Where's Mike Harris when you need him?

What I like about the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) is that it treats the Toronto Transit Commission's employees as important even though they're not white collar professionals. In fact, they usually wear light blue shirts with burgundy jackets. Offering high pay, job security and moral support to people without MBAs makes our society better off, keeping jobs in that middle range between a quarter million dollars a year and minimum wage.

The problem is that the atu is also deranged, a fact that was true a few days ago when I started writing this post. Since I started writing, TTC chief manager Gary Webster wrote a memo to the 12,000 employees of the TTC telling them to at least try to earn their paycheque.

"I am becoming increasingly tired of defending the reputation of the TTC," Webster wrote, later explaining that he released the memo through the media to ensure that all TTC employees heard of it. A similar memo had been sent earlier but was disregarded by some who claimed ignorance.

So, in response to this and other perceived harrassment, TTC workers did the natural thing. They formed a Facebook group called Toronto Transit Operators against public harassment, public harrassment being our temerity to request that they not sleep on the job and treat us like human beings.

In response, TTC workers collected images of passengers behaving badly, which probably aren't hard to find considering that each bus or train has at most a handful of employees and a subway train at peak capacity can hold close to 2,000 people. But that's missing the point, because we pay to use the TTC. We are customers and they are workers, making any equivalency between us impossible.

TTC workers also threatened a possible work-to-rule in return for our harrassment, a truly fantastic turn of events. At least the good news is that after years of complaints about the rudeness of TTC workers, the issue is finally coming to a head. For my part, I can't remember the last time a fare collector took the time out of his busy schedule to even talk to me.

Death, taxes and death again

Dundas Street West, Toronto

Mom: "They hurried but they had to stop at the light anyway. What's the point?"
Me: "Yeah, they all die in the end anyway."
Mom: "What? God forbid, don't say that."
Me: "God forbid? What do you mean? Of course it happens. To everyone."
Mom: "God forbid!"
Me: "God forbid? That--"
Mom (angrily): "Okay!"

Running the ball, stopping the run and playing all-caps FOOTBALL: RIP

The nice thing about the Super Bowl is that it wasn't a victory of some plodding prehistoric group of men who excel at running into other men. There were 37 runs called against 85 passes. More importantly, it was an exciting game tactically if not in the final outcome, not at least compared to the last two Super Bowls. Both teams went for it on fourth down when they could have kicked, and the Saints started the second half with an onside kick.

That the Saints won a Super Bowl this way likely has little influence on how teams will play, playing far too cautiously and couching this passivity as aggression because it means big men hit other big men. Still, it's a nice victory for aggressive, exciting, fast-paced football.

It's a good thing that the Saints won, because otherwise we would have heard endlessly about it from the old guard of analysts who serve up cliches-by-t he-minute on TV. The failed fourth-down conversion on the Colts' goal line, combined with an easy chance to score for the Colts on the failed onside kick, was a ten-point swing.

On the losers' side of the ball, I think the Colts have made themselves into the Braves of the last decade, or the Bills of the '90s, the Broncos of the '80s and the Vikings of the '70s. The Colts won more games this decade than any team in history, bearing in mind that this is the third decade of a 16-game season.

They have ten playoff appearances in eleven years, but a shocking six of them have been first-game exits, and just one Super Bowl. Compare that with the Braves and their 15-year run from 1991 to 2005. They had 14 playoff appearances, including 11 straight division titles from 1995 to 2005. They lost four World Series in that span, making them equal with the Bills of that era, who lost four straight Super Bowls. I'm not sure what's more impressive, making four straight Super Bowls, or losing all of them. The Colts, no matter how Peyton Manning finishes his career, have cemented their name in similar conversations.

By the way, I finished the playoffs 4-7 in predictions. I also predicted 4 of 11 games correctly a month ago without even knowing who would play most of them. I guess I can take solace in the fact that the team with the better record usually wins, so the Colts would have won this game 3 out of 5 times. That's not an argument to turn the NFL into the English Premier League, which has no playoffs, because I like the fact that the winner in the NFL is the person who plays best on a given day. It is what a lot of people argued two years ago, however, after the Patriots were upset.

