Labour Day 2017: The Future of Labour

I booked this day off, and I’m trying not to think of work; I’m not doing that successfully. My weekend was loaded with enough tasks that constitute a full few days of putting chaos to order. Long story short, I was dealing with the results of electrical and steam pressure explosions, plus putting out fires in the floor below me. Add the shooting that happened down the block last Thursday, and it makes me think I'd be safer in Afghanistan. I exaggerate though. The electrical explosion was more like a humongous zap from the power supply in my 10 year old desktop PC, the steam pressure was from a weakened emergency release valve on an old pressure cooker I had, and the fire downstairs was a lapse in judgement from an elderly resident who left the building without shutting her stove off. The shooting, unfortunately, was real. Gang related methinks. I've been fixing everything around here including the kitchen sink, quite literally. The corroded drain fell apart, and on top of salvaging components, hard drives and data from my desktop, I was soldering screwing in and soldering pipes. I'm not really bitter about it all though. It was stuff that I should have done late last year/early this year: things that were already on my to do lists before my arm was injured. I welcomed the escape into doing something more logical and methodical with materials aside from just cooking and writing. 

My thoughts stray to the state I was in around time last year, and remembering the fears that I had about having complications from my surgery, and not recovering fully, with the possibility of rendered to a state where I’d be partially disabled. If this aspect of the past wasn’t enough to bother me, even though I recovered fully from it, thoughts of what the future possibly holds in terms of work and labour in general are sparking in my mind as well. These thoughts were also prompted from me perusing science and tech magazines and periodicals during my down time. Tinkering with and pulling the guts out of my old computer was a prompt too.

I also blame it on a program on CBC radio I was listening to yesterday for getting this all started, which was an interview with a leading intellect and authority about the very real possibilities and global impacts of the further exponential advancement of AI (artificial intelligence), cybernetics, and robotics in sectors the work force, where there are scenarios of human labour being rapidly rendered obsolete due to more efficient computers, the inexhaustibility of machine power, and the increasingly more intricate and variable operations that robots are being designed to perform. It is already making an impact now. White collar jobs are even no longer safe. There is a computerized AI ‘lawyer’ now operating in New York which can review and summarize law matters many times more faster and efficiently than any human attorney. Banks and investment firms are relying on computer algorithms more and on humans less to make many times faster than lightning quick decisions on where and how to invest capital. What does this mean for our economic system based on the need for humans to make an income to consume stuff, the distribution of wealth, and purposeful creation of services and resources to give our currencies value; our sense of welfare and job security based on employability and ridiculous standards of meritocracy, our standard of health and education and how they would radically change, our sociological and psychological well-being, or our remaining services that can’t simply be replaced by microchip loaded black boxes. What role is left for a human where the machine not only replaces the worker, but no longer is in control by a human being because of ever advancing AI? What does that all ultimately mean for whatever progress was made by the Unions and labour movement on behalf of human labourers?

Elon Musk, Stephan Hawking, and other intellects and innovators are already beginning to warn us about unchecked development and advancement of AI, and the approach of the singularity*: the point in our history, where as futurist Ray Kurzweil said, when all computer technology and their networks would be in a state of being fully integrated and able to operate autonomously. This leads to all sorts of scenarios, mostly negative, including the extreme of purposeful AI generated enslavement or extermination of human beings, like the futures in the Matrix or the Terminator movies.

There are too many questions with too many vague and abstract answers to these matters for me to entertain. If there are any positives that I’d like to see happen from the inevitable displacement of people by cybernetics it would be the following:

·         More time on our hands to create purpose in designing and building sustainable communities and environments

·         Less wasted and expended time and energy just for the sake of presenteeism

·         The reassessment of the value of the low-paying, yet intricate and essential jobs that a robot can’t do for people, like assisting sick and disabled people with heavy care needs.

·         Less accidents and injury, because robots replace humans in high risk work environments

·         More time to devote for securing and raising families better, the most essential job, instead of being divided from them all the time with commitments at work

·         A change in school curricula that teaches kids to behave like human beings, instead of preparing them to be just a bunch of hypercompetitive tools to be exploited (or exploiters) as they develop into their adulthood.

·         A radical change in a culture of elitism, with (hopefully) an implementation of UBI (Universal Basis Income) strategy to divide and distribute wealth generated by automatons.

Some of these things are just in the sky, others I’m probably looking upon naively, but whatever the case, I sense a great and massive upheaval in the very near future centred on this very issue. One that I haven’t even scratched the surface of.

*- Ray predicted that the level of technology that would allow this to happen will be available sometime between 2040 -2045, some pundits say it may happen even sooner. Whatever the case, there may be a chance that it will occur in my lifetime, thus there is merit into thinking about such matters and scenarios.

The "Before I Die I Want to . . ." Wall

Despite having half-shot hips and knees, I kept to my commitment of making the distance mandated by my running programme yesterday morning (I’m aching terribly from it today). It was a lovely day, and getting hot. I started out a little bit later than I really should have. More people than usual were circulating and amassing along the trails and the banks of the river to watch the Dragon Boat races that were taking place that day.

For my longer runs, I often pick a route that passes along the trail cutting through River Landing, but yesterday was the first time I noticed a special feature put on the vertical face of the north bank pylon of the Sid Buckwold Bridge as I ran under it. I don’t know when it appeared but it must have been recent, and out of all of Saskatoon’s bridges this is the only one I saw it on. If it was up there for very long, I’m embarrassed to admit how oblivious I've been to it for all this time. It would be due to me usually having eyes front focused or tunnel vision when I’m exerting myself. However, this time I was stopped in my tracks because the message of it was very bold, striking, and profound. It was sort of a public message board that we as citizens could contribute to, with a very distinctive theme. It was simply a ruled blackboard with an open ended, fill-in-the-blank statement . . .

 

Curiosity led me to stop and linger around there for a while to see what was listed there. It’s interesting what people will dare to put there when they can do it in anonymity. There was no chalk around to make my contribution though. I wondered if this is a feature unique to our city, or if this is part of some grander movement around the country, or globally. If it is national or global, I’d be quite interested to see what differences and similarities there are in the types of wishes people write out.

