As part of our recent (and ongoing, as of this writing) home renovations, we decided to sell the antique dining room set that my parents gave us around fifteen years ago. We loved the set but simply no longer had a place to put it. I talked to my dad to make sure he didn’t want it back, but neither he nor my sister had any place for it either. We called a couple of antiques dealers but they said that dining room sets rarely sell anymore. One of them said they wouldn’t take it at all, and the other said they might be able to give us $300 for the whole set.

We were disappointed so we decided to try kijiji.ca and Facebook Marketplace to see if we could get something more. I listed the set at a very optimistic $1000. I figured if it didn’t sell, I could drop the price by half and still get more than the dealers offered. After a week of silence, I lowered the price to $700. A couple of days after that, I received two separate messages, thirteen minutes apart, from the same guy. They were worded slightly differently; one said:

Graeme, I’m very interested! Please contact me if this is still available. My name is [removed], my cell number is [removed] and my email is [removed]. I noticed that you lowered your price. I will be more than prepared to restore the original price and more.

Right away I was suspicious. The first red flag: it looked like he has two stock messages that he sends for such things and accidentally sent both. If I sent two responses saying the same thing, I’d probably delete one of them. Trying to give him the benefit of the doubt, maybe it was an honest mistake – he responded but then a weird thing happened on the web site and he wasn’t sure if it went through, so he had to rewrite it. No big deal.

The second (and bigger) red flag: he’s not only willing to pay more than the advertised price but with no prompting, he offers to pay more. Perhaps he really likes the set and wants to make absolutely sure he gets it. But if that’s the case, I would think you’d wait to see if there is any competition – why pay more if you don’t need to?

I responded saying that the set was still available but that it was packed away in a trailer so he may not be able to see it for a couple of weeks. He responded that he was moving to London (Ontario) in a couple of weeks so that might work out well. Then I had a change of heart (don’t let the buyer forget about the thing you’re selling, strike while the iron is hot, all that sort of thing) and told him we could unpack the trailer easily and he could see it anytime he wanted. The next couple of messages raised a couple more red flags:

Hi Graeme, I’ve been viewing so many items on kijiji today, I’ve forgotten which dining room set it is and the asking price. Perhaps you could help. Also, in which city are you located?

I’m not entirely sure why this was a red flag, and perhaps if red flags 1 and 2 weren’t there this wouldn’t have been a problem, but it just increased my already growing suspicion. I sent him the link to the kijiji page and told him I lived in Waterdown. He responded again:

The earliest I could be there is Saturday, November 17, 2018. … I will contact my relatives in Waterdown to see if they could assist. … I could transfer the money through an e-transfer, send a courier to your location (not Canada Post), or whatever.

Since I was already suspicious, this raised a few more red flags. First, who includes the full date including the year in an email like this? I’d have said something like “The earliest I could be there is Saturday (the 17th)”. Second, he really has relatives in Waterdown? Waterdown is not a big place. The original ad said “pickup in Waterdown”, so you’d think if he had relatives living here, he’d have remembered what town it was (i.e. “Oh, he’s in Waterdown. Uncle Bob lives in Waterdown”) Maybe he’s got relatives all over this area so that didn’t narrow it down.

And finally, he offered to e-transfer the money and send a courier to pick up the set. Sending money by e-transfer isn’t a problem, I’ve sent and received money that way many times, but the courier thing bothered me. I don’t know exactly what’s wrong with it or how he could scam me using that method but the fact that he didn’t seem to want to meet in person raised a big red flag. Perhaps he’d tell me he’d transfer the money but not do it before the courier arrived. Maybe he figured that I’d want to avoid inconveniencing the courier by letting him take the set before payment was verified.

I responded again saying Saturday would be fine but I would only accept cash. He said that cash was no problem. This all happened on Sunday the 11th and I heard nothing from him all week.

On Friday, I sent him two messages asking what time on Saturday he was coming. After receiving no response, I sent another on Saturday morning saying that if I didn’t hear back I’d assume he was no longer interested. I finally got a response on Saturday afternoon:

I apologize Graeme. I have neglected to do several things lately, yours included. My second round of chemo for my cancer has been difficult. I regret not being able to view, and likely purchase the items. But at this time, I will have to decline this offer. Thank you anyway.

Even more red flags.

