Mock Turtle

A question I’m pulling out of a comment on another post, from Return of the Bees:

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Here’s the Highway Traffic Act:

Pedestrian right of way

(28) Every pedestrian who lawfully enters a roadway in order to cross may continue the crossing as quickly as reasonably possible despite a change in the indication he or she is facing and, for purposes of the crossing, has the right of way over vehicles. R.S.O. 1990, c. H.8, s. 144 (28).

So, the woman proceeding south across Front St. at the Blue Jays Way crossing from the northwest corner to the southwest corner, on a striped pedestrian crosswalk, at ca 9:45 p.m. this week, who proceeded when the light turned green and was run over by the rear wheel of a truck making a right turn presumably into the left lane because of a wide turning base, had the right of way.

Here’s my question RE sidetracking, as with the financial planner (and so much else in life): She was talking on a cell phone, and/but why’s that relevant? All the articles written afterwards about cell phones and iPods are beside the point, which is to say, the cell phone handicapped her, and/but this put her on the same basis as the rest of us handicapped folk–she’d have been squashed just as flat if she was in a wheelchair, deaf, using a white cane, pushing a walker, or… old. Or, even possessed of a simple desire to be “dead right”.

So… Why the fixation on the irrelevant cell phone? Isn’t that getting royally sidetracked?

Why’s everyone evidently reluctant to confirm if the truck driver was proceeding into the intersection against the law?

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My take on it: I’d normally agree that the cellphone is legally irrelevant, but in this case it does sound like it was the factor that led to her death. From the CBC:

Because she was on her cellphone at the time, police said, she didn’t notice the truck, and walked right into the side of it. She fell to the street and was run over by the truck’s rear wheels, police said.

So if the truck was already in the intersection and turning, the driver cannot in this case be held responsible for the behaviour of a pedestrian who wasn’t in the intersection at the time he began his turn.

As a cyclist I certainly have learned to be very wary of anyone — motorist, pedestrian or cyclist — on a cellphone. They’re oblivious and do the oddest (frequently wildly illegal) things with no warning.

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N of only 24 on this study, but very interesting stuff:

Expert Financial Advice Neurobiologically “Offloads” Financial Decision-Making under Risk

A simple financial decision-making task involving risk was employed in the current study to investigate the behavioral and neural mechanisms by which financial advice, provided by an expert economist, affected decisions under risk. Behavioral results showed a significant effect of expert advice on probability weighting, such that probability weighting functions changed in the direction of the expert’s advice. The behavioral effect of expert messages was paralleled by changes in neural activation patterns. Of note, significant correlations with the value of the lottery were obtained in the absence of the expert’s advice (NOM), but not during its presence (MES). These results support the hypothesis that one effect of expert advice is to “offload” calculations of the value of alternative behavioral options that underlie decision-making from the individual’s brain.

Much more in the article.

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Star today: How I lost my Bay St. job and found true happiness

It’s a familiar story — to me, at least:-) Girl gets MBA, pursues high-paying job, is laid off/gets a bonus that makes it easy to walk away, soul-searches, finds lower-paying dream job. OK, her story has a Marley-and-Me-esque dog involved. But let’s be clear: working in marketing at Bell Canada, while undoubtedly soul-sucking, is not “Bay St.”, e.g., the capital markets. Is it the Star’s mislabelling or the writer’s?

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Part one:

Basic French-English language skills needed or citizenship denied, federal minister says

I’m happy that the city of Toronto has services available in many languages, and I love the fact that I hear at least five languages spoken in any given day. But do I think newcomers should make an effort to learn one of Canada’s official languages, preferably the one spoken in the area of the country where they live, if they want to take out citizenship? Absolutely.

Why? Well, for one thing, immigrants can get free language training through the LINC program. It’s one of the settlement services the government offers and taxes pay for. Programs often offer free onsite childcare to make taking lessons more convenient.

For another, not knowing how to speak the majority language leads inevitably to some degree of separation from everyone outside one’s own language group, and makes it difficult, if not impossible, to pick up on the cultural references that make nations. I don’t buy into the choose-your-own-adventure concept of Canada: countries aren’t whatever you want them to be, and if that’s all they are, they’re pretty ephemeral.

