Casuistry

From a list of statistics, having something to do with how President Bush was running the country(as referenced by Jean-Louis Trudel on the SF Canada mailing list):

53: Percentage of Canadian young adults who don't know the population of the United States

75: Percentage of U.S. young adults who don't know the population of the United States

I'm always skeptical of these sort of numbers, impressive(or depressing)as they sound. Actually, I'd be surprised if more than one or two young adults in the U.S. or Canada knew the exact population of the United States at any given time, not that there would be any way to determine the accuracy of any such guess, with people being born and dying and immigrating and emigrating all the time. But that's probably not what they mean.

I remember learning from my 1976 World Book Encyclopedia that the U.S. had about 250 million people, and Canada 25 million. That's my baseline figure I retain, though I imagine both are somewhat larger. I'd have to guess at 38 million for Canada, and still about ten times that for the U.S.

For the above test, of course, I imagine they use multiple choice, which is a far different thing than just putting a blank to be filled in. How many choices were offered? Did they adjust for those who just filled in at random? As if they could tell. Are they just looking for an order of magnitude--30 million, 300 million, 3 million, 3 billion?

See, no context. And I didn't see much in the way of references, either. To what percentage of the population does it even make a difference whether the U.S. has 300 million or 3 million people? I'm sure their experiences of life will be different with the different population densities, but what difference will their actual knowledge of it do them? Will you be better prepared to face life in a big city if you know the population of your country?

Splinter

Due to crisper: what songs were in my head today, and why. Actually, the original meme seemed to be for a month, but my playlist changes so fast that it'd be way too long, so I'm just doing today. From when I left work at 4:15 to right now.

The Beatles:Martha My Dear

The last song I listened to before leaving work. When I tape something off of record, I'm not anal about making sure that it all fits on one tape, or anything, so this is actually the last song on the tape(which also includes David Sylvian's "Gone To Earth").

Double:Rangoon Moon

My wife and I often do "questions", little memory quizzes for each other, especially while she's cooking and I'm keeping her company in the kitchen. Today I was asking her what country various cities were in. This song popped into my head when I asked about Rangoon(capital of "Myanmar, formerly Burma").

Miami Sound Machine:Conga

A later question was about dance styles, and mentioning the conga brought this one into my head. Having it posted yesterday on the public forum for the region one of my NationStates nations is in didn't help.

The Offspring:Why Don't You Get A Job

When I checked my email after supper and saw the The Offspring's most recent album was in for me at the library.

Elvis Costello:Pills & Soap

I was sending out an email, and when I went to get a tagline to append to my signature, I saw a line from this song("Give us this day our daily bread in individual slices").

Moxy Früvous:Darlington Darling

Playing Railroad Tycoon for the boys, in the England setting, I ended up choosing Darlington as one of my initial stations.

Jim Croce:Rapid Roy(The Stock Car Boy)

Not sure about this one. I might have said, "Hey," to one of the boys, greeting-wise, and there's a line in this song somewhere about him having "a T-shirt that says 'Baby', and another one that just says 'Hey'". But right around the kids' bedtime, this one was in my head.

Indigo Girls:Virginia Woolf

We watched the end of "Road To Perdition" tonight, and somehow the violins in the theme music brought to mind the string intro to the album verison of this song. It's still going strong.

And that's just one day. Could you imagine a month?

Skittish

So the cats are back. After my first post about the mother cat and her kittens, they disappeared for a few days, came back for a little bit, then disappeared for longer. Now they're back. There's only three kittens left now, which means that some cruel fate probably met the others--I thought there were at least four or five before, but I could be wrong. They're definitely getting bigger, though.

They were sleeping out on the deck when I got home from work, on top of an old mail sack. A few years ago we got something shipped to us in the mail sack, I think, and we just ended up tossing it out on the deck at some point. It was a good place for catnapping, apparently. They went under the lilac bush, or possibly the deck, when it started raining. (I hope the lilac bush--it's probably better shelter right now.)

We called my dad, who's moving to a new apartment in Westlock over the next couple of weeks. He'd expressed interest before in trying to adopt one of the kittens. He couldn't remember whether his new place allowed pets, though, and his lease was at work, so he'll check. I'm not sure it'll work out--he won't really be moved in for a while yet, and I don't know how long the cats will stay around. Not to mention that I don't know how easy it is to take a kitten away from its mother, when she's a stray and has no reason to trust you. We might find another(temporary)use for the mail sack.

We still can't quite get up the nerve to phone the SPCA, because we don't really want these cats to be put to sleep. I personally don't have much of a problem with feral animals being around, even if they get into the garbage sometimes. (Though I remember in Watership Down that the feral pets were among the predators the rabbits were most scared of...) An adult stray might be difficult to adopt into a household(Sims Unleashed notwithstanding), but the kittens would probably do well. There's always farm cats, of course, but the pickings are probably better in the city. Maybe not as many rodents, but more garbage...

Probably they'll disappear again, though, and maybe come back weeks later so we can dither some more. Maybe someone else will call in the SPCA, or they'll meet a bad end on a dark street. But I can't be the instrument of their possible euthanasia. Which surprises me, a little.