Mind

Day 96 – June 20, 2020

A couple of weeks ago, a couple of Thai restaurant operators were sentenced to 723 years in prison… each. What egregious crime did they commit to warrant such a sentence? Basically, they lied. False advertising. They sold a bunch of vouchers that they couldn’t possibly honour… things like a full seafood meal for 10 people… for $30. People gobbled up the vouchers, but quickly started running into problems cashing them in… like a waiting list of several months. The restaurant finally pulled the plug and went bankrupt. “Sorry — we can’t keep up with this demand, so we’re outta here”. Not so fast.

This is textbook fraud… fraud 101… and Thai people aren’t quite so tolerant. In 2017, a Thai court sentenced a fraudster to more than 13,000 years in prison.

You don’t just get to say “OK, I lied…”, and move along. And truthfully, around here, lying is a pretty big deal too. A lot of people mess up, and the courts or whatever else deal with it… and that’s that, usually. But if you lie about it, it’s lot more serious. A good example that comes to mind is Martha Stewart… she did something stupid, for a stupid amount of money… a drop in the bucket for her… maybe $50,000. She acted on inside information, and, knowing before the public that a certain stock price was going to drop, sold some shares. So, she didn’t actually make $50,000 — she actually just avoided losing it. Stupid. And she got caught. And if she’d just admitted to it, she would’ve gotten a slap on the wrist, a fine that would also have been nothing more than a drop in the bucket, and the story would’ve been in the news for at most one day. But she lied about it… under oath. And for that, she went to prison for 5 months.

Here’s another word of the day:

Anecdoche: (noun) A conversation in which everyone is talking, but nobody is listening.

There’s a lot of that going on these days. Actually, it’s probably been going on for a long time. There are a lot of people who just like to listen to themselves talk. They often don’t have much of substance to say, but that doesn’t matter… that’s not the issue. They like to talk… at, not “to”, anyone who’ll listen. A room full of those sorts of people is a very special sort of cacophony. But that cacophony is greatly amplified when some of them are liars. And then just change it… it’s not a room of people, who ostensibly could be having real conversations; no… it’s leaders and decision makers… talking to each other, through each other, making it up as they go… contradicting themselves, contradicting reality.

This is what’s it’s like listening to most people with a microphone. This is what it’s like reading most of the news these days. So-and-so said this, so-and-so said that. They talk at each other. They lie. Then couldn’t care less how their exposition is received; they just need to say it, attempt to make it “stick”, and now — frighteningly — do not care when it’s not accepted, because there’s no consequence. There’s no judge, there’s no 5-month prison sentence. There’s nothing. Just take it. Don’t take it. Whatever. Move on.

If these were 5-year-olds, perhaps it’d be fun… watching kids weave their complicated houses of cards… and then watching them get in trouble from the teacher when it all collapses. The thing is, this isn’t kindergarten…. this is the real world, where as a result of lies and the inability or desire to listen, people will die. Lots of them… and some of them, before they die, will feel betrayed and cheated that they were lied to.

My morbid fascination led me to watch a few minutes of this rally in Oklahoma… I was interested to see the background. The crowd behind the speaker (it’s Eric Trump as I write this) is beautifully curated, as always. Lots of red shirts, lots of red hats, lots of white people… but also, strategically placed (perfectly placed, in fact). An Asian guy. A Black guy. Hey, good looking young ethnic people, want to be on TV? Come with me. Very few masks. How do you convince people they’re being lied to… especially when maybe they know, and don’t care? You don’t, I guess. And the consequence of these lies isn’t some ridiculous number of years in prison. It’s serious illness, or worse.

 

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By |2020-10-08T01:22:25-07:00June 20th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, The First 100 Days, Politics, Interesting Words, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: , , , , |6 Comments
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Day 93 – June 17, 2020

Hernán Cortés (1485-1547) was a Spanish Conquistador who led the expedition that led to the downfall of the Aztec Empire. He’s the guy that turned Mexico “Spanish”. As such, depending who you ask, you’ll get very different answers… To the Spanish, he was an adventurous, conquering hero who brought great wealth and pride to his people. To the Aztecs, he was a raping, pillaging, savage barbarian who destroyed and stole their land, their history, their culture and their prized possessions.

That’s a pretty wide and varying difference of opinion, the sort that reminds us that while “History Is Written By The Victors” (Sir Winston Churchill said that, or quoted someone else saying that), it’s not quite so simple. The implication is that when it’s all said and done, those who won get to create the narrative that history will record as facts, shove that truth down the throats of future historians, and that will be that, especially these days.

The obvious example is the current President down south who likes to make things up and hope they stick. This began a few hours after his inauguration, where the relatively trivial and irrelevant claim that his inauguration crowd was the biggest ever — was attempted to be presented as fact. Period. It’s the truth and it’s what’ll go in the history books. Except, of course, it wasn’t true. There were witnesses and cameras and everyone there and pretty much every version of verifiable evidence to contradict that claim, but that hardly seemed to matter. It was presented as “Alternative Facts™”.

Except that the world isn’t quite so gullible. “I guess we’ll move on” seemed to be the general consensus. If the president wants to make things up (3,000,000 illegal voters), etc… we all know it’s not true, so let’s just move on. All the lies are documented, so whatever. One day it might matter; today it doesn’t.

The thing is though, the world seems to be collectively getting sick of alternative facts. False claims, false reports. People are tired of having unverifiable BS jammed down their throats, and the result is an awakening that’s spreading into all sorts of different facets. I’m very interested to see where it all goes. To those who complain we’re erasing history… no, we’re not. Perhaps re-interpreting it, because perhaps the guys who were originally labeled the good guys — the guys who wrote the history… neglected to take into account the other side. We’re not so big on statues around here, but if we were, there’d probably be a few that’d need toppling.

