Read the Fine Print!

Well, I was reading something in the paper today that makes me feel a lot better. I was starting to think a while back that I must have been a really stupid kid, because I didn’t get all the meanings of stuff that was in songs and stories for kids. I’d just remember the funny noises or the way the narrator sounded when they read something. Then I’d come across it later and go, “Woe, if that was intended for kids to find easy to understand, and I didn’t get it, then I must be really dumb.”

Now I’ve read that a study actually found out that when you’re reading to kids, they’re spending more time looking at the pictures than the text. Phew! Then I’m not stupid. This is normal!

But here’s where I get annoyed with either the people who did the study or the person interpreting it. They make a big production, almost to the point of saying “Ha ha you’re wrong!” out of the fact that reading to your kids isn’t as good as you might think because they’re not actually learning to read. Ok, did anyone actually think that 3-year-old Jimmy was learning to read when you sat down with him? No! He’s learning to enjoy reading! If people actually take this study seriously, they’re going to stop reading to their kids because they think it’s not helping them to read. And then what good did this study do?

Football’s Back

So this morning at 10am tickets to the CFL Eastern Division Championship went on sale for the Rogers Centre (or the Ted) in Toronto. The game’s got the Argos’ and whoever wins the Eastern Semi-final. I got my tickets finished at 10:02am and the closest I could get was 2nd deck, 8th row. Don’t get me wrong, they’re really good seats, but 2 years ago, that many tickets to a football game selling that fast in Toronto would have been unheard of. They’re actually expecting to sell out the place (over 50,000) for the first time for football since the 1997 season. The CFL has always been viewed as kind of a second rate product in Toronto but young people are starting to get back in to it in Toronto and it’s creating quite a buzz as proven by the sales this morning.

It’s the first time the Eastern Final has been hosted in Toronto since 1997, so it’s the biggest game here in quite some time. It should be a huge buzz around the city for the next little while as the Argos’ try to reclaim the Gray Cup again this year. Sunday November 20 at 3pm if anyone else wants to try and get seats…. but you won’t be sitting anywhere near as close as me! Suckers!

Wow, Some People Need Sleep.

I saw something yesterday that made me laugh. I came down to what passes for a bus terminal in this town and jumped on a city bus. Now, bear in mind this bus’s main job is to shuttle people from the downtown to the university, which takes maybe 15 minutes. I got on the bus, weaved through the people who were still looking for seats or standing and was lucky to find a seat between two people. As the bus took off, I noticed that the person on my right was snoring! I don’t just mean a little bit. He was snoring really loudly.

Now let’s think about this. I got on the bus at the main drop-off point where all the buses come in. I didn’t get on the bus in the middle of the route. This guy was already on the bus. How long had he been just riding the bus snoring? Second, there is so much noise on this bus. It’s usually a full bus and sometimes it doesn’t stop for people once it gets too full because they can’t physically cram anymore people on the bus. And this guy slept through it all. He never moved when I got off the bus either. And boy was he ever lucky to even get a seat to sleep on. I don’t know where he was intending to go, but something tells me he missed his stop. Wonder if he’s still there?

Vomit Comet, Venturing into the World of feeds

Well, we’re just going up in the world fast aren’t we? Earlier in the week, we got given the gift of trackbacks, and now we discovered that we can have a feed for this place. So since everyone and their blogging brother is jumping on the RSS/Atom bandwagon, we decided to test it out. I know nothing about feeds, so I’m just following the site’s instructions on how to put one up, so I hope it works. If you have a News-reader and like that sort of thing, give it a try by going here to subscribe.

It can do RSS or Atom. There are a few options of how to subscribe, so hopefully one works. If that link doesn’t work, they gave me a handy dandy link that I put up in our description section with our email addresses. If that link doesn’t work, let us know and we’ll have to figure out how to fix it, because frankly, I’ll be stumped. Hopefully it won’t be stump Carin day. Happy RSS-reading everyone!

Comment changes

Well, I got rid of the numbers, and gained an extra link. Oops. But on the bright side, we have trackback now, whatever that does. Now here’s the important part. Does it still work? Hope so. Can everyone still find the comment links and click on them and put comments in? If not, well, you know where our emails are. Drop us a line and let us know if you have any trouble.

ARAO: A Really Asinine Obligation

Ok, rant time again. Yee ha.

One of the newest places where I volunteer has a stupid policy they call ARAO. It stands for Anti-Racism Anti-Oppression. AT this point I can hear the peanut gallorie booing me off the stage and calling me a racist asshole. But wait wait wait!

Basically the policy says they can’t turn people down based on their race, disability, or any other difference they may have. That sounds cool, until you realize what it means. It means that even if they want to turn you down, if you have something different, like I happen to have, they feel obligated to hang onto you. I wanted to do this job where you go with people to appointments that might be stressful or require moral support. Because I can’t see where I’m going, they don’t think I can do the job. How they think I manage to do my day to day things I don’t know. So, instead of flat out rejecting me, they’re trying to scare me away from the job by telling me that the situation could be unsafe, or they might get sued if I don’t do it right, etc. If they didn’t think I could do the job, and didn’t really want to give me a chance, why didn’t they just fucking say so, and save me the grief of fighting the impossible fight of proving myself to people who don’t really want to listen.

Does something fall from the sky and smack you on the head yet? Why does this place *need* to write down in a policy that they shouldn’t discriminate?? Have they had a history of discrimination before? When will people realize that policies don’t fix problems? We need to change attitudes, and forcing companies to have token women, blacks, people with disabilities only puts faces on resentment. I know, I know, the inventors of these policies think, “Yeah, but if we can just get them into the companies, they can change the minds of the higher-ups and life will be beautiful.” Have these people actually worked as a token? It doesn’t work. If the boss really doesn’t want that person in their company, they can make their life hell and find ways to make them look bad, proving that these policies only keep the best person for the job from having the job.

