Stalker’s Drug Mmart

I heard something on the news that just gave me the shivers. The Canadian Pharmacists’ Association is changing it so that people who get the morning after pill have to give the pharmacist their names, addresses, phone numbers, and details about there sexual activity before they can get it. This is apparently to make sure people are using it appropriately and effectively. Doesn’t that just make you shake your head and go, huh?

In case you didn’t know what the morning after pill is, it’s a few pills you get within the first couple days after a roll in the hay that you think might have gotten you pregnant to stop the pregnancy from going too far. It’s basically like a whole bunch of the stuf that’s in a month’s worth of birth control pills all squished into a couple of pills. it used to only be available by prescription, but now they made it available over the counter, presumably to make it easier to get than before. Do you see where I’m going?

If you have to give all this info to some random pharmacist, how many people actually will? Now, instead of a bunch of people using the morning after pill and no one having stats on its effective use, oh fiddledy dee, we’ll have a bunch of unwanted children instead. Doesn’t that sound like a wonderful plan?

And, why is there any good reason for someone to collect these people’s addresses and phone numbers? Are they trying to create a “for a good time, call” database? Someone’s phone number isn’t going to tell you if they know all the right info about the plan B pill. Why not just take each person who requests it aside and tell them the info they need to know and not bother taking shit down and filing it away for tracking purposes? Isn’t that what they say pharmacists should do anyway in all those commercials with the cute old ladies?

If I am to take these people on faith that this is something they need to do to make sure people are taking their medicine as directed, why not do it for everything you get over the counter? Why not ask for someone’s headache history when they need a pain-killer? Why don’t they ask if you’ve bought other cough syrup when you break down and get some Buckly’s? *Everything* can be abused and administered the wrong way. That Southpark episode about cough medicine abuse was a joke, but I’m sure there’s some base to it. Hell, some of the stuff in crystal meth comes from cold medications. While we’re at it, why not ask people if they’ve ever had drug charges brought against them because they want something to make them stop hacking up a lung? Surprisingly, extreme as it may be, it makes more logical sense than this shit.

This Is Progress?

First things first, if any of you reading this emailed me something any time between Wednesday night and 9:30 or so on Thursday morning, odds are good that I probably won’t be getting it unless you send it again. This morning I downloaded a bunch of mail onto Carin’s computer, which promptly proceeded to crash and eat about half of it. Needless to say, Steve was not a happy guy this morning.

But the tragic and untimely death of a massive amount of electronic correspondence did get me thinking. It got me thinking about the way we live and the ways in which we function as a society. How we do things, how things are done for us. Who and what we trust, and the things with which we trust them. In short, it got me thinking about whether we, as a people, are truly as advanced as we tend to think we are.

Stop and think about your own day to day life for a few minutes. Think about all of the conveniences that inovation has afforded you in the hopes that you’ll be a more efficient and productive worker during select hours, and lazier during others. Consider how much you’ve come to rely on those conveniences, and how much it sucks when you’re placed in a situation that doesn’t allow you to have access to them. Remember all those times when you were running late for something and you didn’t have your cell phone with you? You got pretty pissed off and annoyed with yourself, didn’t you? It’s ok, you can admit it, we’ve all been there and we’ve all reacted the same way. And why? Because we’ve become a culture that depends on computers and gadgets to keep us in touch 24/7. If you don’t think that’s true, think about how angry you get when your buddy doesn’t have his phone turned on, or the profound sense of shock you feel when you happen upon somebody who doesn’t use the internet and has no use for an email address and then tell me again that I’m wrong. Ok, now that you’re on side, ask yourself this question. For all of the teleconferencing and instant messaging and email and whatever else you want to throw in there that’s supposed to save time and make things easier, are we really that much better off? Have all of the technological safeguards that we’ve put in place to prevent mistakes and their associated misery really worked, or have we simply swapped one set of problems for another? Personally, I think the answer is pretty simple.

