This Week in Fat

It's a Fat World After All
Disneyland denies that they're shutting down their "It's a Small World " ride in order to make changes to accommodate heavier passengers. Miceage reported that the boats kept getting stuck forcing the staff to more frequently ask some patrons to get off the ride so that the boats could continue floating. It's been reported that in order to make these patrons feel better they're being offered food vouchers.


Flying the Fat Skies
A doctor in Australia is advocating that airlines should charge a premium to obese passengers to be levied for every kilogram above a certain weight, just like they do for excess baggage. I think this idea's going to have some legs and will eventually become policy. The price of fuel continues to rise as we run out of oil while no one seems to be working on any serious alternatives for jet fuel. I could imagine one day soon being weighed with all of my luggage and paying for my ticket based on the total weight.

Fat Old Opry
Nashville Tennessee is the fattest city in America with 68% of it's residents overweight or obese. Forbes Magazine has also written that the most sparsely populated areas of the country are also the fattest while the densely filled areas like NYC and L.A. are less so. Dense urban living is more efficient in more ways than one.


Fat is no Joking Matter
Unless you go here, where it is.

This Monarch's Not Smiling

Hugo Chavez is a shit disturber, there's no denying it. He pisses off a lot of people especially oil people like the Bush clan. Recently he got into a spat with King Juan Carlos of Spain calling him a fascist. When he tried to interrupt during a conference the Monarch yelled at him to "shut up" on live TV.

Just an excuse for me to dig up something cool from the 80's.

Abecedarians - Smiling Monarchs (1985)

Eat The Rich

A restaurant in NYC is offering a $25,000 dessert. I don't mean to add to the free publicity that is restaurant is receiving. We should probably just ignore these asinine attempts to get our attention but I excuse myself in that this will mostly be a meta comment on the matter. I don't really care what the ingredients are: they're probably a mix of some rare and therefore expensive ingredients and usually include some jewelry that the buyer can take home after they've licked their plate clean.


This kind of thing makes the rich seem like clueless showoffs as represented in popular culture by the Thurston Howell III's or the Montgomery Burns of the TV world. It's just too easy to despise the wealthy when such things are publicized. "That's rare and expensive, let's consume it" is a very unsophisticated approach to riches. I'm quite sure the people who drink gold flakes, much like the people who rent stretch limousines to go to rock concerts, and also like those who strut in white Bentley roadsters in music videos aren't really the rich but only those who want to appear to be so. The appearance of wealth is as valuable to some as actual wealth. This is probably why people rent exotic cars to attend their school reunions.

Eating gold flakes in a sundae or drinking them in a Goldschlager martini can't be good for you. But if you must so conspicuously consume I've got a suggestion for you. You know what's even more rare and valuable than gold? Plutonium costs $120,000/ounce. Why don't you sprinkle a little bit of that in your martini.

No Country For Old Men

I first saw the Coen Brothers film Blood Simple (1984) at the Broadway in Hamilton and I was a little puzzled at first. It was very different than most of the movies I had seen up to then and it started my appreciation for art films. Here was a movie that was glacially paced with sparse dialogue and yet it held your attention for nearly two hours. I liked it the first time I saw it but I liked it more the second time I saw it.

This has now become a pattern for me with their films. I remember thinking Fargo was pretty good but subsequent viewings made me believe it was great. One just doesn't absorb all of the detail the first time around. They have an unusual sense of humour that's brought out in the pacing and the eccentric folksy dialogue of their movies. I remember being disappointed by The Big Lebowski the first time I saw it, thinking that it was too slick and silly but it has gotten funnier each time I've watched it. I now consider it one of the funniest movies ever made.

I just watched No Country for Old Men and I'm assuming that the same thing will happen again. I liked the movie but I look forward to loving it the second time around.

Hot Girl Robot on Girl Robot Action

Bjork Video - All is Full of Love
There's something sad and tragic about sentient robots.

Message in a Bottle

I'm not sure most people realize how big the Universe really is, despite Carl Sagan's valiant efforts to educate us about it. Light travels at about 1 billion kilometres per hour and yet it still takes about 4 years for that light to travel to the nearest star system to ours. It would take you 15 billion years to cross the Universe at the speed of light.

The farthest human made object from Earth is Voyager 1. After 30 years it is about 16 million km away from Earth but at the wicked fast rate of 60,000 kph it will take about another 50,000 years before it gets anywhere near another star system and millions of years before it gets to any denser parts of the galaxy where it is more likely to be found by an alien species.

When Voyager is found the aliens will discover a gold recording disc that we've included on board. The instructions on how to play the disc is on the record sleeve which is reproduced in the photo above. The record includes sounds and images of Earth.

This is one of the saddest and most quixotic undertakings that I can imagine. It is probably one of the surest bets in the Universe that Voyager will never be found but if it ever was found it would likely be a billion years after we've all died on Earth.

You can track Voyager 1's travels at this site.

Mainlining Sugar

I listened to a podcast that aimed to give some writing advice for NaNoWriMo participants. Some of the advice included the obvious like coffee but went beyond by suggesting cream donuts, Pringles chips and blue ice cream.

The really bad white flour donuts have immense amounts of sugar and fried fat so they're packed with energy. They suggested crushing the Pringles chips in the container so you could just "drink" it without wasting the time required to pick up and place the chips in your mouth. These are also loaded with sugar to complement the pressed starch that is the main ingredient and when you're done you could use the can as a hacking aid. The blue ice cream apparently has the most sugar of any flavour probably since it's aimed at children's taste.

It's long been a cliche that writers abuse themselves especially with coffee, cigarettes, alcohol and drugs but I've been good at avoiding these. I drink decaf and I don't smoke. I did have a cuba libre last night but only after I finished writing and I haven't tried the bug powder yet.

If anyone were to follow the advice given by this broadcast I'm sure they'd go into some kind of hyperglycemic fits. But I am feeling a little sluggish tonight and it's too late to get myself to the gym so I've gone out and got myself a six pack of chocolate cream donuts. I'll let you know how it goes.

Texas Bound?

The Canadian dollar closed today above $1.08 against the US dollar. A few years ago it was just under $0.62. If I chose to buy a $200,000 property in the US back then it would have cost me about C$323,000. But today that similarly priced property would only cost me C$184,000. That's a 44% savings just from the currency exchange appreciation.

Add to this the sub-prime meltdown in the US which is causing a rash of foreclosures and price reductions down there and you could easily pick up an American home for less than half price. The dollar might stabilize and recover a little and most people think that real estate prices will continue to drop before they rise again in the US but there probably has never been a better time for a snowbird to pick up a bargain.

So let's go shopping. There are stories from California and Florida of builders selling remaining houses for less than half the initial price. But these tend to be new housing developments in suburban type settings that I'm not sure I'd consider buying at any price. The cooler neighbourhoods are cheaper but still not cheap. NYC seems a natural choice but I haven't seen too many bargains there yet.

So where to buy? I would choose a city with active arts and music scenes, a highly educated workforce, a major university in town and if you listen to Richard Florida a vibrant gay community would also help. I've done some research and Austin Texas seems to come up at or near the top on many indexes that one could use to gauge the coolness of an American city. Perhaps a Texas winter home is not out of the question for this suddenly snowbird. Maybe I'll check out SXSW in March.

Curb Your Buzz

When Jerry Seinfeld got his own TV show I avoided it like the plague. I used to see him on the Tonight Show asking his "what's the deal with ketchup?" questions and I really didn't need to be irritated for half an hour each week. It wasn't until I was in residence at university and couldn't successfully avoid TV any longer that I happened to watch a few episodes of Seinfeld and found it to be very amusing. Despite the fact that all of the characters were extreme sociopaths it was an innovative show that highlighted the absurdities of everyday minutia. Perhaps I was wrong about this guy. Maybe he wasn't such a superficial simpleton.

