October 30, 2002
The tipping culture

The tipping culture here in Montreal (or Canada as a whole, I don't know if it's different in other regions) is somewhat new to me. I was born in a place where tipping is illegal because it is considered to be a form of bribery, and in Australia, you would tip a someone if you were pleased with the service - it is not expected, and certainly not compulsory.

Here, it seems the contrary. I've been made aware that tipping is part of the waiter's salary, and that you are expected to tip about 15% of your bill. Now, I've already said I'm confused about how the tax is not included in the price, but inconsistently so. It seems amazing that I have to actually fork out an extra 30% on top of the original cost shown on the menu.

You could say that "one gets used to it" - as humans we are able to adapt to survive. However, I question the need for unnecessary complexity. I am not yet familiar with the employment benefits system here, but this system seems to be potentially unfair for the employees too.

Posted by sniffles at 12:25 PM | Comments (11)

The meeting at the cafe

As his voice took over my listening mind, my eyes watched well-wrapped ladies in winter coats and scarves filing through the door. Ladies, not women. Ladies who would have almost-feathers in their warm little hats, their delicate shadows following their delicate steps, three-inch make-up and wrinkled red lips, coming in from the cold for perhaps a coffee.

We were sheltered in the strange nook near the door, where the table threatened to flip hot liquid over us if we were careless. The man on the other side of the doorway saw my empty gaze and smiled. I was being seduced by words which trembled with truth but I awoke ever so slightly, and smiled in return.

Suddenly the old Chinese woman whom I'd walked past on the sidewalk half an hour earlier moved across the window, a tall sprig of sword lily in one hand. Half an hour later, I would walk past the shop where she had bought the flower for a dollar. She was sitting on a bench, staring into space, then pointedly at me. I couldn't remember if I'd said "Bonjour" or if I had tried to smile. Strange, because we might have shared the same mother tongue.

The last words trailed and evaporated along with the steam from my tea, I roused from a spell cast and broken. We heard the sirens from fire trucks miles before we saw them and continued hearing them for some miles afterwards, stopping the conversation abruptly each time one passed until it became practical to speak once more.

Posted by sniffles at 02:51 AM | Comments (1)

October 25, 2002
Manifest

I needed to examine some specific ideas, and today, I met a philosopher.

Yesterday, a lovely surprise arrived in the form of a gift of precious tea.

Yesterday, the girl next to me on the bus was reading Sartre, and we had a little laugh because I was reading Simone de Beauvoir.

Today, I wished words didn't have to exist so that I wouldn't feel so inadequate.

Posted by sniffles at 11:43 PM | Comments (1)

Bowling for Columbine

"Bowling for Columbine" by Michael Moore is a documentary which investigates the culture of fear within the masses, and health and welfare systems which are unjust in relation to the high rate of gun crime in the USA.

CNN Entertainment didn't give a flattering review, but I believe it's a very worthwhile film that shouldn't be missed for the execution and presentation of its opinions, whether you're American or not. Something I'm finding rather amusing is that the negative reviews I've read so far seem to nitpick about Michael Moore's personality and dress-sense rather than the content of the film itself, which appears to just get dismissed because of aforementioned personality and dress-sense.

At the bottom of IMDB page about this film, there are some interesting reactions by strong-minded individuals. I'd like to know if K-mart has stuck to its promise of not selling bullets anymore. Can someone please verify?

In any case, I highly recommend this film - which doesn't happen very often ;) - so go see.

Posted by sniffles at 12:41 AM | Comments (5)

October 24, 2002
Dangers of wandering

I didn't take the bus I ought to have taken and worried a little about how to navigate east, wondering how reliable my memory is given the destination I had in mind.

A woman with a shock of red-brown hair stood next to me, the skin on her face sagging a little from age. She wore a great big rust-coloured jacket (almost everyone is wearing big jackets now) and in one hand she carried a large, bulging plastic bag. There was nothing out of the ordinary about her appearance, it was just that she appeared to be murmuring continually, perpetually carrying on a conversation with someone. I thought she was speaking to the girl who was seated just in front of her, but the other certainly wasn't responding when she appeared to ask questions.

Suddenly I caught her saying a familiar name, shortly followed by "Australia". I froze. I could have misheard, surely? Then she said, "What are you going to do?"

What am I going to do? I don't really know.

I lingered on the bus for one more stop with the intention to see what else she would say, but she moved up to the front of the bus, still murmuring. We got off together and she headed south. I watched her trundle along the path, caught somewhere between puzzlement and wonder, and reluctantly began to find my way to where I wanted to go.

Posted by sniffles at 11:28 AM | Comments (0)

October 21, 2002
Empty places

He said "Snow!" and I said, "What?"

"It's snowing!" And so it was, already.

