Posted by zoom! on February 24, 2009, at 7:06 pm |
Ever since Scott Tribe (Scott’s Diatribes) and Debra (April Reign) helped me upgrade to WordPress 2.7, I’ve been trying to find a new blog theme. You’d think, with the hundreds of free themes out there, there’d be something I’d like either straight out of the can or with a few modifications.
But no. It wasn’t that easy. I suspect most themes are designed by young men. Nothing against young men, but fortunately I don’t share their tastes. (Or, unfortunately, their eyesight.) They like sub-microscopic grey text on a black background, and action-packed, cold, hard themes, whereas I prefer a cleaner, lighter, warmer look.
I liked my old theme best, with the sheep and the whiteness and the quirky-pastoral fusion thing going on. I wanted a new theme that could be tweaked to pretty much mimic that look. (Why didn’t I just stick with the old theme in that case? It wasn’t compatible with WordPress 2.7 and couldn’t take advantage of its features and improvements.)
I spent weeks downloading and trying on many themes from many sources, but rejected them all.
Scott made it his personal mission to get me a new theme. He put me on speed dial on Skype. He downloaded even more themes and tried to squeeze my sheep into their headers. But the sheep weren’t cooperating. The ideal header image is a lot wider than it is tall, and the sheep weren’t. They refused to look good.
It wasn’t just the header, either. There were lots of things that bugged me about the various themes. I didn’t like when the Comments link was hard to find, or when each post was truncated so you had to click a link to read the rest of the post. Mostly I didn’t like the colour schemes, graphics, typography, or the ‘feel’ of most themes.
Call me a girl, but I’m just not into raw butt-ugliness.
I was willing to take my time and be patient, but apparently when Scott’s on a mission, he’s seriously on a mission. He was relentless.
Eventually he found a highly customizable theme called Atahualpat. He then proceeded to customize all the things that had led to my rejections of the previous themes. Then he showed it to me, and it was pretty good. But I still wasn’t entirely happy, which I think exasperated him. We both had to remind ourselves that it’s my blog.
I spent some time changing the things I didn’t like while GC made me a brand spankin’ new banner for my sheep.
Finally I pressed the button.
Scott was shocked. I think he had resigned himself to having invested all that time for nothing, since he didn’t believe I would ever push that button.
It’s not perfect, but I’m not a perfectionist (Scott would disagree). As for Scott, he’s a keep-your-eye-on-the-prize, damn-the-torpedoes, get-‘er-done kind of guy. If you need someone like that, I highly recommend him. Thanks Scott.
As for the theme, what do you think? Do you like it? Is it fast enough? Does it feel comfortable? Is there anything about it that bugs you? Do you have any suggestions for improvements?
Posted by zoom! on February 22, 2009, at 12:23 pm |
There’s been a murder in my neighbourhood! A murder of CROWS.
I love them, but I understand that some people in the neighbourhood are a little freaked out. Thousands of anything can be a little intimidating, and crows do have a bit of a reputation. It probably doesn’t help that a multitude of crows is called a murder. Or that Alfred Hitchcock immortalized them in all their eye-pecking glory in The Birds. Or that they’ve got strong connections with the occult, or that they tend to congregate in cemeteries and eat dead things. But these are just some of the things I love about them. (Long-term readers might recall I’ve blogged about crows before – here and here and here and here. )
GC and I have been on a mission lately to witness and document the Carlington Crow Phenomenon. We’ve been going over there early in the mornings and late in the evenings, hoping to find the perfect time to film the murder.
A Murder in the Murder?
Friday morning we got there around 7:00, but we were too late; they were already gone. The only evidence that they’d even been there was one dead crow and an impressive amount of crow poop on the freshly fallen snow. (Crow poop, by the way, looks like nicotine stains.)
On Saturday morning we were over there by 6:30. The field was already empty and a lot of the crows had flown away. (They fly south-west from the Farm to elsewhere at dawn.) But there were still quite a few crows in the trees, and it was worth getting up early for the sound alone.
Today we were there by 6:10. Our usual spot was oddly silent. A handful of crows flew overhead in a south-westerly direction, so we headed north-east to see where they were coming from. We found the whole raucous murder in the trees at the Research Branch Building on Carling Avenue, across from the Civic Hospital.
Here’s my one-minute Blair Crow Project video. Make sure your speakers are on.
If you want to check things out for yourself – and this is definitely worth getting up early for – they congregate on the edge of the Experimental Farm from dusk til dawn each day. See the map for two specific locations.
