October 2016 – Scripturient

I missed my calling in quackery

I missed my calling. I realize that, now I am semi-retired and counting my pennies. But I could have been like Deepak Chopra: rolling in dough, had I been astute enough to see the trends. Too late, I suppose, for me, but maybe not for you. All my life I have criticized and lampooned New Age notions as fuzzy-headed, pseudoscience codswallop. But I should have embraced them because, it seems, there’s money to be had in conning and conniving. Lots of it. Instead of debunking and … click below for more ↓

Politically correct pronoun madness

2016-10-31 2019-02-10 Critical Thinking / Culture / Education & Learning / Language & Grammar / Media Issues / Politics / Social Order & Disorder / Style & usage7 Comments

Ze, zim, zer, zher, zis, mer, hus, shkle, hum, herm, hann, ey, hu, je, xe, per, thon, yo, ghaH, co, e. Know what these words are? They are artificial constructs: neologisms cobbled together for abstruse political correctness to replace traditional pronouns that expose or define a gender in the subject or object of a sentence: the traditional he, him, she, her and so on. They’re sometimes called Spivak pronouns after an American mathematician who coined some of them, but there are many more than he … click below for more ↓

The meaning of dreams

2016-10-29 2016-10-29 Balderdash & Hoaxes / Behaviour & Psychology / Critical Thinking / New Age Codswallop

Jack Kerouac woke up most mornings in the 1950s and scribbled into a bedside notebook what he could remember of his dreams. Characters from his novels interacted with fantasies and real life events. The result was eventually published in 1961 as his Book of Dreams; 184 pages of mostly spontaneous or stream-of-consciousness writing, as this excerpt shows: WALKING THROUGH SLUM SUBURBS of Mexico City I’m stopped by smiling threesome of cats who’ve disengaged themselves from the general fairly crowded evening street of brown lights, coke … click below for more ↓

Does anyone still read books?

2016-10-27 2016-10-27 Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / Culture / Reading & Literacy

I came across an early version of this infographic on Facebook and it shook me to my core. You can see it here. The updated and corrected infographic is shown to the right. It is only marginally less distressing than the earlier one. Unfortunately, the early one, although inaccurate and misleading, is still being shared. That early graphic is based on some disputed statistics and unfounded claims, but it’s worth examining to understand my reaction. Reading is so central to my life that the notion … click below for more ↓

Fulfilling a role? Who are you kidding?

2016-10-26 2016-10-26 Collingwood / Council / Ethics and behaviour / Planning & Policies / Publicity & Communications

The bite of irony is in the air when a flimsy piece of blatant Block propaganda masquerading as an official media release is published by the town. It has the misleading headline, “Town fulfilling role in hospital redevelopment process,” but only delusional sycophants won’t read it as a Block screed. When did town media releases shill for a group at the table, not represent the will of council as a whole? Did the mayor approve this dreck before it went out? I suspect not. * … click below for more ↓

Tough Times for Print Media

2016-10-25 2016-10-25 Culture / Media / Personal Reminiscences

It’s not like the halcyon days when I first started writing for newspapers, back in late 1969. Today, print media is struggling to survive in a world dominated by digital media and mega-corps owners (although not so hard it can’t pay its CEOs and executives several million dollars while they slash real jobs).* Print media has long been losing its advertising share, a trend exacerbated by the internet. Newspapers now have about 11% share, compared to about 35% for the internet, according to a Globe and … click below for more ↓

Back to black

2016-10-24 2021-05-15 Fonts & Layout / Theme & Coding / Typography

I had noticed of late that several websites are more difficult to read, that they opted to use a lighter grey text instead of a more robust black. But it didn’t dawn on me that it wasn’t my aging eyes: this was a trend. That is, until I read an article on Backchannel called “How the Web Became Unreadable.” It’s a good read for anyone interested in typography, design and layout – and not just the Web, but print as well. It makes several good … click below for more ↓

The 10 Worst?

2016-10-24 2016-10-24 Balderdash & Hoaxes / Conspiracy Theories / Creationism / Critical Thinking / New Age Codswallop / Pseudoscience & QuackeryOne Comment

Skeptoid just published its top-ten worst anti-science websites and I’m sure you won’t be surprised at the awardees, especially not the regulars like Mercola, Dr. Oz, Deepak Chopra and Food Babe (aka the Worst Assault on Science on the Internet). Predatory quacks, crackpots and fakirs you will easily recognize. Surprisingly, the uber-wingnut David Wolfe was absent this year. Some of these sites sugar-coat their nonsense with pseudo-spirituality, usually some mashup of New Age codswallop and ancient mumbo-jumbo. Many ascribe their claptrap to traditional – non-medical, unproven … click below for more ↓

Horace and him. And maybe me, too.

