Tom's Opinion

I generally don’t enjoy watching sports except for international football (soccer for the Americans). Why I’m not entirely sure. More recently though I’ve noticed that international games that have my country as a contender keep my interest. These past Olympic games in Vancouver had me staying up until 4am nightly watching the Canadians. The tension I felt when Canada was playing for the gold in curling and hockey was strange to me. I started watching curling just so I could watch Canada play. It’s bizarre and new to me. I still can’t stand watching sports outside of the international arena.

Well not all sports I guess.

Formula 1 racing is my one sports passion, much more so than any international tourney except perhaps the World Cup. In F1 it’s all about the technology and driver cajones. The tech and skills of the drivers and pit teams is such a well choreographed enactment that it takes one’s breath away. It’s a sport with very few margins for error. A second at 300km/hr is almost 85m, halving that is 40m, halve that again and you’ve got 20m, still a huge distance. Can you react in a quarter of a second with an engine screaming behind your head at 18,000rmp, because if you don’t you just hit the wall 20m away? The timings have to be perfect and if they’re not it’s over. Every driver wants the same thing.

Yeah, F1 season starts Friday and I’m pumped. First race is on Sunday.

I find the duality pushed by the mainstream pop-culture to be very distressing. People are so often encouraged to live two lives. Think of how many times people tell us we should have two facebook accounts, one private one professional. Is it really that difficult for people to realize that the net is not private. If two people were caught being naughty on the beach they can’t hide behind anything, what exactly do we have to hide behind on the internet? Someone’s promise of “security” or an HTTPS.

The problem is not that people try so hard to live dual lives but that it is actually proposed as a solution to avoid potentially embarrassing situations. People create two lives and then cannot properly manage them and end up looking even worse when they cuss the boss off on one website then praise him on another only to realize they mixed the sites up.

An elegant solution to me seems to be to unite the personas. If you meet your boss at a bar when drunk don’t try to play it off as something you don’t do often, just accept it and move forward. After all, he’s there for a reason too isn’t he?

It’s kind of like the public bathroom paradox. We can all stand next to each other holding our dicks and pissing (guys) yet taking a crap is somehow different. Yes it stinks and no one wants to admit they produced that POS but we all do it and all NEED to do it so why the duality?

And so someone will say that public crapping duality arose in an age much less accepting and more strict about such things when we were all proper persons who learned our Latin and grammar. However, this is precisely the reason why we, in today’s enlightened age should not only dissuade such practice of duality but disallow it.

Have some integrity, honour, and self-respect for who you are and what you do.

Yes folks. I’ve reneged on my own decision. I’m going to be posting again, though there will be no schedule and the “flavour” of the place is likely to change.

Hope you enjoy the new blog.

I’ve decided I’m not going to renew the domain name for this blog which also means I’m going to simply close it down.

This blog began as a way to practice my writing. Someone, a fellow history student told me to write daily and to write anything I could think of. So I did and this blog was the result. I never desired to have a public place from which to broadcast, I needed writing practice. But the experiment has now changed. This blog will not cease to be, I’m moving it back to it’s old address:

www.kgang.com/blog

It’s just that it will no longer be it’s own entity and I will update it even less frequently than I already do.

My writing needs a different kind of practice now. I feel I’ve gleaned everything I could from the blog style of writing. It’s time to move on to something else.

If anyone actually reads this, I want to say thanks for doing so. I hope you enjoyed it. Email me if you want to get in touch or have a long distance email discussion.

Cheers.

A while back I talked about society’s obsession with efficiency. Over the last few days I’ve been witness to something quite opposite. At least I would call it opposite, what is after all the opposite of efficient? Waste.

The waste comes in the form of some sort of renovation or cleaning of student apartments. The process seems simple enough. A large waste bin is placed below the window of a given apartment and two burly men go into the place and start throwing everything out into the bin below. By everything I mean everything that isn’t screwed or nailed down.

The waste is the fact that most of the items being discarded are in relatively good shape, some are in excellent shape. I’m not certain why they don’t send the things to thrift shops. One of my roommates (a questionable source for any discussion) claims it’s because the immigrants began to fight over the free stuff that was waiting for pick up and so the decision was put forth to simply trash it all. The logic of that escapes me somewhat as does the reasoning of why you’d throw it out instead of giving it to a thrift agency. You save costs on landfill, transport, and the more elusive to quantify benefit of having a furnished population. The Norwegian state does after all provide for it’s people quite well and money that is going into new furnishings could go elsewhere if perfectly good furniture wasn’t being tossed in the landfill but instead given to less well off citizens.

It’s going on and it just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.