Years later while on vacation in Mexico I saw this show called Curb Your Enthusiasm on HBO. I nearly pissed myself laughing and remember thinking that it was another step above the bar set by the Seinfeld sitcom. I watched two episodes during that vacation and it started to dawn on me that this Larry David guy was the same guy who created and wrote on the Seinfeld show. It was also implied that the George Costanza character was loosely based on himself. Curb Your Enthusiasm has of course become a successful and well known show and Jerry Seinfeld hasn't done much of anything since the end of the run for Seinfeld. He would occasionally do a stand-up routine and audiences seemed enthusiastic but it was always the kind of material that wouldn't get a comic very many laughs if he weren't already as famous and powerful as Jerry.

Now we finally have a major project that was initiated, written and produced by Jerry himself and everyone is buzzing about how mediocre Bee Movie is. I'm not at all surprised. If you haven't caught on yet it has become abundantly clear that Larry David was the creative brains and the funny bone behind Seinfeld. Jerry was well known and comfortable in front of the camera so he became the face of the show which I'm convinced would have been just another canceled Pauly Shore type star vehicle if it wasn't for Larry David.

Culture Clash

I saw this commercial on TV tonight. The music is a cover of Pressure Drop by the Clash.

When I was a kid there was this quaint concept around music we used to talk about called "selling out". It was a cute notion that art trumped everything else and making music for money or popularity was an act of betrayal and if you tried too hard to profit from your art then you'd be compromising it and just "selling out". That's why you couldn't imagine hearing a Led Zeppelin song on a TV commercial. If you did hear their music used in that way you could have been assured that they would have lost all credibility with their fans.

Later on the punks were much more hardcore about this concept and the Clash was a band that epitomized this ethos having once insisted on releasing a triple album for the price of a single album and then allowed to do so because they made a deal with their label to tour for free to make up for the loss. I remember hearing Generation X speak for punks and deride the earlier generation by singing "we'll never sell out, like they did" and then watched as Billy Idol sold every shred of dignity he had as a punk in the following years by cashing in with cheesy songs, videos and staged concert hyperbole.

Things have changed. When Moby licensed every song on his album Play for TV ads no one begrudged him. Instead he was praised and admired for his business acumen. Hip-hop artists often prefer to be called entrepreneurs first and musicians somewhere down the list. The latest generation perhaps has a more accurate understanding of the music business by understanding that it is a business after all. That doesn't mean that they don't appreciate true art. They just don't think there's anything wrong with getting paid. It's considered perfectly OK to fleece those suckers at the ad agencies for the privilege to play their music. Just don't ask these kids to pay for the privilege of listening to that same music. They'll then tell you that music should be free and not about making money.

Conservative Rant

It's easy to be lulled into complacency with this Conservative government. They mostly stay out of trouble by being bland, boring and uncontroversial. Every now and then you're brought down to earth when you realize who these people really are. This past week we've had a series of developments that should give us pause.

1. They have brought forth a series of massive tax cuts and reduced the GST by 1 percent. Some economists think that some of that tax reward could have been better used as debt retirement or increased program funding after years and years of cuts. But it seems that nearly every economist including those strongly aligned with the Conservative party have said unequivocally that cutting the GST makes absolutely no sense at all.

2. The Chief of Defense Rick Hillier spoke openly about Afghanistan saying that it would take at least a decade to sort out that mess. This doesn't jibe with the official party line so he's been admonished and told to keep quiet. A few years ago some Military men gave George Bush more reasonable estimates of requirements and time lines for war in Iraq and they were sent packing or silenced and the results have been horrific.

3. Mark Warner was recently disqualified by the Conservative Party from running in Toronto Centre against Bob Rae even though he was democratically elected by his riding association. It seems they didn't take too kindly to him having opinions of his own about income and equality.

4. The Harper government refused to intervene in the case of a Canadian on death row in Montana citing that they didn't want to have such a monster like him back in Canada to serve a life sentence. The fact of the matter is that this person could serve life in Montana if he were given clemency and there would be no need to have him back in Canada. This is all beside the point. If you are a Canadian citizen you have the expectation to be defended by your country in accordance with your countries sense of justice and it is clear that Canadians consider capital punishment to be an abhorrent and uncivilized practice. What's surprising is that so many of the prominent Conservative Party members actually publicly support capital punishment.

5. The Mulroney saga got more interesting this week. It seems that he had accepted $300,000 in cash payments in secret meetings in hotel rooms and then delayed paying taxes on them until it became quite clear that people were going to find out about it. This kind of 3rd world opportunism is embarrassing to Canada and should be exposed and punished. And I know it's not just the Conservatives who have shady dealings in their recent past.

6. The Harper government continues to obfuscate and stall when it comes to environmental action. The old Progressive Conservative Party was much more palatable even with Mulroney at the helm when it came to environmental issues. With such a name one has to wonder what it is that the Conservatives are actually trying to conserve.

American Gangster

There is a tradition of glorifying the gangster in American culture. The Godfather Trilogy and the Sopranos are some of the obvious examples of the Italian-American variety but more recently the African-American Gangster culture has had it's fair share of glorification. Hip-hop and Rap videos are dripping with the ostentatious glamour that showcases gangster/drug dealer/pimp lifestyles.

American Gangster starring Denzel Washington is somewhat of a hybrid. It's the story of a poor African American who makes it big in the world dominated by the Italian American Mafia of 1970's New York. It's so natural to elevate the criminal element because criminal activity is so structurally similar to business activity. America admires the entrepreneur for his audacious confidence and his ability to struggle against risk in order to arrive at success. Frank Lucas (played by Denzel) is a perfect example of a man that possesses a combination of fearlessness, strength and innovativeness that allows him to reap the reward of fantastic riches.

Most Americans do not really feel like they have access to the opportunities to succeed in their lives. Criminal activity allows the fantasy of bypassing that difficult process of education and hard work and going straight to the riches. Of course it's just a fantasy since most of those who choose the life will soon end up dead or in prison. But Hollywood is in the business of selling fantasy and they do a pretty good job of it. Despite the occasional display of psychopathy, Denzel's portrayal of Lucas is mostly sympathetic. Lucas did end up in jail and penniless but it seems a small price to pay for someone who sees no hope for the future.

Peak Stupidity Theory

Judging by the price of crude these days it seems that people are beginning to accept the peak oil theory of fossil fuel supply. Supply is on the way down, demand is on the way up and prices are soaring and are likely never to go substantially back down again. Canada has a domestic answer since we have billions of barrels of oil trapped in the Tar Sands of Alberta. The American response to peak oil also seeks out a domestic solution with their recent focus on bio-fuels. America can produce a lot of corn very efficiently and some have decided that corn would make a nice replacement for fossil fuels.

Something is very misguided here. We're looking for alternative sources of things to burn rather than looking for alternative methods of power generation, or better yet, ways to radically reduce usage. Oil is running out and it happens to be a very dirty and toxic way to create energy. Rather than finding truly creative sustainable solutions we're going to make the net effects worse while dangerously delaying what we'll eventually have to do anyway.

The amount of energy required to extract oil from sands in Alberta is staggering. You have to dig out 2 tons of sand and apply copious amounts of energy to process it to arrive at just 1 barrel of oil. Similarly you have to harvest tons of corn then apply energy to process it to produce some combustible to put in your tank but at the cost of removing acreage from the inventory of land that could be used for food production. Meanwhile food prices rise because of the shrinking availability of arable land. How are these good solutions to peak oil?

