You sleigh me

This has been floating around for a few weeks now, but I feel the need to weigh in. Health Canada has urged that all children wear a helmet while tobogganing.

This quote from the Star story is particularly magnificent:

"There probably, across this country (are) ... thousands of kids that are permanently brain-injured as a result of toboggan injuries that you won't know about because they are hidden in long-term care facilities or ... being taken care of at home," said Louis Francescutti, an emergency room doctor and child injury expert from Edmonton.

Wow, did you catch a mighty whiff of desperation blowing off that quote, or is it just me? There are "probably" many thousands of children being warehoused in covert facilities or kept at home, their families' secret shame! At this very moment! Probably!

There's a pleasant reality check here from the National Post's Andrew Coyne, who wrote this column last week. (Thanks to Molly for linking to it in the comments section of my second carseat post.) Coyne calculates that the odds of giving yourself a head injury during any given toboggan run are approximately 1 in a million. Stay away from toboggan hills near roads, and your risk of death falls to 1 in 50 million: compare this to your risk of being killed by lightening, usually cited as 1 in 10 million.

Vaughan Councillor Sandra Yeung Racco is leading the charge to make a mandatory toboggan-helmet law in Ontario. Is she butt-stupid, or just really bad at math?

Bubble, bubble, birthday trouble

Those who know me, know me well enough to know that I'm mighty touchy about my birthday on December 30th. Falling as it does in that post-Christmas trough between the merry opening of gifts and the welcoming of the new year, my birthday is often difficult to make special. OK, I admit it -- I have birthday issues.

However, even three decades of birthday ho-humity could not compare with the anguish I felt after reading this list of American Food Holidays. While it thrilled me to learn that there is such a thing as National Pistachio Day (Jan. 26 -- tomorrow!), Drink Wine Day (Feb. 18), Garlic Day (April 19), I was shocked and disgusted to learn that my natal day is...National Bicarbonate of Soda Day!

What the fuck?

That's not even a food. It's an additive, a rising agent, a chemical. It has its own chemical symbol. Celebratory foods should not have their own chemical symbol.

This child is no longer being abused.

Well, fancy that. Consumer Reports has withdrawn their report on car seat safety.

From CBC:

Nicole Nason, an NHTSA adminstrator, said Consumer Reports was right to withdraw its study.

"I was troubled by the report because it frightened parents and could have discouraged them from using car seats," she said.

Yeah, no shit, Sherlock. That's what I said last week!

The (quite short) CBC article can't resist adding the detail that "The original report said seats came off their bases or twisted in place. The magazine said in one case, a test dummy was hurled more than nine metres."

People just can't get enough of projectile Chucky. I tell you, that movie pitch has legs.

Garbage delight

I first heard about Sarah McGaughey and Kyle Glover in this Globe and Mail article by Dale Duncan. They have a laudable goal: to produce no garbage whatsover in 2007. The article is available on their blog, nomoregarbage, where you can read about how they’re living up to their self-imposed challenge.



Now, I realize this is going to sound a lot like saying I hate puppies, or butterflies, or teeny bedewed spiderwebs, but really, these guys irritate the hell out of me. After the Globe story, these beardy-weirdies have been popping up all over the place. There's nothing the media loves more than two freaks with a social conscience.

Since my blood pressure hasn’t hit 160/120 in a while, let’s visit their little corner of vegantown and see how we do.

From the Globe article:

The couple's commitment is all-encompassing. In their cozy apartment near St. Clair and Oakwood, newly washed plastic bags attached to a fan in the kitchen dry in the wind. She figures she'll start making her own rice milk and almond milk again, since the refillable milk bottles they order from a health-food store are sealed with disposable plastic tops.

and

The couple recycles as a last resort to avoid sending trash to the landfill -- but they're most committed to reducing waste, and the obstacles can be surprising. "Our biggest problems are the smallest things, like stickers on fruit," says Ms. McGaughey, who saves those stickers to make collages and cards for friends.

Spending my evenings washing plastic bags? Home-made nut juice? Fruit-sticker birthday cards? Where do I sign?

And from their blog:


Also, we reuse our bath water to flush the toilet with. Our system is kind of complicated, but that’s because I’m a bit of a clean freak. The basic idea, which Kyle got from his German boss, is to save the bath water then use a big bucket to scoop in into the bowl of the toilet.

Here’s my system:

1.Get a large Tupperware container ( large enough to sit in, scrunched up) and keep it in the bathroom. Also get a big bucket (about mop sized) and a smaller one (yogurt container) to scoop the water with.

