Boxing Day Sale Shopping/Being a Decorum Dummy

I've recovered enough to at least arrive at a place to be of better humour. Recently, I was educated more about the Aboriginal shamanistic ceremony of "saging" a home. That involves the burning of a bundle of dried sage grass to produce a smoke smudge used to purify one's living space; to cleanse it of negative energy, and to drive out any unwelcome evil spirits. I learned about this by the way of someone I know, who chose this practice to close off this year: a more unfortunate one for her, and to prepare to open their home up and invite something better to come in the New Year. The Japanese also have a custom of welcoming the incoming New Year by cleaning their homes near the end of the old one: every room, from ceiling to floor. This is done to welcome the presence, and good favour and fortune of their kami, the god-spirits of the Shinto religion, into their dwellings. I have my own pre-New Year habit that is similar to that of the Japanese one. I've been cleaning in my own place as well: not so much to invite the right kind of benevolent spooks and divinities in here, but more to be mindfully organized, and to clear and set a stage for efficiency and order that will hopefully help to attract some form of prosperity, of any kind, in the New Year. Given my condition, I started today to break the process into modular phases. It should all end on New Year's Eve. I don't give much credence into stuff like conjuring up spirits, feng shui, or anything else that is as oogity-boogity. However, after this latest bout of events closing my last month and a half of this year, if rearranging furnishings and scrubbing things down coincidentally helps to rid this place of any lingering bad karma around here, I have no objections to it. I don't have any sage; I do have some sandalwood and musk incense though. I started to burn that too, just to cover my ass.

I also have another custom in my home as I organize stuff: not done so much out of superstition, but out of prudence and frugality. If I bring in a new furnishing, appliance, or technical fixture into my home, I'm relegated to clean at least the whole room where it will be stationed or stored, and then sell off/repurpose/donate/throw out the same volume of stuff (if not more). Such a ritual prevents me from accumulating clutter; and encourages me to be more thoughtful about balancing my living space, to avoid being wasteful, and to seek practical alternatives (if any). Knowing that there is ultimately an obligation (or penalty) of having to press myself into some distasteful task of cleaning later also psychologically prevents me from buying anything rashly and impulsively. Thus, to be effective and efficient, I tend to do my home furnishing shopping near the end of the year when the Boxing Day and Year End sales are on, when prices are slashed, and I'm when scheduled to clean anyway.

I looked in my living room, and said
 "I gotta have more cowbell!"
 However, that didn't happen.
Instead I did the next best thing
 and found more cowhide. Ella isn't yet
 sure if she likes it.

That past month and a half of being stuck in here and staring at my mostly naked walls has been a real sobering revelation as to how much my own condo really isn't my vision of what I would think of as a truly comfortable home. It's actually very devoid of any reflections or signatures of my true personality. Most of the time, it is just a glorified dog house, as it is in fact Ella who is the being that spends the most time inside here, strewing her chew toys all about. For me, because I spend the majority of my week at work, this place ordinarily is just utilitarian space where I sleep, bathe, do laundry, and cook and eat the occasional meal. With having all this time off, I was dumbstruck after realizing just how little time I actually spend living in here while I'm on my regular work schedule. The decorum, or rather the sad lack of it, is a true reflection of that. I realize that because of this I'm kind of reluctant to invite other people over. It's no wonder I've been staring at screens all this time, because I really don't consciously want to look at anything else around here. A few other things also prompted me to think that I should put more thought into making this a place more personalized with creature comforts, and less like a place where it looks like Value Village busted in here, drunk in the middle of the night, and vomited up random junk in every room. Things like, receiving some pictures of my brother's family in the mail, they deserve to be hung in special places. I made myself a promise to keep junk off my kitchen table and actually use it for eating my meals, instead of plunking down in front of the TV and eating mindlessly. I have a nice new(er) rug now to dissuade me from doing that, because I don't want to risk getting it soiled. Rather than collecting a new piece of technology, like I initially planned to do, I instead chose to go on the grand adventure of at least window shopping for decorum for my place.

So, I ended up taking a trip to HomeSense where, as per their moniker, I thought they would have a lot of obvious things to make a house even more homelike. To be honest, I was in a loopy/crazy disposition for much of the day, perhaps due to being (finally) hungry and having low blood sugar, right along with my already impaired uptake of blood oxygen, so my observations tended to get a little weird and skewed toward the realm of the right-brain. I made handy use of the camera on my cellphone to serve as a visual memory aide. I'll declare and affirm right now that I'm by no measure any kind of expert on home decorum, but I am wise enough to see and know what kind of crap is out there that doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever. I found a lot of instances where the store should have been renamed HomeNonsense. The following paragraphs and pictures I've listed are the random observations, home utilities, objectives for my own place, fancies, and other home-oriented concepts that made me wonder what kind of dope various artisans and craftsperson were smoking after viewing some of the stuff I saw there.

Observation: The Mega-Pot – I stumbled across a kitchen pot that would be every hard core home brewer's wet dream. The damn thing must have had at least a 120 litre capacity, a larger capacity than the fuel tanks of many half ton trucks. Being shocked and surprised, I was being silly and flippant at the moment when a young girl of seven or so, and her mother walked up to stare with awe at this strange anomaly along with me. I like kids at that age because their questions and answers are imaginative and spontaneous. Just to see the reaction, I turned to the young girl and said out loud:
"I wonder how many babies you could pack into that sucker?" She began to laugh and giggle uncontrollably, and I chuckled along right with her. Her Mama however didn't seem to appreciate this moment of levity, and kind of began to usher her away from me. At least the daughter had a sense of humour. The presence of this thing begs me to question: what kind of home is out there in which the wholesale purchasers of HomeSense thought it would be a perfectly sensible move to market a friggin' 120 litre cooking pot? This thing was made of stainless steel, and already heavy by itself.