I won’t try to argue that technology doesn’t have it’s good points. I understand and appreciate that a great many inventions have been a great deal of help to a lot of people. Without some of the concepts and improvements that have come along over the years, I can pretty safely say that my life as a blind person would suck mightily. Because of technology, I can pay bills without help, I can keep track of notes I need to read in order to do various jobs, I can piss around doing stupid crap on the net while I’m supposed to be doing those jobs, I can do, well, pretty much anything I want, and I have technology to thank for that. But that being said, I truly believe that we’ve come to depend on and blindly trust in it’s supposed infallibility way more than we should. What happened to my email today is a fine example of that. Sure, email’s great when it works, but if for some reason something goes wrong, boom, it’s all gone and you’re out some important company memos, just like that, no questions asked. It’s all gone and there’s nothing you can do about it. Think of it this way. When a postal truck flips over on the highway and bursts into flames, what do you suppose happens to all the mail? That’s right, it’s gone. that’s it, there’s no getting it back. John’s house payment and Francine’s thank you cards are all incinerated and they won’t be getting to where they need to go. So how is it then that email is so much better? I know that in the time it takes to snap your fingers a couple of times you can send 1093 emails, but what good is that if they don’t get to their destinations? Have you ever gotten an email from somebody 2 weeks after it was sent? What’s the difference between that and those stories you hear on the news now and then about a postcard from Paris that was sent during World War 2 finally getting to somebody in Virginia 65 years after the fact? When you scale it down and consider how long each is supposed to take, there’s really no difference.

But where the point is really driven home for me is at the bank, or maybe I should say at what passes as a bank these days since you can bank from pretty much anywhere now. Me for instance, I do a majority of my banking over the phone. Stop and think about that. AT no time do I ever have to handle money, or interact with someone who does. Isn’t that weird? My entire monitary existence has been reduced to what amounts to nothing more than an abstract idea and some blind faith that the hard drive is good at math. Gee, I don’t see what could possibly go wrong there. What used to be me exchanging money with somebody else for goods and services has now become one machine telling another machine that I have the correct number of numbers required for that other machine to agree and then convince another actual person that they can then give me what I need. I’ll give you a moment to get your heads around that.

But in any event, I think I’ve made my point. All of this technology, as useful and helpful as some of it is, isn’t the saving grace of humanity that people would have you believe. Think about that the next time one of your “virtually faultless” CD’s starts skipping because it has a scratch in it. That sounds an awful lot like what happened to all of those records that sucked so much back in the day.

Stupid Stephen Harper

Yeah yeah yeah, we already know Stephen Harper is scary and not who I’d vote for that’s for sure. But I saw him do something that I found to be completely patronizing! There is no other word to describe what I saw.

Stephen Harper’s up there, spouting off about his feelings about the liberals. Same old same old. But occasionally, after going through a huge diatribe about how his government will stand up for Canadians in English, he’d sprinkle in a little french. Usually, it was a couple of words, and if you were super lucky, you got a whole sentence! What a god damn fucking gift! The guy who’s going to lead the country can only afford to stop and say an occasional sentence in French? And this is a good campaign strategy? Who should I strangle first, Stephen Harper, or his little speech-writing weasels? Let me add that these occasional sprinklings in French were spoken so poorly that I thought maybe a male version of my mother, who thought Gothier was pronounced goth-yer, (I’m sorry mom), was up there.

Ok, if you’re not going to make a concerted effort to speak our second *official* language, don’t even fucking try. I mean, he wasn’t even in Quebec for Christ’s sake. He was in Nova Scotia. Was he trying to somehow earn brownie points with the people of Nova Scotia because he could say Bonjour? Was he just trying to shut up the critics who noticed his complete lack of French last time around? Doing what he did was like throwing bread crumbs to a starving homeless guy. It’s patronizing and it shows exactly how little French he actually knows.

I think the translator that was there to convert any french back to English was shocked to have to do some work at one point, and I only saw one such two-sentence translation in the whole damn pile of shit known as a speech. Ooo I guess I should say that if you’d won the lottery, you’d get two whole sentences. And let me say that they were nothing like the giant mound of English he’d been spewing.

This really pisses me off because I saw this a million times when I spent a bit of time in Quebec. The voicemail greetings you’d get that were supposed to be bilingual technically were, if you wanted to be an ass about it, but the English message was nowhere near as detailed as the French equivalent. The French would say something about “you have reached insert name here. I am out of my office Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, but leave me a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.” And the English? “Hi. Leave a message after the beep.” Tell me that’s not horribly inaccurate. I’m just lucky I can speak French.

So now, whenever I see this, it sticks out like a sore thumb. Does he actually think this is going to win him favour? Think again, Mr. Harper.

It’s Nice To Be Right Now And Then

Hey everybody.

Yes, I’m still alive. Just haven’t had much worth saying lately so I haven’t said anything.

Carin already talked about our
Derek Edwards trip
so I won’t spend a lot of time talking about it other than to say that it was great to finally see him live after being a fan of his for over 10 years. She’s right, he puts on a great show and you should definitely check him out if he comes to your town.