Where to find Ottawa's murder of crows
In completely unrelated news, there will be an Ottawa Bloggers’ Breakfast (brunch) on March 7th. If you’re an Ottawa area blogger and would like to join us, please send an email, with a link to your blog, to: bloggersbreakfast@gmail.com.
Posted by zoom! on February 20, 2009, at 6:34 pm |
Could you please give me a word? It’s for a combination writing/art project, and all the words must be donated.
It could be the first word that springs to your mind, or it could be a word with personal significance. You can randomly pick one out of the dictionary if you like. It doesn’t even have to be an English word. There are no rules, except I can accept only one word from each of you.
According to the Gunning Fog Index, a reader would require almost 10 years of schooling to comprehend this blog. How does this compare with the other things we read?
Typical Fog Index Scores
Fog Index
Resources
6
TV guides, The Bible, Mark Twain
8
Reader's Digest
8 - 10
Most popular novels
10
Time, Newsweek
11
Wall Street Journal
14
The Times, The Guardian
15 - 20
Academic papers
Over 20
Only government sites can get away with this, because you can't ignore them.
Over 30
The government is covering something up
Actually, I have no idea what to do with this information. Who’s to say what the optimum level of writing is? According to this article, we should be aiming our writing at the Grade 6-8 level.
On the one hand I think the writing shouldn’t get in the way of the reading. It’s one thing for the content to pose challenges of various sorts, but the writing itself shouldn’t. Good writing is highly readable.
On the other hand, if we’re raising a nation of barely literate citizens, that’s a problem that won’t be solved by dumbing everything down. Maybe we should be raising our collective literacy levels, instead of lowering our collective writing levels.
However, as a personal blogger I have the luxury of writing whatever I want for whoever wants to read it. It was Pfizer who came up with that statistic about the reading level of web users. Presumably they need to convey critical information to health consumers of all literacy levels, so they have to tailor their writing to what is – rather than opine about what ought to be – the literacy level of the average person.
I’m curious to know, if you have a blog or website, your Fog Index score. Are you satisfied with that, or would you rather it was higher or lower?
Posted by zoom! on February 17, 2009, at 6:19 pm |
My back was feeling quite a bit better today so I took a half-price bus to work. (What’s up with the bus fares anyway? Some days it’s free, some days it’s half price, some days City Council votes to vote again tomorrow on whether or not to change their minds again. It’s confusing.)
The highlight of my workday was when Louise showed up at my cubicle with another box from Amazon.ca for me. Books! I’ve been on a bit of a book-buying binge lately. One might think this would also mean I’ve been on a bit of a book reading binge, but one would be mistaken. For some reason, I’m spending a lot of time reading book reviews, perusing book lists compiled by other customers, and moving books between my wish list and my shopping cart, but remarkably little time actually reading books.
When I push the “Order” button I feel both excited and guilty. Excited because Books Are Coming! Guilty because I don’t really need any more books; I’ve got lots of books sitting around waiting to be read. But, I tell myself, books are inexpensive and taxes are light on books and there’s no shipping charges if you spend $39 or more, and sometimes books can change your life.
And therein lies the crux of the matter. I’m on a book-buying binge because Something needs Changing.
The nice thing about expressing your repressed needs through compulsive book buying is that you don’t need a psychiatrist – or even any special insight – to figure out what’s bugging you. You just look at your books. If they’re all about healing your relationships, then you might have a relationship problem. If they’re about managing your finances, maybe you have a financial problem. Etcetera.
So I’m looking at the 10 books I’ve bought in the past two weeks. Two were gifts, so they don’t count. Of the remaining eight, three were computer manuals (PHP/SQL, CSS and Mac OSX), one was an art book, two were about writing creative nonfiction, and two were works of creative nonfiction.
I think I bought the computer manuals because I want to put them under my pillow and absorb their contents through osmosis. God knows I don’t want to actually read them. (But I want to want to read them. You know what I mean?)
(Someday, instead of books, they’re going to sell knowledge modules that you plug into your brain, and then you’ll just download information directly into your brain and bypass all that struggling to actually learn stuff. It’s going to be such a boon for those of us whose attention spans have been fried by the Internet.)