In a sociological perspective, if this is a genuinely accurate sample of what goes on in the heads of people in this city, from what I could judge from the collective wish statements made on there, I must say that generally the people of Saskatoon are:

·         Not too materialistic, which is nice to see. There weren’t many, if any, wishes for wealth, cars and mansions, or owning other such finery. I saw one statement about winning a lottery but that was about all that struck me. The luxuries our citizens mostly listed was about freedoms and experiences that they wanted to have, like traveling abroad, “to retire”. There were lots of intangible things up there too, like “to fall in love”, “find my soulmate”,

·         There weren’t as many vulgar, low-brow scribblings up there as I expected. In such a public place with a node of contact with a high property crime/economically disadvantaged area, I thought there would be a lot more content on there that would be there more the sake of defacing it rather than serving to expound good intent. One example of the low-brow stuff was “get stoned with Snoop Dog”, but for every one stupid statement like that, it was countered by a lot more noble stuff, like “learn another language”, “get my Ph.D.”, “starting a business”, “to see my great grandchildren”, etc.

·         I was expecting more levity and humour like, “see the Toronto Maple Leafs win a Stanley Cup”, but that wasn’t the mood of this monument of our city’s residents. It was more serious, but a positive sort of seriousness. There were very few messages of desperation (maybe the Leafs comment counts as one though). The only one that stuck out for me was “to stop living in Hell!”

·         Lots of wishes and pleas for grander designs of positive social/environmental change, like “to be free from fossil fuels”, “see the end of global poverty”

I don’t know if this wall of wishes gets periodically washed down, recovering and renewing space for other people to add more things. There is a comfort in knowing that there is a lot there already that I have in common with some other souls out there. With facing my own mortality some while ago, its big message gives me pause for thought about it. There is a lot that is left that’s undone. I am left to wonder what I have that is not on there, and is unique for me.

I do know that I will be running by there more often to read it and to see if there are any more additions and changes. Perhaps I’ll make it a point to run over there with my own piece of chalk next time.

Bloody Valentines

I have expressed often enough in previous entries my great loathing for Valentine's Day. I make no secret and don't deny at all that I am to Valentine's Day what the Grinch is to Christmas. I've been single through most of them, and the additional spitefulness towards the day comes from living in a region where 80% of the Valentine's Days during my lifetime have been blasted with winter storms, not unlike the one arriving today (more than 15 cm of blowing snow coming). I was initially going to travel out of town earlier, but I wised up to the advisories considering what my trip back home would be like. I've already been harshly greeted and woken up with a cruel icy bitch slap of a face-shredding wind outside this morning while walking the dog (-37 wind chill), and it doesn't help much knowing that the worst is yet to come. I work this evening, and I'm debating whether I should risk driving there and getting stuck, or try walking there in near white-out conditions. It's pretty much assured that given the weather that we'll be short-staffed. It's a day of anomie and isolation for singles that occurs when one is already in, and enduring, the deepest trough of mid-winter depression. For this province, in this climate, there couldn't possibly be a more poorly-placed, or more idiotically contrived occasion in the year to celebrate and glorify romantic love than today. My apologies to those who have already done so, but if you live around here, and chose today to propose marriage to your sweetheart, just because it's an easy date to remember, on this sort of miserable day, you ought to be automatically and officially classified as some sort of retard.

For me, I just had to find some way to keep myself busy. For the morning of this most wretched of all observances of the year for me, I ceremoniously grabbed my sharpest knife and cleaver and applied them to disarticulating joints, cracking bones, slashing up and peeling away skin, and hacking at, grinding, and macerating raw dead flesh. 

It's OK, relax! Don't over-react, I haven't gone off the deep end! It's not like I was in Halifax* . . . I was just processing and trimming some bulk pork for making my own homemade sausages. It's my way of rebelling against eating the industry-processed food. I at least know what's going into my own stuff. Sure, it's a dorky and weird thing to opt to do on Valentine's Day, but for me it's perhaps appropriate. Like the old European cheese, wine and beer-making traditions, sausage-making seems to be one of those food crafts best-suited for the monastic sorts**. I might as well call myself a monk, since it's another Valentine's Day with no one to share it with. Making tubular meat-filled phallic symbols all morning was as good as it got for me today. To be honest, it felt right to do, or it was at least chopping, cutting, and slashing at some inert fleshy mass was a more benign way to be cathartic, but what would have been perhaps even more fitting for me to do was to take the actual heart of the same poor beast and use it as an additional ingredient to pass through the meat grinder, thoroughly disintegrating it: an act truly demonstrative of my contempt for this damn stupid, inclement, ridiculous, alienating day. Thankfully, there are limits to both my appetite for destruction and gratuitous expressions of spite. That extra step would have just probably only edged me further toward a darker place. However, my focus wasn't tainted by too much bitterness. I concentrated on making my knife work flawlessly. I managed to take some gross-looking stuff and make it more delicious and aesthetically pleasing. My execution of this project was reasonably quick, efficient, inventive, well-contained, and clean, with no indication or evidence afterward that some orgy of blood, greasy lard, and raw pork had ever graced my kitchen. I think that Hannibal Lecter*** himself would have been impressed with my methods. As usual, nothing was wasted. Today's renderings were: three kilograms of Cajun style cured sausage, three kilos of Hungarian style smoked paprika and garlic sausage, three liters of Vietnamese Pho broth made from that noble hog's baked bones, marrow, tendons, and trimmings. For the finale, I fashioned a sort of a chichorón cassoulet made with the rest of that marvelous skin (to be served with some fava beans and a fine Chianti . . . slurp, slurp, slurp, slurp . . .). Through reviewing some recipes online, it seems like it's only the English, the Spanish/Mexicans, the Filipinos, and myself who can appreciate how delicious pork cracklings can be.

So, what of the other aspect of that main element of Valentine's Day: the LOVE part. Sorry. Love is a topic that I don't touch on here in this blog, or with any other company. I come nowhere close to being an authority with any wisdom on such a thing. It's too irrational, and too conditional to allow me to figure it out. I've heard of this myth of unconditional love; I live each day never seeing it really happening. I only know that I've witnessed and endured too many examples of what it isn't (in my mind anyway). To say I'm a bit jaded about the subject is perhaps an understatement. I could expose my thoughts about it, but it would be at the risk of sounding like a cold-hearted bastard, like I was once indoctrinated by the Khmer Rouge, or had once been some sort of feral child that was raised by a troop of rabid badgers. I'll limit myself by saying the following things about it and be done with the subject from here on in.

