Yet another of those “answer this set of questions and we’ll tell you what you believe” tests. According to 5 Dimensional Policial [sic] Compass, I am:
You are a: Right-Leaning Anarchist Isolationist Cosmopolitan Liberal
Collectivism score: -33%
Authoritarianism score: -100%
Internationalism score: -67%
Tribalism score: -33%
Liberalism score: 33%
H/T to John Donovan, who is a “Left-Leaning Anti-Government Non-Interventionist Nationalist Liberal”. Splitter!
Part of the problem with hugging is that it has become a social convention, rather than what it once was, which was an expression of genuine emotion.
There are some times when a hug is appropriate. Those times are when there’s a marriage proposal in the air or a body in the ground.
Hugging is for celebration, or comforting someone who’s had a setback. Hugging is not for noting that two people have both managed to meet at Chili’s after work. Being at Chili’s is not a cause for celebration, and nor is it quite dire enough to require comforting.
An even more important rule is Men don’t hug. The only time men should hug is when male family members are observing a major life milestone, such as a major promotion, the safe return from overseas deployment, or noting a witty observation in the commentary audio track of Die Hard.
The only exception to these guidelines if a man tells another man, “Boy, I could sure use a hug.” But he won’t say that, because he’s a man, so just stop with the male-on-male hugging.
To be serious, if I could: There are rules of physical distance, and there are meanings to breaches of those rules.
People of course do occasionally touch each other. But those touches have important communicative purposes precisely because of the general rule that we don’t touch each other.
[…]
There’s something a little child-like about hugging, too. It’s an innocent gesture — it’s intended to be so.
But it sort of ignores the adult-world meaning of intimate touching.
So I wonder if it’s somehow connected to a growing preference for Child World rules, and an increasing rejection of Adult World rules.
Ace, “Arms Are Not Made For Hugging”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2014-10-10.
As you may have noticed, the pace of posting here on the blog has gone down a bit this week, as I haven’t had as much free time in the morning as usual: I’ve been commuting into Toronto. The good part is that my destination is quite close to Toronto Union Station, so I can take the GO train in rather than driving.
Yesterday, I just missed my train:
That’s my 08:31 train departing the platform. I got to the head of the stairs just as the doors closed. Fortunately there’s another train not long afterwards (although it’s not an express, so it takes longer).
Private William Penman who died in 1915 at Le Touret (25 years old) was Elizabeth’s great uncle. Private Walter Porteous who died in 1917 at Passchendaele (18 years old) was my great uncle.
Dear Sir/Madam,
Thank you for submitting a name for the Roll of Honour at the Tower of London. We are delighted to confirm that your nomination will be included at the ceremony on the 24th of September.
The list of 180 names will be read from the poppy-filled Tower moat at sunset, starting at 7:25pm (19.25). The names will be read the order in which they were submitted and validated.
We regret we are unable to make changes to the reading lists.
At the end of the reading, which will take about 20-30 minutes, an Army bugler will play the Last Post.
If you would like to watch, you can get a good view from the area in front of the Tower ticket desks on Tower Hill.
We will be filming the ceremony and posting the video online. This site is currently under construction, we will let you know when it goes live.
We are also adding the lists of names being read each night at http://rollofhonour.tumblr.com/ so that they can be seen and remembered from anywhere in the world.
Garrick is a cousin of mine (on my mother’s side). We’ve never met, but that’s true of a lot of my distant relatives … the pond does get in the way of regular visits.
Earlier this year, I had occasion to run a Google search for “Mr Gameway’s Ark” (it’s still almost unknown: the Googles, they do nothing). However, I did find a very early post on the old site that I thought deserved to be pulled out of the dusty archives, because it explains why I can — to this day — barely stand to listen to “Little Drummer Boy”:
James Lileks has a concern about Christmas music:
This isn’t to say all the classics are great, no matter who sings them. I can do without “The Little Drummer Boy,” for example.
It’s the “Bolero” of Christmas songs. It just goes on, and on, and on. Bara-pa-pa-pum, already. Plus, I understand it’s a sweet little story — all the kid had was a drum to play for the newborn infant — but for anyone who remembers what it was like when they had a baby, some kid showing up unannounced to stand around and beat on the skins would not exactly complete your mood. Happily, the song has not spawned a sequel like “The Somewhat Larger Cymbal Adolescent.”
This reminds me about my aversion to this particular song. It was so bad that I could not hear even three notes before starting to wince and/or growl.