It was the best of football, it was the last of football

The Super Bowl is Sunday. After all those years, eight in all, of watching Colts teams fold like a well-oiled folding chair, I'll never get tired of watching Peyton Manning and the Colts win Super Bowls. I feel jinxed, unfortunately, by the fact that the game has already been decided to many people, who are now debating what it means that Manning has won his second Super Bowl.

Yahoo! here discusses whether Manning now becomes the greatest football player ever, as well as whether Manning's 1.9 Super Bowls make him better than Tom Brady.

CNNSI didn't jump to conclusions like that. Instead, it chose to hype the hype at the Super Bowl (seriously).

For something actually interesting, read Kerry Byrne's article about previous great match-ups between quarterbacks in the Super Bowl. The problem is that only one of these games panned out. Last year's game between Ben Roethlisberger and Kurt Warner was one of the best ever, it's worth noting.

As for the actual game, each team's chances for winning can be broken down as follows: the Colts are unstoppable, it would be nice if the Saints won because the team and the city both sucked for a long time. To that I would append that Indiana's economy is really struggling and that they could really use this.

In this survey of ESPN experts, 20 of 30 pick the Colts, 12 of them by 10 points or more. Of the ten that pick New Orleans, two justify it by saying that the Saints will win, three say it's destiny, and Rick Reilly says it's because he hates the Mannings.

CNNSI is 6 of 8 for the Colts, with Don Banks reasoning that the absence of a healthy Dwight Freeney will get the Colts carved up. Ross Tucker, a Princeton graduate, agrees.

My prediction, once again, is a 30.4-24.3 win for the Colts.

Book #1: The End of Poverty

I set a goal of reading as many books as possible this year, grammar textbooks or books with vivid illustrations notwithstanding. I started with the lofty goal of finishing War and Peace, which I bought six years ago in that heady year of 2004, when I recounted every (mostly noxious) movie I saw that year.

At any rate, the first book I finished was Jeffrey Sachs' The End of Poverty. I bought it Sunday and finished it Wednesday, thanks to its many non-vivid illustrations, mostly data plots and bar graphs, as well as Sachs' tendency to write well. The End of Poverty gives specific, tangible explanations for the occurrence of what Sachs calls extreme poverty, the inability to secure the necessities of life It also provides tangible suggestions for the elimination of extreme poverty.

I'm not qualified to judge the efficacy of his proposals for ending poverty in, say, Malawi. However, the approach is a strong one. Sachs believes that extreme poverty can be ended if wealthy countries commit to giving 0.7% of their GDP in a thoughtful way for a number of years. The money would be used for public health, infrastructure, and education, allowing the poorest in the world to join the international economy in the way coastal China, southern India and Indonesia have managed.

He takes an overly benign view of poor countries. While countries like China and Bangladesh rightfully receive praise for reducing poverty through international trade, Sachs doesn't urge sub-Saharan countries to try and do the same in some way, portraying them almost entirely as passive objects. Altogether, the book and the ideas within it are very strong, far more than the emotionally-charged appeals that are common in this topic.

There were a few interesting ideas in the book that were new to me. First, Sachs considers the economic growth of several regions over the past two centuries. In 1820, the US was three times as rich as Africa. Africa has grown by about 0.7% a year since then. America has grown about twice that fast on average. That growth, over time, has made America about 25 times as rich as Africa.

Second, by the time emerging economies such as India or China make news for being emerging economies with scorching-fast growth, the heavy lifting is already done. China grew at over 10% a year for much of the '80s and '90s before stabilizing these days at around 7-8%. Most of the heavy lifting in terms of the eradication of poverty was already done by the time we started raving about China's rise as a supwerpower.

Third, the power of geography in explaining poverty, as well as wealth, is immense. Sachs notes that while Americans (and Canadians) consider their wealth to be the result of their own virtue, they inherited state-of-the-art infrastructure and political institutions from Britain. As well, they live in a temperate land with vast natural resources. Contrast that with a place like Kyrgyzstan, which is landlocked, heavily mountainous and benefited from decades of Soviet rule.

Why I live here

The past few days have neatly summed up why I like to live in South Korea. Korea is intense, in-your-face, and both unashamed and unaware of its free-wheeling, anything-goes nature. Yes, it's a society where even kids adopt the Confucian idea of using honourifics to refer to elders, but that's not going to attract anyone into moving here.