In regards to love and entering romantic relationships:

• In the history of literature, Dante Alighieri, writer of The Divine Comedy, foolishly forgot to include "dating after the age of 40" as another one of the circles of Hell****.
• I'm absolutely powerless to "make" someone love me back. Whenever love felt real to me, it has only turned back against to me and disappointed me and made me suffer by being unrequited. It has happened too often; so much so that one can't help but to feel isolated and to give up hope.
• Too many instances and too much exposure to what I would call "50 Shades of Crazy" has no doubt left me somewhat gun shy.
• It's far better to be alone than being around someone who does nothing but argue, nag, belittle, and accost you with other forms of negativity. So far, I've met more people who are like that than those who are not. The ones who don't sadly are either adults who are a just few too many years my junior and wouldn't be interested in me, or else too many years my senior.
• It's most often the case that, given this age, any women who are interesting enough for me are usually already partnered.
• The women I've found most endearing to me now all live afar. Life is unfair

I don't know why, but I do hold out for the chance for when, like the Grinch, my heart somehow grows three sizes larger someday upon crossing paths and meeting that most wonderful person. Right now though, it feels like a mostly useless and unwanted thing: one that has been passed through a meat grinder again and again; weakening and disintegrating more and more, feeling like less and less.
 
Just one positive Valentine's Day in my life is all that I humbly ask for. I guess I just have to somehow stay strong and survive through this one to see if that will ever happen. Today, however, is just another wretched winter day here, made all the more challenging and difficult by having to fumble around through it in knee-deep snow and wind to acquire the more basal elements of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, never mind trying to attain that which approaches a higher love, intimate contact and connection, and acceptance.

*- I just heard on the news about some sociopathic misfit loser punks who were planning a murder rampage in a Halifax mall. As a much as a downer this bit of writing is, nothing tops that sort of unfettered anger and contempt. Thankfully, that was thwarted by the police there today.
 
**- Sausage trivia - I learned that the name of the type of delicacy we Anglophones call "summer" sausage has nothing to do with the season, and is actually a corruption of the words "seminary sausage", i.e. sausage that was traditionally made in a monastery. I can't guess as to why; maybe it changed to "summer" because the word "seminary" perhaps sounded too unnervingly close to the word "semen", which would undoubtedly be an obvious PR nightmare for the church, especially if it was construed that "semen sausage" was prepared by some monks . . . Ew, nasty! That, as I say, is a whole other weekend of entertainment. Anyway, more seriously, before the days of scientific thinking, having something wonderfully appetizing rendered from something like spoiling curdled milk, souring grapes, musty grain, or something formed from the less appealing bits and pieces of an animal was really thought to be miraculous and an act of divine intervention. Thus, such processes of fermentation and controlled decay and denaturation were left under the auspices of chaste and holy men who were charged to be in good standing with the Lord almighty. Speaking of holy men, it still baffles me as to how Valentine's Day, a day originally commemorating the execution and martyrdom of a priest, got deviated into what it is today.
 
***- An interesting, yet creepy,Valentine's Day bit of movie trivia: The Silence of the Lambs was released in theatres on February 14^th back in 1991. I wonder: how many rejected marriage proposals happened that day after such a movie date? So, today's bloody activity thus seemed to be a bit of the homage of sorts. As dark, disturbing, shocking and graphic as it is, it still remains on my Top 10 all-time favourite movies list, and worthy of all the Oscars it won. More interesting facts about this film from this Mental Floss link
 
****- He should have added "February in Saskatchewan" as a circle as well.

Toxicity Taking Away Toxicity

Neo Citron is a troublesome over-the-counter remedy for me because I make less-than-prudent decisions while using it, and I begin perceiving cause-and-effect events in a whole different realm*. It makes me more disinhibited in thought and deed: more so than alcohol ever does. I know I experience strange occurrences which have bizarre repercussions triggered every time I consume the horse-tranquilizer strength form of this cold medication, but after this time around, I experienced one of the weirdest series of consequences that I ever had under its influence. This time it made me realize how even my most passive involvement in things could unravel some wild series of consequences. For this time around, its use, along with being extra irritable and less tolerant to nuisances since I became sick, plus the lack of sleep due to coughing and sneezing all night which put me into my disinhibited insomniac state were factors in the equation that prompted me to make a 911 call.

A raging domestic dispute was happening down the block. Such things have been happening repeatedly during the early mornings of the past few weekends, and sometimes midweek, from this one particular house; sometimes so loud and wrathful that their arguments wake me even when my windows are closed. I just ignored all the previous battles as best I could. I wasn't even really able to pinpoint the source of all of them until that morning. So, this couple have been fighting and verbal feuding openly on various mornings, screaming and playing out their petty drama at each other taking it out on the street. However, this time it escalated to one them starting to destroy property: racing out and breaking down a staircase guard rail at the front entrance, and taking a large column of it and swinging it around and threatening to club the other with it. It seemed pretty obvious that they were intoxicated. After witnessing that, and knowing that there was a legitimate enough concern to report a violent outbreak, I jumped on the chance to call the police and end this ongoing loud and toxic bullshit once and for all. Even after the cops came, they didn't tone down their jostling and hollering. They were so oblivious to everything else that they didn't even notice the police arriving, so I felt pretty assured that they had never noticed me witnessing this drama unfolding from my distant vantage point. My blood ran cold when I heard the woman then screamed out, "He murdered my sister!" repeatedly. Another police cruiser came, a prolonged period of de-escalation and intervention ensued with more cops entering the home. The police didn't clear out of there until an hour afterward, taking away a guy in handcuffs. If there was a killing, I don't believe it happened at that site, since no ambulance came there that morning.

