Medley #4

23 January 2021: I sometimes come across interesting items that don’t warrant separate blog posts. And that’s quite a statement considering that I have blogged about Supermarket Checkout Lines, Hallowe’en Strategies, and even The Perfect Parking Spot 🙂 . I sometimes combine those items into a single blog post. Like this one 🙂 . So let’s get caught up on green needles, brainstorms, hospital beds in Ottawa, and an errant email from the Attorney-General.

Covid-19 in Ottawa

16 January 2021: I occasionally visit Ottawa Public Health’s Daily Covid-19 Dashboard because it offers an up-to-date view of the Covid-19 situation in Ottawa. Sure I could quibble about the format but it does contain a lot of useful data and it isn’t impossible to navigate (although I eventually had to call their information helpline – very helpful). But a couple of pieces of data have always struck me as odd:

Rashomon

9 January 2021: Rashomon is a 1950 film (it’s on Youtube: Rashomon) by the Japanese Director Akira Kurosawa that I saw years ago during my film buff days at University. It’s an excellent film; it regularly appears on lists of the greatest movies of all time. I have a great idea for a remake!

Factfulness

03 January 2021: In May 2020 I purchased Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World–and Why Things Are Better Than You Think and last week I finally finished it 🙂 . I bought it because it had received great reviews, it supported my view that the world was improving, and I had long admired the author Hans Rosling. In fact I had written a post (Life is Good…) in June 2018 about his work.

Arghh! That’s what I should have said!

Admin Note: I accidentally advertised my previous post while it was password protected.  Sorry about that. It’s public now: Barb’s Coffee Cake Recipe.

24 December 2020: Have you ever been criticized unfairly but you couldn’t put your finger on exactly why it was unfair? But more importantly, you couldn’t think of a devastating riposte that put your accuser in her place and left you with that warm self-righteous feeling for the rest of the day? And it was made even worse when the perfect response popped into your head days later.

Barb’s Coffee Cake Recipe

19 Dec 2020: July 26^th 2017 was the beginning of a long and arduous journey for me; because that was the day that I received an email from Barb with her coffee cake recipe. It is only now, after more than a dozen attempts, that I may have finally snatched the pebble from her hand and made that recipe with a well-defined layer of crumble in the middle of the cake.

Trust the Experts?

16 December 2020: Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve noticed a lot more exhortations from Google News to Trust the Experts! than I used to. Sometimes it’s couched as Believe the Science! but the general message remains the same: the world is a complicated place, there are experts who can help you safely navigate its dangers, and it only makes sense to listen to them. Like a lot of Main Stream Media content (e.g. Black Lives Matter, Defund the Police…), it’s a short pithy phrase that poorly summarizes a very complex issue.

Main Stream Media

10 December 2020: I haphazardly follow the United States election process; I click on interesting links but I don’t go looking for them. A couple of days ago I came across an interesting post from VivaFrei: Texas Election Lawsuit Explained.

Competence

08 December 2020: We live in a complicated world. And I sometimes wonder if there are enough competent people around to keep it running smoothly. And for how long. Because it’s getting more and more complex: sophisticated technologies require sophisticated understanding, increased population requires increased accommodation for others, unintended consequences become more far-reaching….

Television Series

26 November 2020: I rarely watch a television series to the end. It’s a bad habit that I’ve developed over the last several years; in the last ten years I’ve only finished Breaking Bad, FarScape, and The Queen’s Gambit. I’ve abandoned easily ten times that number. Just off the top of my head: The Walking Dead, Dark Matter, Dexter, Titans, Sanctuary, Stranger Things, Hanna, Lucifer …. And it’s not that I just watch the first episode; I watched the first seven seasons of the Walking Dead before I called it quits!