BLAZE

Tonight I Have Officially Lost It

Good evening, and welcome to my mind. It's a weighty thing, my mind, on this cavernous October night, and so I'd like to share the burden with others. Read on if you dare.


A. My end-of-pennies campaign

How many times have you tossed a penny down the mall just to watch it skitter or thrown a penny out the window when you received it with your drive-through change? Many people perform these and other unusual behaviours to rid themselves of pennies, the laughably anachronistic coin. And when was the last time you stooped to pick up a penny? Perhaps, with the average hourly wage for a Canadian worker at $17.28 (Statistics Canada, April 2004), bending to retrieve a single cent simply isn't worth your time?

Pennies are silly in an age when the price is of the average Canadian home is $217,498 (2003, Canadian Real Estate Association, latest available figure). Minting pennies each year is a dreadful waste of money and resources, a harm to our environment, and a now-irrelevant support of the market apparatus. My campaign of four simply steps will do away with one of the biggest unnecessary costs in Canadian society.

1. Everyone turns in their pennies. Think about how many pennies you have stashed somewhere in your home: in your piggy bank, in your mad-money jar, in your wallets and purses, in your glove box, in the utility drawer, etc., etc., etc. OK? According to some informal estimates, the average Canadian has ready access to about $3.00 in pennies (obviously some of us have a few more than others). Imagine the economic benefits if all thirty-odd million of us suddenly donated all our pennies to the charities of our choice. This injection of some $100-million into the economy would have a substantial, and reverberating, effect.

2. The government rolls back the GST to five percent. Many people have campaigned to get rid of the GST entirely, but I don't believe that's on the government's agenda at this time, despite the fact that the GST is a regressive tax that unfairly burdens lower-income earners. A five-percent tax potentially eliminates the need for pennies, provided we gain the cooperation of one important party...

3. Retailers end the ridiculous practice of pricing by pennies. Can anyone explain the economic difference between $4.99 and $5.00? Right: there is no economic difference, just a certain psychological appeal. Well, the year-on-year savings to taxpayers offered by my end-of-pennies plan should more than pacify the right-wing capitalists among us who actually believe we're entitled to save a penny or two on the backs of third-world workers whenever we buy new shoes, shirts, sporting goods, incense holders, or superpacks of will-o-crisp at Wal-Mart. Pul-eeze!

4. The Canadian mint ceases to make new pennies. According to documents tabled in the House of Commons, since at least the mid 1990s (possibly earlier), a penny has cost more than its face value to mint, leading the Royal Canadian Mint to reduce the copper content of the Canadian penny and introduce other substances in its place. There are certainly enough pennies already in circulation to see us through the change to a decimal system. Within a year or two, pennies will disappear quietly from common coinage, like two-dollar bills and fifty-cent pieces: still acceptable as currency but rather unusual. Collectors can make their fortunes collecting pennies, and the rest of us will be relieved of the burden of this antiquated copper.

I know my campaign is hardly unique. Americans have been having this argument for years, and here's how one commentator summed up the situation in the US:

The Government's experience with the metric system and the Anthony dollar suggests that the public must be convinced that there is a pressing need to change anything which has become embroidered into the social and commercial fabric of society. Despite careful examination of the various arguments supporting the elimination of the penny, we cannot identify any benefits associated with price rounding and the cessation of penny production.

Aargh! It's time for Canada to be a leader and stop the insanity! Won't it be nice to know that those who buy and sell really are nickel-and-diming us? And can you tell that my heritage is only one-quarter Scottish?

The penny: its time has passed.


B. My end-of-daylight-saving-time campaign

Speaking of time: did you realize that most Canadians spend more months living on Daylight Saving Time than on so-called Standard Time? It's true: since 1986, North Americans (in those jurisdictions that follow Daylight Saving Time) set their clocks ahead one hour on the first Sunday in April and turn them back an hour on the last Sunday in October, giving us seven months on "daylight" time and only five on "standard" time.

The situation is even weirder in Europe. In the European Union, "Summer Time" begins on the last Sunday in March and ends on the last Sunday in October — creating a one-week lag between the two western continents. And Russian clocks are two hours ahead of Standard Time during the summer months, to take advantage of the early sunrise and lingering twilight. These discrepancies must pose some mathematical puzzles for international businesses!