What makes my head spin, apart from the cold medication, is realizing that my simple expressing of a complaint with the intention to just have a morning peaceful enough to enjoy my coffee** outdoors on my balcony for one of the last weekends of summer, and to make it feel less like one of my precious few days off for summer was being stolen from me by illness and other intrusive frustrations, may have by some fluke led to a homicide suspect being taking into custody. There was nothing heroic in this on my part. It was dumb luck to have this kind of negativity simply cleared away in this manner. I hope it will ultimately bring some peace to that household and the rest of the neighbourhood. This time, I'm thankful that using Neo-Citron probably had a lot to do with setting off this particular chain of events, because truthfully, I don't believe I would have made that call if I wasn't using it. I would have probably just instead took the regular course of action of either ignoring it, or leaving my place to go elsewhere for some peace, failing to be around to actually witness the real implications and results of that feuding, and thereby allowing this crap to continue and having someone get hurt or worse. I thought this all was a story worth writing about because it's one of those weird ironies and rare cases where a disinhibiting side-effects of a mind-altering chemical was used to actually prevent a crime and possibly linked to solving, or leading to an arrest for another more heinous one.

Another thing to note to be thankful for is how the police here dealt with this situation, and comparing it with what has been going on in Ferguson, Missouri in the past few weeks. I can honestly say that I'm thankful for the fact that we have a police presence here that operates more with civility and less with brute force and active militarization.
 
*-The worst sentence I've ever written where I am over-using-hyphenation.
**- Actually, it was another dose of Neo Citron.

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 . . .
 

The Future(s) That Didn't Come

"To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting." - R. Buckminster Fuller

Ever since last week, as the comic con geeks and sci-fi nerds were celebrating Star Wars day around the globe (May the Fourth be with you), I've been dwelling on the not-so-fiction based topics centred around the future and human society. I got to thinking about the ideas I had formulated back in the days of my youth about what I imagined the future (this present) would be like. Helping a friend re-organize and add fixtures to her garage over this weekend drew me to thinking about and the subject of the futuristic architecture and living space again; put into the context of the stuff of what I had envisioned decades ago in my teen years.

I wasn't very hopeful in those formative years that we would ever survive as a society, or that I would even survive to adulthood given that the media was always reporting on the sabre-rattling between NATO and the Warsaw Pact nations, spelling out that the Cold War was going to turn hot any second with little or no warning. It was depressing knowing that the most radical advancements in technology then always seemed to be in the hands of the military, which made it feel even more like the race toward Armageddon seem inevitable. There was more than one teacher I had tuned into reminding us of all that gloomy business. I got into reading magazines like Omni*, Popular Science, and Popular Mechanics when I was about twelve or thirteen, more to escape that fear than anything: to turn toward looking into some sort of future that didn't involve some sort of annihilation. Back then, I was actively being a 'futurist': actively speculating what the future technologies and society would be like if we survived, or altogether managed to avoid such destruction. I'm, of course, thankful that events occurred where the scenario of being reduced to a pile of ashes or stricken with the lingering torturous suffering of radioactive fallout never happened, but sadly, neither did the better future that I was preparing for come to fruition either. The forecasted future(s) of technical innovation and social evolution that was to provide enough for every citizen on this planet to live comfortably with an abundance of energy and material resources for physical and societal well-being never came, nor is development coming quickly enough for such possibilities. It's great to see that for the most part, we have been able to stamp out and hamper hard-core global Communism to allow ingenuity, technology and efficiency to thrive. Now all what we have to do is stamp out and hamper hard-core global Capitalism and religious theocracies, and the respective crushing poverty, oppression and ignorance it brings to billions. All these radical systems I mentioned do nothing good for the ecology and environment of this planet.

I was very intrigued back then by the work and writings of Richard Buckminster Fuller. He was such a brilliant man. He got me turned on to his version and vision of applied geodesic geometry, the concept of tensegrity, and synergetics. Also, it was he who got me absolutely hating my geometry class in high school at the time, which seemed in comparison so backward, so primitive, so dull with all the in-class recitation, and rote learning of proofs that we would never have practical use for in the real world. There was nothing creative about it; learning from a teacher who didn't do much more than regurgitate from an antiquated textbook from the 1950's. Each minute in that class felt like a step backward into some sort of intellectual retardation. I dropped it. To do that for an entire school year was hell to me.

Today, I'm very disappointed to see that geodesic dome designs aren't more commonplace for being used as self-sufficient homes, or at the very least ones that are used as greenhouses for local sustainable food growth to avoid the cost of shipping. I'm upset that there still isn't a pan-global hydro line network, lines across the Bering Strait to make a Trans-Siberian/Trans-Manchurian hydro line that switches energy from one continent to another at times when low night time use occurs the surplus production gets diverted to the other side of the globe when and where the need is high during their respective daytime hours, thus making the use of that water powering turbines more effectively and efficiently, thus relying less on other more destructive and wasteful power production. It angers me that South Korea and China have more Mag-Lev bullet trains than this continent, a supposedly more technically advanced one. As a citizen of Earth, I'm pissed off that there is money galore to peck into pristine spots on the Earth to access oil and natural gas with methods that contaminate and pollute the water, but isn't yet an established infrastructure for a cleaner hydrogen economy.

The one established trend that I'm glad was predicted correctly by Becky Fuller and is the phenomena he coined as "ephemeralization" or dMass: the trend of being able to do more with less energy and material** and resources. Think of the mass of material that a smart phone has been able to do away with as computing memory capacity with a given amount of chip-space gets ever more faster and powerful as it falls within concordance with Moore's Law. I attached a You Tube video which gets the point across better than I can.

Another great thinker I respect is Jacque Fresco who was a peer to Bucky Fuller, the founder and creator of the Venus Project. He is a (yet) living contemporary architect and social engineer for resource-based synergistic systems.

 

 

In regards to having a better future all comes down to being a depressing realization that lot of great systemic things have not come to fruition because they fly directly into the face of people who are stupid, greedy, incapable of using common sense, and can't fathom what a paradigm of interdependence looks like, and the ideas are supressed because of some institutional propaganda, promotion of omni-ignorance and pervasive poverty in places; not allowing a better systems to get a toe hold to begin with. I'm still lost in wondering if I should be hopeful for a better future or not.

Buckminster Fuller would be rolling over in his grave if he knew that the average schmuck with a cellphone or tablet, something that has manifold times the computing power that was used to put a man on the moon, is using an obscene amount of time doing nothing more with it than trying to reach a next level of Candy Crush instead of using an app or apps to actually make a difference in their lives.

