Omega Point

On Haiti and Sarcasm

Dear CBC Com­menter:

I under­stand that “some of [your] best friends are Hait­ian” and that you’re only talk­ing about the “bad ones” when you say “Canada will be over­run by gangs and HIV” if we fast-track the immi­gra­tion process for Hait­ian refugees. I get that you’re not really a racist, I do.

In fact, I totally agree with your thoughts on it being “their prob­lem” for liv­ing on a fault line, or that “those peo­ple” should have taken mat­ters into their own hands and risen up against the suc­ces­sion of vile dic­ta­tors more fre­quently. Clearly a coun­try with such a rich his­tory of coups could do bet­ter. Heck, the Amer­i­cans were there for 20 years to help out, and where are their thanks?

And let’s face it, a coun­try that poor? “What would they do for us,” indeed?

…you com­plete asshole.

Sure, we can put a man on the moon, but we can’t put–oh, right.

Eugene Cer­nan walks on the moon, Dec 13, 1972

I’m skep­ti­cal of the use­ful­ness of manned space­flight, even as I believe in its long-term neces­sity. (Besides, should it be nec­es­sary for humans to leave Earth, we could get that going on fairly short order. The technology’s straight­for­ward, even if we don’t have inter­plan­e­tary ships today.)

I was born almost a decade after the last time a human stepped foot on the moon. The Apollo pro­gram was Cold War nose-thumbing and sabre-rattling at its most bla­tant. It was a cor­po­rate boon­dog­gle on a scale scarcely seen since. It was a dis­trac­tion from the hor­rors of Viet­nam and from the wan­ing pop­u­lar­ity of two Presidents.

Land­ing on the moon was also the most impres­sive thing humans have ever achieved.

Despite all its flaws, I’ve been a big sup­porter of the space pro­gram for my entire life. Build­ing bet­ter tele­scopes and probes is absolutely nec­es­sary for the same rea­sons the Large Hadron Col­lider is nec­es­sary: because if we don’t seek out knowl­edge about the uni­verse, if we don’t appre­ci­ate it, what the hell is the point?

36 years ago today, Eugene Cer­nan and Har­ri­son Schmitt stepped into their lunar mod­ule and returned home, the last humans to step foot on another world. That’s not appre­ci­at­ing it, guys.

Catherine’s Vancouver is growing

While hang­ing out at a Main Street cof­fee shop this after­noon, I over­heard a con­ver­sa­tion between a mom and her four-year-old.

“We can go out to the air­port,” the mom said as they were leaving.

“Oh, that’s a long drive!”

Yes. Yes it is. With the open­ing of the Canada Line now moved up to August 17th, less than two weeks away, it will actu­ally be quite a bit faster–for me, at least. The clos­est sta­tion is a 2km walk, bus, or bike ride away, but I expect door-to-door travel time to be much, much shorter than call­ing a cab.

It remains to be seen how well the exist­ing bus ser­vice will inte­grate with the new sta­tions, and if more fre­quent east-west buses will be needed to fun­nel Van­cou­ver res­i­dents into the Cam­bie Street cor­ri­dor. In any event, by open­ing early, Translink and InTran­sit BC will hope­fully have some extra time to work out many of the bugs before the old bus routes out of Rich­mond get discontinued.

I prob­a­bly won’t use the Canada Line much myself, still being closer to the Main Street bus myself. Since I tend not to go to Rich­mond or Oakridge Cen­tre much, I don’t see a lot of oppor­tu­nity to use it, but it would def­i­nitely make get­ting to Yale­town or Davie Street from my neigh­bour­hood much more convenient.

Plus, as has been pointed out to me by friends and drink­ing bud­dies alike, now that I’ll be attend­ing Lan­gara Col­lege, the 49th Avenue sta­tion makes it extremely con­ve­nient to blast down to Gas­town for a drink imme­di­ately after class. (Guys, you get that school isn’t 9–5, right?)

