Get Yoked

I was browsing Reddit recently and came across this post about the etymology of the word zygote (a cell formed by the union of two gametes[1].) It says that the word is derived from the Greek zygotos which means “yoked.” This is confirmed by etymoline.com (one of my favorite websites), which goes on to describe how zygon (“yoke”) is thought to come from the Proto-Indo-European root yeug-, meaning “to join.” When you hear “yoke” today you probably just think of something you throw around a pair of oxen to pull your wagon[2] , and this word comes to us through Proto-Germanic (same PIE root, of course.) For the record, Merriam Webster defines it as “a wooden bar or frame by which two draft animals (such as oxen) are joined at the heads or necks for working together.”

When you look at other derivatives of yeug- things get pretty interesting. It’s listed as the source of all the “join” words (adjoin, conjoin, etc), which you’d expect, but also jugular (via the Latin iugulum, meaning “collarbone, throat, neck”, which is itself the diminutive form of iugum—“yoke”.) Make sense. What was more surprising to me was that yeug- is responsible for the word yoga, meaning joining with the Divine or the Supreme. Trippy.

Another fun one was syzygy, a potentially great Scrabble word that refers to the alignment of three celestial bodies in a gravitational system, as during an eclipse. This demonstrates a great thing about Latin and Greek, which is that if you know a few morphemes, and given a bit of context, you can roughly guess at the meaning of words derived from those languages. In this case, syn- = “together”, and we learned that zygon = “yoke.” With the hint that this has something to do with astronomy, you can kind of figure out syzygy is related to the alignment of things in outer space.

I was curious about how all this related to the term yoked, in the sense of “strong”, though I mostly came up empty handed. An Urban Dictionary entry on the word makes reference to well developed trapezius muscles, and makes specific mention of the apparatus used with oxen. This since removed webpage talks about bodybuilding and the yoke shirt measurement, though it makes no mention of the adjective. I suppose it’s possible that having a muscly neck came to be termed “yoked”, and has since come to mean generally strong. 

According to the Reddit thread, a lot of this is covered in the History of English podcast, which I had never heard of, but I’m looking forward to checking it out. 

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[1] A gamete, in case you’ve forgotten (as I had) is a mature male or female germ cell (e.g. a sperm or egg cell.)

[2] Actually when you hear “yoke” you probably think of eggs, but “yolk” has another root entirely (it’s all about the colour yellow.)

Oh, hello

Oh, hello. Wow, it’s been four years since I've last blogged. I promise it has nothing to do with the Trump presidency. While that was certainly… distracting, what’s mostly been keeping me away is that I’ve busy been hacking away at a new career.

When I last wrote I had recently come back from Berlin and was on the job hunt. Money was pretty tight, as I hadn’t been been working while over there [1]. When not galavanting, I was spending most of my time coding up little projects to fill out my GitHub and building a portfolio to show off to prospective employers. I remember one project in particular, I built it to alert me as to when an appointment opening showed up at some local government office. One thing about Germany, and the EU in general, I guess, is that there are a bunch of regulations, and thus hoops you have to jump through to do anything. In my case I had to register at this office to say that I was living in Germany for a while. The process is called the Anmeldung. I don’t know exactly what the point was, because I didn’t end up using this registration for anything, but I didn’t want to be on the wrong side of the law if anything did come up [2]. Anyway, for whatever reason it was impossible to get an appointment on the website, as any openings that appeared were quickly booked by other people. So I built a little web scraper in Ruby that would run periodically, check the contents of the webpage for an error message (“Zeit gibt es keine Termine” [3]) or a 429 error [4], and if neither of those were present then that meant there was an appointment available somewhere in my area. At that point a noise would go off, signalling me to hop onto the site and manually make a booking (though if that proved impossible my next step would have been to automate that as well.) Simpler days.

Fast forward four years, and here we are. Here’s the quick version:

After getting back to Canada, I split my time between building out more side projects (anyone want a weather app?) and applying to junior web developer jobs. Eventually I got one at a (very, too) small startup. It paid poorly, and I was the only dev when I started. Can you imagine? Most of the site had been built by another mostly junior developer, and I was left to pick up where he had left off. Oof. Not the best environment for me to grow in, but eventually they brought on somebody a little more senior and I ended up learning some good stuff from him. More importantly, the job allowed me to get my foot in the door of the tech scene.

After a year there I joined another, slightly larger startup, and I’ve been there ever since. We’ve grown from maybe 10 people when I joined to more than 100. I’m coming up on three years now. The nice thing about a startup is that you get exposure to a lot of different things, so I spent time on the front end, on the server, touched Salesforce a bit, and now I’ve settled into leading our small data team. It’s fairly early days, but it’s exciting to think where we’ll be one more year from now.

This post kind of got away from me, but the point is that I haven’t written for a while, but I want to start back up again. The goal is to post at least once a month. Some might be short, some longer, but I’d like to make a habit out of it. Because I do enjoy writing, and I think that this can bring a little more balance back into my life.

See you soon.

—

[1] Ok, not entirely true. I did get paid a paltry sum for this (since removed) article about book of homoerotic photography that I never read. But hey, I guess that means that I’m technically a professional writer.

[2] There were a lot of intimidating words like Meldebescheinigung and Bürgeramt, that’s enough to frighten any foolish young anglophone.

[3] There are no appointments, or something like that. I’m guessing this is a fragment of the message that was displayed.

[4] And the error was in Englisch! It said something to the effect of “Calm down.” It’s like they knew impatient expats were manically refreshing the page to get an appointment.

The Robots Are Coming

I have a regular Google Alert for the term 'automation.' It's somewhat of a hot topic these days, and so every morning I get an email with a dozen news articles, most of them describing a new set of jobs coming under threat from computers. And that's usually where my thoughts about automation end—at news articles and headlines, arm's length stories about other people in other places. It's rare that I'm directly confronted with the real people that stand to lose out from automation.

If you've been to a McDonald's recently, you've probably seen the self-serve kiosks, those touch display panels that you stand at, pointing and clicking and paying for your order. It's a decent system: fairly efficient when functioning correctly, and not much less personal than ordering fast food from a human.

When I visited the McDonald’s at Yonge and Charles at lunch time earlier this week, I felt like I was experiencing a rare, precious moment. Almost everyone that came in went straight to the machines, placed their order, and then stood against the wall, patiently waiting for their number to be called. The staff hustled behind the counter as per usual, with the exception of one young woman that was tasked with working the cash register. Between waiting at the counter, she would turn around to help her coworkers for a moment. When she turned back to face the growing crowd, she’d chime "I can serve the next customer!" But there were none. Her job had been done. Although she kept a smile on her face, her eyes betrayed a vague sense of futility*. The kiosks had made her redundant. She knew it. We knew it. All we could do was stand there, looking back at her, and wait for our numbers to be called.