Scariest Costume Evah

November is NaNoWriMo and NaBloPoMo during which I have committed to daily blogging as well as writing a novel from start to finish in 30 days.

I'm always puzzled by some of the costumes that people choose for Halloween. I was under the impression that they were supposed to be scary. I know that it's hard to resist when a little child wants to be Spiderman or a fair Princess like nearly every other friend of theirs but should we still pretend it's Halloween that we're celebrating?

So, with this in mind I am planning to dress up as something very scary this evening. I did a quick canvassing of American News Media reports to determine what it is that really scares people these days and I've combined them in the creation of my costume. This Halloween I will be dressed as a Young Black Male Pedophile Terrorist on Fire.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster vs the Invisible Pink Unicorn

Hell is War

I first met R when he was about 15. A little older than me, he was intimidating and strange. With his closely shorn bristly red hair and wide-eyed stare he looked like a young Johnny Rotten. His cousin was my best friend at the time and they came over to my basement to listen to music and drink some beer. When Devo came over my speakers R got up and danced in a manic swirl of movement, knees bent, arms swinging side to side like a new wave dance but with the energy and speed of a punk mosh pit.

He was quiet and awkward but trying to convey an image of strength and confidence. R had clearly been lifting weights and I imagined it might have been because he had sand kicked in his face once too often and had decided to do something about it. Over the next few years I would see R infrequently each time he would be a little wider and more menacing. He seemed to be very enthusiastic about guns, war and the action films of the time. He had relatives in the military so it was not surprising that he used to talk about rifles, knives, fighter planes and other military hardware even if it seemed a little bizarre to some.

I never got to know R very well and I hadn't seen him in 20 years. As a teenaged boy from Hamilton his dream was to be a member of the Airborne Regiment and he would occasionally and randomly belt out the following tune - the first verses at least. I never heard how the song ended.

I want to be an Airborne Ranger
Livin' a life of sex and danger

I said RANGER!
DANGER!
DANGER!
RANGER!

For the first time in decades Canadians are now involved in a war, and not just as peace-keepers. I guess all the gung-ho soldiers like R finally got what they must have been dreaming of all these years. Along with our involvement in the war in Afghanistan comes the occasional casualty reports on the evening news. My ears always perk up when these reports are aired and am relieved when I don't recognize the name of the dead soldier even though I feel for how their friends must feel when they hear their name on the news.

About a month ago there was a report of a Canadian soldier who was found shot dead in his barracks and his identity concealed. I wondered what story hid behind those headlines. Was it an accident, murder or suicide? A week later the dead soldier was identified as my friend R. Another week later the Military announced that it had in fact been a suicide.

Here is how that song ended:

Well C-130 rolling down the strip
Takin' off just like a rocket ship
Grab your weapon and grab your pack
clip the static line and it's out the back

Now if my chute don't open wide
I've got a second one by my side
If my secondary don't open true
Well look out ground 'cause I'm coming through

If I die in a combat zone
you can box me up and send me home
pin my metals upon my chest
And tell my momma I did my best!

Genocide, Satan and Salad

On August 14 of this year 500 people were killed and about 350 injured in an act of religious genocide. We only heard about it in passing. See if you can find it buried here in the Economist weekly review. The group that was targeted were the Yazidi who are considered by some orthodox Muslims to be Devil worshipers. This seems tragically to be based on a linguistic confusion of nomenclature. The Yazidi believe that the world was created by God and left to the care of seven angels, the highest ranking one being Melek Ta'us. So Melek Ta'us is the angel that holds the position that is most similar to the Christian angel of St. Michael who is considered to be the leader of the seven angels who stand before God.

In one of the Yazidi creation stories Melek Ta'us is created directly from God's illumination and is later tested by God when asked to obey his newest creation in Adam. Melek Ta'us passes the test by refusing and citing that he was created from a higher origin than Adam. So melek Ta'us is the one that disobeys God and opposes him. The Arabic word that means opponent (one who opposes) is Shaytan.

In an Islamic story Iblis is a pseudo-angel that disobeys God's direction to prostrate to Adam and so this Shaytan (one who opposes) is cursed by God for infinity to the Lake of Fire from where he promises to lead mankind astray and tempt them into hellfire. This Shaytan or opposer/disobeyer comes simply to be named by the descriptor of Shaytan and is who we know in English to be Satan.

But remember the other Shaytan (one who opposes) who is really most similar to St. Michael? Because the highest Angel in the Yazidi belief system is also known as Shaytan (one who opposes) he is mistakingly confused and equated with the Shaytan from the Islamic story and therefore equated with Satan, the being that tempts humans to hellfire. This is ironic since St. Michael's name was the war cry used by the Angels in a battle fought in heaven against Satan.

So the Yazidis are considered to be devil worshipers and therefore free game to eliminate from this world. This must be what those car-bombers were thinking when they targeted and slaughtered the large group of Yazidi on August 14.

This is the state of religion in the 21st century. A preposterously misguided etymological misunderstanding can move one group of people to kill another group en masse. A little linguistic education could have saved everyone a great deal of trouble and trauma. With just a little digging one could easily discover that Melek means Angel and that Ta'us is clearly related to the Greek words Theos or Zeus denoting God and thus Melek Ta'us is an Angel of God not an agent of evil.

A similar misunderstanding but with much less tragic consequences is made by the Yazidi themselves. The Yazidi believe that these seven holy beings are occasionally reincarnated in earthly forms as Koasasa. Their word for lettuce is koas which sounds like, but has nothing whatsoever to do with koasasa. This aural similarity however is enough to make it taboo for the Yazidi to eat lettuce. If only linguistic ignorance would lead to eating less salad and not to more killing.

Joel Plaskett Emergency

Blogification

I've recently started watching a TV show called Californication. It's ostensibly about a writer going through a protracted period of writer's block accompanied by a similar obstruction in his personal growth. How apropos. David Duchovny of X-Files fame stars as Hank, a loveable self-destructive writer who has so fallen on hard times that he has been forced to take a job writing a regular blog, all this while trying to win his wife and daughter back.

The show is only so-so. Better than most things on TV but not as good as the best from HBO. What continues to grate on my nerves is that Hank constantly ridicules and derides blog writing as somehow meaningless and something of which any self-respecting writer would be embarrassed. It's true that blog writing is the only writing I've been able to finish on a semi-regular basis lately but this is not a self-defense response.

It should be admitted that most blogs are not written at the level or sophistication of most published novels, but some are. For every dozen mommy-bloggers who fill their pages with fastidiously chronicled minutia of every baby step and diaper change there's a Cognitive Daily For every hundred cat-bloggers who furnish us with their daily furry photos there's a Cosmic Variance. The point is that the choice of medium in which the writing is presented cannot determine the quality of the content. There are some horrifically bad books that sit on the shelves of your local bookstore just as there are some excellent poetry blogs online.

It's true that anyone can write a blog while you must be chosen to be published, so the odds are better that you'll find quality in one medium compared to another but the art is ultimately in the content. There is also a natural process of selection that begins to work when you link from blogs you like to other blogs that they like. Eventually you discover dozens of blogs that you might want to read on a regular basis.

Art can be found just about anywhere a producer chooses to put it. Film snobs like to brag that they don't own a TV as if shielding one's self from any medium could somehow be considered noble. Art can be found in any medium you choose to look at. It can be found in the content that is produced specifically for your TV, cellphone, flash player, sidewalk, milk carton, bus shelter or toilet stall. Snobbery directed prejudicially and wholesale against various media like TV, blogs or even comic books (the most artful of which are now called graphic novels) belies a misunderstanding of what and where art is.