Still, this really does ham­mer home the point that for a pedes­trian and tran­sit user, the shape of our city really is defined by which buses go where. (Hint: they go down­town.) Per­son­ally, when I’m a pas­sen­ger in a friend’s car, I never think about tak­ing 12th Avenue to cut across town because there aren’t buses that go there.

These fas­ci­nat­ing travel-time maps of Great Britain effec­tively illus­trate what even a densely-populated coun­try like the United King­dom must con­tend with when mov­ing peo­ple and goods around.

Also inter­est­ing is the impli­ca­tion of what “cen­tral” means to dif­fer­ent peo­ple. This week, there’s been some dis­cus­sion over at the Van­cou­ver League of Dru­palers, of hav­ing some cowork­ing mee­tups to chat about Dru­pal projects we’ve been work­ing on, get some cod­ing down, and so forth. But where to actu­ally meet? The Grind at Main and King Edward? Sweet, I’m there. Waves in New West? Yeah, not as con­ve­nient. How­ever, if I lived right beside any Expo Line Sky­Train sta­tion in Van­cou­ver proper save for Sta­dium or Main Street, it would be faster to go all the way out to New West­min­ster, hands down.

For­tu­nately, hav­ing my spiffy new bike has opened up a lot of options too, par­tic­u­larly with the abil­ity to switch to tran­sit when I need it, now that all the buses have bike racks.

So far today, I’ve rid­den just under 8 kilo­me­tres to three out of four sched­uled errands. The last one will dou­ble that. I’ll spend most of it on the cross-town 10th Avenue bike route. In the end, I will have spent about the same amount of time on the road as I would have, had I dri­ven, if you fac­tor in park­ing. It’s pretty lib­er­at­ing, I have to say.

But hey, even if it isn’t some­thing that’s totally use­ful for me, a link to Rich­mond and the air­port was nec­es­sary. I wish dif­fer­ent choices had been made in con­struc­tion and plan­ning, but it’s def­i­nitely some­thing we’ll be get­ting some use out of as a city. Plus, hey, Vancouver’s the first Cana­dian city with a sub­way link to the air­port. Go us.

Blogathon 2009: “Legally, we have to refer to you as Catherine December.”

After hear­ing Dave Olsen talk a bit about the restric­tions being applied — in par­tic­u­lar, to the “pedes­trian cor­ri­dors” being estab­lished here in Van­cou­ver dur­ing the Olympics, I’m con­cerned about the impli­ca­tions for free speech, as well as the poten­tial for these laws to endure after the Olympics have ended.

I’ve been con­vinced for a long time that the biggest threat to free speech in the 21st cen­tury is not, as in past eras, some kind of trend towards author­i­tar­i­an­ism, but rather, intel­lec­tual prop­erty encum­brances. The idea that VANOC can trade­mark lines from O Canada is appalling to me. It’s bad enough that the Olympics have become so branded and mired in the exclu­siv­ity of the brand that they’ve threat­ened Olympia Pizza in Vancouver’s West End, to say noth­ing of the actions taken since then.

Thus, I whole­heart­edly sup­port the choice to the True North Media House in response to the line trade­marked by VANOC.

But I’ve been think­ing about sit­u­a­tions where The Author­i­ties have con­fis­cated mem­ory cards or deleted pho­tos and so, I’m won­der­ing about tech­ni­cal workarounds to this: I would con­sider using an EyeFi card in my cam­era to tether with a 3G phone (say, a jail­bro­ken iPhone or pos­si­bly some­thing with rea­son­able bat­tery life.) to auto­mat­i­cally upload my pho­tos to my web­site or Flickr so that I wasn’t actu­ally stor­ing any pic­tures, I was post­ing them live. Short of jam­ming or Iranian-scale net­work mon­i­tor­ing and packet inspec­tion, there would really be lit­tle any­one could do, assum­ing the images them­selves were legal.