According to a statement from McDonald's in a 2015 article from the Huffington Post, these kiosks aren’t designed to replace humans. While I don’t believe that, I also don’t believe that there is anything inherently bad about automation. Machines are cheaper than humans, and they do just as good a job, if not better. They’re consistent and efficient. It’s only a matter of time before the entire food preparation process is automated, achieving the ideal of fast food: a hamburger that is exactly the same whether you’re in Quito, Paris, or Toronto. But what happens to the displaced human workers?

Smart people are thinking about this problem, but it isn't yet clear that governments are taking automation seriously. A report by Sunil Johal and Jordann Thirgood, from the Mowat Centre at the University of Toronto's School of Public Policy and Governance, states that Canadian job losses from automation are likely to be in the millions. The problem is bigger than McDonald's; the threat extends to manufacturing, transportation, and even things like financial counselling, law, and journalism. The report details six social policies in Canada that are currently inadequate to withstand the coming changes to the labour market.

But Canada doesn’t have to fail—indeed, it mustn’t. Canada has the opportunity to be a leader in addressing the problems posed by automation. As Johal mentioned in an interview with U of T News, the scope of jobs that are at risk should help to motivate policy makers in proposing solutions, and should encourage the general population to support the investments required to prepare for large-scale automation. While America is busy closing its borders and making itself 'Great Again,’ Canada should start focussing on this real and unavoidable threat. The threat is not immigration; it's automation.

*Granted, this may have nothing to do with automation, and may just be a side-effect from working at McDonald's in downtown Toronto.

Moods of Norway

Early on during the second season of "Mad Men," there is a confrontation in a stable between Betty Draper and a younger man. As Betty readies herself to head home, the man begins unloading all of his anxieties regarding his upcoming marriage. Then, this being "Mad Men," he makes a move on her, which she quickly shuts down. Undeterred, he crosses the stable.

"You're so profoundly sad," he says. 

Cold as ice.

"No," she says. "It's just my people are Nordic."

Nordic people (Scandinavians, specifically) have long had a reputation among foreigners as cold, rude, or, as with Mrs. Draper, sad[1], and it was this conception of Scandinavians I had in mind when Dom and I landed in Oslo one sunny morning early last month. It’s risky, of course, to put an entire peoples into a single box, especially when your judgment is based only on second and third hand accounts. So during our stay, I sought to find the truth of these characterizations. Are Norwegians really rude? Are they cold? Or, more plausibly, are they simply misunderstood?

The first Norwegian we spoke to was a man in the airport. He worked for Flybussen, an express bus service. He was older, with greying hair and glasses, and he stood behind the counter staring at us with probing eyes as we approached. He was helpful, but unsmiling, efficiently answering as we asked if the bus went downtown (yes), where to catch it (outside), how much tickets were (expensive), and if we could buy them from him (no). He then pointed us to where the bus would be and continued about his business.

I came away from the booth with a weird feeling. The man hadn't been rude, per se, but he wasn’t exactly a paragon of customer service. It felt as though he was just barely masking his contempt for us. Then again, I was tired and hungry, so maybe, I thought, it was just me. Besides, I’ve worked in customer service, I know the tedium that can accompany answering dumb questions from dumb customers hour after hour, day after day. 

In an act of characteristic generosity, I decided that this one experience wouldn’t be enough on which to base my judgement of the rest of the population. Yet, the more time we spent in the country, the more it became evident that the strange vibe I got from the man couldn't wholly be attributed to his disdain for his job, nor to my empty stomach. Every person we met kept an eerie emotional distance, their faces never straying far from a baseline of impassivity. This often led to confusion, and, at its worst, feelings of unease. 

“Oh, yes, Norwegians are very repressed,” our Italian Airbnb host confirmed. He had lived in the country for a number of years, recently in Stavanger, where we stayed with him. Prior to that he was in Trondheim, about a thirteen hour drive north. 

“Until they get drunk,” he continued, smirking. “Then their inner viking comes out.” 

We had noticed. Our room overlooked Øvre Holmegate, nicknamed "Fargegata," or “The Colourful Street”, for the buildings painted in bright colours that line either side. It's narrow, paved with cobblestones, and home to quiet shops and cozy cafés during by day. But come sundown, the cafés turn into bars. Then, finally, can you see the straight-faced locals let loose.

The idea that Norwegians have to be drunk to express any emotion is the joke behind the cover of The Social Guidebook to Norway, a tongue-in-cheek book describing and explaining the peculiar habits of Norwegians. Its author, Julien S. Bourrelle (a Canadian, as it happens) has become something of an authority on Scandinavian customs, and in 2013 he founded MONDÅ, an organization that aids foreigners in adapting to Scandinavian society. He can be seen on YouTube at events such as TEDx speaking to audiences in Norway and Sweden on the subject. Images from the book are projected on screens behind him, often eliciting knowing chuckles from the audience.

The tendency to conceal one's emotions can explain Betty Draper appears sad, or why a stone-faced Norwegian might give someone like me the creeps. Humans rely on facial expressions to gauge the thoughts and feelings of others. A blank face leaves you guessing, and in the context of being a dumb tourist or maladapted foreigner, is more likely to be interpreted as annoyance or condescension.

I've had people misread me on account of my own tendency to not smile, a trait that, along with an argumentative temperament and an unnecessary amount of body hair, I inherited from my father. Thus, as the trip progressed, I began to identify with the locals to a certain degree. Granted, my “resting bitch face” usually only surfaces when I’m particularly focused on something. In the course of normal conversation I can usually express myself reasonably well. 

Typical small talk.

Conversation—that’s another thing Norwegians seem to struggle with, and it's a further issue taken up in the Guidebook. The scene is a dinner table. In the first drawing, two people exchange small talk about some flowers on the table[2]. Next, we see two Norwegians having a decidedly briefer version of the conversation. In much of world, we conclude, friendly banter is a normal and expected part of interaction with strangers; in Norway, not so much.

Then again, I’ve never been much of a talker myself. As a child I was shy, but now it’s more of a conscious effort. As I mentioned, I can get argumentative. So I keep my mouth shut to stop me from saying the wrong thing and alienating or offending someone I care about. Yet I'm still able to engage in friendly chit-chat with a stranger. Perhaps the Norwegian can, too. Can, but won’t.