Daylight Time has been with us consistently for almost a century, although the concept has its roots in the 1700s; it has been neither uniformly applied nor uniformly well received. The U.S. Department of Transportation, which is responsible for overseeing Daylight Time in the United States, promotes the adoption of Daylight Time for three reasons:

1. Daylight Saving Time saves energy.
2. Daylight Saving Time saves lives and prevents traffic injuries. (This point is contested by some agencies.)
3. Daylight Saving Time prevents crime.

These are all good reasons to adopt Daylight Time universally — that is, to get rid of the habit of swapping back to Standard Time for five months of the year. Since it would hardly affect the Majority World (areas of the globe between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, which receive roughly the same number of daylight hours year-round), I propose an international movement to shift the clocks forward by one hour globally.

Opposition to extend Daylight Time rests with the farming lobby, which argues that farmers' needs, production, and local conditions vary too widely to accept uniform application, and some religious groups (also with a few people who have sleep disorders or trouble setting their VCRs). The compromise position, of permanently setting clocks ahead thirty minutes, has been ruled out because of astronomers' preference that noon reflect the highest point of the sun in a time zone (although, given the geographical span of time zones, this preference is fairly arbitrary).

Perhaps a change would be the way to celebrate the centennial of Daylight Time, in 2016. I'm up for a campaign; how about you?

(In case you're interested in even more details about Daylight Time, here and here are two informative, if fairly similar, sites.)


C. The loss of Jacques Derrida

The intellectual world is a darker, sadder place today.

As CBC.ca put it: "World-renowned thinker Jacques Derrida, who helped found the school of philosophy known as deconstructionism, has died, French officials said Saturday [October 9]. Derrida was 74."

OK, so some of you are mourning other news, such as the death of Christopher Reeve or the announcement that Melissa Etheridge has breast cancer, or a personal loss, such as strikes us all. And these are equally terrible events, in their way. But I believe our world, caught up in its techno-positivistic late-capitalism tensions of the demands for ever-increasing production exceeding the capacity of sustainable consumption, needs more thinkers, more philosophers, more critics, and Derrida was one of the greatest.

Sure, maybe you can't define deconstructionism and maybe you wouldn't recognize a postmodernist if she tweaked your nose, but the world you know today was shaped by Derrida and other intellectuals in the late 1960s. Our society doesn't value intellectual labour very highly, but if we did, Derrida would have been one of our most valuable citizens.

Shortly before his death Derrida said, "Learning to live should also mean learning to die, taking into account and accepting the absolute nature of mortality with neither resurrection nor redemption." A person should keep this advice in mind, especially around family holidays.

I, for one, will miss Derrida.


And this just in...

VANCOUVER - A giant squid surprised a fisherman in British Columbia, worrying scientists who say its appearance could be another sign of global climate change.

Last Saturday, Goody Gudmundseth hoped to net a couple of salmon off the coast of Vancouver Island in Port Renfrew. Instead, when he felt a tug on the line, Gudmundseth knew he'd hooked into something else.

"When the rod went, I thought we got a really big chunk of weed or something," recalled Gudmundseth. "It was acting really different than usual."

The squid weighs 20 kilograms and measures about 1.5 metres long.

Scientists call it the Humboldt or giant flying squid [Dosidicus giagas]. They said it prefers warm water, which means Gudmundseth's catch is likely a long way from its home in the Gulf of California. The find is fuelling speculation about climate change.

"It may have come up with a ton of warm water or it might be that they're making their way north comfortably now," said Kelly Sendall, senior collection manager at the Royal BC Museum.

Gudmundseth almost decided to keep the squid for bait or to eat it as calamari. The squid has now become a reference specimen for the species in BC, Sendall said.

Another Humboldt squid was captured last month off the coast of Alaska. Scientists don't know whether the creatures' appearance will be a short-term one, or what effect they may have on the ecosystem.

Courtesy of CBC News Online Staff


Well, that's it for me. Thank you, thank you very much!

L