Author Archives: jdhalperin

Holiday Gift Guide 2012

05 Wednesday Dec 2012

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It’s that season again. Personally, my heart bursts when the people I like and love wish me a warm season’s greeting, but many people are assholes who can’t enjoy the holidays without hard, material proof of your affection. Here are some ideas at different price brackets to win over these vulgarians.

Jeff’s Gift Guide:

1. Russian Literature—fill up a loved one’s spiritual vacuum not with stupid religion, but with Tolstoy, Gogol, Turgenev and the gang. Purchase previously enjoyed for $1-10. To make sure the gift is quality, check that the spine is intact and that pages aren’t released from their binding after being flipped. Check for good translations, too.

2. Whiskey—since it’s the season for splurging, don’t buy a loved one Canadian Club. It tastes like battery acid. For a few extra dollars you can buy them a normal Irish whiskey, or give them a formidable holiday boner by getting them a smokey Islay single malt. L-a-g-a-v-u-l-i-n.

3. Gold Bullion—Gold retains its value, and it can’t get lost like a piece of jewellery  It’s just a quality investment, and nobody wishes they didn’t have it. Very old school.

4. A record—usually great classical or rock and roll records, from Bach to CCR, can be found cheaply in the under $5 range, but good hip hop normally runs you more than that. Buy good De La Soul, Tribe or Wu-Tang. Anyone who doesn’t like that shit is a pervert.

5. Food—it’s a biological requirement, very popular these days.

6. Chess set—there are only two useful chess sets. The first is a bigger stay-at-home board with traditional style, hefty pieces. The second is a small, portable fold-up board with magnetic pieces. Do not buy tacky ornamental kitsch sets that insult the very existence of chess, the noble blood sport of kings.

7. Sopranos on DVD—not everyone has HBO. It’s the best cultural offering of our generation, rivalling anything cooked up by Melville, the Grateful Dead or Leotardo Da Vinci.

8. Guitar Lessons—the gift of music lessons is nothing less than seraphic ecstasy stolen for Earthlings by teachers, incredible Prometheus figures who bring godly delights to mere mortals. Shame I don’t know any good guitar teachers.

Bogus Profundities

30 Friday Nov 2012

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By applying a neo-Foucouldian lens to a systems discourse it’s easy to trace the setbacks and impingements caused by neo-cons and other critical analysts of a certain stripe. It can be seen, therefore, that more investigation is wanting in this department, but, on the other hand, its corollary is true too, namely that the talk and feedback loop has increased the vivacity of grassroots initiatives, and plans are coming along steadily to bring about the fundamental change from the ground up. Quite literally, fruit is bound for harvest as indispensable momentum has been gained in this and in other related and interrelated fields. Incidentally, a retrospective glance at historically bypassed alternatives to the accepted narratives and viewpoints is a vital reconstruction that adds definitively to the wider scope, as mitigating and transcending the accepted biases is is required or we are hopelessly lacking completion. It is necessary, therefore, to bring up the rear, as it were, and ensure that this crucial aspect doesn’t dwindle. The strength of current bonds, agreements, and cross lateral academic joint suppositions depends upon the intrinsic strength of this arrived at result of reflexive academia.

We cannot possibly move forward until the above is understood. Now, looking ahead, the socio-political, geo-military, and cross-cultural implications and ramifications are diverse, severe, and need to be critically unpacked from multiple standpoints. First, through a polyrhythmatic intra-religious  duality we can see that these are less interdependent than we think at first glance, and moreover that these interrelations form a complex and multifaceted reality whose nature and being can only be ascertained first by comparing its neo-Marxist elements against its third wave feminist heritage. Where they are aligned will be indicative of the overall meritocratic veracity with which its grounded in, whereas the differences will be instructive if we consider the ramifications of other fields against what is surely a fascinating discrepancy. But this is only the beginning.

The real challenge will be unpacking the intertwined an variable complexities of the innards of each category against the conclusions reached from a wide variety of alternate studies. This, therefore, will rally together a diversity of related fields, visions, and studies to produce an overwhelming harmony that will shine a useful light on these and other related subjects. This multiplicity of studies, fields, and categories is the only way to increase clarity and lucidity. The last thing we want is inaccessible conclusions due to muddled manifestations of research which, however fixed and steadfast, are obscure to those without the necessary means for the necessary means for higher education. In this vaunted realm, the personal is political, not so much because it’s an intrinsic part of the latter but because the former is the overarching focal point of study of this womanifesto, and relegating human rights to a back seat role is unduly punishing it to the dismay of future generations of the silent majority.

