ReNe: when DIYing in a foreign country

Sometime back, I wrote about noting the differences in the houses between Canada, which generally have wooden drywalls, and apartments in Singapore, which generally are made of concrete. Also, the concept of posts. When Mike first made a hole in the wall, he was a little stunned at how easy it was (you don't even need a powerdrill). He has since happily made a few more holes. Since it's easy.

So today, I was amused to see a post about the reverse experience (an American who's now living in HK).

Lately, we've been preparing our guest bedroom for a new arrival; today's task was installing black out blinds and a curtain rod. Sounded easy enough. In North America, we'd always been pretty good at doing things around the house. All it should take, really, is a screwdriver and maybe a drill, right?

In Hong Kong, DIY is almost a foreign concept. The walls of most apartments are concrete or brick, layered with plaster. Complicating matters, the electric, water and plumbing lines run through the walls in a somewhat random pattern. One wrong step with the drill and we have major damage. Even something as seemingly simple as hanging a picture can create trouble – masonry hangers are available, but have a weight limitation – make a mistake with the positioning and you're left with a permanent mess.

ReNe: smokers

Living over a cafe sounds nice and all -- our apartment overlooks a patio -- but one downside is the cigarette smoke. We should have known. Who are the people who would sit outside in the sun, in an outdoors cafe? Besides 'mad dogs and Englishmen' that is.

To be fair, I think there are not as many smokers in Toronto as compared to Singapore. Still, it's a pet peeve of ours, because we think that it's not fair of smokers to force us to 'smoke' as well, and worse, this smoke drifts into our room. Grr. I can't wait for winter, where it's too cold for people to sit outside to smoke.

On a totally different note, here's something interesting I read last night.

In 1970 Prof Zhang (Zhang Jin-Zhe, head of the pediatric department in Beijing Hospital) suffered from meleana and was diagnosed to have gastric cancer and a gasterectomy was recommended. There were no fully trained surgeons around so the operation was done under acupuncture with the patient following the procedure in the mirror (guiding the surgeon performing the operation). When the surgeon said that he could not find the cancer, and asked what he should do as there was no facility for frozen section, Prof Zhang decided to risk losing half his stomach rather than the risk of missing a malignancy. The patient then continued to direct the surgeon in the operative procedure.

ReNe: the fuss about summer camp

When summer came round, I started to notice this thing called 'summer camp'. At first I paid no attention to it; I figured it was probably much like the school camps back in Singapore, where you send a class of kids away to some chalet in Pasir Ris for a few days. But then I started to think, maybe it's a lot bigger than that.

There were the advertisements everywhere; there were even the charity calls for donations so that less privileged kids can be sent to summer camp. I was mystified. Why were there huge posters in the bus-stops about summer camp? And why was it a huge deal that money be donated so that a kid can go to summer camp? I mean, I seriously doubt the kids would die if they don't go to summer camp...

I saw a young teenage boy busking a few times; his sign read, "Send me to summer camp."

And then, there was the news story a few weeks back about a girl in Quebec who was grounded by her father because she was caught on an online dating site (she was underaged, 14 I believe). Fair enough right? Part of the grounding includes not being able to go for a 3-day school trip. She was so pissed (particularly about the school trip) she took her father to court... and won. I'm just flabbergasted. Apparently the lynch-pin in the argument was that of the school trip; that it was some really important event in a young teenage girl's life.

There were also the numerous NY times articles. For example, camps that cost $10,000 for tuition (sounds like a university education), policing checks on conselors' web pages, summer theatre camps, and so on.

Am I missing something out here? Is summer camp like some terribly crucial teenage rite of passage, like the prom night? (Again, prom night here is a cultural phenomenon. I guess we can't really grasp its significance merely from movies and other media. Singaporean JC kids try to emulate the hype but sometimes it falls really flat. It's like trying to celebrate Christmas when you're not even Christian.)

So I asked some colleagues. They were like, nah, it's no big deal. It's just something for working parents to send their kids to get them out of their hair over summer holidays. They seemed a little embarrassed and changed the topic quickly.

Ok... so I guess (and these are all my personal conjectures) it's more the media hype than anything else. I guess summer camp is a big deal but not that big a deal. And I'm also guessing that, like many teenage experiences, it was probably a huge thing back then, but when you're twenty-plus and looking back, you wonder why and what you worked yourself all up for.