Muslim Democrat?

Turkey has elected a so-called Islamist as President. This might sound alarming to some paranoid western ears. Any word containing or having as cognate the word Islam has in recent years taken on a connotation of fundamentalism and extremism. But look past the descriptive terms and you'll find that the oppostional forces in that country's politics has less to do with religion versus secularism and has more to do with rich versus poor.

Turkey is socially and politically very unconventional; for one thing the military has on four occasions deposed the national government and forced it to adhere to the constitution which it holds dear. Unlike most other military establishments this one doesn't consider the constitution to be a pesky document that gets in the way of their path to power. They consider it their raison d'etre to protect it.

I am strongly in favour of secularism. I don't think there's much wisdom in mixing the church with the state. So one would guess that the recent presidential ascendancy in Turkey should trouble me. It does not trouble me because I think that the people have strongly supported the AKP not because they necessarily crave a government that mixes faith and politics but because they have been given so few reliable and honest politicians from which to choose.

The secularist parties much like the Federal Liberals here in Canada had become much too comfortable in their position as the natural governing option. While the constitution and reforms brought forth by Ataturk in 1923 were impressive and necessary at the time they are clung to by the secularists with even more vigour than a religious zealot clings to his scriptures. If Turkey wants to join the European union (and most of the population strongly does so) then they need to realize that the tenets of Western Liberal Democracy can supersede the proclamations of Ataturk who it must be admitted was not infallible. His innovations, it could be argued were right for the time but can be improved upon and therefore must be subject to criticism.

Along with the comfort and ease of power came the temptation of corruption. It should be admitted that the rich and the powerful have for decades colluded in corrupt practices that have fleeced the average Turkish citizen of their deserved economic success. Their untiring work ethic has largely been wasted by scandal after scandal in which those in power made it very easy for those with the purse-strings to abscond with the country's liquid resources and to do so with relative impunity. This gave the secularist parties a bad name and the poor not surprisingly flocked to their shepherds.

Recep Erdogan and his chosen President Abdullah Gul are probably no more frighteningly Muslim than Stephen Harper is frighteningly Christian. They all knew how to seek favour with voters to oust a naturally governing party: they did so by giving the voters an option to sweep aside an establishment that was shown to be too comfortable in power and too prone to corruption. Ironically in Turkey it took the efforts of a so-called Islamist party to truly put into practice the various virtues of Western Democracy. Those previously in power, despite being ostensibly advocates of right-leaning capitalist thinking, had no interest in true competition because having already the most they had the most to lose through it's introduction.

There has been a long tradition of Christian Democrat parties in Europe who despite their religious sounding names have upheld the values of Liberalism and I propose that the party in power in Turkey be labeled similarly as Muslim Democrats. If we could somehow keep those corrupt politicians from using the electoral process for their own personal economic enrichment instead of the enrichment of their people then the people wouldn't have to resort to voting in religiously linked parties to oust those same corrupt politicians.

This Music is Gay!

Men in Istanbul walk hand in hand, kiss each other in greeting and occasionally lather each other in a Turkish bath, and those are just the straight men. Turkey has a very macho culture where so-called manliness is highly prized and praised. Every time I look up at a TV or glance at a tabloid here in Istanbul I seem to come across the face of a rather severe looking female singer by the name of Bulent Ersoy who it turns out was once a man.

People can't seem to get enough of her. She seems to be hosting a different show every night, her photos are on the front pages of most newspapers, people are talking about her plans to adopt children and about what her 23 year old husband was doing with another woman last week.

It seems very strange at first to find that they have elevated a transgender performer to the pinnacle of their entertainment pyramid, and it should be noted that this is not just a freak-show curiosity since most everyone really appreciates her singing talents and her bravery. There is a surprising readiness to accept LGBT people in the world of entertainment even if these people aren't readily accepted in the more mundane workplaces of the everyday world. As a very young child in Istanbul I remember asking my Mother why people said Zeki Muren was a man when he clearly looked, dressed and sang like a woman. Later when I moved to the West I confused him with Liberace who engendered the same question.

As a youth I remember watching Mick Jagger strut on stage like a preening girl more or less kissing Keith Richards while tough-guy biker-types in the crowd roared their approvals. As an aside, for years I confused Ron Wood with Rod Stewart (another male performer with clearly gay mannerisms). Freddie Mercury of Queen also strutted around on stage like a prima donna but by this time I had chalked it up to the understanding that British people were just more pimp and circumstance than the rest of us. It never really occurred to me that these people might be gay; It's just how rock stars behaved.

If you survey the pantheon of pop music you will find a very lengthy list of male rock stars who were either gay or behaved in a stereotypically gay manner on stage. They wore makeup, tight tight jeans, wiggled their asses and stroked their bodies like strippers. The hair bands of the 80's represented the extreme manifestations of this tendency.

During my teenage years it was so much fun watching Robert Smith of The Cure prance around in Love Cats that it almost made me want to wear mascara, hairspray and elaborate jewelry. The straight male population is accepting of this style even if most of them aren't accepting of gay culture in general but the female populace seems to simply adore it. Most heart-throbs marketed to little girls are soft smooth effeminate boys who are also highly attractive to the gay male population. It baffles straight men why women are more attracted to pretty-boys over manly men but the advent of the Metrosexual seems to be an effort to appeal to this tendency in women.

This is not new. Dionysus, the original rock star gave the women of Thebes ecstatic fits and the men were so drawn to the spectacle that they dressed up and joined the women in their adoration of Dionysus. The Dionysian is often aligned with the feminine spirit of humanity while the Apollonian is aligned with the masculine. Meaningful art results when both are twined in an interplay of the forces of human natures. Whether you are drawn to Apollo or Dionysus you cannot help but appreciate the art that results in their admixture and even the hardened men of a militaristic middle power like Turkey appreciate the beauty of art made by a creature borne of a mixed spirit. Rock stars as well as audiences seem to know this intuitively.

Planes, Brains and Automobiles

Every time I get on a plane I find myself getting metaphysical. After settling in, checking out the reading materials and going through the usual aircraft emergency fantasies (the one in which the plane plunges into a vast jungle and only a handful of us survive, or how I single-handedly would subdue a team of 3 terrorists attempting to hijack the plane) I invariably start to marvel at the fact that I am in a small metal building that we have somehow managed to get off the ground and float through the air. It’s not really that impressive to get the building airborne since it is simply a matter of brute force. What is truly impressive for me is that we can do it with such precision, stability and predictability that we voluntarily agree to climb into these metal buildings while it shoots up into the sky and glides back down again thousands of kilometers away.

It has been said that a sufficiently advanced technology should be indistinguishable from magic and this would surely be the case for anyone experiencing an air flight for the first time. I also notice that the small video screens in front of us would surely be one of the most amazing feats of magic were you to watch it for the first time. Just as I’m thinking about this the in-flight movie begins and it is The Prestige. In the movie, David Bowie plays the role of Nikola Tesla, who many thought to be a magician of sorts.

But after the experience of magic wears off it’s even more impressive how we are able to fine-tune a technology so that it’s inner workings become completely moot and hidden to us. A modern automobile does not reveal that it is really working through the primitive technology of fire. We feed it with some sludge that we've dug up from the ground which is burned in an intense fire to move some pistons in order to produce locomotion. The reality of motoring is actually somewhat virtual for us. Even the act of going to a service station and filling up is really like plugging ports together and moving data or credits between machines since we never actually see the gasoline that goes into the car nor the fire when it burns.