Filled to capacity with liquid, it would easily crush my average-sized stove, that is if I could have ever got it on the damn thing! I guess this thing must have been there for that exact instant when a Hudderite colony should wander into their store looking for something to adequately cook all their borsht for them (for a whole bloody month!), or if the Jolly Green Giant comes along looking for something to steam his peas. I was going to get the young girl to stand by it to get a sense of the scale of this thing when I took the picture, but she and her mother already left, probably looking for Security. HomeSense 0, HomeNonsense 1.

Objective: The far wall opposite of my entrance at the end of my hallway – Initially, I thought I would hang a mirror on this wall space, to give it an illusion of greater space and depth. Then I thought again about when I'll be arriving home after work at night, and how I really don't want to have an instant reminder in seeing just how ghastly, disheveled, and bedraggled I look after an eleven hour day when I come through the door. I would want something a hell of a lot more welcoming than that. I may have to get creative and try to paint my own picture to hang there, but I think so far I like this one. HomeSense 1, HomeNonsense 1.

Objective: a utility, Drink Coasters – How is it that I'm using a drink coaster all the time when I'm at the bar; and yet I'm not so civilized enough to have them handy around my own home? Lord knows I do most of my serious drinking here at my own abode. Maybe I just don't set my glass down long enough around here. Apparently, throughout all this time, I've been one of those innovative bachelors who has figured out that any corner of a newspaper, or a DVD case, or the open end of one of my socks to slip around a drinking vessel works well enough to keep condensation rings and dribbles off my coffee table.

As eccentric as I am, I don't really use this kind
of makeshift coaster, but I was curious as to
know what the visual actually would look like.

However, that just doesn't work if I'm endeavoring to attract and keep a more sophisticated ilk of company. So, I decided to get some coasters. After looking around there without any success, I finally approached one of the stock clerks at the store: a somewhat scrawny, yet strangely attractive and comely young blond woman.
"Excuse me, where would I find the drink coasters?" I asked plainly. The look on her face after my query was one of an attempt to stifle bemused astonishment.
"We have no drink coasters here." she replied with a thick Slavic accent, sort of almost half spitting the answer at me before she turned away. I couldn't help but to react like this was the stupidest thing I ever heard. How in the hell can an establishment, dedicated and devoted to decorating a home with ornaments; a place that sells seemingly endless varieties of stemware, cocktail glasses and coffee/tea cups; a place that sells a plethora of tablecloths, trivets, place mats, napkins, throws, slip covers and other surface protection paraphernalia not have a single goddamned set of drink coasters in its whole entire massive inventory?! I'm being led to believe that there are dinner parties out there in this town where even the more elite homes are having their guests using magazines or their own socks slipped on their wine glasses to protect the furniture because there were none to be found anywhere. HomeSense 1, HomeNonsense 2.

Observation: Ridiculous packaging – Selling bottled water here in Canada apparently wasn't already a stupid enough idea. Unless you were going to a place with an actual tainted water supply, there is no need to buy bottled water here. Now, I just found something that trumps even that for marketing imbecility. Yes, that is, A BOX OF WATER!!! . . . a 5 litre box of water,

They actually have to add the
word "Happy" on the label
to encourage the miserably
stupid people to buy this.

packaged like it was exotic bulk wine from Chile or Australia. It's not even imported from some exotic locale, it's from right here in Canada sitting on that shelf. . . WTF !!! I was tempted initially to pick it up and check and see how outrageous the price was for such a thing, but then that impulse was quickly halted by the self-conscious fear of having some onlookers watching me handle it, and thinking to themselves, "Look at that stupid fucker over there, he is actually thinking about buying that BOX OF WATER!!!
 
Another thing that pissed me off and made me think about how affluence is making us devolve into something that is so much stupider as a society is what is in this next picture. Look at it. Kinda pretty, isn't it? Is it some finely-crafted chocolate bon-bons from Switzerland? . . . Nooooo! Is it an intoxicating fragrance from some boutique in Paris? . . .Nooooo! Is it a package of high-quality rolled up silk handkerchiefs? . . . Again, Noooooo! This is actually a package of plastic bags for collecting DOG SHIT!!! Why is it packaged like this? Is it to give people a fleeting window of appearing superior to someone else when they whip one of these out and bend over to pick up after Rover? I began looking for some gold-leaf embossed toilet paper there after I saw this. HomeSense 1, HomeNonsense 4.

Objective: Decorative, yet manly – Adjectives for things that I will not have in here: frilly, ephemeral, sparkly, pink, yellow, lacy, chiffon, fluffy, sheer, silky; that already eliminates about 40% of the merchandise in HomeSense. There are some things there that would suit me, but would go out of style too quickly as I mature. There are some definitely non-feminine, testosterone-charged things that guys embrace a little too willingly to use as ornaments in their homes, like antique license plates, sports memorabilia, heads of antlered beasts, or even the more ridiculous collections of swords and battleaxes. Unless there is an impending attack by a horde of Visigoths over the hill, I really have no need to keep medieval weaponry around the place. The same goes the relic pieces of vehicles: if I don't want that crap cluttering up my garage, why would I then draw it into my actual living space?

The weird manly things I'd probably have around here are wood carvings and figurines of animals, mathematically complex sculptures, hand puzzles and classic board games, and signs in tasteful calligraphy that reflect a simple personal philosophy, like what is seen on this serving tray. HomeSense 2, HomeNonsense 4.
 