There’s still more. If we care about the children at all, we need to bring in a parallel from other related fields of study, and hyper-critical lenses which can be applied post-modernly without fusing the various aspects together, so long as the correlations aren’t primary in nature, and, and this is especially crucial, so long as they derive intrinsically from the whole and not just reached for inductively from superficially diagnosing its outer aspects. It’s one of the great misfortunes that this ineluctable modality is frequently cited with poor accuracy, and what ends up happening is greatly unfortunate in that the misalignment between the primary and tertiary aspects increases this gulf rather than narrows it. The main thing, however, is that studies perpetuate the dominant aspects of what they reach for without sacrificing its lower depths.

In terms of the colonial imperialist sphere, there’s much to contend with, and it doesn’t take a careful ear to hear the supersonic high end beams of conservative misappropriation. It must be looked at piecemeal first, then as a whole. In this way, the repugnant goings on of the dominant hierarchal higher ups can be understood in both scope and inner structure, and from both an internal and external position. This is what’s key here, as without this the mode will be little understood, and the false and misleading appearance of real knowledge can have unintended consequences in other interrelated fields.

Can anything be understood in isolation, or isn’t it true that it’s opposite must be taken into account with it? Mirror causality is crucial or else this severance presents an ungraspable chasm which puts the veracity of the original claim into great and insurmountable doubt. It’s an understatement to say the rich complexities of this mode of thought is highly disagreeable, deceptive and incomplete as they are, and to the rescue we bring a progressive diagnostic litmus test in order to fully vitiate the solemnity of the issue at hand. It’s impossible to bring the full tapestry of being without congruent tertiary aspects, however harmonizing may prove to be difficult, surmising impossible, but the fuller, broader test requires these values be procured without delay in order to vindicate the thoroughness with which its cognitively ascertained. In simpler terms, one thing and its opposite must be seen from the same lens, the same terms, and then flipped and inverted if we are to understand it all. The economic implications can’t be cut off of this examination, as they are inevitably intertwined; obviously, their exchange is a give and take where reciprocity correlates positively with the opposite of the backward sub section. To bypass this, we’ll need transcendental analyses from a dialectic of global studies.

If we are to reach a fair, equitable and progressive place, we ignore these findings at our peril.

The stink of vegan hypocrisy

15 Monday Oct 2012

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[Going through my computer I found an old unpublished piece that was undeservedly buried, so I polished it and present it now.]

I read an issue of Maclean’s containing a hilarious article wherein Martin Mersereau, the director of emergency response for PETA, states, “Any vegan restaurant that kills rodents is absolutely hypocritical. If you’re going to exercise such conscientiousness in the cuisine that you prepare, then why not bring that same heart and soul to managing your little unwanted visitors? [glue traps and poison] should be avoided like the plague.” Even if the little unwanted visitor in question carried the plague, I expect Mersereau would demonstrate for the rodent his superhuman compassion. He imagines that his position is the most magnanimous, but he is wrong.

The vegan must go further than not killing animals. Vegan’s prime directive is animal rights. If all you do is not kill people then you’re not a murderer, but you’re not an advocate for human rights either. For starters, that would entail actively opposing and protesting against murder. Yet Mersereau watches the animal holocaust at a distance, his silence enabling the ceaseless slaughter to continue. To stay consistent, he ought to prosecute people who eat or kill animals. A passive vegan, like Mersereau, who looks the other way while all his animal friends are being killed isn’t doing anything to save the animals. He’s just clearing his conscious.

But a real vegan would go further still, as humans aren’t the only ones who violate animal rights. In the pursuit of justice, a devoted vegan of Martin Mersereau’s stature ought to condemn animals who harm animals. It doesn’t make a lick of a difference to the animal being exploited whether the exploiter is a human or a fellow animal. Dead is dead. A real vegan ought to be concerned with all the blood that’s spilled, not just the blood on his hands. Until Mersereau demonstrates consistency by policing forests worldwide and trying to arrest me for barbecuing, he is a hypocrite.

