Lydia Schoch

I have to admit to being suspicious of this film when I first came across it. How on earth do you tell a compelling story in 49 seconds?

The answer made me smile. I think my readers will like it as well.

Photo by Evan Swigart.

I’m sure many of my readers have already read about Uncover Colors, the nail polish in development that is intended to help people detect when their drinks have been spiked with date rape drugs. Someone I follow on Twitter asked me to blog about it for today’s post.

I could very well see it becoming something that’s widely available and commonly used if the creators are able to drum up enough investors in the product. With that being said, I have reservations about it.

My first concern is how that would change western culture. Women are already expected to do a long list of things to keep themselves safe every single day. If a woman is sexually assaulted, the first questions she’s asked are about whether or not she followed all of the rules on this invisible checklist. Why did she choose to be alone with him? Was she wearing a short skirt? Was she drinking? How much makeup was she wearing? What made her think that he was trustworthy? Is she sure this wasn’t just all a big misunderstanding?

(Yes, men are assaulted as well. At this point, though, Undercover Colors is only being discussed as something that will be marketed to women).

The last thing we need is to make this list any longer or blame victims any more than our culture already does. I’m extremely wary of people who are way more interested in talking about what the victim was (or wasn’t) doing than they do on the fact that a crime was committed.

My second concern has to do with the statistics of sexual assault. 80% of  victims are assaulted in their own homes, and 70% of their assailants are people the victim knows: a partner, a family member, a friend. The vast majority of assaults don’t involve date rape drugs at all. If there’s no alcohol or drugs that might be mixed into it, this nail polish won’t help at all.

I understand why this story has generated so much press. It’s exciting to think that such a small change in one’s daily habits could prevent something horrible from happening, but it’s not that simple.

What I would like to see happen as a result of this product is a shift in our attention. What if it lead to serious social (if not legal) consequences for people who assault others as well as for those who defend them? What if other cities copied Vancouver’s highly successful Don’t Be That Guy campaign?

There are ways to change public opinion and reduce the number of people who are being assaulted every year. We’ve discovered a few of them. I have a hunch that there are much better ones yet to come. It won’t happen overnight, but I can see it shifting slowly from one generation to the next.

Here is this week’s list of blog posts and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

28 Magical Paths Begging To Be Walked. Wow, these are incredible!

Moonrise via RHMustard. This is a shining example of why I love poetry so much. I’ll be tempted to whip it out the next time I meet someone who has yet to meet a poem that they love.

When “Race” Wasn’t About Skin Colour. Fascinating stuff. It makes me wonder how our definitions of race will change as DNA tests for heritage become more widespread and accurate.

Nariya’s First Beer. When I was about this girl’s age a family friend offered me an ice cream sandwich. I turned them down in polite horror. The only bread my family ate was the extremely healthy whole wheat kind. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would slather ice cream on something so dense and chewy. To me it made about as much sense as pouring chocolate syrup on steamed broccoli.  I can’t remember if I’ve shared this story before, but it came to mind while reading about Nariya’s funny misunderstanding.

On the Beach via fridayam. I thought this was a very appropriate poem to share as we say goodbye to August.

From An Unexpected Inheritance via Funny_Matters:

I carried on walking, behind my friend. I commented on something. My voice cracked. We continued along the hill-path.

There’s something wonderful about knowing she’s still very much ‘there’. In ways I’d never imagined. In other people’s memories of me. In hill-top walks. In my behaviour. My strengths. Even in my weaknesses.

How would our species change if we no longer had the ability to speak? The Silent History imagines a chilling answer to this question that kept me up way past my bedtime.

One of the things that fascinates me about babies is how they figure out language. Sometimes it’s weird to cuddle an infant who is too young to speak. I wonder what they’re thinking about and what they would have to say about the world around them if they had the ability to start talking right away. The idea of interacting with a child who never gains this ability is really interesting.

I’ve purposefully avoided the terms science fiction and dystopia while discussing this book. I know some of my readers are gun-shy around those genres, but this is something I strongly recommend to anyone with even a passing interest in the premise.

What have you been reading?

Photo by Infrogmation.

For anyone just tuning in, this summer I’ve been attempting to be more diligent about keeping in touch with friends and family members who live far away. It’s been an interesting experiment. Today I’ll be sharing my thoughts on the process as we get ready to say good-bye to August.