If I take a photo of a poster with the Olympic Rings, is dis­tri­b­u­tion of that photo a trade­mark or copy­right vio­la­tion? Is my use of the words “Olympic”, “2010”, “Win­ter”, or “Games” in this post action­able? No, but what if I’m doing so in protest of some­thing involv­ing one or more of those words?

I mean, I don’t seri­ously con­sider myself at risk for hav­ing the last name “Win­ters”, or for writ­ing under that name, but it’s so impor­tant to explic­itly affirm that I have the right to do so when propos­ing –or pass­ing!– any law that pur­ports to restrict speech.

Blogathon 2009: Dave Olsen & the True North Media House

Dave Olsen stopped by Work­space this evening to cheer some of us on and tell us a bit about the social/indie/citizen media project he’s work­ing on for the 2010 Olympics this year, the True North Media House.

From the TNMH website:

We intend to cre­ate a space in down­town Van­cou­ver to serve as a media resource cen­tre with high-speed inter­net, audio and video pro­duc­tion facil­i­ties, green screen and inter­view space, press con­fer­ence space and workstations.

This project was launched by a group of media mak­ers who cov­ered the past sev­eral Olympic Games as un-accredited media. The orga­ni­za­tion has grown into a exten­sive group of vol­un­teers from var­i­ous indus­tries and bring­ing diverse skills and moti­va­tions to the project.

Nice, right? Dave notes that they’ve been care­ful to iden­tify as a group dis­tinct from anti-Olympic pro­tes­tors as well as the IOC itself. He says that his inter­est is in find­ing the sto­ries the main­stream media can’t or doesn’t cover. He wants to make friends with peo­ple from other coun­tries, hang out with them and enjoy a game or two: this is what breaks down the dif­fer­ences between us and makes it hard to hate peo­ple from “over there”, wher­ever that may be.

And he’s right. Stud­ies demon­strate resid­ing in large, diverse cities, or inter­na­tional travel — even reli­gious pil­grim­age — increases tol­er­ance, respect and under­stand­ing for peo­ple lucky enough to be able to make the trip. And isn’t that what the Olympics are sup­posed to be about?

Unlike a few friends and blog­gers, I’m not a huge sports fan myself. At the same time, I’ve been known to enjoy watch­ing a game, tak­ing in an event. But it’s the sto­ries Dave’s inter­ested in telling that are most inter­est­ing to me. And that’s why I’m going to go to the next TNMH meeting.

Blogathon 2009: Infographics, Part 1: Why the CBC sucks

Okay, this is some­thing that has bugged me for a while. Peo­ple who say “inter­ac­tive” when they mean “hard to use” and “Flash scroll­bars”.

While oth­er­wise a com­pe­tent, irri­tat­ingly under­funded news orga­ni­za­tion, the CBC sucks at info­graph­ics. Most of their “inter­ac­tive fea­tures” are just text that requires a lot of click­ing and scrolling to read. That’s not “inter­ac­tive”, guys. That’s “bro­ken”. (In fair­ness, a lot of these come from the Cana­dian Press, which pre­sum­ably also sup­plies these hor­ri­ble clicky things to the two other^[1] Cana­dian news organizations.)

But I digress. A tad.

Yeah, that’s a shame.

This graph of the depress­ing fail­ure that is North­ern Tele­com is pretty good because it ties news and events to stock price over time. There’s still ridicu­lous amounts of click­ing on tiny lit­tle dots though. Mouseover, anyone?

(In fair­ness, there are at least forward/back buttons.)

I find it really bizarre that the two most effec­tive “inter­ac­tive” fea­tures on CBC’s web­site are both incred­i­bly mor­bid: a “where did peo­ple find feet washed up on beaches?” map, and a map of gang hits in Metro Van­cou­ver. (Wow, that map cer­tainly makes the Down­town East Side look quiet. “DTES: Too poor for gang-bangers.”)

