Napping in the heat with my dog Sam.
Ugh.
It’s super hot and super gross. Thermometer on the window says it’s 34 degrees Celsius. I believe it. A haze from forest fires on the Mainland hangs over the Island, making for a diffused light and blood-red sunsets. Not 100 feet away, I can see the haze settling over the forest nearby.
It’s exhausting. All I have the energy to do is be a useless layabout. Good thing the dog agrees with me it’s a good way to spend the afternoon.
There’s a little red spider living in my keyboard.
Hang on a sec, I’ll see if I can get him. tydjm789dtghm xdfgnawer
Nope. Missed. He’s too fast. And there are too many places for him to hide. And lots of parasites to feed on. That’s the problem with Mac keyboards – they’re white, which looks great when they’re new, but makes it easy to see all the inevitable grime, crumbs, pencil lead, paper clips, hair, coffee stains, fried chicken (I kid you not) and that “gunk” of mysterious origin.
There he is – dfhbdnd3756
Nope. Missed again.
This guy’s hard to kill. He pops up, taunts me, declares a jihad on my corpulent, decadent Western fingers and disappears.
I think I’ll call him Osama bin Spider. There he is again, on the number pad! 32. -+. 0.2659999999999
Missed again. This spider is good. But tragedy – there was collateral damage this time. The number 9 was killed in the decisive air strike by my fingers. I will go on television and issue a carefully-worded apology to the rest of the residents of the number pad province. My fingers will be more compassionate and endeavour to win the hearts and minds of the rest of the keyboard keys, in the hopes that they will surrender Osama bin Spider to justice.
Meanwhile, we will rebuild. I have plucked another number 9 from a keyboard in the backroom technology graveyard. It’s as good as new, at least until the next airstrike.
Maybe it’s time to try another tactic. I just noticed something disturbing. All my pounding on the keyboard has disturbed Osama bin Spider’s eggs, which now appear to be hatching. Tiny little red spiders are crawling around – gross! I think I’ll call them the Spiderban. Or the Talib-nids. I can’t just get rid of them – the more I type, the more come out. The harder I type, the faster they move. This is terrible!
Time for a massive counter-insurgency offensive. Here it comes, you disgusting Talib-nids!
wsz’’;kjuy vgfrvbgthyki,l op.; .,mnbv 567p; 15688610,hjgfxm c5g41n6gf486dn4fgn
That kind of worked, but now they’re all holed up under the F-keys. I’m afraid to hit those because I might launch all sorts of applications at once and crash my computer. Maybe I’ll just leave them alone for now. But I can’t back off, because then they’ll take over my entire keyboard and cover all the vowels and consonants in a web of injustice.
I think I know how American General Stanley McChrystal feels. Now, how did he get out of running the war in Afghanistan? Oh yeah. Bad-mouth the president in a magazine no one takes too seriously, apologize and resign. It’s foolproof.
Here goes. APPLE SUCKS!
Can I get assigned to a different keyboard now?
Hmmm, didn’t work. Maybe I’ll just have to get up off my butt and go get the canned air to gently blow the junk out. No destruction required.
And maybe it’ll get that fried chicken out from under the space bar, too.
Originally published in the Campbell River Mirror, June 25, 2010
I think I convinced Quatchi to move to Campbell River.
Yup, after the Olympics are over, I’m pretty sure the cuddly, hockey-loving sasquatch mascot of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games is going to come check out our fine city. Well, the woods, anyway. Sasquatches are really shy creatures, unless there’s a hockey game going on. But he might be interested in a patio home near the forest.
We met the big lug when we took our family to Vancouver this past weekend to enjoy some of the sights and free activities downtown. There was plenty of free fun, enough to keep us busy all day, from concerts to free admission to the art gallery, outdoor art displays and even some collectible freebies.
But although I would have loved a chance to wander through the art gallery for free, some things aren’t possible when you’re backpacking a two-year-old and also trying to keep a four-year-old girl from dashing into the crowd.
As far as she was concerned, the whole reason we were there was to watch the “Mascots on Ice” show on the ice sheet underneath Robson Street.
“Can I see Quatchi now?” she asked about six million times.
I wasn’t going to let her be disappointed. I handed off my cranky two-year-old son to my wife, hauled the girl up on to my shoulders and barreled through the crowd, staking out our spot at centre ice 15 minutes before the show began.
I have to hand it to the Olympic organizers – they’re very considerate of kids. Rather than making the thousands of little ones hunkered around the ice sheet wait for the mascots, Quatchi, Miga and Sumi showed up early, high-fiving and hugging kids while the rest of the skaters got their costumes on. And they stayed for a few minutes after the show, too.
While my daughter screamed in joy and tried to rip out handfuls of Quatchi’s fur every time he skated by, I adjusted my “City of Campbell River” pin and did my best to act as an ambassador for our community.
