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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2015-10-08, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2015. PAGE 5. You know what the problem with being a man is? No purse. Men need purses. We need them to tote around all our necessary accouterments – the wallet, a ring of keys, the cell phone, paperback novels, ballpoint pens, spare change, a Crispy Crunch – all the essentials without which daily life cannot decently proceed. I’ve tried wearing a purse a few times (the masculine variety is The Murse) – a shoulder bag by any other name. They have a few drawbacks. For one thing, they make me list to port or starboard, depending on which shoulder I hang it from. But the biggest problem is, I leave it behind. Unlike women, men have not acquired the lifetime habit of carrying a purse. It’s unnatural to us, so we tend to leave our purse/murses behind in theatres, restaurants and taxicabs. And that can be embarrassing. Men are better off avoiding scenarios such as standing up at a hockey game and shouting “Has anyone seen my purse?” I’ve often filled the purse/murse void by wearing a fisherman’s vest – basically a purse with armholes. They feature dozens of pockets – a packrat’s dream come true, but Air Canada’s worst nightmare. Airport check-in minions are ruthless about the weight and dimensions of carry-on luggage, but they ignore passengers wearing fisherman’s vests – even if they resemble human pineapples. And that is the major drawback of the fisherman’s vest. You can carry half your household goods in one, but you will not look cool. You will look, in fact, like a giant walking bag of walnuts. So what’s the answer – a briefcase? Nah. Too Bay Street. A backpack? Uh uh. Backpacks invoke a variation of Parkinson’s Law which states that work expands to fill the time available to do it. Backpacks expand to carry all the crap you can possibly cram into them. Have you seen those kids humping off to school bent almost double under the weight of their backpacks? What have they got in there – their entire bedrooms? Beats me – but they look like sherpas. So what then – a tote bag? Too inconvenient – you spend too much time fishing around for your car keys. And again, if you’re a man you’ll spend a lot of time trying to remember where you left it. The answer is a simple one that’s been around for years. The fanny pack. It’s perfect! It goes around your waist, features separate pockets (with zippers for security) and leaves your hands free to do all the things you need to do with your hands. A fanny pack keeps your valuables secure and it’s limited. There’s only so much stuff you can get in a fanny pack before strangers start hailing taxis to whisk you to the maternity ward. Fanny packs work. Compared to a fully- loaded fisherman’s vest they’re svelte. Unlike a purse/murse they’re gender neutral. Take Dwayne Johnson. Six-foot-five, 260 pounds, built approximately like the Rock of Gibraltar – hence his wrestling/acting name: The Rock. The Rock wears a fanny pack. Jimmy Fallon, the TV host had the temerity to ask him what was in it. The Rock looked down on Fallon and rumbled: “Pop tarts and condoms.” As Tony Soprano, another macho icon might say: “End of story.” Arthur Black Shawn Loughlin Shawn’s Sense There are a lot of things that make me look twice and think, “Who in their right mind would want, or do that?” and then be absolutely stunned when hundreds, thousands or millions of people do it. Whether it’s the extremely creepy home monitoring systems from certain media/telecommunications providers that allow you to spy on everyone in your house at all times or setting it up so your debit card can be ‘tapped’ to a machine, never requiring you to prove your identity, there are plenty of ideas out there that seem great, but in the end either scare me or seem absolutely ridiculous. This week, I decided to look at two of them: the new wave of music ‘services’ available from several large companies and Peeple, a new app with some absolutely horrifying implications. The music services go back a ways, to be honest. I remember one of my roommates in university using one and I thought then it was a horrible idea. Now, however, with Spotify, Rdio and Apple Music and all the other IPs popping up, I’m again stuck asking myself, who in their right mind would pay for this? My wife signed up for a free trial of Apple Music and, I have to say, for a service that is supposed to cost money, it really misses the mark. These services provide music to customers through their phones, computers and smart televisions. If you don’t want to have to put up with advertisements, you can use some of these services for free, but each one of them has the same bottom line: If you want the best service, you’re going to pay $9.99 a month. (I guess it should be noted Rdio does offer a lesser version for $3.99 a month.) For that $10, what do you get? Well you get music, randomly generated, based on what you listen to and what channels you choose. Want country? They’ve got it. Rap? They’ve got it. Rock? They’ve got it. It seems amazing that they are providing all this music? Right? Well, it might sound amazing until people start to realize they have a hand-cranked radio in their storage closet that does the same thing. They also could do the same thing completely for free by booting up a radio station’s website and streaming it. To me, that’s where this whole thing falls flat. Without paying for data (on a cell phone) or increasing your bandwidth for your internet service at home (and that’s on top of the $9.99 per month) you can do exactly what these stations are doing with a cheap computer that can run iTunes and a web browser. You can also listen to completely free music, complete with news, weather and sports on any local radio station. If the local stations don’t float your boat, you can stream pretty much any music you want for free on the internet already. However people are signing up for the service. For the price of an album a month or so, they get access to a lot of music and probably only want to listen to very small percentage of it. I have to wonder how ideas like that get