Hiatus

Conspicuously absent

Verily, 'tis been a while since I did Blog. Laziness did vex me. And the usual rumpus with getting back to work after a long Xmas break.

It was some time well before Xmas 2012, in fact. I had a few more leg issues (I'm sticking to my promised guns, and not going to blather on with the gory details), then Xmas. Then a fantastic visit from longtime friends Jo and Ian from Ontario, Canada. (Which was supposed to be me joining them on a month-long trek around the country ... but, legs ... so we just partied it up here in my Aro Valley Aerie. Which was most excellent, but TOO SHORT!)

Then it was almost February, and my long Yuletide break was over, and back to the toil I went. And now it's May. Nearly MID May. The opening round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs is upon us, and *checks clock* in about half an hour from >this< word, the Leafs face the Bruins to attempt to stave off total elimination. Good luck ...

Welcome to a new Blogger in my 'verse!

The weekly delivery of a new blog from my friend Glenn ('Shwa Stories) should have been firing me up to Blog more ... especially since I convinced Glenn to start blogging a while back. After much balking about the idea, and a lot of encouragement from me and other pals, Glenn finally relented. And, it seems, I've created a monster! It streams in weekly ... sometimes more frequently!

Check out Glenn's blog, it's great. The 'Shwa in question is Oshawa, Ontario, his habitus familiarus. That's fake Latin – which is just slightly better than pig Latin.

Stats

I'll start from the most recent bit of absurdity. Stats ... mainly, unemployment stats. My friend Pete sent me a semi-regular email about the unemployment rate in his Ontario town, London, Today it's 9.9%.

But what does that REALLY mean? For decades, since I've been old enough to work, some news agency regularly fronts up with the unemployment rate. I can never remember it sinking lower than 10%. Occasionally it rises to 7 or even 6%. Or maybe even more (I wasn't that focussed on it ...)

So today, in London, Ont., it's 9.9%. Turn that math around, and look at it from the opposite angle. A whopping 90.1% of people who CAN work there ARE working. Overall in Canada, the unemployment rate is 7.2%. Which means 92.8% of viable workers are working. Holy shit! That sounds like a pretty viable economy to me. And it seems Step One to improve your lot in life if you live in London and are unemployed – move to a town with more jobs. Clearly, if these stats are to be believed, they're out there.

But we never ever hear about that aspect of the "unemployment" stat. Why? Because good news is boring. We need train-wrecks, bad news, disaster. Death, destruction. We need to hoover up fodder to fuel the fires of the overall media reports: the economy is in the toilet! It's circling the gurgler! We're almost in a depression! Start eating dog food!

Yeah, Right ...

Remember high-school or college / Uni tests? If you ever scored 90% or higher, you aced it! That's an "A" in anyone's books.

If a surgeon retired with a 90+% success rate, healing people (and they didn't die due to his actions), wow. That's astonishing success!

Say you read about a new car that's so energy and fuel efficient, it tops out at 91%. That's amazing news! Buy that car (and most of you can, as 90+% of you are working), and you'll save the most money you ever have on gas (petrol here), and you'll be doing hugely positive things for the environment.

Taken to school

The lesson here is: Always question the information we get spoon-fed by the media. Besides skewed economic news, we just have to look the information we are fed most other times, too. Case in point: look at the barrage of insane information we got surrounding the Boston Marathon Bombers in the first 12 hours after the attack.

For the first time, the media was betrayed as exactly what it has de-evolved to ... it's now just a funnel – a big trough, a septic tank – for all the photos and videos and such that stream in from everyone who was there who had a cell phone with a camera in it. And there was a LOT.

So why should the media even bother wandering off from in front of the camera to do actual reporting?

And did all that "digital storm" of media help? Sure, eventually. But it was mostly over and done with when the media actually started doing their jobs. They mostly just sat around,  siphoning through the deluge of freely submitted digital "evidence", and near the end, happily reported the cops foundthe two ACTUAL suspects.

But in the interim, we had "reporters" standing around, fingers up asses, interviewing each other about the stuff they were looking at from the public, and taking wildly UN-educated guesses as to what was up. Dark-skinned men were the primary focus in the crowd scenes, of course. And the two fuckwits who actually did it? Not dark at all. Not even Middle Eastern.

We know the result now. It happened relatively fast, mostly due to virtually every cop available prowling around out there, searching, following leads (AKA "doing their job"), and Bostonians staying indoors as advised. Kudos to Boston for solidering on throughout, and then immediately hitting the streets for a huge party when it was all over. That was a huge "Fuck You!" to the terrorists.

Lots more ...

There has clearly been a lot of stuff happening since the last 2012 Blog. So I'll stop here for now ... the Leafs v Bruins game is starting. And my Canadian friends are tee'd up on chat to comment on the shenanigans!

Yours in absurdity,