Both of these, pre­dictably, use Google Maps, and colour-code the dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories of event at that loca­tion. (“Rac­coon paw hoax” or “stab­bing”, for exam­ple.) This con­veys a decent amount of infor­ma­tion with­out hav­ing to select the icon to view addi­tional details. How­ever, you still do have to click the thing to find out any­thing more.

I will say, though, that the effec­tive­ness of both of these hor­ri­ble death maps could be improved by tak­ing time and date into account: per­son­ally, I want to see how long ago those peo­ple down the street got mur­dered in their attic. I mean, really, now. (I remem­ber see­ing a Google Maps mashup that did this, with a slider at the bot­tom. Can any­one help me out with a URL?)

The New York Times, on the other hand, takes online info­graph­ics to a whole new level, rival­ing the qual­ity of their print fea­tures. I’ll explain more about this in 30 minutes.

[1] Yes, seri­ously. (Stu­pid Con­rad Black. Stu­pid CRTC.)

Catherine Winters in… The Case of Too Many Catherine Winters!

Recently, there’s been a lot of media inter­est in a woman named Melissa Huck­aby — though not that Melissa Huck­aby — and what it’s meant for her to be con­fused with an accused mur­derer and sex­ual preda­tor: media atten­tion, van­dal­ism, death threats, etc, etc. Scary stuff.

I, on the other hand, share my name with a num­ber of mod­er­ately Googleable women, none of whom seem to be ser­ial killers or skin­heads or any­thing ter­ri­ble like that at all. That said, the most promi­nent ones tend to be fairly embarass­ing. So who are they? A cou­ple other Cather­ine Win­ters have writ­ten embar­rass­ing books, but that’s thank­fully a lot bet­ter than it could be. No, my fel­low Cather­ine Win­ters are pretty harmless.

The first Cather­ine Win­ters’ story is pretty tragic, however:

Nine-year-old Cather­ine Win­ters was last seen around noon on March 20, 1913. A fam­ily friend named Dan Mon­roe spoke to her as she walked along the town square toward her New­cas­tle, Indi­ana home. On that day, the schools had closed due to an out­break of measles and Cather­ine had spent the morn­ing play­ing with her pal Helen Stretch. As she skipped toward home, she wore a “red sweater coat,” a white straw hat, and a black and white checked ging­ham dress. She had brown eyes and light brown hair.

They never found her. At the time, it was a huge mys­tery — was she kid­napped by gyp­sies? Did she run away? Her dis­ap­pear­ance was cov­ered in a 1913 silent news­reel.

Of course today, we can all guess what hap­pened and it’s pretty hor­ri­fy­ing. I really can’t fault her for hav­ing the same name, par­tic­u­larly when she met such a tragic end.

Sec­ond to her is a Cather­ine Win­ters who is also pretty hard to be irri­tated by. Cather­ine Win­ters of Lin­don, Utah is 12 years old and plays the flute really, really well. I fig­ure she doesn’t need crazy peo­ple pick­ing at her for being good at stuff, so I’ll forego link­ing to any of the sites that list a lit­tle too much per­sonal info.

Cather­ine, if you ever read this:

• Tell your par­ents to think about pass­word pro­tect­ing some of those pho­tos of you. Flickr is a good option for this.
• Don’t let high school get you down in a cou­ple years. In my expe­ri­ence, Cather­ine Win­ter­ses don’t like high school.

So, with the excep­tion of Cather­ine Win­ters who dis­ap­peared in 1913 and Cather­ine Win­ters who plays the flute, the rest are kind of lame:

There’s Cather­ine Win­ters, who in 1983, wrote a sin­gle entry in the 1980s Sweet Dreams series, How to Talk to Boys and Other Impor­tant Peo­ple. I’ve had peo­ple ask me if that one was mine. (“Yes. Yes it was. I was a pub­lished author when I was 2 years old.”) I strongly sus­pect that this is the Cather­ine Win­ters who wrote for Young Miss mag­a­zine in the early 1980s. If it is, today she’s writ­ing for Health.com and is not as lame as pre­vi­ously asserted. Either way, it’s sur­pris­ing that some­one as pro­lific as this Cather­ine Win­ters could be eclipsed online by a book writ­ten 25 years ago.