Third, this wouldn’t prevent people from remaining permanent residents of Canada. I would expect to jump through some hoops if I moved elsewhere and wanted to take on the full responsibilities and rights of citizenship. I see many reasons to expect the same. Note that because of our rules about citizenship being conferred on all babies born on Canadian soil, any children born in Canada are automatically citizens anyway.

(The Star’s headline on this story, Immigrants need French or English, Kenney says is unfortunate as it suggests a higher standard of English/French would be required for immigration alone. While some immigration classes already require some skills in English/French, refugees and family reunification immigrants are exempt and there’s no suggestion that they would cease to be.)

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On a train during a family vacation a few years back, with the carriage filled almost entirely by my large, chatty, argumentative, politically-charged American Irish Catholic family, my aunt-by-marriage explained to another by-marriage relative that it had taken her years to adjust to our style of conversation, which, according to her, consisted of endlessly asserting ourselves and contradicting others in interminable rounds of playing devil’s advocate. The thing it had taken her a while to realize, she told the second newcomer, was that we considered this normal conversation, and enjoyed it.

The Globe’s resident Irishman John Doyle, in his column today, calls out another aspect of the Irish that is worth celebrating:

…pause between pints to reflect that the truly authentic and distinctively Irish quality is the tendency to puncture the grandiloquent, the pretentious and the merely foolish. Go ahead and be self-indulgent. We’re laughing.

Oh Yeah, 2008 edition, here we come.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, everyone!

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More cocktails for the recession/depression, courtesy of the New Yorker online:

Nasdaiquiri
Add a dozen I.P.O.’s to portfolio, wait until bubble bursts, drink all day every day.

BlackBerry Sling
Discover that your BlackBerry doesn’t work because you haven’t paid the bill. Sling it against the wall, then buy a prepaid phone and make some rum in your toilet.

Bloody Maria Bartiromo
Squeeze four packets of McDonald’s ketchup and one packet of pepper into a glass. Mix with eight ounces homemade hooch. Drink while you watch the Money Honey on a TV in the window of a Circuit City that’s going out of business at the end of the month.

There are more…

HT: Pink Slips Are The New Black

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The Globe’s John Doyle sums up one of the problems that plagues business television in his enjoyably tart column from Thursday:

All-business television and business news segments had to create their own iconography, mainly because business news is essentially boring and difficult to illustrate. The natural, real-world imagery of business TV is footage of some machine stamping loonies or churning out $20 bills. The only alternative is a tracking shot of shirt-sleeved traders talking on the phone and staring at computer screens.

Now, I’ve spent many hours trying to find interesting footage to accompany stories on accounting malfeasance and drops in GDP, so I know exactly what he’s talking about. However, I’d question his assertion that business news is boring. In defence of business newscasters everywhere, some of us are fascinated by the market, which overreacts as much as it underreacts to events and whose moods are buffeted by geopolitical activity as much as by actual corporate earnings. Watching the ups and downs of stock indexes in real time can be as weirdly fascinating as watching an ant — or a toddler — make its incomprehensibly chaotic way on the sidewalk. That’s why people watch business television — and, importantly, why there must always be a market update every fifteen minutes.

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The current issues of the New Yorker and Vanity Fair both have good features on the end of Iceland’s short tenure as finance superpower. Both are worth reading, but if you only have time for one, Vanity Fair’s piece, by Liar’s Poker author Michael Lewis, better captures the insanity that took hold:

I spoke to another hedge fund in London so perplexed by the many bad LBOs Icelandic banks were financing that it hired private investigators to figure out what was going on in the Icelandic financial system. The investigators produced a chart detailing a byzantine web of interlinked entities that boiled down to this: A handful of guys in Iceland, who had no experience of finance, were taking out tens of billions of dollars in short-term loans from abroad. They were then re-lending this money to themselves and their friends to buy assets—the banks, soccer teams, etc. Since the entire world’s assets were rising—thanks in part to people like these Icelandic lunatics paying crazy prices for them—they appeared to be making money. Yet another hedge-fund manager explained Icelandic banking to me this way: You have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that they are each worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners, but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets.

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Democracy, Russia-style, from the Moscow Times:

One of the most commonly used methods for eliminating undesirable candidates is to disqualify on “legal” grounds the authenticity of signatures that are required to register a candidate. “Handwriting experts” from the Interior Ministry find mistakes on lists submitted by opposition candidates, and this provides the pretext to disqualify candidates from the vote. One candidate was rejected because on one of the forms he filed, he failed to write that he was a Russian citizen — even though one of the papers he submitted was a copy of his Russian passport.