Back in the early 1980’s, I was working in Toronto’s largest toy and game store, Mr Gameway’s Ark. It was a very odd store, and the owners were (to be polite) highly idiosyncratic types. They had a razor-thin profit margin, so any expenses that could be avoided, reduced, or eliminated were so treated. One thing that they didn’t want to pay for was Muzak (or the local equivalent), so one of the owners brought in his home stereo and another one put together a tape of Christmas music.
Note that singular. “Tape”.
Christmas season started somewhat later in those distant days, so that it was really only in December that we had to decorate the store and cope with the sudden influx of Christmas merchandise. Well, also, they couldn’t pay for the Christmas merchandise until sales started to pick up, so that kinda accounted for the delay in stocking-up the shelves as well …
So, Christmas season was officially open, and we decorated the store with the left-over krep from the owners’ various homes. It was, at best, kinda sad. But — we had Christmas music! And the tape was pretty eclectic: some typical 50’s stuff (White Christmas and the like), some medieval stuff, some Victorian stuff and that damned Drummer Boy song.
We were working ten- to twelve-hour shifts over the holidays (extra staff? you want Extra Staff, Mr. Cratchitt???), and the music played on. And on. And freaking on. Eternally. There was no way to escape it.
To top it all off, we were the exclusive distributor for a brand new game that suddenly was in high demand: Trivial Pursuit. We could not even get the truck unloaded safely without a cordon of employees to keep the random passers-by from snatching boxes of the damned game. When we tried to unpack the boxes on the sales floor, we had customers snatching them out of our hands and running (running!) to the cashier. Stress? It was like combat, except we couldn’t shoot back at the buggers.
Oh, and those were also the days that Ontario had a Sunday closing law, so we were violating all sorts of labour laws on top of the Sunday closing laws, so the Police were regular visitors. Given that some of our staff spent their spare time hiding from the Police, it just added immeasurably to the tension levels on the shop floor.
And all of this to the background soundtrack of Christmas music. One tape of Christmas music. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.
It’s been over 20 years, and I still feel the hackles rise on the back of my neck with this song … but I’m over the worst of it now: I can actually listen to it without feeling that all-consuming desire to rip out the sound system and dance on the speakers. After two decades.
Elizabeth and I got married in Toronto on this date in 1983. It was a bit of a race to get to the courthouse on time — my so-called best man decided that he had to go back to Mississauga “for a shower” that morning, and was quite late getting back into Toronto. Trying to get a cab to hurry in downtown Toronto traffic was a waste of effort, so I very nearly missed my own wedding. Elizabeth was not pleased with me holding up the show (even though I could rightfully claim it wasn’t my fault). The rest of the day is rather a blur to me now.
We had the reception that evening at a lovely house in the Playter Estates (during which my father tried to pick a fight with Elizabeth’s uncle), and then set off for our very brief honeymoon in Niagara-on-the-Lake the next day. We could only afford two nights at the Prince of Wales hotel, and because we got married on Saturday, we were in NOTL for Sunday and Monday nights. Back in 1983, Ontario still had fairly restrictive Sunday closing laws, so there was very little to do — almost everything was closed. (And that was probably for the best, as we had almost no money to spend anyway…)
One of the few businesses we found open in the area was the original Chateau des Charmes estate winery (not the huge, imposing facility of today: a small industrial-looking building a few kilometres away), where the only person on duty was Mme Andrée Bosc who gave us an exhaustive tasting experience and showed us around the winery. Neither of us were experienced wine drinkers, so this was wonderful for both of us. I’d love to say that we started our wine cellar that day, but that would only be partially true: we bought about a dozen bottles of various Chateau des Charmes wines, but we couldn’t afford to restock after those had been opened. We visited the winery every year on our anniversary for about a decade, until we got out of the habit of going back to NOTL (which was around the time our son was born).
After our brief honeymoon, we both had to go back to our jobs. Very shortly after that, my employer (the almost-unknown-to-Google Mr Gameway’s Ark) went bankrupt, which was financially bad timing for us, having just spent most of our tiny cash hoard on our honeymoon.
A few weeks back, we said goodbye to our older dog, Buffy. Yesterday, we welcomed the newest member of the pack, Maggie:
Maggie and Xander on an introductory walk before we adopted her
Maggie is a rescue dog from Oklahoma. She’s part Corgi and part Basset Hound (the original rescue group noted her being a “Basset Mix”). We were told she’s about two years old, but she seems younger to us. She’s had at least one batch of puppies but has now been spayed.