Observation: HUH?!?! – And finally there is home ornamentation there that I just have no words for, as it just boogles my mind as to what kind of home these things would actually belong in. HomeSense2, HomeNonsense 6.

The perfect something for the gay cowboy/cult leader in the family

I don't know what this thing is supposed to
represent, but I can think of a few people
I'd like to have sitting on it.

A house is just walls and a roof, but a home is defined by the characters in it, which in turn are often reflected by the objects and artifacts that they chose to include in it and collect. Sadly, today's shopping trip was a reminder that there will always be people stupid enough to buy water in a box in a nation where it's free on the tap, and others who are pretentious and idiotic enough to by dog shit bags designed by Gucci. I wish all it took to cleanse these sorts of people away from me was burning some sort of herb. If I had only one wish for the New Year, it would be to encounter fewer and fewer people with this degree of stupidity. If that happened, about 90% of my problems in life would probably disappear.

Addendum: I at least managed to find some bloody coasters. I went to Pier One (a place too dangerously close to the Future Shop) for them. This time, I was helped by a stunningly beautiful store worker . . . another one with a thick Slavic accent coincidentally, but this time with some very pleasing proportions. They are of a black alligator skin texture (the coasters I mean, not the physical assets of the woman I mentioned). Nothing too pretty, and yet nothing too corny and cheesy: something you'd expect to find in a more sophisticated man cave.

Leaf Cutters and Bitcoin. . .WTF!

It's only two days away from the solstice, and it aches my spirits knowing that so far almost every day off I've had since the first week of May, including today, has been either too cloudy/gloomy, or chilly, or rainy. The downpour this morning prompted the dog and I to go out only far enough for some of her relief essentials during her walk before she quickly dragged me back in; so she could then burrow and crawl back under my bed sheets to find that token warm spot she left. It was tempting for me to do the same thing, and just swear today off as another wasted, lazy, unenjoyable day for this season. Any day during the summer season when I can't start it by enjoying my breakfast and coffee on my balcony in the fresh air and sunshine seems like the beginning of a lousy day. I could have followed the dog's idea, but I have too much on my mind to allow me to rest. I decided to divert myself and escape from all that mental clutter and noise by writing here.

I sense now more than ever, after being so cooped up because of the dreariness and rain, how desperately I'm missing and being estranged from traveling, and just freely being able to walk around in nature and being bedazzled by brand new places. I realize that it's been more than a year since I just simply went fishing. I spent much of my evening last night in my armchair exploring destinations and favourable lodgings in Bing Travel and AirBnB. I also studied and tried to make sense of some literature on Bitcoin* and other digital crypto-currency movements that are happening, and all the unique options, securities, and freedoms they are allegedly supposed to allow when booking online and traveling abroad. More comments about that down the page.

With the setting being so gloomy and dreary for this time of the year, outside it seems almost too green. Normally, that wouldn't ever be a complaint from me around here (It's certainly better than when it gets too grey and white around here), but with the absence of sun, there has also been a sparseness of any flowers and blooms, making it look barren in another special way. Walking down the street under the canopy of thickly-leaved elms in the gloom and rain, I was struck with a special memory: of the insect nature, of all things.
 
More specifically, the verdant trees and the early day gloom triggered and took my wanderlust stricken mind back to a time when I was trekking through the rain forest, along some jungle trail that cut through some foothills near the coast when I spent time in South America**. On that excursion, something caught my eye on the trail. At the first flashing glance I had of the movement, it struck me that there was a little reddish-brown and green snake crossing the path slowly. However, on closer inspection with a clearer view, I discovered that it was really a dense column of ants carrying bits of fresh leaves on their backs. They looked like little surfers heading towards some beach carrying along their little green longboards, all in unison at a perfectly synchronized rate of marching in one direction to make them all look like one organism. This was my first encounter with leaf-cutter ants.
 
As strangely interesting and fascinating as they were to me at the time, I still didn't hold them in any special regard in the grander scheme of things that were happening in and beyond that jungle. I had enough of my own challenges I was going through in trying to adapt to that environment and the social scene of the nation I was in back then. However, later on I did gain some perspective of this creature's role in the interdependent symbiosis of that particular ecosystem. It turns out that this seemingly insignificant ant and its bizarre behaviour is greatly responsible for being a balancing component for keeping an entire forest system alive.

Most of us, who appreciate biology, are already familiar with the intricate role of honeybees, who work symbiotically as nature's reproductive postal workers/surrogate penises for flowering plants. The leaf-cutter ants are just as critical as an element of a life support system in a rain forest. The leaf-cutter ants act as a soil conservationist, habitat builder, gardener, and farmer. The leaf-cutters trim the leaves from select trees in the upper parts of the forest canopy. The consequence of billions of them trimming away these leaves is that it allows more sunlight to penetrate onto the forest floor so other smaller species of plants below can then photosynthesize and survive, and hence introducing more food and habitat, allowing more animal species to thrive in the middle and lower parts of the forest matrix. The ants take the fresh leaves back to their colony, where they are used not to directly feed the ants, but to nourish a specific type of fungus which is grown on the cut leaves. The fungi consuming the leaves is actually what the ants and their larvae feed on. The fungi also work in a copacetic union with other microbes to then accelerate the decomposition of the leaves which greatly helps to replenish nutrients and minerals the rapidly depleted/leeched topsoil on the rain forest floor. It's an intricate and sensitive system that has cycled for millions of years. Even though the ants have an important and integral role in it, they are not its most dominant force nor its weakest link. The system they interact in, without any one dominating power, is self-sustaining, interdependent and completely de-centralized. I reviewed this process, because it was supposedly important to know before I could try to get the gist of what the Bitcoin author was trying to explain.

