Honest, I love the CBC, I guess, sort of. They had me on the radio once, and it was fun, and before that, they flew me to Toronto to be on a game show, so they've been really nice to me. But I've got thoughts....
So this week news washed over the transom that the CBC, along with many other Crown corporations, faces more direct Treasury Board intervention in its union bargaining.
So my father-in-law found an iPhone 5 in front of the house, screen smashed, but still able to power on. Even the touchscreen was still responsive!
Unfortunately, the owner engaged in the smart practice of locking their phone, so I can't troll through their personal information looking for a way to contact them (like their email address, a phone number called "home," or similar).
Then began a little odyssey in which I tried to reunite the phone with its owner.
This is the easy and good-faith thing to do with a phone, but it's not that likely to get phone and owner reunited. For perfectly good reasons of better things to do, little time is spent on lost-phone cases. Even if the owner drops by the police station to try to find it, they may discover a large bucket of turned-in phones, and how to find theirs?
On January 28, 2013, my friend, Travers Naran, died of complications from cancer.
"You're like the thief who isn't the least bit sorry he stole, but is terribly, terribly sorry he's going to jail." -Rhett Butler, in Gone With the Wind
I have now read both of Daniel Coyle's cycling books, "Lance Armstrong's War" and (as co-author with Tyler Hamilton) "The Secret Race." As of now, here's some of the tell-all memoirs I'd like to read from retired bike racers:
-Miguel Indurain, because (at least in English) he is the most enigmatic, least-profiled superstar rider ever
-two or three sprinters, including Cavendish, because their training, goals, and attitudes are so different from that of grand tour teams (which were well-covered by Coyle)
-George Hincapie, because he has said so little, and unlike Hamilton, he was there from the beginning to the end of Armstrong's cycling career
-Jens Voigt, because Jens
Letter from Greece, touchdown edition
An uneventful flight. The interesting events in our two-legged flight from Vancouver to Athens were seat selection and AV problems.
We selected our seats relatively late, and as a result should have been even more screwed than we were. The YVR-YUL leg was on an A320, and we ended up with Rebecca on the aisle, and me one row behind in the middle (3-3 seating configuration). I asked the gentleman in my row's aisle seat if he would mind swapping with Rebecca, so we could sit together. He demurred, as the woman in the window seat in my row was his wife.
Yep, I was the unwelcome meat in a spousal sandwich. There's two rational reasons for a booking choice like this couple's: you hate your spouse, or you are trying to sneakily book your own private row of seats, aka ghetto first class. The down side is what happened, on a heavily booked flight where they got me in the middle.
I have no idea why.
A friend linked to this article published on the Atlantic's website: "1% Wives Are Helping Kill Feminism and Make the War on Women Possible," by Elizabeth Wurtzel. I usually ignore such things, because while I think the Atlantic is a great magazine, I want to engage with strong arguments, not weak ones, and my initial response was, dismissively, "this is terrible...cyanide-laced Kool-Aid for movement feminism."
I am convinced by the response though, that some people regard this article as advocating something reasonable. I guess I can write a rebuttal, then (and what follows is slightly edited from a comment I made on Facebook).
Quoting straight from the article, "Who can possibly take feminism seriously when it allows everything, as long as women choose it?"
There seems to be further evidence that modest drinking while pregnant (as I noted previously) does not affect the development of your unborn child.
NPR is reporting on a bunch of studies (also summarized here that just got published in BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology.
Vegas, baby
Las Vegas, and I was theoretically prepared for this, is a profoundly, wildly strange town. What follows are little vignettes of my stay here for Infocomm 2012, the trade show for audiovisual nerds.
Disorientation is the default setting for me here, and I have stopped blaming my poor sense of direction. Even the conference centre is laid out such that it has taken two days to figure out the relationship between the North and Central exhibit halls. And yes, I realize there is a pretty big hint in their names, thank you.
Recent electoral events in Greece appear to have been lightly attended to by the usual English-speaking chattering classes, so I thought I'd fill in.
First, there was a national legislative election on Sunday, and the result was fairly dramatic. The ruling left-of-centre PASOK party was comprehensively trounced. The right-of-centre New Democratic Party (yes, a right-leaning NDP, very amusing to all Canadians) gained a bit. Those are also the only two parties, as far as I can tell, that were committed to continuing the austerity/bailout policies.
And now, the guy with no professional credentials in workouts will embarrass himself.
Darren Barefoot linked to a semi-interesting but disappointing article about exercise myths.
Instead, here's my rough-sketched precepts of exercising, which draw on the Lifehacker article, but are more succinct, more coherent, and don't lie to you about the value of hard workouts.
Most people should do strength training. It is far more important than we previously realized*. Shorter, high-intensity workouts and drills are more useful than long-slow workouts; unless you're training for an endurance cardio event, you don't need a cardio focus in your workouts.