2016-10-23 2016-10-23 Books & Reviews / Classics / Poetry & Lyrics / What I'm Reading Now5 Comments

Horace and Me, subtitled Life lessons from an Ancient Poet, is a recent book by Harry Eyres (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2013) about his efforts to connect the dots of his modern life to meaning via the ancient circuitry of a classical Latin poet. It attracted me because these past few years I have been reading such classics – albeit without the classical education or Latin learning of Eyres and other writers who have recently returned to the Latin and Greek authors. Any help I can get along … click below for more ↓

552 kWh? We can do better

2016-10-22 2016-10-22 Collingwood / Daily life / Personal Reminiscences / Utilities: electricity and water

I received a report in the mail from Collus PowerStream giving me an overview of my electricity usage for the one-month period of August. A hot, humid August that no doubt had us running the air conditioner and ceiling fans more often than we normally do (we actually like it warm most of the time). I really appreciated getting the notice because we care about conservation. I always want to know more about our energy and water use, especially as the utility rates continue to … click below for more ↓

Leonard Cohen deserves the Nobel Prize, too

2016-10-19 2016-10-19 Arts / Culture / International politics / Literature / Music & Reviews / Politics4 Comments

News that songwriter Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for literature shook the literati worldwide. Here was a pop icon sitting in the august company of Alice Munro, Mario Vargas Llosa, Doris Lessing, Harold Pinter, V.S. Naipaul, Gabriel García Márquez, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Yasunari Kawabata, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats, Rudyard Kipling and many others. Novelists, essayists and poets. No songwriters, and especially no commercially successful, popular songwriters until the 75-year-old Dylan. And, we hope, that surely opens the door for similarly … click below for more ↓

The bucket list, kicked

2016-10-14 2016-10-16 Critical Thinking / Culture / Internet & Social Media / Logic and reason / Memes; Internet & Social / New Age Codswallop / Personal Reminiscences / Philosophy2 Comments

Nowadays the “bucket list” concept has become a wildly popular cultural meme, thanks to the movie of the same name. Subsequent marketing of the idea to millennials has proven a successful means to derive them of their income, with which they seem eager to part. I don’t like the concept. The list, I mean, not necessarily the plucking of the millennial chickens who willingly hand over their financial feathers. They get what they deserve. Bucketlist.org has, at the time of this writing, more than 5.317 … click below for more ↓

Hypergraphia

2016-10-12 2016-10-12 Behaviour & Psychology / Culture / Science & Technology / Writing & cursive

An article in the September, 2016, issue of Doctor’s Review looks at the curious, compelling affliction called hypergraphia: the obsessive need to write. I never knew before this that there was an actual illness of this sort. As someone who is often driven by a deep compulsion to write, I am both curious and a little afraid to learn more. And of course, I turned to the internet. Curious because I always want to learn, especially when it’s something that might touch me in some way. Afraid … click below for more ↓

Collus report debunks Block conspiracies

2016-10-10 2016-10-10 Collingwood / Council / Development & Growth / Ethics and behaviour / Planning & Policies2 Comments

Every year, the Ontario Energy Board (OEB) publishes the scorecard of local distribution companies (LDCs). Across the province, more than 70 LDCs are ranked and rated according to performance, customer service, efficiency, progress and other measurable data for residents to see how their utility is doing. It’s a thing called openness and transparency. As the OEB notes: The scorecard includes traditional metrics for assessing a distributor’s services, such as frequency of power outages, financial performance and costs per customer. In addition, performance results for 2014 … click below for more ↓

Promises, promises, promises – all broken

2016-10-09 2016-10-09 Collingwood / Council / Ethics and behaviour10 Comments

Two years ago, in a series in the Collingwood Connection on the eve of the last election, 2014, all candidates were asked to make statements about certain issues. I thought it would be good to examine a few of their promises and see how well they have progressed. Whether they have actually kept those promises. Here is what they said about the topic of accountability and to measure their performance to date. First, just what is accountability? The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as “the quality … click below for more ↓