I promise not to do this too often

I don't wade into the soi-disant "Mommy Wars" on this blog too often, essentially because I'm worried that if I do, I'll never stop. I'll wind up hunched over my monitor for days, wearing Depends like some toothless crone playing the slot machines in Vegas. I'd probably lose my job and some batshit social worker would take my kid away. So let's not go there too often.

But I'm feeling fortified by a sweet day of vacation today, so I'm only going to allow myself one sarcastic comment as a special treat.

Unlike most working women, as depicted by popular culture and the media, I actually have the leisure to read at least two newspapers a day and keep myself relatively well-informed about the world at large. While reading the Globe and Mail today, I stumbled across this article, about how most women really want to work part-time and not full-time.

Well, sort of. The article is quoting a study: Only 21 per cent of working mothers with children under 18 see full-time jobs as the best arrangement for themselves and their families - a drop from 32 per cent in 1997, according to the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, 60 per cent of working mothers say part-time work is their preferred option, up 12 per cent from a decade ago.


Yup, that's a drop, no doubt about it. But when you read on, you've got to wonder about how they asked the questions. Let's see what Exhibit A, working mother of 1-year-old boy, has to say:

Marlo Miazga, a Toronto mother of a one-year-old boy, can relate. After a brief, self-financed maternity leave, the freelance film editor took on full-time hours as a film editor and teacher. She and her husband, a writer, enrolled their son Phoenix in weekly daycare.


But if she could work part-time and still afford daycare, all without taking a professional hit, she'd "do it in a second," she says.

REALLY?! Wow, that's such a huge surprise. Effectively what the journalist is asking is "do you want NOT to work all the time, but make the same amount of money, enjoy the same amount of responsibility and senority, get the same promotions, and keep your kid in daycare full-time, freeing you to enjoy your life on your days off, getting pedicures and seeing movies and eating bon-bons while enjoying the ministrations of Sven, your beefy-forearmed masseur?"

What an incredibly stupid position. The only way I'd take any of this seriously would be if they asked fathers and childless people the same question: "would you like to scale back your working hours if there were absolutely no negative consequences?" and the answers were substantially different.

I love my kid and I love my job, and yeah, I'd like to be paid to sit on my ass while my kid goes to daycare. (Come to think of it, that's what I did today: LOVE paid vacation days.) But then I'd like a lot of things: a car that runs on love, an oiled Ralph Fiennes on a silver chain. I don't expect anyone to hand them to me just because I popped out a kid.

Fucking hell. On behalf of working parents everywhere, I apologize on behalf of that very stupid column.

Now I either have to stop writing or go and buy some Depends.

How rude

Are you thinking what I'm thinking? (Well, this blog never pretended to be PG-13.)

You're disgusting -- it's a traffic bollard. But if you thought, however fleetingly, of a giant stone penis, you are not alone. The good people of Keizer, Oregon are distressed by the monstrous dongs adorning their parking lots, and are demanding the bollards be removed.

The story, however ridiculous, did make me glad that Victorian values are alive and well (and living in Oregon, apparently).


A total of 52 of the posts were installed at a busy intersection in Keizer and they are getting a lot of second glances.

A number of residents have complained to the city that the posts resemble male genitalia.

"I can't disagree with that," said City Manager Chris Eppley. "They certainly did not turn out the way we anticipated."

According to Eppley, the posts were ordered from a catalog and looked much different on paper.

Well, of course. I became consumed with the desire to help out this modest town, so I went online to search for some decent alternatives.

What do you think -- too ridgy?



Now we're talking:




Hoo boy. Is it hot in here?


OH MY GOD.


As Rufus Wainwright would say, I'm so tired of Americans. Though they do make me laugh.

Bacon sandwiches and disagreement

I'm pissed at the pile-on that's happening over Salman Rushdie's knighthood.

Normally I don't give a toot about a) who the Queen choses to knight and b) what the government of Pakistan and Iran think about, well, virtually anything. But reading how Pakistan feels it's "insensitive" of the British government to knight him makes me want to flip a massive, fleshy bird in their general direction. According to this story from cbc.ca, Pakistan's house of parliament passed a resolution saying: "The 'sir' title from Britain for blasphemer Salman Rushdie has hurt the sentiments of the Muslims across the world. Every religion should be respected.

Well, booty hoo hoo, fuckers. Do you respect my beliefs? I believe in freedom of speech, a vigorous media, equality of the sexes, happy homos and lascivious lesbians, birth control. Oh, and lard.

Actually, I think Salman Rushdie has said this all and better, in his essay October 2001: The Attacks on America.

The fundamentalist believes that we believe in nothing. In his worldview, he has his absolute certainties, while we are sunk in sybaritic indulgences. To prove him wrong, we must first know that he is wrong. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love. These will be our weapons. Not by making war but by the unafraid way we choose to live shall we defeat them.

How to defeat terrorism? Don't be terrorized. Don't let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.

Give this man a knighthood.

