3 Banal Thoughts on 10-Digit Dialing

For those who don’t know, Montreal went to 10-digit phone dialing this month.

1. When I moved here, I enjoyed the 7-digit phone number as kind of rustic. There’s some kind of threshold between 7 and 10 numbers on the phone. Or maybe that there was a tactile distinction between local and long distance calling, and now there isn’t.

2. A quick browse of the reports show that the original CRTC hearings on the change took place in 2001, but that it didn’t happen because the anticipated demand for phone numbers didn’t materialize. But now it is happening. Except here’s the hitch: the claim is that the new area code is needed because of demand for numbers. There are approximately 1.8 million people living on the island, a few thousand more counting for migration since the last census. Now, granted you can’t use a prefix like 911 or 411, but even there, there’s an impossibly large number of numbers in the 514 area code when you line it up against the number of people, or even businesses. So the “demand” is actually not from consumers but from prospecting phone companies themselves, who buy phone numbers and whole prefixes in bulk. At least, this is what happened in several U.S. cities (including Pittsburgh when I lived there).

3. There is talk of prospecting for 514 numbers, or selling them off on ebay as if they’ll become prestige commodities. But that is quite unlikely to occur on any significant scale — very quickly, people will adjust to the new area code and that will be that. A quick search of ebay for “phone number” and “area code 212” yielded no phone numbers for sale.

MRI Phenomenology

This is a couple days overdue.

I mentioned before certain knee and ankle issues which have led me to see a doctor. The knee looks good under the x-ray which means it’s some kind of soft tissue thing. So I was sent off for an MRI on Friday. For those of you who don’t know, it unusual to get an MRI in Quebec within days of the referral. It’s usually more like six months. But McGill has private insurance for faculty which reimburses us if we go to a private clinic. I think this sort of thing is only quasi-legal in Canadian policy, but it helps prop up the system by essentially buying off elites, so it’s tolerated. Or maybe it works differently than that. I’m still figuring all that out.

But anyway, the MRI. First of all, I thought it was very funny that I had to remove all metal from my person and endue a series of questions about fillings, surgeries, objects that may or may not have flown into my eyes years ago, etc., this only a week or so after I’d see the last X-Men movie. Gee whiz, it was just like I was going to see Magneto.

Except it wasn’t. The machine was huge and tubular, just like on TV. I was all the way in except for my head. It takes them 45 minutes for them to do the scan and during that time you’re totally immobilized. Apparently some people freak out, but I had the opposite reaction. The machine is really loud but it’s all pulsing drones a-la early Tangerine Dream or some kind of experimental laptop show. I fell asleep in about 5 minutes. Afterward, the attendant told me that most people fall asleep in the machine. Which is weird when you think about it: loud, uncomfortable and immobilizing. Mmmmm! Perfect for a nap.

The End of Authorship. . . .or just reading?

In today’s NYTimes Magazine, John Updike has a piece defending authorship and books against the usual digerati critiques. I basically agree with it, but I took special note of the following:

Kevin Kelly, identified as the “senior maverick” at Wired magazine, the article describes a glorious digitalizing of all written knowledge. […]

Unlike the libraries of old, Kelly continues, “this library would be truly democratic, offering every book to every person.” The anarchic nature of the true democracy emerges bit by bit. “Once digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page,” Kelly writes. “These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves. Just as the music audience now juggles and reorders songs into new albums (or ‘playlists,’ as they are called in iTunes), the universal library will encourage the creation of virtual ‘bookshelves’ – a collection of texts, some as short as a paragraph, others as long as entire books, that form a library shelf’s worth of specialized information. And as with music playlists, once created, these ‘bookshelves’ will be published and swapped in the public commons. Indeed, some authors will begin to write books to be read as snippets or to be remixed as pages.”

Does Kelly read? Does he write? He certainly doesn’t do much with music if he can’t tell the difference between a relatively pedestrian playlist and a remix. But really, one of the scary thing about the whole digerati thing is their collective illiteracy. You have a group, exemplified by the kinds of faux-savants that Wired likes to put forward who make claims about history and writing without knowing any. Pretty much every book I pick up inovlves a good deal of “sampling” and “remixing.” It was Walter Benjamin who hoped to write an essay someday that was composed of nothing but quotations from others. I know it’s been tried by several literature professors, though to my knowledge none has had a big impact. In fact, when I write, my own reading practices are exactly as they describe: I dart in and out of books looking for the right section, passage or inspiration. Other times, I work through an argument carefully. Perhaps this process is occluded through the publication process itself. It was, after all, Oxford University Press who asked C. Wright Mills to gut his endnotes for The Power Elite. All this is to say that if there ever were a universal digital library, and some day there might be one, its “revolutionary” character will not be in digital remixing or creative copying of text. We’ve already got online paper-mills for that.