When a technology reaches such a state of refinement and meshing with human behaviours and social patterns it becomes a part of our human being. If you watch a carpenter at work you will note that it is difficult to see where the hand ends and the hammer begins. The hammer becomes not just an extension of the hand but it becomes one with the hand and one with the practice of carpentry. Until the carpenter bangs his thumb or a plane crashes we will not even see the tool as a tool.

Designers of tools must always be thinking of the tool as a tool but striving to produce something that will, if successful, become invisible. Designers of future cognitive augmentation devices such as embedded memory expansion devices or built-in mathematics processors will one day create devices such that they will cease to be experienced as separate from our human brains. A human being will live with a myriad of expansion and augmentation devices with such meshing that they may eventually forget where the brain ends and the technology starts. Nano-technology may mesh the two realms even further to such an extent that we will blur the distinction between human, cyborg and robot. Reality will become mostly virtual for such a future being and we may wonder what to name it's peculiar type of being. I suggest that we continue to call it human being.

Suspicious Minds

My friend Robin who's doing great work over there at the Institute of Higher Purpose tagged me with this task. Start every sentence with "I am suspicious..." go.

I am suspicious of viral blog tagging.
I am suspicious of raccoons because I think they're planning something big.
I am suspicious of squirrels who know what those guys are up to but won't tell us.
I am suspicious that I found in a restroom 12 different types of loose toilet paper rolls in 12 different sizes.
I am suspicious that there's always a different man smoking and hanging his head out of my neighbour's window.
I am suspicious of my other neighbour who in the back laneway always seems to be having an argument with an unseen foe.
I am suspicious when someone says they have the answer.
I am suspicious of suspicion.
I am suspicious why time travelers from the future haven't revealed themselves to us.
I am suspicious of unseen forces that hold together the nucleus of an atom.
I am suspicious when a pretty young girl talks to me on the street, even with my early middle-aged good looks.
I am suspicious why someone hasn't yet come out and said "Yo, you've been punked, now here's your real life."
I am suspicious..... not.

I won't tag anyone directly but consider yourself served.

Wow! It Smells Just Like Fabric Softener

I don't care how hot it is. I refuse to wear shorts in public.

Being stoned is like being within the cognitive sphere of a dog.

Food does not grow on supermarket shelves. It grows in warehouses.

Miss Universal - Someone that everyone agrees is beautiful.

DRCR - Remotely Controlled Domestic Robot

Overheard spoken by a child in a park flower bed - "Wow! It smells just like fabric softener."

Pellegrino Pipeline

Gasoline at the pumps seems to have permanently settled above the $1/litre mark and people are complaining that it's too expensive. I had a refreshing drink with a friend at Starbucks today when I realized that the small 250ml bottle of San Pellegrino water that he was drinking cost $2 and therefore $8/litre. My orange mocha came in at about $10/litre. Perhaps we should ask why gas is so cheap.

Petroleum powers our economies just as water and mocha powers our bodies. Because we need so much petroleum to fuel our transportation networks we have set up a very wide and efficient framework for getting the oil out of the ground, quickly to refineries and ultimately available as gas to pump into our cars. The economies of scale are so great that after all that work and distance we can deliver it to your gas tank for about one eighth the price of Pellegrino which is also extracted from the ground. It should also be noted that oil companies still make more profit than mineral water companies.

If there was significantly more demand for European mineral water then we would eventually set up pipelines from their sources in France or Italy, get it quickly into giant tankers and deliver it to pumping stations where you could fill up on Evian for a fraction of the price you would pay today. But no such demand exists to drive the building of such an efficient infrastructure to deliver mineral water.

There's another major difference between the two essential fluids. If we run out of Pellegrino we can drink tap water, well water or sip from a puddle in the forest. If we run low on gas then we're somewhat screwed because we've built these giant factories that continue to produce giant rolling machines that can run on gas and only gas. There is no substitute and a massive retrofit would be required for our economies to continue.

Because we demand cheap products we have come to rely on intricate networks to deliver essential goods from far away lands. This super-efficient system actually makes us more vulnerable to collapse. If the gasoline supply chain is disrupted then the entire economy could screech to a halt. Just as we have alternative power sources for our bodies we need to develop alternative power sources for our economies.

This Week in Work

Consultant Fernando Flores often charges more than $1 million dollars to teach business executives how to say what they mean and mean what they say.

A famous ad executive said that the masses are not mindless and easily manipulated and that if they were he wouldn't have to work so hard; he'd just "call it in" from his mansion in Aruba. It's true that if his job was so easy he could "call it in" but he wouldn't be able to afford a mansion even in Albania, much less in Aruba. That's because if the job was that easy then anyone could be hired to do the work thus driving the wages down to the level of lesser paying positions. It's precisely because he possesses a unique set of skills that he is paid so much.

There are stories of welders moving from other parts of Canada to Alberta and earning as much as $30,000 a month working in the tar sands. This is due not to possessing a unique set of skills but ones that are in short supply.

Here in Ontario the provincial legislators have given themselves a raise to keep in step with their Federal counterparts. They still make less than they could in the private sector but many will make much more when they lose the next election and end up working as lobbyists.

Yes it's hard being a doctor in a universal health-care system. In his upcoming movie Sicko Michael Moore interviews a young English doctor who drives a new Audi and lives in a posh $1 million flat. The British system, the doc says, is fine for doctors--unless you want to live in a $3 million flat and own three or four cars.

This Week in Authenticity

1. The Luminato Festival just wrapped up here in Toronto. It seemed to come out of nowhere to be something quite huge. I read a criticism of the festival in a major newspaper. The journalist wrote that the festival really wasn't authentic; that it seemed more an example of how a corporation would design an arts festival. He was of the opinion that Luminato was something that did not originate from natural artistic expression and was therefore inauthentic.

2. I heard an executive of the new Toronto FC soccer team describe how they wanted to create an authentic soccer experience for the fans of the new team. They decided to do this by copying most every obvious cultural marker of European soccer teams. The name, the uniform, the logo, as well as the songs that are song by the fans would all be quite at home in the English Premier League.

3. I heard a VJ say that the most important thing for young music fans is authenticity. She said that they can easily see through someone who is putting them on and only respect authentic artists.

4. I heard an advertising executive say that the most effective advertising is one that has an authentic message.

There is a lot of talk about authenticity lately. What does it all mean?

Greens Cleaning Up

People have a natural trust of others that are similar and a natural distrust of those that are dissimilar. It's an unfortunate reality that the message is often clouded by the impression that is made by the messenger. The typical environmental activist, as seen on TV, is a young shaggy male with unkempt hair and very casual clothing. He may even have body piercings. To the typical middle class voter he may as well be from another planet.

The suburban straights (905'ers as we call them in Toronto) may judge such a spokesperson to be an extremist simply because of the way they look and dress. They may glance at this young bearded man advocating green policies and think that he's clearly some kind of a freak and his views aren't to be taken seriously. The environmentalists should learn from the mistakes of the PLO.

Israel and the PLO have had a public relations war as much as a real war between them for decades. The PLO would often supply a spokesperson who would be sporting a heavy beard, wearing a scarf or head dress and speaking in a heavy accent that was utterly alien to the average middle American TV viewer. Israel would have a clean cut man wearing a nicely tailored suit and speaking in perfect English. Regardless of the words spoken and the arguments made, the PLO would lose the public relations war. It's not until they started using that nice American-educated woman that they started to make some headway.