But sitting in the audience last night made me wonder about people. I know I always seem to be wondering about people, but that’s because some of the things they do are endlessly fascinating to me.

While we were waiting for the show to start last night I casually said to Carin that I wondered how many of the people in the audience actually knew why they were there. That is how many people, all of whom had paid $30 a ticket I might add, had any idea of who Derek Edwards was. After getting a reaction that sounded a lot like Scooby Doo does when he gets frightened, I finally got a chance to explain myself.

I’ve gone to a lot of comedy shows, many of which weren’t exactly cheap. I went to all of them because I’m a fan of comedy and more specifically, of the comedian doing the show. That, I’m sure you’ll agree, makes sense. But almost without fail, at every one of these shows, there’s at least 1 person who is taken completely by surprise by who and what they’re seeing. the best example of this that I’ve ever seen was the first time I went to see
Steven Wright.
The opening act came and went no problem. But then, when it was time for the main event, I actually heard the guy behind us say in a sad voice, “oh, it’s that guy.” He sounded so upset that I seriously thought that he might grab the people he came with and leave.

Carin, understandably, was completely shocked by this as was I the first time I saw it, but for some reason, she still chose not to believe that this could possibly happen. All of my attempts to explain that no, this kind of thing happens all the time fell on deaf ears. But then, oh yes then, redemption was mine when a woman sitting to our right struck up a conversation with somebody sitting behind us about the show. She asked if she had ever seen him before or if she was a fan of his work. And I kid you not, the exact words out of this woman’s mouth were “no. We just saw him in the paper and thought we should go.”

Maybe it’s just me and my failure to be stupidly rich, but who does that? I understand paying 10 bucks to go to someplace like YukYuks or maybe a bar with a local band and not knowing what to expect, but this show was in a fancy theatre and it cost 30 bucks to get in. Who drops 30 bucks on a whim to see somebody they’ve never heard of just because an ad in the paper tells them to? You can’t even see clips of the guy to figure out if he might be your style or not. If you get a recommendation from a friend who thinks you might be into it that’s one thing, but otherwise, why would you do that?

But back to Carin. Being the kind of person she is, she didn’t want to just come out and say wow, you’re right. But after watching that same conversation play itself out at least 3 more times in the next 5 minutes between 3 completely different sets of people, my point was made and she had no choice. Game, set, match. I win.

I know I know, I’m childish, but I don’t really care. It’s just nice to be right now and then.

What is a blog anyway?

Well, it appears I didn’t need to eat the news reporter for breakfast in my
post about blogging and the news.
I saw the story and it wasn’t nearly so blog-blaming as I thought. The only person who got canned because of her blogging activity deserved it. Note to self: when blogging about my job, avoid including pictures of myself with a backdrop of the company logo. Everyone agree? Thought so.

The rest was just about blogs, and brought it’s own hilarity. I can’t believe how many people don’t know what a blog is. I admit I didn’t know a few years ago, but do a google search for practically anything, and you’ll discover they’re every frickin where now. I have to admit they got some entertaining answers though. So, according to your average dude on the street, a blog is:

  • a bog,

  • a giant glitch,

  • a big log,

    • or last but not least,

  • a brain fart (“When I can’t think of something, I have a blog”).

I am relieved that a few people actually knew what a blog was, but….oh me oh my. But then again, they always seem to have dumbass radar when sent out to do street talk segments, so one can pray that that’s all it is. But maybe the guy who called blogs big glitches was on to something. Just land on some of our stuff and…well, maybe he’s right.

Derek Edwards was Fun

I almost feel like there’s not much more to say than that, but what the hell? Steve heard a while ago that Derek Edwards was coming to town, so we decided to go. At this point you’re going, who the fuck is Derek Edwards and why should I care? Well you should care because you should see him, and you should see him because he’s funny. In case you hhaven’t guessed, he’s a comedian.

I’d seen him on TV and I remembered he was funny. But you know he’s funny when before the first ten minutes of the show are over, he can make you laugh so hard you’re crying. Holy shit he’s funny. At first I thought he’d been drinking a bit before the show and thought, oh boy, we’re in for a few surprises. But he has this weird way of changing his voice from mumbly and slurry to perfectly crystal clear in the blink of an eye. And he has this really awesome way of finding the smallest things that you don’t really think about and making them completely hilarious. He even gave me a new name for someone you think is a knob. Ted! Thank you, Canadian Tire guy.

