Lullabot Boy

All that to say that I’ve noticed some Montreal metro passengers have started exhibiting superstitious behaviour. We have new rechargable ticket cards which are used by placing them on a card reader at the turnstile. There is a small delay while the card is processed – about a second – then the green light comes on and you can proceed. But people are impatient; they place their card and nothing happens immediately, so they start waving it about and flipping it over. Eventually the green light comes on, they get their reward. Their primitive dolphin-like brains think the waving and flipping caused the green light to come on so they keep doing it.

That’s my metro observation for today.

So presented by EndCycle, here is Skeptic Circle #96.

Then I returned home to discover that one of the best races of the season had been ruined by more ridiculous decision making by the stewards. The idea of writing anything about the race evaporated at that moment and took a few days to return.

Neither driver did anything in those few corners that could constitute a rule infringement severe enough to warrant changing the race result. Even if (and it’s a very big if) Hamilton broke the rules, choosing to strip him of the win as punishment was insanely harsh. Hamilton was overttaken by Kimi again after that incident, and re-took the lead before Kimi crashed out so the incident had absolutely no bearing on the final result.

Handing down a punishment like that after the token fine Massa got for unsafely exiting his pit garage just exposes the FIA stewards as incompetant at best, corrupt at worse.

Patty, Aidan and Sid

Yesterday we headed out to a downtown theatre with Aidan, his Bama and his bunny to see Patty and Sid on tour. Patty and Sid are the presenters of Kids CBC, a commercial free selection of shows for pre-schoolers shown every morning between 7 and 11.

Patty and Sid were joined on stage by Curious George and Bo from Bo on the Go and on video (presumably live via satellite) by Drumheller, the skeletal dinosaur from Alberta, Mama Yama, the animated yam/penis from Ontario, Saumon the french-speaking salmon from Quebec and Captain Claw, the old sea-dog lobster from Nova Scotia. Hilarity ensued as they collected the necessary pieces for Curious George’s surprise birthday party.

Aidan was a little overwhelmed by the whole thing, but still had a good time, and started getting really into it about 5 minutes before it finished. After that we lined up (luckily close to the start of the very long line) to meet Sid, Patty, George and Bo. When it was Aidan’s turn, he started by telling Sid and Patty about “Kerry and John’s Birthday Party” before eventually sitting down for a photo. Meeting Curious George had a slightly different effect though, involving Aidan cowering on the floor in terror. I managed to get him onto my lap for a photo with George and Bo, but his face was buried in my shoulder. The traumas we put our kids through.

Aidan has been talking about Sid and Patty ever since, including to the waiter at dinner last night. I guess they made an impression.

They did not sell well.

We needed to get rid of them, so I decided to take them to work and hand them out to my colleagues. I got as far as the train and decided the bag was too heavy to carry all the way to work. My solution was to hand the gift bags out to all the people sitting in my chosen train car.

I guess in this cynical world we live in people don’t expect to get something for nothing, so I received many bemused looks. It seemed as though most people thought I was a complete weirdo or I was selling something. Some people even refused my offer.

Out of about 40 people I gave bags to I got about 5 thank yous. The people who said thank you were invariably under 16. Do we get less polite as we get older?

I was a good little student at school and my brain was like a sponge, soaking up knowledge. That knowledge has been slowly dripping out over the years; I’m sure I’ve forgotten half the stuff I learned at school. Of course the forgotten knowledge has been replaced by new and different knowledge, but still it’s sad to think of all that lost information.

I just hope I retain enough to be able to help Aidan with his homework.