Something to make you feel proud: Canada is almost certainly the only country in the world to put the word "penis" on cigarette packages.

You think I jest? Au contraire, mon ami! I bought a package of smokes today and discovered to my surprise and delight that our federal government has mandated a change in the warning labels. Up til now, our Canuck coffin nails have had plain black-and-white all-text messages, prominently displayed on the front of every package, saying things like "Cigarettes are addictive," and "Smoking is bad for pregnant women." The idea is that these dire warnings will dissuade you from consuming the evil weed, if you happen to be the kind of total idiot who doesn't already know that smoking is not the healthiest of vices.

This, however, was not enough for the health nazis. They have to be seen to be "doing something" about this scourge. So they forced the tobacco companies to change the labels. Now they include full-color art, and multi-colored text in a variety of type sizes. The one I got (I assume there are other variations) had the headline, "WARNING: TOBACCO USE CAN MAKE YOU IMPOTENT." The best part followed in the body text: "Cigarettes may cause sexual impotence due to decreased blood flow to the penis. This can prevent you from having an erection."

I can imagine all the teenaged boys lining up to buy this one. "Tee hee, it says erection!" What's really dumb is that the new labels are nicer looking than the old ones, making the packages more attractive than before. Great idea, guys.

Oh, and for those of you who might be concerned...nope, no problems in that department. I'm just worried the next label might tell me that smoking may make you vote Liberal.

Hmmm, lots to think about with these recent posts. We have the remake of The Blue Lagoon by SurfCarol -- god, I wish I could run away somewhere tropical and take all my clothes off -- and the Weekly Phlegm Report by Bleu. Very funny stuff on the DirecTV hacker war, by the way. Then there's the Incredible Disappearing Post by Sarascara (I swear I saw it -- a long, really good muse on body image -- wtf happened to it?).

Beef, I agree with you on the idiocy of taking very young children to scary or violent or crude movies. I think the problem stems from people being insensitive. They are so dulled by the daily bombardment of media that they no longer can distinguish the healthy from the unhealthy. Cartoon bunnies frolicking, babies being burned alive, it's all just images and diversions to people like that. Luckily, I suspect most parents are more discerning; I hope they are in the majority, anyway.

Kara and Simon really got me thinking about inter-connections and how insignificant we seem in the face of an infinitely huge and infinitely uncaring universe. I've stared into that abyss many times, and it's ugly to look at. But I have come to believe, like Simon, that what matters is the effect we have on the people around us, especially on the people we care about.

We make ripples in our little ponds and they spread out, rocking the lilly pads and making the waterbugs change direction. Our lives have meaning insofar as they mean something to other people. I know that if I disappeared tomorrow, there are people in this world in whose lives it would leave a hole. What I try to do is to make the best of the space I occupy in their lives while I'm alive. Make them laugh, make them think, help them to grow, give them intense sexual pleasure (well, only one person gets that last one, but I hope you get my drift).

I guess I am also answering Wayward's question about being significant versus being immortal. I think immortality is beyond our power to achieve. But we do have the power to be significant. That's what I'm going for. My idea of a successful life is having a LOT of people weeping uncontrollably at my funeral, then wetting themselves laughing at my wake, telling all those funny and amazing stories about me. That would be so cool.

Welcome Dogma! I look forward to reading your random thoughts and brilliant ideas. Also to peeking down your blouse some more. PRESS START!!!!

Beefi, having decided to quit your job, it’s no surprise you’re worrying about where you’ll land. But I’m a real believer in following your gut instinct, and it’s clear that you know this is the right thing to do. You’ll be fine, I’m sure of it.

More fun with words. Here's one that has always amused me: the word indri, which is not widely known but is in the dictionary, means a species of lemur native to Madagascar, Africa. The funny part is, in the native Malagassy language, indri means, "Hey, look at that!" Apparently, early European explorers were tramping through the forest when their native porters spotted this lemur and started shouting "Indri, indri!" and the Europeans jumped to the conclusion that they were being told the animal's name. Hee hee.

Which 10 people would I invite for a drink and a chinwag? I've often thought about this, and my list has changed many times over the years. It’s damn hard to limit it to 10. I like Simon’s list, featuring a lot of “ordinary” folks through history. But I confess I am more interested in the famous individuals who stood out from their peers in some way. For one thing, they are more likely to know what was going on at the time, given their privileged position.