[Update: May 28, 2009: Cather­ine Win­ters good-naturedly con­firms that she is, in fact, not as lame as other Cather­ine Win­ters have wor­ried and doesn’t sue me. (Thanks, Catherine!)]

There’s a “Kather­ine Win­ters Hair Salon” in Irv­ing­ton, New York. I’m not actu­ally sure of the spelling of her first name, but appar­ently, the pro­pri­etor isn’t actu­ally named Cather­ine Win­ters. I’m not totally sure where the name comes from. As of this writ­ing, there’s only one extremely neg­a­tive review avail­able on Google:

“If she didn’t give me a bunch of atti­tude for leav­ing and offered me a dis­count to come back when she got her ____ together I might have come back. I wouldn’t go back if she paid me.”

Finally, there’s the Cather­ine Win­ters who self-published a 48-page book called Being Sin­gle and Lov­ing It. In the author’s own words:

I wrote this book because I had expe­ri­enced some short­com­ing also in the area of being sin­gle and pray­ing for the right mate to come my way after my jour­ney on being sin­gle I am now hap­pily mar­ried to a won­der­ful hus­band but if I had not stood still just for a sec­ond I also would of miss my bless­ing. I hope and pray that my book would give you some things to con­sider while your wait­ing on God and soul search­ing for what you want your mate to be.

You know, a lot of peo­ple look down on self-publishing because it’s not seen as ‘legit­i­mate’ or because you don’t have ‘edi­tors’ or ‘proof­read­ing’ and can have ‘prob­lems’ with ‘gram­mar’, but to them, I say, balder­dash! I’m order­ing this right now.

So that’s the big four. Still, that’s not even count­ing the myr­iad Katherine/Kathryn/Catharine/Cate/Kate/Kat/Cat/Cathy/Kathy Winter(s)es out there! There’s too many to count, so I picked out a cou­ple enter­tain­ing ones.

• In 2008, New Orleans res­i­dent Mary Cather­ine Win­ters, a nurse at Omega Hos­pi­tal, (Yes, really!) gave $419 to Hillary Clin­ton.
• In 1976, British ice dancer Kathryn Win­ter won gold at the inau­gural World Junior Fig­ure Skat­ing Cham­pi­onships. At two sen­tences in length, she has the short­est Wikipedia entry I’ve ever seen.
• Kathy Win­ters, NASA Shut­tle Weather Offi­cer, gets quoted in the press all the time and appar­ently has the author­ity to scrub shut­tle launches. I feel this more than makes up for going by “Kathy”.
• Dr. Kathryn Win­ters, a pedi­a­tri­cian from New Mex­ico, has at least one patient (or more likely, at least one patient’s par­ent) who likes her, but thinks her staff is rude.

Inter­est­ingly, Cather­ine Win­ters have a ten­dency to be fictional!

• “Cather­ine Win­ters”, “Cate Win­ters” and “Kate Win­ters” are all pop­u­lar names in a vari­ety of fan fic­tion: Twi­light, (Damn it.) Smal­l­ville, Harry Pot­ter, Boy Meets World, Doc­tor Who, and so on. The most bla­tant one of these, a Star­gate SG-1 Mary Sue seems to have disappeared.
• Hilary Swank played Pro­fes­sor Kather­ine Win­ter in the 2007 film The Reap­ing, which I have not seen. With a Rot­ten Toma­toes score of 9%, I have not made plans to do so. (Seri­ously, Hilary, who is your agent!? Most. Incon­sis­tent. Career. Ever.)
• Kate Win­ters is the pro­tag­o­nist of Gerri Hill’s novel Coy­ote Sky, cur­rently one of the top-ten books on Amazon’s ever-mercurial les­bian romance list. Unlike The Reap­ing, I have read this, and yeah, I’d say that rank­ing is fairly well-deserved. If your name is Cather­ine Win­ters, it might be weird to read though. I’m just saying.
• One of my per­sonal favourites: “Cather­ine Win­ters” is the alias cho­sen by the pro­tag­o­nist of het­ero romance novel Indis­creet by Mary Balogh.
  