Similarly, the environmentalists need to understand that as forceful, convincing and obvious as they consider their positions to be on global warming, they weren't really taken seriously by the average American until a friendly middle class clean-cut man in a nice suit presented them in a powerpoint presentation. The election of Elizabeth May as the leader of the Green Party in Canada was a major step towards mainstream acceptance. They will very likely make some real progress in the next election but I hope that they remember to hand out razors with their candidate playbooks. Maybe they can also clean up at the polls.

Smashing Diamonds

There is a scene in Antonioni's Blowup (1966) in which the protagonist photographer walks down a dark alley and finds himself in the middle of a Yardbirds concert. This band featured Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck after Eric Clapton had left and before Led Zeppelin was formed. The audience is mostly subdued as they watch Beck get annoyed by a crackling amplifier. He whacks the amp a few times while continuing to play until his frustration gets the better of him and he begins to smash the guitar on the stage in a way that would later come to be associated with The Who.

Beck then throws the broken guitar neck into the crowd and it lands near the photographer. A scrum ensues as all the kids try to grab the offering. The photographer gets caught up in the melee and he manages to win the tug of war. He runs out of the concert clutching the broken guitar fragment and is chased by several young people who want to take it away from him. He successfully escapes onto a well-lit London boulevard and begins to walk away. He looks at the broken guitar neck in his hand and after all his effort to obtain it, he just tosses it onto the sidewalk. A young man immediately walks up to it, picks it up briefly and deciding it to be worthless, tosses back onto the sidewalk.

Within the world of rock and roll celebrity the guitar neck obtained an aura through its close proximity to the rock star. Everyone in that world sees a great worth in that piece of wood and metal and would fight to have it. Once the photographer has left that world and reentered his own on the sidewalk he realizes that it is just a piece of junk after all. He only wanted it because everyone around him wanted it. The young man who picks it up from the sidewalk would probably deem it to be of great value but without that connection to celebrity there is no aura to it and it comes to be seen simply as material and is discarded as such.

Celebrity is only one way of supplying aura to an otherwise worthless material and it explains why people will pay large sums of money for a piece of paper just because it was signed by someone considered famous. Economic value is determined by what someone is willing to pay for it. So one way to increase profit is to enhance the aura of your product in order to add value where there is otherwise little or no value at all. Consider the diamond industry. People have somehow been convinced to pay as much money as could buy a house for a string of shiny glassy rocks that adorn the wrist as a tennis bracelet. People seem to desire diamonds because everyone around them also does. But what if everyone stepped out onto that well-lit boulevard and realized that they're just rocks?

Lunch and the War on Open Source Terrorism

Each and every day in Mumbai India about 5,000 mostly illiterate men pick up and deliver about 200,000 lunches. They do so with such extreme precision that they make only 1 error in every 6,000,000 deliveries. What's also interesting about this organization is that there really is no documentation or management to speak of. Everyone is treated equally, gets paid more or less the same and doesn't answer to any lackey in middle-management. Compare this to an efficient Western corporation like FedEx. They've invested billions in developing information and logistics systems that could never dream of delivering the infinitesimally small error rates that the Dabbawala achieve every day.

Businesses like Fedex are said to be studying the Dabbawala to see if there is anything to be learned. I'm guessing they will be able to glean some useful bits but will find it difficult to apply these to their own business. This is because the two organizations are not really working towards the same ends. A western corporation works ultimately towards maximizing shareholder value and it tries to do this by maximizing profit and growth. The Dabbawala are not concerned with such goals. They are concerned with making a living to support their families. They are not trying to get rich through their work. The system is not designed to deliver quarterly numbers so that the markets will reward them with higher share prices. The system is not really designed at all. There is no command and control, it is just a platform for their work.

This is a serious challenge to capitalist theory which holds dearly the notion that the most efficient systems are those that are driven by personal greed. Open source software is another example that challenges this long-held notion. A collaborative effort to create a software program often results in a better more efficient product than those created by massively funded, profit-driven enterprises even though the people working together in the open source project are often not driven by personal profit motives. These people are brought together by a common desire to create a great piece of software and some of the others join in just to stick it to The Man, which in the realm of software for some time now has been Microsoft.

The American Military is another example of a highly structured organization that invests billions in maintaining a top-down hierarchical command and control system. They have been trained like the captains of industry to deal in measurable deliverables. The generals design the comprehensive plans that are carried out by the foot-soldiers and the practice of ranking participants makes it absolutely clear where one stands in the hierarchy and who one takes their orders from.

What happens when they are faced with an enemy like Al Qaeda? This terrorist organization is not really an organization at all. They don't have a command and control hierarchy, no ultimate commander is giving orders to be carried out and what semblance of organization and hierarchy that they appear to have has been bestowed upon them by western media and politicians that completely misinterprets them. By framing them in the same way as are western organizations the mighty American military lost the war on terror before it even began. These people are open source fanatics. They seem to be working in concert because they may share a common goal of creating a fundamentalist world or perhaps some of them just want to stick it to The Man, which geopolitically for some time now has been the US.

The cost of citizen global open communication drops ever closer to zero and as it does newer more efficient systems of delivering products to each other become more viable and if the captains of industry remain out to lunch on this, they will soon become lunch.

Carless and Carefree

3 years ago I asked myself if I could live without a car and decided that I wasn't ready to give it up. I did want to work towards breaking the habit so I decided to downsize my car. I looked into the Prius hybrid but the battery technology was still unproven, not to mention that it was a butt-ugly car. The Smart Car seemed pretty stupid when it came to storage space - it would be like having a motorcycle with a side-car. I ended up choosing the car that had the best combination of performance and prettiness that still qualified as an ultra-low emission vehicle. So this might seemed somewhat spoiled but I chose the BMW320i.

The lease runs out in 2 weeks and I find myself asking again if I can live without a car. I've been taking transit and walking a lot lately and really enjoying it, and I got my bike tuned-up and ready for summer. My lifestyle today is decidedly more relaxed and I just might be able to break the habit this time around. I'm going to experiment this summer living without a car in my life for the first time since I was 15 (I saved up and bought my first car before I even got my license). Sometime before it starts to snow again I will compare the ultra-small, ultra-efficient Toyota Yaris to the larger but even more efficient Toyota Camry Hybrid but hopefully by then I will learn to be carless and carefree.

Green Campaigns on the Horizon

It seems to me that most political parties are conservative by nature. Not because of their policies but by the way they run their own campiagns. The most common strategy seems to be to get and keep votes by preaching to the choir. Their's is a path of least resistance treaded mainly by avoiding offense. The federal issue of the environment is a case in point.

The Conservative Party cannot bring itself to offend the big corporate polluters lest it loses the support of their moneyed base. The NDP talks a good game but always backs away because it's afraid of offending the big industry unions like the Autoworkers even though these constituents create heavy rusting products that spew massive amounts of hazardous emissions. Meanwhile in the middle, the Liberal Party is content to appeal to everyone all at once and couldn't achieve anything of significance with regard to the environment even though they were given consecutive majority governments with which to work.

The Green Party seems to be the only party that takes this issue seriously enough beyond just using it as a vote-begging plank in their platform. They however have very little experience governing and some of their candidates may be too green (in a bad way) to step up and run an administration. I'm encouraged by Stephane Dion's posture on the environment and also his cooperation with Elizabeth May in not running opposing candidates in their respective ridings. The best case scenario could be a close cooperation between these two parties.

The New Democrats would have been the natural partner for the Green Party but they've let a great opportunity slip from their grasp. They are in danger of becoming irrelevant and altogether collapsing because they're still supported by an outdated ideological framework built on a rusty base.

Prolly Probably

I've noticed on more than a few occasions that some young people have begun to substitute the word prolly for probably. There are of course many examples of words that have been shortened to save on the number of characters required to send a text message but this one really bugs me. It only saves 2 characters so you gain very little but you lose a lot.