I’ve learned that I really dislike preprinted greeting cards. The companies that produce them tend to make a lot of assumptions: sick people always recover, birthday cards must either be mushy or raunchy, and  condolence cards must be religious.  It makes me wish that one of these companies would hire me to come up with new ideas for them. There are a lot of holes in their coverage.

I wasn’t a big fan of the types of things that they tended to make jokes about. Boob and beer jokes work for some situations, but after a while they became repetitive. While blank cards are always an option, it sure would be nice if they had better competition.

Postcards don’t seem to have this problem. Almost all of them are neutral enough to suit any purpose.  For the time being I’m not planning to give Canada Post quite so much business, but the next time I do need to buy something like a greeting card I think I will be checking the postcard section first.

The reason why I didn’t use e-cards during the course of this experiment is that most of the people I was communicating with aren’t at all technologically savvy. I’ve already switched to e-cards for everyone my parents age or younger, but there are some older people in my social circles who can’t make that adjustment. Maybe someday!

Last month I mentioned wanting to improve my email response times. To be honest, I’ve only shortened the amount of time it takes me to clear through my email by a little bit. I think the problem is that I try to do it all in one sitting, so this autumn I’m going to try to break it down into much smaller amounts of time. If I can spent 2 minutes a day archiving and deleting old emails I think it will be much easier for me to keep on top of it.

The care package has been pushed back to this autumn. I’ve decided to include Canadian chocolate in it and want to make sure it doesn’t melt while in transit. It’s going to be exciting to see who likes what!

How have your summers been? What have you done to keep in touch?

See also:

How Do You Keep In Touch?

Keeping In Touch Update #1

Keeping In Touch Update #2.

This Way Up from Nexus on Vimeo.

This short film follows two long-suffering men as they attempt to deliver a casket to the cemetery. I loved the beginning, but what happens once they arrive at their destination is what makes me so eager to share this with all of my readers.

One of the reasons why I loved this video so much is that it reminds me of my childhood.  Childhood is a funny thing. At the time it seems to last forever, but one day it suddenly ends. When I look back at it, everything seems like it happened much more quickly than it felt like it was at the time.

When I was 8 or 9, I thought about about this specific question a lot. The difference between dream worlds and our (real?) one seemed so thin at times that I wondered if my entire life up until that point had been an elaborate dream.

For a while I tried to come up with an experiment to finally prove which theory was correct. I never did come up with a foolproof one, but it was an interesting thing to ponder.

I was originally planning to blog about Buskerfest today. It’s one of my favourite festivals of the year. In the past I’ve gotten some amazing pictures of the performers, but its new location and the abysmally humid weather this past weekend kept me from collecting enough stories about it to warrant a full post. Oh, well. Maybe in 2015. If Descartes is wrong, it’s only a few moments away. Ha!

What about you? How do you know that you exist? What philosophical questions kept you on your toes when you were a kid?

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, poems, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

Trinity Bellwood Park Loses White Squirrel. Most of my readers aren’t from Ontario, so I thought you all might enjoy a little taste of our local news. The comment section is especially entertaining.

What Happens When Evangelical Virgin Men Get Married? This Secular Female Sociologist Found Out.  A long but good read.

How to Be Polite via donttrythis. This has popped up into my twitter stream over and over again this past week. I thought I’d pass it onto any of my readers who aren’t on Twitter or otherwise haven’t seen it yet. It’s truly excellent.

Raspberry Time Travel via ourvalley. It’s funny to see how special places change when you revisit them as an adult. I thought of my grandparents’ farm while reading this post.

From Friend to –Stranger?  Sometimes these things happen. I liked how this blogger described the awkwardness of running into someone you once knew so well.

From Memories of Irresistible Toys via joshuamneff:

Unnatural Selection wasn’t an easy book to read. Sex-selective abortions over the past generation have created a massive surplus in young men and in countries like China. Some communities are so imbalanced that there are roughly two boys for every one girl.

How will this affect the future? The latest research has shown a spike in sex trafficking and people buying brides for their sons. It looks like the crime rate may also be on the rise. I’ll admit that some of the author’s projections don’t have a great deal of data to support them (yet), but the picture they paint of what could happen based on similar occurrences in the past is grim.

