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Posted by Zoom! on October 30, 2010, at 1:52 pm |
Earlier this year, Italy granted sweeping new powers to its municipalities to create laws that they believe will reduce crime and anti-social behaviour. Given that you can get some very strange people running municipalities (I’m looking at you, Toronto), I wouldn’t be surprised if some very strange laws were put into place.
So far, the new laws range from implementing dress codes to prohibiting panhandling. One municipality forbids the building of sandcastles. Another no longer permits the playing of football in public places. Also on the chopping block: feeding pigeons, kissing in cars, wearing wooden clogs and feeding stray cats.
Of course it varies from town to town. Three people are not permitted to share a bench after 11:00 pm in one town, whereas you’re not allowed to put your feet on a bench in another.
Incidentally, Italy now has a “Minister of Simplification,” whose job it is to identify and eliminate redundant laws. I’m not even kidding.
Personally, I think we’re all over-regulated to begin with. But if we had this kind of power here, and I were in charge, I’d make it illegal to spit on the sidewalk.
How about you? What laws would you create?
Posted by Zoom! on October 27, 2010, at 3:45 pm |
I’m going through an unusually busy stretch, but I’ll be back soon. In the meantime, here are a few pictures I took at the Experimental Farm with the Hipstamatic. Don’t you think I’m lucky to live so close to the Farm, and to have a Hipstamatic?
This guy’s not from the Hipstamatic. But he’s a regular on that post.
Posted by Zoom! on October 22, 2010, at 9:40 am |
For months now I’ve been dreaming almost nightly of smoking cigarettes. It’s always the same. I’m smoking, and I’m so disappointed. Then I wake up, realize it was a dream, and feel relieved. A couple of nights ago there was an unusual twist – I dreamed I was smoking again, but this time it occurred to me I might be dreaming. I concluded I wasn’t, and proceeded to feel disappointed, but then I woke up and realized I had been dreaming and was so relieved. (I haven’t had a cigarette for a few years now, and I don’t miss it, so I don’t know why it still figures so predominantly in my dreams.)
I also dream a lot about getting laid off. I started having this dream several years before I got laid off, and it continues even now, probably once a week or so. You’d think the dream would have stopped after it came true, but no, it didn’t. It’s always the same too – I get laid off and I feel like it’s my own fault.
For about 10 years I dreamed almost nightly of apartment-hunting. Even when the dream was about something else, apartment-hunting was always going on in the background. I kept finding perfect places and terrible places, and exploring mazes of rooms and thinking about the possibilities. Often I found my dream home, but with a single deal-breaking fault, like there was no bathroom, or the devil lived in the basement, or it was a three-hour commute to work, or it was just a three-month sublet, or it was in an elevator shaft, or I could live there but I’d have to hide from the real tenants, who would also be living there. But other than that, it was perfect.
Do you have recurring dreams, or recurring themes to your dreams? Do you think they mean anything?
Posted by Zoom! on October 20, 2010, at 11:47 am |
The last two days I’ve been following the sentencing hearing of Colonel Russell Williams. (For those of you unfamiliar with the case, Col. Williams was commander of Canada’s largest military base. About two years ago he started breaking into homes in his neighbourhood(s) and stealing the underwear of women and girls. He took photographs of the underwear, and also of himself wearing it, in the bedrooms of these women and girls. He also took pictures of himself masturbating there. He meticulously documented and catalogued everything. His pattern of behaviour escalated: he started breaking into houses naked, then naked while the women were home (in the shower, for example). Later, he started sexually assaulting women. Ultimately, he murdered one woman in her home, and then kidnapped another woman and murdered her in his home. He videotaped the rapes and murders. Then he was caught. He confessed. He pleaded guilty. His sentencing hearing is now underway in a courtroom in Belleville, Ontario.
I’ve been following the hearing on Twitter. Meghan Hurley, the Ottawa Citizen’s crime reporter, is live-tweeting from the courtroom, along with a number of other journalists. Hurley captures and relays the evidence being presented, as well as details she observes in the courtroom, in an ongoing series of 140-character-or-less tweets.
Now here’s the thing. The last two days of evidence have involved a fair amount of graphic detail. Hurley reported much of it, but sometimes she said something was too graphic or disturbing to report. Whenever she did that, I couldn’t help but wonder what exactly was being held back.
Meanwhile, I was seeing all kinds of tweets that other people were shutting down Twitter or no longer ‘following’ Hurley (and the other reporters) because they found it too disturbing to read the gory details.
So I started to wonder if there was something wrong with me for being so interested in the gory details, especially the omitted ones.