An open letter to OISE concerning beautiful oppressors

06 Thursday Sep 2012

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Dear OISE,

I am writing in hopes you’ll show solidarity towards today’s most unacknowledged and disenfranchised group.

It’s well documented that beautiful (read: Western “beauty”) people are automatically and unwarrantedly assumed to be more talented, intelligent, reliable, and overall more capable. Through no merit of their own, just genetic lottery, studies cite that they amass an extra $200,000 over a lifetime.

While many acknowledge the existence of the beauty bias, few admit it overprivileges the beautiful, so there’s a reluctance to concede the corollary: gross people are an underprivileged group oppressed by beautiful people. I think beautiful people are carefully taught not to recognize the beauty bias, as white males are carefully taught to marginalize all non-white males (McIntosh, Peggy).

While the extent of disenfranchisement and marginalization is hard to quantify and it differs from case to case, anti-gross oppression usually correlates positively with the degree to which the gross are gaunt, hirsute, balding, asymmetrical, squat, albino, peg-legged, pock marked, hunchbacked, beady eyed, and just generally weird looking. Imagine trying to make it as a runway model with explosive acne, or try getting good tips as a bartender while a class-three goitre hangs off your neck. Yet can’t gross people show attitude while walking in a straight line, or successfully pour a beverage into a glass? Comrades, is this a meritocracy?

Please, help show solidarity with gross people around the world and demand from governments that every industry be encouraged to hire a quota of gross people. As well as, of course, recompense the $200,000 taken from them by the beautiful. The proceeds of oppression should be dispersed among the people. All are entitled to this money, so long as they can prove beyond a doubt that they are gross.

GROSS PEOPLE ALL OVER THE WORLD, UNITE!
Works Cited
1. McIntosh, Peggy. “White Privilege and Male Privilege” in Race, Class and Gender, edited by M. Anderson and P. Collins. 1992 New York: Feminist Press.

Toronto’s pathetic book culture

06 Friday Jul 2012

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Our city’s book culture is terminally ill, and there is no chance for its revival. Real book culture isn’t about glossy new $30 hard cover books about a woman contractually obliged to put out in sordid ways she never imagined, it’s about the books that are enriching as they are inexpensive. They generate rapture because they are written beautifully. I made a joke months ago after buying toilet paper and paper towel, “paper is only cheap if there’s literature on it,” but after learning yesterday that Frantic City is closing, perhaps my favourite second-hand book store, this joke now contains a very tragic note. Let’s not mince words: if we ever had a literary culture, it is dying slowly, emitting only a thoroughly ignored whimper.

The hardest thing for an individual to bring himself to do now is spend dozens of hours on a book nobody in their inner-circle is reading or talking about. It will in no way boost their status among friends or peers or society at large, and investing so much time given the esoteric pay off is uncommon, or eccentric. There are active forces against reading real books, great literature: we are inundated with friends telling us “you have to watch this TV series,” or we are glued to our various screens, or we read the lofty magazines urging us to try a series of gastronomic hamburgers.

Books are anathema to the marketplace and our consumer culture, and that will never change, and it’s getting worse. Any advertiser’s worst nightmare is the consumer who can cheaply think and entertain himself for great lengths of time. A copy of Anna Karenin can be purchased for $3, and you can spend incalculable hours (YEARS!) reading and rereading it. But this keeps you away from pop-up ads, away from commercials, away from stores, away from restaurants, away from spending money, and so all these things (their presence increasingly ubiquitous) pushes people away from lengthy reading. You earn funny looks if you tell someone you read this stuff. Perhaps they doubt your intention, high-brow scorn, like you can’t genuinely love literature the way people do Game of Thrones, that you’re putting on airs to appear intelligent.

The post-literate generation needs things fast, and the great tomes take time. “Caress the detail, the divine detail!” Nabokov urges us, but he is dead and nobody listens any more. So what we have is dying second-hand stores, and mainstream book merchants stocking t-shirts, various bookish looking kitsch, board games, and somewhere, if space graciously permits, books.

The decrease in real reading coincides with an increase in public bookish proclamations. The book as symbol. There are tote bags with pictures of books on them, people volunteering a love for books in neon letters all over social media, and there was a respectable hullabaloo when Ford, the philistine Goliath, tried to strip the library of funds. Yes, but people aren’t loud when they read, they are silent. Though the above is well and good, none of it convinces me in-depth reading is broadly taking place.

