Young and prudish

Yesterday, the Globe and Mail ran a "Facts and Arguments" essay by journalist and j-school prof Linda Kay. It was called "The teacher has no clothes":

I was applying body lotion in the locker room at the local YMCA, having just enjoyed an invigorating swim and a leisurely shower.

Standing stark naked with my hair wrapped in a towel, I heard someone approach and loudly exclaim, "Is that Professor Kay?" 

Oh yes, it certainly was. In all my glory.

Some of the comments on the story are hilarious. People wondering why she was naked in the locker room, for instance. Why not be more discreet? 

There's also an age-related thread running through both the essay ("It never fazed me to stand naked before fellow swimmers in my club, maybe because most of us were middle-aged and sagging in similar places"), and it comes up in one of the comments too.

Tom R from Victoria, Canada writes: My question has a little different slant but nonetheless relevant. Why do the younger men in my local rec centre... way too often hide themselves away so as to seemingly protect themselves from being seen by anyone else ?? What's their problem ?? This doesn't seem to be an issue for us older males.

Reading the piece, I found myself thinking about a misconception that I think dates from the 60s: the idea that younger people are more likely to be relaxed and comfortable about nudity. I never saw it when I was younger, and I certainly don't see it now. As one of the commenters (in a comment now deleted) wrote: where's the evidence that we are at all enlightened in 2008?

Adolescence and young adulthood are so much more fraught with concerns about image, and the way our bodies appear is the most personal manifestation of that concern. I've been in locker rooms and seen exactly what Tom R is talking about. High school and slightly older guys wrapping themselves up in towels, going off to the toilet stalls to change (yuk) and going through contortions to get dressed without showing any skin. Meanwhile, their elders are just going about their business -- shower, shave, sauna, get changed -- with minimal fuss. Some of the time they're naked, some of the time they're not. Big deal. 

Somehow we've absorbed the idea that youth equates with casual attitudes towards sex and nudity (hence the perennial teen sex panics in the media). It's a holdover. A cliche. And like all cliches, it's time for it to go.

Putting your money where your mouth is -- but not where your wheels are.

I was at a small-town farmer's market on a recent Saturday. It takes place in the local hockey rink, and features a mix of artisans with sea-glass jewellery, market gardeners with organic produce, fair trade coffee, and pleas for local causes. The crowd was mostly locals, with a sprinkling of tourists. Many of the tourists' cars sported Obama bumper stickers.

Near the entrance to the market, one bumper sticker caught my eye: "I buy local first."

The sticker was on a Japanese car.

The complexities of sweatshop monitoring

Great story in the Washington Monthly, on something I suspect most of us have rarely thought about: just how companies do try (or not) to ensure goods from their overseas suppliers are produced under acceptable conditions.

The writer, T.A. Frank, used to work for a company that carried out these inspections.

"Now, anyone in the business knows that when inspections uncover safety violations or wage underpayment more than once or twice—let alone five times—it's a sign that bigger problems are lurking beneath. Companies rarely get bamboozled about this sort of thing unless they want to.

"And many prefer to be bamboozled, because it's cheaper. While companies like to boast of having an ethical sourcing program, such programs make it harder to hire the lowest bidder. Because many companies still want to hire the lowest bidder, "ethical sourcing" often becomes a game. The simplest way to play it is by placing an order with a cheap supplier and ending the relationship once the goods have been delivered. In the meantime, inspectors get sent to evaluate the factory—perhaps several times, since they keep finding problems—until the client, seeing no improvement in the labor conditions, severs the bond and moves on to the next low-priced, equally suspect supplier."

Squeezing more money out of grocery shoppers

Two case studies.

1) Atlantic Superstore (and the rest of the Loblaws chain, presumably) introduces a new pasta. It sells for $0.99. The price, you know, is too good to be true. But instead of pitching it as an introductory price, after about a month they put the pasta on sale for $1.49, with signs that say "Save $0.40!"

So you're not paying 50% more than the original price, you are saving money off the soon-to-be 100% higher than original price. (OK, not quite 100%, but close.)

2) There's nothing new about the old trick of keeping the price the same but making the package smaller (that's why it's an old trick). But I love the liquid laundry soap scam. The package claims the contents will wash, say 36 loads. You pour the liquid into the cap provided to measure out the soap for your laundry. I suspect most people more or less fill the cap. But the one-load measure is a barely perceptible line about 1/3 of the way up the cap. In other words, if you're filling that cap, you're getting 12 loads, not 36. If you're half filling it, you're getting maybe 20. Nice.

