Customs and Immigration

I'm in California at the moment (lunch, Mr. Kite? Monday or Tuesday?). My husband and my two little kids are here too. They decided to come along to keep me company because I am here for a full week. We are lucky to be here. Let me tell you about the nasty thing that happened to me at the Vancouver International Airport.

If you're travelling to the US from Vancouver, you clear (if all goes well) Customs and Immigration in Vancouver. I've never had any problem crossing... until yesterday.

I got a bad feeling from the officer right from the moment we were directed into his queue. He took his time before he looked up from the glow of his computer screen to acknowledge us. I won't say greet us because, um, that didn't happen. (Despite the pure fiction they have displayed on posters in the Customs Zone at the airport: We pledge to greet you with courtesy and welcome you to the United States. Ha! More like, We pledge to get erections while we give you the silent treatment until you start to babble and cry.) Anyway, he asked some questions, and then slowly and deliberately reached for an upsettingly non-handy fat purple felt pen.* I could tell this wasn't his regular pen. He wrote a big letter "H" on my customs card. "H"?? I've never seem that before. What could I have said to give me the worrisome H?

Then he said, "Go in there." And pointed to a set of closed doors. Not a good sign. (Did I mention that it is 4:30 am?) I said, "Is there a problem?" He said, "I don't know."

To make a long story short, we had a long wait in the second room. The clock was ticking (as clocks do), and I was starting to get nervous about missing my flight (the fam was on a later flight so I wasn't as worried about them). Finally, I had some more questions from a slightly nicer person and found out that I am violating NAFTA rules by coming down here to do work. The only reason they finally let me through was because I swore up and down that I was only coming here for training and that I wouldn't do a stitch of work (so help me god). The fact that I work for the same company in Vancouver as the one that I am visiting in the US? Makes no difference. The fact that I am doing the same work in Vancouver as I would do in the US? Makes no difference.

Good to know. Wish my company had given me a heads up (does this take an apostrophe? I've often wondered. I will look it up someday).

They added an annotation to my passport record. I expect that border crossing will get harder from now on.

I ran and made my flight with 2 minutes to spare. I am not in very good cardiovascular shape.

But here we are. We're having a pretty good time.

* Yes, I need that many adjectives.

Susan

My favorite books from my childhood are those in C.S. Lewis's Narnia series. In particular, I love The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Naturally, when I was a little mite, I didn't pick up on the Christian symbolism. Now that I am a Big Fat Atheist, I notice it all right, but don't give a hoot. Actually, that's not quite true: if anything, I rather enjoy it. I suppose it's because the books were already special to me.

More of a problem for me is the fact the Susan doesn't get to come back to Narnia at the end of the series. Why not? This is especially hard for a child reader to understand. A child reader wants the whole family together: the thought of an excluded one is hard to accept.

I can tell, even from the very first book that she appears in (T.L.t.W.a.t.W.), that Susan is not Lewis's favored child. She doesn't want to give in to the magical world. In Prince Caspian she is the last to see Aslan and is responsible for leading the children astray while they are on their way to join the battle. In The Last Battle, Susan does not appear and is described by one of the children who returns as "...no longer a friend of Narnia." But why? Is it because she is too cautious and sensible to believe (to have faith?) or is it because (as some critics think) she is becoming a sexual being, more concerned with her own beauty?

And what of Aslan's words in T.L.t.W.a.t.W.: "Once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen of Narnia"? How are we to reconcile these things? Perhaps Susan just has to wait for her turn. Maybe she has a thing or two to learn first.

Neil Gaiman (most awesome modern fantasy writer) wrote a short story a few years ago called "The Problem of Susan." (It appears in his recent collection, Fragile Things.) This story features an elderly Professor Hastings, who is Susan Pevensie in her dotage. Worth a read. Gives quite a different perspective. Don't read aloud to children.

Water and Wine

I'll admit that the puzzles that appear here are easy for me to pull together for your enjoyment: I don't make them up. They're the lazy girl's blog post. The low-hanging fruit. You'll see more of them when I'm busy. When I don't have time to do a proper post about (a) what I'm reading*, (b) atheism, (c) language, or (d) funny stuff, I'll give you a puzzle to hold your interest. I want you to stay with me!