The word probably rests on mathematical and statistical underpinnings. It signifies that something has a better than 50% chance of being the case. So by using it and knowing the root of the word one displays an understanding of certain concepts of not only mathematics but also of logic and epistemology. By using probably one doesn't commit to a certainty, one claims that given the facts at hand the statement is not certain but only likely. By using prolly it only implies a vague likeliness not based on any rigorous consideration. It could be based on such nebulous folk concepts as intuition (see Malcolm Gladwell).

I'm convinced that some kids think that prolly is the proper spelling of the word and are already alienated from it's basis in inductive reasoning. I know that words alter in spelling and occasionally lose their original meaning. Terrific originally meant terrifying but hardly anyone today associates the word terror with terrific. Likewise, prolly is probably on it's way to becoming one of those words which will one day in the future be brought out by a stickler like me and shown to have had a much richer past than it would have been assumed.

Doc Soup

I just spent a couple of weeks working at the HotDocs Film Festival. I got to meet and hang out with some directors and producers, moderated presentations at high schools and even cut tickets, counted ballots and ushered at theatre screenings. It was very hectic and I've taken a couple of days to unwind. During the 10 days of screenings I watched about 20 documentaries. Some that I remember:

Girls Rock - A week spent in Oregon at a rock camp for girls 8-18. It goes beyond the music and touches on issues of gender and empowerment. A charming cast of quirky girls win you over as they learn to rock.

Super Amigos - Directed by Arturo Perez Torres and probably my favourite film of the festival even before I realized that I knew the producer. Five guys in Mexico City dress in Lucha Libre costumes and fight for their respective social justice issues. It made me want to don a mask and suplex a cause of my own.

City Idol - This is the second film by Torres and Heather Haynes at this year's festival. Canadian Idol is for people who look at rock stars and say, "I wanna do that!" City Idol is the opposite. It's for people who look at politicians and say, "What the hell are they doing?". A candidate is chosen to run for office from a contestant pool of dedicated and committed citizens.

Manufacturing Dissent - I spent some time with Debbie Melnyk who made this film with Rick Caine. It exposes the liberties that Michael Moore takes with the truth in his documentaries. She affirms that she is a leftist who really admired Moore until she uncovered some of Moore's distasteful tactics.

Kike Like Me - Jamie Kastner walks around "civilized" European cities asking questions about Jews while coyly not answering whether or not he is himself Jewish. The merits of this film was hotly debated in the lobby by viewers from the Jewish community.

Lovable - Alan Zweig explores why it's so hard to find love in the middle years. He interviews several single women and commiserates with them.

King Corn - Two guys move to Iowa, rent an acre of land and farm corn for one season. They are left to mostly oversee an easy automated process and end up with corn that cannot even be eaten until it is processed in a factory and turned mostly into high fructose corn syrup.

Last Call at the Gladstone - An historic Toronto flophouse is transformed into a hipster artsy hangout displacing the long-time residents. This seemed to be the crowd favourite.

Please Stay on the Line

Thank you for continuing to exist.
Your presence is very important to us.
Please don't let go of the line.

08 - Let Go The Line

If a Tree Falls

When I was in grade four my oldest sister had a friend who I thought was very nice. She was nicer to me than my sister anyway. One day I had nowhere to go so I tagged along with my sister to her friend's house. I remember thinking that this high school girl was so cool. She had her home's basement all to herself, played the electric guitar and had lots of cool records. That day she taught me how to play Smoke on the Water, which is still the only guitar bit I know how to play. I flipped through her vinyl records and saw artists like Lou Reed, Black Sabbath, and Led Zeppelin.

I got to one album that I simply had to pull out because the name of the artist was so amusing to a fourth grader like myself: Bruce Cockburn. She noticed that I was studying the the record front to back and thought I had some other interest in it beyond the name. I had to stop myself from giggling much like I did when while reading a physics book I came across the name of Klaus Fuchs.

When we got up to leave on that summer day, she handed me the Bruce Cockburn album and insisted that I accept it as a gift. After some resistance I obliged, took the record and made my way back home, flattered by the attention, wondering what to do with this uncool music and anxious to have a laugh with my friend down the street about the illicit name on the record. I did try listening to it a couple of times but it just didn't catch the imagination of a restless 10 year old.

Years later in high school I heard this artist again who is of course a legend in Canadian music. He had released music that seemed quite a bit cooler to me at that time. This was an era in which I often wore surplus military khakis as a fashion staple, and I got that through a confluence of influence from Cockburn and The Clash. I became conscious of political issues mainly through music and my first thoughts on the environment were probably guided by the music of artists like Cockburn (with a shout-out to The Nature of Things scientist David Suzuki).

Some people have been sounding alarms for decades and most people hardly took notice of them. It finally took the efforts of a cheated presidential candidate to bring the mainstream on board. Suzuki once described our situation by saying:

I feel like we're all sitting in a car heading at a brick wall at a hundred miles an hour and everybody in the car is debating about where they want to sit. OK, there are a few people in the car who are saying, "For god's sake, slow down and turn the car." Unfortunately, they're locked in the trunk.

Happy Earth Day

Care to Distance

When I was in University Peter Mansbridge came for a visit with a handful of campus student leaders. He explained to us how they decided the order in which the news was delivered. If an event has the potential to effect you immediately then it goes first. If it is distant geographically or culturally then it will go down the line and may not even make the cut unless it's enormous like a tsunami or massive earthquake. It seems to me that there is an inverse relationship of care to distance (geographically or culturally).

Then there is the editorial decision of whether or not to interrupt local programming to report a news item. Again, if the event is immediately endangering or has the potential to affect people close to us or is sufficiently large then we may be interrupted to be told about it. The mass murder in Virginia today was serious enough to interrupt the programming of the news channels but not of the standard TV channels - unless of course you happened to be in Virginia where it likely intruded on most local programming.

It was a horrific setting no doubt and the ramifications of the day's events will be felt by the families and friends of the victims for the rest of their lives. Far away on the other side of the world about a hundred people are killed in and around Baghdad every single day but over here it might only be mentioned in the middle pages of the newspaper with a paragraph indicating that "Baghdad Market Bomb Kills 130" Massive Tsunamis and earthquakes like the ones that originated in the Pacific and in Pakistan last year are reported but they are done so almost pruriently because of their freakish or record breaking natures. The fact that millions were left homeless to suffer the subsequent Pakistan winters was almost completely ignored by the western media. Perhaps they are too geographically or culturally distant from us.

Imagine the heartbreak and stress that the people in Virginia are feeling today or the people of Montreal after the shootings at l'Ecole polytechnique. Now imagine experiencing events like these everyday for several years running without interruption. This is the plight of the survivors who remain in war zones in which they or their families could become victims at any moment. We just don't seem to care as much about people in distant lands and cultures. We can't. We're just not programmed for that. We have a natural inclination to care first about our tribe or village. It might be overwhelming to extend that care to the whole world.

These days we have near instant access to information so we learn of these human disasters whether or not an editor chooses to inform us. At the same time the new media also makes it easier for us to find commonality with people of far away and distant cultures. Our tribes or villages are no longer just the people that are geographically near us. Our tribe now includes people of distant lands, religions and cultures and their value is more appreciated. As we come to live in an increasingly global village the suffering of our fellow villagers may become unbearable to us whether they live down the street or in Baghdad or in Darfur.

Shit Floats

It was 95 years ago today that the Titanic sank near the coast of Eastern Canada and 10 years ago this year that one of the most irritating movies of all time was floated into theatres.