ReNe: honor systems

There was an interesting story in one of the local news today about a cafe in Kitchener, Ontario, where the staff trusts you to pick up the food and pay by yourself (and pay the correct amount). I like the comment by the owner, "We price the bagel for you, but we trust you to pay it. Just like you trust us not to poison you."

I think it's a very good idea, this trust system, and I am all for it. The cafe reports that they don't lose money and that people are very honest. But since the article is all about singing praises about such a system, I'd like to note the odd downsides to this trust system. Some regulars are so impressed that they always tip generously (which can set up an uncomfortable expectation). One of the commenters noted that she has actually gone to the cafe, and while the food is good, the staff is unfriendly, the regulars smug and it's embarrassing for newbies to figure their way around the cafe. My question is, are the savings from not hiring extra staff passed to the customers? Also, can I forgo the tip, since I provide the service myself?

I was reminded of Annalakshmi, an Indian restaurant in Singapore. Not quite the same system; you pay how much you think the food is worth at the counter. Sounds like a good deal, right? I think so too. The food is really good, the staff (most) are courteous and I get the impression that customers tend to overpay because they're impressed; the restaurant borders almost on swanky. However, we tend to take the 'pay what you think the food is worth' quite literally and we always pay what we thought was fair, and the old lady at the cashier would always give us a slightly dark look. It's not because she's naturally sour-faced too; her disapproving sneer darkens or smooths out depending on how much we pay. I mean, I really do not think we're underpaying, but we're poor students and we can't really afford to tip generously. Moreover, the food is all vegetarian and not made from expensive ingredients. Once the food was badly cooked and we paid less than usual. Her face was black.

So yeah, does it seem like places that run on an 'honor' system then rely on a subtle pressuring and shaming to ensure that customers pay, and pay more in the form of tips? I can't say but it's an intriguing thought.

ReNe: the dumbness of 2-pin sockets

One of the things that irks me is the use of two-pin electrical socket. It was irritating when I first got here, and downright irritating now after many months. I think that the fact that most plugs here (with the exception of big appliances like the microwave) are two-pin means that the earthing pin is missing, and that's a little worrying. But what's irritating is that sockets here do not have a switch; this means that for appliances without a built-in on/off switch, the only way to turn the appliance off is to pull the plug. Or pay money for a power strip, and it's only the more expensive power strips that have that on/off switch.

I think it's quite dumb. Never mind that, one would think that given that limitation at the wall socket, people would then design appliances with on/off switches, right? Not really. We actually have a lamp that requires the wire to be pulled from the socket to turn it off. Even appliances like the kettle and coffee grinder have a blue LED light going when not in use, continually sucking up a small but continual drain of electricity. No wonder the power consumption in North America is so high. So when environmentally friendly messages go, "save energy! turn off your appliances!", that means you probably have to bend down or crawl behind the fridge to, literally, pull the plug. No wonder many people don't bother. The 3-pin plug and wall socket with a switch seems like a much brighter idea to me.

ReNe: scaling down on consumerism

One headline in BBC news reads, "Arctic has 9bn barrels of oil". With some US politicians pushing hard for off-shore drilling and the rising oil prices, this increasing interest in the oil under the Arctic is rather worrying for environmental and ethical reasons. Given that the oil's located in the Arctic, 'who' does the oil 'belong' to? What about the wildlife? Sure, the rising oil prices have hurt everybody, some just more than others, some life-styles more than others. I think the problem is, everyone's looking at the dwindling oil supplies and trying to look for *more*, but what about looking at how we spend this oil and seeing if we can cut back unnecessary usage?

My question is: do you think it's all right to cut back on aspects of our consumerism if it meant conservation of the earth's resources?

ReNe: the fairness of coffee

Read an interesting book a while back: Coffee, A Dark History, by Anthony Wild.

What first attracted me to the book was the word 'coffee', but what was really fascinating about the book was the social history surrounding it. I'd admit I was in a hurry to return the book to the library so I skipped the parts about the bean's history, but the parts about the current global economics of coffee and social (in)justice between the countries producing and buying it were compelling.

I may love coffee and the cafe culture but I've cut down visits to cafes in the past few years because they're quite pricey -- they're all right for the occasional afternoon out with friends but not a place I should be going every few days, something we used to do when dating. And after reading the book, I can add another reason to that list: social justice, which in a way, is closely tied to the economics of coffee.