But you know tallent when the lights and mics go off and he can just go on and make a joke out of that. I was even wondering if it was part of the joke somehow. But when I came home and saw my own power had flickered, I realized it was no joke.

If Derek Edwards comes to your town, go see him! If not, then I guess I’ll have to call you Ted!

Scapegoat Fun!

I’ll admit this might be a bit premature since the news story I’m about to bash I haven’t seen yet, but the ads for it made me think this, and since I haven’t written anything in a while, my computer made a meal out of yesterday’s attempt at a post, and I’m bored right now, I figure what the hell, why not babble up here for a bit? Plus, hey, if I’m totally wrong, that’ll create more fuel for another post.

Tonight they say they’re going to have this big story on how blogs are screwing with work productivity and employers are getting pissed. I just look at that and think, aren’t employers happy to find something else to blame their problems on? Isn’t it easy to, instead of blaming the shitheads you hired who obviously don’t appreciate their jobs enough to do them properly, turn and blame a bunch of strangers who the shitheads might not even know, and companies who thought it might be nice to give people a voice? It’s not their damn fault that the shitheads don’t know that maybe they should only blog/look at blogs on break or in low times.

It’s the same damn thing as when researchers tried to blame music for kids turning to violence. Doesn’t the kid have any active part in this whole equasion? Are you trying to tell me that the kid has no control over what he does or thinks, and the music is controling him? I think the last person who said music was telling him to do stuff got taken away by men in white coats, don’t you?

The same goes for the blog shit. The blogs aren’t forcing people to go look at them. If people don’t know that maybe they should pick up that phone instead of looking at the blog, that’s not the blogger’s fault. Personal responsibility, people. If I know human nature, I’d be willing to bet that if blogging/blog-reading was banned at work, even if it could be done completely, these same people who are dragging down productivity would find other ways to slack off.

Weird Stuff Stew

I’ve been thinking about some weird things people do or weird things I’ve seen that just make me go, why? I don’t know if they’re good enough to make separate posts, so…isn’t this predictable? I decided to throw them together. Mmm…who knows what soup!

I saw an annoying Canadian Tire commercial where the dog is sniffing out everyone’s Christmas presents and figuring out what they’ve gotten. Ok it’s not nearly as annoying as the fiow-plathe one, but it does know how to grab my attention and make me go huh? At first the dog is sniffing out barbies and drills and everything. And then it gets to a remote-controled car with an mp3 hookup on it. At this point, my head spins. I’m all for technology combining, but in what evil parallel universe does that make sense? You are controling the car *remotely*. That means you’re *away* from it. What possible legitimate reason would you have to play music on it that you won’t be able to hear because you’re away from the music-playing object, and will always be away from it because you’re controling it remotely? Is it specifically designed to be an irritation tool to be used on the lucky brat’s siblings and parents?

I got thinking about Sesame street, I think because I turned on CFRU and a kids’ show was on with a clip of Bert and Earny playing. It led me to thinking about something that crossed my mind as a kid. I guess I was a pretty unimaginative and square kid, because I remember thinking. “Hmm…these guys sound old. Why do they have toys and still share the same room?” But they had a whole place. Why did they share a room? And I’ve never seen grown-ups with places have toys unless they had little ones running around. I never thought they were gay, but I remember thinking that I wanted to be out of my house and not sharing a room with my sister by the time I had a grown-up voice. Maybe it was the fact that I couldn’t see the little puppet face. Maybe that was what made it odd. But it was odd for sure, and still I watched and went ha ha ha along with them. Ah the weird powers of Sesame street. Too bad it’s going to hell in a handbasket.

And speaking of kids, negligent parents, and other goodness related to kids, why in the good holy hell do some parents cart their sick children out to social events? I was at a potluck yesterday, and in walks this woman with her kid. Someone commented on how quiet her kid was. The mother responded, “Oh she’s not feeling the best, she’s been fighting this for a few weeks now.”

Ok, why in hell did you bring her? I see so many things wrong with this that…where should I begin? And, must I?

First off, she’s sick. Why isn’t she at home? If the mom can’t get a babysitter, then maybe she should do the mom thing and, um, stay home with her sick kid. And if the kids’ been fighting this for weeks, what in hell is the mom doing wasting time at a potluck? Shouldn’t they be somewhere else, like, oh, say, a doctor’s office?

Let’s take mommy and snotty-nosed child out of the mix. Why is mommy bringing snotty-nosed child into a bunch of people if she knows she’s got something she’s been dealing with for a while? Does she want to make us all sick? Do people consider others at all anymore?

