Prepaid

You know what's great? Not having to pay for things. By this, I don't mean stealing things, or getting stuff for free. I'm simply describing the absence of a cash or credit-card-signing transaction when it comes to pay for things.

My Starbucks card does this for me. I prepay $50 or so at Starbucks and then hand my card over every morning when I buy my coffee. I get that card back less than 5 seconds later and I'm on my way. No muss, no fuss. I noticed the other day that Subway has introduced a similar card -- it makes a lot of sense at stores who sell a lot of very low-priced items like coffee and sandwiches. In my opinion, Starbucks should let other stores use their payment system. They could probably sign up just about every convenience store and fast-food joint overnight. Customers would love it.

Even better than the Starbucks card, though, is the deal I have with the coffee guy across the street. He knows me, I know him. I give him a $20 every now and then and he tells me when I've used it up. Or not -- sometimes he lets me get a few bucks in the hole before he reminds me. Either way, it's a great system. I can go for a run without having to carry cash and before I go home I can stop by, grab an iced tea from the cooler, give him a nod and head on my way.

The Prisoner

I have just completed possibly the most painful TV viewing experience in recent memory, all 17 episodes of The Prisoner, the 1966/7 series apparently about a cold-war era spy who resigned his post and was then kidnapped and taken to "The Village", where various means were used to elicit the reason for his resignation. I was curious to watch it because I'd heard of the series many years ago when a primitive Apple II game based on the series was a popular pastime in the computer store that I worked at.

The series started out well: intriguing and mysterious. The Village is a visually interesting place, and the characters that populate it are uniformly odd and therefore entertaining for some time. Toward the middle, things got a little tiresome and the writing and acting became a little uneven. But then something, somewhere went terribly wrong and the show took a left turn into the completely bizarre and just fucking weird. The last two episodes in particular -- supposedly the finale that would wrap up the series -- were just entirely incomprehensible. Of course, the events of that episode were so strange and apparently random that I expect some dedicated fans can extract some sort of symbolism, but to my weary eyes it was just a huge steaming pile.

Kind of a cool idea, but ran out of gas pretty quickly.

An Inconvenient Truth

With a rare day to myself, I went for a run, did some errands, and then headed off to Tinseltown to catch the 12:30 viewing of "An Inconvenient Truth". My friend David MacLachlan blogged about this documentary a few months ago after being smart enough to have been hired by Google and therefore fortunate to have attended a talk by Al Gore given to Google employees back in April. The film is subtitled "A Global Warning" and deals with the climate crisis.

Gore's arguments are ironclad; the imagery in his presentation is striking. It's one thing to hear about glaciers vanishing, it's another to see before/after images of Alaskan, European and African mountain ranges taken 25 years apart. The photos of the collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf are terrifying, especially so when coupled with the explanation of how it happened, and the information about other ice masses that are also headed in the same direction.

Although skeptical about many things, I've never really been a skeptic about Global Warming -- the science behind it has always seemed tremendously sound -- and so the information presented in this film is not really new to me. What I did get from the film was a sense of the terrible urgency about the issue. Timeframes for dramatic, perhaps even catastrophic effects are in the 20-50 year range. Well within my lifetime and certainly within my daughter's. There are good arguments that we're already seeing catastrophic effects if we consider that last season's hurricanes are caused by warmer sea water, and that the drought in sub-Saharan Africa is one cause of the human tragedy in Darfur.

Please go see this film and visit climatecrisis.net for more information. It will make you feel like you should probably do something.

The Illiad

When I was in elementary school, I found a book in the library that told some of the stories of Greek mythology in clear prose and vivid drawings. Something about the stories in that book caught my attention — I borrowed it several times — and I have ever since had a fondness for Greek culture. I'd love to visit Greece one day. I expect that being exposed to those stories at an early age has probably had some contribution to my skepticism about religion in general, because of the absurdity of some of the stories told by the Greeks.

When I got to university, I decided that I'd like to read The Illiad and The Odyssey in order to get some of these stories straight from Homer. I borrowed the Illiad at least twice then and worked on it studiously, but never made very much headway with my busy schedule of Computer Science and Beer. By then, I also had developed a habit of falling asleep whenever I read anything, which come to think of it may have contributed to my unimpressive university career.