2. Put the plug in when you are having a shower

3. When you finish use the big bucket to scoop the water into the Tupperware

4. After using the toilet, use the big bucket to “water bomb” the bowl of the toilet and everything will flush down.

5. Put a small bucket full of water in the toilet so that there is water sitting for the next time.

6. Use a towel to wipe up the water you have inevitably spilt on the floor

Fucking hell. Toilet water has nothing to do with garbage. If I had set myself a zero-garbage challenge, you can bet your ass I’d be flushing with merry abandon because I’d feel totally frigging justified in disposing of something -- anything, even a turd -- without agonizing about it six ways from Sunday. Running water may be the last vestige of civilization in their crunchy kingdom and frankly, if I were living with them, I'd be taking scalding hot baths every night. Perhaps to better contemplate slitting my wrists.

Now, I am not an SUV-driving lardass greedhead (I drive a Matrix). We compost. We use our green bin. We use energy-saving lightbulbs. We have spent a minor fortune making our house more energy efficient. We have complicated arrangements involving rain barrels that I'm at a loss to even describe.

But even so, I absolutely concede that Sarah and Kyle, bless 'em, are doing way more to suck up to ol’ Mother Earth than I will ever do.

However, I would argue that they are doing far more damage overall to the environmental movement.

Why? Because people are lazy sods, and when they read about fruit-sticker greeting cards and having to set up a fan in their kitchen, they’re going to think “fuck me, that sounds hard. I can’t do that. I don’t want to do that.”


Sarah and Kyle are the right-on, Greeny equivalent of those mouth-breathing Christian sects you sometimes read about -- the kind who don't believe in birth control or money or TV, but who do believe in lots of prayer and goats. In fact, if they lived 150 years ago, they'd probably belong to some obscure sect that wore burlap undershirts and distributed tracts about their salutary effects for preventing masturbation. It's the same mentality.

And now I am going to do penance for writing this by eating a date and drinking a pint of nut juice.

This child is being abused

This week, in What You Don't Know Could Kill Your Child Part CCLXXVIII, infant safety seats were being declared unsafe by the media. Consumer Reports tested a bunch of them and only two passed. (Several stories noted gravely that a dummy was flung across the room during the course of their tests. Awesome! Am I the only one hoping the video makes it to YouTube? There's the Chucky movie in there somewhere. Chucky Gets Chuck-ied?)

Anyway, you should have seen various online parenting boards light up like the sky on the 1st of July. Oh god, little Wesson has been riding in an unsafe car seat. Lord in heaven, have mercy, little McPooply uses the kind that flung Chucky across the room! Let's all buy new carseats, because now there are only two possible car seats to buy in the whole of North America. Oh, and let's book that professional car seat installer in for a week next Tuesday -- you know, the one that has the PhD in mechanical engineering. Or if she's busy, let's take it to a fire station and a police station. And get a priest to bless it. And maybe a shaman.

Welcome to the newest freakin' yuppie parenting fetish: the goddamned car seat.

I am not saying that people should not buy, install and use car seats. They should. It's also the law. But before any more people get sucked into a screaming vortex of overthinking and consumerism, consider this:

1. The Consumer Reports tests were more stringest than US safety tests (Canadian tests are different again). So big fucking surprise that only 2 seats passed. If I tell Acme Seat Co. that the current safety standard is X at 48 km/hour, then do you think they're going to build their seats to withstand X at 56 km/hour? Why would they? But Consumer Reports tested the seats at 56 km/hour, a speed higher than current safety standards, meaning they were essentially rigging the test to fail a proportion of the seats.

I mean, why did CR not test the seats for a head-on collision at 75 km/hour? My kid rides at that speed frequently. Except then all the seats would fail, and people would start to question the validity of the test.

2. Car seats save lives. Sort of. Now, this is going to blow your little yuppie minds, but really, car seats are not magical force fields that have the power to ward off evil and semi-trailers. If you get into a collision with another car, it's possible that nothing will prevent your child being injured or killed -- not even the PoopaTron9000 with SnugShielding that you spent $280 on.

Or if your child is not killed, it may not have been the car seat that saved him. Read this article, detailing a study of how child restraint systems function in the real world.

Or don't, and let me draw your attention to the relevant part:

Compared with seat belts, safety seats were associated with a 28% reduced risk of death (relative risk=0.72; 95% confidence interval=0.54 to 0.97) when both were properly used.

When including cases in which seat belts and safety seats were seriously misused-for example, when two children were buckled with one seat belt or when the safety seat harness was not used-safety seats still reduced mortality risk by 21% compared with seat belts (RR=0.79; 95% CI=0.59 to 1.05).

