Screen time

Sharing is a symptom of scarcity (or just lameness)

100 percent screening of airline
passengers

In the land where individualism trumps the group, it seems we keep finding ways to avoid shared experiences. Sure, we share experiences after we've had them -- on Facebook. But why should we waste time experiencing music or film or other mass media with other people when there's even a small chance our tastes may differ? That's what headphones and iPads are for. This trend (if that's what it is) was in my face on a flight earlier this year. One seat, one video screen. It's assumed now that only people flying on food stamps need to be offered headphones. Having been on just a few planes with this one-face-one-screen accommodation, it would already feel dreadfully pathetic to confront the long standard choice: watch the movie or don't. But the old standard would also fly in the face (pun intended) of this trend (if that's what it is) because watching a movie in an airplane, on a shared monitor, with a bunch of strangers, would now seem less like an in-flight premium than like being stuck at a bad summer camp. So toddlers take note. Your parents' repetitious insistance that you share and take turns is oblivious to the trend (if that's what it is).

Maybe I'm wrong

iPad can be wePad but it's myPad
and it's gone.

For Fathers' Day this year, I got an iPad. Apparently, I'm supposed to share. While I wasn't sure at first what the void was between my smartphone and my laptop, apparently the distance from ears to lap  represents a huge market for apps that could change my life... if I'd only let them. But it's been difficult to explore these new frontiers because first, I have to track down the 'pad. I started hiding it and taking it to work with me. The compulsive sharers have found the hiding places. I tried to see how I'd use it at a meeting. Flipping open the "smart cover" at a conference table in Vancouver last week, I had to make the snap judgement that it would be worse to attempt an explanation of the wonderfully high resolution page of pink bikini bathing suits (those things are expensive btw). And see? If we all had our own iPad instead of my new wePad, I would know less about all the game apps that are now loaded on to it, less about all the cool stuff we may or may not be buying, and my colleagues would be less inclined to wonder about my fetishes.

It gets worse

Survey says... what the f*** is that guy doing fishing for
for file folders in a coat-and-tie-dress?

The banality of PowerPoint is a tired cliche, it's true. But it's still happening. With a generation of rising Teletubbies taking over soon, we can't seriously expect this trend (if that's what it is) to reverse. See the screen. Be the screen. Giggle and coo. Among the most unfortunate spinoffs of this mediocre medium is clipart. Where other art has the potential to imagine life's complexities, clipart's agenda is bluntly opposite: obfuscatory reduction. And so I posit that clipart is not cute. (Though, by using the word "posit" I may be giving off the vibe that nothing in this world is cute.) Coupled with the deference to the screen that we're taught in self-referential duplicate by Tinky-Winky, Dipsy, La La, and Po, clipart is management consulting's weapon of choice against scrutiny. Analysis, if it is actually performed, can be synthesized into bulleted truisms and paired with clipart to cement the abstraction. And so, maybe because we just want the meeting to end, we're unwilling to argue with the insight of hard working experts that organizations dedicated to success should not wade into water, fully clothed in dysfunctional garb, to pull up oversized file folders with a fishing pole?

We are what we clip (?)

I am car driving man. I have three skirt-wearing people, a dog, and two cats.

A lot of people are now embracing clipart as a way to affirm their domestic arrangement -- at least to those who may be tailgating them. You've seen this -- those white vinyl line-art decals used to represent the people and creatures affiliated with the household car (sometimes depicted with their favorite toys. A quick Google search (of family stickers) tells me that if I only want to mock this trend (if that's what it is) I'm really late to the party. But nonetheless, it seems sad. What compels this stickering? I can't think they're stuck up in hopes of starting conversations at stoplights (Hey there. Two cats, eh? Wow, you're a lot fatter than your window sticker).  So, sticking with the clipart analogy I'm going to, you guessed it, posit that these mountings are driven by a need to reduce domestic relationships to a simple, stable, and most importantly projectable form (that can survive the stresses of a drive-thru carwash). Maybe I'm wrong so to end I'll say, thanks for reading this far -- my love for you is like window glue.