So, without further ado:

You have a glass of water and a glass of wine. Both glasses contain the same volume of their respective liquids. Take a teaspoon of the water and add it to the wine, then take a teaspoon of the wine and add it to the water.

Question: Is there now more water in the wine glass or vice-versa? Can you give a simple explanation for your answer?

* Harry Potter book 7, I'm afraid. All of creation is reading this at present. My cousin told me of a recent spoken word performance she attended: the performer simply took a seat, paged to the end of the latest Harry Potter, and read the last 4 pages aloud. He was booed.

Explain this sequence

Explain why this sequence is ordered as it is:

8 5 4 9 1 7 6 3 2 0

T-Rex is damn sexy!

Surely you agree! Enjoy more of his awesome exploits at qwantz.com.

Wev

As a follow-up to this post, I feel I should alert you to the existence of the term wev.**

This, apparently, is a short form of whatever, come to us through the intermediate stops of whatev and whatevs. Yeah, it sux having to text words of eight or more letters...unless they are strings (can't really call them "words") like omfgrofl or kthxbye: eight little letters doing the work of many, many more.

I don't like wev—not because it's abbreviated, mind you (I luv abbrvs! Abbrvs rck! UR N MY BRAIN, TOXOPLASMOSING MY GRMMR***)—for all the same reasons I don't like whatever, but I suppose it has a breezy newness to it. At least, it does for me; at least, it does so far.


**Yes, yes, this is also from Language Log.

***I didn't make this up. I don't know who did. I wish it were me.

Democrats are finding God

I'll just say it: they're finding God to get votes. I don't believe for a minute that Clinton, Obama, and Edwards are devout. Heck, I can barely bring myself to accept that they're theists. Someone has been advising them that an avowal of faith would be a smart tactic.

Is this a bad move? I know what R. Dawkins would say (dear R. Dawkins is bursting a gasket), but I'm not sure. Here's an excerpt from the July 12 Time magazine cover story, "How the Democrats Got Religion":

The most conservative white Protestants, [John C. Green] says, are all but off-limits to the Democrats. But then there are more than 22 million voters he calls "freestyle Evangelicals," worried about not only their eternal souls but also their kids' schools, their car's fuel efficiency and the crisis in Darfur. In the past, those voters may have leaned Republican in part because the G.O.P. has been far smarter about presenting itself as friendly to people of faith while painting the Democrats as a bunch of sneering, secular coastal élites.

But the Republican lock on Evangelicals may be breaking. The percentage of white Evangelicals who self-identify as Republicans has declined from roughly 50% in 2004 to about 44% this past February, according to Green. Now the number is closer to 40% as more Evangelicals choose to label themselves independents. "There is a loosening of the Republican coalition, particularly among people under 30," Green says, "but it is not yet a movement toward the Democrats. It is a small but real change."

One does what one must do, I suppose. It's clearly a tactical move. But I can't help but wonder whether any mainstream American presidential candidate would have the courage to unflinchingly claim to be an atheist in 2007.*

* I don't know about Nader. Google** brings me back atheist, agnostic, humanist, and secular when I search Nader+religion; I'm not sure what Nader himself officially claims. And Nader doesn't count as mainstream, now, does he? And he's not a candidate this time, at least not so far.

**Wow: Google does reveal that Nader is simply dripping with Cisco Systems stock. Interesting, at least to me. But wildly irrelevant to this post.

Steel belt around a sphere

Because you are such quick and clever puzzle-solvers, I'm going to raise the (ahem) belt a bit. This one is hard. Acknowledgements to Martin Gardner.

Imagine that you are standing on a perfectly smooth sphere that is as large as the Earth (in circumference). A steel belt is wrapped snugly around one of the equators of the sphere.