I do tend to be a little morbidly curious at times. I’m reading a book called Stiff right now – it’s about cadavers. And I was fascinated by the Jim Jones cult suicides in 1978, when 900 people killed themselves on command, by drinking the poisoned kool-aid. No detail was too gory for me. Despite the publicity ban on the Homolka/Bernardo trials back in 1993, I was one of those ghoulish people who accessed the forbidden details on the alt.fan.karla-homolka group on a foreign server. If there’s an editor’s note urging discretion before viewing ‘disturbing’ material, I always look.
Why is deviance so compelling? There are so many aspects to deviance which fascinate me. The psychological and sociological and cultural dimensions of deviance. I want to know if the deviant escalation of individuals also applies to societies. In other words, does a society become increasingly deviant over time, the same way a deviant individual might? I want to know just how deviant deviance can get, which is where the gory details come in.
(I have no interest in horror movies, by the way. Just reality.)
It’s not that I’m insensitive. If I were sitting in that courtroom with Meghan Hurley and the victims’ families and the colonel, I’d probably be sobbing throughout it all. But here, on my couch, watching the gory details emerge on my Twitter feed, I’m okay. I just want to know more. I just want to try to understand why the Colonel became what he became.
I can’t help but wonder, though, if it’s deviant to be this interested. Or is it just human nature?
Posted by Zoom! on October 19, 2010, at 9:24 am |
GC and I went to our first meeting of the Parrot Society on Sunday night. It was at the Jack Purcell Community Centre. We didn’t know what to expect, but we were pleasantly surprised to see that there were almost as many parrots as people there. There were a bunch of people sitting in a semi-circle with parrots on their shoulders. All kinds of parrots. There was a Macaw, a cockatoo, a quaker, a pionus, an African Grey, a conure, and several others.
Surprisingly, the birds were exceptionally well-behaved. They didn’t fly willy-nilly all over the room, and they didn’t monopolize the conversation. They mostly just sat politely on their people’s shoulders and watched.
 Except for Rock, the Macaw, who stretched his magnificent wings out and chewed on his person’s shoelaces. And Coco, the African Grey, who nuzzled up against her friend’s ear and insisted on being stroked and scratched the entire time, and made noises like water dripping into a full sink. And Lester, the cockatoo, who kept stretching his head up and down while saying “Up and down, up and down.”
There’s just something about a talking bird that I find irresistible.
Someone once told me that when she was a kid her father won a mynah bird. They would put a bowl of water in the bottom of its cage and it would jump into the water and splash around and scream “Help! Help!” I think that’s hilarious.
My son and I visited a greenhouse out near Arnprior when he was a kid, and a crow flew across the yard, landed at my son’s feet, looked up at him in a cock-eyed sort of way, and said “Now what? What now?”
A couple of men at Sunday night’s meeting talked about their African Greys. One man said that if he wants to talk to his wife, he has to go find her, because she will no longer come when called. That’s because the bird has called her – in the husband’s voice – too many times, and she won’t fall for it anymore. He also said that whenever the phone rings, the bird says “Hello? Oh hi. Really? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yeah. Okay then. Talk to you later. Bye.” This bird also does a very convincing imitation of their doorbell, and they often answer the door to find nobody there. The other African Grey gives commands to the dog, and the dog listens and obeys.
Part of what’s so amazing about talking birds is that they don’t just repeat words. They often understand what they’re saying, and they can mimic specific voices and sounds perfectly. I’ve heard that you have to be very careful about what sounds you expose an African Grey to. Unless you want a bird that mimics your farts, you should leave the room when you need to pass gas. (Personally, I have the sense of humour of a five-year-old, so I’d stay put.) But I wouldn’t want him learning how to mimic the smoke detector, or even the lovebirds for that matter.
 I think I might get an African Grey instead of an eclectus. I met a breeder at the meeting, and she has a one-year waiting list for African Greys. They seem like lovely birds, very intelligent and a lot of fun. Apparently they can achieve the intelligence of a five-year-old, and the emotional maturity of a two-year-old. They live for about sixty years, so I’ll have to make provisions for it after my death. My son says he’ll take it, but only if it swears and farts.
Posted by Zoom! on October 16, 2010, at 11:36 am |
I’m so sorry about the rat infestation at Confederation Park. I honestly didn’t think it would come to this. In retrospect, it’s just surprising that it took so long.
Back in the early 80s, my son’s father, John, told me that he’d always wanted a pet rat, but his mother wouldn’t let him have one, and then his wife wouldn’t let him have one. So I – being young and naive, and wanting to be a cool girlfriend – got him a rat for Christmas.