This is not an argument for reading the Western Canon exclusively. I believe reading should be done widely, according to one’s taste, and that there are only two schools of literature: the talented and the untalented. Ragging on a book because it’s popular is as wildly ignorant as loving a book because it’s in the canon. But for stores to be going out business because they choose to stock great but not in vogue authors’ entire catalogues instead of their number one seller, rather than schlock, is a bad sign, and I am lashing out at the risk of appearing like a snob. (Perhaps I am a snob: suck it.)

Think hard what I’m about to say, or it’ll sound perfectly deranged or offensive. Zizec describes Gandhi as being more violent than Hitler, in that Hitler’s unimaginable atrocity was actually much more within historical context than Gandhi’s unprecedented determination towards non-violence. In this sense, the real revolutionaries aren’t in the streets demanding change with thousands of other people just like them. The biggest act of protest now is to shut yourself off from everyone and read a book in silence without sharing it on social media. This private act is violent!

That my area is sooo hip and cool because of the glossy restaurants and the multitude of watering holes offering extremely local or extremely exotic beer is a sham. Shellacked culture, no rapture. It’s not just condo culture, but the so-called counter culture that’s inane, and I feel let down by it.

Don’t get me wrong: people can indulge in whatever decadent drivel they like, but it stops being benignly amusing when their world, the physical one I share with them, can’t permit for me only a cheap book store that stocks according to taste, not predictable money makers. I want very little, and I can’t have it! At the very least, the current pretence towards a bookish culture during this insoluble literary assault is salt in my wound. I am insulted.

The tomes are entombed. So long, Solon! I am not looking forward to the day, soon approaching, where I have this conversation:

Me: “Hey, do you remember when great books cost a dollar, bought from an actual store?”

Average citizen: “No.”

 

On status, advertising, and bottle service…something I know about

15 Friday Jun 2012

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Facebook has eroded the actual meaning of the word “status,” a real shame (and no accident) since I think the concept of status is an immensely important evolutionary psychological tool which helps us understand just about everything. This is an immensely loaded statement, so let me qualify and explain what status is, how inauthentic and contrived it can be, and what all this means in regards to advertising.

Status is ever-changing reputation that you wear or live. It has nothing to do with the person’s innate qualities. If you drive a Porsche, whether you can afford it or not, you get heightened status in most communities (not amongst bohemians though…you need rags and a record of activism, imprisonment a bonus, for that). If you’re rich but drive a Honda, your status is equal to all non-rich Honda drivers.

Perhaps you don’t want to be showy, but a CEO would look ridiculous, or have his authority undermined, appearing to work on a bike. Perhaps the guy in a Porsche is just a destitute man having a mid-life crisis. You cannot judge someone without knowing their inner reasons! This piece is about considering our own reasons for buying things, not judging others. But Porsches and Hondas differ hugely in performance, materials, and the quality of construction, so the increased price is warranted.

But the most pure example of headlong waste is bottle service. Nothing signals baller status like unnecessarily paying ten times the price for the exact same drinks. If bottles were sold at $30 instead of $300, they’d no longer be desirable. Obviously people would buy the cheaper booze, but not the same people, and for different reasons. $300 bottles reliably sends the message that the buyer can afford to waste, and this message is no longer sent if the bottle is reasonably priced. I have seen sparklers attached to bottles so everyone sees who ordered: if nobody sees them ball, they’re not really balling. The impression made is worth $270 to some–this is what’s really on purchase, not the alcohol, after all.

This is a silly, irrational remnant of the Pleistocene, where having an over-abundance of resources in harsh times meant guaranteed survival to cavemen and the people in their circle. But today, spending for the sole sake of wasting is tacky and everywhere in bad taste. The most essential thing when considering evolutionary psychology is not to conflate what is in our genes with how we ought to behave. Remember, too, there’s nothing wrong with buying expensive things that are worth the money if you appreciate them.

Facebook’s diabolical genius is letting people control and publicize their own “status” for free. Of course, it’s not really a status they’re posting, but just a message that appears to people on their list. But they called it that for a reason. Facebook is the sparkler attached to the bottle service, without having to buy the bottle. No wonder its mass appeal.

