Insecure

While at Harvard, I must have had five or six different passwords for their various systems, not to mention my ATM PIN. They were all fairly short and contained familiar words or codes that had meaning to me. As such, they were all very easy for me to remember, and I never had to write them down. Here at UVA, though, they're far more intense about internet security, and none of my passwords are permitted. All passwords have to be very long and have to contain letters, numbers, and symbols, in no familiar or oft-repeated pattern. Now, this might make my passwords a whole lot more difficult if not impossible to crack, but there's a problem. They thus also become absolutely impossible for me to remember. They're just long, random combinations of unrelated symbols. The only way I can log into anything is by writing all my passwords down and carrying them with me all the time. Which means if my wallet is lost or stolen, whoever has it has access to every last drop of info about me and can easily steal my identity and generally cause mischief. It is thus my carefully considered professional opinion that these so-called 'high security' passwords are in fact anything but, and serve precisely the opposite purpose: since you have to write them down and take them around with you, they are far more likely to be stolen than the short and sweet ones you easily memorize. I predict this whole system will backfire if it hasn't already. Then again, I also predicted a Lakers sweep, so what do I know?

Sign I'm not at Harvard anymore...

A ROTC building! Actually on campus. I still feel a little stunned.

Sign I'm not in Canada anymore...

Walked past a Barnes and Nobles yesterday here in Virginia. Brazenly on display in the front window? Mark Steyn's America Alone.

UPDATE: Welcome, fellow Steyn fans! You might like this old thing, or this one. Have a great weekend!

Leaving on a Jet Plane

I'll be away from the interwebs for a week or so. But not to worry, the blogroll has everything more than covered! I call your attention especially to Rachel Lucas, who has been absolutely blogging her butt off the past couple weeks and doing a great job of it, too. This post is my favorite. And don't forget to wish her a happy birthday on the 21st! I happen to remember the date because, to my everlasting honor and delight, it's one we share. The downside is that it's also the Queen's birthday, so most of the good presents (snow leopards, priceless jewels, small islands) get taken.

And please go and support Kathy Shaidle in her fight against Richard Warman. The more money you give, the sooner the slasher movie version of the trial will get made (tagline on the blood-soaked poster: "He messed with the wrong blogger..."). I almost feel sorry for the guy, I don't think he understands just what he's gotten himself into, dude is in for a big-league butthurtin' (though, just between you, me, and the CHRC, I'd venture that he's intimately familiar with that particular soreness already).

My Brilliant Light Bulb Idea

Okay, so if I were a Senator (and let's face it, it's just a matter of time), I would bring one of them newfangled efficient lightbulbs to the floor and 'accidentally' drop it. The whole Senate would have to be evacuated because of the toxic mercury fumes, the networks would have no choice but to cover it. The reaction from the average American viewer: "The Senate was evacuated!? What was it - terrorism? Al Qaeda? Another anthrax scare? A sniper?Wait - what? What did he say? A lightbulb? The very same lightbulb that this Senate is forcing us to buy for the rest of our lives? Well, fuck that!" And that would be the end of that.

Old French(-Canadian) Whore

Few things get on my nerves like modern moralizing. Not because it's nosy, or faddish, or state-imposed (though none of these help), but because it lacks one crucial element: morality. Whether the campaign is anti-drinking, anti-drugs, or even anti-sex, things always come down to one all-important concern: health. In other words, screw your immortal soul, just keep an eye out for your liver and any embarrassing rashes. In fact, I guarantee you that in this godless age, the Ten Commandments would make a comeback, and big time, if it could somehow be proven that worshipping false idols increases bad cholesterol.

All of which leads me to the latest example that grits my teeth: a public service announcement, paid for by the Quebec government, being run endlessly on local radio. The ad is about the importance of having a designated driver. Well, that's not quite right. It's about how designated drivers can still have hot one night stands. The ad in full: A beautiful woman (well, she sounds beautiful!) tells her girlfriend she met a stranger at a bar the night before, and he was a designated driver, which is just sooo sexy, so she invited him home - the rest is left to our imagination, but it's quite clear they didn't busy themselves drafting MADD pamphlets.

Look, I'm not asking that the government broadcast Dawn Eden's articles (though wouldn't that be nice!), but at the very least could they please refrain from actively campaigning for empty, soul-destroying one night stands?

I don't care if they test negative til the cows come home, I for one do not look forward to living in a province full of healthy old whores!