There probably would have been more art books in this most recent delivery from Amazon except I’ve already bought most of the art books I want. I don’t know if I’m the only one who does this, but often when I feel like making art, I buy stuff instead. As a result, I have tons of art books and art supplies but hardly any art to show for it. I’m sure it’s not healthy and I keep vowing to stop, but you know how it is…just one more colour, one more brush, one more tool, one more book…
The rest of the books in the delivery are about writing. Honestly, I think my real problem is that there’s a book stuck inside of me somewhere and I don’t know anything about it. I’m supposed to write it, but I don’t know what it’s about or who’s in it or even if it’s fiction or non-fiction. I’ve been saying ever since I was in the first grade that I was going to be a writer when I grew up. (Actually, that’s not entirely true. For awhile I said I was going to be an engineer’s wife, but that’s because I confused the words ‘engineer’ and ‘millionaire.’ I think my plan was to write books while my millionaire husband entertained himself. I also, for a time, thought I’d marry a guitar-playing fireman, live in a bright yellow house, and have five children – Harry, Pansy, and the triplets, Timmy, Tammy and Tommy – who would busy themselves with all kinds of Enid Blyton adventures while I wrote books.)
Anyway. I think I’m hoping all these books about writing books will somehow dislodge the book that’s stuck inside of me, because I’m pretty sure I could write it if I just knew what it was about.
Posted by zoom! on February 16, 2009, at 9:33 am |
I haven’t been posting much lately because I’ve succumbed to a variety of ailments more or less simultaneously, and now I’m going to subject you to all the gory details.
It all started with a wicked headache that spanned several days last week. I went to work for the first two days, and kept myself just barely functioning with Anacins. I also saw a massage therapist who seemed to be conquering the headache, but it ambushed me again as soon as I stood up.
By the third day I realized that my continued presence at the office probably wasn’t doing anybody any good, since I hadn’t gotten much accomplished beyond getting there each day and making my colleagues feel sorry for me. So I stayed home on Friday and got the period from hell.
I also got a backache that day. It wasn’t all that bad, but it was one of those ominous backaches that says “One wrong move, and I’ll have you on your knees for a week.”
By this time I was taking Anacin, Anaprox, Midol and Robaxicet. This would no doubt explain the queasiness that led me to suspect I was also coming down with the stomach flu.
Saturday, the headache mercifully vanished and GC and I celebrated Valentines Day with a fondue and cupcakes. On Sunday, we went for a little walk at the Experimental Farm, because I thought it might help my back. Unfortunately I slipped on a bit of ice and the corrective action I took to prevent myself from falling wrenched my back and kicked my backache up to a whole new level. By the end of the day it felt like a combination of sciatica, iliotibial band syndrome, restless leg syndrome and a pinched nerve, with perhaps a touch of hypochondria thrown in for good measure too.
So now I’m hobbling about, bent over at the waist, with varying degrees of pain and discomfort in my back, hips, butt and thighs, while an irritating little voice keeps telling me it’s all in my head. Which it’s NOT.
Posted by zoom! on February 13, 2009, at 12:22 pm |
Duncan doesn’t play much. Playing is a lot of work, and he’d rather conserve his energy for snuggling or eating or sleeping. But occasionally, with a lot of help from his friends, he’ll play with the catnip-infused mouse that GC got him for Christmas.
Here they are: GC and Duncan, playing. (Viewer discretion advised: this video contains language and violence.)
I’d forgotten about all the good people-watching opportunities on the buses. This morning, for example, there were two small families sitting right next to each other on the Number 14, and they were a study in contrasts.
The first family consisted of two stylish young Asian parents and their son, about two years old. The second family consisted of a very large young woman and her son who looked to be about five.
The young couple were both so nurturing towards their son, touching him frequently, adjusting his clothing, speaking softly, smiling at him. He leaned peacefully against his father, patting his father’s leg and smiling at his mom.
The other young woman and her son were both being kind of awful. They spoke harshly, barking at each other, looking for fault, even being physically violent towards each other. He put his hand in her coat pocket. She ordered him, between clenched teeth, to remove it. He didn’t. She punched her pocket hard, and he yanked his hand out, rubbing it and crying. Then he told her she was a bad mother. Just like that. “You’re a bad mother!” A few minutes later he head-butted her in the chest and she punched his arm and snarled at him.
Even when they weren’t interacting, I think he was fantasizing about getting even with her. I watched as he drifted into a daydream. The expression on his face contorted into anger and then, a minute later, it relaxed into satisfaction. It was a bit scary actually.