What does this mean, exactly? This means that if you use a carseat properly and you are unfortunate enough to be in a crash, your child enjoys at 28% reduction in risk of death. However, if you toss your kid into his seat and don't even do up the straps, your child still enjoys a 21% reduction in risk of death. Pretty good, eh? The study doesn't control for "good" vs. "bad" carseats, so we can safely assume that even crappy seats protect kids.

Steven Levitt argues in the popular book Freakonomics that the reason child-death stats have been falling since carseats have become more widely used is purely due to kids being put the back seat and less to do with the seats themselves. (There's a somewhat-related article by Levitt here.)

Why do I care, though, that over-entitled yuppies are getting their Calvins in a bunch about their car seats? Well, some of it is just sheer annoyance that car seats have become another stupid thing middle-class parents can be competitive about. Did you get a bucket or a convertible, did you get the right brand, did you choose the houndstooth pattern or the stripes, did you get it installed professionally, did you get it rechecked at a clinic? Oh, you must never EVER accept a used car seat, even from a friend, it might have been in a fender-bender! You must throw out a 5 year old car seat. It must be actually DESTROYED, not just put out in the trash, because otherwise a poor person could come along and steal it and then their child would die.

And those poor people is why I feel strongly about the shittiness of this whole Consumer Reports report. Imagine that you're poor. You have maybe $100 to spend on baby gear. You keep hearing all this stuff about how there are only two carseats in the whole of North America that will actually keep your child safe. (And you know what that means -- they're not going to be the cheapest ones.) And car seats keep getting recalled. You're supposed to keep track of the serial number at all times in case of a recall. Or they could email you. If you had email. And you've heard they're hard to install. Professional people are paid to install them! You don't have the money for that. The cops would do it for free, but like you're going to go into a police station with those unpaid parking tickets in your car.

No, better not buy a carseat. It's expensive and they won't keep my child safe anyway, so what's the point?

This is why I'm pissed off. Because a five-year-old, bottom-of-the-line, Consumer-report-failing seat is better than no seat at all.

Oh, and out of 22,000 car accidents in Ontario in 2006, how many injuries or deaths were attributed to improperly installed, defective or otherwise problematic car seats?

That would be zero.

If you're that worried about car accidents, here's a thought: don't drive as much.

Let's talk about socks, baby

My husband gave me these stockings for my birthday from a bizarrely wonderous online-store-cum-blog called Sock Dreams. They seem very, very thrilled by the whole notion of socks, by the sheer sockliness of socks, by the whole socks gestalt. If you have ever despaired while gazing into the sameness that is your sock drawer, clicking on that link will make you very happy.

Anyway, their socks are, as advertised, totally dreamy. My socks are considerably more subdued than those worn by this fine lady in the picture; mine look more like what a wartime housewife would knit herself if forced to unravel old wool blankets before taking up a little light prostitution. Discarded on the floor, they look a little like vacuum cleaner hoses. But that's why I love them.

Where am I going, and why am I in this handbasket?

Back in December, this article investigating Noka chocolates appeared on a blog. Read it; it's a cracking yarn. The author is remarkably dogged. He's a great reporter. And chocolate is obviously one of the more crucial subjects facing our society today.

And it depressed the hell out of me, as someone who works for a major newspaper. That insistent tapping sound you hear is another nail in the coffin of the dailies. Here's a guy who's not only willing to do a ton of work presumably for free, but who can put together an article -- without an editor, fact-checker, copyeditor, proofreader, printing press, or distribution system -- that any newspaper in the world would be lucky to run. Oh, and he's made it available for free, too.

Imagine you've had a very profitable business making widgets on your WidgetTron1800 for 200 years. Suddenly, in 1992, widgets just start falling out of everyone's ass. There you are, walking down the street, and the sidewalk is completely covered with widgets, just there for the taking. People are interested in the new widgets -- after all, they just fell out of their own asses! These new free widgets are constantly available and ever-changing. (You can use them surreptitiously at work, for example, and waste countless hours.)

You doggedly keep running the WidgetTron1800. You claim your widgets are of a higher quality. You advertise relentlessly and try to shore up your widget brand. You cut prices. You try to make your widgets more appealing to youngsters, who spend about six hours of their day doing nothing but gather free widgets.

But it doesn't matter what you do. You are screwed. People only wanted your widgets while the WidgetTron1800 controlled the means of widget production. If people like Scott can drop perfect chocolate widgets out of his ass that are better than yours, at absolutely minimal overhead and give them away for free, you are royally fucked in your widget-maker.

And that's the name of that tune. I'm going to retrain as a plastic surgeon -- I fancy there is a future in it.