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon... because it went with her shoes

Via ALDaily comes this article, on a much-needed book. Unfortunately, both essay and book seem to typify the often meaningless, always over-complicated academic writing of our time (and the review's author, judging by her bio, appears to be some sort of abortion lobbyist, disgusting). Still, it's all worth it, for two reasons. One, because it blames the hippies, and anything that blames hippies is all right with me. Two, because of this absolutely priceless anecdote:

"When I asked one of the young female interviewees who wore a pink-ribbon t-shirt what made her choose to wear the garment on certain days, I was seeking to understand whether there were certain situations, relationships and experiences that prompted her to show her awareness of breast cancer. Her keen reply took me by surprise: 'I think ‘it’s got pink in it, what goes with pink?' Actually I wear it with this skirt quite a lot …'."

Times have changed

Indeed.

The Greatest Sentence Ever

This was in The Montreal Gazette a couple weeks ago, I put it aside and forgot about it til now. The paper celebrated International Women's Day on March 8th with a feature on feminism. One of their articles, on page B4, included this sentence:

"In her second year of environmental and First Nations studies at McGill, Rea Fenger is not sure she would even have called herself a feminist before she started working on the Radical Vulvas project."

The world has come a long way in my short lifetime for a sentence like that to even be conceivable, let alone to be presented in such an entirely matter-of-fact, unremarkable manner. Ah, progress.

Lower down, on the very same page, just to show us that there are still some perversions which even our society will disapprove of, is an article condemning that great evil, stay-at-home motherhood. Choice excerpts include a call for "a life more challenging than the playground and the PTA," the contention that women who leave the workplace "are neglecting their duty to society in general," and the plea that these women not abandon the public world for "the private world of laundry and kissing boo-boos." I, for one, take solace in the knowledge that for all those incredibly selfish stay-at-home mothers who, let's face it, should have had abortions in the first place, there are brave, progressive pioneers like Rea Fenger, studying the effects of Friday night bingo games on the ozone layer, and radicalizing vulvas wherever she goes.

The weirdest part of that anti-motherhood opinion piece (by The Gazette's Peggy Curran, if anybody cares, and titled 'Get To Work manifesto takes aim at the backlash generation') is this statement, presented not as opinion but as fact: "Conservatives are already asking why society should spend resources educating women." Really? Funny, I know my fair share of conservatives, and while the movement to repeal the nineteenth amendment is gaining ground, I haven't heard anyone suggest women shouldn't be allowed an education. The very idea is profoundly unfair. Can you imagine, women banned from a place like Harvard? The very thought makes me furious - I mean, why should they get all the breaks?!

Announcement

Sorry I haven't been blogging, I've been SUPER busy, working on lots of big non-bloggable projects and important career stuff, don't really have time to blog like I did when I started and was at school and bored out of my mind. I'll try my best, but you're really much better off reading Rachel Lucas and Kathy Shaidle and the other lovely folks in the blogroll anyway.

If I do post something soon, it'll be about how soul-numbingly awful No Country for Old Men is, I don't think I'll be able to keep that rant to myself.

Anyhoo, the announcement. I'm moving! To Virginia!!! I am beyond ecstatic. What a beautiful state, and I've always longed to live in the South, I set off in June and can hardly wait.

I LOVE This

Absolutely classic. I doubt the citizens of Ontario will prove as defiant (or imaginative)...

The Nail on the Head

Very insightful, very accurate observations in this post over at Church of the Masses, don't miss it.

Great Obama post

Over at Rachel Lucas. Heck, all her posts are great, and if I'd be honest I'd do little more than link to her and Kathy Shaidle all day, but I'm trying to show some restraint here, folks. Anyway, my favorite part from this post:

remember how much fun it was when Hillary was First Lady to call her names,
criticize everything about her (hair, face, clothes, ankles, size of butt,
voice, ideas, you name it)? How easy it was and how only some impotent feminists
cried foul? Well I hope you got it out of your system because you won’t be doing
the same to Michelle Obama when her husband gets elected, unless of course you
like being accused of racism.

The part where I disagree, though, comes here: "it makes no sense to me, because you’d think minorities would be less offended by Whitey treating them the same than by Whitey treating them like sensitive little children who can’t take their punches like everyone else." Come on, Rachel, you know that can't be true - if it were, affirmative action wouldn't even be an issue because black people would be too proud to accept it. We all know that certainly is not the case.

Now that's more like it

For a while there I felt a bit dizzy, looked liked the Canadiens might finally be getting competitive, a strange and foreign feeling. But then they reassure their fan base with one of their traditional trading day performances, sending a great goalie away for next to nothing and failing miserably in their attempts to do anything else. What, they couldn't lure Denis Savard out of retirement?

Will someone please wipe that stupid smirk off Jon Stewart's face?

I haven't blogged for a while cuz the nice folks in the ol roll have it all covered, but that is just something I had to get off my chest.

Please watch this movie!

