Why are women always looking like idiots?

I'm not the first person to notice this, but I'm having a surge of "pissed off" about it right now:

Why is it that commercials always make women look like dumb freaks on any kind of cleaning product ad? Seriously. I just watched two Febreeze ads. One of them actually had a female psychiatrist lying on the patient couch sniffing like a fool. The patient says "Doctor, shouldn't I be on the couch?" and she snaps back, "No!" So, presumably a woman who has spent thousands of dollars and years on her education lacks the capacity to maintain professional behaviour faced with a sweet smelling cleaning product.

This is but one example of any number. It disgusts me. I'm going to start buying lemons and vinegar to do my cleaning because I'm offended by it.

And yet in December 2006 , our friends in Canada's New Government thought it was a good idea to remove equality from the mandate at Status of Women, close SoW offices and cut funding to advocacy programs.

Don't think these are unrelated in the grand scheme of things.

Eat Your Greens

Just a quick note to point out that AHC has started posting on his recipe blog again after a bit of a hiatus (could it be that he was a single dad with two kids for eight months? I'm not going to hold it against him...too much). His recent post on cooking vegetables reminded me of the fact that when he started studying culinary, he hated vegetables. I always bugged him that it was not going to be acceptable for a chef to not eat vegetables. After a short time at cooking school, he realized that, in fact, he did NOT hate vegetables, just that his mother had been overcooking them for his entire life.

(It also amuses me that she likes to take credit for his cooking ability: "I taught you everything you know!" whenever he has suggestion (like, for example, the right way to cook veg). It's like that scene in Dirty Dancing where Baby's mother says something like "I think she gets it from me." On the bright side, she's really good at refried beans and other southern fare of her youth.)

Being that I am the beneficiary of pretty much every recipe on the blog, I can certify that it's all pretty damn good. I highly recommend reading and cooking from it.

The Facebook Dilemma

PRIVACY: I've spent considerable time this year studying privacy at school, for my research job and for my own personal interest. I've spent the past several weeks reading numerous SCC judgments on the "reasonable expectation of privacy," a standard (if you can call it that) underlining a person's s. 8 Charter rights. I worked lengthy hours on a report about digital rights management technologies and the privacy concerns surrounding them. I've got a continuing project about health records and privacy. I'm all over privacy.

Which is why I have a Facebook dilemma. I've resisted thus far. I do not have an account, though I will admit to hypocrisy: When I came back from school, I logged on to AHC's account (with his permission) and nosed around. Found some people, sent a couple of messages and even re-connected with a couple of people from the past. Otherwise, it seems kind of freaky to post stuff for the world to see. I know you can fix your privacy settings, but I have concerns that there's insidiousness just below the surface and I don't want to get sucked into it.

This is mostly a problem right now because I am in Toronto and many of my friends are not. But many of them have FB accounts. It seems like one way to keep in touch. Scanning someone's FB page seems kind of like passing them in the hall, or chatting for a minute by the lockers after class.

In truth, I'm one of those people who thinks you can't really replace face time with a person. I'm against living online. It would drive me crazy in class that people would be posting on people's walls in the middle of class to people who were three rows away. Seriously, wait until after class and talk to the person! It's a whole confluence of elements in our culture, I think: our sharing culture (guilty! I have a blog!) and our soundbite culture (not exactly guilty, but I do have a past in journalism, contributing to the phenom), to name but two. Oh, and I should add our simulacrum culture, just to shout out to Killingsworth. [On a weird note, I just pulled out my Canadian Oxford to check the spelling of "simulacrum" and I opened it on exactly the right page.]

What to do?!

US Supreme Court

The Sunday New York Times (from July 1) had an interesting article on the session of the US Supreme Court that just closed. By the way, why is there only one woman (and only one visible minority) on the US Supreme Court? Not that Canada is the shining paragon of equality, but at least we've got four women sitting in our highest court. Though we're a little slim on the minorities ourselves. Unless you count the French.