off the ground. Peeple, on the other hand, is an idea that scares me. Based on apps such as Yelp that allows you to post reviews of businesses and restaurants, Peeple is an app that allows people to review the people in their life. Have someone’s cell number? Then you get to a post an anonymous review about them. Don’t like your boss? Hide behind a wall of anonymity and berate him. Had a bad date? Snipe at them from the security of a randomly generated user name. Tired of paying your ex- partner’s alimony? Well, you can see where this is going. There are limits, for example, only people who sign up for the service can be negatively reviewed in public (there’s a selling point, use our app so people you pissed off years ago can air their grievance with you on the internet) and there are ways to dispute the accuracy of reviews. However, it’s not the mechanics of the app that scare me, it’s the fact that some bonehead out there thought this was a good idea. The internet is already rife with people bullying others and using the relative safety of an anonymous username to try and make other people feel bad (and before anyone gets smart- alecky, my name is right there to the left and everything I say is something I can be called on). The only saving grace of the internet when it comes to bullying is that there needs to be some kind of connection between the bully and the person being bullied. Writing random things about someone in a comment section of a YouTube video isn’t likely to be seen, but commenting on someone’s Facebook profile will and people have to let other people post on their profiles. This app takes away that layer of security. It creates a situation where all you need to do is get someone’s cell phone number and you can say whatever you want about them without fear of reprisal. As part of my job (and as part of not knowing any better when I started), I didn’t hide my cell phone number. I gave it to a couple people and some of them took it upon themselves to give it to anyone with a pulse. At the time it annoyed me because it meant that these people who had received my number were able to contact me at any time, night or day. Imagine, however, if that happened to someone with thinner skin than I. Some friends are having an argument, one gives out their cell phone number and now that person could be the target of cyber-bullying by every individual with access to a keyboard. It’s a bad idea. But like I said, I’m not scared by what it is, I’m scared by the fact that people out there think it it’s a good idea. There are even $7 million from backers for it. That scares me. It’s one of those situations that makes me wonder, when can I move to another planet? Denny Scott Denny’s Den Learn to listen There are two ways to participate in a conversation. The first is to truly listen to the person with whom you’re conversing and the second is to simply sit there and wait until you get to talk again. For what must be the fourth or fifth time by now, I look to the movie Fight Club for wisdom in writing this column. In the movie, two people are discussing the terminally-ill, but really, it should apply to everyone who interacts with someone else on a daily basis. “When people think you’re dying, they really, really listen to you, instead of just...” the man says. “Instead of just waiting for their turn to speak,” the woman finishes his thought. We like to think we listen, but how many of us actually do? I feel as though I do, because it’s my job. As a reporter, I wouldn’t be very good at my job if I simply asked a question and then tuned out until I got to ask the next one. Good luck writing that story. In fact, that was one of the cardinal rules of interviewing that I learned in journalism school. While it is alright to prepare questions ahead of time (I don’t, haven’t for years), always listen to the answers, because more than likely, the person you’re interviewing will lead you on a course with his answer and that, and not your prepared list of questions, should dictate your next question. Well... last week on HLN, the conservative news outlet that carries Nancy Grace’s program, among others, broke that cardinal rule in a horrible example of incompetence and a look behind the curtain of poor television journalism that makes you wonder if reporters even listen to their subjects. Last week, host Yasmin Vossoughian interviewed Jon Hendren about Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency (NSA) employee who blew the whistle on worldwide government surveillance of citizens and his decision to join the social networking site Twitter, even while in exile from the United States. Hendren spoke eloquently and answered the questions in a professional manner, but he answered them as if Vossoughian was asking about Edward Scissorhands, the character Johnny Depp brought to life in Tim Burton’s 1990 film of the same name. Needless to say, Vossoughian didn’t catch on and thought she was conducting a hell of an interview. She was not. Hendren spoke about the American people casting out Snowden/Scissorhands with direct references to the movie (and certainly no aspect of the Snowden story – at least any telling of it I’ve heard). Snowden is currently residing in Russia, unsure what awaits him if he returns to the United States. “But to cast him out, to make him invalid in society simply because he has scissors for hands, I mean, that’s strange. People didn’t get scared until he started sculpting shrubs into dinosaur shapes and whatnot,” was Hendren’s first comment that was more Scissorhands than Snowden – but he wasn’t done there. Hendren continued: “We cast him out. We got scared when he poked a hole in a waterbed with his scissor fingers, and that was unreasonable of us.” At no point does Vossoughian raise an eyebrow at the answers she’s receiving. Perhaps that means she’s unflappable in the face of adversity (weirdness?), but more than likely, I think, it means she wasn’t listening to Hendren to begin with and was more focused on spitting out the next question. Listen, people. It could save you looking really, really silly one day. Other Views Man’s best friend: The fanny pack Where can I get a ticket to Mars?