Out of my hat

So there’s a novel that I had to read back in my high school days called “Bonheur D’Occasion” by Gabrielle Roy. The English title is “The Tin Flute”; I don’t recall that there was actually a tin flute in the story, but rather at one point a character makes a mental comparison between some event in her life and the feeling you have upon receiving a tin flute at Christmas. It seems like such a great idea beforehand, but then when you get it you’re no longer sure why you wanted it.

And I, staring blankly at my computer screen, thought that it would make a nice morose comment on Christmas in general if I could hunt down that passage and blog it. Unfortunately, it seems that the Internet is not a good source for the full text of Canadian novels from the last fifty years, because a quick Goggling didn’t turn it up. And I’m too lazy to try and hunt down the actual physical text of the English translation right now. But it’s the thought that counts, right?

Contrary to what this might lead you to believe, I’m not actually feeling morose about Christmas or anything. I just thought that it would make an interesting comment.

I’m back in the Home Town for the Xmas week.

One consequence of this is that I’m limited to dial-up speeds.

This is problematic, since it seems that the entire internet is now not meant to run on dial-up speeds. As one simple example, the ‘net interface to my Canadian bank seems to involve truly startling numbers of redirects, which — I’d imagine — are meant to be invisible.

Funny how visible they become when you’re cruising along at 26400 bauds.

Update (Dec. 25, 2003): I’ve been informed by the friendly folks at cmdo that my use of the word “baud” is in fact incorrect; the proper term is “bits per second” or “bps”. It should perhaps be noted that my first modem was an acoustic coupler that operated at 300 bauds (or bps, though “baud” was the term in use). So my mistake wasn’t luserism so much as honest ignorance.

So to set the scene: I flew Out West for the American Thanksgiving this year, as is my wont. And riding around the highways of the city in question with the UCoS my host, we’re quite naturally surfing the FM band. And — naturally? — about half the stations have injected Christmas songs into their rotation. By November 26th.

After the obligatory complaining about the slow, steady march of Christmas music earlier and earlier in the year, we got to discussing depressing Christmas songs. Now there’s a fair few of these, as it happens: “I believe in Father Christmas” by Greg Lake, a cheery little ditty about disillusionment as one ages; “Father Christmas” by the Kinks, featuring a street-corner Santa being roughed up by some young punks; even “I’ll Be Home For Christmas”, which is a very sad song if you actually listen to it. But of course, my all-time favourite is “Fairytale of New York” by the Pogues with Christie McColl, which managed to incorporate elements of all three of these themes (broken dreams, rage against the System, loneliness) and is a pretty damn fine piece of music to boot.

I bring this up now because I’d mostly managed to avoid Christmas music from that day until this afternoon. Fortunately, the song that was playing on the radio at the deli was another fine piece of Christmas cheer: “2000 Miles” by the Pretenders. This is not to be confused with any songs by the Proclaimers that you might be thinking of; rather, it’s another variation on the theme of separation during a time of notional togetherness.

One feature that’s shared by both the Pretenders’ and the Pogues’ songs is that, while they’re “Christmas songs” in some sense, they’re not really about Christmas. Rather, they’re using Christmas as a backdrop to make an entirely different point. As such, I find they make a welcome change from the syrupped-up new versions of older songs, and am actually a little regretful that they’re tagged as Christmas songs and only make their appearance starting in late November.

OK, so this is something that’s been bugging me for something like six years now, ever since the first time I had to program with Excel in a corporate setting.

Microsoft Excel is, in many ways, a nice program. It’s a little bloated for my modest needs, but I can well see that most of what I regard as useless cruft has its place in the grand scheme of things. It’s reasonably fast, and reasonably intuitive. Overall, Excel may well be my favourite MSoft product.

My principal criticism — and the reason for today’s rant — has to do with the gap between formatting and functionality. Specifically: when I’m assembling my final grades of a semester, I usually have various numbers marked by colouring either the text or the background. These colours tell me things: so-and-so handed in Worksheet X five weeks late (and so gets a tremendous penalty), so-and-so’s grade was adjusted for good and sufficient reasons, etc. Often, I would like the ability to treat these numbers differently from their conformist, black-on-white cousins.

The Excel IF function, however, does not seem to recognize tests based on the colour of a cell. Or if it does, it does so in an undocumented, hidden, and enigmatic manner that I’ve been unable to unriddle. And trying to bring VBA into it helps about as much as you might expect: not at all.

Of course, it’s possible — probable! — that I’ve just been consistently dense for the past several years on this topic. That wouldn’t surprise me very much, actually.

Gah. Stupid cookie-based semi-stateless web applications.

My original post was more interesting, but here’s the summary: sorry for the lack of updates, on the off-chance that someone’s reading it. Expect a more active blog no later than the new year.

So in case anyone is reading this site, you’re probably wondering just what the hell was up yesterday. The answer has to do with DNS and corporate slowpokiness. And it’s not really all that interesting — even to those of us who were caught up in it — and so I won’t say another word about it.