The first one that comes to mind would be Joseph Trutch. Trutch was an English-born Canadian engineer, also surveyor and politician, who served as this province’s first Lieutenant Governor… guiding B.C. during Confederation. So far, so good. But also… Trutch was also horribly racist, and said some things about the Aboriginal peoples that are so vile that I won’t quote them. He also rolled back their previously-agreed-upon land reserves by more than 90%. Maybe in its day, “just the way it is”, but through today’s lens, more than worthy of a good statue-toppling. There’s a Trutch St. on the west side, and there’s one in Victoria. There were some rumblings a couple of years ago… perhaps time to consider changing them. Not much came of it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we start hearing about it again. Uncle Ben’s. Aunt Jemima. They had their day. Time to move on.

All of these changes are occurring at the exact same time, when facts regarding something else that’s critical… our health and our economy and the next several years of existence… are all being argued about, with wide and varying opinions.

At the end of the day, we need to know what’s going on. Transparency, clarity, all the rest of it. There are those “victors” already trying to write today’s history, but fortunately, we’re not all ignorant sheep. You can try to convince someone it’s safe to go back to normal, but don’t expect they’ll just believe it. The Vice President says coronavirus is over. Twenty-one states are reporting rising numbers. Some states are shutting down again, the obvious consequence of opening up too soon. And around here… you know what, not great numbers. We would’ve been very happy with these numbers two months ago, but as far as trends go… it’s creeping in the wrong direction. Again, low two-digit numbers aren’t a calamity, but I prefer high single-digit numbers. Let’s not forget, this thing isn’t over… history needs to be written… just not yet.

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By |2020-10-08T01:22:26-07:00June 17th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, The First 100 Days, Politics, Business & Economics, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , |5 Comments
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Day 91 – June 15, 2020

It was nice to see Dr. Henry and Adrian Dix back on the podium. It’s been a while — since Thursday, in fact, that we got a live update. There’s something so incredibly calming about the way those two present themselves, and their messages. I suppose it helps that they’re reporting good news. The numbers locally are slightly higher than a week ago, but still nominal. No new deaths since Friday. Green data all across Canada today. Might I add, across the country, the new-cases numbers from yesterday and today (+379, +344), are the lowest since March 22nd… when they were heading very quickly in the other direction.

I don’t get stressed watching these reports any more; very calming… very sophisticated… very cultured. Here in Canada, we might take this sort of demeanour for granted… but elsewhere… you don’t have to look too far to see the way different cultures approach things.

Yeah, you know, I was going to write about the cultural differences, between here and south of the border, but perhaps that particular topic has already gotten enough attention from me. I get it. You get it… cultural thing or not, let’s talk about something else.

Like maybe a little follow-up to a post from a couple of days ago, where I mentioned San José, Costa Rica. I spent a fair bit of time down there at the turn of the century, and it was quite an experience. You don’t have to travel far in this world to collide with significant cultural differences, and as per my usual rant of not being ok with “that’s just the way it is”, that place certainly offerers plenty of opportunity to scratch your head in disbelief.

The first thing is… this is the place that U2 had in mind when they wrote “Where The Streets Have No Name”. The streets, literally, have no names. Destinations are defined by landmarks… like the government office whose official address included the words “behind the papaya/watermelon/cantaloupe stand”. Another one was “200 metres east of the bridge, north 300 metres, left at the Alcoholics Anonymous 100 metres, yellow house”. McDonalds, mango trees, large boulders, Antonio’s house, and, on one occasion, “where the bank used to be” — all parts of official addresses.

Interestingly, at some point, someone decided to try numbering some streets… they did some of “downtown”, but the plan seems like it was ultimately abandoned… and nobody uses the street numbers. Why is that, you might be wondering…

Like every other Latin American city, town or village… you will find, right in the middle, the Central Plaza. From there… avenues that run east-west, and streets that run north-south, nicely numbered. So far so good, right? Except… in San José, the avenues north of the plaza are the odd numbers, and those south of the plaza are the even numbers. Want to go from 5ᵗʰ Ave. to 6ᵗʰ Ave? That’s a 6-block walk. And to keep things ridiculously consistent, same with the streets. West of the plaza, even numbers… east of the plaza, odd numbers. A walk from 12ᵗʰ St. to 13ᵗʰ St. will be a very nice 13-block walk. Back in school, you may have asked the teacher… like, teacher, when am I ever going to use trig in the real world? Well, if you’re a kid in San José, there’s an answer to that. Typical word problem…. If Carlito is walking east on 1st Ave, and he just crossed 14ᵗʰ St, and Juanita is walking west on 4ᵗʰ Ave. and just crossed 11tᵗʰ St, who will reach the Central Plaza first? Well, if you take the cosine of the angle formed by (1,14) and then take the tangent of (4,11) and then… oh, wait… more important point… if the question is, “When/where will they meet?”, and you throw into the mix the fact that one of them got lost and asked for directions, then the answer is… “never”. Because for some reason, the friendly people in San José don’t really like to say “I don’t know”. So when you ask for directions, you will always be given directions… very confidently, with specific instructions and finger pointing. And often, they will be completely wrong, the result of someone just making it up because they don’t want to admit they don’t know. I guess there’s another relevant U2 song that applies to that place… “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”. I guess it’s a cultural thing.

It reminds me the time there that we went to the beach; me and a couple of friends. It was a “Beautiful Day” (yeah, U2 song), and the beach was quite packed. Curiously, nobody was in the water. And, there was no lifeguard… the lifeguard stand was empty, but had a red flag. Weird… the water looked pretty calm, with “Every Breaking Wave” (U2, of course) but not a single person in there. To hell with it, we thought… we’ll take the risk of these one-foot waves. We went into the water… it was warm and amazing, and we spent a long time in there. A few people looked our way, but nobody else came in, and nobody said a thing. We eventually left, packed our stuff, and found a nice beach-side restaurant for nachos and beer. I was the only one who spoke fluent Spanish, so I was the one who did most of the talking with the waiter… who asked where we were from, etc. I asked him about the beach — so beautiful, calm water… how come nobody was swimming? Oh… he said… yeah, this morning a whole bunch of sharks were spotted in the water. Oh. Yeah… great, thank you. You'd think one of the thousand people on the beach might have said something. I guess it’s a cultural thing.