Fleeting flakes of white spiralling under the orange lamp, and it seemed as if we were shut within a glass bubble world that someone has just picked up and shaken. All this prettiness, but my mind was far elsewhere.

The Menzies Building at the Clayton Campus of Monash University is 11-storeys high, its corridors known for being dank and claustrophobic. Affectionately called "The Ming Wing", you can expect at least one of its escalators to be broken on any given day, and upon walking out the northern exits, you get caught within a blast of wind, apparently as a direct result of the construction of the building itself. Its rooms tend to be much too tiny for a class of ten. I had been in some of these rooms as a student, and then later, as a tutor, reinforcing the virtues of programming in C. It seems surreal being able to visualise the location of the shooting yesterday, 6 years after the incident at Port Arthur. I have no more words.

Posted by sniffles at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)

October 14, 2002
Precious laughter

Yesterday, just outside the strange little laundry, I'd stumbled across a small figurine of the Laughing Buddha, made of the same kind of ceramic as the Indian elephant Cat gave me for luck. He was lying on his back on the cold concrete, still crosslegged, his robe defying gravity and clinging to his knees, his face looking up at me and laughing. So I picked him up and placed him safely under a tree, so that he wouldn't get stepped on, or trip anyone over.

Having met at the appointed street corner, we walked onwards and upwards, slicing through sharp sun and dappled shadows, weaving threads which form friendship, drawing parallels and differences, watching caterpillars crawl in circles.

The sun rises much later now, and these days, I wake before the shadow of the streetlamp outside my window swings from the left to the right, where it stretches long and curved, as if reaching across the wall for the window below. Unexplained lethargy clouded any mental clarity I might otherwise have had today, but I finally dragged my sorry self out for a walk ...

The beauty of the world which thrives in hives where lives can be lived in freedom is no compensation for the pain. Ivied walls, stretching staircases, ornamented doors, laughter over a bottle of beer, two squirrels chasing each other round a tree. Yet being able to acquire joy at such scenes and such simplicity is what we have to fight for.

On the way back, I passed the strange little laundry. The Laughing Buddha was no longer there.

Posted by sniffles at 11:40 PM | Comments (1)

October 11, 2002
Hands

The boy on the bus had beautiful hands, but I did not see them at first. He was holding onto a pile of records, of which I tried to read the title of the one at the top, but it had a strange design and was facing away from me, hidden under a red camera bag.

It was crowded. The blond woman who stood in the aisle between us wore a painted expression of impatience and utter boredom. A kind of thank-god-it's-friday-dom. I noticed that my sunglasses were terribly greased, and tried in vain to clean them, and it was when I looked up that I saw the glint in his eyes, staring straight into mine, before someone's coat brushed past my line of sight.

His fingers tapping to the tune of something I couldn't hear, and I watched, entranced by their rhythm and soundless dance. A musician. Piano? Drums? Guitar? I studied the movement of his thumb on his right hand, how it covered more space for each beat than his other fingers. Guitar, more than likely. Not a keyboardist. And so I stole a photo of his hands.

At the station, passengers flooded off, and he, too, got up to leave. A glance and half a smile, a subtle movement of lips which could have been any of "goodbye", "see you around", "au revoir" or "bonne journée" and I wanted to say, "I'm sorry, your hands are beautiful", but he disappeared down the stairs and I wondered why I remained in my seat when I have no idea where I am headed.

Posted by sniffles at 11:35 PM | Comments (1)

October 09, 2002
Shadow

Waking up with a migraine is no fun, but I'm realising that no amount of jasmine tea, coffee (in case it was really only caffeine withdrawal), fruit, cucumer salad or orange juice is going to make it go away.

On Sunday, down at Hurley's where the storytellers were transporting us to other worlds with their words, I took the chance to ask my new-found friends if they had any ideas about Polly. Kris (or Chris?) had a thought that's interesting: that the name Polly might be related to parrots which were considered Polynesian birds, and feeding crackers (because they seemed to like it) might have been a way of taming them. I'm not sure about the truth of all this, but it seems a nice theory.

Trying to find the origin of parrots is strangely difficult too, and I have a feeling that the Britannica would be more helpful than the Web for something like this (any of you guys got the P book of Britannica?). What is fascinating though, is that the parrot might be a much, much older bird than we realise.

Cos has posted a report on viewing SVG under Linux, and made me smile with Sweet dreams of Cat and Girl. And yesterday, Dan made me laugh with this. I have awesome friends.

Posted by sniffles at 04:02 PM | Comments (0)

October 08, 2002
The room

Magic woven in words spoken, poetry in froth of beers drunk too quickly.

Smoke clouds the days before and the days after, tonight's crowd in the pub will sound the same as tomorrow's. The photographer's eye sees that the room is too dim, the light too uneven; the musician's senses are attuned to the silent piano, delighting in the sounds of familiar songs through smoked-out speakers. The joker juggles humour, linguist joins the jest, the poet breathes.