Consider: Raw Arabica coffee beans (the more expensive cousin to Robusta beans) currently sell for about 82 cents a pound on the world market. The Arabica beans are (or should be) the beans you buy or consume at fancy cafes because they are generally considered to be of higher quality. Let's say the consumer (you) pays $5 per pound for roasted beans, though the price is probably more; Blue Mountain retails for $30 per pound. (Sure, roasting costs money, but the price differential from 82 cents to many dollars seems excessive.) Also, given that it costs farmers about 60 cents a pound to produce coffee, how is that fair to the farmer? Wait, the numbers get better. That pound of coffee can make 30-40 cups of coffee. Taking the lower bound of 30 cups, at $2 a cup of plain black coffee in a fancy cafe, that means a cafe makes $60 per pound of ($5) coffee, before subtracting other costs. To be sure, there's a lot of middlemen that take the coffee from farmer to consumer, but still, in that 'cheap' $2 cup of coffee you're holding, only 3 cents goes to the farmer.

I'm quite disturbed by that. It's a very bloated pipeline.

So, what can I do about it? Stop going to cafes, stop paying for over-priced coffee? Yeah, that's one conclusion I've came to.

The fair-trade minimum price, which hasn't changed since 1988, is $1.26. But if I'm not mistaken, that price also includes the 'cut' by the fair-trade organization body; still, the farmer gets more than just 60 cents, maybe it's a dollar instead. Doesn't sound very much better, but it is still a better scenario, right? Given the choice, we should all buy fair-trade (FT) coffee, right?

However, though I don't have exact figures right now, have you noticed retailers tend to charge a premium for FT coffee? FT coffee doesn't just cost a few cents more per pound; retailers tack on a few more dollars per pound, while farmers just receive a few cents above the 'market price'. In other words, the retailers are profiting more than ever from FT coffee (and not just coffee, actually) because consumers are willing to pay more for so-called 'fair-trade'. To me, that doesn't seem very fair. I don't mind paying a bit more, if I know that all of the 'bit more' goes wholly towards the farmers. Retailers and middlemen are already making enough profit (before the FT movement came along), and now they're trying to salve the guilt of consumers while still skimming yet more off the top?

So, what's the conclusion? Give up coffee completely? Probably not, as I love a cup of joe. Plus, would that actually help the farmers? The middlemen could probably move to handling and selling other products, so the hardest hit by such an action could be the farmers. From a purely pragmatic point of view, I'd buy coffee as close to the source as possible, and I'd buy the cheapest FT coffee.

ReNe: wettest summer record

It's official -- this summer is Toronto's wettest on record. 272.8mm of rain, so far, over the months of June and July. It's fairly funny because all throughout winter, there was a lot of hype in the local news about breaking the all-time snow levels record, and I was excited as well because it was my first winter in Canada, but it only turned out to the third-heaviest for the record books in the end. In contrast, this summer didn't seem especially rainy and suddenly, it seems, Toronto just broke the heaviest rainfall records.

Unlike the locals, it does not seem terribly rainy to us. So I had to google -- what's Singapore's heaviest rainfall record?

In 1978, the highest rainfall recorded over 24 hours was 512 mm while the second highest rainfall recorded was 467 mm in 1969. And on 19 Dec 2006, the third highest on record, the 24-hour rainfall recorded was 366 mm.

All those numbers are rainfall recorded over ONE day.

And, because we actually remember that December of 2006, the amount of rain was 765.9 mm, which was a record for December since 1869.

We remember riding through the one on 19 December; we were on our way back to Singapore from KL. When the rain got really heavy and visibility dropped, we slowed down from 140km/h to 120, then 90. The North-South highway was jammed at parts so we had to occasionally moved to the shoulder to overtake the cars, and we passed by a few accidents. I remember the first accident: cresting the top of a hilly stretch, I looked down and was wondering about the black object in the middle of the road. Visibility was pretty poor, so I slowed down, and realized it was a smoking car, black because it was burnt. After that, we slowed down to 90km/h.

ReNe: missing the monsoons

Apparently, this summer in Toronto is one of the wettest to date. For this June and July, a total of 240.4mm of rain fell. That's apparently astounding because last year, Toronto received a total of 88mm for the whole summer, which was drier than usual.

Er, and here we were thinking that lately, Toronto's weather was feeling like Singapore's. Warm and humid, even if the so-called 'thunderstorms' here can't match the monsoons in South-east Asia. Last weekend was especially rainy and we especially enjoyed it. To us, it didn't seem especially heavy, but the local news said the recent rainy weather was creating 'chaos'. In the GTA, many traffic lights were out and some roads were submerged in water.

