On the other hand, a really specific (short) word limit can force one to be more creative and improve the text. I love the Blaise Pascal quote: “Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.”
In English: “This letter is very long because I did not have time to make it short.”
In other words, brevity is not only the soul of wit, it takes more time to achieve, sometimes, than much longer pieces of writing.
This post notwithstanding.
This made me laugh, because I just put my cell number on my FB account. (Mostly so my friends could actually talk to me if they wanted. Not to be “safer”.)
Dear Elections Canada,
First of all, thank you for doing this job! I imagine it is somewhat of a thankless task, and I for one appreciate being able to vote, even though Stephen Harper tells me I shouldn’t want to. I certainly don’t begrudge you the hard-earned tax dollars that helps pay your salaries. (Unlike the loonies that got flushed for the G-20 summit.)
I understand that as “an independent, non-partisan agency that reports directly to Parliament” you can’t do much about the elections act, and the fact that a portion of the act prevents the “premature transmission” of election results across time zones. Obviously, this “transmission” could be done by CTV, CBC, hack newspapers, and, of course, individuals using Twitter. So, your threat that anyone announcing results too early could be fined $25,000 and suffer a thorough noodle-lashing is perfectly reasonable. You’re just upholding the law.
A thought occurs: a thorough implementation of this policy may be an excellent way to deal with the massive budget deficit the previous (Conservative) government has left us. In fact, if only 1.2 million Canadians say something about the election results before all the polls are closed, that should cover the $30 billion deficit. (16 million Canadians are on Facebook, more than 300,000 are on Twitter – and many of those will be repeat retweeting offenders – this seems like a reasonable proposition.)
On the other hand, you, like others, may feel this is an excessive response to what may be an innocent mistake. (Not every slack-jawed Facebook user is an Elections Canada Act aficionado, like your correspondent, who has a special drool-wiping gnome to help him with his slack-jawed Facebook use, and several cyborg pixies to help him keep track of the act.)
The answer to this issue is so obvious. I’m surprised it evaded you.
Change the time zones.
All you need to do is pick a Canadian Standard Time. Voila. If we all live in the same time zone, there will be no likelihood of Canadians (innocent and not-so) contravening the act and using their social media to tell their distant relatives and friends what is happening where they live. Granted, it may prove inconvenient to have the sun rise at 5 am in Halifax and 10 am in Vancouver, but we all must learn to make sacrifices. (Except in Toronto. Never there.)
Another (more radical) solution may require some research. My understanding is that time travel is theoretically possible. Perhaps we could somehow move populations through time so that no-one has to experience the horror of knowing what other parts of the country have done before them. Obviously, there will be some expense to this. But we can make it affordable by moving populations based on size and location. Once again, this proposal will mean that nothing will interfere with people living in Toronto – or Montreal and Ottawa (also important) – and their daily activities. Besides, people who live on the coasts should be willing to work with the inconvenience, because they’ve got all those positive ions helping them keep healthy and be happy anyway.
A third (extremely radical) idea, is that you could only release the poll results once all the votes have been counted. This would mean no time travel, nor subjugating the entire country to the diurnal dictates of one time zone (Toronto-time, we could call it), but it may work. You would have to count all the votes, and only release them to the media (and slack-jawed Facebook users, with and without gnome helpers) when ALL the results are in.
Of course, that would mean that people in Toronto would have to go to bed before they knew the results of the election.
Scratch that. Ignore that last idea. Crazy talk.
Yours (in) sincerely,
Mark
“What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?”
Plato said that in the 4th century BC (back when men were men, women were not, and boys had to be watch the men carefully — kind of like the Catholic Church today.) But I digress; his was only the most recent version of the complaint. There are Egyptian hieroglyphs worried about the same things, thousands of years earlier. I’m sure cave men had the same problem. It’s a fact of human behavior that old people are frightened by young people, because they’ve lost what young people have in excess: vitality and passion.
So I initially took the headline in today’s Globe and Mail with a pinch of salt: “Today’s college kids are 40-per-cent less empathetic, study finds.”
However, we are talking about a scientific study — or at the very least, a study of studies. According to the Globe and Mail:
“Today’s college students are 40-per-cent less empathetic than those of the 1980s and 1990s, says a University of Michigan study that analyzed the personality tests of 13,737 students over 30 years.”
Now that’s a significant number of people they talked to, and apparently, the same empathy tests were given to all the young people they tested in the study, so I think we have to take the initial finding at face value. There is a general lowering of empathy in our young. But reading the story, I notice that we leave the science really quickly, jumping straight to causes:
“The influx of callous reality TV shows and the astronomical growth of social networking and texting – technologies that allow people to tune others out when they don’t feel like engaging – may be to blame, the authors hypothesize.”
The biggest drop in empathy comes after the year 2000, and I suspect the partying in 1999 may be the cause, but the authors suggest the social networking sites of MySpace and Facebook may be connected. Really? Social networking makes us less empathetic?
Thankfully the Mop & Pail talks to some people willing to go beyond the grab for headlines, and posits that, I dunno, maybe it has more to do with parenting. Could it be that two-income families, the rise of single-parent families, and a general lack of time could be at fault? Was there some kind of change in parenting and teaching attitudes post-1980 that may be causing this lack of empathy? (I’m thinking about something that would give young people an unwarranted sense of entitlement and self-confidence — I mean, more than the usual bravado of youth.)
Personally, I blame the metric system.
P.S. Obviously, it’s not because of the metric system in the U.S. Clearly, there it’s because of the Republicans.
P.P.S. According to Wikipedia, the only other countries that don’t use the metric system are Burma and Liberia. So there it’s clearly because of aliens.
A public service announcement from The SkwibThis time of year can be troubling for bloggers; the days get shorter, the holiday season has its own particular stresses, and for those running weblogs, there are the dangers of SAD.
Statistical Affective Disorder (SAD) is caused by an abrupt and inexplicable drop in the visitor statistics to your blog. Early symptoms include:
As the disorder progresses, you may find yourself:
And in the final stages, SAD can even lead to:
If you have any of these symptoms you may have SAD, and should seek qualified psychiatric help at the first opportunity. Alternatively, you could just turn off your damned computer.