Maybe I’m just noticing the selfishness of people because my neighbours are driving that point home daily. Ok, not my
cool neighbour, but the new assholes who took his place after his unfortunate death. They smash beer bottles and leave their trash on the apartment steps, they smoke inside their house even though all they’d have to do is walk out their door and out another door to smoke outside, they even smoke inside in the summer. But the thing that makes me stare in bewilderment is the noise at all hours of the day and night. It doesn’t matter if it’s noon, 4 in the afternoon, the evening or 4 o’clock in the fucking morning. Great masses of people seem to enter and exit their apartment daily, slamming, thumping and banging their way in and out the door as they make their way. First of all, what the fuck are they doing to make that much noise? I’ve tried to make noise by slamming the door, and I don’t even come close to making the racket they make on a regular basis. Second, can they learn to have some respect for their neighbours? Please? I’ve asked them to stop smoking in their house because it seaps into mine and this is not a smoking-permitted building, and they won’t stop. I’ve asked them to be more careful about the broken glass, and they don’t care. I really hope they get evicted soon, because frankly, the selfish pricks need to think of more people than no. 1 for a change. Woops, that was a little more fuming than I planned it to be. But hey I’m not taking it back.

And this latest thing that some of my friends like to do baffles me. They call me repeatedly when I’m out somewhere, saying how much they want to hear from me. Then when I call them back, expecting to hear earth-shattering news or some crazy new development in their lives, all I get is the mundane happenings of their day, and then they start watching the simpsons or playing with something nearby. Then I find out that they just called me so many times because they were bored.

Ok, I have no problem with hearing about how their day went. That’s cool, but don’t call me three times in a row, with specifications of times before which I should call, please please please, unless there’s something crazy going on. Call,, leave a message, I will call you back. And if you’re just calling me because you were bored, don’t fucking bother. I should rephrase that. Maybe it’s all in the delivery. If you call because you thought about me and felt like giving me a call, sweet. Someone’s thinking of me. That kinda brightens my day. But it really makes me feel meaningless when you say you called because there was nothing else to watch on the TV and you were bored, and then proceed to say nothing. Thanks for wasting my time as well as yours. Maybe my time couldn’t be wasted right now, but you made me feel as though I had to drop everything to call you. They do that, or they say something that could have taken five minutes and perhaps could have been left on a message if it was so important that it needed 3 attempts at catching me. But is being bored really a good enough excuse to phone/message bomb me? Am I that unreliable at returning phone calls that you feel the need to hound me for a call-back? I’m sure you can find another way to cure your boredom.

Well, wasn’t that great gobs of pleasantness? Hope you enjoyed my steam-blowing off session. I didn’t expect it to be that long.

Heavy Meditation

So I learned today that I suck at meditation. This guy was doing a thing on meditation, so since I’ve tried yoga, I figured hey why not give it a try? But I found out that it’s way harder than I thought.

First off, there are a million contradictions. They tell you to sit up straight so your feet are flat on the floor. Maybe this is relaxing for a daddy long-legs, but for this shrimp, it means sitting on the front edge of my chair and holding my back straight, not letting it rest on the back of the chair. But then they tell you to relax. I don’t know about you, but sitting bolt upright isn’t the most relaxing thing in the world. Then they tell you to clear your mind. I must be weird, because as soon as someone tells me to clear my mind, I start thinking so hard about how one clears one’s mind that it’s the furthest thing from clear. Then they tell you to let your mind wander, but then after a while, they want to have you focus it, and if it does wander, you’re to bring it back to this image of white light etc. Can they please make up their minds on what mine’s supposed to do?

And here’s the fun part. They tell you to exhale all your anger and inhale wisdom and compassion. Isn’t that the most patronizing thing you’ve ever heard? If you just push your anger out, isn’t it going to come back and bite you? And why is it going to go away just because someone tells you to send it away? If it’s that easy to get rid of, it can’t be that serious. And if one could inhale wisdom and compassion, would we need to meditate? We could all be gurus just by breathing. I know, I know, it’s a metaphor. But think about this. Our own mind is imagining breathing in wisdom, right? So our own mind is manufacturing this wisdom, right? Well then, how successful is this venture?

Maybe I’m just a closed-minded cynic, or maybe the way this guy taught meditation was weird. Either way, the whole concept is too complicated for my little brain. But maybe he’ll prove me wrong, I’ll inhale some wisdom and figure it out.