The other day, I went shopping for contact lenses at the Namdaemun market in central Seoul. Namdaemun is popular with tourists, so I was wary of a ripoff. I spent some time concocting an elaborate story which explained that I was a Pakistani student that only spoke a smattering of Chinese, and therefore prevent me from being ripped off. However, when I finally walked into a store, I was in and out so fast that I didn't even notice what had happened. I asked if I needed a prescription to buy contacts, he replied by asking for my "number", which I told him, and then he asked for $20, which I gave to him.

Canada has rep hockey, Kenya wrenches out the front teeth of children, and my school had a vicious game show-like quiz competition that weeds out about two-thirds of the kids in the first two minutes, continues for a punishing 45 minutes. Punitive would be the best word to describe this if you're a Canadian, but if you consider that elementary schoolchildren have a class on morals once a week and that a day of high school is 15 hours, we were quite kind to them.

In exchange, students rewarded us by making us feel like either rock stars or caged baboons, I haven't decided yet. At a ceremony concluding our month-long English camp, they swamped the stage with cell phone cameras, eventually making it impossible for anyone to speak or walk. They asked for cell phone numbers, home phone numbers, and email addresses. Mothers demanded we pose for pictures and one sincere mother pointed her business-like video camera to me and said "may-see-jee".

"Message? I can give you my [email] if you, uh -- oh, God, you're recording this?"

Still, I got a box of cookies out of it and I met this professional comedian, all part of the charm of life in the swankiest half of the Korean peninsula.

Afterwards, I bought dinner for my friends with a crisp 50,000 won-note from the envelope of 50,000-won notes that was my salary. They rewarded me by driving all the way across the province, a distance of 40 km, to take me home, where my now-former coworkers were deep in the midst of a Korean-style work gathering. These are basically contests of endurance that end when everyone falls asleep at a karaoke bar or fried chicken restaurant sometime around dawn. I didn't quite make it to dawn, but about half of us did.

In the end, I went to see the pompous changing-of-the-guard ceremony at Deoksu Palace in central Seoul. Keeping it all real was an old man in the distance, his beard proving that he certainly had not kept up with the times, who shouted incoherently at the guards.

All they know is the yellow line

Right now I'm in Ilsan, a suburb of north of Seoul. North Korea is about 15 km away as the crow flies. The nearest North Korean city is Kaesong, about 40 km away. I can't think of any other place on earth where the gap is so stark between the First and Third World, between taking pictures of yourself for fun and not being allowed to wear blue jeans, between watching TV while you drive and having never heard of Coca Cola.

Every time we have lunch at school, a lot of food gets wasted. Kindergarten students are not too fond of tasteless white rice, so it tends to go to waste. Every time I threw out a half-full dish of rice, I thought about all the people that would kill for that rice. But, of course, this is more or less a new dressing on the cliche from the '80s, now adapted as "drink your beer, there's sober kids in Africa".

The food we waste at school isn't going to go anywhere but the garbage, but the situation in North Korea is the opposite of the Ethiopian famine in the '80s. Toronto is a long way from Addis Ababa, but North Korea is alarmingly close. Activists recently sent 150,000 leaflets bearing information to North Korea via hot air balloon. Surely a few packages of instant noodles and the chocolate pies (moon pies) that sell for $10 on the North Korean black market could also be sent.

The facts on the ground, in the air, and underground

In Toronto so far this year:

- 14 people have died from being hit by cars while walking on the street

- 3 people have died from being killed by other people

- nobody has died from terrorism or plane crashes

- no TTC workers have died on the job from heart attacks, strokes, lead poisoning and so on, but it's our fault for not checking up on them while they nap

So, please be kind and inquire about the health of TTC workers as they sleep while earning the salary you pay for. If someone can make a short video of knocking on the glass at a collector booth because the pseudo-human inside didn't even look at you, much less talk, when you dared to buy tokens, I will send you a set of steak knives.

I would write more, but I'm unable to find words to describe the surreal arrogance and astonishing ability to lie of TTC union chief Bob Kinnear:

"It is very discouraging that the picture taker and, apparently, other customers, made no attempt to determine if there was anything wrong with this TTC employee,” said Bob Kinnear, president of the Amalgamated Transit Union."