We got a message in the middle of all this from someone else expressing interest in a much more typical fashion with no red flags, but Gail and I had enough hackles raised at this point that we both wondered if she was affiliated with the first guy. “I’ll get him excited about a sale and then drop out suspiciously, and you be the “good cop” and come in to save him, then he’ll fall all over himself selling to you. Then you write him a cheque that bounces after we have the set and we’re done.” Luckily, the second person actually did buy the dining room set and that transaction went smoothly. Ironically, she sent the money by e-transfer and sent movers to pick up the set, but before that, she showed up in person to look at it. I received the payment days before the movers arrived, and there were exactly zero red flags with her or her husband.

I still have no real proof that this was a scam, just lots of red flags, but I still feel like we dodged a bullet by not selling to this guy. It’s highly possible that this is a totally innocent exchange that I’m misinterpreting. If it is, then I apologize, Mr. potential buyer. I hope the move to London goes well, I hope the chemotherapy does its job, and I hope you find another dining room set for your new place.

But if not, then you can go to hell.

I saw a number of articles on Facebook in recent weeks about an annual “dog-eating” festival in Yulin, China. Of course, all of the comments on these articles were full of anger and disgust over the eating of dogs. Some of the commenters went further and said that some of the dogs were tortured or in some other way not treated humanely. Many would argue that there is no “humane” way to kill and eat a dog but regardless, the majority of the commenters were put off simply by the idea of eating dogs.

But why?

Now, don’t misunderstand me. I’m just as disgusted by this festival as anyone else, and the idea of eating a dog is unfathomable to me. I’ve eaten some unusual things like bison, shark, and alligator, but I’d never consider partaking of man’s best friend. My question is more a philosophical one:

Why are we disgusted by eating some animals while others are OK?

Obviously there are vegetarians and vegans for whom eating any animal is disgusting to some degree. And there are different cultures around the world – well over a billion people in India would never think of eating beef. But I’m talking about your standard North American omnivore who eats beef, ham, pork, chicken, turkey, and maybe others like venison, goose, and duck. Most of these people don’t think twice about those animals but those same people would never think to eat a horse. Why is it that eating a cow or pig is OK but horse or dog is not?

I imagine the reason is mostly “that’s just the way it’s always been”. We all know that people as a group are resistant to change, and if that’s the way it is and has always been, then that’s likely the way it will stay until people have a good reason to change. Our parents didn’t eat horse, and so we don’t eat horse. We don’t eat horse, and so our kids don’t eat horse. And so on. Over the years it’s gradually changed from something we simply don’t do into something we would never even consider doing, and now it’s gotten to the point where people who would consider doing it are sick twisted bastards. Is that overly judgemental? Perhaps. I imagine there’s a billion people in India who think that North Americans are sick twisted bastards for eating cows.

Or maybe they just don’t taste good.

You may have already seen this, but if you do a Google search for the word “literally”, it comes up with the following definitions:

Note the second one, which was apparently added back in 2011 though nobody really noticed it until recently. I see it all the time in the sports world; a player will play very well for a few games in a row and people say he’s “literally on fire”. I’ve heard people saying that someone “literally took the bull by the horns” or something they didn’t like “literally drove me crazy”. Up to now, this has simply been wrong. Now, apparently, it’s not.

At the risk of being (correctly) labeled a “grammar Nazi”, the misuse of this word has been (figuratively) driving me crazy for years. Language changes and evolves, I get that. The sentence “My cell’s out of juice so I can’t tweet” would have made no sense thirty years ago. These kids today People younger than myself use the word “sick” to describe something good, but that’s slang and was likely done intentionally for ironic effect.

This is not the same as giving a word (cell, tweet) a new meaning for which no word previously existed, or using a word ironically. In this case, people who don’t know what the word means are incorrectly using it to mean precisely the opposite of what it actually means, and now we’re saying that’s OK. We are catering to the seemingly increasing number of ignorant people. Rather than teaching people the correct meaning of the word and correcting those who misuse it, we are just making it right so that there’s no problem.

We are dumbing down the language.

If this continues, here are some other words that will be added to the dictionary sometime soon:

Prolly: (adv.) Probably. As in “I’ll be there late in the morning, prolly around ten-thirty.”

There: (adv.) Synonym for “they are” (formerly “they’re”) or “belonging to them” (formerly “their”). As in “They can’t remember where they parked, so there looking for there car over there.” Much easier to have just one word since people use them interchangeably anyway. Similarly, “its” vs. “it’s”.

Alot: (n.) A lot. Alot of people use this word, not knowing that it does not exist. But it doesn’t need to make you unhappy.