Actually, same trip — we went snorkelling… this was a few days later, and the shark thing was still on our minds… but the tour guide/captain assured me, where we were going — no sharks. I wasn’t comfortable with the whole thing… I really had no “Desire” to go… but a group of people wanted to go… so, ok, let’s go. We went out in this guy’s boat… put on the equipment and went in. Some jumped in, others lowered themselves in… and somehow, I managed to scrape my leg on the way into the water. It was bleeding, a tiny bit. OK, I thought, there’s no way I should in the water if there’s any chance of a shark nearby. But the captain was adamant… no no, no problem, don’t worry, it’s fine. I vehemently disagreed, but he really said I should go in. Then I said something like, hey buddy… you’re going to get paid either way. The full price, even if we don’t all go in the water. Ooohhh, ok, yes sir… yes, maybe you shouldn’t go in the water. Yeah, thanks man. I guess it’s a cultural thing.

There’s plenty to learn from other cultures… and if you want to go somewhere cool, “I Will Follow”, but certainly one thing I’ve learned over the years, having travelled to many interesting places… I’m always happy to come home. With Or Without You.

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By |2020-10-08T01:22:27-07:00June 15th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, The First 100 Days, Politics, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |9 Comments
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Day 89 – June 13, 2020

Rules are not actually “meant to be broken”… that’s a just a nonsensical way to justify stupid behaviour without wanting to take responsibility. But then again, some rules are stupid — like, genuinely ridiculous… and as I’ve written before (on May 16th, in fact), I have a big problem with people justifying nonsense to me with “that’s just the way it is”. We’d all still be living in caves if that’s how everyone thought.

There are people who “question everything” — and they’re typically insufferable jerks, because apparently they know better… about everything. There are people who aren’t too good at critical thinking, and might believe anything. Don’t try to argue with those people. And… there are people who are both. Just stay away.

There are people, and I’m one of them, who do question a lot… not because, just for fun, I want to be an oppositional jerk… but because if I see a much better way of doing something, I just can’t sit around and let it be. And if there’s a rule that makes no sense to me, yeah… I might break it. Which often leads to an argument with someone whose only fallback position is “because that’s the rule”. I will always defend my opinion, but it can be frustrating.

I was about to write about numerous examples where some version of this is the relevant point… but everything that comes to mind seems to do with airport security. So let’s talk about that. There’s plenty to dig into with that particular example.

I used to have a little screwdriver on my keychain… and when I say little, I mean for eyeglasses. The pointy part was less than 1cm long, and went into a tiny handle. The bottom part of the handle was threaded, so it screwed into the base, which was attached to my keychain. The whole thing was not much bigger than a medicine capsule.

What’s that, asked the TSA guy… I showed him. “You can’t take screwdrivers onto the plane, sir.”

“You’re kidding, that’s hardly a screwdriver.”

“Sorry, that’s the rule”.

“Come on, how can this be considered dangerous?”

“Sorry sir, you’ll have to dispose of it.”

This was a $5 trinket, not the end of the world… but what was further annoying was what else was on the same keychain, including a sort of multipurpose skeleton-looking key which is a flat screwdriver, a bottle opener, a saw, a nail file, a tiny ruler… and a few other things. But it looked like a key, so it was ok. Zero critical thinking.

One time I got stopped “randomly” just as I was boarding the plane, pulled over at that spot where the duty-free hand-off takes place. The guy searched everything…. “Why me?” I asked. “Nothing personal”, he said… “totally random, I just pick every 4ᵗʰ person”. I didn’t feel like getting into an argument with him about how that’s possibly, by definition, the least random way of doing it… I could’ve argued that for a long time, but I’m not sure he would’ve understood it. And anyway, the longer I stood there, the less chance the overheard bin above my seat would still be free. That’d be a total disaster.

There are a few airports in the world where, when you land… here’s how it works. You fill out a customs landing card and simply hand it to the guy. Then, there is this magic gate… with a big red button. You go through one by one and hit the button, and when you do, one of two lights turns on. Green — off you go. Red — search everything. Standing and watching it, it became apparent that it is indeed pretty random. It averaged red about one in five, but there were streaks of green that ran from 3 to 7. One thing that never happened was two reds in a row, and a lot of people had figured that out… so rather than a proper lineup, it was more a cluster of people about to go through who suddenly had to check their phones or make sure the suitcase was properly locked or whatever… but as soon as someone buzzed red, they’d jump into the lineup to be next. OK, I get it.

Unfortunately, one particular time… landing in San José, Costa Rica… I was late, in a foul mood and just wanted to get the hell out of there. Monsoon rains, bumpy landing, dark skies, brutal humidity. Just get me out of here. And to make it a bit worse, so distracted was I by my bad mood that I messed up the approach to the magic gate and wound up 5th behind someone who’d just landed on the lucky red. Dammit. It’s just one of these days. Guy 4 ahead of me, green. Next person, green. Green. Green. My turn….. BzZzZZZzzz. Red. Of course.

“F!@# this BS” was my thought, and I played the stupid gringo card. I obliviously pretended it was green and headed in that direction.

“Señor.” I head somewhere behind me. I kept walking.

“Señor!” — louder but more distant. I was walking quickly.

“SEÑOR!!” — I was at the sliding glass doors and walked through them. My ride was parked exactly where he was supposed to be. I ran, threw my suitcase and myself into the car and yelled at my friend.

“Hammer it!”

“What?”

“GO!”

“What the…”

“Just GO! And take the long way.”

The long way is a windy side-street way of going from the airport to where we were going. In that weather and how I was feeling, it was awful. And though I doubt they threw up any roadblocks for us, who knows. If they did… “Oh, I’m so sorry, mucho perdon, yo no hablo el Spanish, how much pay dinero por favor?!” I wouldn’t try that around here, but in places where rules make no sense, $20 goes a long way in clarifying them.

I’m not here to tell you to break the rules; I’m telling you to think for yourselves. This isn’t a call to anarchy, just a request to think about things that don’t make sense to you, and speak up. Question what doesn’t make sense because society needs that… it’s a critical part of evolving society to the next level. We can’t all just go along with what’s worked for the last 200 years because if we do, that’s how it’ll look for the next 200. People wonder what they can do to make a real change? Start here — question stupid rules. Get people talking about them, and when enough people do, maybe real change happens.