Average rainfall for Toronto and Singapore, figures pulled from World Climate's website.

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec	Year
Toronto	68.1	59.5	66.3	64.7	71.1	68.3	77.0	70.0	73.3	61.6	69.5	67.2	817.5
Singapore	238.5	165.1	173.6	166.4	170.7	163.1	149.8	171.3	163.5	191.0	250.1	269.7	2272.2

MiKE: Ugh. Postmodernism is Hard

I have not written in a long time. Both for this blog, and for my academic work. The problem with that, I've learned, is that at the moment of being read, stuff can make a lot of sense, but until one has to deal with the pressures of textual production, of using and combining ideas that one has read, these ideas never really becomes the 'property' of the reader.

So it's tough; it's been tough. I think I have encountered quite a lot of material, if I can recall correctly, there has been much stuff that I've read from such authors as Michael Apple, Henry Giroux, Chela Sandoval, Gunther-Kress, Theo van Leeuwen, Jay Lemke and many many others including some in the cognitive learning, semiotics, sociology of education, and other topics, but for the most part, I effectively cannot remember a thing about who said what.

And so I am starting to have doubts as to whether I have actually read all that, or have I been dreaming as the words appeared before my eyes, and I created for myself the illusion of ingesting the words and constructing the meanings?

I suppose a part of this has to do with moving away from the known and the comfortable, the life and the mechanics of getting along in a job in singapore, and moving into a new career, in a new country, in a new field, with little feedback as to whether I am treading in the right track, or soon to fall into a deep ravine with only very difficult escape.

And I feel as if I have fallen into a deep funk, knowing the way out in principle, but not able to motivate myself to move. I sit here by the computer most hours of the day, getting life sucked out of me as I watch piles of papers unread grow around me. Once in a while, when I get panicked enough, I download some more papers from journal sites which I think will be helpful for my "research", which then get added to the "to read" pile. And as a consequence of sitting before the screen too much, I am putting on weight. Not anywhere near obese, to be sure, but enough to make me feel sluggish and wanting to head over to the athletic centre and run. And then I realise my knee hurts once in a while when I run.

I know what to do. I know what I should be doing. I know that I should do it bit by bit. I know I should take notes, get started on a writing project; talk to people; join others who are in the same boat; exercise; stay away from the damn computer; all that.

But there is so much; too much. sian ah

MiKE: Marxism

Stolen from www.partiallyclips.com A brilliant comic, if you ask me.

ReNe: making a difference

This was floating around the internet. Not the first time I've seen it, nor struck by it.


I am the girl kicked out of her home because I confided in my mother that I am a lesbian.
I am the prostitute working the streets because nobody will hire a transsexual woman.
I am the sister who holds her gay brother tight through the painful, tear-filled nights.
We are the parents who buried our daughter long before her time.
I am the man who died alone in the hospital because they would not let my partner of twenty-seven years into the room.
I am the foster child who wakes up with nightmares of being taken away from the two fathers who are the only loving family I have ever had. I wish they could adopt me.
I am one of the lucky ones, I guess. I survived the attack that left me in a coma for three weeks, and in another year I will probably be able to walk again.
I am not one of the lucky ones. I killed myself just weeks before graduating high school. It was simply too much to bear.
We are the couple who had the realtor hang up on us when she found out we wanted to rent a one-bedroom for two men.
I am the person who never knows which bathroom I should use if I want to avoid getting the management called on me.
I am the mother who is not allowed to even visit the children I bore, nursed, and raised. The court says I am an unfit mother because I now live with another woman.
I am the domestic-violence survivor who found the support system grow suddenly cold and distant when they found out my abusive partner is also a woman.
I am the domestic-violence survivor who has no support system to turn to because I am male.
I am the father who has never hugged his son because I grew up afraid to show affection to other men.
I am the home-economics teacher who always wanted to teach gym until someone told me that only lesbians do that.
I am the man who died when the paramedics stopped treating me as soon as they realized I was transsexual.
I am the person who feels guilty because I think I could be a much better person if I did not have to always deal with society hating me.
I am the man who stopped attending church, not because I don't believe, but because they closed their doors to my kind.
I am the person who has to hide what this world needs most, love.
I am the person who is afraid of telling his loving Christian parents he loves another male.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I am the guy who came out to the entire school in his senior speech and got a standing ovation for his courage.

I am the girl who kisses her girlfriend on the sidewalk and laughs at those who glare.