This pair has fewer flowers and no tablecloth, maybe a nod to the minimalism of Scandinavian design. They're also down a bottle of wine, so maybe they would talk more if they would just loosen up a bit. 

It’s possible that the Norwegians we met weren’t comfortable speaking with us in English. (Although, it must be said that everyone we spoke to seemed to have an impressively strong grasp of the language.) But Bourrelle's point is that Norwegians just don't care for small talk. For one thing, he says, socialization takes place in a more contextualized manner; it’s not something that just happens out of the blue. Furthermore, politeness is seen to be more about not bothering people than engaging with them. This isn't without it's up-sides. In Bermuda, you have to say “good morning"to everyone before you can get anything done. In Norway, you just do it. 

In 1933, "En flykting krysser sitt spor" ("A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks") by Dano-Norwegian writer Aksel Sandemose was published. In it, Sandemose describes a fictional town, Jante, and the code its inhabitants live by: Janteloven, or the Law of Jante. Janteloven (summed up as "you’re not special, so don’t think you are") has been read as an exaggerated version of a real but implicit social law that exists throughout Scandinavia. It manifests through attitudes that value modesty over pride; conformity over difference. Janteloven might also explain, then, a Norwegian’s aversion to conversation: Why would anyone care what I think?

As we were ending our stay in Norway, I was growing to appreciate the up-sides of Janteloven. It was around 4:30a.m. as we walked to the bus terminal, and a light rain laid like a blanket over the city. We boarded the Flybussen to the Stavanger Aiport, and had only been on board for a few minutes before it stopped at a hotel to pick up a lone passenger. He got on and took a seat across the aisle from us. As soon as he sat down he took out his phone, and for the duration of the trip he held the entire bus hostage to his conversation.

He mostly complained about different people and things, ending each rant with an exasperated “Oh, fuck off." Occasionally he swapped that out for a drawn out “Oh my Gooooooood…” He was English and a flight attendant, and he sounded like a cheap Ricky Gervais impression. He was a living caricature. At one point, he changed from airline talk to his personal life, describing the time his former fuck-buddy had tried to fist him. Oh, fuck off. It was a lot to take in that early in the morning (the story, I mean), and by the time we had reached the airport Dom and I had gone from frustrated, to angry, to incredulous, to amazed. As we pulled into the airport he was talking about his plans for an upcoming trip to Japan. 

“I’m just going to eat, eat, eat, eat, eat!” he said into the phone.

“That’s just what you do there.”

---

[1] I'll note that this also provides Matthew Weiner an easy out for January Jones' stilted performance in the early seasons of the show.

[2] Funny that they're Bermuda Buttercups. I had never heard of them before finding this panel, and at first I thought they were just some esoteric sounding perennial that Bourrelle had made up. Turns out they're a type of sorrel. I don't think I've ever seen them in Bermuda, but I do have fond memories of the childhood novelty of biting into what must be some other type of pink or purple-flowered sorrel, judging by the pictures. Good acidity.

Migrate, Adapt, Don't Die

Welcome to Berlin. I suppose I never mentioned on here that I was moving. Well, I am. I did. I'm living here for about four months while Dom takes advantage of an exchange program offered by her school. Except, she scheduled herself for class only two days a week, and I quit my job, so, for the most part, we're free to explore the city, the country, and the continent as we please. 

Let's start with the city. How about the neighbourhood, actually. A couple of months ago we searched for an apartment through 9flats, a German service comparable to Airbnb, and got ourselves set up with a studio in Prenzlauer-Berg, a district just to the north east of the city centre. The Wikipedia article sums up my first impressions pretty well: picturesque, kid-friendly, hip, but historical. It's pretty gentrified, and populated with a fair amount of expats, by the looks of it. The transformation of the neighbourhood in the past couple of decades has earned it the clever label "Bionade-Biedermeier", a mash-up of a trendy, organic lemonade brand and an environment in early 19th century Central Europe in which the middle class grew and developed a certain set of comfortably vanilla artistic tastes and pursuits. A trendy, yuppie, New-Bourgeoisie vibe appears dominates. So, not a rough neighbourhood, parents at home will be relieved to know. We're probably overpaying relative to Berlin as a whole, but it's still cheaper than Toronto. Hey, that's exactly what Wikipedia said I would say!¹

It must be human to try to map your past experience onto new ones, an efficient and effective way to make sense of uncharted territory. That would account for the rampant name appropriation throughout the New World. (Ontario even used to have its own Berlin, but they changed the name to Kitchener in 1916 for some reason.) So, walking around Prenzlauer Berg this morning, I tried to think of what I could compare it to in Toronto. Roncesvalles is close in terms of yuppiness. Leslieville has its fair share of babies being pushed around in strollers. The Junction is definitely trendy, but maybe too trendy.

Anyway, we're in the Old World now. There's nothing in Toronto to compare to the cobblestoned streets, the architecture, the cyclists not getting rammed off the road by enraged and reckless drivers. We'll get used to it eventually.

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[1] "More recently, countless North American, British, Australian and Spanish citizens have moved into the borough attracted by the relatively cheap cost of accommodation and studio space compared to other cultural capitals like New York, London, and Paris."

Three Out of Six Ain't Bad

I have a weird habit. Every so often–twice a year, maybe–I'll buy a new notebook, and I'll use this notebook as a travel journal, or for notes for a class I'm enrolled in. Eventually, the class or the trip will end, and the notebook, only half filled, will end up on a shelf to gather dust, waiting until the day I pick it up, leaf through it, and shove it into a box. I like recording things, but I also like a certain degree of order. Separate ideas, life stages, or classes, belong in separate notebooks. It takes up a lot of space (and paper), but it's how I operate. 

I do a similar thing with blogs, although I'm quicker to throw them in the trash can than I am with my notebooks. Notebooks, while not entirely private (somebody going through my things could easily find and read them), are not available for the world to see. The same cannot be said of the things you write on the internet. You write it, you post it, and it's out there. It's true, the chance that someone will read it is still quite small for most people. But if someone cares enough, if they really want to dig, they can find you, your blog, and all of your weird, human thoughts spilled out over their computer screen.

Of course, the ease of accessibility to one's online writing changes the style and content considerably. Journals and notebooks are meant to be private, and with that, structure, coherence, and content follow no strict rules. Blogs, on the other hand, are, after all, at least intended to be read. Yet blogs are still personal. Writing, in all its forms, provides some degree of insight into the mind of the author. Journals, obviously, tend toward the unfiltered. But even public writings, and blogs, especially, betray some of the author's personality. For personal blogs, there is no editor, no proofreader. While an awareness of the openness and accessibility of the web creates some self-censorship (for most of us, anyway), it still takes a considerable amount of care to craft an authentic, personal piece, while still keeping some of your cards close to your chest. 

