bunsen_h

The Utah DEA is now concerned that marijuana farms will lead to rabbits getting stoned and not showing their normal habits of self-preservation.

First: Rabbits are not exactly an endangered species.

Second: This will create a strong natural selection bias in favour of wildlife that isn't affected by cannabinoids.  In a couple of decades, that may give us some very useful pharmacogenetic data.
 

I heard Jason Kenney on the CBC news this afternoon, saying that Santa Claus is a Canadian citizen.

He doesn't seem to be all that concerned about Santa's citizenship documentation.

I wonder if Santa is First-Nations?
 

I was trying to remember why, in my last post, the Immigration Minister's idea seemed so familiar.  It just came to me:

"Back during World War I, they called it 'Loyalty Days,' and they made all the people of German extraction stand up in the middle of the town where everybody could see 'em.  Made 'em all stand up and say the Pledge of Allegiance and salute the flag and everybody watched to make sure they weren't crossing their fingers, I guess.  Well, everybody goes through that sort of foolishness once in a while. Our country does it more often than most, but here we are." — Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Loyalty Days

Sadly familiar territory.

ETA: What do they do for somebody who can't speak?  There must be some provision for written oaths.
 

Should I be concerned that the 15-digit "secure access code" in the 2011 census envelope can easily be read without opening the envelope, by shining a bright light through it from behind?  Thus enabling someone to complete the census on-line for the specified address without leaving any traces other than, say, the IP address from some public-access site..?
 

I managed to get downtown today for a couple of errands.  Banking for OSFS: it simplifies the books and financial reports a bit if all of the cash and cheques are deposited before the end of the year and show up in the bank statement, rather than being a cash asset.  Passport photos and passport renewal.

The photo stuff didn't run as smoothly as I'd hoped.  For starters, I fumbled the small shaving mirror they had on hand while I was checking that my hair was combed, and dropped and cracked it -- my hands were cold from a long walk.  Then it took them twenty minutes to develop the pictures instead of the promised ten (luckily, this is when I went to do the banking), and it turned out that the pictures needed to be re-done.  And then done again.  The employee who did the work the first couple of times didn't have the necessary technique to get pictures without shadows; the last time, the shop owner did the work.  It still took a longer than it should have to get them printed and cropped.

But I finally made it to the passport office, and had to wait for about twenty minutes.  Not too bad, and I had a book.  It turned out that the clerk I was dealing with was a good friend of one of the more distant relations with the same last name as me -- my father's second cousin's son, or something like that.  And that was probably a good thing, because it turns out that the passport I was trying to renew was invalid.  As in, reported stolen.

Well, yeah, when my house was broken into in July of 2004, a lot of stuff was messed up and I couldn't find the passport in its usual place; I reported that to the police.  But then I found it the next day -- I'd recently come back from a convention in the U.S., and I hadn't gotten around to putting it back where it belonged.  I immediately called the police and let them know that it hadn't been taken after all.  And that was the last I heard about it.

But apparently, as soon as a passport is reported stolen, that information is immediately sent to the passport office, and they flag it as stolen and invalid.  My later call would have been too late, and might not have made any difference anyway.

The odd thing, of course, is that I've been using it all along since then for travel to the U.S.  That's about six trips, twelve border crossings.  I'm a bit surprised that none of the customs officials or other agents noticed a problem, in either direction.  The guy at the passport office told me that for travel between Canada and the U.S., they don't check all the details that carefully.  Whee.

So now I have to go through the process of applying for a completely new passport, instead of the simpler process for "renewing" the old one.  And there's also a form I need to complete with regard to the "stolen" one; I haven't looked at it yet.  Oh well, I needed to go back downtown early in the new year anyway, to finalize the OSFS bank statement for 2008.  And it could have been worse: according to the passport clerk, I could have been arrested at any of those border crossings for attempting to travel using an invalid/stolen passport.

Part of  my reason for renewing the thing early (it didn't expire until February) was to make sure that I'd spend as little time as possible without a valid passport.  So much for that idea.