Maggie and Xander got on well during our introductory walk at the rescue group, and they’ve played very well together since we picked her up yesterday. The rescue group has a minimum 24-hour cooling off period after you agree to adopt one of their dogs … I guess they had too many people changing their minds very soon after taking on a dog.
After we picked her up yesterday afternoon, we brought her back to the house and then took both dogs for a long walk around the area. Both of them were eager to walk and didn’t object to the other one being along for the experience. We got home and Xander came in first, followed by Maggie, then it was out to the back yard for exploration and some rough-housing. She’s very affectionate and moves very quickly, so getting a clear photo of her was a bit of a challenge … here she is just having come up for a quick petting before she goes and chases Xander again:
One of our key concerns about getting another dog was that any new addition would have to be able to cope with Xander’s combination of high energy and occasional fits of idiocy: Maggie already seems to have his number and plays with him very well indeed. It helps that she’s nearly as heavy as he is, but built closer to the ground: she can push him around when she really tries. I think he’s enjoying having another dog in the house again, and he almost certainly needs the exercise!
Saying goodbye. Goodbye Buffy.
Buffy 1999?-26 August 2013
Buffy was a rescue dog we adopted in July, 2007 as a companion for our first dog Xander. Xander accepted her immediately as the top dog in the pack. She’d had a very rough early life, including being used as a breeder dog in a puppy mill and had clearly been abused (the pet rescue organization said she’d been thrown from a moving vehicle on an interstate highway in Ohio). She was blind in one eye (which we had to have removed shortly after we adopted her) and had only minimal sight in the other eye. In spite of her injuries and the increasing debility of age (Cushing’s Disease and diabetes), she was a very dignified dog … and other dogs almost always gave her the space a dog ten times her size would command.
We like to think we gave her a happy home.
I’d just sent an email to Jon, my former virtual landlord, thanking him for sending me the last item I posted when my email client UI was replaced with this:
So, if you are expecting me to respond to an email, it may be a while before I can do that…
Yeah, I slept in this morning after attending Brendan’s New Year’s Eve party in Toronto. It was a nice party, although we had our traditional problems with the wine (Bren has terrible luck in the particular bottles of wine he opens when I visit). As I was driving, I only sampled the wine anyway…
Driving through downtown Toronto at two in the morning is rarely as entertaining as it is on New Year’s: between the staggering celebrants on the sidewalk stumbling into traffic and the overly-cautious-drivers trying to get past them safely, it can be frustratingly slow. Last night’s worst drivers were the cabbies — but not for the usual excessive speed/random lane change reasons. Last night, it seemed like half the cabbies were drunk or stoned … and were driving too slowly and weaving in the lane even as they were going too slowly. That, combined with their seemingly random stops to pick up and drop off customers, made the taxis even more of a hazard than they usually are.
Even more remarkable was that we saw only a single marked police car over the entire drive (no RIDE checkpoints, either). I’m sure they were out at full strength, but aside from one SUV that pulled a fast U-turn at Yonge & Carleton, they were clearly patrolling different routes than the one we took.
Long ago, in the days before personal computers were ubiquitous, there were “zines” (short for magazines, correctly reflecting both non-professional status and less-than-totally-serious content). There was a wide variety of zines for all sorts of interests — rather like the back corners of the internet today, except they were physically distributed using the post office (and therefore had to stay within certain boundaries to be safe). Clive and I used to publish a zine for postal Diplomacy:
 Download PDF |
 Download PDF |
If you want to read ’em — and I wouldn’t blame you in the slightest if you didn’t — you can download a PDF of each issue from Doug’s Diplomacy and Eternal Sunshine. You’ll note that it was a much more innocent time then, as we not only listed our own contact information, but that of many others through the game listings and other parts.
Doug only has issues 11 and 12 available, but they’re a generous representation of what the rest of the production run was like: amateur, laboriously assembled, totally ignorant of both copyright and appropriate credits, and full of in-jokes that nobody aside from the production team would hope to understand (except the “Skulking Cavorter” column: even the publisher and editor had head-scratching moments over that, but it had a noisy fan club among the subscribers). It was a lot of fun to do, and once we ceased production I found I missed it a lot (but not enough to get back into doing it again). I published a few other zine-like things over the next few years, but didn’t get back into a regular publication schedule until I started the blog.
So, thanks to William Plante for digging up these musty relics and bringing them to my attention.
Obituary notice in the Calgary Herald, 27 September, 2012
Colin and I weren’t close — I hadn’t seen him in many years — but it’s still a shock when a family member (however distant) dies unexpectedly.
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