Warbler central

It's been raining hard for a few days now. Luckily, our backyard cherry tree was a popular spot for several birds to wait out the storm. Breakfasts got longer and longer as I watched Wilson's warblers, a willow flycatcher, and a half dozen or so yellow-rumped warblers flitting about. Here's some terrible shots of a male Wilson's warbler. It would seem that photographing a 4 inch bird from 10 feet away requires a zoom lens.

Infinite Jest

This week, after months of heavy reading, I finally finished Infinite Jest. Finishing was sad. I feel like I've lost my best friend.

At first reading the book gave me the howling fantods. Why was the author so hostile to the reader? Why use a bunch of invented acronyms without defining them? Why write in gigantic multi-page blocks of paragraph free text? Why publish in a format that makes it physically painful to hold the gigantic book? Why use words whose definition was surely unknown even to the author before he looked them up in a thesaurus? And most annoyingly, why have endnotes instead of footnotes, so that I have to search through the end of the book to read a useless additional comment interrupting the flow of the narrative?

Luckily a friend who had read it recommended that I stick with it. There's method in the madness, he said. So I ploughed on and kept reading. And suddenly I got sucked in to the Infinite Jest world. I couldn't get enough of the Enfield Tennis Academy, the Quebecois wheelchair assasins, the bizarre O.N.A.N politics, and the hilarious AA stories.

When it was over, I did something I've never done before. I went back to the start of the book and started reading it again. I thoroughly enjoyed the first 100 pages a second time, with the new found understanding of the David Foster Wallace universe, before the madness of what I was doing caught up to me. Truly this is a novel that will stick with me for a long time. I look forward to the vanishing memories of the next five years so that I can go back and read it again.

Youth Devlopment Sales

Today a kid from Youth Development Sales came to our door selling chocolate almonds. While I was distracted, a less cynical roommate purchased chocolate goodies from these awful exploiters of child labour.

Let's read the back of the chocolate almond box

"Thank you for your continued support.

Your salesperson is part of a supervised program organized to give the youth of your community an opportunity to be constructively active after school and on weekends. Through this valuable business experience, they will gain confidence and develop a sense of responsibility and leadership, therefore allowing for a more positive attitude and outlook.

20% of purchase price goes to the youth sales person. Remainder to production, distribution, and prizes."

60 cents of this 3 dollar box of almonds goes to the child who's below minimum employment age in B.C., and $2.40 goes to the distribution and production, which is to say the scammers exploiting child labour. None of the money goes to anything charitable, though the sales pitch is carefully designed to sound like a fundraiser.

There's an address on the box
Youth Development Sales
#213-1755 Robson Street
Vancouver, B.C.
V6G 3B7

I feel like something ought to be done. But what? Any one know of a child services organization I could report this to?