Understanding status is essential to understanding the horror show of corporate branding. To be certain, branding is so successful that any company would be crazy not to do it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not absurdly irrational. They give out status by making us feel predictably good about ourselves (or stop us from feeling insecure or bad) or by making us feel like we belong to a desirable set.

To be a company in the present age requires a predictable image, a term I like better than “brand”; The word “brand” falsely suggests the company is innately and permanently a certain way, where “image” rightly sounds contrived and painstakingly designed in advance to appeal to certain masses.

Companies can’t exist now unless they are seen to be giving entities which help the world in some small, yet heartening or profound way. So they give a negligible amount to a high-profile cause and take possession of a moral posture. Moral qualities are not for purchase, yet companies lay claim to them and offer moral vindication to consumers as a reward for buying their product. The formula is roughly: Fight hunger by buying this chocolate bar since we donate to so and so.

While on the surface it seems only positive that companies benefit people who otherwise would receive nothing, it’s the exploitation of our craving for status working in their self-interest that upsets me, as well as the impurity of the hijacking of the genuine yearning to do good for only its image. It’s not unlike requiring high school students to perform community service in order to graduate; the charm and the actual moral worth of the action is removed from voluntary service when it’s obligatory. So when companies posture like they care about the world, even if it does help somewhat, it ceases to be charming or genuine when their “giving” is embedded in their price, or when it makes them appear advantageously compassionate. 

You can be certain no company will ever give anonymously, unless they also secretly leak to the right media sources that they were the ones who donated so freely. I predict this will happen one day, as companies seek to appear pure and genuine.

Imagine the CEO of a fortune 500 company venerating the company’s dedication to the environment, or towards humanity, on a jumbo jet en route to Las Vegas where a business deal will be concluded amid unimaginable excess. This blends the two strains of status–exclusivity proved by over-priced gluttony, and worldly benevolence proved by high-profile giving. While I made up the above CEO, no doubt he has many real existences somewhere.

When branding is safely ignored, it’s evident that we only buy products from companies, yet there is an immense chasm between the physical properties of the product, the price at which it’s sold, and our reasons for purchase. Companies increase our status by making us feel accepted in cliques they spend millions of dollars determining we seek belonging. Beer commercials are hilarious in this respect.

The notion of a beer being tastier for a certain demographic (undergraduate party animals, urban sophisticates, etc.) is absurd. People either like it or they don’t, but it tastes the same way for everybody. The combination of barley, wheat and water cannot love hockey or act as a national ambassador for the simple reason that inanimate grains cannot have thoughts or feelings. Yet companies try and convince us that drinking their beer puts us on the “cool male hockey guy” or “patriot” team.

When a celebrity claims to use a product, ordinary mortals who also use it somehow feel linked to their high status, despite knowing they’re paid for the endorsement and might not actually feel that way. But this works in reverse too. Andrew Coyne wrote well on how Magnotta’s picture drinking a Labatt shouldn’t really mean anything:

“The idea that Magnotta’s alleged crimes would somehow have been related to his fondness for drinking Blue is only slightly more tenuous than the idea that drinking Blue would cause hundreds of sexy girls to show up at your parties.”

I’m sure Coyne knows that people aren’t rational, but a brand has a strange hold on people. Nabokov describes a similar cynical humour of the falseness in advertising in even better terms, and I never resist quoting him:

“…the world they [advertisers] create is pretty harmless in itself because everybody knows that it is made up by the seller with the understanding that the buyer will join in the make-believe. The amusing part is…that it is a kind of satellite shadow world in the actual existence of which neither the sellers nor buyers really believe in their heart of hearts…”

But Nabokov wrote before there was a clear demarcation between the real life and the made up world of the advertisement. If this clear line between “ad” and “world” ever existed in Nabokov’s time, it has been fully eroded by advertisers who not only put ads into movies, but make sure their celebrity is candidly filmed consuming a product in the “real world”. The idea is to make the giving and taking of status more authentic by conflating the world of the ad, the art, and the actual world.

