The Phone Dilemma [Ask the Hive Mind]

So now that I have a job, it is time to decide what to do about a phone. The pay-as-you-go thing from Fido is fine for what it is, but hardly ideal. It does still seem that all plans in Canada kind of suck.

I don't spend enough time talking to people in the US to make a North-America long distance plan worthwhile. I liked having a smartphone in the past (Blackberry) and wouldn't mind going that route again. That being the case, it seems an iPhone is on the table. The phones offered by Fido are not inspiring, and I've been curious about the alternatives to the Blackberry/iPhone duolith. I suppose with a SIM card, any of those are options.

Anyone with any suggestions for a good phone and plan I should look at? (While most calls would be local, calls to Toronto and Ottawa regions are not out of the question.)

We interrupt these important messages for strangeness

Dildo Dolls. I am sure the more arts and crafts oriented among my readers are already brimming with ideas.

Dear Lazyweb - a savings account

So once upon a time, I had a savings account with INGCanada, which I quite liked. I also had a credit line with them.

The disastrous unraveling of my finances destroyed all of that, and I burned that bridge.

I did like having a savings account that actually earned money, though. While they are all at vastly lower rates than once they were, such accounts still seem to exist, while savings accounts in RBC or other real banks continue to offer things like .05 percent annually.

Anyone have good stories to tell about any of these companies? It seems many don't work in Quebec for language reasons.

Neurosexism and hooking up.

It's a nice term in this article on the whole men and womens brains are wired completely differently.

(This also gives me an excuse to point to Echidne's Statistics Primer.)

The general point is summarized thusly,

There may be slight variations in the brains of women and men, added Fine, a researcher at Melbourne University, but the wiring is soft, not hard.



As long as we're discussing social science, here's an article looking at the whole hookup culture issue and its effects on adolescents and young adults. Unsurprisingly for some of us, "hooking up" wasn't invented in the 90s and so there is some research on it.

The research shows that there is some truth to popular claims that hookups are bad for women. However, it also demonstrates that women’s hookup experiences are quite varied and far from uniformly negative and that monogamous, long-term relationships are not an ideal alternative. Scholarship suggests that pop culture feminists have correctly zeroed in on sexual double standards as a key source of gender inequality in sexuality.

And while this line is specifically women-focused, I rather think it applies more generally.

For most women, the costs of bad hookups tended to be less than costs of bad relationships. Bad hookups were isolated events, while bad relationships wreaked havoc with whole lives.

Super Saints!

I am terribly fond of patron saints. Something about the idea of finding just the right story that you should hitch your star to when performing a certain job or faced with a certain dilemma appeals to me.

Now, the story of the Catholic Saints is a fascinating one, as the struggle to control and formalize the declaration of saints gives an insight into the struggle between a top-down hierarchy of temporal power and the spontaneous celebration of the holy that results in so many saints who only ever existed locally. (Of course, other traditions are filled with holy people as well, but very few have the specific formality of the Roman Catholic church.)

Many saints that are no longer saints fascinate me. Stories like Saint Guinefort and the fall of the Archangel Uriel into St. Uriel (and the other angels who mostly got demoted to Demons) fascinate me.

But I never cease to be amazed as to what there are patron saints for and what some of the saintly powers are.

And so, I present to you some of the best ones I've come across:

Perhaps my new favorite: Saint Drausinus who is the patron saint of invincible people. Because when I think of who needs a patron saint, it is the invincible. (I do think he would make a good patron saint of superheros, though.)

Although never formally beatified or canonized, there is Saint Christina the Astonishing who lives up to her name. She could levitate, was immune to fire and cold, able to smell sin on people, and also regularly led the souls of the recently dead to purgatory. She is, interestingly, both the patron saint of lunatics and the patron saint of therapists.

Again with the levitating thing, we have Joseph of Cupertino, who is now the patron saint of air travelers.

Padre Pio could fly/levitate (he seemed to protect pilots in WWII) and could bilocate. He isn't the patron saint of anything, though. (There are a handful of saints who could bilocate, by the way. Levitation is more common.)

I wonder if there is a canonical (pun intended) list of Saintly Powers?