Chez PLJ

I don’t know how Americans can stand their year-long federal elections–ours has only been going on for a few weeks (though I guess in reality it’s been several months now) and I’m already tired of it. I thought at first that it’s because I’ve already made up my mind who I’m voting for, but I suspect that even undecideds are sick of the whole process.

At least I can vote for the guy I want in; my Mom is considering holding her nose and voting strategically to try to prevent a Conservative candidate from getting in (more of a problem in BC than downtown T.O. I expect she’s more determined after the Conservatives’ bilge yesterday about the Liberals and NDP “supporting child pornography”). Yuk. I’m not sure how they’d ever get proportional representation to work, but anything’s got to be better than this “first past the post” silliness.

A story in The Guardian talks about an upcoming book published by an anonymous senior intelligence official that condemns the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism policy. What makes this book different from the (many) ones that have preceded it is that the author is still a serving official working in intelligence. Dare we hope that this sort of criticism will keep growing and eventually lead to Bush getting turfed? Personally, I’m not holding my breath–my cynicism about American politics is pretty entrenched–but I’ll be more than happy to eat crow if I’m proven wrong in November!

Here’s another US fun fact, article courtesy of The Nation: During the height of the Cold War (and until the mid 70s) the lock codes for setting off the Minutemen nuclear missles were set to “00000000″–the top military guys didn’t want any sissy, waste-of-time security features to slow things down!) Ai yi yi.

Sounds like a bad movie title…actually it’s our 11-year old niece Midori, from BC. She was interested in coming out to visit this summer; we said “Sure! A week would be great!” Seems that due to the way the AirMiles worked out, she’s coming for — gulp — 12 days, which is fine, but it’s a lot longer than a week!! (Time to rack the ol’ brains for ways to entertain a preteen…)

She says she’s looking forward to visiting Canada’s Wonderland, which initially puzzled me–she knows about Canada’s Wonderland?–but apparently Wonderland advertises nationwide and so it’s considered a Big Thing for kids across the country (okay, maybe everyone else knows this, but as someone who doesn’t have a kid ride-junkie, I plead ignorance!)

Peter and I went to see Hairspray at the Princess of Wales Theatre on Friday. Loads of fun! Excellent cast, wonderful costumes and sets, and oh yeah, the best earworm music I’ve encountered since I saw South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (Marc Shaiman, not coincidently, wrote the music for both). Earworm is a direct translation from the German “ohrwurm” (pronounced oar-verm), and is a very descriptive name for a catchy tune that bores into your consciousness and won’t get out, no matter what you do. With me, earworms tend to be pieces I like (at least initially)… though now that I think of it, Jon did have a Sound of Music phase a while back that affected us (or should that be infected us?) worm-wise.

Jon’s social abilities are limited for several reasons, and this means we end up playing many more roles than for a standard, off-the-shelf kid. We both know that we are pillars in Jon’s life, but I’m often reminded that there is a third adult that Jon fully relates to and feels absolutely free to communicate with. My mom, herein known as Grandma.

Grandma has always been there for Jon. All of our parents have been incredibly supportive on this journey, but Grandma is the one on the ground, fighting with the troops. She and Jon have built a relationship through every part of his life. She babysits often (which is a huge deal: no matter how hard it is for your standard garden-variety parent to find babysitting these days, it is difficulty personified for us to find anyone who is willing and capable to stay with Jon). She dotes on him shamelessly. Spicy nachos, anyone? (Grandpa and Auntie Patti yelped when they absently tried some today)

She interrupted her snowbird holiday in Florida, flying up for a week just to be with us when we first got the news about Jon’s seizure activities. Three years ago, she sat with a sedated and/or screaming boy each evening after his hip surgery at Sick Kids, arriving daily at dinner hour to kick us out, insisting we go out to eat and take a little time to ourselves.

She slips us theatre tickets, and babysits those nights. After Grandma’s visits, Jon’s vocabulary is greater and more open.

I can’t describe the difference my mom has made in our lives, but I know that I, for one, would certainly be up mental instability creek without her. And Jon is incredibly enriched.

Now if we could only solve the new trend: Jon gets so excited about an impending visit that he can’t sleep the night before, and is totally fixated on her arrival. Lately, as his vision has developed, he looks for me at the front door when his bus pulls up in front of the house (ah, love), but on the last Grandma day, he looked bewildered and didn’t seem to see me and was bobbing around…that’s when I realized that he was looking for Grandma and he was assuming that I was blocking the view. Ah, Grandma love.

This week a 9.3 hectare man-made lake in a suburb in Missouri suddenly drained away. Apparently a sinkhole developed under the lake because of the porous limestone floor, and after a huge rainstorm, the limestone structure collapsed. Goodbye lake! As one resident said, “Mother Nature. Don’t mess with her.” Duh!

I recently saw the trailer for The Polar Express, a 3D-animated movie based on the picture book. Ewwww! It looks like it’s filled with creepy, lifeless robots. A Japanese researcher, Masahiro Mori, explored the concept of robotic design and used the very evocative phrase “the Uncanny Valley” to explain human psychological reaction to humanoid designs.
In short, as an artificial humanoid object (robot, 3D figure) gets closer to human appearance (ie looks, movement), people have a higher and higher empathetic response towards it, until it hits a certain point, whereupon people find it disquieting and even creepy–this is the realm of the Uncanny Valley. This would explain why a vaguely humanoid robot (eg C-3P0) can be appealing, while the super-realistic animated people in some 3D movies/ads etc are totally off-putting. In contrast, Pixar seems to be going in the right direction with The Incredibles–they’re using 3D human characters, but they’re deliberately cartoony, so they can move in a dynamic, cartoon fashion. And in doing this they look waay more “realistic” than any of those dead people in The Polar Express.