Whistler

We have experienced many different weather conditions today, snow, sleet, rain, really heavy rain and sunshine.
We managed it safely to Whistler and back, but I always feel I'm about to be trapped there or be enveloped by the blizzard. My sister and niece have a lovely two-level room overlooking the village plaza, I think they'll enjoy their week.

The other day, in Superstore, I spotted an excellent T-shirt. I presume it was being worn by a firefighter. It had a picture of a firefighter in uniform with axe and the legend,
'Send us to Hell and we'll still be putting out the fires.' Brilliant.
Today however, I saw another T-shirt on a blog that I felt was equally, though differently, brilliant.
A simple, grey vest with the html instruction which I have to write in words because when I write it as it appears, the instruction, being an html instruction, and the blog is in html, cancels itself.
Inside the <> is the instruction /patriarchy - meaning an instruction to cancel the patriarchy.
Simple, Superb.

I had been annoyed by a recent set of signs that had appeared at construction areas. A picture of some kids with the words,
'Please slow down (or something like that), my daddy works here.' Ok, I thought, but women do work on construction projects here, even if they don't seem to be given much more than the holding the sign job.
Today, as we were driving back from Whistler, I can only assume that this had been pointed out to someone. One side of the road had daddy, and now the other side had mummy.
Kevin suggested that construction work was like High School dances, girls down one side of the hall, boys down the other.
I wouldn't know, I went to grammar (and thus single sex) school.

There is a TV show called 'Are you smarter than a fifth-grader'. I can't imagine it's a show worth watching, however an article on Slashdot about how toddlers can learn language by data mining makes me think that I'm not even as smart as one of those data-mining toddlers. I had to read it several times and then look up the contributing article before I could mine all the data for myself.
This despite the fact that part of my first degree was linguistics and my MA is in language education.
But... it engaged my interest.
Perhaps I should have given it a first read when drunk, things tend to make more sense then.