Sociology

I've been thinking about a couple of sociological experiments that would be fun to try. I don't think anyone would get hurt, at least not badly.

The first was inspired by a bunch of long-haired, cheesy-mustachioed guys I saw walking around downtown a week or two ago. They were wearing skinny jeans and black Iron Maiden t-shirts, and I realized that they must all be in town for the Iron Maiden concert that night.

That's when it struck me. Ever since the Beatles, rock bands have had a major influence on the stylistic mores of their fans. I have to wonder what would happen, or rather what would have happened if the guys in Iron Maiden or Black Sabbath or - to be more modern - Van Halen or Guns 'n' Roses or Billy Idol or Henry Rollins had decided, as their little bit of rebellion against society, to wear tuxedos or morning suits as their costumes instead of leather and denim. I'm not sure the world would be prepared for the instant reapparition of dandies. Think about it. [In passing, I do realize that Slash fans haven't created any palpable re-ascendancy of the silk top hat, but perhaps that's the exception to the rule.]

I wonder if parents had the same problems in Mozart's day. "But Mom, all the other kids at school are wearing their wigs backwards like Mozart!" "Johann Chrysostome Josephus Albertus Emmanuel Philipp, as long as you're living under my roof you'll wear your wig the right way around - and don't let me catch you skimping on the cornstarch or sneaking any of your mother's beauty marks!"

Experiment number two popped into my head as I was in a taxi. From the time I got into the cab to the time I got to my destination, and presumably for a good while before and after, the driver was engaged in a high-volume conversation in one Dravidian language or another. The trip itself was obviously a secondary consideration as the cabbie bobbed and weaved in and out of traffic, yelling at his conversation "partner" the whole way. I almost felt badly for interrupting what was obviously a very important discussion to tell the cabbie little things like where I wanted to go and that I needed a receipt for my fare.

This was far from the first time it's happened; in fact, when one cabbie recently apologized to me for answering his phone without asking my permission I nearly fell out of my seat. Good thing the car door was locked.

I asked myself who could possibly use a cellphone continuously like that. Then it came to me: fourteen-year-old girls. So here's my experiment: all cabbies and all fourteen-year-old girls get a phone to use as much as they want, at no charge. The only condition is that any member of each group can only call a member of the other group. A tweenager can only call a cab driver and vice versa. My hypothesis is that within a few days, such an arrangement would free up scads and scads of cellphone bandwidth, and the number of car crashes on Toronto streets, as well as the average blood pressure of parents, would go down significantly.

When setting up this kind of experiment, it's always important to think about what would happen if the experiment goes wrong. Let's look:

1. There would be a run on formal wear. That can only be good news for the retail and rental market, since this might finally give businesses the opportunity to blow out some of those powder-blue and Key lime-green tuxedos they've had in stock since the 1980s;

2. This one is potentially more insidious. I see two potential unwanted outcomes. One might be that we get a new crop of Hindi- or Urdu- or Malayalam - speaking teenagers. Well, being multilingual never hurt anyone. Alternatively, taxi drivers might start obsessing about their hairstyles, or the latest jeans or sneakers, or that cute guy who sits in the back row of fourth-period English class. That, my friends, is too much for my brain to even contemplate.

On a completely unrelated topic: it turns out that the scribblings of one Lord Black of Crossharbour that I revealed in a previous blog post [which were apocryphal, unverified and not even the teensiest bit libelous] turned out not to be his final writings at all. Maybe ol' Tiny wasn't as tough as we thought.

Imagine my surprise when I saw the other day that Tubby had somehow managed to get an e-mail to, of all people, the Canadian Press. Anyone else would have asked for a file to be smuggled in in a cake or something, or maybe a few packs of smokes to use for barter; instead, our favourite ex-press baron sent the equivalent of a letter from camp: "Hi... um, I guess I'm okay. Bye. PS I still think the judge is a meanie."