By coincidence, the author of this Bitcoin book was trying to explain its workings by trying to use the life dynamics of these particular ants as an example. I was eager at first for the comparison, since I was indeed awestruck by them when I first saw them working, and I thought the author could actually somehow use these very same creatures as a relatable, comprehensible, and meaningful example to me to posit his analogy to the workings of Bitcoin. His leaf-cutter ant metaphor involved the establishing and creating a functional new digital currency, where there is no real direct intervention or regulation by any one national government authority on settling on what the value and potential transaction opportunities/limits can be for this type of crypto-currency, and the actual bottom-of-the-pyramid users generate and control this self-sustaining transaction system instead. Did you understand any of that? Who knew that social insect behaviour and digital currency macro-economics were so much alike? I sure didn't, and do you know what . . . I STILL F*&^%ING DON'T!!! I feel like my time was wasted now for reviewing something so bizarre, and I failed to anchor any of this crap to a workable concept that's meaningful to me. I confess that I'm no stranger to at least trying to study and attempt to understand some pretty wild esoteric ideas in a lot of fields, but the one that makes me want to gouge out my own eyes when I glance upon it is the subject of economics, and the words of people who think they have all the answers about it, and can't produce an intelligible and tangible example to explain so abstract. I don't know what qualifications you need to write a textbook explaining economics which now include more abstract computer coding for transactions and more esoteric tech-lingo, but after reading this stuff, I think it involves going to whatever school it was that Nostradamus went to, or whatever one the crazy old bastard who wrote the book Revelation did. I only got to wondering afterward about what it was, and much of it that he had actually smoked from some bong while he wrote that stuff. I don't intend to bash the guy who wrote this book too harshly: he did openly declare that it was his raw, unfinished copy, meant for more editing. I'll give him some great credit for daring to do his best to make describable a technical phenomenon that is itself changing very quickly in leaps and bounds as app development for it gets enhanced. It's still all gobbledegook to me. The comparison to Nature's ecology with human economics doesn't help me much either. I tend to think that Nature didn't account for human stupidity and human greed in her design, which the real workings of human economics is full of. Look how she is suffering now because of it. As a result, his example became nullified for me. Trying to follow any economic trend or related news just disturbs me, I can even see the result of doing it reflected by the quality of my own writing now. Rambling and discordant; lacking of a real central theme: just as I find regular discussions about the dynamics, theories, and policies in this field.

Between the two subjects of the ants and crypto-currency economic practice and theory, one had me a bit enthralled and interested; the other put me to sleep in my armchair. Hint: I didn't wake up with drool rolling down my chin, as if coming out of a coma, after reading about the ants. The subject of economics, especially as it is today, is all too cryptic, complicated, boring and nonsensical for me. It's all loaded with a bunch of cold and prickly theories which have more to do with making hyper-competitive businesses and corruptive governments flourish, and less to do with satisfying the real and current needs of the human condition. Google defines it as: the branch of knowledge concerned with the production, consumption, and transfer of wealth. It sounds sweet and simple, but it's a little too general, and it also has too much wiggle room to allow for doing perverse, greedy, and unethical things as options to gain wealth. My personal simplest, yet exact, definition of economics (or at least as to how I try to apply it in my own life) is: the knowledge, practice, and study of managing and transferring given resources, assets, energy and time in a responsible, practical, effective, efficient, and ethical manner. The inclusion of the words "responsible" and "ethical" alone to the definition of economics shows you just how screwed up this world is when brought to light in the way we are living in under today's current actual economic system realities (or I should say tyrannies). My idea of what economics should mean doesn't jibe well with that used by most of the rest of the world. Maybe that's why I've been a poor student of it, or maybe I'm just pragmatic, and don't want to really waste time learning any more about a convention that really hasn't been working well for us to begin with. 

When it comes to Bitcoin, I can see now how those in power in institutions that are too archaic to readily adapt to this (like most governments) being really scared of it, along with those who are without technical savvy. Black market activity is not as easy to do with Bitcoin as people think it is, so those who are trying to sidestep accountability and transparency will have even more difficulty doing it as the technology evolves. Those digits still leave trails. I wonder what other propaganda wars/changes will ensue as it becomes more established. Boning up on some knowledge of Bitcoin is something not I'm really doing out of real interest; I'm just regarding as a necessary labour/evil because I might someday be forced to use it and comply with its terms; plus I may at the very least need to learn how to avoid being screwed over by it.

If we already avail ourselves to use some sort shopper's card for collecting 'points' for discounts and freebies from our favourite retailers, a casino card, or some means for collecting Air Miles® or any facsimile thereof, we are already resorting to de facto alternative forms of digital currency with an arbitrarily assigned value. So, why should we really be surprised, or feel so threatened that such a thing is Bitcoin has come along? We already seem to not mind too much about blindly feeding our personal information and data about our shopping and consumption habits for the fungus that is the market researcher to gather and exploit whenever we use such points cards. Using Bitcoin may actually lessen some of this sort of intrusion. The threatening thing I suppose is that it's a lot more abstract and more technical than other forms of payment that we use, but that's the way money has already been constantly evolving through the decades and centuries. Money, in any form, will always be used in corruptive ways so long as greed, waste, and stupidity in people exist. People might actually have to try to be a little less ignorant, and make an effort to actually tune into markets, and learn how to read candlestick charts and conversion tables to protect their interests as this digital convergence with money happens. I can see how that is intimidating for some, especially those who just want simple. All I know is that: a. there will be a huge powershift that will arise from this, and b. that for now I'll be studying the degree of convenience, security, and volatility of the Bitcoin system a little more before I commit to changing my dollars to binary digits in a QR code.
    