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We are both fans of Italian food and wine — J. being especially addicted to good pastas — so we tried to eat well when we were in Florence, without entirely breaking the bank. Depending on where we went and how much wine we ordered, we were generally able to sit down to leisurely dinners for something in the order of 60-90 Euros. (I’m not sure exactly what the conversion rate is right now and at the moment I’d rather not know.)

A point of detail: it’s rare for a good Florentine restaurant to open before 7:00, and some of them don’t open till 7:30.

The challenge in Italian dining is not altogether unlike that in the Italian wines category — finding the right middle ground between traditional-but-not-very-good and creative-but-international-and-rather-anonymous. Some of our best dining experiences were with wine bars that were also apparently popular with locals: Coquinarius on the north bank near the Duomo, and Il Santo Bevitore on the south (Oltrarno) side (both of them, incidentally, located in former stables). Both offered interesting pastas and cold dishes (meats, cheeses, carpaccios, etc.). Bevitore also had warm main dishes (secondi) that were well-executed but perhaps not very Tuscan. We had some very good Tuscan wines at both places. Santo Bevitore has a very good wine bar two doors down which opens earlier than the restaurant per se — we spent about half an hour there waiting for the restaurant to open. Unusually, Coquinarius is open all day.

We were more equivocal about a similar type of establishment in the Santa Croce area called Baldovino — good pastas (including a porcini ravioli in truffle oil [or "truffle oil"? -- we're not sure] that J. returned to devour again on our last night), but the secondi are kind of weird Cal-Ital at best. We also had our worst wine experiences here — two rather anonymous international-style wines identified on their labels as DOCG Chianti Classico, both recommended by our servers. (Why did I ask for another recommendation on the second occasion having being disappointed by the first one? — I dunno — there were only 5 Ch Cl’s on the list…) I don’t know whether all their wines are international style or only the ones they recommend to tourists.

In the more traditional (though upmarket) Trattoria style, we had an excellent lunch at 4 Leoni in Oltrarno, and we would have been more than happy to return for dinner. Their menu is only in Italian which might make them a better candidate for a visit later in your stay, after you’ve learned a bit of terminology (we visited them in a jet-lagged state for our first lunch, before we even checked into our hotel). We also had a very good meal at Antico Fattore, which is a traditional Trattoria very close to the Uffizi (they apparently suffered considerable damage in the 1993 bombing of the Uffizi).  We ordered mainly off their extensive daily specials menu. Also likeable in the traditional style though perhaps not as interesting  was Trattoria Angiolino just down the street from Il Santo Bevitore in the Oltrarno.

We didn’t have any genuinely awful food experiences in Florence. Our worst experience was a place near downtown called Paoli, a cloth-tablecloth type of place that gave us serious attitude about I’m not sure quite what. Their food wasn’t all that good either — I had a good pasta (butter and sage…) but my main was uninspired and J. found both her dishes a trial.

Being in Tuscany, we generally tried to get our hands on a good bottle of Chianti Classico at dinner — it’s a style we both like, a moderately oaked red with some complexity and an earthiness and “meatiness” that goes well with food. We met with varying degrees of success.

Baldovino, as already noted, recommended two oaky international-style wines to us on the two nights we were there. The first started OK, became somewhat overwhelmed with oak as it opened up, and then was already starting to fall apart well before the end of dinner. J. essentially rejected the second wine so we both ended up leaving the restaurant with quite a lot of wine in our glasses — something I’m not sure I’ve ever done before… Antico Fattore led me astray by listing Villa Antinori as a Chianti Classico on their English menu — it’s not, and I confess I probably would have known that given more than a passing acquaintance of the leading Italian producers. It’s a perfectly likeable IGT Toscana, probably more likeable than either of the the Baldovino Classicos, but missing the characteristic earthiness-meatiness-not-overwhelmed-by-vanilla-iness of a traditional Chianti. We had very pleasant wines on both occasions at Coquinarius, and Santo Bevitore served us two very nice Classicos in the wine bar and restaurant respectively. The half-bottle of Classico we ordered at Paoli (Peppone, I think) was possibly the best part of the evening. Next time we go to Tuscany, we will go with some serious wine research in hand.

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