Kinnear not only went on to criticize the passengers for laughing as his employee blissfully napped on the job, but he described their behaviour as "disturbing". If for some reason you were even remotely deceived by his slimeball tactics, just try imagining any other scenario. How about a cashier at Tim Hortons napping in front of a line of people? Would a spokesman berate those customers for not inquiring about the health of the cashier?

Grammar time, part two

Today and tomorrow, I am giving tests to each of my 70 or so students. The tests have 25 questions, 24 of which involve choosing in the form of multiple choice or true and false. The last question involves writing a sentence. Writing a sentence is exceptionally hard for Korean students.

Randomly asking a student here to make a sentence using the words "shoe" and "elephant" is to turn the classroom process on its head. To some extent, we pride ourselves on being able to make a sentence like that, but not being entirely sure what the object of a sentence is. I only learned what an object was when I started studying Korean.

As I wrote the test, I remembered Peter Mlodinow's fantastic book The Dunkard's Walk. Mlodinow writes that if 25 students guess randomly on a test of 10 true or false questions, there's an 75 percent chance that one will get 80%. Or, in other words, there's a 5% chance any student scoring 80% by guessing.

At first this gave the impression that over the years, a lot of dull students have walked away with good grades, but then, how many 10-question true-and-false tests did you ever write? The number of questions and the number of choices (two) help to keep the odds low. There are only 1024 possible ways to answer this test. Compare that with a trillion ways to answer a 20-question multiple-choice test with four options on each question. Mine ranks a little low, I guess, with about 2 billion possibilities.

When I first gave tests, I was dismayed by how little tests seemed to prove. If they prove anything, it wasn't what I wanted them to prove. Weak students, the sort that I thought should be punished by tests, often scored extremely well. Smart students that always work hard and should really get perfect somehow found ways to muff up questions. The result is an unsatisfying batch of tests that score somewhere in the middle.

How predictable

The top two seeds in the playoffs are going to the Super Bowl for the first time since 1993. Not only are the Colts and Saints the top two seeds, but they've been the frontrunners, along with the Vikings, the entire season. They faltered at the end, finishing a collective 1-5 in the last three weeks, but they were still at or near the top of everyone's self-important "power rankings".

Good teams doing well is good business, apparently. The second-round playoff games were decided by 31, 31, 17 and 3 (down from 10) points. Still, oddly enough, the TV ratings were the highest they had been in 16 years. It was a 15-percent increase over last year.

It's a great game, at least on paper. The Saints scored over 500 points this year, almost a touchdown per game more than the Colts, who scored 416. Peyton Manning is one of the top three or five quarterbacks in history, while Drew Brees puts up stunning numbers if he doesn't quite figure into many rankings just yet. The Saints started 13-0, the Colts started 14-0.

One team represents a region that has been hit hard in recent years. The Saints' success is also a fantastic opportunity for frighteningly melodramatic journalistic charitython pieces about what the Saints mean to the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, the Gulf region, the Vatican, and the Frankish king Clovis I, who is reputed to have come up with the fleur de lis.

At any rate, the Colts opened as four-point favourites largely because they are an established brand. But the Colts played the Jets, who got this far because they got not one, but two freebies in the regular season, and then beat the Bengals and Chargers to get here. Parenthetically, opportunity is a fantastic thing: you can't throw wins back like home runs, and champions benefit as much from opportunity as they do talent. The Colts did fall behind 17-6 to the Jets. The Saints played the Vikings and got five turnovers, but still needed four quarters and change to win.

Since overly-detailed analysis of a highly unpredictable event makes people look smart, I'm going to make some predictions. Look for this New Orleans Saints football to utilize screens to take advantage of a Larry Coyer Colts defense that likes to pursue, that likes to run fast. Incoherent gurgling sounds from Shannon Sharpe and Dan Marino. The Saints, meanwhile, will go with three or four-receiver sets and burn the Colts up top since they like to bring those safeties up to blitz, especially in that A-gap since left tackle Jermon Bushrod has a nipple ring.

The final score: Colts 30.4, Saints 24.3.