The Beaver: Not the Only Clichéd Canadian Symbol

My friend, who works at Heritage Canada, was rather frustrated at the use of the beaver for the PIPWatch toolbar. Because, as she said, there are more clichéd Canadian symbols out there than just the beaver. For example:

The moose
The lumberjack
Igloo (can you imagine? The privacy igloo)
The Bluenose
The Rocky Moutains
Tuques
Hockey, hockey hair, hockey players
The Great White North
Northern Lights
Mounties
The maple leaf

Anyhow, you get the idea. It's hard for me to know whether those PIPWatch people were being deliberately funny when picking the beaver, or just kind of lazy. Post it in comments if you have other fine clichéd Canadian symbols.

Conference Fun

I spent the day at the Internet Privacy Symposium, hosted by uOttawa's Law & Technology program and the Privacy Commisioner of Canada. All quite interesting, but we still managed to have some completely distracted fun, which I've received permission to blog (all anonymously, as usual, but anyone who actually knows who I am will be able to guess who the culprits are. I officially have to come up with blog names for all of my friends who appear).

So there was once session that talked about the PIPWatch toolbar. It's kind of a long story, but it's a Firefox extension that essentially has to do with rating the privacy policies of websites. And one of their symbols is - I'm not kidding - the privacy beaver. It shows green, yellow or red as a quick visual indicator of the "acceptability" of the privacy policy. So my small group friend Vimutra (he picked that name for himself, not me!) leans over to me and says, "I thought everyone's beaver was private." Except maybe Paris Hilton on the Internet, so I wonder what colour her privacy beaver rating would be? Ok, I apologize immediately for that, but I'm not retracting.

At some later point, during the post-lunch attention span lull, I'm sorry to say that we devolved into a bit of note passing. In our defence, this did honestly start out as academic discussion ("What about the potential privacy apps that are counter to corporate interests? Are they funding that?"), but it degenerated into a very short game of primary school check box and "Who would you do?" (listen, it's not that I engage in this kind of behaviour a lot, but we all do it so stop being so judgmental already). I did have a couple of good ones, but the only one I'll admit to is "The PIPWatch beaver or the Greyhound dog". Once again, I apologize, but I think this is maybe the kind of behaviour the emerges at conferences for short 10 min periods.

The rest of the time I was totally focused and learning really interesting things. For example: Some company called Citywatcher.com was requiring some employees to implant RFIDs in order to enter into a secure data centre. Did you all get that? Some job is requiring their employees to implant RFIDs in order to carry out their duties. As in your boss requiring you to implant a device into your body. Wow, I can't imagine I'm the only one who's a bit spooked by that. As I said to TF&C, "But can't you see how secure that data site is now? Someone would have to hack off their arm to get into that place." A real victory for secure data. [sarcasm]

Then there was this cool guy, Yves Poullet who spoke on the subject of third generation privacy laws. He's not a native English speaker (though, like many Europeans I've met, totally competent) and his Power Point slide had this sentence:

"Governments have lost the control"

To which TF&C immediately deadpanned:

"It's between the cushions of the couch."

Am I the only one who thinks that funny? TF&C also brought up the notion of being a data terrorist. The fact that I've written the word "terrorist" on my blog will probably have me indexed somewhere now, but anyway, I think it's kind of an interesting concept. What exactly would a data terrorist do, and would one be considered to work on the side of good or evil? (Good and evil being quite subjective notions in the realm of privacy. Please discuss.)

Also totally fantastic is the fact that Yves Poullet's bio says that, in addition to having a PhD, he holds a "License in Philosophy". Holy Christ! Some university (in Europe, I suppose) grants a license in philosophy. As TF&C said (ok, he's everywhere in this post, but we were sitting beside each other), it's harder to get than a license to kill. Oh my God! Could you imagine if it was a "License to Philosophy"? That would be the cat's meow. Then, afterwards, I actually chatted with Poullet for a minute and he said I could come see him in Belgium. I am SO into that.

Also on the subject of "Poullet" (and this will be my last point because this post is becoming unwieldy), at some point I had to notice that in English, you don't find anyone with the last name "Chicken". You don't even find anyone with the last name "Chiken". Why do you suppose that is???

I Eat Food Yum Yum!

A Humble Chef has started a recipe blog. Apparently one of my lady friends tried out the brownie recipe he posted and brought them to work and they sort of, ahem, went down really well. So her colleagues been asking where on Earth did she get that fantastic recipe. So I made AHC make a new blog.

Prepare to be impressed!

CHALLENGE: Whom among you is astute enough to catch the reference to Canadian children's lit? Show me the reference, and I'll show you the delights of AHC.