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By |2020-10-08T01:22:28-07:00June 13th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, The First 100 Days, Life in Vancouver, Travel Stories, Sports & Gaming, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: , , , , , , |8 Comments
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Day 88 – June 12, 2020

Have you ever wondered why the number of UFO sightings seems to be way down in recent years? It’s really pretty straightforward… once upon a time, people weren’t walking around with cameras (actually, entire TV studios) in their pockets. All UFO stories were relayed by word of mouth. Nobody would’ve expected a person to have a camera on them, and when pictures did show up, it was one-offs… look, a bright blob in the sky… the only reasonable explanation is aliens who’ve somehow managed to bend the laws of physics and time and space… and after their journey that must have taken millions of earth years, decided to just park 50,000 feet above the ground for a few minutes before speeding home for another few million years. Yes, that is indeed the likeliest explanation.

Truth is, if a flying saucer of any sort showed up today, it would be seen and captured by thousands of people. It would be on Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter… from a thousand different angles. The fact that’s never happened should tell you something. And to be clear, there are unidentified flying objects all the time — unidentified by you and me. But rest assured, someone probably could identify it. And they wouldn’t tell you it’s little green men.

Funny story about UFOs though… I’ve never seen one, but I did cause a bunch of people to see one… and since this was in 1987, in the middle of the desert of northern Chile, there was nobody around with a camera… and here’s the story. My cousin and I had driven past a guy on the street selling fireworks. Side-note, in many places around the world, Chile among them, every time you stop at a red light, you will be accosted by a salesman of some sort. And they’re not all selling dingy crap… sometimes it’s ice-cold sealed bottles of water, charging cables, hats, cigarettes. But sometimes it is total crap. And sometimes it’s animals, like a skinned rabbit turned inside out. You usually keep your windows rolled up for those ones.

Every corner, someone is hocking something. And so, at some intersection, some guy jumped out with… fireworks… no idea why he had any or where he got them, but it was interesting enough to pull over and check out his stash. We bough a bunch of stuff, including a curiosity you wouldn’t see around here, at any of the firework pop-up shops that show up near Halloween.

What it was… was an open-bottom hot-air ballon, made out of wire and tissue paper. It was pretty big — fully inflated, maybe a 5-foot diameter ball of wire and paper that held a big candle in the “basket”. Does this thing really work, we asked… oh yes he said, very well… and proceeded to explain to us the process of unwrapping it and inflating it… after all, fire and tissue paper aren’t always going to go together well. OK, so cool… let’s get it… and we did. And on one of the following nights, we went a few km. out of town into the middle of the pitch-black desert (pitch black except for the crystal-clear, star-filled southern night sky, a real-life planetarium) and fired off a bunch of fireworks… and left the ballon for last. But eventually we got to it.

My cousin sort of held the balloon “up” while I lit the candle and held the basket straight and flat to the ground. Very quickly, the thing inflated… it was very impressive how little time it took to heat up the air underneath the ballon. Within 2 minutes, he didn’t need to hold it up… it was a big, glowing ball… and that air was hot, and pulling very hard… and I’m not exactly sure at what point I was supposed to let go, but eventually I couldn’t really hold it… so I let go, and the thing shot up into the sky, surprisingly quickly. It was incredibly impressive. Up it went, very quickly and very high. Ooooh. Ahhhh.

And then… well, the air isn’t necessarily still at certain altitudes. The wind caught it, and it started to drift toward town. Oh shit, that’s not ideal. And then… the wind caught the basket and candle, and ever so slightly tipped the basket to the side, causing the candle to come closer to the edge… like the edge of the bottom of the balloon itself. You know, the tissue-paper ballon.

What happened then was really impressive to see, even from far below on the ground. It caught on fire, and it was all entirely consumed within seconds, the entire thing engulfed in flames. For a few seconds, it was an impressive glowing fireball. Of course, that quickly became nothing more than a very hot mess… a collection of burning wire, which came crashing to the ground. Oh, the humanity.

We ran over to where this mess of wires hit the ground, glowing hot and still slightly burning…. and did the responsible thing and called the fire department. Ha ha, as if… no, we just buried it all in sand, and I’d be surprised if it weren’t still there today.

But the next day, no pictures… but a lot of people had seen it Did you guys see the UFO? What UFO we asked… oh yeah, this big glowing ball in the sky around 10pm. Oh yeah… no, didn’t see it. Oh, you missed it… it was huge, like 10 feet tall. An hour later, the story we heard was 20 feet tall. 30 feet… someone saw it land. Someone saw what might have been an alien. Someone’s dog barked, and it never barks; maybe more than one alien. By the end of the day, it was a full-on War of the Worlds.

We kept our mouths shut, because during that time, the country was still under the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, and breaking laws wasn’t a good idea. There was enough illegality about all of that, that talking about it was a bad idea; but hearing the story get taller and taller… that was amusing.

Anyway, as we’ve recently seen, the ability for anyone and everyone to be able to document what’s going on around them is leading society to new levels of accountability — which can only be a good thing. “Because I said so” is no longer an accepted threshold for the truth, no matter from whose mouth it’s emerging. This is where I’d end up saying something that someone might conclude is a Trump-bashing sort of statement… but I don’t need to. Like with UFOs, look at the evidence (or lack thereof) and make up your own mind. When things are going downhill and the top guy is saying things have never been better, you don’t need to have take a graduate course in critical thinking to figure it out.

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By |2020-10-08T01:22:28-07:00June 12th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, The First 100 Days, Politics, Business & Economics, Travel Stories, Humour, Space & Astronomy, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: , , , , , , , , , |9 Comments
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Day 76 – May 31, 2020

Looking around the world for some good, optimistic news… we could all use a bit of that… I came across both France and Italy, both showing steadily declining numbers… and entering re-opening phases… a very welcome progression for those two places that were hit very hard.

