Last Night on the Road . . . for less than a week

Tonight’s my last night on the road until next Tuesday (when I take off again for two weeks). There’s much I’d like to blog about but I’ll just post about a couple things for now:

1. One of the pleasures of being in Washington DC with my family is that I always get a few pieces of family history that I didn’t know about. My great-grandfather (grandmother’s father) had a shoe business in Manhattan and apparently did custom jobs for some famous people including Mickey Rooney. Though by that time, it might actually have been my great uncle running the store. On a related note, he is the only member of that generation in my family (on either side) to have published. One of the Burgers’ specialties was elevator shoes, and the library of congress records show a holding for a book called Why Be Short. The next generation would have publications by both my parents, aunts on both sides, and my uncle Myron on my mom’s side, for whom the Weinstein Memorial Lecture is named, and who provides the occasion for us to gather here each year in May.

After tonight’s lecture, I had the pleasure of crashing a wine tasting with my aunt and uncle (both in their 70s). Too bad the wine wasn’t all that good.

2. Before D.C., I attended a conference on the history of acoustics at the MIT Dibner Institute. The conference was great. Though there are doubtlessly other people in the world who know a lot about the history of acoustics, I was in a room with 11 of the best. It was like taking a seminar in the subject with leading people. I learned a ton that will be useful for the mp3 book this summer. Everyone was very generous and helpful.

The Dibner Institute itself is this incredibly posh space for humanists. Every year, they would have a group of fellows working there, and I gather they’ve been a major source of support for historians of science and technology. So it’s too bad they’re closing (sign of the apocalypse: Sterne gives the last lecture at the institute’s last conference). Their collections will be transferred and some of their functions will be absorbed, but a tremendous resource in the fellowships and the opportunities for collaboration and cross-fertilization will be lost. Time off to research, think and write is one of the most precious things you can have as a humanist. I’m sorry to see it go, but glad to have discovered it even if it was at the end.

More Taxes, More Travel

Following up on my earlier tax post, here’s a tidbit from the conservatives’ budget, as reported in The Smoking Section. Sound familiar, Americans?

Speaking of smoking sections, a guest informed me tonight that one can order smoking cabs in Montreal. So we ordered her a smoking cab. I wonder if the smoking ban will affect that business.

May is a big travel month for me, and I fear that this blog will suffer some neglect due to my intermittent internet access. This month features trips to Boston, Washington DC., Minneapolis and Milwaukee. And the beginning of June has me in Toronto for CCA. But I’ll try to put something up here once in awhile. June-August should be more fruitful for le blog as I stay put in the same city for most of the time and devote my life to writing, reading, recovery and relaxation in varying configurations.

While I’m away, I invite you to troll my blogroll (now that I have one). Axis of Evil Knievel has been particularly satisfying of late, pairing as he has the birth of his daughter with a day-by-day recounting of historical atrocities and celebrations of the deaths of evil figures. It’s acutally quite sweet and sentimental (as all birth-of-my-first-child blogs must be) but in a totally surreal way.

Ottawa Theory

I’m here in Ottawa while Carrie attends a meeting of the Law Commission of Canada. The plan was to hang out in the hotel room and write, but the reality is that I’m more in sit-somewhere-and-read-and-wander-around mood. And so I have.

Yesterday, while waiting to cross the canal on Rideau St., I got stuck in traffic for a minute. I was was behind a bus so I couldn’t really see, but at the corner there were some guys hold bikes in the air and I could see others on bikes riding into the intersection. Then the guy in the car to my right rolled down the window and starting cursing the bikers. Which leads me to believe that I just experienced my first Critical Mass Ride (motto: we’re not stopping traffic, we ARE traffic), which is borne out by the scheduled 5:15 ride in Ottawa the last Friday of each month. Zack Furness, one of my doctoral students, wrote a dissertation on biking politics and I was really surprised at some of the hostility motorists showed to critical mass bikers. But I’d never seen it for myself. Guess that’s another take on road rage. Zack’s diss is in the pocket at Pitt and will be revised into a book very soon, from what I gather. . . .

As to my tooling around Ottawa. Yesterday was all about music shopping. I stopped by Songbird Music, which is like a graveyard for old gear, especially the back room. That’s the recording and PA section, and I saw all sorts of dusty old gear, some of it from the 1970s and some of it with brand names that I suspect never made it south of the border. It’s like an Isle of Lost Toys for musicians.

I’m saving Octopus Books to visit with Carrie — so that’ll be tomorrow.

Oh yeah, my Theory of Ottawa: it’s like a great college town. I don’t know if Canadians have a concept of “college town” but if they did, maybe they’d look down less on their Capital City. I’m always surprised to hear Canadians disparage Ottawa, since it seems like a perfectly nice place to me with plenty to do, at least as a visitor. It’s not a global city like Montreal, and certainly not as cool but as someone who’s spent my life in the midwest and mid-east United States, I find it perfectly charming.

This is what progressive taxation looks like

It’s tax time up north and the usual complaints are making the rounds. But this is the first year I’ve done my own taxes in Canada (we were too freaked out by the move to try it ourselves last year). And it’s actually a lot easier than American taxes. For one thing, there are many fewer things you can deduct. For instance, we could deduct the cost of supplies for Carrie’s insulin pump (not covered under McGill’s plan in 2005 but will be covered from here on out) from our Federal return but not our Quebec return because we make too much money. Some professorial expenses are deductible but thanks to the grant system, we’re not paying out of pocket for those. And the mortgage interest deduction is a dim memory.

But the other thing I like about the Canadian forms is the transparency of the tax brackets. In the US, you have that elaborate table at the end of the 1040 book and can’t really see how taxes are organized. Here, you have very simple calculations (I didn’t include the deductions here but you can look those up if you actually cared enough to look). You can see the tax brackets. For instance, the highest tax bracket in Quebec starts at just over $56,000. Which is a relatively low place for your top tax bracket to start. Well done, Quebec.

Now, before my local readers get all hot and bothered, yes I know that corporate income tax here is almost as completely hosed as it is south of the border, that income trusts give people giant loopholes from paying the government, and that there are probably 1000 other strategies of tax evasion for the rich. I also know that the system of high sales taxes here is quite regressive (as in, that 15% of sales tax matters less to me than to a poor person). But right or wrong, the forms allow me to imagine taxation here as a more progressive system than the American one, where the rich and even the merely well-to-do pay significantly more, proportionally, than the poor. And that’s how it ought to be.

Radio Super Bon: Fetus Training, Incorporated

Fetus Training, Incorporated, “From Womb to Room.”

An appropriate subject for the first installment — birth!

A couple weeks ago, some friends of ours had a “Baby Bacchanalia” party in honor of their then-impending newborn. They asked guests for original performances for either of them, or for the child. Carrie and I decided to make an “instructional audio tape” for the fetus (no “pro-life” message intended) in the persona of the “Fetus Training, Incorporated.” I collected some cheesey sound effects from around the internet and Carrie brushed up on the birth process in Our Bodies, Ourselves. With script in hand, we produced this one-off wonder. Despite occasional thoughts about instructional tapes for department chairs or our cats, I think we will move on to other genres. . . .