Jack, you moron, let go of the girl's hand and find some flotsam to climb onto and Rose, you senile selfish twit, don't throw that priceless gem into the ocean. Sell it and use the money to save the lives of thousands of children.

Puzzling Behaviour

While spending time with some recent first-time parents I've noticed that on several occasions the parent would praise their child by saying something like "wow, you're so smart" and then immediately stop themselves in mid stride and change the praise to something like "wow, you did a good job". They were making sure to praise the effort and not the child.

My friend Michael linked me over to this interesting article about the talent myth by Malcolm Gladwell. It's mainly about business but it got me thinking about my childhood. Research has found that children who are praised for their intelligence instead of their efforts soon become reluctant to tackle difficult tasks and begin slacking off. This observation hit home for me.

I was an immigrant kid who was thrown into grade one after the school year had already begun. I so quickly learned to read and write this completely alien language that I was paraded around like a trophy. They also determined that I might be a math prodigy so in grade two I was sent off to the grade four class during math lessons. The head-swelling praise began there.

By the time I was in middle school and in the "gifted" program I was so full of myself that I was well on my way to becoming a dysfunctional underachiever. Most schoolwork came easy to me but if some task required real work I would dismiss it or completely ignore it. I started spending more time in the Principle's office or at home than I did in the classroom. I always passed with decent grades but only with the least amount of effort that I could expend. If people saw me working hard at anything then they might start to doubt my talents.

Later when the Rubiks Cube became a huge fad in the eighties I got my hands on one and played around with it for a few minutes. I was surprised to find that I couldn't immediately solve it and so rather than work at it I avoided it completely. I guess I was afraid that if I tried and failed then it would completely shatter my self-image, so I never really tried. I pretended not to care about that silly cube until the fad finally faded away. To this day I have never really tried to solve the cube. It's been my dirty little secret and it's bothered me ever since. I'm glad to finally get it off my chest (sorry, the skeletons in my closet are lame like that). I now realize that effort and determination are as crucial or more crucial than innate talents. Maybe those parents are onto something. I think I'll find a cube and solve it.

Somethin Bout Yo Bidness

I don't watch a lot of TV but I do appreciate a quality show when I see it. Is it worth sorting through all of the mind-numbing, soul-crushing content on TV to find these little gems? No, it certainly is not. So I've devised a new strategy: Wait until the TV season ends, see where all the buzz is, then watch the whole season on DVD (or torrent download).

I've just finished watching 4 seasons of The Wire within a span of a week. This goes some way in explaining the dearth of blog postings lately. HBO is probably the best outlet for quality TV programming and The Wire had me hooked. It follows the inner city life of Baltimore, intertwining the efforts of drug dealers, the police who pursue them and the politicians who enable them and are enriched by them.

The series is generally praised for it's realistic storytelling and deep character development but I want to point out something else I noticed while watching The Wire. The character Stringer Bell is a crime boss and second in command to Avon Barksdale. Stringer is a highly intelligent man who spends his spare time pursuing a college business education. He attends macroeconomics classes and applies his higher learning to the operation of their criminal enterprise. Avon is very much like the CEO of their organization while Stringer is the Chief Operating Officer. When Avon is locked up Stringer starts applying business processes more and more to their operations. Some very humorous exchanges take place in a gathering which is essentially structured like a corporate board meeting, complete with a chairman that recognizes gang members before they are allowed to speak.

It is made abundantly clear that efficient business practices can be grafted effectively onto the operation of a criminal organization. Moving product is moving product, whether they are widgets or packets of heroin or cocaine. The landscape is the same and includes activities like the sourcing of inventory, making distribution agreements, dealing with the competition, and motivating and reprimanding employees. We see the mentoring of junior runners by the more senior corner boys, how supply problems are solved through partnership agreements, and how to maximize profit by expanding marketing territories. The entrepreneurial and managerial spirit pervades crime dramas like The Wire as well as that other HBO hit series The Sopranos to such an extent that we might consider it to be America's essential social principle.

Stringer does so well in applying business practices to his criminal organization that he begins to make "legitimate" investments by buying up large stretches of real estate and going into property development. Poor Stringer gets blocked and ripped off by city hall permit overlords, general contractors and a slick State Senator. He discovers that these guys might be better criminals than he is a businessman. So the lesson is that not only are business processes effectively applied to criminal activities but that business activities and criminal activities are really one and the same.

The players on the corners always refer to the game in which they're engaged. An acquiring CEO might ask the head of a takeover target not to take it personally since "it's just business". Likewise when Omar robs the drug dealers of their stash he often says "it just part of the game n!&&@h". A disadvantaged environment doesn't crush the American spirit. On the contrary, the corner kids are inspired by the same ambition that drives a private school kid to become a CEO or a Senator. The criminals are just working with the hand that was dealt to them. In a strange way we come to respect them no less and perhaps more than the politicians on the show since they seem be braver and have a stronger code of ethics. Whether it's corporate business or slinging crack on the corner, the game is the same, so we hate the game but not the playah.

Being and Playing

Everyone's been guilty of exaggerating, misrepresenting or outright lying when it comes to description. I have known very few people who in their humility choose to underplay their assets. Most tend to overplay certain attributes, emphasize others, and completely fail to mention still others. If you've ever looked through Toronto real estate listings you might be left with the impression that everything west of Dufferin St. is "within steps of High Park". That is of course a true statement for any property. The question is how many steps: one hundred or one million?

It's hard to maintain such a fiction since the person will eventually walk through the house and realize the number of sole-wearing steps required to walk to High Park. The hope is that in seeing the house they will find other aspects to fall in love with and decide to buy anyway. Online dating services are similarly structured. You might lie a little about your height, weight or age just to get in the door hoping that they'll be unable to resist your ample other charms once they meet you in "real life". But is a digital layer even required for this approach? Consider how people behave when meeting someone in a bar. What kind of creativity have you seen on display?

But what if your created persona is never meant to transfer back to the real world? Services like Second Life allow people to create avatars completely from scratch. You can give them appearances, skills, possessions that may or may not have anything to do with your own first life attributes. No one needs ever to discover these shortcomings nor find them to be relevant. Digital technology makes it much easier to maintain such a fictional persona but is not necessarily required. You can create your own fictional persona in meat-space without ever having to turn on a computer. You can pretend you're an experimental electronic musician from Europe, complete with an unidentifiable mid-continent accent (as I once did at a university party) or you can go much deeper and create a character named Borat and then document his exploits on film, as Sacha Baron Cohen did.

Borat is the world famous Kazakhi journalist created by Cohen. It is an avatar that Cohen wears and plays within our first life world, albeit a stylized version of our world (cinematic space). It is interesting that a first life person named Mahir Cagri has mused about suing Cohen for ripping off his persona which was briefly famous in 1999. People familiar with both characters have noted the striking similarities. The truly interesting thing about it is that Cagri's persona is not a deliberate conscious creation like Cohen's is. The character that came to be know as that "I Kiss You guy" is not a put-on; it is Cagri himself. It will be difficult to litigate someone for ripping off such a persona because it will be said that this persona was not a creation at all and therefore not protected by creative copyrights.

Cagri is in the odd position that his case would be stronger if he wasn't being himself but merely playing himself. There is something amiss here. I can argue that we are the creators and puppet-masters of several avatars or personae that we control all the time. It may be the bat-winged hunchback vampire that you play in Second Life, or the hardworking cubicle-dweller that you play at work or the good citizen that you play on the neighbourhood committee, but these can all be seen to be avatars created by you to control within different environments. We have always had these powers and there is a fine line, if any, between being and playing.