One of the well-known symptoms of COVID-19 is how it affects the sense of taste and smell.. and that reminded me of amusing thought… due to an observation I had when I was in Paris in 1996. My girlfriend at the time was studying a year abroad at The Sorbonne, and I’d gone over to visit her for a couple of weeks. We didn’t have a lot of money to spare as we were saving money to go to Italy the following week, so we spent most days just wandering the streets of Paris, from park to park, coffee shop to coffee shop. And what struck me were two things; everybody smoked, and nobody picked up after their dogs. The streets were littered with cigarette butts and dogshit, and it occurred to me that the two things were connected. Most people didn’t realize now badly their city smelled, because all they could sense on a continual basis was cigarette smoke. Actively, stale or second-hand — you couldn’t get away from it.

And all of that reminds me of a funny story…

She lived in a tiny apartment above a coffee shop that she frequented, and on my first morning there, we went down to grab a coffee.

“Un latée, si vous plait”, I said to the shopkeeper/barista/older French guy.

“Monsiour, there is no such thing as a ‘latée’ — what you want is a café-au-lait. You Americans… you butcher our language.”

Whoah dude, what… jeez.

Typically, in that situation, the first thing I do is clarify the very relevant, important and proud point that I am Canadian, not American. But in that very WTF moment, what I said was… and I should point out, I don’t speak German… but having visited Berlin a few years earlier, I still remembered a few key words… and so what I found myself saying was,

“You know… if it weren’t for us Americans, I wouldn’t be asking for a latée… or a café-au-lait… I’d be asking for Ein Heisse Milch Kaffe.”

As you might imagine, that was not well-received. The look of genuine surprise on his face though, the way his eyes got all wide… his own WTF expression… that was funny.

“Get out. Don’t come back”.

Hell yeah man, we’re outta here, and we’re not looking back.

So that’s how you get banned from a French coffee shop. The girlfriend wasn’t too pleased, having had her daily coffee hook-up destroyed (it wasn’t, she went right back to it after I left), but that whole episode brought to mind that old saying that France is wonderful, except for the people. I don’t really agree with that; we met some great people on that trip and I’ve been back there a few times since. Always a great experience. Arrogant jerks come in all shapes and sizes, and you’ll find them everywhere.

And we did make it to Italy, near the end of the trip… near the end of the relationship too, in fact… due to episodes like that one, but also this:

The idea was to get to Venice, but it was going to be shoestring all the way. Staying in Venice was out of the question, but we found a cheap hostel in Padova, about a 30-minute train ride away. Cool hostel by the way… the rooms were all molded plastic. The bathroom — sink/toilet/shower — was one tiny molded room, and after you used it, you’d push a button and the entire thing — every part of it, would be thoroughly cleaned; a whole cycle of soap/rinse/dry.

So in the morning, we headed to the train station to catch the train to Venice. I don’t remember how much the tickets were in Lira (this was before the Euro), but it was roughly $14 for a 1st-class ticket and $12 for a 2nd-class ticket, and we got into a huge argument. I wanted to pay the extra $2, and she argued we didn’t need to. Come on it’s only $4, yeah but it’s throwing money away, yeah but jeez, for the experience, who knows when we’ll be back here, as if we’re ever coming back here together, etc. Finally, I had to cave because — well, does that even need explaining. In any event, she spoke Italian so she went to deal with it… she bought us two 2nd-class tickets and she guided us to the platform and onto one of the train’s 2nd-class cars.

And, I have to be honest. It was really nice. Plush, comfortable seats. Not crowded. Quiet. Air conditioned. Wow, I thought… this is great. OK, I was wrong.

Halfway through the journey, the conductor shows up to take our tickets. We hand them over. He frowns. No no, he says… not 1st class. Huh? Oh crap… we’re sitting in 1st class. Oops. Sorry, we say… we will move right away. No no, he says, wagging his finger at us… you pay. Oh… yeah, ok, we will pay. Ironic, I think… all that fighting for nothing; here we are. I’m prepared to pay the “upgrade”, except now they’re both arguing and she’s getting upset and eventually explains to me that no, we can’t just upgrade the tickets… we’re being fined. She’s crying, I’m yelling, and he’s telling us police will be meeting us at the other end if we refuse to pay the fine, on the spot. The fine was $40 each, which took our entire budget for the day. I’d been trying to figure out how we were going to eat, catch a chamber-music concert at some church, and go for a gondola ride with the budget we’d had. The problem was solved… we did none of that… just wandered the streets (and bridges) of Venice till we could walk no more. At least there was less dogshit to contend with.

Yes… this has little to do with anything; blame it on Dr. Henry and her lack of releasing numbers on Sundays. I will correct the numbers tomorrow, as usual, and hopefully have something more relevant to convey… but it seems to be a “flat-or-better” sort of day.

But for now, that’s it; the weather looks good… maybe go outside and take your dog for a walk. And pick-up after it.

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By |2020-10-08T01:23:08-07:00May 31st, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, The First 100 Days, Life in Vancouver, Travel Stories, Sports & Gaming, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , |17 Comments
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Day 75 – May 30, 2020

Let’s start with the vastness of how incredibly big the universe is, like indescribably impossibly, unimaginably big. I’ve written about how our brains lose scale the bigger and more unrelateable the numbers get. But also, if you go the other way, things get unrelateably small. We think we can conceive of how small an atom is, but it’s way smaller than you imagine… and the building blocks that make up the nucleai of atoms… protons, neutrons…and other sub-atomic particles… way smaller… and quarks beneath that… it’s a long way down, all the way to the down to the Planck length… which is the scale at which classical ideas about gravity and space-time cease to be valid, and quantum effects take over. This is the “quantum of length”, the smallest measurement of length that has any meaning. It is roughly equal to 1.6 x 10^-35 m or about 100,000,000,000,000,000,000th the size of a proton.

It is estimated that the diameter of the observable universe is about 28.5 gigaparsecs (93 billion light-years, or 8.8×10^23 kilometres or, well, let’s spell it out… 550,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles), putting the edge of the observable universe about 46.5 billion light-years away.