It's for this reason that I only have three blogs online right now, despite having started at least twice that number. (Even then, only two of them are active.) It's cheap, fast, and simple to start a blog. Any number of platforms will let you register a domain for free, and they provide an abundance of templates and blogging tools to help you post and maintain the site. But after you build your blog, you actually need to fill it with something. This is where most projects fail.

On that happy note, let me introduce Drinky-Poo! Yes, it's a really dumb name. But I chose a dumb name to keep me from putting too much pressure on myself. It's a blog about drinks of all sorts, mostly alcoholic ones, and as such I didn't think I should try to make it too serious.

That's it for now. I hate to end abruptly, but this went on longer than I expected. For more of information about Drinky-Poo, head to the portfolio section of this site, or go directly to the new blog itself. Enjoy!

Vanilla Bean on Mushroom Dreams

@freshcutgardenhose

I have a test on Monday. A wine test. 

I've been taking a wine course at George Brown this summer. It's fairly basic, a foundation for the other wine courses at the college, and a prerequisite for the couple of programs that they offer there. Each lecture, myself and a dozen or so other students, ranging in age from about 24 to 64, sit and listen to the instructor talk about the regions of the week, the various laws and traditions of the areas, the grapes that grow there, and the wines that are produced. That's the first half. After a quick break we get to the fun part. "Tasting".

I put that in quotation marks because, depending on how you're feeling, you're free to actually drink all the wine that's poured for you. While it's not a huge amount (small pours of about six different wines), we're not doing any of that swish and spit stuff. And you can end up with what amounts to at least two glasses, more than you'd consume in just about any other classroom setting. More than you'd consume in any other wine class, even, given that the idea is to get a clear sense of every wine. You can't do that if you're buzzed by the sixth sample.

But hey, it's Wines I. It's meant to be fun. The tastings were (unsurprisingly) more enjoyable than the lectures, but not only because we were drinking. When assessing a wine, you can break it down into three parts: Visual, Smell, and Taste. Using these, your general knowledge about various regions, grapes, and your sense memory, you draw a conclusion about the quality of the wine, and if tasting blind, you can take a stab at trying to guess what it is. If you're really good, you can name the wine right down the the producer and the vintage, but at my level I'd be happy to get the grape(s) and the region right. 

So that's all good and fun, more so if you draw a correct conclusion during a blind tasting. But having participated in a decent number of tastings in this class and in restaurants in the past, it's really coming up with descriptors for the wine that is the most weird and entertaining. Although you get hints about the wine from what it looks and tastes like, the bulk of the information comes through its smell. That's where all the magic happens. 

Now, granted, if you're a casual drinker that hasn't really spent much time nosing your wine in the past, you're likely to just say "Eh, it all just smells like wine." That's understandable. But if you sip glass after glass, with the explicit intention of drawing out the similarities and differences between them, then eventually you'll pick up on those variances. And when you do, the results can be pretty unexpected.

The most well known of these obscure smelling notes is maybe cat piss. Is cat "pee" more polite? Either way, It's urine, and it's used to describe many cold climate Sauvignon blancs. Personally, I've never picked up on that particular note, but I had cats growing up, so maybe I'm numb to the scent. 

Another one that comes up a lot for many white wines is "petrol", or some variation on that. Gasoline, kerosene, whatever. Then there's "tar" (Barolo), and "barnyard" (red Burgundy). That last one I believe is meant as a euphemism for animal shit. I can kind of see the resemblance, but that being said, I don't really find the smell offensive. Then again, horse manure doesn't even really smell that bad, does it? On the opposite end of the spectrum, sometimes wines smell like things you would actually want to put in your mouth! Bubble gum Beaujolais, the sweet lychee of Gerwurztraminer, the chocolate that can come through on a Bordeaux.

While there are common characteristics to be found in many wines, those that allow for meaningful discussion and comparison amongst wine people, at the end of the day, one's sense of smell is a deeply personal thing. You're limited or enabled by your own sense history. If you haven't experience an aroma before, you have nothing to compare it to. On the other hand, sometimes your memory serves up some weird associations. I was tasting a red from South America—I can't remember what it was—but it had a note exactly like the cappuccino flavoured ice cream I had had a few nights earlier. I didn't hesitate to write it down on the tasting sheet. 

This idiosyncratic way of assessing wines has been noted for quite some time. In the documentary Somm, prospective Master Sommelier Ian Cauble described a wine as smelling like a fresh can of tennis balls. Another time, he names an aroma as "fresh cut garden hose", the inspiration for the Instagram account of the same name and source for the images in this post. Maryse Chevriere, somm at Petit Crenn and artist behind the account, curates odd-ball descriptions from somm's around the web and transforms them into humorous and whimsical cartoons. 

(The above doodle—it's awesome, right?— is for one man's description of Old Fitzgerald's 1849 Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey. Not wine, sure, but sommeliers need to be knowledgeable of spirits, too.)

Are these kinds of descriptions unhelpful? Probably, to some degree. But they're also part of the fun. People tend to get bogged down by wine. Too often it's perceived as a stuffy sort of enterprise, and sure, it still is in some areas. But there's a whole other side to it, one where you can write things like:

"Berries. Berries. Berries. Like a wild bear who just stumbled upon a field of wild berries, just *barely* ripe and he ate a few... and then a few more and by the time he was at the end of it he was rolling around making jam in his field of wild berries, smashing them as he holds his tummy, screaming of a bellyache and glee simultaneously."

That's the side I want to be on. 

@freshcutgardenhose

Referendumb

So here we are. While Britain (England, in particular) has voted to #Brexit from the European Union, Bermuda has voted to #remain in the last century. A little while ago I made a prediction on how the Bermuda referendum on gay marriage would turn out:

More than likely, it's going to be a narrow majority against. Then what? The OBA will either wuss out because the people don't support it, or they'll do the right thing and move ahead with legalizing it and make themselves even more unpopular than they were in the first place.