*-The weird and seemingly unrelated imagery on one of the EPUB books I was reading about Bitcoin also no doubt compounded the thought-triggering (it was a picture of a leaf-cutter ant).
**- Cue in me mimicking David Attenborough's voice and accent here . . .
 

Amusements in Logic

Starting Monday, I have about 11 hours left of short shifts to do this week before I do some holiday time. In a way that's good. I do three or four hours within three days, and I'll hopefully have enough energy and momentum to clear stuff away at home for the remainder of those days before I dive into time that's to be devoted to mostly leisure. Perhaps weaning myself away from work gradually like this is the way to go, rather than having a more radical transition. 

I'm doing some more advanced programming exercises now. Messing around with the process of trial and error in correcting some missing details and other silly mistakes, is making me think that there was a time in the past when I would have been so much better able to retain the knowledge, hone my skills, and have a peak performance at doing such tasks.* Right now though, I feel as though my brain has to have a lot of rust, dust, and cobwebs brushed and knocked out of it before I can deal with anything that's purely logical. 

There was a time in my life, when I had less busy days and was better able to focus, when I was becoming a real enthusiast for doing the rather esoteric hobby of solving logic puzzles. The British ones were (still are) the best. It was a way to sort of play detective. I was correctly completing ones ranked five stars in difficulty; even the ones without a logic grid, on a regular basis. I became so interested in them that I wondered if I could even create any of my own that would ever be acceptable enough for publication in any one of the puzzle magazines one finds them in. I did start a small portfolio of some that I drafted up, working at composing and editing them piecemeal. I don't remember when it started happening, but I'd guess that it was something I did as an effort to endure the coldest, darkest, loneliest days of winters past.
 

I doubt if dreaming up and writing these things is something one could ever get rich at, or allow me to just quit my day job. Logic puzzles, at least non-digital ones, are a dying amusement these days, like most of the other pencil and paper puzzles; thus their creation is becoming a dying art as well. The jest and appeal of it for me though is that I’d be creating something that like-minded people want to approach for a bit of diversion and positive mental stimulation. Also, the thought of making even a little money from watching an idea grow and come to fruition, even if it's just a small and trivial one, is now becoming a hell of a lot more thrilling to me than that of earning comparatively more money from doing stuff that wears you down with boring routine, and constantly muddling through and dealing with others' ignorance and stupidity in the act (guise) of service.

Back when I taught English for my brief time overseas; being sent frequently without a prepared lesson plan, into a classroom full of kids often too incorrigible or indifferent to learning anything, making and presenting a logic problem was often my salvation. If the kids were disinterested in learning language directly, they were more often than not more willing to be involved with a game or puzzle based on a formula, which they had to force themselves to express in English. I wasn't any good at enforcing classroom management with structure and discipline, but I did alright with at least capturing the attention of those few students who enjoyed the challenge of doing more critical thinking.

The one thing I miss most is getting to be engaged with more people who regularly deploy logic and common sense; so that's the kind of company I should be seeking out during my holiday time. I suppose then that one of my ambitions during this vacation time will be to start probing through and editing these past works of mine, and find publishers to submit them to. If they get rejected, I'll post them here to share with other interested parties. Perhaps my followers who are logic puzzle enthusiasts, especially those from the UK** who read my blog, could help me with this project.

 *- I'm referring to a time when the computer languages and technology I'm messing around with now did not yet exist.

**- The stats from my reader numbers by nation indicate that readers from the UK are only 7th in the standings. As it is currently, the rankings of my numbers of followers before that placement, by nation, rank as such: 1. Canada, 2. Russia, 3. Latvia, 4. United States of America, 5. Germany, 6. Ukraine.

Getting Media Profiled

I'm somewhat better today. I've halved the cold medication intake, and thus feel rendered a little less dazed and staggering compared to the last couple days.

I caved: in two ways, this weekend. Caved, in the sense that with it being so cold outside; being too bothersome to tour around town, plus being sick, I holed up here at home all weekend.  My vision became too strained and made blurry by cold-medication to track any fine print, plus I lost too much lucidity to allow me to follow and mentally form any literary scenes in my mind from reading, so the other way I caved was re-subscribing to a TV service of sorts. A few days ago, I knocked some dust of my TV screen, and connected to a month long free trial of Netflix®, and I abused this privilege to the max during this weekend.

I had a good long spell of not needing a paid television service to entertain me (ten months), but being under the influence of Neo Citron perhaps weakened my resolve. I could still get some odd bits of programming, news and movies (if I wanted to) on TV through channels via my Sony Blu-Ray player and Wi-Fi network, but nothing was offered that could keep me mindlessly gluing my eyes to a screen for hours during a day (a good thing really). I find that the free movie channels, like Crackle®, have content that's too dated and festering with commercials that can't be skipped through. I just sit down with it to be a tech-geek: to explore and review it intensively around once a month, or so; not to really watch the programming per se, but to study the interactive features and formats of the Sony network system, and to see if there are any useful changes and updates. Through this setup, I get to peer into other foreign news and documentary networks/services, like Deutsche Welle, and some of the Russian programmes through Первый канал (First Channel) out of curiosity to see their perspective of the world, or else I tune into a couple of Latin American channels to see much Spanish I still understand (or be humbled, and see how much I've forgotten). I do also check out snippets from Blinkx, Wired, Epicurious, Livestrong, some video podcasts, and then I'll check and see if the YouTube interface through a TV remote is getting any less user-hostile. That's about as interesting as TV has been for me at home since I discontinued service with my former provider.