The coasters on the table ask on one side, "What is your favourite song?" and on the other, righteously proclaim: "Guinness. Pure Genius. It's like drinking your favourite song." I question its ingenuity.

Between being enchanted by the storytellers, we spin our own tales between pints, everyone has stories, snatches of history from which we weave one that is the now, the present carrefour.

The cold steals in through gaps in the windows, keeping the drinks chilled and the waitresses chirpy. Minutes nailed to the dartboard and time stayed away until we tire.

But meanwhile, it shall be of butterflies and spiders, friendships, loves and the lost art of carving quills.

Posted by sniffles at 12:33 AM | Comments (0)

October 07, 2002
Montreal Pet Hates

I love many things about this city except for a couple of small issues, and funnily enough, the top three things which have annoyed me most to-date are all related to money. I'd been thinking about writing on these for a while, but it took a $7 bag of grapes to finally push me over the edge. So, here goes.

Firstly, the tax is not always included in the prices you see. This isn't such a bad thing, apart from the fact that some places include the tax and some don't, and it's a bit of a shock to be hit with a 15% tax at the cashier. The inconsistency is confusing, and I'd even begun to appreciate the GST in Australia, where the GST is included in the price if the item is taxable, and your receipt shows the amount of GST you have paid. Confusion for that system arises, for example, when you have to pay GST if you are eating in at a restaurant but not otherwise, so you see two different prices for the same menu item. However, you always see the true price of what you would be paying for, and I guess I've been spoiled by that.

The second thing which gets on my goat is the Canadian currency, specifically, the coins. The coins are: $2, $1, 25 cents, 10 cents, 5 cents, and 1 cent. For the first week or so, I kept confusing the 10-cent and the 5-cent, but after much retraining to remember that the puny coin is really the 10-cent, I now confuse the 25-cent and the 5-cent given their similar sizes. It doesn't help that the number written on the coin is much too small to be read in a hurry when you are struggling for change at the cashier.

Now I shall tell you the story of the $7 bag of grapes. It turns out that at the Metro supermarket at du Parc, the prices of vegetables and fruits are shown in pounds, eventhough you get charged in kilograms at the cashier. Later on, I realised that the price in kilograms is also shown, but have a look at relative font sizes. I sniff a marketing ploy. It wasn't the price of grapes that I was annoyed about, it was more that the purchasing process seems to be wrought with unpleasant and unnecessary surprises. I'm normally pretty good at estimating how much I would need to pay at the cashier, and I was not particularly impressed to find that the bag of grapes was worth a fifth of my grocery shopping today only after I have paid for everything. Well, I got a refund, so that was one good thing.

Posted by sniffles at 09:10 PM | Comments (4)

October 05, 2002
Counting votes and SVG

I meant to post this a couple of days ago, but somehow, kind of, for a multitude of reasons, didn't get around to it ...

Some of you would have seen that Karl posted a vote on Oct 2. The supporting script is very simple, and I'm linking it here in case someone finds it useful.

Essentially, it's a Perl script that stores (and counts) votes, and outputs the results in SVG (you should be able to right-click and view the source). It uses the very primitive method of issuing a cookie to prevent re-voting, a method which has many flaws, but the focus of this script was more on generating the graphic. If you don't have a SVG viewer or have problems with your plug-in, the graphic looks like this:

Feel free to bug me with questions or comments, as usual. :)

Posted by sniffles at 05:35 PM | Comments (1)

October 02, 2002
Polly want a cracker?

Sometimes, trying to find the origin and reasoning behind very common language or common etiquette can be surprisingly difficult. I've search the Web to no avail, so maybe one of you guys might know?

Here goes: where do you think the phrase "Polly wants a cracker" comes from?

In the hunt, however, I dug up a history of common phrases, and a story about how young Polly Nomial (our heroine) is accosted by that notorious villain Curly Pi, and factored (oh horror!!!) [Warning: high level maths].

Posted by sniffles at 10:38 AM | Comments (10)

October 01, 2002
Saturday on Saint-Denis

On Saturday, as I was heading towards Saint-Denis I saw an unusually large crowd gathered in front of a building. At first I thought it was a protest of some kind, but as I got closer I realised it was a huge gathering of deaf people. It was rather odd walking past a whole group of people who were apparently silent apart from the rustling of clothes and handbags, except that it was oh so very noisy because they were all having deep and animated conversations with their faces, bodies and hands.

The theatre school on Saint-Denis was having an open day and I wandered in, peeked at scripts and students who were painting or making costumes, and left a haiku in the "haiku corner", which was really a sheet of brown paper taped to a wall.

Posted by sniffles at 12:07 PM | Comments (2)