*- Omni was a futuristic magazine, but unfortunately, it itself didn't have a future. It stopped publication in the early 90's. However, I heard rumours that it may be revived in a digital edition. Omni is an interesting title, because as it relates to Fuller, it was frequently used as a prefix by him in a lot of his visionary writings.

**- Bucky would argue that there really is no such thing as solid "material", but rather "energy-events".

Welcoming Spring, Touring the Man Show

Acupuncture: the back of my leg's
 impression of being a porcupine.

It's Saturday. . .officially. I finally woke up in the morning without my body greeting me with as much severe inflammation, cramping, and pain. Yesterday's session of treatments were a bit diminished in intensity than last time, that is, I felt less inclined to pass out when my leg muscles were being shifted, stretched, and kneaded. Desperation to expedite the healing process has made me more open to testing alternative forms of medicine. I have to make it a point not to favour the stricken leg anymore, and avoid limping so much. Sure, it's painful; but the extra use of the cane and limping was causing other problems. Deep breathing, and counting out my pace is helping. I had enough tolerance for the discomfort to tidy up inside a bit, and to use a little time to set up my deck furniture and clear the dust and debris that the six-month winter blew in and deposited on my balcony. I wanted to have it clean enough to enjoy some fresh air and a different vista for the evening; to hopefully watch last of this snow all melt away. I sit out here now, enjoying some whisky as I write this account. My peace is being ruined though by some dummies stunting with their vehicles (big half-ton trucks) south of here. I'll get to mentioning more about those kinds of morons in a minute.


There was desperation to do anything outside of the home today, so desperate in fact that I actually made an effort to circulate socially and I took a peek around the venue that was closest to me: The 2013 MAN SHOW. I don't honestly know why I opted to tour this event. It's enough to know that I am a man, with mind/body format compatibility, and I don't really need to do much in terms of shopping around, or finding other ways to waste money and time, to validate that fact. I'm not so insecure with myself that I need to latch onto and depend on some sort of power and status symbols to delude myself to thinking that those things will somehow magically make me more manly. When there is a expo in town with the advertising in big bold letters saying MAN SHOW, I automatically presume that there will be nothing much there for actual personal betterment for me as a man. What my preconception of a Man Show is, in my mind, is an expo of marketing stuff(s) that:

1. is just a tacky looking piece of shit that's built bigger than it needs to be, and just wastes space. 
2. is made to go faster, or have more power output than most people reasonably know how to control.
3. are mechanical and electrical things that exceed certain thresholds of making an obnoxious amount of noise, and using a wasteful amount of fuel/energy to power.
4. is a ridiculous attempt of automation of something to make it "time saving", but in reality is a lot less time/energy efficient or precise than managing the same work with more conventional or manual tools and methods.
5. are leisure crafts and vehicles that you pay thousands of dollars for, to use only a few days of the year.
6. are more technically enhanced ways of isolating yourself and vegetating.
7. if it's a food product, has the right combinations of deep fried/char-broiled protein, grease/trans-fats, salt/spice, which along with beer, induces the maximum capacity for raucous bouts of belching and farting.

Well look here. . . it's a perfect example of a
Skinny-whitetrash-mobile, or a.k.a. "the dumb-fuck truck"
 because that's mostly who you'll find driving them.
This truck pretty much represents the first five
 points I mentioned earlier**. I could also simply call it
"the over-compensator", but then I'd be using concepts these
poor rednecks wouldn't understand, or know how to spell.
Nothing screams out insecurity of one's manhood more than
when I see the types of  jerks who drive these stupid things
around, but yet don't have a job that justifies (or can pay for)
such a massive fuel-wasting piece of steel.

 

However, during this past while of lingering around home for so long, stricken with pain, and seeing how irritable and grouchy I was getting, it was undeniable that there evidently was something missing from around here that could have gave me better comfort in my place. Anyway, I was left to wonder if there were actually any other material things that this event would have had on display that could have brought me contentment. I got curious about it. So, I went just to explore it anyway, and perhaps discover what those things might be.


As I suspected, the event was largely a waste of my time, I only threw my name in a couple of cash prize draws; everything else that was up for grabs in a raffle was too grossly impractical for a condo dweller. There, of course, was a multitude of things stuffed with an over-powered engine, extreme sports gear, golfing supplies, and the ubiquitous presence of things that comprise the ideal "man cave"*. There was also, however, stuff that I wouldn't define as manly at all. Some of the pictures illustrate the point better than my words could. Like this photo of the pink golf cart . . . at THE MAN SHOW?!!!. . . I must have missed some circulated memo about how there's nothing that makes a greater statement that you're a studly pillar of pure testosterone than cruising around in a pink golf cart. I was looking around for the circus clown who owned this thing. Other stuff that was there, that one wouldn't exactly think of as manly, were spa treatment compounds, like Dead Sea Salt hand exfoliant. I also found all kinds of other crazy instances of strange juxtapositions. Here you are, surrounded by these super turbo-charged, jacked up, drive-through-the-swamp-and-muskeg, mega-4x4 half ton trucks, meant to do hard-ass labour, and withstand the worse physical punishment and conditions that can be thrown at a vehicle. . . and what are they selling for them right next to them as accessories, at the MAN SHOW? . . . air freshener scents!

That alone is a sure hint that the buyers don't really want these trucks for doing the actual dirty heavy work for which they were designed. If you have a super-charged half-ton truck, yet don't use it for real work, have all the chrome always polished up, smelling like an ocean breeze or pina colada, and looking like you are going to take friggin' Cinderella to the ball, it's pretty blunt and apparent that you are using it as a status symbol for a delusional sense of power. The only practical reason to have an air freshener handy for the kind of stupid loser bastards who I see driving these kinds of trucks are to hide the smell of booze and weed after they get pulled over.

Another unique thing there was a personal hovercraft. It has to be fully inflated when you want to have some real fun with it, the action happens underneath a skirt, there is a powerful thrust involved; how could a phallic symbol like this not be at the MAN SHOW? Points #2 through #5 covered by this thing. I must confess though that I'd like to try one of these things out at least once to see how it handles.

*- A stupid piece and insulting bit of terminology - since my dwelling's lone human occupant is a male, it by default makes it a "man cave", and I endeavour to be at least a little more sophisticated and worldly than an average troglodyte.