The peanut gallorie rises again. “Just be thankful they’re giving you a chance at all and there is legislation in place to guarantee that chance.” But the chance is no good if it’s not genuine. It’s like saying that everyone who’s poor has the right to this little pot of money. But when they get to the pot, they find out it’s monopoly money. What good is that? They can’t buy things at the store with it, they can’t put it in their checking account, but oh the government says they gave them money. It’s the same with these stupid bullshit policies. They’re not real.

Let’s face it. The future freaks me out. I don’t know if I’ll be able to find a job where I actually feel valued. I have found some volunteer placements where I felt like I had a chance. But when money’s involved, I’m afraid that the company will go for the cheapest and least labour-intensive option. Wouldn’t you? “Hmmm. I can hire this person who can read the print notices on the wall and all the print resources available to them, doesn’t need special software on the computer to make it usable for them, can drive, and will never ask me for anything except the occasional holiday. Or I can hire this blink with the same skills who I’ll have to throw a bunch of money into, they might ask for more stuff, and they might complain if they miss an important printed company memo. I choose…lemmy think…the first one.”

So I can see where some genius thought legislating companies into hiring people in the minority might have been a good idea. But what they forgot is you can’t legislate opinion. Human thought is still free, and it should be. Plus, if legislation was so effective, we could demolish the prisons and fire the police. Does that sound like a good idea to anyone? Didn’t think so.

Who Wants To Be A Small Claims Judge?

The other day I sat down and watched Judge Joe Brown for the first time in a little while and I was wondering about something. What the hell happened to that show?

It used to be my favourite out of that whole bunch of court shows. It was the only one that didn’t seem overly staged, over-produced and over-dramatic. Well maybe the People’s Court, but the People’s Court never gets the chance to truly establish a personality before they change judges again. But back to Joe Brown, since my whole point was really about him anyway. The thing that made his show cool was that he was the guy without any sort of stupid hook. He didn’t yell at people, he wasn’t some sort of do-gooder intent on changing the world 1 dented car or late cell phone bill at a time, and like I said, he just seemed real.

But now, things have changed. Oh, how they’ve changed. Somebody seems to have got it in his or her head that just being a good judge and trying cases isn’t good enough, even though it’s been working since like the beginning of time. They’ve got him randomly polling the audience for no apparent reason in what appears to be some sort of an attempt to make the show more interactive. Since when was court interactive?

“Ok, before we get to the jury, I want to ask you people in the seats, how many of you think that John killed those 6 people and then burned their car?”

Then lights flash, random beeping sounds fill the air, and a nice little yes/no percentage breakdown appears and John gets hauled off to jail because 77% of the victim’s families think he did it. That just doesn’t happen, and small claims, though not as serious as murder, should be no different. Come on, that $182.31 might mean a lot to somebody, so why shouldn’t it be taken seriously? It is court after all.

I suppose you could argue that the people involved should expect nothing less than to be turned into a spectacle since they agreed to have their cases tried on syndicated television, but still, if I cared what the audience thought, I’d be watching Millionaire instead.

The other thing that bothers me about this new Joe Brown is that he seems more like a character than a judge who deserves any sort of respect. Back in the day he would shut the bickering between people down before it had a chance to get going, but now the show has pretty much degenerated into black people yelling at each other while Joe sits there at the bench like a goddamn idiot. Either that or he’s doing this goofy fucking voice while he’s making his judgment or pretending to yell at them. Listen to him sometime, how can you take anything he says seriously when it seems like it’s coming out of the mouth of a Disney character?

Maybe I’m getting too worked up over this, but it bothers me that everything concerning TV these days is all about “reality,” but as soon as the reality looks too real, right away we need to spice things up so people will watch it. Leave it alone! Not all reality is exciting, that’s why a lot of people watch TV to begin with, to escape reality. But for those of us who want to watch reality, we’d prefer to watch reality as it is, not as some producer thinks it should be.

Always Follow the Code

Hey Kids,
So I’m back. I missed the ol’ VC. blah blah.

On Sunday night I went and checked out a concert for a band I’ve been listening to a lot lately. They’re awesome. They’re called Social Code. I know most people know their hit “Beautiful” and it’s a great tune. But not even close to their best.

It’s awesome cuz they’re still small so it’s a small club setting concert which is how I dig it. Underground music rocks. And this was quite literlaly under ground. It was held in the basement of another building in Oshawa.

Outstanding punk show. The openers all kind of sucked but it was worth the show. It was an all ages show so there were a lot of teeny boppers around that were pretty irritating but there were some pretty hardcore punks in Oshawa that I didn’t know about. (of course I use that term as an endeering one as opposed to how most people use it).

They’re a good little Canadian band out of Edmonton. So they’re struggling to get fans. they opened the show with Whisper To A Scream. If you don’t have it, Get it! They played most of the album and a few new songs which rocked pretty hard. They closed with Beautiful of course and said it was to thank their fans and told everyone to turn to the person beside them and hug them as a thank you from Social Code. I hugged my friend Ashley which was comical since she’s a country fan who hadn’t heard them until the day before – but hey. she showed up and supported them and actually enjoyed it and downloaded some songs when she got home and that’s what it’s all about for a band that size. Awareness. all and all a great high energy show. They’re passing through Guelph and a few other cities coming up on this Canadian tour. Get out and check them out. www.socialcodemusic.com.

If you wanna get a taste of what they are. A few songs I’d reccomend are Beautiful. Cats and Dogs, Miss You, He Said She Said, and Birds fly. Hell, all of it’s good but those are a good start.

PeACE