  Lady Cather­ine Wins­more, a hero­ine of quiet courage, refused a forced mar­riage when rape left her with an ille­git­i­mate child. Exiled by her fam­ily, she poses as a young widow, Mrs. Cather­ine Win­ters. An inno­cent smile brings the unwel­come advances of another rake, the Vis­count Rawleigh, Rex Adams.

  That’s super. Not only do I appar­ently have a name that makes me sound like a char­ac­ter from a romance novel, I have a name that sounds like a char­ac­ter from a romance novel made it up. Awesome.

Who shares your name?

Trackballs: A part of our heritage

In the sum­mer of 2007, I learned I had a bit of an RSI prob­lem when a can of Coke I was hold­ing sud­denly slipped from my grasp and plum­meted to the ground. I couldn’t apply enough pres­sure with my thumb and fin­gers to hold it in my hand.

One short diag­no­sis of ten­nis and golfer’s elbow later, (“Cather­ine, you use the mouse a lot, don’t you?”) my doc­tor ordered me to find a less dam­ag­ing point­ing device. Since then, I’ve mostly relied on my laptop’s trackpad.

That’s all well and good while using my lap­top, but for desk­tops, I needed a bet­ter solu­tion. It’s really just Cirque that still makes USB track­pads, and those aren’t super either.

The Apple iTunes store pro­vides a dozen or so “track­pad” apps, most of which use VNC to func­tion as an input device alone. These let you use your wifi net­work to get your iPhone going as a track­pad. Sur­pris­ingly, this works fairly well, but it really does take gad­get overkill to a whole new level.

So that leaves track­balls. Which is good, because I like them! ^[1]

So beau­ti­ful. So majestic.

Con­se­quently, for the past 18 months, I’ve been using a Kens­ing­ton Expert Mouse 7.0, the lat­est ver­sion of the clas­sic ADB track­ball. Kens­ing­ton track­balls are so good, in fact, that some­times I print out trackball-advocacy lit­er­a­ture and go door-to-door, invit­ing peo­ple to hear the good news.

The lat­est ver­sion of the Kens­ing­ton Expert Mouse boasts the same four but­tons in a but­ter­fly lay­out, as well as a one-dimensional “scroll ring” around the ball. The ring’s move­ment could be a lit­tle smoother, but it moves eas­ily and is dif­fi­cult to nudge by mistake.

So yes, I strongly rec­om­mend the Kens­ing­ton Expert Mouse to any­one, if only because I rely on other people’s con­tin­ued inter­est in track­balls to ensure com­pa­nies keep pro­duc­ing them. Aside from that, track­balls are gen­er­ally fairly good, ego­nom­i­cally speak­ing, and also make it more dif­fi­cult for mouse-only friends to use your com­puter, pro­vid­ing you with ample oppor­tu­nity to look smug. If you’re into that sort of thing, I mean.

For my key­board, I’ve been alter­nat­ing between my Mac­Book Pro and a 2005-series white/clear Apple key­board. I own a Microsoft Nat­ural Pro ergonomic key­board, but I never liked the “mushy” feel­ing of the keys. The last-generation Apple keyboard’s keys aren’t buckling-spring. so it’s no Model M, but they def­i­nitely have suf­fi­cient give and are nicely clicky — within the lim­its of dome-switch keyboards.

Aside from feel, many Microsoft key­boards have a bit of an issue that’s always bugged me: they tend not to detect the left shift key being depressed when char­ac­ter entry keys have already been hit. This makes my hastily-typed smi­ley emoti­cons look ter­ri­ble: ;0

I am pleased to say that Apple’s key­boards have never exhib­ited this problem.