My body for science

My invitation... to science.

Oil & D
After 45 years of waiting, it's happened. I've been drafted by science to be a subject in a long term health study. If my completed questionnaire doesn't eliminate me, I have agreed to eat large amounts of both vitamin D and fish oil (or one or two placebos) for five years. The hypothesis given by the investigating institutions (Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital) is that these supplements might prevent heart disease, stroke, and cancer. So here's the ethical question. What's stopping me from getting my package of pills analyzed to see if I've been put in the placebo group? I mean, it wouldn't necessarily mess up the research to, upon finding my pills are placebos, toss them in the trash and say I ate them. And wouldn't you have to make a fish-oil placebo smell and taste like fish? What could be ethical about that? They could at least use gummy-fish for the placebo group. I guess I could be undermining the possible finding that all it really takes to prevent disease is a good, daily whiff of fish smell.

Backyard archeology

Unearthed: the portrait of Garage Baby. 

The time has come to replace our 1930's era garage building. Built atop of a schmear of cement rather than any kind of real foundation and constructed from things like scabbed-together door jambs, there's not a lot to save. But we will be saving the "Garage Baby." Sometime around 2004/5, I noticed a painter's canvas nailed backwards onto the exposed studs between some larger pieces of plywood shearing. I pulled the nails, flipped the canvas, and voila! It was nothing to cart off to the Antiques Roadshow but the mid twentieth century studio portrait of fourish year-old boy  was definitely a mystery to be investigated--or at least invented. Would some neighbors recognize him as the teenager who broke all those windows in 1949? There had to be a reason his image was nailed backward onto the cobwebs and soot. And despite decades facing darkness, countless cycles of freezing and thawing, and the monotonous silence occasionally broken by the creak and whistle of icy winds, Garage Baby is an eerily compelling presence. Ella, Ivy, and Jack were about 8, 8, and 5 when we made the discovery. With my help, we decided that GB had probably disappeared when he was very young. Because his parents couldn't be reminded of their grief, they had to hide his image in what was now our garage. Certainly, GB's unknown tragic experience lived on as his ghost in and around the garage. In fact, I'm pretty sure I once heard someone howl, "noooooooo" as I started to re-mount the crank on by bike backwards. And there have been pranks. Somebody recently pulled the plug to the garage refrigerator.

Alas, the ghost stories we've enjoyed over the years are false. Thanks to a new feature on Google's image search, I was able to upload the original image of Garage Baby (above), find visually similar images from the entire World Wide Web, and in no time at all, construct a timeline of Garage Baby's  life.

Garage Baby: A visual chronology of a life well lived.

Despite the revelations via Google, our garage will forever be a more spirited place because of GB.

My upcoming children's books
Due to my obvious knack for turning mundanities into stories that prevent young people from thinking clearly, I've decided to write a children's book -- maybe two.

I stumbled across the first plot about eight years ago during a conversation with friends about what  should determine when a girl can pierce her ears. Thus, The Piercing Elf is a modern fairy/faerie/small-weird-person tale about a girl (or boy) who's too young, in her/his parent's (s')/guardian's opinion, to have her/his ear(s) pierced (or otherwise mutilated). Rather than deny their daughter (or son) directly they/he/she say(s) tries to frighten their child out of the idea by announcing that  they/he/she will have to summon the Piercing Elf, the tiny bearded man/woman with one long sharp tooth who visits children while they sleep and bites a small hole into their precious little lobe(s). Alas, the smart child's questions force the parent(s) deeper into a string lies until the end of the story turns a tad disturbing.