Now, a length of steel, one meter long, is added to the belt (the belt is "opened", the new segment added, the belt fastened again). The segment adds to the length of the belt sufficiently to raise the belt off the surface of the sphere by the same distance all the way around. Will this segment lift the belt high enough so that you can:
- Slip a playing card under it?
- Slip your hand under it?
- Slip a baseball under it?

For bonus points:
- Is your answer different if the sphere is the size of the sun?

For extra do-decko bonus points:

- Explain your answer.

Enduring Love

Have you read Enduring Love by Ian McEwan? No? Well, do.

I've read it before and am reading it again now for book club purposes. (Yeah, book club! There's hope for you yet!) I wish I hadn't let so many intervening years (6 or 7) go by since I last read this book.

Here's what I love:

- The entire opening chapter. There is nothing to equal it. It stands alone beautifully. In fact, I do believe, although I couldn't swear to it (the front matter of my edition makes no mention of it), that this chapter was originally published as a short story and that is how I first encountered it. A picnic, a yell, five men running toward each other across a field, disorder, tragedy, guilt, the beginning of obsession. I don't want to tell you any more: just read it yourself and then let me know what you think.

- The writing is exquisite. Here's an example; the narrator is describing his experience of recounting the story of the tragedy to friends:

I watched our friends' wary, intelligent faces droop at our tale. Their shock was a mere shadow of our own, resembling more the good-willed imitation of that emotion, and for this reason it was a temptation to exaggerate, to throw a rope of superlatives across the abyss that divided the experience from its representation by anecdote. Over the days and weeks, Clarissa and I told our story many times to friends, colleagues, and relative. I found myself using the same phrases, the same adjectives in the same order. It became possible to recount the events without re-living them in the faintest degree, without even remembering them.* (p. 36)**

- The philosophical questions: What are our moral obligations to our fellow humans; are they different for relations than for strangers; how do we balance self-interest and altruism? What is the biological basis for altruism? How does game theory impact our decisions?

- The science vs. religion threads that appear throughout the story. Rationality vs. irrationality.

- The discussion of love. The parallel discussion of obsession.

* This exactly how I feel when telling a friend a story about something that happened to me. If I have a 1 hour delay in the airport, it pisses me off a certain amount. Let x be that amount. I tell you about it... now, you may like me, but you're not me, so although you sympathize, my feelings of x will elicit something less than x in you. 1/2 x, let's say, if I am lucky. OK, so when I tell you about my experience, I am trying to do more than give you the bare facts. I want to communicate how the experience made me feel. So, without meaning to lie, really, my 1 hour wait at the airport somehow becomes a 2 hour wait at the airport in the retelling. And now you, bless you, feel x too. Thank you.

** Vintage Edition, 1998.

On Holiday

Not much will happen here for 10 days or so. But rest assured that I will be having a great time playing on the beach, looking for sand dollars, getting my toenails painted**, eating great food, soaking up the sun, singing campfire songs... my husband is practising his guitar as we speak. He's working his way through the set list. I'll ask for Dragostea din tei. Charles will ask for The Battle of New Orleans. (He's American; where you see British in this cheerful little ditty, replace it with Canadian...

We fired our guns and the British kept a'comin. There wasn't nigh as many as there was a while ago.We fired once more and they began to runnin' ... down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.

OK, it was a long time ago. We'll all sing along and shoot the British for an evening.)

Michele will ask for Radiohead's Pearly. Angela will ask for Fix You by Coldplay. The kids will ask for Baby Beluga (or maybe not, they are getting older) and Lollipop (Mika). Bob and Derek will ask for Pink Floyd (Owen can only play Comfortably Numb, so we'll hear that a couple of times). Strangers on the beach sometimes shout out requests. Things like, "TOM PETTY!!" and "SHUT UP!!" Yes, it will be lovely.

I'll see you in a bit. Be good.

**I know the toenails don't really fit in with all that beach stuff. But there is a spa right by the beach resort! Woo-hoo!

Two Trains and a Fly

I hope this doesn't remind you too much of the problems you had to work out in Grade 7. This one is a little different.

Two train engines are facing each other on a single track, two hundred miles apart. Simultaneously, they begin to move towards each other at 50 miles per hour (assume they don't have to take any time to get up to speed). Predictably, they crash.

