The heroes for me this week are all of the preschool and elementary school teachers. They are using every muscle in their face to smile with their eyes to welcome nervous kids to school behind masks.
(don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they’re wearing masks too)
Author: Steven Garrity
The best song I’ve heard this year is a joke
Of all the new music I’ve heard this year, the song that has stuck with me most is a joke. Like all great joke songs, it’s a great song first.
Bo Burnham’s Netflix musical comedy special, INSIDE, culminates in a song call All Eyes On Me (YouTube, Spotify). There’s a concluding song that comes after it, but this feels like the emotional apex of the special before it wraps up.
All Eyes On Me is three-and-a-half minutes and includes a monologue. It’s best consumed with the visuals, ideally in the context of the full special. The hook has been stuck in my head for weeks.
It’s a joke song, but it’s also kind of a great song.
I would love to see this performed live even thought its power may come from the isolation from which it was created and performed.
Cottage gatekeeping
I had a few conversations with friends and family recently where we ended up compiling a list of requirements for a place to be called a “cottage”.
If your so-called “cottage” has any of the following, then I’m sorry, you don’t have a cottage. You have a Summer Home.
- A foundation
- A dishwasher
- Air conditioning
- Insulation of any kind (some exposed/visible insulation may be allowed)
You may be allowed one of the following, but two or more will disqualify you from the “cottage” designation:
- A new mattress
- A complete/matching set of dishes or cutlerly
- A full-size washer and dryer
- Cable TV or high-speed internet access
If you have recently chased a bat, bird, or other rodent out of the building, or if you have crawled under the building to jack it up in the spring, you may use the “cottage” designation for one year.
Stephen DesRoches, photographer
My friend and colleague at silverorange, Stephen DesRoches, has been an accomplished photographer for years. Recently, though, I feel his work has crossed into the could-be-a-default-Apple-wallpaper level of quality. I can imagine this photo as a default wallpaper for macOS Cavendish in 2023 (I’ve since learned this shot is from Bermuda).
If you live on Prince Edward Island (née Epekwitk), you’ve probably seen Stephen’s work on your provincial health card:
You can follow Stephen’s work on Twitter (where he snagged the coveted last-name handle @desroches), on Instagram, on his own site StephenDesRoches.com, or you can get one of his excellent photo books.
The ghost of Leslie Nielsen
Every time you throw an apple core out the window of a moving car on a country road, you hit the ghost of Leslie Nielsen in the face and knock him off a horse.
Standardize milk label colors now!
Here in my home province of PEI (née Epekwitk), we have two primary dairy brands: Perfection/ADL and Purity. They both use similar white plastic bottles in four common milk-fat amounts: 3.25%, 2%, 1%, and Skim (fat-free).
Both dairies use color to differentiate the milk-fat variations. For 3.25% milk, they both use red. For 1% they both use a light blue (sort of, I’d call the ADL variation here teal, but it’s close enough). For 2% and skim milk, though, they colors don’t match, and worse still, blue is used for 2% Perfection, but Skim from Purity.
Our household has a wide variety of milk preferences and needs, and the inconsistency makes it easy to mix up milk types across brands. I ask you, the milk-producers of Prince Edward Island: come together and standardize!
If Big Dairy of PEI wants to pay me to be the milk label czar, I’d use the rainbow to go from heavier to lighter milk variations: RED 3.25%, ORANGE 2%, GREEN 1%, BLUE Skim.
Both brands already get the color right for chocolate milk: brown, like the cows it comes from.
Bob McDonald is an active listener
Today at work we were talking about the concept active listening. Hearing the practices of “reflecting back what is said”, “asking for clarification”, and “summarizing” made me think of Bob McDonald.
Bob McDonald is the host of the CBC Radio science program, Quirks & Quarks. I also loved watching his science TV show Wonderstruck when I was a kid. I remember one episode of Wonderstruck about balance where Bob learned to center his mass over the rear axle of his mountain bike and rode around perfectly on the back-tire only.
On the Quirks & Quarks radio show, you can hear the pattern of asking questions of a guest, listening, and then reflecting back what was heard (often in simpler terms). It’s a great way to communicate, and it’s also a great way to host a science show. Keep active-listening, Bob!
Brad Sucks: A New Low In Hi-Fi
I wrote back in April about Brad Sucks’ pending new album. It’s out today (June 10, 2021) and it’s great: A New Low in Hi-Fi.
The Charlottetown / Halifax weather radar blackout of 2021
I spend a lot of my time on the internet. Much of that time is spend checking the local weather via the Canadian Weather Radar service. Some time this year, one or two of the weather radar stations seems to have stopped reporting data on this page. As a result, a swath of PEI (née Epekwitk) and Nova Scotia is in a radar dead-zone. What gives?
UPDATE: As per this helpful comment from Isa, the Chipman – CASCM radar station (near Fredericton, New Brunswick) is having an “Unscheduled outage” and is expect to return on June 9, 2021 (a few days from the writing of this post).
UPDATE UPDATE: It turns out there are two simultaneous outages that I’m conflating here. The Chipman CASCM station mentioned above comes back online in a couple of days, but according to the CBC, the Halifax radar station will be offline until the end of August.
While we’re on the topic, there are a few other interesting things to note on this page:
- A recent redesign of this page added many improvements, but also made the large map area something with zooming and panning, which interferes with regular scrolling on the page (you have to make sure your cursor isn’t over the large map before scrolling).
- That long narrow rectangle-with-blob near the top right is the geopolitical peculiarity of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, a territory of France off of the Canadian province of Newfoundland.
Trivial Tragedy #7: The science class lie
This post is one of a series called Trivial Tragedies. Each installment is a small story of minor heartbreak that has stuck with me from my childhood.
I was a pretty good student in high school. I wasn’t great at applying myself, but I was capable of getting marks in the 80s and 90s. At the time I thought I was smart. I found out a couple of years later that my ease with math and physics was actually an ease with high-school-level math and physics. When later confronted with university-level material, I quickly realized that I needed to work hard and didn’t know how.
While I did well enough academically in high school, my attendance record was weak. Contingent on transportation of some kind, I skipped a lot of classes. Teachers didn’t press too hard on this, given how I was keeping up with the class.
I had one grade-12 science teacher who got suspicious. I skipped his class one afternoon. The next day as I entered his class, he asked me where I had been the day before. I steeled myself and lied. I told him I had been sick at home.
He had laid a trap for me. Before class, he had phoned my parents to confirm my absence for the day before. He knew I wasn’t home sick — he was asking to see how I would respond.
He looked me in the eye and earnestly asked: Why did you lie to me?
One of a handful of students who witnessed this train-wreck later told me that I actually “made a sound”. It might have been my soul leaving my body.
I don’t even know how I responded, but it felt like a punch in the gut made out of shame and regret. Skipping a class wasn’t a big deal, but an adult human being looking you in the eye and sincerely asking you why you lied to them — that left a mark.
I remember thinking: you’re a high-school teacher and I’m a student — aren’t I supposed to lie to you?
Even though that moment has stuck with me for about 25 years, it didn’t do much to change my behaviour. A few weeks later, I had a friend call the school office and have me paged for a “dentist appointment”.
The PA-system in our class passed on the message. I packed up my things and walked across the front of the class to the door. I’m not sure what the teacher was thinking, but every kid in that class knew exactly what was happening. I knew they knew, and they knew I knew. For about twenty seconds, I was Ferris Bueller.