**- The other indicator of how much a vehicle is ridiculously and impractically designed, and made strictly for the senses, is the amount of female models hired to hang around the thing in a showcase.









Pasta, Marshmallows, and an Egg: The Tools for Collaboration

I like attending the workshops at the union office. I find them very enlightening. Attending the one today was a very welcome thing, to get me away from vegetating too long inside my place. It ended up being a fun day. The activity that was most appealing to me in this session was an exercise involving collaboration with a team. Our task was to build a tower with dried spaghetti and marshmallows, as high as we could, which could support a single raw egg on top of it, within a time limit of twenty minutes.

I liked it because not only it was an opportunity to play around and experiment with my limited knowledge of architecture and engineering, but because I got to see how my leadership style works, and how I operate in a team setting. I prefer spending much of my time living and working independently; so I admit and acknowledge that I'm a little oblivious about my personal style of collaborative problem solving and involvement in teamwork.

When it came to task, I introduced the idea of a geodesic design to the group and showed them what a tetrahedral structure looks like, and how to take these small units and build onto them in a patterned frequency for a supportive structure. The idea was totally foreign to these guys, but they caught on quickly after I gave a demonstration. Another guy gave some input as to how reinforce the base's struts, the two women of our four member group were reacting a little frantically as we neared the end, just about knocking it down, but they created an innovative design for the "egg cradle". The structure got somewhat sloppier as it got higher, as we were rushed to finish before time was up, but we still won the challenge, not only in height, but I would dare say we also won in terms of aesthetic appeal compared to the others at the 00:00 mark.

There was more than one dimension in which this was enjoyable. It was just working with a good team itself. My current reluctance to work or play in teams is a result of witnessing/being involved in too many bad teams with in the past. As minor as this recent accomplishment was, I realized that this has been the first time in a long time that I've been able to have a group of more than two people work with me* on a project without naysaying, negativity, bickering, impudence, big egos, sore losers, nagging, or just the outright ignoring and rejecting of any (or my) ideas without reason when sharing constructive input** in a brainstorming session. It showed me how important an environment of respect, focus, trust, honesty, encouragement, support, and solidarity is to have when I do join teams, and just how much those elements have been lacking in the dynamics of most team settings I was stuck in. It's a tall order to ask for. It gave me insight as to why I so often choose to work alone and independently.

TED lecturer, Tom Wujec, has a better explanation of the potential team building exercise with similar such materials and objectives than what I can present. I embedded a link for a video for better elaboration. I wish our prize was $10,000 worth of software.

Tom Wujec on Tower and Team Building.

 

If you should be so curious and adventurous as to try out what we did, here is the challenge:

 

Materials

• 900g dried spaghetti
• 500g bag of large marshmallows (use the fruit flavoured ones if you want to be colourful)
• 1 raw egg

Object: As stated above, build a tower as high as you can with the pasta and marshmallows, that's strong enough to support the weight of a raw egg placed on top of it. Good Luck! Do your best!

 

Here is the link to the official site for the rules of the real Marshmallow Challenge

*- Just to clarify: I work best one on one with people, like me and tolerate being around one or two other co-workers. Larger teams are my challenge. 
**- To rub salt in the wounds, it especially pisses me off when my theory was right to begin with; then some other bozo in the group comes around to opting what I originally suggested, and then tries to claim credit for it when it does works out. I make it a point to weed such people out of my life, and stop working with such bottom-feeding parasites. It has happened often enough that I'm still unwilling to share thoughts in a group setting.

Slow Healing, Going Shack Wacky, Dry Streak

Thursday, April 11

I definitely have to force myself to use a full rest day today. I'm healing slower than I thought I would be; that's my own damn fault.  Despite the fact that I've been more idle than usual, I've still been using my injured foot more than necessary in the past couple days by looking around at cars and attending to some other appointments for this week. I only have enough tolerance to go one other outing that I have to do today, otherwise the new snow coming down today is pretty much a prompt that I need to keep myself planted in one spot for the remainder of the day to allow the swelling to subside. It's in these moments of sitting still that I become quite grouchy and frustrated; sitting here miserably brooding over the fact that I've rendered myself half-crippled out of my own clumsiness and stupidity.

Thus, I retreat into writing. I've been getting really bored, and it doesn't help that I have the disposition to automatically start pacing when I do become bored: it's like the use of my feet are a critical part of some function to get me mentally unstuck. So now, being stuck on a couch seems to be further driving my mind into limbo. I can think of a thousand things to do, but they most of them require me being able to freely stand and walk. The pain-killers have been dulling my senses so badly: anything I try reading from books, or from online is pointless as it ends up being just lost in brain fog; plus they're ruining my appetite with the side effects of dizziness and nausea. Watching too much TV is rotting my mind as well: I keep flipping through channels, but I can't find anything but depressing news*, and there seems to be nothing else intellectually stimulating, engaging, or entertaining.** However, the cane has been a source of entertainment for Ella. It serves as a makeshift hockey stick, to put a little more speed and action on her toys when she wants to chase them around and pounce on them. At least one of us is easily amused. After a while, the insipid little game apps I've found made me feel reduced to a level of a cat chasing a dot from a laser pointer around the floor.

Friday, April 12

Spirits lowered even more: I learned about a death in the extended family, my cousin and uncle have my sympathies. I'm still useless and hobbling around, and can't follow a bead on anything mentally; so I caught a ride with my folks, and ventured out of town with them to watch my brother perform in a dinner theater play. He did a fabulous job with his role, and the production was very entertaining. The setting was about a small rural Saskatchewan farming community in the 1980's, during those bad drought years. It brought back lots of memories, plus their characters in the play were the perfect representative archetypes of the kinds of people I grew familiar with from that time: the stubborn, conservative old farmer; the younger generation, either willingly or reluctantly, pushed into seeking prospects outside of farm living, the free-thinking outsider with ideas and opinions that clashed with the culture at the time . . . it was a great comical story and a fine snapshot of what people were facing around these parts during those times. The play was called Dry Streak, and I would have gave it an award if I could have. I wish the pictures I tried taking of it turned out. I'm grateful to have seen it, and to have a little reprieve from the pain and negativity.