Following on the heels of The Piercing Elf will be another story of modern parental struggle. Daddy Wears Sweatpants Now is a middle aged man's commentary on other middle aged men's struggle with economic downturn as told from the fabricated perspective of a bemused seven year old. While the first pages can be a bit wrenching, Daddy's eventual switch to yoga-pants proves catalytic for a complete, albeit ironic, reinvention. (hard cover only, sorry)

Pre-orders accepted (it might be a while)

Teach lactose tolerance

Think globally, eat tinily

A little cheese goes a short way in the locavore world

Since last August or so, our house has been buying some food through a new community-supported agriculture (CSA)... thing (I don't think they'd want to be referred to as a business). Rather than support agriculture in the typical ways, with money or a shovel, a CSA simply requires more money. Product for product the various price premiums reflect the fact that the berries, carrots, chard, kale, more chard, and more kale are from just down the road or over the hill. We can now claim that we are locavores (not to be confused with locovores -- those people will eat anything). You might think that cutting out transportation costs, distribution costs, and big-government chard taxes would lead to lower prices. But, locavoracity is complicated. It turns out that the people growing and picking these berries live in the same real estate market and have grad school loans. But sometimes the nuances of "sustainable" foodie-culture are too funny to avoid the attention of Sporadigram and so I ramble about it here. The first shock came when our weekly CSA e-mail encouraged us not to miss their debut of chicken -- a whole bird for $26. Last week a wedge of cheese in our box weighed less than the plastic pouch it rode in... in. It was almost cute-a-vore.

Big milk -- too big to pail

Got milk? 

Up here on the border, a strong Canadian Dollar, Canadian price supports for dairy products, and a lot of migration from India to British Columbia over the last thirty years have resulted in an impossible-to-ignore spike in cross-border milk buying by Indo Canadians. This has led to easily overheard speculation by non-Indo Bellinghamsters about what anyone could do with so much milk. Urban legend (if you can call Bellingham urban) already has it that many Indians use the milk for baths. I've also heard conjecture about milk-buying clubs, re-sale in Indian-owned convenience stores, and, less-sensational-thus-less-satisfying explanations involving heavy use of milk in traditional Indian cuisine. After exhaustive research by Sporadigram's investigative arm, there is no evidence that milk baths (not an unheard of though excessive attempt at skin care) have any special place in Indian culture. And how could anyone really get away with repackaging and selling milk in a convenience store? Haven't you heard of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Special Dairy Crime Tactical Unit?

Paneer: when milk looses its whey.

So, literally, the milky [high]way running from Whatcom County, WA to Surrey, BC boils down to Indian cooking -- specifically ghee, a clarified butter that's made through a process that begins by boiling large amounts of cow's milk; and paneer, a fresh cheese generally made by heating a lot of milk and curdling it with lemon juice (or other food acids). The bottom line: you need more than a gallon of milk to make two servings of paneer.



Thank you. That's really weird.

If you were tiny, you'd be home by now.

Staying with South Asian tangents, last summer I was asked to meet with a delegation of of Pakistani border enforcement agency managers to discuss, well... work stuff (regional cross-border coordination and investment strategies). While I did not have a chance to ask them what they knew about Indian milk consumption, I scored a cool thank-you gift (I think). The presentation of my gift was great. Abdul Rehman Rind (the deputy collector of customs in Islamabad) stood up and announced that the group wanted to leave me with something from Pakistan. He then made some short remarks to the effect that, since I was a planner (sure, that will work I guess) they wanted to give me something that embodied the results of good planning. This turned out to be a miniature wood, string, and bead bed assembled inside an old Johnny Walker Red bottle. (Looks like an optimistic view of the future to me.) It seemed obvious that this was the same gift they had ready for each person they were meeting with over their three-day tour, so I had to wonder how the bed-in-a-scotch-bottle was spun as a metaphor for others' jobs. "...and since you're a border inspector, you know you never know what's inside unless you look..." "...and as mayor of a border city, you know how important it is to provide a bed for people who crawl inside a bottle..." "...since you write a blog, you know that nothing is ever too stupid to present to others in hopes they'll be as amused as you."