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Dec. 27th, 2014
Crowds were skating on the reflecting pond and people wandering about on a very spring-like day.
This CBC item describes a terrible story. Is there more to this, any real reason why this can't be fixed? I wonder, and hope for the best for Mr. McGlaughlin.
A 60-year-old Dawson City, Yukon, man whose birth was never registered says he has spent years trying to get recognized by the Canadian government.
Donovan McGlaughlin, 60, says he was born in Ontario. His father was First Nations from the U.S. and his mother was a Canadian.
"Both my parents distrusted all government," he says. "For a lack of a better term, they were anarchists and they chose not to register my birth. I'm technically what's called stateless."
He says he was homeschooled and left home at 15. It wasn't until his 20s that he tried to get an official ID, but without a birth certificate, he had no luck.
[. . .]
He has been in the Yukon for decades but still has no birth certificate, passport or social insurance number.
Al Jazeera reports on a terrible atrocity. May the father be punished; may the daughter be helped.
A 13-year-old girl has accused her father of giving her to Nigeria's Boko Haram group that ordered her to explode a suicide bomb in Kano city.
The girl said she and two other females were sent to carry out an attack on a textile market but after the other detonated their bombs, she decided not to complete the mission.
Police Superintendent Adenrele Shinaba said on Wednesday that the girl left her suicide vest on the seat of a taxi that took her to the hospital for treatment of her wounded leg after shrapnel hit her in the market bombing. The taxi driver alerted police who then arrested her.
The girl told a news conference on Wednesday night that her captors asked if she wanted to go to paradise and, when she said yes, explained she would have to be a suicide bomber.
"When I was told I would have to die to enter paradise, that I would have to explode a bomb and die, I said I cannot do it," she said.
When they threatened to kill her, she allowed them to strap her into a vest primed with explosives, saying "I was afraid to be buried alive".
The Toronto Star's Laura Armstrong reports on the thriving Canadian gay bathhouse scene.
Bathhouses date back to the Roman Empire, initially built to maintain hygiene in major cities. By the late 1950s and ’60s, as the need for a public place to wash up declined, bathhouses began drawing crowds by offering a discreet place for gay men to meet and have sex in a time when sodomy was still a crime. Bathhouses saw their heyday in the 1970s, before being vilified in the 1980s during the AIDS epidemic.
Today, bathhouses face new challenges. The rising acceptance of homosexuality and the growing number of gay dating websites and hook-up apps are endangering the once-booming businesses.
The Associated Press reported earlier this year that Damron, the publisher of an annual gay travel guide, found the number of bathhouses across the U.S. dropped from nearly 200 in the late 1970s to about 90 by 1990. In the last decade, the number of bathhouses nationwide dropped to 70 following closures in San Diego, Syracuse, Seattle and San Antonio.
[. . .]
The city’s big-name bathhouses, [Spa Excess president and director Robert Knight] said, still see a lot of business, as do locations in other Canadians cities. The difference between bathhouses in Toronto and some of the ones facing closure in the United States is hospitality, Knight said.
“Typically, (American) owners put just enough money in to take money out. It’s not every bathhouse, but many don’t offer decent customer service,” Knight said. “A lot of them are seedy. A lot of them have been taken over by drug dealers and users.”
Wired's Christina Bonnington reports on a camera that, I suppose, is cool but also seems rather redundant.
When I look at my bare beige apartment walls, I lament the passing of personal cameras and Polaroids. If I want real life copies of my precious smartphone photos now, I must use a service like Printstagram. Polaroid’s latest camera attempts to bridge that gap by blending the physical photo printing of yesteryear with today’s instant social media sharing.
The Socialmatic is a 14-megapixel camera that connects over Wi-Fi so you can post images to Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. (It actually runs Android, so you can download other apps or browse the interwebs on its 4.5-inch touchscreen, too). It comes with a 2-megapixel selfie camera on the back, because humans are now incapable of turning cameras around to take photos of themselves. It’s also GPS- and Bluetooth-enabled.
After you’ve futzed with your photos on its screen, the Socialmatic lets you print two by three-inch adhesive-backed photos you can stick on your wall, bedroom mirror, or Trapper Keeper. You’ll still have to resort to some other printing service if you want anything larger, but hey, at least you’ve got something you can share with friends in meatspace.