Ignorant: (adj.) Rude. It actually means “without knowledge”, as in “I am ignorant of the rules of cricket.” But if someone cuts in line in front of you at the grocery store, that’s rude, not ignorant.

Dear Mr. Kobus,

I have no idea if that’s your name, but it is your license plate. I’m the guy whose van you were parked behind at the Burlington GO Station tonight.

We arrived at the GO Station around 9:00am, and pulled through an empty spot into another spot, so that I could simply pull forward to leave rather than backing out. When I left my van, there was nobody parked behind me. When we returned around 9:45pm, we could see before we even got to our van that yours was right behind ours, parked very close. The front of your van was definitely over the yellow line marking the edge of the parking spot. When we looked closer, we could see that it wasn’t just very close, the front of your van was touching the back of mine. My phone’s battery was too low to take a flash picture and so this one is fairly dark, but it shows pretty clearly that the two vehicles were touching:

After taking this picture (and one of your rear license plate), I pulled forward to see if there was any damage, and saw a deep scratch near where the vehicles were touching. This is about when you arrived. You looked at the scratch and asserted “That’s definitely an old scratch”, but I saw no evidence to support this.

However I also saw no evidence that your van did cause the scratch. I did not see any damage to the front of your van. The front bumper of your van is plastic with an indent for the license plate, and it did not appear that the plastic could have caused the scratch. It also did not appear that the licence plate was sticking out from the indent far enough to have caused it. However if the bumpers were squashed a little (not unlikely), the screw holding the license plate on could have caused it, since it was at about the right height and would have been sticking out the furthest of any part of the plate. I found no red paint on your license plate or the screw. I also cannot confirm that the scratch wasn’t there when we parked that morning; it might have been. I don’t remember seeing it before, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.

So in a nutshell, I cannot say with any certainty that your van definitely caused any damage to mine, so no harm done, I suppose. Please be a little more careful when parking in the future.

However, you should at least accept the possibility that you actually did park that close to my van. Simply saying “But we didn’t park that close” does not qualify as proof that it wasn’t your fault. Not accepting that possibility led you to an implausible alternative theory of what happened – that someone must have pushed your van into mine. “But I don’t see how”, you said, “the doors were locked.” You even went around to the back of your van to check for evidence that someone pushed it forwards. You didn’t attempt to determine if this is what actually happened, whether it was even possible, or why someone would do this; you skipped directly to “how did they do it?”.

Are you really trying to claim that someone broke into your locked van and hot-wired it (something that’s exceedingly difficult to do on modern-day cars and vans) only to drive it forward a few inches so it was pushing on my van’s bumper, then locked the van again and left? Or that someone used their vehicle to push yours into mine and did this without leaving any damage to the back of your van or any skid tracks on the ground?

Yes, it’s possible that someone pushed your van forward into ours for no obvious reason and without leaving any trace. It’s also possible that Martians moved it forward with a tractor beam. Or maybe you just parked too far forward and didn’t realize it. Which of those three is the most likely, do you think?

Sincerely,
Graeme Perrow

A friend of mine posted a Facebook status yesterday about a man who did something, well, dickish. I am not here to defend him; in fact I don’t even know the man and I have to assume that the description of what happened is accurate, though I do trust the source. Anyway, someone else (who I don’t know) left a comment to the effect that the reason he did this thing was because he was a man and must have been “overcompensating for some deficiency”.

I did not leave a response to this comment since I don’t know the person who posted it, and it would have been off-topic for the original status, but this person’s comment really pissed me off. Why is is still OK to be sexist towards men? If something similar had happened but the offending party was female, and I had posted something like “must have been that time of the month”, people would have come down on me like a ton of bricks for being a sexist bastard, and rightly so. Even worse, what if I had made a snide comment about the size of her boobs? That would also have been way out of line, but it’s apparently OK to say that this particular man must have a small dick. I thought we as a society were trying to get rid of these kinds of “jokes” and no longer accept sexist, racist, or homophobic humour.

Just because the joke is at a man’s expense and not a woman’s doesn’t make it any less sexist.

Gail volunteered in the beer tent at the Waterdown Ribfest last night. One of her duties was to ask people for ID if they looked like they were under 25. Step one: figure out what year one would have to be born in order to be able to buy alcohol legally. Some quick math, and the answer is 1992.

The same year Gail and I graduated from university.

Oh, God.