So, suffering through my cold trying to rest, I spent an abominable amount of time (for me) with my ass planted on the chesterfield all weekend watching movies and other programs through Netflix. There has been such a huge gap in my media diet with unwatched shows and films, and so with no real mental ability for reckoning of passing time, it was easy to allow myself to get sucked into this black hole. Today, I opted to leave the TV off and use this time to process it all. What is interesting (and kind of creepy) about Netflix, and other similar services, is that I don't even have to actively search that hard for the movies and shows that appeal to me, because from the first few choices that I've opted to watch, the Netflix system starts monitoring my viewing choices through my account, and begins building a profile of my viewing habits, and then narrows down, filters, and limits things to a more concise menu of some suggested shows that it predicts that I'm most likely to watch to some very pinpoint accurate and specific genres. It struck me then that there is something a little insidious about a digital entertainment system that knows what my favoured viewing interests and pleasures are better than I do. I watched the movies Layercake, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, Centurion, The Gods Must be Crazy II, the documentary Walking With Cavemen, and an episode of Spike TV's Deadliest Warrior, and some other junk. I guess what I discovered I'm into, from watching Netflix, which is watching me watch TV, is what it is recommending to me as future choices. It's automatically narrowing them down and forecasting that I'd be into Guy Ritchie British gangster movies, crime thrillers, historical/nature/science documentaries, science fiction, and action cinema (that's unnervingly accurate). The system has somehow also determined that I have enough of a quirky sense of humour, and a taste for foreign/independent films that the Netflix search engine presumes to recommend to me a set of movies centred around starring my "favourite" actors (I'll leave them a mystery), a Norwegian sex comedy, and other documentaries on rather eccentric subject material. It boggles my mind to think of all the specific variable categories, cross-referencing, and correlation of all this data to get this all so customized for me as a viewer.

Profiling of the media consumer has always been going on since mass media has been invented, and evolving rapidly into ever more intrusive ways for gathering some ever more revealing data about those who are the audience/consumers. It then becomes almost a laughable paradox to see so many, who call themselves "private" people, who are so distrustful and not prone to socializing with others in the 'real world'*, who so often opt to stay home and retreat into watching a lot of TV, or using the Internet** because they can find little else to do by themselves that keeps them engaged mentally. Yet, watching television, or using the web, in this present day, are perhaps the least "private" activities that one can do. Someone, or some organized intelligence gathering entity, is always monitoring your choice of media, inter/activity, and usage.

*- Having a flashback now of the movie The Matrix, when Morpheus asks Neo that very profound question: "What is real?"
**- I always kind of wondered why we (as English speakers/readers) find the word 'Internet' consistently capitalized? Is it because it's regarded as proper noun for a place name or something geographical (which it isn't), or is it because we are regarding it now as a proper name for something that's like a living sentient being, like John, or Mary, or Goober the hamster? The lack of use of the indefinite article is suspicious too: I've yet to see a case of  'an internet' in any formal writing. I'll leave these questions of semantics to open for debate for some other time. I'm also having the horrid realization that this thought resembles one like those circulated around the dining table at work . . . I HAVE TO GET OFF THIS WRETCHED MEDICATION!   

Black Friday/Buy Nothing Day

Today was payday, and a day off. A typical kind of day where I devote a bit of my morning to tabulate my budget and pay my bills. Just for shits and giggles; just to force myself to think outside the box a bit, I performed the whole operation with one of my desk toys: a Chinese abacus. I sometimes use it for place holding numbers when I don't have a pen handy.* Most of the time though, it's just a fidgeting toy that I use when I'm lost in contemplation, like some sort of more scientific form of rosary beads. I suppose I keep it around as a reminder that sometimes solutions to majorly complicated problems can be found by using and focusing on the simplest of things.

An interesting bit of math trivia: if you used an average of one
 second to move the counters, non-stop, on a 13 column abacus,
like this one, to represent each and all of the total possible counter
 positions, just once, it would take 659,839,939 years to do it.
(. . . and no, I didn't calculate all that using this thing.)

Noting what today was, I couldn't help but to assume that budgeting and bill paying are the complete opposite things of what many of the Americans are doing right now, that is going overboard and getting deeper in debt with manic episodes of shopping. That is, today is also Black Friday, the day when the neighbours to the south go berserk and stampede into shopping malls in a greed driven frenzy. Reading an article about it in a complimentary issue of today's issue of The Globe and Mail prompted me a little more to look into this phenomenon, of how the cross-border shopping is impacting Canadian retailers. To be honest: either probably because I'm that disinterested in shopping, or I'm that indifferent or oblivious to the traditions of American holidays, I never even heard of the phenomenon of Black Friday until relatively recently in my life, probably about five years ago. That seems to be when Canadian news media started to shine more of a spotlight on this insanity. Now, there are even Black Friday sales here in Canada at this week of the year, despite the fact that our Thanksgiving Day is in October.** I notice "Cyber Monday" is becoming a bigger hyped-up deal here each year, to get supposedly big savings, with an adequate window of processing/shipping time before Christmas for online purchases of material items made at some domestic and US vendors. I've included this Wikipedia link about it, which better explains the how and why Canada's burgeoning involvement with this retail world wildness. What floors me about the figures in the table lower on this page, just before the references, is just the ever rising Total Billions Spent after the year of the big American financial crisis. All the news during the years of record high home foreclosures, and personal bankruptcies, and the consequences of being overburdened with debt didn't apparently sink in with the American consumers around holiday time. 