Don't Let The Catty Out of the Bag

So my roomie had to call the landlord to come in and fix the faucet of our bathtub because it was leaking to the point that it could practically run the shower. The following exchange took place between Roomie and the Landlord between 10:00 a.m. and 10:01 a.m.:

Ll: Ok, I'll come tomorrow. You have any pets?
Rm: No, but my roommate might be there, so just knock.
Ll: Your cat? You have a cat?
Rm: No, a roommate.
Ll: Ok, you don't want me to let the cat out.
Rm: I don't have a cat, I have a roommate!

Now I can be catty but not, you know, literally.

From the Margins

I've taken to scribbling "blog this" in the margins of my text books when I come across funny, profound or egregious statements. Here are some from Contracts: Cases and Commentaries:

• "[...] but in my opinion such a person must bear the consequenses of his own exceptional ignorance[...]" Mellish LJ in Parker v South Eastern Ry. Co. (1877), 2 C.P.D. 416 (C.A.). Tee hee. Sometimes ignorance is less than bliss and not equal to a defence. And such a nice example of the business efficacy argument.
  
• "Without knowledge there is nothing." Lord Devlin in McCutcheon v MacBrayne Ltd. [1964] 1 All E.R. 430 (H.L.). You can't get much deeper than that, inadvertent as it may have been.
• "And some people would sign a contract even if ' THIS IS A SWINDLE' were embossed across its top in electric pink." ("Contract as a Thing" (1970), 19 Am. U.L. Rev. 131 at 157). If only that were a statutory requirement for contracts, I could at least have a sense of humour about the really horrible ones, instead of getting my indignant self in a twist.

Egregious will come later, don't worry. There's no shortage of that in the courts.

Welcome New Baby!

This morning around 4:30 a.m. my Big Sister brought into this world her fourth beautiful baby! So welcome New Baby to the world and to the family. NB weighed in at 9 lbs 1 oz (which is, according to our mother, the exact same weight as my sister was) and she is 23 inches long. So I'm resisting the urge to call her Big Baby, instead of New Baby.

Curiously, her name is spelled with the first initial of Big Sister's* other three kids first names (in order of arrival), plus the first initial of the Big Boy, and it is the Card Shark's** middle name, so it is like a little homage to the all of the kids in our family so far. Also curiously, it is just a weird coincidence that the initials form a totally normal name. So don't worry, my sister hasn't saddled the poor child with some made-up name that will get her beat up in school. I will have to figure out blog names for all of the kids and then re-name NB with whatever word the inials form when she is no longer a new baby.

Congratulations, we're all so happy :)

*It would just be wrong of me to refer to her by the initials "BS" because that is so not her. That would actually make it ironic, and therefore funny...
**Fiorellina has been renamed, at the urging of AHC, who never liked it in the first place. I'm not sold on CS either, but we'll see.

Incentivize: Most Certainly A Word

Re: This comment

Oh, Aitch, how could you doubt my vocabulary?! I have the Canadian Oxford Dictionary beside my bed. Which is both a badge of honour and total nerdiness, but I have that thing about language. You know, I dig it. And I have a girl crush on Katherine Barber, because she gets to edit (in chief) the Canadian dictionary. Wikipedia calls her a lexicographer. That sounds so exotic. Or is it just me?

Well, to be sure I wanted to actually check the COD, but it had to wait until I returned to Ottawa. And indeed, incentivize (or incentivise if you prefer the British spelling) is a word. You can find it on page 713 of the 2001 edition.

Why would I need to make up words when there are so many good ones we so rarely use?

The Doctrine of Estates: Make. It. Stop.

It's taken me six days to read 40 pages on estates. I find it to be exceptionally dull, and yet it's one of those things that rips families apart. Lesson learned: Make sure you get a damned good lawyer to write your will, for crying out loud. Mercifully, there's only one class on this before we move to aboriginal property law, a far more intriguing proposition.

Poor, poor property law, keeps getting interupted by my afternoon naps, the February issue of Vanity Fair, Margaret Atwood, The Children of the Lamp (book three), jaunts to Chinatown, cards games, and the occasional trip to the drug store for Advil and Buckley's cough syrup. Because no vacation is complete without a wretched virus. No vacation is complete without a little LOTR, either. I myself am partial to The Return of the King, because Viggo is all over that movie. I don't get tired of LOTR, though I do tend to skip a lot of the hobbity parts, except when AHC is around. He makes me watch the hobbits, even though I would rather skip ahead to the world of Men.

What was I talking about? Oh, right, property law.

A CHALLENGE: Draft a clause for your will guaranteed to confuse and dismay your heirs! Surely you don't need to know anything about the doctrine of estates to do a bang up job of this. The courts are filled with the confusing self-written instructions of people now dead. But I'll expect a little creativity from my law peeps. Impress (or confuse) me and you may be rewarded.