So for starters I'd want Richard Francis Burton, the 19th century explorer/philosopher/adventurer, to me one of history's most intriguing people. I'd invite Alexander the Great, partly because of his incredible accomplishments, partly because the real person is shrouded in mystery. For similar reasons, I'd want Shakespeare there. Ditto with Cleopatra -- she supposedly was not a ravishing beauty but was charming, seductive, and sexually skillful. I bet she'd have some great tips. Casanova could talk shop with her; I'd love to pick his brain too. Joining him in the Italian corner would be Leonardo Da Vinci and Machiavelli, to share their brilliant insights. And to keep the party lively with their wit, I would invite Oscar Wilde, H.L. Mencken and Dorothy Parker. On the standby list in case of no-shows: the Indian leader Tecumseh, the pharoah Cheops I, Marco Polo, Napoleon, William the Conqueror, Mozart, Dickens, any of the Bronte sisters, and Benjamin Spooner (captain of the ghost ship Marie Celeste, to solve that mystery).

Hey people, good posts lately!

I had a good laugh over Simon's post about the program notes on Japanese underground music. Praising music for "the absense of music" and "a merciful lack of notes", and calling something both extreme AND tentative...well, it's just too funny. To me, either it works as music or it doesn't, and I don't give a crap about what cutting-edge movement it supposedly represents. But I do enjoy unintentioned self-parody.

Sarascara makes an interesting point about memory: that some of our memories feel like they are just the echo of earlier memories. The original is gone, we're just remembering thinking about it. It's like a copy of a copy of a copy -- after a while it gets blurred and fuzzy.

I remember some things about when I was very young, maybe 2 or 3. I remember the electric floor polisher my mother used on our hardwood floors, with the headlights in front; it looked evil to me, but I was fascinated by it. I remember my dad walking across a vacant lot toward me, when I had wandered away from home and got stuck in some mud. I remember looking down and noticing a hole in my sock when the firemen came to rescue my brother when he got his head stuck between the bars of his crib. But it seems to me those memories used to be more vivid. Am I just remembering the original memories? Is that how memories survive through the years, by copying themselves? Hmm.

Beef's amusing slice of Chicago life reminds me of how goofy Vancouver drivers get when it snows here -- a fortunately rare occurrence. Leaving aside the panicked wheel-spinning and other technical shortcomings, what really irks me are people who refuse to brush the snow off their cars after a big snowfall. Inevitably you'll see some chowderhead driving along, his car so covered with snow it looks like a moving snowdrift, with just a little rectangle cleared off directly in front of his face. I guess he's thinking, "Why expend the effort and take five minutes of my valuable time to sweep off the snow when it's just going to blow off or melt eventually anyway?" Haw! No wonder it's like bumper cars out there.

Bleu brings up the word jingoism -- a very cool word, I agree, with a neat history. It originated in England during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78. When it seemed the British might intervene, someone wrote a music hall song that summed up the belligerent popular sentiment of the day:
We don't want to fight, but by Jingo if we do
We've got the ships, we've got the men,
We've got the money too.
As used in the song, Jingo is probably a euphemism for Jesus. But people who felt this way became known as jingos, and the word jingoism was born.

I love words. Here's another one of my favorite little-known words: MacGuffin. It was coined by Alfred Hitchcock, and means an object upon which the plot of a mystery turns, such as the secret microfilm that the spies are trying to smuggle, or the bag of loot the robbers are fighting over. The Maltese falcon was a classic MacGuffin; so were the letters of transit in Casablanca, and the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. It doesn't really matter what the thing is, just that everybody wants it.

Two things especially interest me. One is the primacy of memory as the single biggest factor in determining who we are. The second is the nature of memory itself – what it is, how it works – and the more I learn about memory, the more it seems that we as individuals have built our houses on shifting sands.

First point. It seems clear to me that our personalities – our entire sense of self – are completely based on our memories. We are the sum total of our experiences, and our recollections of those experiences (whether conscious or not) create a kind of mind map of who we are and where we stand in the universe. For example, take away all my memories and put Simon’s memories in my head instead, and I become Simon. I’d feel weird, suddenly being in a body that feels alien, but I’d still be him. My body is just the vehicle that carries my memories around.

So what is memory? Well, the big thinkers are still unraveling that mystery. But it seems to be biochemical in nature. All day long our senses send little bursts of electricity along a network of nerves to our brain, where they are interpreted (“The object in my hand is a red rubber ball. The sun is bright and is making my head warm. My underwear itches. I hear a dog barking outside.” These perceptions are stored in a kind of short-term memory – they are highly perishable at this stage. Then when we sleep, our brains sort through all these temporarily-saved inputs, delete some of them as unimportant, and shuffle some of them into long-term storage, where they can be used again (“remembered”) as needed.

(This, by the way, is why I don’t place much stock in trying to draw meaning from dreams. They provide entertainment, sometimes fun, sometimes disturbing. But dreams are basically just the product of random neurons firing while memories and feelings are shuffled around in our head. They don’t “mean” dick, in my humble opinion.)