 

It's a ridiculous time of year when I hear the odd story about how many people got trampled to death down there when crowds charge at the doors when the malls and stores open for it. I'm sure I'll hear the other odd report about how many morons died of exposure because they had a tent pitched and camped outside a store two days in advance of its opening. I'm not at all sympathetic to such people. If they are that idiotic to allow themselves to forsake their own safety to get a discount iPad or a cheap pair of designer shoes, and willingly be at the wrong place at the wrong time, I say screw'em. That's just Darwinism doing its thing. I really won't shed any tears about there being a few less idiots, and greedy shitheads walking the face of this Earth. The topic of Black Friday only jolted some interest and concern in me because my parents are on a holiday tour in the United States right now. I'm hoping that they, and their tour group, had some good sense to steer clear of the insanity in their shopping malls down there today. Businesses and corporations control most of the mainstream news of course, so sure there is a lot of media hype about Black Friday on the business perspective to make the year end sound positive, but we sure as hell don't hear much about the following reality of "In-the-Red January" from the consumer end of the deal in the news.

 

My fourth Friday (or whole weekend) of November tradition is coming to be "Buy Nothing Day", an idea promoted by Adbusters magazine, to use it for anything else besides shopping and needless consumption, and to stop business/corporate control of the holidays. I'm also not keen on being part of the hyped up madness of Boxing Day sales: the Canadian equivalent to Black Friday. That leads to the question, what can one do to get into the spirit of the season, without spending money on anything? I thought of these things as answers to give:

 

• Make an appointment to donate blood/platelets: A way to be charitable without giving money. Go to your Canadian Blood Services clinic(or your nation's respective agency clinic for blood donations). If you never have done it before, at least get tested for eligibility. Everyone has it, everyone needs it. The best gift you may be able to provide is to help someone else survive to see another Christmas.***
• Sort through closets/drawers; donate clothing and other articles to good will charities and agencies: The thought of irony that really disgusts me is knowing that there were probably some Americans, perhaps during some moment in prayer with their families, who were stating how thankful they were for whatever type of abundance they have during their Thanksgiving dinner; who now a day later, some of these same people became part of the stampeding hordes of assholes who would trample over someone else to get through a WalMart entrance somewhere to buy more shit to hoard. That seems pretty insincere to me. If you are really that fortunate and secure with your so-called abundance, you wouldn't need to walk over somebody's face to get some cheap piece of crap made in a sweatshop. How greedy can you get? Abundance means you don't have to charge out anywhere to fetch something in near panic mode. Abundance means having more than you actually need. Sort through your crap to know just how much you do really have; if you've outgrown it or neglected it too often, just give it away.
• Turn off your TV, or else make an effort to watch commercials conscientiously: If you choose to watch TV, take a count of exactly how many commercials you viewed, note what the products are, think about how much money you would have to spend that day if you absolutely had to buy each and every one of those products that was pitched to you. Think about how many hours of work and financing that it would really require to both acquire and maintain the product. Ask yourself, "Is this thing really going to make me a better person?", and "What can I do/use instead of that is cheaper, costs nothing?" The outcome of this exercise should hopefully make you angry with allowing yourself to be a tool, and for being dazzled by so much magic in advertising, and this meme-warfare that you are being subjected to every day.
• Walk/Run/Move Your Ass: Start making an effort to take off more pounds during the season than the ones you'll be gaining with all the treats and parties between now and the end of the year. Move around six days a week, binge a bit on the seventh. I didn't say that you can't enjoy the parties, you'd just have to work for them. If you do a well enough job keeping the lard off before New Year's Day, you should have an easier time committing to your resolution after Jan 1st. Don't you think that one reason people are buying clothing so often, is because of exponential weight gains due to inactivity and overeating. Take measures to make it less likely to happen.
• Sit down and make a budget: Make a plan to pay off bills and any other debts you may already have, and live within your means. You don't have get too crazy by using an abacus to do it. Small steps are better than no steps, or totally veering off wildly in the opposite direction.

 “The safe way to double your money is to fold it over once and put it in your pocket.”- Kim Hubbard

All this stuff that I mentioned could easily keep me occupied throughout the course of Buy Nothing Day. Happy non-shopping everyone!

*- Which is surprisingly often. I use a pen so seldom in my office now that when I do find one, usually while I'm on the phone, more often than not, the ink is dried up in it. An abacus needs no power, and no ink refills.

**- Better now than in October. Out of respect to the veterans, I absolutely refuse to put up Christmas decorations, or even consider holiday shopping before/during Remembrance Day.

***-Another thing that peeves me: hearing a person who talks about, or has actually endured, being poked enough with a needle to be decorated with tattoos and piercings, but admits to me that they would never attempt to donate blood. That's a true sign of a person being shamelessly selfish.

   

 

Neuroeconomics, The Marketing of Intimacy, First Fall Sunday

I've been messing around again on the FOREX* scene, making a lot of small profits, only to have them wiped out by bigger losses. This morning yielded a net profit, too embarrassingly small to mention, but at least it was profit. I'm thankful that I'm still in practice mode, and not playing with real funds. I have been using the orthodox methods of reading and reacting to the candlestick charts; my problem seems to be setting my stops too tight on my trades. It's too technical to get into, I'm just at the stage of learning from mistakes, making it a habit to stick to modest deals that wouldn't be crippling if losses resulted. I'm trying to be mindful that this is just "game mode", and to not to get too caught up in the elements of greed and fear, which are the major forces of failure at making wise trades. There is so much to study and analyze; strengthened proficiency at this game though doesn't even guarantee anything profitable. I'm more forgiving of myself given these following points, which I gleaned from a book by Jason Zweig, called Your Money and Your Brain.