Ten or so years later, I tried again, and failed. Last year, during my attempt to clean up some long-standing tasks from my life, I put reading the Illiad on my reading list for the year, but again the book had to go back to the library before I'd finished it. It's really the Library's fault — they always want their books back too soon.

Finally, a couple of months ago, still working through last year's list, I gritted my teeth and determined to try again. I happened upon a translation that was a little easier to read than the others I had been reading, and I dove in. It wasn't easy, but with some luck (including a trip to a friend's wedding and being sick for a day) I found enough time to finish the book. Victory!

Here's a quick summary: The Achaeans (Greeks) have been fighting the Trojans for years because Paris kidnapped Meneleus's wife Helen. At the beginning of the tale, Agamemnon, Meneleus's brother and king of the Greeks, gets in a fight with Achilles, the best Greek warrior, and takes his wife Briseis at the request of her father. Achilles goes off in a huff and refuses to fight. He also asks his mother, Thetis, to convince Zeus to not let the Greeks have victory over the Trojans without Achilles help, something that one thinks might be overkill since the Greeks hadn't been able to sack the city in the nine years they'd already been trying. Zeus agrees, to the dismay of several of the other immortals.

The rest of the book is a litany that goes something like this:

1. Two warriors approach each other
2. They introduce themselves and give a brief precis of their lineage and family history
3. They trash talk each other
4. One of them immediately kills the other, with a brief description of the injury (eg. spear spattering brains inside helmet)
5. The victor takes the victim's armor.

That's a dramatic simplification, but as a generalization works reasonably well.

At several points, the gods intervene. They usually do this by taking human form and pretending to be someone who is giving advice. Also they seem to spend a lot of time generating mist to hide things, or to temporarily blind people. Interestingly, the gods — although immortal (not born to die) — are not invulnerable. In a couple of cases they are injured during battle and go crying back to Olympus to be healed by Zeus's personal doctor with herbs and balms. I sort of like that idea: the gods aren't innately immortal, they just have the power to get immediate medical attention.

In the end, things get so bad for the Achaeans that Achilles is convinced to fight again, and he sends his buddy Patroclus out to do some battle. Patroclus kicks ass then dies, Achilles gets pissed and now it's "go time". He gets more help from the gods, kills the Trojan warrior Hector, does unspeakable things to his body, is convinced to return the body to Priam (Hector's dad, the King of Troy), and then the story ends.

That's right. No victory, no Trojan horse. It just ends. It's like seeing a "To Be Continued" at the end of a TV show.

Well, I guess the Odyssey is on my list, so I'll get to it eventually, maybe in another 15 years. In the meantime, I'm looking forward to watching the movie.

Tipping

A friend and I were at a bar the other day talking about our tipping policies. Here's how I think about tipping:

Here in Canada, tipping is expected in certain circumstances: restaurants, etc. However, unlike some places, people don't usually work solely for tips. Tips serve to augment a base salary (which is often minimal, I expect).

First of all, I consider tipping completely optional based on the quality of service. I never feel obliged to leave a tip if the service or product is substandard. That said, I usually don't tip less for slightly poor service. There's a cutoff somewhere: either I tip or not.

I modify that slightly in that I tend to tip to my own convenience, too, especially at places that I frequent. If the bill comes to $19.00 and all I have is $20s, then it's a buck for tip, no matter how good the service is. By the time it comes to pay the bill, I want to be out of there, and getting change to leave a tip always seems to take too much time.

However, having said all that, I like to think that I tip reasonably generously most of the time. I'd rather tip too much than too little. I think 10-15% is a fine tip, 20% is over the top for me. I also much prefer to tip in cash rather than on a credit card. Adding a tip to a credit card bill just feels awkward to me, even more so now that in some places the amount of each transaction needs to be authorized. The discussion of this topic originally started when the friend I was with tried to pay a bill with a credit card and the hand-held terminal asked him if he wanted to add a gratuity to the bill. He wanted to, but then was advised by the terminal that he needed to inform the server of the amount so they could add it. That's just horrible design. I don't want to discuss the tip with the server. That just doesn't seem right.