The big obstacle for google and everyone else is sustained reading on screens. Right now, it just isn’t happening, and books remain more portable and convivial than PDAs or electronic reading devices. . .at least for now.(1) The codex is a centuries-old technology of which I’m particularly fond. Someday, it may disappear as well, but not just because someone at google wants to make some money.

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1. I did just find a way to dump rss feeds onto my ipod and that’s pretty cool. Now I can read blogs while waiting for the train. At least those of you who write shorter entries. . . .

Medical System

So I was going to add this clever thing to my post below about the softball game where I show you the x-rays of my knee and ankle (long story but there are injuries in both places). But when I popped in the CD, I found that the images were in a proprietary format that’s not readable on Macs anyway. Which got me thinking: why don’t they just use .tiff files? (For the uninitiated, .tiff is an uncompressed image format.) This seems to be a classic medical authority thing: sure, let the patient carry around his or her own x-rays but don’t let the patient look at them! That would apparently be too much.

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Today we got our forms in the mail for the permanent residency medical exams. I’ve never been so excited to go to a doctor in my life.

Sweet Victory at Last

Coach Greg predicted it. Yesterday, the rain gave way to sunshine and as the clouds began to part the False Consciousness took the field against a team from Chemistry and Physics known as the Otto Masochists, which is no doubt some kind of disciplinary in-joke I don’t understand.

As a bagpipe player droned on in the distance (I am not kidding) our team bravely took the field and took a decisive 22-12 victory. It may have taken an opponent so obsessed with grilling hotdogs that we had to remind them that they needed a couple extra outfielders, but we won fair and square. In the process, countless players fell flat on their faces or asses due to the slick grass, and there was outstanding fielding by Julia Skelly at 2nd base, who was responsible for all of the outs in one inning, and Jeremy Morris at 3rd base, who made a highlight-reel-worthy spectacular catch. The other team? Well, they seemed to be happy just to get 3 outs some innings (there’s a 7-run-per-inning-except-the-last mercy rule here) so we shouldn’t get cocky. But somehow, we looked like a decent team out there. My own play was marred by poor hitting (no doubt due to a leg injury I may discuss at a later date here) and two errors in the field, but I made up for it by saving a few others.

It took two years but there was finally a win.

Too bad about the Oilers, but at least I had the very Canadian experience of watching the Stanley Cup with a group of (mostly) Canadians. Yes, I know that sentence is tautological. But it is also true.

Yesterday

was a hot and unpleasant day, to be sure (1), but also a wonderful Montreal summer day in many ways. I wrote a little, I had a French lesson where I got my head around indefinate pronouns, I strummed my acoustic bass guitar for a good hour, I did some self-care around the house, and I picked up Carrie around 9pm from the airport. The freeway was remarkably open and I had the rare pleasure of driving on the 720 and 20 at full speed with the windows down and rocking out. We then went to Cafe Santropol, which is clearly some place we should have known about 2 years ago when we got here. Amazing shakes and vegetarian sandwiches (a few with meat) on a sublime terrace. My French tutor has been saying for months “I can’t BELIEVE you guys haven’t been to this place yet.” Well, now it’s in the rotation.

Speaking of French lessons, I picked up the Metro and 24 on my way in this morning. I’m going to translate some articles. And work on the future tense in my grammar book. A new verb tense is always exciting.

We finished the night watching the very exciting end to the NBA game.

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1. We SO should have installed the A/C before Carrie left. It’s a two-person job. Perhaps tonight.

Graduations

I find this Steven Rubio post rather touching.

I didn’t skip my high school graduation, though I did cross the stage with my shoes on my hands (loafers — easy to slip on and off). Needless to say, the vice-principal or whoever was on the other side refused to shake my enshoed hand. The previous year’s graduation had a rock band play (the band was made up of graduating students), and they played something extremely mellow like Buffalo Springfield, and people started to dance. People (meaning adults, meaning not us) got angry. So no rock band at graduation at Hopkins High School in 1989. Some of us talked about ways to protest the unnecessary soberness of the occasion and apparently the shoes on hands was part of that. Or maybe not. It’s a little fuzzy now. It must have seemed important at the time. There was a picture taken though I doubt I still have it.

Like Steven’s mom, my mom was pissed too. I remember she told me afterwards and I was surprised. I guess I’d worked up enough contempt for my high school as an institution at that point that it didn’t occur to my teenage mind that graduating from it would be a big a deal to her. Once I promised there would be no shoe antics, she did come to my college graduation (actually the college graduation was so big and alienating we did the Phi Beta Kappa honor society ceremony instead, because she was also Phi Beta Kappa back in the day), I marched and she seemed satisfied. That’s also the day that Carrie’s parents and my parents first met. They talked about cats. By then I’d figured out that the graduations are for the people in the audience, not the students.