Our small family at Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids.

If you’re in or near Chicagoland this week, the tour continues on from Charlottetown to a secret location in Chicago this Wednesday, November 8, 2017. Somebody tell the Obamas.

John Gruber went to check out the iPhone X line at the Apple Store in Philadelphia. People in the line had questions for him. He recorded them. I would happily watch a weekly show with this cast of characters.

An excellent (and pleasantly ironic) way to learn more about Hannah Bell, Green Party candidate in this month’s District 11 by-election, is through this interview with her by Premier Wade MacLauchlan.

I’ve been a beneficiary of several gifts from the household-move of our friend Catherine, including this lovely 1976 poster from the United Nations Conference on Human Settlements.

Jason Farbman interviewed Wallace Shawn; in part:

Farbman: Throughout the book, you are making structural arguments, and about people being compelled in certain directions. It was interesting to me how you traced this line of thinking to a discussion of punishment, about what to do with capitalists after the revolution.

Why are you thinking about what to do with the rich after the revolution?

Well, I believe in radical change. I don’t think the rich should rule the world, as they do now. But if a different system should replace the current one, the character of the new system will be determined to an important degree by how it treats those over whom it would then have power, the former rulers. I don’t believe in revenge or even really in punishment, and I think that people who take revenge against formerly powerful monsters become at that moment powerful monsters themselves. Of course I’m a member of the bourgeoisie, and so are most of the people I know and love, so you might suspect my motives when I say these things. You could say I’m trying to protect the asses of the bourgeoisie, and my own ass is one of the ones I’m protecting. But I can’t deny my own beliefs simply because someone might suspect my motives. Those are my beliefs.

I don’t believe in punishing the poor. And I don’t believe in punishing the rich, either. I don’t believe in punishing the innocent. And I don’t really believe in punishing the guilty. I realize that leaves a lot of questions on the table that I don’t resolve in the book. For instance, what do we do with serial killers, who are driven to commit murder again and again? There must be some way we can cope with those people. We don’t want them to kill everyone.

Punishment of some kind is a very articulate way for society to express its disapproval of certain actions. There should be some way that society can express its disapproval of what was done. But I don’t really believe in punishment, because I think it’s based on an erroneous idea of how people make decisions. Person A decides to murder Person B. Well, a lot of forces go into what we call “a decision,” and a lot of those forces are unconscious and not under the control of the person making the decision. Blaming the murderer assumes that he could have behaved differently. It’s hard to prove that.

Here’s Oliver, dressed as a cow for Hallowe’en, at age two, and then again tonight, which he chose as an homage to his disappearing youth. Both photos taken at Catherine Hennessey’s house.

Catherine and Oliver and I went to the Jack Blanchard Family Centre this morning for our annual flu vaccination (clinics are being held now across the Island, and the flu vaccine is free for everyone for the first time).

The nurses who administer the vaccine recommend hanging around the waiting room for 15 minutes after receiving the vaccine; usually this time is spent twiddling thumbs and clock-watching, but this year we were handed a survey to fill out on a variety of vaccination topics. It was a thorough and informative survey, to the point where I requested and received supplemental information about the vaccines I might have missed along the way. By the time the survey was done and pamphlets in my hand the 15 minutes were up and it was time to go.

Kudos to PEI Public Health for using otherwise dead time to both gather information and to inform.

My friend Tracy Michael, co-owner of Nourished Kitchen, has released a series of low cost learn-to-cook online courses. I just signed up for “Simple Dinner Solutions” for $10, and watched the first video, a walk-through the preparation of Lentil Tacos.

Tracy’s a good, patient explainer and after watching her make tacos I’m ready to try it myself.

I told Tracy that I feel, cooking-wise, like a musician who can only play 3 songs; so anything that can add a new song to the playlist is a gift.