It was love at first sight and John named him Buddy. And then he promptly went out and bought me a rat. I named her Annabelle. John and I loved Buddy and Annabelle. Buddy and Annabelle loved each other – with great gusto and frequency. In no time at all, they produced a litter of nine baby rats. John and I were delighted.
My delight was not as lasting as John’s however, since the nine baby rats were practically born pregnant. Within a couple of months, there were litters of rats being born almost on a daily basis.
(I finally grasped the concept of compounding interest.)
The cage was full. Way too full. I started giving baby rats to the pet store, but it didn’t take long before they said they had enough.
I did some library research on rat overpopulation, and discovered that there were three likely outcomes:
1. The rats would become homosexual until the population levels rebalanced themselves.
2. The male rats would become aggressive to one another, competing to the death for the privilege of mating with the females.
3. The rats would escape from captivity.
I was rooting for Option #1, which sadly didn’t happen in our case. The male rats just became more ferociously and competitively heterosexual, leading to violence and social decay, and a new social ethic of every rat for himself. It was brutal. The community turned on itself. Things were getting ugly in the rat cage.
And then they started escaping.
We began finding litters of baby rats in our jacket pockets and winter boots and underwear drawers. Eventually even John had to admit that things were getting out of hand.
By this time it was summer – six months since I’d bought him Buddy for Christmas. We considered flushing the babies, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to do it. I ended up gathering a bunch of them in a box and taking them to Confederation Park, where I let them go in the bushes and wished them luck. I knew it wasn’t the ideal solution, but I was truly desperate.
At any rate, it was too little, too late. I got home from Confederation Park to discover three new litters of rats – and that was just in the cage. That wasn’t even counting the rats in the rest of the apartment.
I moved out in July. It wasn’t just the rats; the relationship wasn’t going well. But the rats weren’t helping.
John deserted the apartment a few months later, but he had to move three times altogether before he managed to completely escape the rats. Ironically, he now lives right across the street from the rat-infested apartment, with several large aquariums and several thousand fish. At least they can’t escape.
I’ve always felt bad about those poor landlords and what we inadvertently did to them. They were a nice young family who lived in the building. And now I feel bad about Confederation Park, too.
By the way, I love Robin’s park rat picture.
Posted by Zoom! on October 15, 2010, at 9:54 am |
I’m having the best birthday EVER. GC delivered fabulous presents to me in bed at 7:30 this morning. Boxed sets of David Attenborough documentaries – Planet Earth, and The Life of Birds! And an iPhone docking station, and a digital art magazine! We’re going out for dinner tonight at my favourite restaurant – The Savanna Cafe.
Then I came downstairs and discovered all kinds of happy birthday greetings on Facebook and in email and on my favourite online discussion group.
It’s garbage day, which means Duncan gets to hang out outside while I make multiple trips in and out of the house. He loves that. Usually when I’m done taking everything out, he makes me chase him down the street to get him back in the house, but today he didn’t, because it was my birthday. He just cheerfully walked up the steps and through the open door when I called him.
Then I cleaned the bird cage. I change the paper every day, but today I took it apart and cleaned and disinfected everything in the bathtub. The birds were fascinated. They all perched on my head and watched me work. I think I’m going to have to be Oboe’s girlfriend, by the way. It looks like Banjo and Piccolo have paired up, and poor little Oboe is the odd man out. The other two sleep snuggled up together on a perch, and he has to sleep by himself at the other end of the perch. Piccolo sometimes snaps at him and bites his toes if he tries to eat at the same time as them, or if he tries to play with them. It’s so sad. I’m trying to make it up to him with extra love and affection. I’m a little worried about mating season though.
Back to birthdays. I was thinking about the fact that I remember very few of my own birthdays. Here are a few that I do have memories of:
Age 7: I got two budgies from my mother’s boyfriend, Skipper. My upstairs neighbours, Heather and John Akin (parents of journalist David Akin, who was a little boy at the time) gave me a 3-quart jug of 2% milk with a big red bow on it. That’s because we could only afford powdered milk, and I hated powdered milk. My sister and I were thrilled. Budgies and real milk! What more could we want?
Age 8: I woke up early in the morning and opened my presents before anyone else got up. I rationalized it by saying I was born at 6:10 am, therefore it was officially time to open presents. I got a Bunnykins ornament. And I got sent to my room for a few hours. But then the mail was delivered, and there was a parcel from my grandfather, and in it was a Winnie-the-Pooh smock top and some coloured pencils and other things.
Age 16: I was in the ROH adolescent unit then, and I cut my cake with a plastic knife.
Age 18: My sister took me to the liquor store and told them to check my ID. (Back then the drinking age was 18.)
Age 10,000 days: I had a party.
So what about you? What was your most memorable birthday? Which one stands out, and why?