We are the couple who planned and studied and got a damn good lawyer and BEAT the state that wanted to take our child away.

We are the ones who took martial arts classes and carry pepper spray and are just too dangerous to gaybash.

I am the transgendered person who uses the bathroom that suits me, and demands that any complaining staff explain their complaint to my face in front of the entire restaurant -- and shares with my other trans friends which restaurants /don't/ raise a stink.

I am the mother who told her lesbian daughter to invite her girlfriend over for dinner.

I am the father who punished his son for calling you a fag.

ReNe: child soldiers

Making headlines today in the Canadian newspapers was the interrogation of Omar Kahdr (see, for example, the Globe and Mail and Toronto Star). (Briefly, Omar Kahdr is a 20-year-old Canadian citizen who's was interrogated at Guantanamo Bay when he was 16. He was caught fighting in Afghanistan against the American troops.)

The topic also came up over lunch today, and I found the reactions of my colleagues (all 3 are Canadians) interesting. One said that Kahdr took part in a war and should be tried as such; she said, if your family was killed by this guy, wouldn't you want revenge? Personally, I think it's this type of thinking that leads to a lot of problems and wars.

The other two argued that he's should be tried as a child and not as an adult. One pointed out that although Omar did kill combatant troops, if Omar was a high-schooler and he were to go on a school rampage in the US and killed people, he would not have been tried as an adult. I agree with the two -- what do kids at 12, 13, even 16 years know? They may be physically big enough to handle a weapon, but mentally, these child soldiers probably do not fully understand what they are doing. (Even many adults don't know what they are doing in a war...) And by treating a child soldier as an adult and torturing him, what does that say about the captors? That colleagues added that he think it takes a sick person to be able to torture another.

To them, age is the lynch-pin in this argument. But I think that's a slippery slope (how old is old enough?), and that there's also something else that's wrong with the case -- the validity and legality and morality of interrogation and torture.

I also pointed out that it was highly unlikely that a teenager would know anything about Al Queda intelligence (anything of worth that the US side did not know already), and more importantly, that any information obtained under interrogation is highly suspect. Kahdr was, among other things, deprived of sleep before his interrogation, and people are capable of saying absolute nonsense when they are sleep-deprived. So if the information they get is suspect, why are they doing it (interrogation at Guantanamo Bay)? Lots of cynical reasons come to mind.

Under the Third Geneva Convention, which primarily concerns the treatment of prisoners of war (POWs) (Article 17):
"No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind."

Blah blah... "unlawful combatants"...blah blah
Huh.

Really funny posters

Stolen from http://www.insanepoly.com/. Of course, if you need a refresh, go read this wikipedia page on the scandal

ReNe: is google making us stupid?

I came across this article today -- the gist is the Google (and the internet) is making us lose our ability to concentrate. Though this is not the first time I've heard of this (that our use of the internet is affecting the way we think), I found myself identifying strongly with this paragraph (whose title I stole for this post):

"Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle."

Nicholas Carr, The Atlantic

I've written about this before. As a kid, I could easily read a book from cover to cover without stopping. Now I still read a lot, but I find myself flitting from article to article. On the computer, it's all too easy to switch between work window to browser, and my browser typically has over ten tabs open. Because pages are linked, I'd leave the page open so as not to lose the links, and because the page remains open and because leaving open tabs to articles does not take up physical space the way leaving open books and papers do, I don't feel the urgency in finishing an article and closing the tab.

I do think that our heavy use of the computer and internet has significantly affected the way we think, at least for me.

The combination of powerful search facilities with the Web's facilitation of associative linking is what is eroding Carr's powers of concentration. It implicitly assigns an ever-decreasing priority to the ability to remember things in favor of the ability to search efficiently.

John Naughton, The Observer (Wed 2 July 2008)

So, the next question is, is that bad? Probably; this lack of concentration would spill over to many other areas in life, and a lack of concentration isn't a positive trait.

Is it that bad? That's harder to say. It seems like we're trading off one skill-set for another. As students, we're told cliches such as "it's better to understand than to memorize" and that "schools should teach children to how to learn". So, maybe we're losing our ability to focus, but on the other hand, our generation is more exposed to a much broader field of knowledge and we're (probably, hopefully) more savvy at looking up things we don't know.

Does it necessarily have to be a trade-off? Now that we're more aware of it, I suppose not. Already many people are talking about changing habits such as checking email every x minutes. It's not as if we have to completely stop using Google or the internet.