Well, I was right about the majority against, but it wasn't narrow. About twice as many voters opposed civil unions and same-sex marriage. But, only 46.89% of voters even showed up to the polls. Here was my summary on Facebook:

While everyone was paying attention to Brexit, Bermuda was holding a little referendum of its own, this one on same-sex marriage and civil unions. Yes, the OBA Government had decided to turn to the masses for guidance on the granting of rights to a vulnerable minority. Great idea! Unsurprisingly, both same-sex marriage and civil unions were rejected by voters, proving the whole exercise to be an extraordinary waste of everyone’s time. The silver lining, however, is that so few people took the idea of a referendum on human rights seriously that only about 47% of the electorate voted. So technically, the outcome can’t even be treated as a valid representation of Bermuda as a whole. Not to imply that the referendum was even binding in the first place, as the OBA made clear from the outset… Did I mention how this was a waste of time? Now we just need to wait a little bit, let emotions calm, and watch the OBA brush the whole thing under the rug and hope that no one holds it against them.

Spoiler alert: people are going to hold it against them.

Drawing Badly

Some time last week, there was an particularly awkward New Yorker live stream through the magazine's Facebook page. Now, this is a pretty awkward set-up to begin with. Live streaming is tricky, and it's inevitably clumsier than edited productions. Empty pauses linger much longer than is comfortable, and every bad or mistimed joke falls flat before the viewer. The effect is compounded in these New Yorker videos, where both hosts and guests tend to be closer to sponges than to MLK on the charisma scale. They are writers, after all. So how do you get more awkward than a magazine writer in front of a camera, live streaming out into the ether? Swap them out for cartoonists (don't feel obligated to watch):

Pretty awkward, right? There's something vaguely bird-ish about the two of them, though Stokes is probably more of an owl, and Finck whatever kind of bird Woodstock is. 

Awkwardness is a byproduct of weirdness, and you definitely need to be at least a little weird to be a cartoonist for The New Yorker. To be driven to any sort of creative career when the likelihood of achieving prosperity is so low[1] requires, if not straight up insanity, a certain degree of non-normalcy. Next (and most importantly), you need to be funny. This much should be obvious. A cartoon can be funny in various ways, and it's been talked about at length before, so I won't bore you with it now. 

Anyway, while a successful cartoonist must be 1) weird, and 2) funny, one thing that doesn't appear to be necessary is any extraordinary ability to draw. At least that's the main thing I took away from the New Yorker video stream. To give you a better taste of Liana's work, here are a few of my favourites:

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A post shared by Liana finck (@lianafinck) on Jun 12, 2016 at 6:14pm PDT

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A post shared by Liana finck (@lianafinck) on Jun 16, 2016 at 3:55pm PDT

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A post shared by Liana finck (@lianafinck) on Jun 18, 2016 at 5:29am PDT

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A post shared by Liana finck (@lianafinck) on Jun 21, 2016 at 11:57am PDT

Ehhh, maybe #3 wasn't even technically a cartoon. But it struck a cord, as does most of Finck's work. They aren't technical or beautiful drawings, but they portray feelings of doubt and insecurity that I think are fairly common throughout the Millennial generation. Remember that old formula, "humour = tragedy + time"? There's an inverse relation between the addends. Because the Millennial tragedy is, at the end of it, a problem that comes from the privilege of having options, on the tragic scale it ranks pretty low. So even though we're living out our existential crises right now, we can still laugh at the cartoons (and ourselves).

Going through Finck's work can be dangerous, though. You see the cartoons and think, "Hey, I have ideas! I'm funny! I can draw at a basic level! I should do this!" And then you waste the rest of your day, ink, and paper on scratchy little doodles that end up in the recycling bin. 

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[1] Turns out that, in 2005, at least, cartoonists made about $675 per cartoon. 

Play It Right

I've torrented music before. That is to say, I've been the beneficiary of piracy. I'm part of the problem. I'm complicit. 

But, then again, who hasn't illegally downloaded an album or two? Not that that is any way to justify one's actions. No, the way I justify it to myself is that the music that I occasionally download for free is, by and large, from decades ago, created by musicians that have by now very clearly made it. Oh, sorry, Robert Plant, yeah, I illegally downloaded Led Zeppelin III. Why don't you dry your tears with your 120 million dollars. 

On the flip side, I pride myself on being a conscientious music consumer when it actually matters. I've added five albums to my iTunes library this year, and I paid for four of them (the outlier being the aforementioned Zeppelin album). These purchases are recent(-ish) albums from contemporary artists. Still touring, still recording, still working the grind. I'm not a monster. 

Most recently I took the leap and bought Sylvan Esso's eponymous album from 2014. It's a wicked set of electro-folk-pop tunes, Amelia Meath's bright vocals carried by Nick Sanborn's intricate synth assemblies. I first heard "H.S.K.T." maybe last year, and have since gradually sampled the rest of the album, leading me to finally buy it last week. Try listening without dancing:

Compare it to the dreamy "Coffee", the next track on the album. It has a beautiful, smooth, and gentle flow—decidedly more relaxed. But even so, you can't help but move your body. 

God, that's good. Hopefully they'll come to Toronto some time and I can see them live. 

Bonus listening, "Play It Right":

(Embarrassing) News from the Motherland

In today's news of "Living Under a rock on The Rock", the OBA (One Bermuda Alliance) is standing its ground regarding the June 23rd referendum on same sex marriage. At the Supreme Court this week, the Centre for Justice argued that holding the referendum, which asks citizens whether or not they support 1) same sex marriage, and 2) civil unions, would be in breach of the Constitution and the Human Rights Act. Chief Justice Kawaley was a welcome voice of reason, telling the lawyer representing the Government that the idea of a referendum in this case is "absolutely absurd."

You got it, man, I mean, Your Lordship. I really have trouble understanding the Government's reasoning. From the linked article:

Mr Howard [lawyer for the Government] said it was “perfectly permissible” to ask the electorate how the Government should recognise same-sex unions.

The options being either legally and not at all. Isn't that just a fucking opinion poll? Why is a referendum necessary? More importantly, though, is that opinions don't really matter when it comes to human rights. Can you discriminated based on sexual orientation? No. So Adam and Steve are good to go. It's uncomfortably embarrassing that this is still an issue for Bermuda. 

From the OBA perspective, I can see how they don't want to steamroll the legalization of same sex marriage through. It would be a pretty terrible move, politically. But a referendum? A non-binding referendum? Best case scenario: they're geniuses. They know that there's secretly a lot of good will for same sex marriage, but people will only admit to it alone and in secret (in the ballot box). Then, with the results supporting same sex marriage in hand, the OBA can carry on because "it's what the people want". 

I doubt that's going to happen. 

More than likely, it's going to be a narrow majority against. Then what? The OBA will either wuss out because the people don't support it, or they'll do the right thing and move ahead with legalizing it and make themselves even more unpopular than they were in the first place. Truly, it would be a noble move. But we're talking about politicians here. 

(Also, something like half the polling stations are in (openly homophobic) churches. Because that makes sense.)