This deliberate obfuscation is the most pernicious delusion of all. It strikes me as unfair and as the most profound kind of lie imaginable, approaching the Platonic form of falsehood. The only reasonable response is to distrust every screen–no grain of salt is big enough. We cannot remain innocent in an age where everybody knows advertisers have hitherto unprecedented information about us, and they exist only to find new invasive ways to flatter us (“you’re so charitable and good”) or threaten us (“you’re not charitable or sexy enough”).  

And so, anybody who makes money by selling us something cannot be an impartial status bestower.  Measure your status on your own terms, or by the intimate people in your life who don’t benefit from praising or criticizing you. The people who think buying a product has any bearing on their status or character whatsoever is under a delusion not very different than the hypnotized man who makes love to a chair.

A lap in Mario Kart 64 played, narrated by James Joyce

09 Saturday Jun 2012

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– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Ineluctable modality of Nintendo. Signatures of all things I am here to read: cacophonous car crash, bump, traverse, thumped, reversed. Racing relentless animalistic pilgrims ever heading forward. I bypass evil yellow man, speaking dung in tongues. Imagonnaween. Surrounded by swirling seaside shells, I move onwards. No, hit! How? Star power subterfuge. A surprise from behind. Only to listen harder. Illstarred heresiarch. Ah. The eluctable modality of the audible. Oh, catch up catch up. Nebeneinander nebeneinander. His pace slackened. Victim of discarded fruit. ananaB.

–Wahoo! Wahoo!

Overtake. I’m ahead, not by much. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Onwards. Must I come to know that question mark? Mystery is a theme I am trying to escape.

Peach: (A tempo) Let’s go!

Bowzer: (Stringendo) Rraawwwr!

DEAR  DRIVING  DIRTY

Arr turns. R turns by rote. Angling hopping and hoping. Let me pass a pike’s progress.

Beach level. He rooted in the sand, dabbling, delving, and stopped to listen to the air. Slow now. Careful cavernous cavorting. Engaged! Open hallway. Now, red shell shall put Toad beyond the veil for good. Cadaver. Pugnosed driver. Take him out. Stymied suddenly by bifurcated banana excrescence, again! Divine intervention: substantially consubstantial.
Raised on reason, race on. Moving through the air high spars of a threemaster, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship. Lead. Led. Leading this leg’s end. Legend. To beat, or not to beat?

With what meditations did Peach articulate her succumbing to the constellations power?

Star music! On a stardivarius. Weep. The infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way song, nascent enough yet moribund, prophesying 2nd place.

Damn toad I tried to pass him but his heart was going like mad and no I said no I won’t no.

Toronto-Toronto-Toronto, 2012

An interactive game for my readers

17 Thursday May 2012

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Today we live in a generous, enlightened age. Happily, we understand that school boys and girls innately comprehend the highest reaches of literature, science and math—they aren’t simply empty vessels to be filled by caveman exercises like reading from a book. A similar enlightenment extends to adult readers, who are no longer belittled by having their role confined to simply reading. Technology makes readers feel like engaged participants in what they read, or, because reading literary masterpieces should be about more than reading words on paper, the book itself actually comes alive in their hands. Readers of mine can comment on and share my work, but I want more  for my small, noble following. That’s why I’ve decided to create a little treasure hunt in every post from now on. It’s just like a real treasure hunt, only instead of hunting for gold booty you’re looking for shoddy work.

Hidden somewhere in every future post is a “mistake.” It might be a typo, a factual error, bungled research, or perhaps a ghastly howler like failing to join a coordinating conjunction to an independent clause with a comma. It’s a wild game! Anything can happen.

So, read future posts with a fine-toothed comb, and keep a record of all the “errors” you find. Be sure to store your record in a safe place, because one day I’ll ask my readers to report back all the “mistakes” they’ve found. The reader with the longest list gets a special, secret prize! In order to keep the excitement at fever pitch, I won’t disclose the prize now, but I can promise you that it’s either both very expensive and prestigious or very thoughtful.

Also, double points will be awarded to those who go backwards and find errors in already published articles. Having a hunch that I’d hold a contest just like this, I intentionally planted mistakes in my pieces all along. As a tip, when you’re deciding exactly where in my back catalogue to dive in, pieces where I defend the values of things like corporal punishment, eugenics and pop-culture are ripe for error.