A thought about the political spectrum: hard-right thinkers consider the mean income bracket as a good indicator of prosperity. Centrists prefer the median income. Hard-lefties look at the modal income bracket. The fact that all three of these concepts can legitimately be called “average” under certain circumstances probably contributes to the general confusion that seems endemic in political shouting matches debates.

The Toronto Star has an article today about new right-wing union between the soon-to-be-former PC and Alliance parties. The new group’s name will be the “Conservative Party of Canada”.

I suspect that this may be a mistake on the part of the PCs. MacKay, the PC leader, got his position this summer by cutting a deal with David Orchard, an organic farmer from Saskatchewan and possibly the truest thing to a real progressive conservative we’ve seen at the federal level for some time. “The Orchard Threat” got a lot of play with the die-hard blue Tories because he opposed a number of conservative causes — such as NAFTA — and because he seemed to have a great deal of success in recruiting new members for the party… members who supported his viewpoints on certain issues. Brisson made a pact with Orchard that included a provision saying that the PCs would not merge with the far-right Alliance. Well, so much for that plan.

Personally, I’m curious to see what Orchard does next. His personal viewpoint isn’t entirely incompatible with the NDPs or Greens, so he might join one of them. For that matter, now that the name “Progressive” has been released in federal politics, so it’s not inconceivable that he might try and splinter the new-minted party. Of course, the losers in all this are Orchard’s supporters.

The Conservative platform reads very well, but it’s more or less content-free at the moment. Essentially, it says “we support good things”, but — since the name Mike Harris (the former premiere of Ontario, not the curler) has been bruited about as a potential leader for the united party — I think I’ll believe it when I see it.

I just listened to the somewhat abortive Bill O’Reilly interview on NPR’s Fresh Air last week. All in all, quite an interesting meeting of the minds.

First of all, I’d just like to say that, if that was a hatchet job, then NPR’s in for a long, cold winter unless they sharpen their blades. Had “defamation” been the intention of Ms. Gross, there was plenty of material in O’Reilly’s statements for her to use. One of my favourites was when he was defining the difference between spin and opinion — an important distinction, in fact — and gave some examples of facts being spun to say something else. Of course, he himself had just done this; he said that he never claimed that a certain show had won a certain award, then immediately explained that he’d misspoken when he’d made the claim. Hmm…

I also found it interesting that O’Reilly affirms the argument of Pascal’s Wager: the idea that the expected value of believing far exceeds the amount of work involved. O’Reilly didn’t actually mention Pascal by name, or in fact that the result of his meditations had a historical antecedent. (It’s possible he didn’t know; although he did go to Catholic schools for several years, theology isn’t generally a big topic in high schools. Even Catholic schools.) He also makes what amounts to the Argument from Design: nature works perfectly, Man is incapable of perfect works, therefore there must be a Being above Man Who is responsible for Creation. (BTW, “Man” is his usage.) Of course, the problem with this argument is that it’s making the assumption that there is a design at all. Now if the universe is the result of intelligent design, then I might accept his argument that the Designer must be omnipotent, etc. Maybe. But assuming the antecedent without proof is bad, bad form, logically speaking.

So I just got a phone call for a previous holder of my phone number… a “wrong number”, in the vernacular.

This in itself is not that unusual; I’ve been averaging one such call every week since I got the service, though they have been dropping off somewhat lately. The unusual thing is how taken aback the callers tend to be at this occurance.

Let’s do the numbers, shall we? I’ve had this phone number of about fourteen months now. Phone companies generally hold numbers for 90 days after they’ve been disconnected, before assigning them elsewhere. So we’ve got a case of someone who hasn’t tried calling a number for a year and a half, who is shocked that the number no longer works the way it should.

Now maybe this is just me; I mean, I’m still relatively young, and my friends of my own age are for the most part just beginning to buy houses and put down roots. I expect a certain amount of mobility; any number that I haven’t called for a year and a half, I generally take to be suspect until such time as I can confirm it. But still…

You know, upon reflection it seems very odd to me that there’s such a strong alliance between the so-called “neo-conservatives” and the Christian Right. I mean, I’m certainly no theologian, but I perceive some definite conflicts between the neocon world-view and the Gospel According to Any of Those Four Guys.

For instance, let’s take taxation. The popular far-right viewpoint is that taxes are bad. Period. In fact, the Powers That Be on the right have managed to frame mainstream thought on taxes with this as an often unspoken understanding. Now, I’m not going to argue the validity of this at this time; for the moment, I just want to point out that the libertarians (a group distinct from the neocons) who endorse this viewpoint do so sincerely; they don’t like taxes, and they don’t like government programmes. This is perfectly consistent, and I have no problem with people choosing consistency.

However… stop me if you’ve heard this one, but “what would Jesus do?” Well, it so happens that, as the story goes (Matthew 22:16-22), some folks asked Jesus about whether the Roman government had the right to exact taxation. And Jesus said, yes. “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.”

And this is the point that a lot of people who argue against taxation based on the right to property miss. Money is not private property; it’s a public good, sponsored by the government, that only has value because the government says it does. Arguing that “it’s my money” is disingenuous at best.

Oh, and while we’re on the subject of neoconservativism vs. Christianity, you might want to scan a nearby New Testament regarding Jesus’ view of the wealthy.