Ceci n'est pas un website

Overly enthusiastic video play button leads to Magritte-esque moment.

Beatrix Potter has a lot to answer for

This morning I overheard the following conversation between a small boy and his mother at Riverdale Farm:

Boy, coming up to the cow pen: And does this animal talk?

Mum, exhaustedly: No, this one doesn't talk.

Boy, incredulous: It doesn't? This one doesn't talk either? What kind of a farm is this?

Mum, resigned: It's not that kind of farm.

Finally, a Barbie doll of astonishing realism

I never had a Barbie as a child, and here's the really sad part: I never wanted one. But I bet if this particulary model of Barbie had been around at the time I would have begged my mother for one. Why? Because Barbie has a dog who eats her own shit.

Under Product Features, you learn that "You can open Tanner's mouth and feed her dog biscuits". More fun awaits "when Tanner has to go to the bathroom" because "Barbie cleans up with the magnetic scooper."

So let me get this straight: the fun of this doll is essentially totally scatalogical: feed your dog a turd, watch him drop a biscuit (did I get that the right way around?) and shovel the shit. Excellent!

These are going to be yoinked from the shelves faster than the I Hate Math Barbie, mark my words. So I'm going to buy one tomorrow and keep in safe for my eight-year-old son's birthday. He's going to love it.

Little Mr. Mousikin, in our little housikin...

Let me preface this entry by saying that it's been a long, hard week of swabbing bodily fluids, and not in that fun way. I'm talking vomit and poop, friends, almost all of it emanating from a small miserable person. It's been our first real brush with pukey illness chez Quince, and I guess we should count ourselves lucky. Public service announcement directed at childless people reading this: I'm sure you've thought to yourselves, "oh, I'd like to have kids, but it must be a drag when they get sick and puke all over your shirt." Yes, it is a drag. SAVE YOURSELVES. It's too late for me. Wear a condom. I beg you. Because otherwise you will not only have a small person puking on your shirt, you will actually instinctively be stretching forth said shirt while still on your body to better catch the stream of barf before it hits the carpet.

Yes, that is a true story. And here's another one: we have mice. Many mice. We have had at least 9 mice living in our house. How do we know this? Because we have killed 8 of them using mousetraps.

And what happened to the ninth? Well may you ask.

We have a cat, Smudge, who is really quite lovely. She is also elderly and frail and, to be honest, a bit of a prima donna. She is the type of cat who complains over a full food dish, and we love her for it.

This week, Smudge has also had cause to complain that mousetraps were placed near her food dish, and the traps occasionally have contained dead mice. (Not for days on end; that would be gross, but just until we've gotten home for work or something.) She complains in Cat language, of course, but I can tell she's saying, "Waiter, there's a mouse near my soup."

Anyway, Smudge is far too refined to actually catch mice, or, apparently, even deter them from running riot. Or so I thought.

This afternoon, in order to tend to my poopy child, I came home early. I was attending to some important business while patiently awaiting the next poopsplosion (note to childless people: put Trojans on shopping list) and was taking an important phone call from the Editor-in-Chief. Who should come waltzing in but Madam Smudge herself, thoughtfully gumming the head of a mouse.

This was reasonably distracting in itself. Frankly, Smudge isn't the type of cat who'd wake us up if the house were on fire; if that were happening, it's more likely she'd start bitching about the fact her water dish was getting uncomfortably steamy. But the whole element of distraction began to get out of control when I noticed the mouse was still kicking its legs feebly.

Smudge gave me a look like "what now? I have sucked the fur bon-bon for several minutes, and am full of ennui."

I am still on the phone with the Editor-in-Chief.

Smudge puts down the fur bon-bon. It kicks to life and then starts to run towards me, obviously totally out of its little mind from breathing in the stank of Smudge's maw. Without thinking too much about it, I drop an empty yogourt pot down on top of the bewildered mouse.

I am still on the phone with the Editor-in-Chief.

The mouse begins to beat against the side of the plastic. Smudge gives a baleful wail at the loss of her fur lolly, a wail that sounds very much like "I was enjoying that."

I finally get off the phone with the Editor-in-Chief. What to do with the fucking mouse? I decide the drown the little bastard, because it seems like sensible plan and I might have read about doing something similar in a David Sedaris story. I ready a dustpan and brush, remove the pot, whisk the mouse into the dustpan then into the sink.

And yes, reader, I drowned him. I am a killer of mice. This was not manslaughter or criminal negligence, but actually first-degre mousiecicide.

A couple of things to know if you ever want to drown a mouse (perhaps having Googled "mousiecide" and wound up on this page): they appear surprisingly hard to drown. This one managed to swim around successfully for around a minute, like a very small Ophelia in the all-mouse production of Hamlet. They also poop quite a lot in their final minutes, which was unexpected and not at all fair, given how much poop I've had to deal with today already.