It was interesting watching these two families interact in such different ways, and to think about how such differences will affect those two little boys in the long run. One child is growing up feeling genuinely loved and liked, while the other probably isn’t. One child has parents taking care of him because they want to; the other has a parent putting up with him because she has to. (I’m not saying she doesn’t love him. I have no way of knowing. But I don’t think she likes him and I don’t think she likes being his mother.)
We have absolutely no control over the kind of parents we get. It’s just the luck of the draw. But it has a lasting influence on us throughout childhood and beyond. Most of us – as children and as parents – fall somewhere in the middle of the parenting continuum. Do you ever wonder how your life would have been different if your parents had been at one extreme or the other? Either phenomenally good or phenomenally bad?
I went to a community meeting at the library on Thursday night about the proposed SCAN legislation (Bill 106) introduced by Ottawa Centre MPP Yasir Naqvi. (Who, incidentally, recognized me, shook my hand, told me he had read my blog, and said his mother would be proud that I had said he was polite.)
According to Mr. Naqvi, the proposed SCAN legislation would target only properties that are habitually used for illegal activity and which have a negative impact on their neighbourhood.
But Bill 106 is controversial (see my previous post about it), and it drew a polarized audience. There were people on both sides who felt very strongly about this Bill – and people weren’t necessarily aligned with their traditional allies.
For example, among people who advocate on behalf of low-income Canadians, there is some disagreement about the potential impact of proposed SCAN legislation. Some think everybody has the right not to live next door to drug addicts or sex trade workers, while others think that housing is a basic human right for everybody, including drug addicts and sex trade workers.
There’s more to it than that, of course. Much more. There’s the fact that some groups – including poor, visible minorities and the mentally ill – will be disproportionately affected by this legislation. There’s the issue of how useful is it to introduce new legislation that will add bureaucracy, cost money, and shuffle ‘problems’ around instead of addressing root causes. There’s the question of what we, as a society, are failing to provide in the way of mental health services, drug treatment programs, and supportive housing. There’s the fact that our crime rate has been falling for a number of years now, so why do we act as if there’s a crime problem spiraling out of control? And then there’s the problem of muddying housing issues with crime issues. If someone’s habitual illegal behaviour is causing such egregious problems for others, why would we consider eviction to be the appropriate remedy?
In jurisdictions that already have SCAN legislation – I believe Saskatchewan and Yukon do – almost all SCAN cases were resolved “informally.” Because the people involved are mostly poor and marginalized and unable to afford to defend themselves from these accusations, how do we know that the resolutions were fair? How do we know that people weren’t simply intimidated into abandoning their rights and their homes?
Once the panelists finished speaking, things got intense. Yasir Naqvi had to leave to catch a flight. This angered some people in the audience who felt it was disrespectful of him not to stay and respond to their questions. (To his credit, he offered to make himself available upon his return to Ottawa for further discussion with anyone who wanted to talk to him.)
One shrilly pro-SCAN woman brought her two little girls with her. They were maybe 6 and 7 years old, and I got the impression they were used to being used as props at community meetings. She marched them up to the microphone and demanded to know how she was supposed to explain the drug addicts and prostitutes in her neighbourhood to her two little girls.
It probably wasn’t helpful when a woman in the audience yelled out “They could be addicts in 10 years too!”
“Prove it!” yelled the mother.
“I was an addict and I used to be a cute little girl too,” replied the other woman.
In spite of the hostilities and drama, a few people made interesting points, especially those who didn’t seem so tightly wound.
One man said the fact that people are calling for SCAN legislation is evidence that there are problems that need to be fixed, but SCAN is not the solution to those problems. Another man said that he used to sell pot to make ends meet but his house was scrupulously clean, and he saw SCAN as having the potential to create a lot more problems than it can fix. A young woman said that she was queer and was concerned about the potential for neighbours who have a problem with her sexuality using SCAN to get rid of her.
“I see it being used as a tool for people to terrorize people like me,” she said.
Another woman said if the police were more accountable and were actually doing their jobs, we wouldn’t be talking about new legislation.
Anyway. It was an interesting meeting, and there were two inadvertently funny lines I have to share with you:
1) Yasir Naqvi said that he and Cheri DiNovo shit near each other in the Provincial Legislature.
2) Anne Levesque, from the Francophone Legal Aid Clinic, said the government is allowed to decapitate you, but it must do so fairly.
By the way, RealGrouchy blogged about this meeting too, but in a much more timely manner than me. Check it out.
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