(Also, the Royal Gazette's writing is painful.)

Happy Negroni Week

It's Negroni Week! Equal parts charity, celebration, and drinking. If you've never heard of it, go out and drink one. It's really one of the most popular classic cocktails out there: boozy, slightly bitter, revitalizing, it's excellent. It's made from gin, Campari (the bitterness), and sweet vermouth. With a 1:1:1 ratio, it's also incredibly easy to make. Just stir them on ice and then serve up or on the rocks (my preference, and I think the more popular way). Garnish with an orange twist. 

There are a ton of variations/related drinks, most easily made by swapping out one spirit for another. Bourbon instead of gin, and you have a Boulevardier. Sparkling wine instead, and a Negroni Sbagliato. You can alter the bitterness by subbing some or all of the Campari for Aperol. At my work we do a version with Cazadores tequila instead of gin. 

What I'm really interested in, though, and have yet to try, is an Old Pal. 2oz Rye, 0.75oz Dry Vermouth, 0.75oz Campari, served up. No garnish. Obviously related to the Boulevardier, it seems like it'd be quite a bit drier (rye and dry vermouth vs bourbon and sweet). Hopefully that means it would stick around in the glass longer—I've seen many a Negroni be knocked back far quicker than you'd expect, especially for a drink that is straight spirits. 

Negroni!

Bread, Glorious Bread!

Cooling on the counter behind me sits a round, chestnut coloured loaf. The crust is crackling as it cools. It's been almost 24 hours in the making, and I'm beyond excited. 

I've been baking bread on and off for a couple of years, all from the same recipe (the master recipe from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day). It's a quick, no knead, "artisanal" recipe that can yield a loaf in less than four hours, start to finish. It was awesome the first time I pulled a loaf out of the oven and set it down to cool. Eating bread, still warm, that I had baked. It was exciting. But the excitement faded, and I eventually became frustrated with the shortcomings of the bread that I was making. The crumb (the pattern of holes inside of a loaf) was tight, and it was hard to get a consistent shape. The bread would often rise unevenly, sometimes exploding out one side. There had to be a better way. 

That happened.

I looked for an alternate method and quickly found Jim Lahey's recipe. It seems like this is the one that really made the no-knead method popular, thanks to Mark Bittman of The New York Times who wrote about it in 2006. It uses less yeast and requires a much longer rising time—up to 18 hours. Further, Lahey suggests baking the bread in a smaller, preheated vessel within the oven—a cast iron or ceramic pot, some sort of Dutch oven. From what I can tell (from here, here, and here), this provides two benefits. First, the dough will be hit with a more even and concentrated heat. It'll get hot faster than it would if it were just on a pan or baking stone, and this more direct heat gives it a better spring. Second, the Dutch oven has a lot less air in it, meaning that the moisture from the dough is much more concentrated around the bread. This high humidity environment allows the outer dough to stay flexible for longer, which in turn lengthens the spring time. Steam/humidity also has the effect of transferring heat more quickly than dry air, which relates back to the quick-heat-oven-spring mentioned before, but also appears to be beneficial for crust formation. This, I'm still hazy on, as oven spring and a good crust seem to be in opposition. Though, the spring apparently happens within the first five to ten minutes, so I guess the crust must get going after that. Maybe it's not so complicated. Oh, one final benefit from using a Dutch oven is that it gives you a good mould for your loaf. Cheating? Whatever. 

So, I made it! If you follow the link to the recipe, you'll notice that the video and written version are a little different. I mixed my dough a little more thoroughly than he did, and opted for a rise time of around 18 hours. I used a silicone spatula to get it out of the bowl, and it slopped out pretty easily. I had to use a lot more flour than I anticipated just so that I could handle the dough without it sticking to everything, but I eventually tamed it and managed to do a quadruple fold before resting it in a floured dish cloth. The written recipe has an intermediary rest of 15 minutes, but I missed that. Oh well. I didn't even form it into much of a ball, really. From watching the video, Lahey seems like a pretty relaxed guy, so in his spirit, and seeing as it was a first attempt, I didn't worry about the details too much. I did, however, buy a cast iron Dutch oven. I'd been meaning to get one for a while, but this recipe was what finally made me go out and do it. 

The biggest discrepancy between the written and video recipe is the oven temperature. Lahey says "500, even 515" degrees, whereas the written instructions say 450. I went 475. 

It was a little hairy getting the dough off of the dishcloth and into the pot. It seemed like I hadn't used enough flour on the cloth, and basically the whole thing required a good deal of scraping dough off while dumping it into the blazing cast iron pot. Not the prettiest, but hey, it's "rustic".

And holy shit, it turned out beautifully!

Definitely a step in the right direction! I'll probably try to mess around with the recipe to improve the flavour (increase the salt a little, refrigerate it for a while), but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't proud of this initial result. 

Maintenance

Is it tedious to blog about one's blog? Too meta? Meh, I'm not going to worry about it. It's better to write (and, more importantly, post) something than to get wrapped up in concerns like actually putting out something that someone might want to read. That comes second. Once you get to a point where you're writing and putting stuff out daily, then you can worry about whether or not it's any good. For a blog, that is. 

Other writing, sure, that can take time. You (I) need to just make sure that you keep up with it. And it can be a slog. Just like reading this is, right now. Just like writing this is.

Anyway...

That's not really what I'm posting about (keeping in mind that the goal here is to just post, readers be damned). I'm writing because, as you might notice (if you visit regularly, which you don't, but let's pretend), the layout of the homepage is ever so slightly cleaner than it was before. The issue up to this point: the SquareSpace feature/tool that makes a pretty mosaic of my pictures and videos from Instagram would put a weird border around the videos, whereas the images would show up flush against each other. The solution: dig around just a little more into the settings of the Instagram block and tick a little box (aspect ratio adjustment something something something). I don't doubt that the feature was there all along. I just A) hadn't posted any videos until fairly recently, and so I didn't realize I had a problem, and B) didn't bother that much with looking into how to fix it. Another sad symptom of how much I've neglected this space. What a waste. I think I have a solution, though. But I'll save that for later. 

Now go look at the beautiful grid on the homepage!

Charm (Brazos)

Just a song. I'm used to the album version (bottom of the page), but the video is kind of... Well, it's not what I pictured. But you get past the brains and it's not so bad. If you want to skip the brains/mad scientist vibe altogether, here:

Great song. 