I might have left Ophelia for a few minutes to see what would happen, but the Editor-in-Chief called me again so I took a butter knife and weighed the mouse down under the water. Finally, after a conversation about performance management that went on far too long, Ophelia achieved her quietus.

She was put to rest in a Sun Valley plastic bag in the trash.

Note to self: scrub sink, autoclave butter knife.

I like to watch

Sitting here as I do on the poop deck of the Titanic, as is my wont, I was intrigued by this article in Slate about the declining watch industry. It seems that now that humans have cellphones, computers and iPods more or less permanently attached to their orifices at all times, there's less of a need for wrist watches. What does this mean?

As in many other consumer areas, the middle is getting squeezed. According to Deborah Rudinsky, merchandise manager at the Doneger Group, sales of moderately priced watches—time pieces that retail for under $200—were probably down about 10 percent in 2005.

The purpose, or unique selling point, of watches used to be that they could provide you with information (the time) that was inconsistently available otherwise. There's nothing unique about watches as a time-information delivery device, apart from cultural associations we've built up around them. If other devices can deliver the same information as efficiently, they got nothing. And unlike the information contained in, say, newspapers, the time is not complex or nuanced in any way; it cannot be branded, personalized or shaped to give it added value. In fact, 'good' timekeeping is based on the fact it's standardized across the whole world.

So what's left for poor old watches? According to this article, the high end, the low end and niche markets.

"The customer is buying a fine watch more as a jewelry piece and less as a timekeeper," said Doneger Group's Rudinsky. Women are drawn to watches that help accessorize different outfits. Men are drawn to high-tech gadgetry. Fitness geeks of both sexes opt for souped-up digital watches equipped with heart rate monitors and GPS technology. "To capture younger customers, watches today need to have much more of a fashion nuance," said Rudinky.

Watches will probably be around for a while yet (much like newspapers). By the way, I looked up watches on Wikipedia and discovered this gem:

Because most watches lack a striking mechanism, such as a bell or gong to announce the passage of time, they are properly designated as timepieces, rather than clocks.

You just know some pedant tediously insists upon this distinction to the profound irritation of his friends and family.

A matter of luck?

A real prince of a guy, Trevis Smith, was sentenced to five and half years in court today after being convicted for knowingly exposing two women HIV by having unprotected sex with them. Neither of them were infected.

Now, I don't disagree for a moment that this guy is a dick (apparently, a latex-free one). Maybe he was just reckless, maybe he was angry and really wanted to infect them, maybe he just really likes bareback sex. I don't know.

What I do know is that the prosecutor, Bill Burge, is totally talking out of his ass when he "argued that Smith knew the dangers of HIV and he knew that he had a responsibility to disclose his condition to his sexual partners.

'It was just a matter of luck' that neither was infected," Burge said.

Not exactly. Our friendly neighbourhood AIDS page on Wikipedia gives a very useful table of estimated rates of infection per 10,000 exposures. Rates of exposure for receptive penile-vaginal intercourse...survey says...10.

Ten per 10,000. That's an infection rate of 0.001%. [Correction: 0.1%] Not exactly a matter of "luck," then. More like a 99.9% chance that the woman wouldn't be infected. I would take those odds.

I don't deny that these women probably went through a few hellish months waiting for their test results. Sucks to be them. Insist on a condom next time. And yeah, our Trojan horse really should have disclosed his HIV status. (Like, as if he'd ever get laid again.) But imprisonment -- particularly for more than five years -- is ridiculously punitive.

What really frosts me is the perpetuation of an impression of HIV that is years out of date. Yeah, it was pretty scary back there in the 1986, when you didn't know if you could get it from drinking fountain, but I'd like to think we've moved on in the intervening two decades.

Five and a half years for a 0.1% chance he harmed them? How much would he have gotten if he'd driven them home after a movie? Those cars are deathtraps, I tell you. It would have been only a matter of luck if she'd gotten out alive.

We are like unto the oyster, and irritation shall bring forth pearls

The New York Times reported Friday that CanWest Global is now The New Republic's majority shareholder, and in light of plunging readership and revenue, they're rethinking their operation. Starting in a couple of weeks, they're going to publish biweekly and go to a heavier paper stock with more graphic elements.

Yeah, yeah, same tune, different verse. Wake up and smell the circling buzzards, print industry. The New Republic is essentially screwed unless they can figure out a way to get online, fast, and a way to finance their online operations sufficient to feed a high level of journalism.

I guess the good news is that they know it. As Martin Peretz, the editor-in-chief puts it,

"The print publication cannot keep up with the news,” Mr. Peretz said. So actual news will go up on the Web site, which now has five employees, up from two a year ago, while the longer production cycle for the print magazine will give writers more time for reporting.

But by far the best part of that article is the following information:

To that end, Mr. Peretz has become a blogger. "He said he was “not enjoying it exactly,” but that he had found it addictive.

“When I used to see something irritating, I would typically call a friend,” he said. “Now I just go to the blog.”

There's hope for TNR yet.