If you look at the numbers in metric… I’m going to normalize these things to a unit we’ll define as a tenth of a millimetre… let’s call that unit… I dunno… a Kovid.

Why that particular length? Because it’s the mid-point between the biggest and smallest things in the universe. The universe itself is 8.8×10^31 Kovids wide… while the Planck length is 1.6 x 10^31 Kovids… which means the width of a human hair is the half-way point in size. Take the width of the universe… average it with the smallest width we can measure… and you get the width a human hair. It blows your mind no matter which direction you approach it from. We, here, in our 3D existence, are right in the middle of a scale that’s vastly incomprehensible, no matter how you view it.

This is the sort of coincidence that either means a lot, or means nothing… sort of like how if you observe the cosmos, you will notice that everything is moving away from us. Like, if there was a Big Bang, visualized as an explosion from a central location, we are right in the middle. That sounds profoundly meaningful until you realize that the Big Bang was not that sort of explosion… it was an explosion of time and space, and it’s expanding uniformly everywhere… like, everywhere in the universe looks like the middle of it, because everything seems to be moving away from it.

Interesting duality with both of those things, depending on how you look at it… either we, humanity, is really incredibly important in the grand scheme of things… or we’re an insignificant, irrelevant part of the bigger picture. It’s probably a bit of both, again… depending how you view it.

All of this came to mind this morning while watching a rocket launch — the first manned launch for SpaceX and their Falcon 9 rocket. It’s fantastic to see the new technology, which, if you’ve been following the evolution of SpaceX, is a slow and steady progression of very impressive engineering. I am in awe of these guys being able to take the exhausted first stage of a rocket, and recover it perfectly, landing it on a ship that’s waiting for it in the precise spot. And the space capsule itself, all operated from touch panels… no endless maze of confusing knobs and switches. It’s crazily impressive what mankind can do when it puts its mind to it.

It’s also tragically horrifying what mankind can do, as evidenced by the events that triggered the present evolving meltdown in the U.S. We make such progress on one hand, and it’s like we haven’t evolved from barbaric cavemen in others. Rocket fuel burns, taking mankind literally upwards, on a 19 hour journey to another technological marvel, the International Space Station… while on the ground, cities burn in protest and recognition of just how far other parts of society need to evolve. The vast spectrum between those two things seems as vast as my Kovid scale.

Shoutout to the two astronauts, Bob and Doug (how’s it going, eh…), and may they have a safe journey to the ISS — and back. And it’s interesting… for those guys, when they look out the window, they can see it all… the entire earth below them. The place where everything that’s ever happened… entirely in their field of view. How small we all are in the grand scheme of things, but at our scale, how large and important things seem. I bet if we could all see that view — take a huge step back… or, up, really… 400km up to the ISS… and look down, I wonder if we’d realize that we are all very much the same.

It’s suggested that everyone, especially when they’re young, go somewhere… else. Like, vastly different. There are plenty of places that need schools built and fresh-water wells dug and English classes taught… they need the help, and some people around here need a vastly different perspective. You certainly appreciate what you have here and what you take for granted when you see things through a different lens. I’d like to think that in the future, space travel will be so accessible that everyone might have the opportunity to at least spend a few hours in orbit, looking down. The grade-12 trip won’t be 2 weeks in Guatemala… it’ll be a trip to a launchpad, and then upwards… far.

Perhaps a few laps of the planet would make people realize that from up there, there are no visible borders and that the people below, whose cultures and skin colours can’t be seen from so far above, must also all be part of the same big picture. And maybe that’ll lead to less people being murdered, asphyxiated with knees to their necks. Or less people playing victim and trying to get someone arrested (or worse) because they’re offended at being told to leash their dogs.

Look at this godforsaken virus. It’s doesn’t care. It doesn’t differentiate. White people in Italy, Black people in New York, Asian people in China. It’ll infect and kill us all indiscriminately. But you can’t blame it. It has no brain, no consciousness, no empathy, no compassion. We humans have all of that, and if we can use it to advance humanity the way today’s launch implies, we can certainly use it to fix the rampant and evident ongoing societal inequalities that persist.

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By |2020-10-08T01:23:08-07:00May 30th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, The First 100 Days, Travel Stories, Humour, Space & Astronomy, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: , , , , , , , , , |8 Comments
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Day 59 – May 14, 2020

Thinking about my time in Northern Chile, in Copiapó, a few decades ago… led me to realize how much of that experience has aspects relatable to a lot of what’s going on these days… around here and around the world. Here’s an interesting sociological observation…

Back then, there wasn’t much to do except work. With no TV and only one radio station, it felt very much cut-off from the rest of the world. There was exactly one magazine kiosk that got anything in English, and everything was always, at best, a couple of days behind. But a 2-day-old New York Times was better than nothing, and I’d read every word of it. Most days looked like this: You’d be up early, get to work… work until lunch… which could turn into a 3-hour break if you threw errands and a siesta in there… and then back to work, till about 7pm. Then an hour or two of socializing, and then dinner… then sleep, and back to it next day.

It was about an 8-hour work day… 8:30am to 1pm, 3:30pm to 7pm… and the socializing to which I refer was often not more than wandering the streets and running into people and chatting. A feature of every single city, town, village in Latin America is what’s called the “Plaza de Armas” — a central plaza, usually located near the heart. Any place that has at least two sets of parallel roads will have the middle of that tic-tac-toe, and that is the de-facto Plaza de Armas. Often, it’s much bigger… 2 or 3 sets of streets ending at the square from all sides. A 3×3 block of grass, trees, paths, benches, statues. And the hub of outdoor social activity.

I lived a block away from the Plaza, so I was there often… and it was great. Lots of people milling around, kids kicking soccer balls around. It was also a commercial area… some artisans selling their work, and the permiter around the plaza on all sides — that was the “downtown”, if that’s the right word… populated with government offices, businesses of all sorts; the typical eclectic collection of one-off mom-and-pop shops, including two thirds of the entire town’s restaurants.

But right around that time is when things began to change.

Some Latin-American satellite TV company began offering service in Santiago… and quickly, people were asking… if Santiago can get satellite TV, surely it must be possible in Copiapó, which is actually 800km closer to the equator… right? Of course, and don’t call me Shirley.