Google doesn't know when to be offended

Looking for the number of a researcher I want to interview at Montreal's Jewish General Hospital, I Googled these words: Jewish General Montreal.

The Google ads on the side of the search page were topped by one from Google itself, linking to this page, where I found the following text:

An explanation of our search results.

If you recently used Google to search for the word "Jew," you may have seen results that were very disturbing. We assure you that the views expressed by the sites in your results are not in any way endorsed by Google. We'd like to explain why you're seeing these results when you conduct this search.

A site's ranking in Google's search results relies heavily on computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page's relevance to a given query. Sometimes subtleties of language cause anomalies to appear that cannot be predicted. A search for "Jew" brings up one such unexpected result...

We apologize for the upsetting nature of the experience you had using Google and appreciate your taking the time to inform us about it.

Two problems. 1) I did not search for the word "Jew." 2) These are the first-page search results Google came up with:

• Jewish General Hospital
• Segal Cancer Centre
• Dr. Clown -- Jewish General Hospital (an outfit that sends clowns to hospitals to entertain)
• Department of Otolaryngology -- Staff
• Two Nurses at Montreal's Jewish General Hospital Have Lost Their Licences
• Example: Jewish General Hospital, Montreal,QC (a page from Cancer Care Ontario)
• Sir Mortimer B Davis Jewish General Hospital (search results from a site reselling papers)

You get the idea. A whole cornucopia of offensiveness.

Why I hate Purolator

Here's how FedEx works. When someone sends me a package with FedEx, the company's local driver comes to my house to deliver it. It used to be that if I wasn't home, they would call me to see if I would be around soon so they could drop it off. If I wasn't, they would come back the next day. (Now the way it works is they leave it in a pre-arranged spot whether I'm home or not.) When I want to send something via FedEx, I call them and they come pick it up. Or I take it to the local drop, and they pick it up from there.

Here is how Purolator works. They come to my house with a package. If I'm not home, they don't try to deliver it again. Instead, they leave a note saying the package is available for pickup at their local agent. Is their local agent the post office? You know, an outlet of Canada Post, which actually owns Purolator and has convenient hours, like opening at 8 AM?

No, their agent is a local business that sells wine and beer-making supplies and bottled water, and offers dry cleaning and a Sears pickup service. They open at 10 AM most days.

I take the note off my door, and naively head down to the local agent to pick up my package. "Oh no, it won't be here today. He'll drop it off when he comes back tomorrow." Because they only open at 10, of course, if you have a job in the city or somewhere else to be that takes you out of the community earlier in the morning, you are screwed.

How about using Purolator to send packages? 1) Go to the post office (a branch of the corporation that owns Purolator, remember). 2) Hand over the package. 3) Be told that Purolator won't deliver to that address. 4) Listen to suggestion that maybe the UPS store or the local weird little bottled-water-and-whatever store might know if there's a way to get Purolator to deliver that address ("They really don't tell us anything about Purolator") and 5) Send package using another company before 6) Remembering to ask clients to please use FedEx instead.

Iraq looting

One of the wonderful things about the slow death of the newspaper firewall era (in which you needed a subscription to access "premium content") is that Robert Fisk's reporting for the Independent is now freely available.

Remember the orgy of looting that broke out after the US invasion of Iraq? How there were troops protecting the Ministry of Oil and little else? (There is an excellent chapter on this whole episode in Rajiv Chandrasekaran's book Imperial Life in the Emerald City.)

Well, the looting never stopped. In fact, the looters just took over. Read Fisk and weep.

Takes one to know one department

Former Bush speechwriter David Frum (the man apparently responsible for the words "Axis of" in the phrase "Axis of Evil") talking about Ervand Abrahamian, co-author of the book Inventing the Axis of Evil on CBC Radio's The Current:

"Unfortunately, you can find apologists for anything."

He should know.

This pause brought to you by...

I haven't disappeared. Just back from a holiday -- far from any computers -- and planning to stay away from them for the long weekend too. Our regular programming will resume in a few days.

