Maybe that's the whole point of Discworld, but it still didn't make me like it.

3) Getting to Maybe - Frances Westley et al.
The book's premise tries to show that individuals have been and can continue to be the focal point for major social change. It tries distill those real-life experiences into general rules for how individuals might want to get involved. However, the suggestions are too vague and if the people you describe couldn't predict that they would be this focal point, how can the authors? If the authors applied the ideas from Made to Stick, maybe it would've been more effective. Or, it's just something a book can't properly describe.

4) How Happy to Be - Katrina Onstad
I read this on a recommendation by Paul Wells, who found it to be an absolutely fantastic read. I read this after Stanley Park, and while they both seemed to tackle similar issues (particularly the estrangement with one's father), I thought Stanley Park handled them much more effectively. I also found the main character of this book to be more neurotic than necessary. The not-so-subtle in-jokes and monikers like "The other Big City Lefty newspaper" (get it, it's the Toronto Star, wink wink!) and "The Annual International Film Festival" (both paraphrased, but you get the idea) made me want to scream, "EITHER USE THE REAL NAMES OR MAKE UP A NAME!"

5) Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures - Vincent Lam
It's not a bad collection of short stories. I really didn't know what to expect. It's more me than the book. I think the fact that the connections built up between the characters in the earlier stories quickly unravels in the later stories left me wanting. While I understand that this is what happens once you leave university or med school or whatever, it just left me with a neutral feeling. It does make me want to read more short story collections to see how others do it.

Honorable Mention: High Fidelity - Nick Hornby
This was entirely my own fault, having seen and loved the movie before reading the book. It's not that the book was bad, but I couldn't develop my own scenes from the descriptions in the book. Instead, all I could think about was Jack Black and John Cusack...)

Maybe I'll post again when I've found a real job and can no longer read books at the current pace and see if the list has changed any.

What Energy Savings?

I'm shocked...shocked I say, to hear that arbitrarily changing an already arbitrary method of keeping time resulted in NO energy savings.

I mean, why should we put our efforts into real energy conservation efforts when we can just keep moving time back and forth and make it look like we're trying to do something?