I watched this on PBS tonight and was blown away. Hilarious, adorable, tragic, depressing, and hopeful all at once. Plus, some American election parallels as both dirty tricks and crying are involved. I couldn't find any info on when or whether it'll be on tv again or available in stores, but here's part one on youtube, the rest is up there, too:

It's a close one, today, folks

It's really a toss-up as to what was the dumbest, most offensive sentence in this morning's Montreal Gazette.

Reading the opinion section, I was certain this was going to be the winner:

"The modern [Quebec] independence movement was born in Montreal's bilingual francophone intellectual community, inspired by hearing Martin Luther King and Gandhi speak about freedom, justice and liberty" - Georges Boulanger, "Pauline Marois and her problem with English," B7

Because, you know: MLK, Gandhi, Levesque.

But then I read this bizarre statement in the book review section, and was no longer so sure:

"I'd like to think of this as high praise and not offence: I don't think it's a book a woman could have written." - Kirk LaPointe, in a review of Charles Brock's Beautiful Children, I9.

What on earth is that supposed to mean??? In the reviewer's defense, he also praises Don DeLillo, the single worst author in human history, so he can't really be taken all that seriously, he probably doesn't even know how to read and is just one of those illiterate guys artfully bluffing their way through life. Come to think of it, that could make a pretty good story - the illiterate book reviewer. Not all that implausible, either.

Faced with no choice but to open this rag every morning, I sometimes wish I couldn't read!

Where round some mould'ring tow'r pale sharia creeps...

A kerfuffle this past week. A Harvard student was unexpectedly denied entrance to the Harvard gym. The ensuing email: "Hey has anybody else been turned away from the QRAC recently because they instituted women's only hours on monday from 3-5 (also tu. and thurs. 8-10 AM)? Today I was forced to wait outside in the cold until 5 to get in because they wouldn't let me use 1 of the 10+ open machines.The policy seems sexist and discriminatory to me as there are no equivalent men only hours. Anyone know who I should get into contact with to complain about this new policy?" The debate barely got started before the Harvard Athletic Department released its official statement on the matter. In full: "These hours have been put in place for equality reasons. Whether it is for overall comfort or religious purposes we wanted to offer an opportunity for women to work out without the presence of men."

Left at that, this probably would have become yet another in a long line of arguments about what equality means, between people calling themselves feminists and other people also calling themselves feminists, and going nowhere. But it wasn't left at that. No sirree. Because, turns out, the Harvard Athletic Department's official statement was full of shit.

The real story came out shortly thereafter, in an email from a member of the Harvard Islamic Society. Her explanation: "Harvard Islamic Society, the student group on campus which I am very involved with petitioned for the women only hours (I think the hours are offered no more than once or twice a week). The reason for that is many hijabis (muslim women who wear the headscarf) really wanted to have an opportunity to work out in an environment where they did not have to wear the headpiece or the really long baggy sweats to cover up all parts of their body (as many of you may know, it is rather difficult and unpleasant). Our organization has been talking to the athletic department for a while now and finally, this year they let us do it. Interestingly, the interest was not only coming from the muslim women, but later on some jewish and christian women joined in. The purpose of institutions of those hours was not at all to offend/discriminate against men, but rather give an opportunity to women with certain strict religious obligations to work out in a more comfortable environment. "

So, yeah, wonderful. A great big thanks to the Jewish and Christian women who collaborated.

If only they would have extended this to the classroom as well. I can't tell you the number of mornings I would have loved to have been barred from attending my compsci lecture. "I'm sorry, Prof Roberts, but I just can't enter this room and impose my degraded Western values upon the other students. I'll be in the gym -um, I mean, the student lounge - no, wait, not from nine to eleven, damn - okay, just going back to my room, I'll copy Fatima's notes later."

It is a real shame, though, that working out while covered like Dracula at the beach can be "difficult and unpleasant." I wonder, how could a woman doing the stairmaster in a burlap sack feel more comfortable? A hard one, I know. I'll leave it up to Islamic scholars to figure out, though my guess is that the answer probably involves stones.

Discarding the Elderly in Quebec

A friend's grandmother, in her early nineties, suffered a sudden illness and had to be rushed to the hospital last week. The staff blatantly neglected her and basically let her die. The doctor wasn't even ashamed. He told the lady's daughter outright that he wasn't going to waste his time on the old and infirm. You know, because a doctor has sworn to dedicate his life to healing the young and healthy. I don't have the family's permission to name the hospital or doctor, but this is just such a disgrace, such an evil, that I had to say something. I have to admit, though, I'm not surprised - once a society has lost its respect for life, it is bound to become a culture of death.

Away

I'll be gone for about a week. Have fun with the blogroll!