At the outset, a little fly is sitting on the front of one of the engines. When the engines begin to move, the fly immediately takes off and flies towards the other engine. When it reaches the other engine, it turns around and returns to the first engine and so on, back and forth, to and fro, until the fly is crushed in the impact. (Tears.) Before the crushing, the fly flies at 75 miles per hour.

Question: How far does the fly fly before the impact?


PS: Puzzle is from What is the Name of This Book, by Raymond Smullyan (Prentice-Hall, 1978).

Sabbath Mode

My new KitchenAid electric range (Architect Series II) arrived today. As soon as it was plugged in and its gleaming surfaces admired, I curled up with the Use and Care Guide (wouldn't you? You wouldn't?? Well.).

It has more special functions than I know what to do with:
1. Fahrenheit and Celsius conversion
2. Tones On/Off
3. Tones High/Low
4. Cooking Time Completions Tones On/Off
5. Dehydrate
6. Oven temperature calibration
7. Sabbath Mode

As I read this list, a few thoughts flit across my mind:
- The copy editor wasn't checking for consistent casing.
- Can you download personalized tones for the Cooking Time Completion?
- Dehydrate? Awesome!
- Oven temperature calibration is definitely more control than I need.
And finally:
- Sabbath Mode? "Sabbath Mode" as in A MODE FOR THE SABBATH?

Yes, that's right. A mode for The Sabbath. With this mode, Mode 7 (how appropriate), you can program the oven on Friday afternoon so that it will cook the food at the right time and at the right temperature on Saturday. You don't have to do a stitch of work. I presume that opening the door to get the food out of the oven and bringing it to the table doesn't count.

And I haven't even told you the really interesting part. Are you ready? To quote from the Use and Care Guide (p. 18), emphasis added:

The oven temperature can be changed when the oven(s) [(s)?] are in the Sabbath Mode. No tones will sound, and the display will not change.

You know what this means, right? If, on The Sabbath, you wander over to see how the meal is cooking (by itself), and you think, "Fuck! I accidentally programmed it to cook at 500 degrees—that's 200 fucking degrees too high!!" well, there's a surreptitious way out of this little pickle for you. You can quietly adjust the temperature and No One Will Ever Know.**

**No one except God, that is.


PS: Zoot's staying over... I blame her for my bad language.

Big Words

Conrad Black. I shall tell you what I know about him; I shall not Google him first. Here we go:

Not much.

I know that he's a Canadian publishing magnet. (Some of you may even say magnate. Fussy.) I know that he's married to Barbara Amiel, stylish right-wing columnist. I know that he is an English Lord (Canadian birthplace be damned). I know that he is (was? former?) CEO of Hollinger. I know that he's in trouble related to some alleged financial jiggery-pokery. He's presently on trial, in fact.

Do I like him? Do I dislike him? Well, up until one week ago, I was completely neutral. I was Sweden. I was beige. I was pH 7 on the subject of Conrad Black. I was 21 degrees Celsius. I would have been an excellent juror.

I don't know a lot about his alleged crimes and what I do know doesn't worry me much. I can't pretend to be interested; the news of his trial is, to me, soporific.

I did read something last week, however, that moved me off my neutral stance. I've become... if not Sweden, then Denmark, perhaps. Pink. pH 8. Nearly 22 degrees C. Not a lot of movement, you'll notice, but something.

It was this delightful article by Ian Brown, which appeared in the June 16th edition of the The Globe and Mail. It's called "Vocabulary: Are we losing our lexicon?" and it's well worth reading in full.

Brown opens by stating that Black's lawyer (Brown and Black! That's funny!), Edward Greenspan, won't let Black take the stand. And it's for quite an interesting reason:

The problem is Mr. Black's fondness for whacking big words: tricoteuses (knitters of yarn, used to describe reporters and gossips, augmented by the adjective "braying"), planturous (fleshy), poltroon (a coward, a.k.a. former Quebec premier Robert Bourassa), spavined (lame), dubiety (doubt: Mr. Black rarely uses a simple word where a splashy lemma will do), gasconading (blustering) and velleities (distant hopes), to list just a few of his verbal smatterings. Mr. Greenspan fears the Lord's lingualism will turn off the jury.