Saturday, April 13

I've been able to get around little better, relying less on the cane for support. The last of my pain-killers will be used today, so hopefully I'll soon be rid of their wretched side effects. If this rate of recovery continues, I hope to be back running again (within 5 km) by the middle of next week.

*- The Rehteah Parsons case in Halifax (so tragic that it's hard not to dismiss the thought using vigilante justice against those who bullied her), and the craziness happening in North Korea, being the most prevalent stories upsetting me most.
**- Actually, that's not 100% correct. I started watching Hannibal. They did well by casting Hugh Dancy and Mads Mikkelsen for the roles of Will Graham and Dr. Lecter respectively.

Springtime in Saskatoyuktuk

It's somewhere in the realm of 3:00 AM time-wise. I'm writing now as a bit of a mind purge. I've not been able to just simply drift off to sleep because the howling 90 km/hour blizzard wind that is slamming at my outer wall of my bedroom. It's not at the state of being destructive: if you are inside, just an eerily noisy nuisance. We are in the midst of a clipper that is raging throughout the western interior of Canada. We've been through our first full day of the vernal equinox, and conditions are nowhere near appearing close to being spring-like throughout the time since I last posted here.

Did I share this photo to show you the interesting
 geographic info on the sign?. . .No. . .
Did I share this photo to show you the alphabet soup
 that is the Inuvialuktan language? . . .No. . .
I shared this photo out of envy, to show you that even
they have less f****in' snow there than we do! 

A few days ago, I noted that Saskatoon was even colder than the far northern hamlet outpost of Tuktoyaktuk near Inuvik in NWT, close to the Arctic Ocean. I commented on Facebook that we should rename this town Saskatoyuktuk, or something else that sounds more linguistically concordant to an Inuit dialect, given the extended length and snowfall of this miserable winter. I thought it would at least roll off the tongue more rhythmically to match all the other "-uck, -uck" words I've been muttering repeatedly every time I've tuned into the weather report for this region each morning for the last few weeks. After these last hours of the wind packing the snow, we would indeed have the ideal banks around here now to cut out sturdy enough blocks to actually build a few igloos. Given the affordable housing shortage around here, that might not be such a bad thing.

One of the first day of spring 2013 photos, taken here locally.

The most salient question I suppose the locals around this city/part of the province have been asking themselves is: "Why do I live here again?" The only positive answers I can scrape up for now is, at least it's not North Korea, or Iran. I can dress for the cold and snow and be protected. I don't know how to dress for an earthquake, or volcano (Pacific Rim), or for a car bomb (the Middle East) or for a sudden spray of bullets (like what's possible now in Syria, or any American school/movie theatre). These realities don't diminish the fact that this winter has been overly long and depressing for me though, even with the effort to use some of the days that were more ideal for skiing. By this coming Sunday, there will have been a full five months of snow coverage, and still no sign in the forecast for potential good thawing weather, until the maybe the second week of April, which still could potentially throw another couple storms our way.

A pileup scene somewhere between Edmonton and Calgary

I'm definitely not an Inuit, nor do I have the constitution of one. I have this innate urge in me to experience greenery, flowers, or even just simple grass close to this time of the year. The heightened flooding alert is going to delay even that from coming normally. It's becoming even more imperative that I visit Gardenscape this weekend at Prairieland Park. After this brutal season, I would bet my bottom dollar, despite the great delay for planting and sowing stuff, that there will not just a few, but throngs of people there, with near-orgasmic expressions on their faces, paying a ridiculous admission price, to just get a simple long awaited opportunity to smell the heavenly aroma of actual dirt and compost again, and to catch a glimpse of these things long estranged from our memory called "tulips", and "daffodils". The horrid road and highway conditions will not deter them. This picture above of a scene from Alberta won't be a sobering enough reminder for them to take it easy, or to just stay home.

That's how desperate people around here are for spring to come. . . here in Saskatoyuktuk.

Reformatting, Re-Thinking Singlehood

The weather continues to be inclement, out of phase with my time off, and less than ideal for doing any skiing. It's been close to -40 outside with the wind chill factor this morning, and it's not going to change into anything much better throughout the day. I do welcome the chance to sit down and relax for a change. I've exhausted myself during my "days off", using all my valuable daylight hours for running around doing shopping for necessities, home upkeep projects, and cleaning. One of the very long tasks between household chores was updating my laptop's operating system. This is the first chance I've had to explore and play around on it.






My office whiteboard. Some days, it's like a big, ugly,
overbearing, 2-dimensional 'wife': always looming and nagging
 non-stop at me with reminders and "honey do" lists

This is my first entry made with using Windows 8. So far, I'm both impressed and overwhelmed with the functionality and the new dimensions of accessibility with the apps available. It's somewhat more user friendly for a laptop track pad than Windows 7 was. The only thing that annoys me about it is the slow start up time, and getting the "corner" features to pop up properly. I only installed it on my laptop. I'm doubting if it would be worth the time and effort to stick it on my aging desktop unit: I'll be replacing or eliminating that thing entirely before wasting time doing any more hard/software upgrades on it.

The other leisurely thing I did today was peruse this weekend's edition of the Sunday Phoenix. The article that captured my attention was a cover story about singlehood. I used to be down about being single earlier in my life, but now after some time and seeing a few more of the dynamics of other people, and big mistakes I would have avoided, I'm all the more happier about being so, or at least making a better peace about it. It's now comforting to know that I'm not truly such an oddball after all: preferring not to be burdened with marriage. I'm just one who is hip with the growing trend of the times. I was dumbstruck to read that 40% of the population of Montreal lives as singles, and the city of Stockholm has 60% of its people living alone. The social trend of single living is so common and prevalent there that their government is accommodating for it by building places equipped with single suites with communal kitchens and laundries. It kind of makes me even more curious and wanting to visit Sweden. Maybe I'd feel a little more normal and accepted there. Even though the thought of sharing my kitchen with someone else is irksome to me, depriving me of more of a sense of "home space"; perhaps infringing on my sense of order and privacy*, I'd still like to observe how the model of this type of living situation actually functions. If it indeed works, it would be something that should be opted here for sharing with the workplace as it is now, in terms of something both accessible and practical.

My laptop. The sweet little mistress, who's trying on a sexy
little update, who's tempting me to do all sorts of fun and naughty
things with her. Definitely more fun than the whiteboard.