Track­balls: A part of our heritage.

[1] Little-known Cana­dian trivia: the Royal Cana­dian Navy devel­oped the first track­ball back in the 1950s.

How­ever, astute Cana­di­ans will note that this photo from Wikipedia shows the DATAR track­ball assem­bly using flat-head screws, rather than supe­rior, patri­otic Robert­son screws. For shame!

How to write a US Political Thriller: Start with the Secret Service codenames.

So the most press­ing ques­tion of the post US-election period, beyond “did adults seri­ously come up with the name ‘labradoo­dle’?” and “will Team Obama need to buy their own key­boards?” is clearly, “what is Sasha Obama’s Secret Ser­vice codename?”

Appar­ently, it’s Rose­bud. I find that a lit­tle weird on its own, but par­tic­u­larly so in light of the oth­ers assigned to the Oba­mas, Bidens and Bushes. Accord­ing to the Chicago Tri­bune:

President-elect Barack Obama: Rene­gade
Michelle Obama: Renais­sance
Malia Obama: Radi­ance
Sasha Obama: Rose­bud
Vice President-elect Joe Biden: Celtic
Jill Biden: Capri
Pres­i­dent George W. Bush: Tum­bler
First Lady Laura Bush: Tempo

Aside from Bush’s code­name, which I assume means that some­one has a sense of humour, these all sound like cars. Crappy, marketer-named cars.

“This fall, test-drive the 2009 Chrysler Capri and dis­cover an auto­mo­tive expe­ri­ence that demon­strates why no one wants to buy Chrysler. Act now before the recall!”

Also, as an aside, I love the names-that-start-with-the-same-letter bit and all, but seri­ously, you guys are pos­i­tive every­one can hear the dif­fer­ence between “Radi­ance” and “Renais­sance” over an ear­piece, right? I ask because the sit­com viewer in me thinks this is going to end with some­one get­ting fired by an enraged Pres­i­dent Obama.

It sucks when the little guy falls on hard times.

So yeah, it turns out that if you let peo­ple buy things with imag­i­nary money that they have no hope of pay­ing back and then those things turn out to only be worth their actual value, rather than their imag­i­nary, crazy-person value, your entire econ­omy turns to crap. Who knew?

One side effect of this is that banks are sud­denly forced to cut back on things like mort­gages to unem­ployed peo­ple and employ­ees — who are now unable to secure mort­gages from their for­mer employ­ers. Bummer.

Case in point: Scar­lett McCutcheon, for­mer Bear Stearns employee, fea­tured in this BBC News piece:

“I was very sur­prised when I was called into the head of the hedge fund group’s office and told that due to restruc­tur­ing rea­sons, I was being let go.”

“Wow,” reporter Karen Nye responds.

On voiceover, Nye con­tin­ues: “For one of the finan­cial industry’s worker bees, liv­ing in a big city with­out an income is NOT easy.”

McCutcheon agrees: “You know, I’m not one of these… uh… sto­ried Wall Street work­ers who makes mil­lions of dol­lars in bonuses. You know, I had to pinch my pen­nies and really tighten my belt.”

Wow, that’s tough. Liv­ing in Van­cou­ver with­out an income is tough enough, let alone a city like New York. Hey, I won­der what job she lost. The video didn’t men­tion that part. Let’s take a look at her LinkedIn pro­file:

Scar­lett McCutcheon
Greater New York City Area
Past: Vice Pres­i­dent at Bear Stearns

Aw, that’s a shame. It always sucks when upper man­age­ment in the very depart­ment that crip­ples a multi-billion-dollar bank­ing cor­po­ra­tion gets let go because they fucked up so badly that it trig­gers a global eco­nomic cri­sis. How unfair.

BBC News: Life for Wall Street unemployed