I like Conrad (may I call you Conrad?) for this. It's reason enough, isn't it? It's odd that Greenspan is concerned Conrad will "turn off" the jury. I bet they'd love it.

Crossing a Bridge

Four men need to cross a bridge at night:
- No more than two can cross at a time
- They need a flashlight to cross, and they have only one
- They all start on the west side and all need to end up on the east side
- They take 10, 5, 2, and 1 minutes to cross, respectively

What's the most efficient way for them to cross?

And to add a note of suspense: a madman turns up after 18 minutes to kill anyone left on the west side or still on the bridge (i.e., 19 minutes is not the correct answer!).

Thanks go to Darren—this tricky one is from him.

Steig and Peet

I have been enjoying two fabulous children's authors: William Steig and Bill Peet. They have a lot in common, it turns out.

Both were American. They were contemporaries: Steig was born in 1907 and died in 2003 (aged 95); Peet was born in 1915 and died in 2002 (aged 87). Both charmingly illustrated their own stories*. Both had interesting careers outside of their work as authors: Steig was a cartoonist for The New Yorker; Peet wrote for Disney.

Both wrote stories about innocent child or animal protagonists battling the odds to achieve something. Steig's characters outsmart evil captors, break free from enchantments, and face storms to find their way home for a happy reunion with loved ones. Peet's stories frequently contain an environmental message. In one story, a little bird flies from New York City to California to live in a redwood tree. In another, a group of animals hop a train to try to find a new home after their habitat is destroyed.

Gripping stories, sweet pictures, engaging characters... yes, yes, yes. But what I am enjoying the most at the moment is the rich vocabulary in these books. They are for quite young children, really, but neither Steig nor Peet shies away from big or uncommon words. Here's what I've found in a quick flip-through of the ones that happen to be lying about:
- Steig: perplexed, ceased, compote, exclamations, defecate**
- Peet: chortled***, blunder, diminishing, bedraggled, sycamore, indestructible

I read aloud to my kids every night. And I've had enough of Go Dog Go, Green Eggs and Ham****, and Are You My Mother? I love books like this instead: books that engage me as much as they engage the kids. My kids prefer them too.

* With a few exceptions; for instance, Steig's later work was illustrated by others. Hard to draw when you're, like, 92.

**Seriously!

*** Peet loves this word! I've seen him use it in at least three different stories.

****Am I the only one out there who is not a fan of Dr. Seuss's illustrations? Creepy. Why are they all smiling with their eyes closed? And all those floppy feet...

Default position

Recently—since I've started getting all outspoken and all—I've had people ask me the difference between atheism and a religion. I was silenced (briefly) by the question—not because I thought it was a silly one, not at all. I was silenced (briefly) because although it is clear to me that there is an enormous difference, I didn't have a good answer all ready. I've been thinking about it over the last couple of weeks, when... guess what? I found that someone has expressed it beautifully for me. So here you are then; a marvellous quote from Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation:

Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, atheist is a term that should not ever exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a non-astrologer or a non-alchemist. We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs. An atheist is simply a person who believes that the 260 million Americans (87 percent of the population) claiming to 'never doubt the existence of God' should be obliged to present evidence for his existence—and, indeed, for his BENEVOLENCE, given the relentless destruction of innocent human beings we witness in the world each day.

And, for good measure, here's a nice succinct quote from a fellow called Don Hirschberg (I have to confess I hadn't heard of him before today, but I like his analogy): "Calling atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color."

What does this all mean? Well, it means that we should think of atheism as a default position—like disbelief in astrology or alchemy—that we ought to hold until we are presented with sufficient evidence to switch.

Four men in hats

Here's a fantastic puzzle that I found here (no peeking).**

Imagine four men buried up to their necks in the ground, as shown in the illustration. Between A and B is a solid brick wall. The men can only look forward, so A and B can see only the brick wall, C can see only B, and D can see both B and C.