What’s really strange is that this process does not store hard data – what we really saw or heard or smelled – but our subjective interpretation of the original sensations. We held a red ball, but months later we remember it as brown. The guy on the bus had a beard, although others swear he was clean-shaven. Memory is fickle and changeable. Why is that? And what does this say about our self-perceptions, our sense of who we are? Is any of it real? How much of it is made up as we go along? And if our personality is an invention, is it created by a random, capricious process, or is it molded by something lying way deeper in our mind? Whose creation are we?

By the way, kara, don’t be too hard on your artistic abilities. I have yet to meet a writer or artist yet who wasn’t deeply convinced that he or she had no talent at all. I struggle with the same demons myself. On my good days, I realize that it doesn’t matter whether I write as well as John Updike. What matters is whether I write as well as me. I’m not a contestant in a life-long competition with other writers. I write because that’s what I am.

But I’m not complaining. Travel agrees with me. I share Beef’s excitement over the moment of embarking on a trip. I love the anticipation of planning for it, and I especially love the moment of leaving. Your journey lies in front of you, full of possibility, a great exciting unknown.

Mexico was amazing. Crabbygal and I had never considered going there, especially not Mexico City. The possibility only came up a few months ago when we mentioned to our Mexican sissy friend Punketa that we were trying to decide where to go for New Year’s. We’ve started a tradition of always being somewhere interesting on New Year’s Eve. Punketa said we HAD to come visit her. “Come come come!” she demanded. “We will get fun!!” We hesitated, but she brushed off all potential obstacles, including the age difference. “My mother will cook!” she informed us. “All the women in my family will cook for you! My parents want you to come! You must come!” When we gave in and agreed, she was beside herself with excitement for weeks. “I am SO FUCKING HAPPY!!!” she wrote in one of her adorable fractured-English messages.

So we came, and were instantly made part of the family. Punketa (Sylvia) is a complete delight, smart, funny, irreverent, full of warmth and light. Her parents were proud to share their home with us, and catered to our every whim. We met her brothers and their wives, all the cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents. They stuffed us with food at every turn; once, we ate two huge dinners on the same evening, just because everyone was so keen to show us hospitality.

Mexicans are affectionate, outgoing people who place a high value on family. So we were deeply honored by the way they accepted us. Never once did we feel like we were imposing. On New Year’s Eve we took part in their family party, eating and sucking back tequila and champagne, dancing til 6 in the morning (Mexican pop music is great for dancing).

During the 12 days, Punketa and her friends took us everywhere. We explored huge outdoor markets and found some great bargains in handmade jewellery. We ate strange and delicious Mexican snack foods (man those people love to eat), toured glittering old churches and possibly the world’s best anthropology museum, admired bigass murals, climbed the Pyramid of the Sun, looked at ancient altars upon which the Aztecs sacrificed virgins. We stood admiring the natural light in the studio where Diego Rivera did much of his painting. We also saw the toilet on which Leon Trotsky did some of his best thinking (I have a picture, of course).

Some impressions of Mexico City: a huge, sprawling, confusing jumble. Crooked buildings slowly sinking into the ancient lake on which the city was built. Dim, low-wattage lights casting an orange glow at night (power is apparently expensive here). Street vendors everywhere, selling everything imaginable, usually in weird combinations (one old woman with a stand selling cotton candy and motor oil). Cops clustered on every street corner and outside every bank and public building, looking under-employed, under-trained and over-armed.

A modern city, but with signs of poverty everywhere. Huge hillside barrios like grey concrete rabbit warrens. Old toothless women begging on the sidewalks, but strangely, no adult male panhandlers in sight. Guys making their living waving people into parking spots in return for a few coins. Graffiti on every vertical space, bars on windows, gated communities behind high walls topped with barbed wire.

The traffic is nuts. Very little speeding, because of the huge speed bumps on so many streets, but Mexican drivers treat traffic signals, stop signs and lane markings as suggestions only. The traffic often flows four cars wide on a two-lane street. It’s every man for himself, and if you see an opening, go for it. Luckily, public transit is plentiful and dirt-cheap (25 cents for the subway, 2 bucks for a cab ride, mini buses running in all directions).

One thing I didn’t know before is that Mexicans seem more proud of their Indian roots than their Spanish heritage. Cortes has a bad rep as a treacherous, bloodthirsty bastard, while there are statues remembering the outgunned Aztec warriors who resisted him. Indian dancers perform in public squares, then pause to explain the moves to interested locals. One very nifty thing was when Punketa took me to a temezcal, a kind of Aztec sweat lodge. Think of the hottest sauna you’ve ever been in, then double it. I was convinced I was going to die, but I stuck it out, and felt wonderful afterwards.

I could go on and on. It was a great time. Mexico is fascinating, and I want to go back. Not to the tourist traps like Mazatlan or Acapulco, but to the places real Mexicans go for fun, like Oaxaca (Punketa’s favorite place). We'll be back.