• "If you think you are a financial genius, you are almost certainly dumber than you think - and you need to chain your brain so you can control your futile attempts to outsmart everyone else. If you think you are a financial idiot, you're probably smarter than you realize - and you need to train your brain so you can understand how to triumph as an investor." (page 6)**
• Even smart people make financial mistakes. Sir Isaac Newton, being the mathematical genius as he was, was wiped out in a stock market crash. **
• "Professional" investors, on average, do not outperform "amateurs."**

Zweig's book would have stayed on the shelf if it was only just about economics. It was, however, the emphasis on the psychology of investing/spending/saving money (neuroecomonics) which was the thing that made me pick it up and read it. Money working for you instead of you working for money is a beautiful thing,*** but for most of us it is just a pipe dream, or we get bogged down by listening to the (often conflicting) details, information, and opinions of so-called experts. Prices of stocks, bonds, commodities, and currency values rise and fall for a bunch of innumerable excuses, (usually false) correlations, and the stupidest of variables and reasons.****  I think the best advice on investing I've heard so far is don't give any money to anybody to invest in anything if they aren't willing to show you the performance of their own portfolio. I don't know of any investment brokers yet who are so willing to do that with me.

The degree of automation in an online trading station is wonderful tool once getting a clearer sense of focus and discipline for interpreting the data from it is mastered: for either market/entry order placement, or closing a trade, which let's you free yourself from constantly monitoring charts to do other things. The one thing I don't want to do is to become addicted to watching a bunch of red and blue lines rise and dive on a time chart, which could be easy for an analytical person to get lost in doing.

I still don't know yet what my gimmick would be for getting a little extra seed money for more investing. To be a writer would be interesting, but it would take a keen sense of knowing what key issues are throbbing through the pulse of contemporary society to create a good original story, and making it a sincere mission to tackle them and building a plot around them. For example, I was reading a recent article on MSN about E.L. James, the author of Fifty Shades of Grey. Her erotic novel has been charging up the best sellers lists, and is so controversial that it has been put on the "books to burn" lists of several organizations as well. I think the writing in the book is rather average and mediocre, but the marketing of it was brilliant*****. In my eyes, the popularity of this book is perhaps not really telling about how the average man and woman is becoming depraved and obsessed about alternative (and painful) expressions of sensuality, but of really how deprived and estranged people, in general, are becoming from the feeling of genuine intimacy. The list of reasons of how and why this has become so in modern society is too long for me to write in this entry. If there is a supply and demand marketing paradigm that E.L. James used in getting rich by creating something that is a reflection of what people in this society today are really wanting and craving, I would have to say that thing/theme would be intimacy: something that money and power couldn't buy for Christian Grey, the rich male character in the book. He had to earn it by learning to surrender power and be vulnerable. Getting to even entering a degree of intimacy that a person wants today, has come to the point where it has to be gained through some greater degree of exploration of humiliation and pain, as the character of Anastasia did in the book. The play and antagonism between Christian and Anastasia leaves one wondering which character has gained, and which one lost power in the strange "romance" depicted in the story. The sex is certainly there, a relationship is there, a (fluctuating) power dynamic is there, but as for intimacy. . . that is very questionable, and it leads the reader into exploring if it's there or not.

To be a successful fiction writer in this day in age seems to be harder, in that one has to have volume set no less than a trilogy to be published before ever getting popular; contemporary examples include E. L. James (as I mentioned), J. K. Rowling (Harry Potter series), Stieg Larsson (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), and Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games). Most importantly, there has to be an effort by the writer to be able to build a sense, or a bond of intimacy between him/her, the story, and the reader: an ability in which I'm probably very lacking.

I've been writing this entry piecemeal. It's now Sunday morning: a day off for this part of my rotation. I noticed leaves changing and the smell of the air as I drink my coffee outside this morning, and its crispness makes me feel like summer really has officially ended as of today. I have nothing planned except to harvest the remainder of my tomatoes, and perhaps do some cycling before it possibly rains, or the wind picks up. I don't think I'll be perusing any more female erotica, but the fiction that I would like to check out today is a book by Paolo Coehlo, The Alchemist: a short novel, but reputed to be a very deep one. I'll continue reading along with my non-fiction selections as well. If it stays cloudy, and when my eyes get too sore from reading, I'll maybe nap, or watch a classic movie before the FOREX markets re-open this afternoon (Monday morning in Tokyo and Sydney). I really don't want life to be any more intense than this today after I'm finished dumping out my mind in this entry.

*- It shocks me just how little knowledge people, even amongst those guys whom I serve with commerce degrees, and have had jobs in banking, generally have about the operation/existence of the FOREX market, yet its volume of trading is a few times greater than that of New York Stock Exchange within any given day.

** - Zweig, J. (2007). Your Money and Your Brain: How the New Science of Neuroeconomics Can Help Make You Rich. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks.

***- Getting rich by a spark of creativity is even cooler, as you see as I write on.

****- In world of economics and finance, the only prevailing constants are the greed of banks, governments, and corporations, and the power they exert over everyone else from the level of the consumer and taxpayer upward.

*****- Yes, I did read this book before having the gall to mildly critique it. I don't ordinarily make it a habit of reading female oriented erotica, but it was good to do to gain some insight into the female head space. Don't let it be said that won't try to understand. It was done so out of some hint/dare/suggestion from one of my female friends (I can't/won't openly speculate on any other motive as to why she did so).