A Socialmatic with enough paper for 10 prints will cost you $300 through Photojojo; bump that to 110 for $344. You can buy a 25-pack of photo paper for $25, or two packs for $45.
Marginal Revolution linked to a remarkable BBC report.
Tax collectors in Russia have stumbled across a new way of getting people to pay their debts - by threatening to take away their cats, it's been reported.
State collectors in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk recently succeeded in getting a resident to pay 12,000 roubles ($198; £127) he owed in unpaid taxes after threatening to seize his expensive pedigree cat, Interfax news agency reports. When bailiffs arrived at the student's flat, they initially found nothing of value worth seizing - that is until they spied the British Shorthair cat he was holding and three of its kittens running around the place. "Because the animals are pedigree and expensive, the representative of the law decided to place the cat brood under arrest", Interfax quotes a statement from the region's court marshal's service.
In another case, bailiffs in the Siberian region of Tomsk placed four pedigree Scottish Fold kittens "under arrest" after their owner, a former businesswoman, failed to make payments into a company pension fund, Tass news agency reports. She was eventually allowed to keep the cats after managing to get hold of the money. And it seems it's not just people's beloved felines that have fallen prey to the latest scheme. In another Siberian region, Krasnoyarsk, a man who owed 20,000 roubles in unpaid utility bills had his "British Shorthair cat named Yasmin and his fluffy pet rabbit" seized, Interfax reports.
Speed River Journal's Van Waffle describes his experiences with a pet cat from his childhood, Grey Shadow.
She sounds lovely.
Christmas reminds me of Grey Shadow.
When I was growing up we had a lot of pets, but Grey Shadow was around longer than any of them. She began life outdoors near our cottage on Lake Erie, where we would later move permanently. Her mother was a feral cat, and the kittens were born on the bluff overlooking the beach. I was only three, but I remember the day one of the Salisbury girls from next door brought the long-haired grey kitten over to see if we would give her a home, and we did.
She took well to life as a pet. We had a beagle-hound cross named Snoopy, who became fast friends with Grey Shadow. In our house in Windsor we could run a circle from the kitchen through the dining room through the living room and back around again. Grey Shadow and I would chase each other tirelessly. Then she would dart to the sun room, hide behind the curtains and play with string I dangled over the back of the chair.
However, the outdoors remained part of her nature, and she preferred to be there. She was an expert huntress, so Mom always tied bells to her collar.
She sounds lovely.
The New York Times' Guy Trebay has a nice short biography up of Joel Simkhai, the man responsible for developing gay sex app Grindr.
Hanging on a wall behind Mr. Simkhai’s desk is a variety of masks, including one resembling Hannibal Lecter’s face restraint, references to the Grindr logo, which is a mask. Given the historic necessity for gay men to live in concealment, a mask may seem a curious choice of logo, and yet it is not altogether at odds with Mr. Simkhai himself, who though he wears his paradoxes lightly can sometimes seem like two very unalike personalities in the body of one small man.
Close to 40, he appears far younger and has about him the air of an overgrown adolescent. Head of a successful privately held and far-reaching international business, he is so low-key as to be easily be mistaken for a parking attendant. Boyishly handsome, with a toothy smile and a shock of dark hair, he claims to be beset by physical insecurities.
“Grindr made me get fit and go to the gym more, get better abs,” said Mr. Simkhai, who occasionally posts a shirtless photograph on his own profile. “People criticize it for being superficial, but I didn’t invent that in human nature. What Grindr does is makes you raise your game.”
Though he has inarguably effected seismic changes in contemporary gay male culture, altering not only how men meet, but also how they portray and even see themselves, he thinks of himself, he said, primarily as a service provider.
“If someone had said to me 10 years ago is, ‘Is it your dream to be a C.E.O. and manage people?’ I would have said no,” said Mr. Simkhai, who is a charter member of the Young Presidents’ Organization, an international network of chief executives under the age of 45; a multimillionaire capable of gleefully reporting that he redeemed a $14 Yelp coupon for lunch; and a marketing wizard who admits to having conceived of the influential Grindr cascade of thumbnail images while stoned.
I've a post up at Demography Matters inviting readers and commenters to leave feedback. (This could include you, too.) As always, what readerships care about matters.