It's shameful to say that I still find too many stupid people around here who treat me like a friggin' anomaly or outcast, because I'm not, nor have ever been, "fortunate" enough to be permanently partnered with someone. I'll even dare to go so far to say, to some degree, that there is even prejudice and bigotry working against me. The worst judgements, criticisms, and reactions, I find, are made by people who (typically):

• have been married longer than they have been single
• who don't know anything else but to be coupled, or a parent of children
• were too coddled, smothered and spoiled themselves as children, and constantly dependant on a parent or other authority figure
• don't know how to enjoy their own solitude, and instead have a strong need to wiggle into the lives of other people, and usually/eventually end up being an obnoxious pain in the ass to others around them
• are too delusional to know when their own marriage/relationship isn't working for them, and still keep whipping that dead horse rather than trying to find a sensible way to settle things with better options of counselling, separation, or divorce
• are ultra-religious or ethno-centric idiots who think it's some duty and obligation to marry, rather than daring to even think of it as being a choice. The last person who cast such a judgement on me was an immigrant from another culture where arranged marriages** are the rule rather than the exception. Once they learned my status, being at my age, they looked at me aghast, like I was some freak of nature that shouldn't even be alive.
• are otherwise, I would guess by their attitude and behaviour, just too goddamned stupid to know how to live on their own independently.

Totally unrelated bit of stuff here. . . It's the Cool Infographic of the Day: Nation Population/Migration Chart. It's only here because I'm a nerd for international demographics. Given what I just mentioned, I might someday be registered as one of those skinny little lines flowing from Canada to Sweden.

*- To have such insecurity and angst about losing these things has probably been already rendered pointless. Swedish companies, like IKEA, have no doubt foresaw this trend coming already through their research, and probably have been at the forefront of pre-designing everything accordingly for it for the rest of the century in terms of architecture, environment, furnishings, and decorum.
**-.Domestic violence statistics show cultures with arranged marriages as having some of the highest rates of spousal abuse. There is no arguing with me (one who has worked in a sexual assault and crisis centre) about this.

Starting 2013

I found a very appropriate movie I just watched recently which I'd recommend to everyone during this season, the transitioning of years. It is called In Time, starring Amanda Seyfried and Justin Timberlake. It's a science fiction movie with a unique, yet morbidly fascinating, premise: humans have been genetically altered/evolved to exist in a completely time-based social economy, making the saying "time is money" much less abstract. People in this society stop physiologically aging at the age of twenty-five, however there is a catch. Monetary currency has been entirely eliminated, and people are biochemically programmed with a countdown clock, where the time of their chronological lifespan can be increased or decreased, giving one a variable "expiry date". When the countdown has timed down to all zeros in a person, all of their metabolic functions cease entirely, and they simply die (time out). All transactions for goods, services, and living essentials are then made by directly exchanging units of time on and off one's lifespan. Time zones in this story don't mean global hourly differences, but rather they're gated communities where the elite classes (those who have banked centuries/millennia of longevity) are segregated away from those living in the time impoverished ghettos (those who literally live day to day on borrowed time). It makes one think a little more seriously about how we are exchanging, or wasting, our time in our life, and perhaps it prompted me greatly to give more thought about what I want to see happen for this new year.

What are my resolutions and ambitions? I haven't really thought them through with any great exacting detail, but the starting outline of them is as such:

• This year's general theme: Skills diversification, and daring to be different.
• Muses/Hacks/Motivators/Mnemonics/Reminders/Rationales:
• This is the first time since 1987, that all of the digits in the year number have been all different from each other
• "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results" - Albert Einstein

• Method: Do many new and exciting things throughout the year that challenge and build on all my "intelligences"
• The intelligences are:
• Linguistic
• Mathematical
• Visual
• Physical
• Musical
• Emotional
• Social
• Environmental
• Spiritual
• Practical
• Mnemonic Affirmation: (L)et (M)y (V)arious (P)ositive (M)indful (E)ndeavors (S)erve (E)veryone (S)ensibly and (P)ractically

 

• The 13 books I want to read (re-read*) for 2013
1. The Four Hour Work Week* - Timothy Ferriss
2. The $100 Start Up - Chris Guillebeau
3. What the Dog Saw - Malcolm Gladwell
4. Guns, Germs, and Steel* - Jared Diamond
5. Changeology - John C. Norcross
6. Eat to Live - Joel Fuhrman, M.D.
7. People Are Idiots, and I Can Prove It* - Larry Winget
8. The Writer's Idea Book - Jack Heffron
9. The Art of Nonconformity - Chris Guillebeau
10. The Manual of the Warrior of Light - Paulo Coelho
11. The Screwtape Letters - C.S. Lewis
12. Hyperspace - Michio Kaku
13. Embracing the Wide Sky - Daniel Tammet

• Starting Date to Commit to a Plan: January 6th, 2013
• Rationale/Reminder:
• Majorly ambitious changes for a whole year can't be organized within a single day, and doing so turns out to be just a rash and empty effort. It's probably why so many people fail at committing to their resolutions in the first place. I've tried planning some within one day before; it just doesn't work. I'll need more than just today for plan and orchestrate things, and to make feasible timelines for the year. Hopefully five planning days will be enough.
• These first five days should be sufficient to start cleaning and organizing my space, and for ridding some of the impediments out of my place without it turning into a wasteful purge. e.g. enough time to eat the foods out of my fridge that are contra to my diet plan (instead of just throwing them out).
• I'll have this coming weekend off to do a last proper binge before things get serious
• January 6th starts on a Sunday, which makes it easier to formulate a week by week training plan
• On January 6th, there will be 360 days remaining of 2013. A good time to affect things to watch them come full circle.

• The 13 things I want to do on this first day of 2013:
• Go skiing with my friend
• Make a new batch of beer
• Nap
• Watch a Blu-Ray (Prometheus)
• Take Ella to the dog park
• Try a new recipe
• Call my family
• Start a new budget for my projects
• Clean out and organize office closet (and fitness equipment)
• Re-tune my guitar, and learn a few new chords
• Collect some books to sell
• Purge old files on hard drive
• Begin brainstorming stuff and collecting ideas for the next four days