The men know that among them are four hats: two black and two white. None of the men knows the colour of the hat on his own head.

To avoid being shot (I l-o-o-ove puzzles that include that phrase), any one of the men must correctly call out the colour of his own hat. If he gets it wrong, all four men will be shot. The men are not allowed to talk to each other and have 10 minutes to think.

After one minute, one of them calls out the correct colour of his own hat, thereby saving them all. I'd like to think that what happens next is that they are immediately dug up, relieved of their triangular hats, and taken to a Radiohead concert as a reward.

Questions for you:
1. Who calls out?
2. How does he know?

** I pinched the illustration from that site too.

Sir Salman

Salman Rushdie became Sir Salman last week: on June 15, 2007, he was knighted by the Queen.**

Here are some quotes, running the gambit from frightening, through appropriate, to fluffy.

A Pakistani government minister sees this as justification for suicide attacks: "If someone exploded a bomb on [Rushdie's] body he would be right to do so unless the British government apologises and withdraws the 'sir' title." (The Guardian, June 18).

The Guardian sees this as a "...belated endorsement by the British establishment."

My favorite is one that Bill Poser found and mentioned on LL; he doesn't identify the original author: "The queen is a piece I recognize, and so is the knight, but what, scacchically, is a "rushdie" and how does it move on the board?"

(Scacchically, Poser tells us, is an adverb that means "from the point of view of chess." This obscure word is recorded in the OED*** as dating back to 1860—thanks to Language Hat for looking it up for us.)


** On the same day, the founders of an erotic lingerie line received MBEs.

***The OED may approve, but my spellchecker frowns.

[Update, 2007-06-20: Seriously now. Predictably, things have worsened. An Iranian government official calls the knighthood "a provocative act," and Pakistan has asked Britian to rescind the honour.

This takes me right back to 1989. Coincidentally, I happen to be reading God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens, and in Chapter 2, "Religion Kills," he reminds us of some of the public statements made by religious organizations when the fatwa against Rushdie was first issued. Rather than the universal outrage that one might have expected, Hitchens reminds us that the Vatican, the archbishop of Canterbury, and the chief sephardic rabbi in Israel agreed in official public statements that, while the threat of violence was a pity, The Satanic Verses was indeed blasphemous. Other public figures agreed. If you haven't yet read the famous exchange of letters between Rushdie, John Le Carre, and Hitchens that appeared in The Guardian in November 1997, now is the time to remedy that.]

Kid Birthdays

I have a confession. I make it with some hesitation. In my circle of friends, this is like saying "Recycling is stupid!*" or "Omg, like, too bad Stephen Harper is already married!" It's like saying that one loves watching Fear Factor or Blind Date**. It's like installing one of those TOTALLY offensive noisy huge above-ground grass-killing backyard pools (not to be confused with those dear little wading ones that you can fill up with cold water from the garden hose)***.

Here it is: I adore goodie-bags from little kids' birthday parties. I like putting them together and handing them out; I like receiving them (well, I don't receive them, more's the pity, but I do look forward to the moment when we're all in the car on the way home and my kids tell me what they find in the ones they've been given). Yeah, yeah, plastic crap. Yeah, yeah, too much sugar. Yeah, yeah, waste of money. I know what you're thinking; I hear what you're saying. But I like them anyway.

My kids both have birthdays in the spring. This year, we did quite different things for each. For my daughter, we booked a party at... well, I don't think I want to give you the actual name of the venue because I don't want to do it any Google-harm. But I can tell you, small circle that you are, I don't mind you knowing. It was at that large, silver, Buckminster Fuller-inspired geodesic dome in Vancouver that was built for Expo '86. That should narrow it down sufficiently for you. I love the place, actually, which is why we picked it for the birthday party in the first place. Big Mistake.

Here's what I didn't like:
1. We thought we were getting a decorated party room. The web site assured us we didn't need to worry about our own decorations (unless we wanted "extra".... I guess that was a cue to probe further).