It was a big deal when the TVs showed up. A handful of people got them, and crowds would gather in the street to peer through these peoples’ living room windows to check it out… and those windows to the world offered a very impressive view. For example, recall a show called Miami Vice… two cool cops, Ferraris, fast women, alligators, flamingos, everything in pastel shades of pink and blue… wet streets, slicked-back hair. The whole package was pretty impactful around here; imagine how it looked to people who’d never neither seen nor imagined any of that. And the commercials. Sensory overload. And an emerging attitude and understanding that the world has a lot more to offer, and why can’t we here have all that… stuff.

And then one day, a SuperStore/Costco sort of place showed up. They bought up a huge parcel of land and built a warehouse-sized shopping experience, with aisles and tall shelves. Very quickly, that became the Plaza de Armas; that’s where you’d go to socialize and be seen. And, of course, you can’t go to a shopping destination without at least the illusion of shopping, and that’s what it was… people walking up and down the aisles, filling their monster-sized shopping carts with crap they didn’t need, and in many cases, probably didn’t understand… all while running into other people. You’d hear snippets of conversation like, “Oh hey Pablo! You’re here too, yeah awesome, hey check this thing out, it’s a carbon-monoxide fire flood detector emergency light, cool eh, yeah, ok nice seeing you”.

Pablo didn’t need that device, nor pretty-much anything else in that basket. Pablo was a labourer, his wife was a housewife, and they lived in a modest home… and could never afford any of that stuff. So after an hour of socializing and filling the cart, when it was time to go home for dinner… Pablo and his wife, where-and-when no one was looking, would just ditch the cart and go home. And from there emerged a job that I don’t believe exists in many places: the “restock-the-shelves-from-abandoned-carts” gig, popular only in cultures where something so jarring is imposed, that it actually shifts the underlying fabric of society.

Once the cat was out of the bag, that society changed, and never looked back… and it could be argued, not for the better. Not for the better because it didn’t happen organically. It didn’t slowly grow to that; it was self-imposed, and it was weird… and some things that used to exist in the past, to a great extent, vanished. But also, arguably, for the better. A consolidated place to shop, a bit of free-market capitalism to keep prices fair. Progress, change, sometimes not evil, sometimes necessary, sometimes good.

I’ve spoken before about the radical lifestyle changes we’re all getting used to… and will quickly point out the obvious; today’s changes are not by choice. We’re not copying the behaviour that some other culture 30 years ahead of us is providing us as an example that we may wish to emulate. This has all been jammed down our throats. If we could snap our fingers and Restore to our Saved Game from 6 months ago, we all would.

I think it’s an important thing to keep in mind; to some extent, this current new-normal will provide some great insight for when things are ready to go back to the old normal. We’ll have the luxury of going back to our old ways, with the insight gained by having imposed upon us a whole new set of ways of doing things. I’m optimistic about the emergence back to the “new” old-normal… because it’ll ideally encapsulate the best of both worlds.

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By |2020-10-08T01:24:25-07:00May 14th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, The First 100 Days, Politics, Business & Economics, Travel Stories, Sports & Gaming, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: , , , , , , , |8 Comments
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Day 57 – May 12, 2020

One of the most interesting times in my life was a year away from school, Vancouver, and real life in general as I knew it. I packed my bags in the late Summer of 1987 and headed down to Chile, returning in the late Spring of 1988. I wasn’t here for the Calgary Olympics… in fact, I missed them entirely because where I was had no T.V.

Where I was… was in a town called Copiapó, in northern Chile, in the middle of the Atacama desert. No T.V., one radio station, one very old movie theatre, three questionable restaurants, lots of dirt roads. It’s grown a lot, both in population and modernity, but back then, it was like living in the 1930s. There were telephones, but not many. My phone number had 4 digits.

The relatable aspect these days was the culture shock of going from what we’re used to around here, to that — literally overnight. It’s the same sort of jarring impact life around here has recently given us. As tough as it was down there, especially initially, you get used to it… and over time, it seems normal. Those three questionable restaurants… well, they seemed to have gotten better over time.

One of them was Chinese food, and it the first couple of times, it was awful. The next few, not so bad. By the end of my time down there, it was among the best I’d ever had. Same thing with another hole-in-the-wall restaurant, where the food was awful to begin with… and it ended up being my favourite. By the end of it, they’d named a dish after me… where I’d described to them how to cook giant clams… by soaking them in white wine, then coating them in garlic butter, smothering them in parmesan cheese and baking them. Squeeze a lemon over all of that at the last minute. Certainly not my recipe, but they’d never heard of it. Deeeeelish.

But as much as you get used to it, you remember your old life… and you miss it. The one thing that made it all palatable is what, in common terms, is called an “out”. “Outs”, like in poker, where after the flop, your hand is behind and you need some help — but you’re not dead yet. Perhaps the only chance you have is to pair that King in your hand with one of the last two cards. As far as you know, there are three Kings left in the deck. You have three outs. When you have a crappy but well-paying job… and sometimes you’re close to just saying to hell with it… because in the back of your mind, you have a “anytime you want to join us, just call — start tomorrow” job offer pending in the background, there’s your Out. In baseball, quite literally, as long as you still have some outs, you’re in the game. It might be the bottom of the 9th with two outs and nobody on base and you’re down 10-0… but you still have an out. Many teams have come back to win games from exactly this situation. As long as you have an out.

Down there, my Out was that I could, with little more than a couple of week’s notice, find myself on a plane back to Vancouver. Knowing that Out existed made things tolerable, no matter what. It was there if I needed it, and the peace of mind that came with that… made all the difference.

As distant as they are, we have Outs here. Many of them. They’re not on the near horizon, but life will eventually get back to normal.