Posted by Zoom! on October 14, 2010, at 10:54 am |
One of my pet peeves is automated telephone advertising. A machine calls my telephone and leaves a lengthy recording advertising something at me. I’ve had five calls recently from some recording saying a new newspaper is starting up here in Ottawa, and I should call soon to reserve my very own paper route. If I hang up on it, it goes to message and I have to listen to it again later in order to delete it.
This morning I heard that a number of people in Ottawa received this kind of call from the Larry O’Brien campaign last night. Not only that, but Larry’s bragging about it this morning like it’s a good thing – an exercise in participatory democracy – by calling it a “Tele-Town Hall meeting.” He says 13,000 people “participated” in it last night. (See David Reevely’s post about that.)
How sleazy and deceptive.
You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.
Have you all decided who to vote for yet? I’m still undecided, but I’ve narrowed it down to Charlie Taylor, Clive Doucet or Jim Watson. I’m leaning towards Watson because I think it’s essential we get rid of Mayor Larry. (I have a friend who says the problem with democracy is that we always vote against what we hate instead of for what we want. She’s got a point.) For councilor, here in River Ward, I’m voting for Nadia Willard. (Yesterday I delivered flyers for Julia Ringma in College Ward.)
Posted by Zoom! on October 12, 2010, at 2:59 pm |
My sister, Mudmama, detests telephones. I’m not crazy about them either, but I’m not as phobic as she is. I can answer the phone, and if I really, really have to, I can make a call.
I don’t know why we have this fear of phones. Maybe it was because we had a party line when we were kids, which meant that our phone line was shared among half a dozen households. Neighbours could, if they were so inclined, eavesdrop on your phone conversations. This possibility may have piggy-backed a fear of telephones onto my fear of public speaking.
Or maybe it was because our mother insisted that girls do not call boys. Ever. Boys call girls. Girls wait to be called. I didn’t understand the reasoning behind it. Actually, I don’t even recall that there was any reasoning behind it. It was just one of those arbitrary rules that confuse you as a child and make life seem so complicated. But this rule might explain why I can receive phone calls more easily than I can make them.
Anyway, however it happened, Mudmama and I are not enthusiastic users of the telephone.
I’m enjoying my iPhone though, precisely because being a phone is just a tiny, insignificant part of its raison d’etre. I use it for email, geocaching, calendars, to-do lists, tracking stuff, listening to music, bus schedules, photography, surfing the web and much, much more.
I’m pretty sure even Mudmama would like this phone.
 She says the only thing about the iPhone that appeals to her is a photography app called Hipstamatic. So I downloaded it two days ago, for $1.99 plus $5 for all the accessories. It converts the iPhone’s camera into a virtual replica of the 1960s Hipstamatic camera. There are seven interchangeable lenses, nine types of film, and six flashes. You can select one of each for each picture, or allow it to randomly throw three together for you.
 So anyway, I’ve kind of gotten hooked on the Hipstamatic. It really does produce pictures just like the ones you took in the 60s or 70s or 80s with cheap plastic camera equipment and film and flash bulbs. They’re really that bad, with light leaks and streaks and odd colour casts. My thumb ends up in about a third of the pictures. It’s almost impossible to compose a photograph with any precision because the viewfinder is small and not very wysiwyg (what you see is what you get).
 But the charm is that you have no idea of how your picture will turn out until after you take it, especially if you use the random feature. It’s all a big surprise. A lot of the pictures are undeniably awful, but there are some happy surprises too. And even the bad pictures are cool in their own nostalgic way.
I’ve taken over 300 photos with it in the past 48 hours. I end up taking multiple photos of the same thing, since I’m curious to see how the different effects will change the result. My usual 45 minute walk took an hour and a half today because I needed to take so many pictures of corn and geese and cows and flowers and sky and trees.
 I think this camera app would be especially good for taking photos of old things – antique cars, vintage trailers, old household stuff, vintage clothing, etc. It’s even good for taking pictures of older people, since it doesn’t magnify every flaw in crisp detail.
If you’d like to see some really good Hipstamatic snapshots, check out the monthly Hipstamatic photo contests.
Posted by Zoom! on October 11, 2010, at 11:47 am |
Happy Thanksgiving, everybody! Turkey’s in the oven. I’m thankful for a lot of things, and one of them is cats. Duncan in particular, of course, but cats in general too.
If you like cute cat pictures, check out 119 Ways to Store and Organize Your Cats, which is where I got these from.
I realize this is a pretty cheap blog post, especially considering I haven’t blogged in three days and today is my blog’s 5th birthday (!) but I have to get back to preparing a feast and counting my blessings.
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