What we got: a cold room with one drooping "happy birthday" banner (lowercase intentional, if not strictly accurate) that had obviously been up for awhile. Two plain brown tables shoved together with no attention to alignment. Stacked chairs.

2. We thought we were getting our own Science Leader, a dynamic person who was to show the kids some age-appropriate science experiments.

What we got: a distracted teenager arrived 15 minutes late, wheeling in a Van de Graaf generator. At that point, I was quite pleased to see him and optimistic about the hour's worth of experiments that we should still have time for. However, after few rounds with the generator (four or five kids got to come up, touch the thing, and have their hair stand up), our leader left to "check on lunch." After lunch (see item 3 below), which was delivered by someone else, there was still no sign of him. I went looking and found him eating his own lunch. I asked if there would be any more experiments. He bounced up. "Sure!" he said, as if this was quite a good idea of mine and he'd be happy to oblige (!!!!). Back in he came and... plugged in the Van de Graaf generator again! I couldn't believe it! I was beginning to view this old dented silver thing much the way a circus visitor, who is wondering where all the lions and tigers are, views a depressed motheaten old goat as it is lead around the ring a few times for the crowd's entertainment. And that was IT! That was it for the "science experiments"!

3. We thought we'd have a decent lunch.

What we got: Utter failure. I take a good portion of the responsibility here because I should have known that pre-made sandwiches are a risky choice for a group of 5- to 7-year-olds. Of course there will be ones who don't like the lettuce or tomatoes. There will be ones who don't like tuna. Yeah... there's a reason that hot dogs are the birthday food of choice. But that big science dome and the BC chain restaurant that has a presence there have to take responsibility for the lack of freshness—even I couldn't choke down one of those sandwiches, and there were a lot of leftovers to deal with. Old lettuce. Can't bear it. (The lemon meringue pie went over very well! We brought that.)

4. We thought we'd have a great time knocking about the place, checking out the exhibits, after the official "hosted" part of the party was over.

What we got: The most terrifying 5 minutes of my life. This is another thing that I take responsibility for. I should have realized that getting 12 5- to 7-year-olds from a party room downstairs to the exhibits upstairs requires more than two adults. We made it, finally, after the longest 5 minutes that I've ever experienced. We got all the kids into one smallish exhibit room and then my husband and I sat outside its entrance to make sure no one left. We spent the entire time counting and re-counting kids until their parents started to arrive for the pick-up. Comparing numbers. Checking lists. Counting again. Oh, the sweet relief when we could start to match up kids with their parents and cross responsibilities off our list.

Compare this with my son's birthday. We had it at home. We planned every detail ourselves: crafts, party games, and make-your-own-pizza. No tired old goats. No fear of losing anyone. No uneaten food. It was great! And a LOT cheaper. We could afford to do more with the goodie bags.

* I shamefacedly admit to being half-hearted about cleaning out the cat food tins.
** Never!!!!!
***Ever!!!!!

The Monty Hall Problem

This is a very famous puzzle; you may have come across it before. I absolutely love it. I love it because it is counter-intuitive (clue) and controversial to the point of emotional debate** (clue), and yet the problem is easy to describe and the solution is reasonably simple to explain.

Don't get me wrong: complex math does some serious work behind the scenes (so they tell me; I'll take their word for it), but you don't need to be a mathematician to understand the solution...at least on a superficial level.

The Monty Hall Problem gets its name from the host of an old TV game show called Let's Make a Deal. In the show, Monty offers a contestant a choice among three closed doors. Behind one is a new car; behind each of the other two is... I forget. Something less desirable than a new car. Maybe a goat. Yeah, I think that's it: each of the other two doors conceals a goat. (I know I could Google this but I am doing my best to write it down from memory.)

After the contestant makes his or her choice, Monty opens one of the unselected doors to reveal a goat. The car is either behind the contestant's choice or the only other remaining closed door. Then Monty asks whether the contestant wants to switch doors or stick with the original choice.

Question: Should the contestant switch? Does it make a difference to the odds of winning?

What do you think?

** The letters to the editor in the magazine that published the solution to the problem, Parade, got quite heated.