For the moment, we’re stuck in this new-normal, and that’s what it is — for now. I’m actually sick and tired of the dystopian “new normal is here forever”, “your life will never be the same” bullshit-scare-tactic click-here-to-read-more stories. They’re awful, pandering to our worst fears. Trust me, things will eventually get back to normal. There will be restaurants and operas and music festivals and beaches and hockey games and race tracks and graduations… with full crowds. It’ll be more than 10 days from now and less than 10 years from now. We can refine that range as time goes on… call it within a one-to-three year window before things are back to totally normal, with hopefully some remnant changes that make sense now and make sense in the future.

And when things are back to normal, we will look back at this time and think… yeah, that sucked. As used to it as we got, as new-normal as it was, it was nothing like the real thing. Indeed, that’s what went through my mind when I came back from Chile and went to one of our local Chinese restaurants. Truly, there was no comparison. But that in no way diminished the fact that what I got used to, at the time… it had its moment, and it served its purpose.

In baseball, when you hit into that final out, you’re Out. In poker, when your opponent flips over his cards to reveal a hand so strong that nothing can help you, it’s called drawing dead.

Nobody around here — not you, not me, not society — is drawing dead. We have Outs. Let’s continue to play our cards right, like continuing to do what we’re doing — and we’ll win this thing.

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By |2020-10-08T01:24:25-07:00May 12th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, The First 100 Days, Life in Vancouver, Travel Stories, Sports & Gaming, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , |22 Comments
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Day 56 – May 11, 2020

William Henry Harrison was elected to the presidency of The United States of America in 1840, as only the 9th president of that young nation. Indeed, right around the time he was born, George Washington was giving his first State of the Union address. His running mate, John Tyler, was elected vice-president. But this posting has little to do with the presidency of Harrison, because he didn’t do much, and died a month into his term, leading to his VP’s ascension to the throne.

John Tyler (1790-1862) was sworn in as the 10th president, and served in that capacity from 1841 until the next election, where he was soundly defeated, making him the longest-serving president who was never actually elected.

Tyler may not have made a great president, but he did make a lot of children… 15 of them. He was 63 years old when one of them, Lyon Gardiner Tyler (1853-1935), was born.

Lyon Gardner wasn’t quite as good as his dad at fathering lots of children, but he did ok, having 6 of his own. And he was certainly good at having them at an older age. One of them, Lyon Gardiner Tyler Junior, was born in 1924, when Senior was 71. And another, Harrison Ruffin Tyler (we can only assume after whom he was named) was born in 1928, when daddy was 75.

These Tylers clearly come from good stock… but it’s still mind-boggling to realize that since those latter two are still alive, John Tyler, born in 1790, has two living grandsons. Three generations that span the entire existence of the country.

That was perhaps the best example I could find of just how “new” the U.S. is. It’s arguably three generations old. From a Canadian point of view, someone born at the time of confederation (1867) could easily have a child that’s still alive today. Two generations.

There’s a rich history between these two young countries, who at times have been mortal enemies. In fact, it was a war that started both… and depending with which side of history you want to associate, you could say, as an American, that you “won” — and those defeated British, who went on to retreat to what ultimately became Canada, “lost”. If it means so much to call it that, by all means — take your victory. And of course it should be noted that both sides of the war were being fought by people who had much more in common with each other than the indigenous people, whose land it actually was.

The two countries weren’t done squabbling quite yet. The war of 1812, which technically was between the U.S. and the U.K. was really more Canada vs. America. We burned down the Capitol and White House in that one.

It’s not fair to summarize a complex war — that went on for years — in one paragraph, but the summary is that it was probably a sort of stalemate, which of course, in North America, means both sides thought they won. Or at least claimed they did. There is no overtime or shootout or sudden-death to an entire war, but by the time the Treaty of Ghent was signed, both sides simply had had enough. Nobody had any fight left in them, so that was that.

The fighting didn’t end there, as far as America was concerned because of course, the civil war came along… more similar people just fighting each other over ideology. The soon-to-be Canadians fought in that war too, on both sides — but the vast majority with the anti-slavery Union soldiers, who eventually defeated the Confederate states. Interesting little factoids… the soldier who organized the detachment of Union solders that captured and killed Lincoln-assassin John Wilkes Booth — was Canadian. And the composer of “O Canada” was a French-Canadian Union soldier.

By the time the two World Wars rolled around, the countries were strong allies, and have been ever since. The world’s longest undefended border. Each other’s largest trading partners, till recently.

But as young nations grow — and by any measure, these are still mere children in the sea of adult countries from around the world that have existed for many centuries or millennia — personalties begin to develop, and whatever the older generations may have had in common… well, things change. It’s sometimes hard to gauge whether you’re dealing with the attitude of an entire country, or just a vocal minority, or just its leaders… especially when the messages are so mixed. For two countries that are really pretty similar when you compare populations with anywhere else… we sure seem to be on different paths these days. Americans really like to stick to their guns… in every sense of that statement. The vast and conflicting confusion that’s becoming evident is worrisome to say the least. A cohesive plan is by no means guaranteed to succeed, but a confused, mismanaged one is doomed to fail. It seems like a lot of state governments aren’t listening to the feds. It looks like a lot of municipal governments aren’t listening to the state. It looks like a lot of people aren’t listening to any of those three, and just doing what they want — or cherry-picking what works for them, and hoping for the best.

I’ll end this with my usual profound gratitude that I was on the “losing” side of a War of Independence… and as much noise is being made about how poorly Canada is handling this at a federal level (it’s not a lot of noise, and it’s not really true) — or how the government here, whether provincially or municipally, could be doing so much better, because jobs economy lockdown jobs money jobs economy — yeah, we get it, we are all suffering. We’re also all surviving, and are far more likely to with an infrastructure that can handle it. I’ll take Canadian-handling criticism all day long. If what we’re doing is some version of failure, some version of “losing” — like the British or Canadians from wars of the distant past — I’ll take it.

Some numbers… the U.S. counted its 80,000th death over the weekend. Canada is under 5,000. That’s deaths per million of 247 vs. 132. And today was the third straight day of declining new-case numbers in Canada.

Bring on the phased re-openings… with all things continuing as they are, that’ll be just after the upcoming long weekend.

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By |2020-10-08T01:24:26-07:00May 11th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, The First 100 Days, Politics, Business & Economics, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |5 Comments
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