Hey I wrote something

So I'm pretty bad when it comes to posting longer things that I've written, mostly because I can never get them to a stage where I'm happy with them. You may have noticed, then, that the Writing part of my portfolio is pretty (very, really) sparse. Well it's a little less empty now! I took the UP Express for the first time the other day and was compelled to write about it. I really like the style of the "Talk of the Town" section in The New Yorker, so I kind of went with that. Check it out!

Posting it also turned out to be an interesting exercise in working with SquareSpace. (Aughh, I know, web dev bootcamp and I didn't build my own site??? I had it before I knew anything, ok? And it's really good. And why reinvent the wheel?) ANYWAY, turns out they don't have a strikethrough effect built into their text editor (which is dumb), so I had to put in a custom code block and through a "<del>" around what I wanted to strike out. But then the spacing for the whole paragraph was off because the code block wanted to throw a margin of something like 28px on the bottom, in addition to the regular paragraph margin. (So there was an extra big gap.) I tried to adjust it with inline styles to no avail, but making a custom class seemed to work fine. (Incidentally, I had to use the class again here to allow myself to embed the "<del>," that is, in the code style seen above, within this paragraph.) Not greatly technical, but it's cool to be able to fix these things when they pop up. Makes me wonder what it would be like being a SquareSpace developer...

Read the article!

Train Dream

At precisely 10:23 this past Sunday morning, at the recently constructed Bloor Station of the Union Pearson Express, one of the short, gunmetal trains glided quietly to a halt. I was heading to meet my sister at the airport for brunch before her flight out and had arrived on the platform only a minute before. In my borderline obsessive quest to maximize the efficiency of my daily transit, I tend to cut it close. Today, in what would usually be a 50 minute trip from my house to Terminal 1 via the TTC, I would attempt to travel in half of that. Walk to the station: ~1 minute. Buy ticket: ~40 seconds. Climb stairs: ~10 seconds. Leaving home at 10:20 I allowed myself a buffer in excess of a minute. Plenty of time. 

The UP Express (pronounced “up” rather than “you pee,” I discovered) boasts a twenty-five minute travel time between Union Station and Pearson Airport, with stops at Bloor and Weston along the way. My own journey from Bloor was to be a speedy 17 minutes, it’s terminus being directly inside Terminal 1. At 22 dollars from Bloor ($27.50 from Union), the price is a hefty jump from the $3 $3.25 that the Toronto Transit Commission charges, but it’s apples to old, mushy oranges. The UP is quick, clean, direct. The TTC, while not entirely terrible, is none of those things.

There’s something distinctly utilitarian about the UP that makes it so appealing. The stop at Bloor is plain: tall, exposed concrete ceilings extend skyward, finally giving way to large glass panes that allow the natural light to flow in. The trains keep with the colour scheme: greys upon greys, from seats, to walls, to carpets, with subtle highlights of ochre and sage scattered throughout. The muted colours aren't gloomy, however. Rather, they give off almost a Nordic vibe. Dispassionate? Perhaps, but also calming. You’re going somewhere fast, but you aren’t in a hurry. 

That calmness is undoubtedly also related to the utter lack of people aboard. The entire train was empty but for myself, three other passengers, an attendant, and an engineer. Built with a capacity of 173, in the dozens of trains I’ve seen speed by since the line opened in June, on only a couple of occasions have I not thought that the cars looked drastically empty. Yet, for me, that’s part of the draw. Fewer people means a cleaner car (and fewer reading distractions). 

But the UP is by no means inhuman. A courteous attendant checks your ticket upon boarding. An engineer announces that the doors are closing, asking that you “please stand clear.” The people are there, but only as much as they need to be.  The automated announcements, welcoming passengers aboard and announcing the few stops along the way,  straddle a pleasant middle ground between the no-nonsense, gruffly bureaucratic male voice that occasionally sounds off on TTC subway platforms, and the heavily-medicated female coo that narrates the Air Canada safety video. The anonymous UP woman is professional, yet friendly. Her voice puts you at ease at a time when your mind is likely to be running through a list of possible minor emergencies. Did I lock the door? Did I remember my passport? Will I make it to my flight in time? Of course you will. You’re on the UP Express. 

The mystery of the UP is that, despite its minimalist aesthetic and its basic functionality, the service feels oddly decadent. Part of this can be attributed to the price. It’s natural to feel a little indulgent paying upwards of twenty dollars for a ride to the airport when you can go the same distance for a little over three. But there’s something more to it than that. It’s too well designed. It’s a little too easy, a little too good. In a city whose favourite past time is fussing and fighting, sometimes literally, over transportation, when we get something that works as seamlessly as the UP it almost doesn’t feel deserved. 

In fact, many people think that it isn't deserved at all. With construction costs topping out at $456 million, critics feel that the money could have been better spent trying to relieve the already strained public transit system, rather than creating a luxury line that relatively few will use. Transit advocacy group TTCriders, in an interview with the Toronto Star, argued that the line should be integrated with the TTC. “We need this line to be useful for everyone in this city,” spokesperson Jessica Bell said. “And that means doing the right thing […] and turning it into a proper transit line.”

Maybe that will happen. Maybe the UP Express is just a misanthropic fever dream, one in which you can escape from the city without having to contend with congested roads or subway cars, where you can spread yourself over three seats and dig into a book without the distractions of a taxi driver’s cell phone conversation or a teenager’s blaring headphones. Integrating it with the TTC may be more profitable, more useful, and more beneficial for the city. But until that happens, I’ll be enjoying the ride. 

Garlic the Good

I love garlic. I remember when I was being trained on the bar at a restaurant I used to work at, and the manager was extolling the virtues of having a clean work station. He offered an analogy:

“If you’re chopping garlic and you don’t clean your cutting board, everything else you cut on it is going to taste like garlic.”

I nodded, getting his point. “Although..." I said, "everything tastes better with garlic!”

He didn’t get that I was joking. “Everything? An apple wouldn't be very good.”

“Haven’t tried it, but wouldn’t bet against it.” He stared at me incredulously, and I told him I'd keep the bar neat.

With the possible exception of apples, most things do, in fact, taste better with garlic. I use it a lot when I cook. One time at a hostel in Chile I was trying to use up all of my food supplies before packing up my backpack and moving on south. On a whim I threw garlic into the pan I was using to make a grilled cheese sandwich. So simple, yet so delicious. How it took me so long to think of that winning combination, I'll never know. 

Despite my passion for the plant, I was unaware of garlic's health benefits until fairly recently. I had heard something about its role in Eastern traditional medicine, but my skeptical side was awaiting scientific confirmation. The science was there, it turns out, I just hadn’t been looking… I was too busy enjoying garlic’s more apparent (read: tasty) virtues. 