In a piece of private fan-mail I once received, one very sharp reader said of my work: “The mistakes and misstatements in it form an uninterrupted series so complete as to seem artistic in reverse, making one wonder if, perhaps, it had not been woven that way on purpose to be turned into something pertinent and coherent when reflected through a looking glass.” I have contacted this astute reader, V Sirine, and awarded him one point, and consoled him that, yes, my blunders are indeed high-art.

So next time you come across a mistake in a blog, anywhere, remember that bloggers are devoted craftsman, like me, and the “mistake” of my peers was surely just planted on the sly in preparation for a similar treasure hunt to take place in the future. Yes, we do all kinds of things for our readers.

Love,
JD

Post-Script: as you likely guessed, there is one mistake in the above piece. Let the hunt begin!

 

Overzealous parking police

10 Thursday May 2012

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While it is hard to fault someone for carrying out their chief function, there is a disproportionate amount of police force devoted to procuring money from people whose only crime is turning off their cars and walking away. When you think about it, it’s odd that we can freely drive on public roads anywhere and for any length of time, but must hand over money the second we desist.

There are different classes of parking infractions, but none of them constitute an egregious moral breech. Of course, I am not against paying for parking and punishing those who don’t pay, but it’s a question of how tightly it’s enforced. The ebb and flow of a hockey game requires the invisible presence of a ref who skilfully balances the ratio of infractions to called-penalties. Parking your car in Toronto feels like playing in a hockey game where the ref blows the whistle on every single tiny hook and hold, real or imagined.

I don’t use “imagined” loosely. I’ve heard of enough instances where someone received a ticket after paying to park. Keep in mind the parallel to hockey doesn’t really exist: refs have to make key split-second decisions during an impossibly fast game, while the parking police leisurely observe dormant vehicles. While the incompetence, or perhaps malevolence, involved in ticketing someone who has paid for parking isn’t standard, it is baffling and inexcusable. If brushing off fulminating heckles is an inevitable part of the ref’s job, we owe parking police a backlog of abuse.

That people who pay for parking shouldn’t suffer an additional charge is obvious, but it used to be possible to leave the car for a minute without receiving a guaranteed ticket. This should still be possible…risky, but possible. The equilibrium is currently too far askew.  Parking police are ubiquitous. If we adjust to the current  pressure and everyone always pays for parking, the parking police will actually be out of a job, truly a paradoxical revenge. Unless, of course, they ticket those who have paid! The fault isn’t with the individual ticketers…they’re just following orders. They are required by the city to issue a minimum amount of tickets. Parking tickets must constitute a substantial stream of income and budgets are dependent on these dollars, so parking infractions need to be found, whether they’re really there or not. I hope the parking police’s distant cousin, the police, hunt terrorists, drug dealers and rapists as vigilantly and effectively as parked cars are hunted. 

There’s a lesser-known but pervasive parking evil that is quite simply an open racket perpetrated by the city. For six months of the year my street, like numerous others downtown, requires drivers (who have already paid the city for an overnight parking permit) to alternate every two weeks what side of the road they park on. Before midnight it’s on the left, after midnight it’s on the right. Without fail, the next morning there is a parking police ticketing a procession of cars whose owners were guilty of simply forgetting what day it is.

My roommate’s working life as a bar manager makes him especially vulnerable to succumbing to this trivial law. He can’t move his car before he goes to work in the afternoon because then he’s liable to get a ticket for moving it too early. It’s understandable that when he returns from a ten hour bartending shift at 3-4am he doesn’t always have the presence of mind to recall that it’s precisely the month’s halfway point. No mens rea! He is a hard worker, not a nefarious parker to be punished. It was a legal park when he parked, but in this surreal Daliesque world where the law is tied to melting clocks, such is justice. It has cost him literally hundreds of dollars. 

What does the city accomplish by demanding drivers play a veritable game of parking hopscotch? This has nothing to do with snow removal, as the law is not in effect during winter. If it’s to do with street cleaning, why is it essential the way is cleared for them to clean first thing in the morning when they have two weeks to clean? Anyone who doubts this is purely a money grab is adorable. If there is a reason it must be this way, I am all ears.

Otherwise, this deplorable bylaw should be removed immediately and the city should retroactively compensate my unfortunate roommate. That would be a nice gesture. Of course, anyone who believes the city will do the honourable thing and consciously change the law so as to make less money is living inside a Dali canvas.