Montreal round-up

Things I learned on a recent trip to Montreal:

• Xavier Caféine's "Montréal (Cette Ville)" (Chorus: "Cette ville va me rendre fou / Cette ville va me rendre complètement fou") is the perfect accompaniment to have when you drive downtown from the airport, having negotiated the Dorval circle, cars whipping from one lane to the other all around you.
• I have been away from the city long enough to have forgotten the frequencies of all the radio stations I used to listen to.
• The few mini-malls near my house that I consider to be horrendous sprawl would barely qualify as one block in Laval.
• Signage continues to be up to its usual standards. Drop your rental car off at the airport, follow the crosswalk to the terminal, and before you get there you're confronted with a concrete barrier and two signs, one for international arrivals pointing left, and one for domestic arrivals pointing right. Departures anyone?
• Ted Tevan notwithstanding, the meals at Chenoy's seem a lot less impressive than they did when I was a teenager.
• The Reluctants have some great new songs, and the new album they're recording should be a good one.
  

IKEA gets instructions right

I have been putting together a bunch of IKEA furniture. One thing that truly impresses me is how clear the directions are -- and all with no words. The instructions actually seem to me to be closer in form to comics than anything else.

Bad directions can be incredibly frustrating. Take the LED lantern we bought -- the one that has only one switch "On/Off" but still manages, in its broken English and sentence fragments to be utterly confusing. (Does it mean you should store it fully charged? Or is it warning you that if you store it fully charged it will drain over time?).

IKEA on the other hand, offers clear drawings that even someone like me -- not especially technically competent and generally preferring words to pictures -- can follow. Last night I assembled the futon couch. The instructions contained one word: "Click." But it all went together pretty smoothly.

Other companies should be taking lessons from these guys.

Ouch!

Jen Alexander, a 32-year-old Halifax woman, has just swum the Northumberland strait twice -- from New Brunswick to PEI and back, non-stop. It took almost 20 hours.

What leaves me especially in awe is not just that she could do it in relatively chilly water, or that she has Type 1 diabetes and swam with a waterproof insulin pump, but that she could keep driving forward through all the jellyfish. She estimates she was stung 60 to 80 times.

Makes me feel like a wimp for having stayed out of the water at Basin Head a couple of weeks ago after watching the jellyfish float downstream from the tidal river towards the beach.

Funny ol' web

If you asked me to pick which would be by far -- by far! -- the most-read post on this blog, I don't think I would ever have guessed this one.

Directing traffic

So much has been written about the power and intelligence of crowds -- crowdsourcing, wikis, and so on -- that it's worth remembering the power of one person in the right place at the right time.

I got a reminder last night, when we went to Bedford to see the Canada Day fireworks.

We arrived in the area a few minutes before the show, and discovered the whole area jammed with cars. Obviously the Bedford fireworks were more popular than we had expected. A police officer suggested parking in the lot at a local little mall, which we did. We walked down to the waterfront, and got there just as the fireworks started. They were spectacular.

After the fireworks were over, the parking lot bottleneck began. There was only one way out of the lot, and long lines of cars formed, snaking their way towards the exit (which had a traffic light and led out onto a busy intersection). Instead of idling the engine for half an hour, we waited. Cars hardly moved at all. Parking lots like this are designed to handle a steady flow -- not hundreds of cars all leaving at once.

Eventually, we joined the lineup of idling cars. Right about that time, a guy appeared at a key point in the parking lot: the spot where cars coming from three different directions funnelled into the final approach to the traffic lights leading out of the lot. He had appointed himself traffic cop -- mind you, a long-haired traffic cop in jeans, but still effective.

At first, I had thought he might be drunk. But he wasn't. (Or, if he was, he was a very effective drunk.)

With dramatic flourishes, he waved cars from one direction forward, stopped cars coming from another direction, and quickly managed to restore order and get the traffic moving smoothly towards the lights and out of the lot. There was no reason to pay attention to this guy waving his arms. He had no external authority. But people did pay attention, and it worked. We all got out of there a lot faster than we would have if we'd left it up to the wisdom of the crowd.

Even crankier

People who are even crankier than me about language.

It's the results of a contest from the UK's Daily Telegraph.

The idea was to come up with a paragraph or two, no longer than 150 words, packed with as many infuriating words and phrases as possible...

Infuriating as the language was, the entries were very funny. "When it comes to abuse of English, I've been there, done that, got the T-shirt. Do you know what I mean?" Jackie Rowe's entry started, worryingly.

Oh dear

I was in an elementary school last week, and it was the day of the annual volunteer tea -- a thank you to all those people who helped out during the year. Part of the event was some music, with kids from the band showing their talents, and a choir singing for the volunteers.

One of the choir's songs featured a very sweet girl in Grade 3 as a soloist. There she stood, front and centre, bravely singing her part -- all while wearing a t-shirt that said on it:

Penthouse
It's great to be on top