What is it that makes garlic so good for you? It’s all in the allicin. That’s the compound produced when you chop or crush a clove of garlic, and it has been shown to fight viruses, bacteria, fungi, and various types of cancer (notably, of the colon). The trick, though, is that it takes a little while for the allicin to get synthesized. If you heat the garlic right after chopping it, you deprive yourself of all of those nice properties. Best, then, to chop it, leave it for ten minutes, and then go ahead and throw it in the pan. 

I heard about this from Jo Robinson when she was on The Splendid Table promoting her most recent book, “Eating on the Wild Side.” The book traces the evolution of the human diet, noting the shift towards good taste at the expense of nutrition. As the title hints, Robinson argues that, in order to gain the dietary advantages of our early ancestors, we should be substituting our nutrition deficient produce with those that more closely resemble wild varieties. Swap out iceberg for loose leaf lettuce. Golden Delicious for Granny Smith. Not all plants are created equal, it would seem. So how do we know which are best? Robinson points to the thousands of academic articles that she spent ten years poring over, and it’s a relief to hear that a lot of the good, more nutritious foods are already readily available: 

You can just go to a grocery store and if you were to buy green onions, they have 100 times more phytonutrients than other onions in the store. They're inexpensive, they're common and they're unheralded super foods. It's the green portions that are the best for you; when you're chopping them up, make sure you chop up all the green portions too. Kale; black, red and dark red grapes; artichokes; parsley; all of the herbs -- they're just like eating wild plants.

We can be quite confident when it comes to what science says about the levels of nutrients to be found in different types of plants. What is less certain is how those plants and their various preparations can impact our health. The science is young in this respect, and Robinson even admits in an interview on NPR's The Salt that she is careful to place a "perhaps" here and a "should be" there when talking about any potential health benefits.

I don't see the harm in letting my chopped garlic sit for ten minutes while I busy myself with other kitchen prep. At best, I save myself from colon cancer. At worst, I get to eat a delicious meal. Works for me. 

Fly to BERMUDA!

Christmas is coming, and in 6 days I'll be getting on a plane to head back home for the holidays. I've always loved flying. Obviously, there's the magic of sitting in a steel container thousands of feet above the earth, jetting at super human speeds towards your destination. But there's a comforting disconnect that comes with flying as well, one that is perhaps felt even more acutely in today's world of endless notifications and updates. Please turn of your electronic devices. It's an order that I happily follow. Airplane mode, for me, is simply off. While in-flight wi-fi is gradually becoming more widely available, I haven't yet had the misfortune of having it on any of my flights, and if I have, I haven't felt the need or desire to use it. 

Stepping onto an airplane, then, can be a kind of step into the past, as far as telecommunications are concerned. While airplane travel is not as glamorous as it once was (they don't even serve you a hot meal anymore), the disconnection that it provides still lends a little bit of that bygone romance. The whole concept of being able to get on a plane in Toronto and get off in Bermuda in a few hours is amazing in itself. Every time I arrive at the airport, I stand at the screen that lists flights with their departure information. I imagine myself walking up to a counter, buying a ticket, and disappearing to someplace halfway across the world. The sheer possibility is exhilarating. 

This romantic association with air travel is probably the reason I find myself so attracted to vintage travel posters. Offering a taste of the glamour without the any of the cost, they depict colourful scenes of exotic landscapes and architectural landmarks. Destinations are printed across the images in large capital letters. People are often absent or relegated to the background, except maybe for a young female, be she a traditionally garbed local or a fashionable jet setter. 

Bermuda, being a vacation destination itself, boasts many posters of this kind. I remember sitting in The Specialty Inn as a kid, waiting for my vanilla milkshake, and gazing at the large prints that hung around the room. The Bermuda posters tend to feature young, smiling, couples, presumably on their honeymoon, exploring the island by bike or by carriage. Other posters focus on the physical beauty of the island, emphasizing the flora, the beaches, or the distinctive Bermuda cottages. All of the posters, though, convey similar sentiments: Bermuda is a calm refuge from the hustle and bustle of modern life; an island paradise inviting you to explore and discover its wonders.

These posters depict a fantasy, of course. After all, they are advertisements. The vintage ads aren't even photographs, they're illustrations— further abstracting themselves from reality. And considering the intended audience of the ads, the posters only portray a very limited picture of the island. While acknowledging that these posters present just one experience of the island, a dated and extremely privileged one, at that, I still think that most modern Bermudians would be able to connect with them. Bermuda being a tourist destination can be a great source of pride. Of course people want to visit! It is beautiful. It is paradise. And for us, it's home. I can't wait to be back. 

I Met a Little Mouse Today

So there was this mouse. There's another one now, too, but first there was just one. Mice are not something you want in your house, but here this mouse was, running to and fro through my kitchen as soon as things would quiet down for the night. So I bought a couple traps. I set the traps, put some expired pumpkin seed butter on them, and went to bed. When I woke up they were licked clean. 

I reset the traps, same way, and the same thing happened. Licked clean. Little bastard. So I looked up the best way to set a mouse trap. I found a video on YouTube that told me that the best bait to use was a Tootsie Roll. Candy! So sticky that it can't be licked off. I tried it that evening, set two traps with half a Tootsie Roll each, and within fifteen minutes a trap snapped. Mouse was dead. 

I felt a little bad. I had heard the snap and went in the kitchen to look. The trap was flipped over, the little mouse twitching and pissing himself. In less than thirty seconds it was over. Maybe it was shorter, but time seemed to drag on as I watched his little legs scramble to get free. Maybe he was still conscious, terrified. Maybe it was a reflexive reaction, neurons firing randomly. I hope it was just that. 

Anyway, clearly an impression was made on me. It lingered through the next day, and as I was going about my business the seed of a poem was planted in my head. So I attended to it. And here's the result, a poem, by me: I Met a Little Mouse.

I met a little mouse today,

His coat was soft and gray,

I met a little mouse today,

He asked if I could play,

I met a little mouse today,

I said, “Please go away!”

I met a little mouse today,

He settled in to stay.

I saw that little mouse today,

He nibbled on my toes,

I saw that little mouse today,

He danced across my nose,

I saw that little mouse today,

He chewed holes in my clothes!

I saw that little mouse today,

That mouse has got to go.

I killed a little mouse today,

He could not comprehend,

I killed a little mouse today,

That cheese would be his end, 

I killed a little mouse today,

His neck will never mend!

I killed a little mouse today,

And lost a little friend.

And there you are! Hopefully you like it, and if not, meh. My girlfriend saw another mouse last night. I might have to write another poem in the morning.