Big Fat Hairy Living

I bought a new sofa. It will replace the ugly old falling-apart one I got many years ago when I had much less decor sense than I have now.

It was designed in Canada and will arrive with the fabric of my choice (pictured above) in four to eight weeks. I also got the matching chair.

Alan and Shawn laughing about something funny Brodie said.

Paul and Dell relaxing outside.

Jim drinking beer and eating 2-4-1 pizza.

A statue in one of the food booths.

A cute guy I saw on the street.

A cute dog watching the parade.

A trashy drag queen in the parade.

More dancing queens in the parade.

Bob and me at the parade.

Jim and Alan being cute.

Brodie snapping photos from a ladder.

One of the best costumes in the parade.

Mark and me. Isn’t he cute?

Bitterlawngnome took this picture of us on Church Street this weekend. From left to right: Mark, Huw, Brodie, and me.

Why we need Pride week.

(If you’re American, you can do something to help.)

When we celebrate this weekend in Toronto, let’s remember how truly lucky we are to live in a country where we have the protection of the law. Too many of us don’t.

Remember two months ago when I mentioned some guy who had posted on his blog about studies showing a link between circumcision and reduced HIV infection rates in Africa? Remember when one commenter said that gay men who are against routine child circumcision are members of the “sacred foreskin cult” who are “rattling their diva crowns?” And remember when the guy who wrote the original post agreed and all but stated that gay men who are against routine circumcision are pedophiles?

Well, someone just pointed out to me that a new study has come out, and guess what? Come on, guess.

… male circumcision, which in previous studies had been found to be important in controlling AIDS, becomes statistically irrelevant once the study controls for the number of prostitutes in a country. The study finds that the more Muslim countries of North Africa do indeed suffer much less AIDS than southern and western Africa, but this lower prevalence is not due to higher numbers of circumscribed males in these Muslim communities, but rather results from the fact that there are significantly fewer prostitutes in northern Africa on a per capita basis.

and

While male circumcision may indeed reduce the risk of transmission by some 50% to 60% in each sexual encounter, reducing single encounter transmission rates alone cannot control the epidemic. The reason is that individuals in highly infected countries have multiple contacts with the infected so reducing transmission rates only defers the inevitable.

Not that routine child circumcision would be ethical even if it could reduce transmission rates. Just like routinely removing breast tissue from baby girls isn’t ethical even though it would eliminate female breast cancer.

This time I’ve had too much. Really.

I’m designing something for the Quality Assurance department so that they can test one of our products. In a company that didn’t suck, I’d be given a clear set of requirements as to how to design this piece of test equipment. In this company, of course, I’m given vague verbal guidelines. So I do my best, attempting to get clarification as to what is really needed, and I send the final design off to the person who will be using it to make sure that it’s what he wants. He looks at it and tells me “As long as you’ve verified that the dimensions are correct, it looks good.”

Not that it’s relevant to anything, but he has an ugly moustache and particularly bad hair. I say particularly bad because the place I work with is full of middle aged engineers and so there’s enough bad hair to go around. His is like Spock’s, but worse. Much worse.

Not trusting his verbal assurances — I bullshit my way out of stuff at work all the time and I can recognize another bullshitter from a mile away — I send the design off to one of the mechanical engineers to check. He e-mails back a response and asks a few questions.

Five minutes later, moustache man, who is always careful to put as little as possible in writing, arrives with my manager in tow. My manager wants to know why I designed this product the way I did and where I came up with all these requirements. Moustache man, of course, decides to join in and point out flaws in what I’ve done, flaws that he didn’t notice when he looked at it on his screen just half an hour ago.

The sad thing is that I know he’s not being malicious. If he were malicious, I might be able to respect him for being so cunning in trying to bring me down. But he’s not malicious. He’s stupid, and that’s just plain unforgivable.

So I’ve decided that, as much as I hate engineering, there’s got to be a job that I hate less than this one. I was too foolish to see it at the time, but the job I had at my previous workplace, stupid co-workers aside, was a dream compared to this one. So onto the job sites goes my freshly updated résumé.

(Click to enlarge.)

I saw his front too, but I wasn’t able to take pictures. He had an ear ring. And a big package.

The Premier has just announced some pre-election transit goodies, including

• An extension of the Yonge subway to Highway 7,
• A rail link to the airport from downtown,
• Light rail all the way across Eglinton, Finch West, Sheppard East, Jane, and Don Mills,
• Light rail along Dundas from Kipling to Hurontario and from Kennedy station to Malvern,
• An extension of the Scarborough RT to Malvern,
• Light rail along the waterfront from Union station to Long Branch, and
• A busway on Yonge from Finch to Steeles.

That’s just a fraction of the stuff inside the City of Toronto. There are extensive improvements and expansion to regional commuter rail and even rapid transit for Brodie in Hamilton. What’s more, the province will pay 65% and will ask the federal government to pay 35%. Cities won’t have to pay any of the capital costs. I’m wetting my transit panties.