I’d definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in sociology, history, or predictions about what the future might hold.

What have you been reading?

I first met Bruce Gerencser (and his family) six or seven summers ago while visiting family in Ohio.

Since then I’ve followed him through several incarnations of his blog, The Way Forward. He’d step away from it when his health worsened and try again a few weeks or months later when things had stabilized. (Or, in many cases, when he’d better adjusted to his newest limitations).

After a while I grew accustomed to the rhythm of his appearances and disappearances online. As a former fundamentalist pastor who eventually deconverted from Christianity and became an Atheist, he drew more than his fair share of criticism. It wasn’t too much of a surprise, then, to see this message on his blog last week:

Thank you for being a loyal reader of The Way Forward. After discussions with my wife, counselor, and primary care doctor, I have decided to that is time to hang up my blogging spurs. I wish each of you well. Thank you for your support and friendship over the years.Bruce Gerencser.

The fact that he’s taking a permanent leave of absence from the blogosphere caught me off-guard.

While I completely understand his reasons for stepping away, there’s always a small part of me that is sad to see other blogs end. This is such a unique form of communication because so many readers (generally) don’t leave comments. In no way does that mean that the post aren’t appreciated, though.

I don’t know if Bruce will see this post, but I wanted to publicly acknowledge all of the time and energy he’s put into blogging over the years. It isn’t easy to come up with new topics consistently over a long period of time, especially when one receives as much blowback as he did.

So thank you, Bruce. May your retirement be restful.

I’ll try to come up with topics here that are half as interesting as the ones you covered. 😉

A talented woman named Megan McShane made this short film.

I absolutely loved the ending.

A few years ago I challenged my readers and myself to find Beauty in Three Ordinary Things.

As this summer is winding down, I thought I’d return to this challenge. It’s been weird here in Toronto over the past two months as far as the weather is concerned. One week it feels like autumn, the next we’re boiling hot. We were lucky enough to have some gorgeous temperatures late last week, so that’s when I went out in search of beautiful things that most people who visit my city probably walk past without a second glance.

It was one of the most entertaining walks I’ve been on in a long time. I hope you enjoy my findings as much as I did discovering them.

Have you ever wondered what the tattered remains of old posters used to promote?

I like wondering about that when I see walls that look like this. There are constantly new political protests, concerts, English as a second language classes, poetry readings, lost dog posters, and incoherent rants popping up on community boards like this one.

After a while someone always takes down the old ones. Once you’ve lived here a while you can generally predict what types of notices you’ll find on these boards, but every once in a great while I’m pleasantly surprised by the wild creativity of other Torontonians.

Pigeons are everywhere in this city. Some people call them sky rats because they’ll eat just about anything and often carry parasites.

My husband spied this pigeon sitting peacefully on a second-story ledge. I spent several minutes watching the bird as it watched over our city. If not for the thick pane of glass between us, I could have reached out and touched it.

It amazes me to see how pigeons have adapted to such a urbanized environment. They not only survive in the city, they truly thrive here despite all of the dangers that surround them.

There’s something beautiful about that to me.

Somehow life always find a way.

My final entry is a funny one.

Sometimes when I’m walking down the street I like to make up stories about the people I pass.

For example, it’s interesting to think about what lead the same family to adopt a toy poodle and a Saint Bernard. Were the dogs best friends at the pound? Did half of the family want a dog they could carry while the other half was rooting for a dog that could carry them? Have they considered getting a Labrador Retriever next to even things out?

It’s not about judging other people. It’s about trying to figure out how their minds work.

Maybe that is why I found my third picture so amusing.

Did the owner’s love of elaborate basket decorations come before or after  their love of electric bikes? What do they store in the basket? If I happen to see it again this autumn, will the basket have leaves woven into it instead of flowers? Seasonal foliage makes sense, but it also seems like it would eventually damage the weave of the basket.

I probably spent 30% of my walk thinking about all of the possible answers to those questions. It truly fascinated me.

I’d love to see your photos, drawing, haiku, or other creative responses to ordinarily beautiful things in your neighbourhoods. Leave them in the comment section, or send me a link to them and I’ll add them to this post!