And I think it worked. Quatchi kept skating past us to check out my pin. I think he might be coming up next month to check out our fair city. If you hear a rustling in the woods, that’s probably him. Pray it’s him. If it’s the “Fuwa” things – the mascots from the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics – be afraid. Be very afraid. They only smile before they kill.
Quatchi mentioned that other mascots from previous Olympics (barring the Fuwa) are interested in relocating, including Hidy and Howdy, the two polar bears from the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, and my favourite, Fatso the Fat-Arsed Wombat, who was the unofficial but popular favourite mascot of the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia.
I hope our tourism promotion offices can get it together to attract them here, but I’m not confident. The campbellriver.travel website… well… it sucks. Sorry. Tiny little boring pictures and lots of text. Sasquatches and wombats aren’t going to read all that. It needs big, beautiful pictures of the Campbell River region, and less text. Maybe a video testimonial or two. Maybe they’re there, I don’t know, I didn’t bother looking past the front page, it was too dull.
And RiverCorp the city’s economic development agency, well, who knows what they’re actually doing. They’re apparently helping attract new businesses to town, but we can’t tell because they never call, they never write, and when I try and talk to them about a feel-good story all I get is “no comment.”
I sure hope Quatchi doesn’t want to start up a business here to ease his way into retirement, I don’t think he’s going to get a lot of help from them.
As for the rest of them, I know there’s a long, boring history in this community of little tourism and business fiefdoms battling each other to see who can get the biggest pile of crumbs, but come on. It’s only going to work if we put the grievances of the 1980s and 1990s behind us and look at the future.
We’re only 10 years behind. Time to catch up. The mascot market is waiting.
So on Sunday the pastor ended his sermon with a bit of a monologue about the situation in Haiti, and made reference to the idiot Pat Robertson’s comments that the Haitians got what they deserved for supposedly making a pact with the devil. The pastor soft-peddled Robertson’s comments and suggested they were taken out of context by “the media.”
Then he really pissed me off. He said that many people are looking at the horror in Haiti and asking how a good and loving god could allow something like that to happen. He said we should turn it around on ourselves.
“How can a loving god not allow devastation on us?” he said, suggesting that North America is just as sinful as anywhere else in the world, and just as deserving of destruction.
“How can god not allow his judgment and wrath to be poured out upon us?” he said.
We live at a point of grace, he said, suggesting that as long as we tremble in fear at the foot of the cross, kept safe by hiding behind Jesus, God won’t squash us like the worthless bugs we really are.
Some kind of love. That’s an abusive relationship. God only hits us and hurts us and kills us because he loves us. That’s what abused spouses tell themselves.
This is not a god of love. Threatening to destroy us unless we kiss his ass is not love.
Then the worship team came and led the congregation in singing love songs to Jesus. I couldn’t stand it and walked out.
“How can one little insulated wire bring so much happiness?”
– Homer Simpson
There’s a war waging over free TV, which is apparently a fundamental human right.
That’s the argument advanced by cable companies, anyway, who launched a campaign earlier this year against the “TV tax.”
“You can dress this up any way you like, but the so called fee-for-carriage is a tax on TV viewers with absolutely no benefit,” says Jim Shaw, CEO and vice-chair of Shaw Communications, in a statement on the company’s website.
Them’s fightin’ words, and it sounds like I should be outraged about it, whatever it is.
“It is unfortunate the cable and satellite providers have resorted to scare tactics and misleading information,” fires back Paul Sparkes, executive vice-president of corporate affairs for CTVglobemedia on the “Local TV Matters” website.
Huh? What the h-e-double-hockey-sticks is this all about? Turns out TV stations are asking the CRTC (deep breath – the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission) to allow them to charge cable and satellite TV companies fees for reselling their channels.
The CRTC is the federal government organization which regulates all communication services in Canada. And unless people speak up, they’re going to allow those nasty greedy broadcasters to charge us more money on our monthly bills – so say the cable companies.
Cable and satellite providers have been trying for months to get people to leave comments with the CRTC opposing the “TV tax.” On Nov. 2, the CRTC will stop taking comments and will make a decision on whether or not to allow the fees.
CTV and other broadcasters across the country, including Vancouver Island’s A Channel and CHEK, have launched a counter-campaign, asking people to support their request for the fees, which isn’t new – broadcasters have been asking for them since the 1970s when cable TV started replacing over-the-air broadcasting as the norm.
These days, they really need the fee. Broadcasters can’t rely on advertising anymore. The stampede to high-definition, digital TV has required them to spend millions on new equipment, and they can’t get that investment back because the recession has been brutal for any media company which relies on advertising as its primary source of income. Recessions kill spending, which kills advertising, which kills pretty much every form of media you consume on a daily basis.
But what do you care, as long as you’re still getting it for free, right?
True, you pay a monthly fee for TV. But TV stations in your “basic package” don’t see any of it. Cable and satellite providers resell the stations and give them nothing in return.
That’s why they’re so desperate for the CRTC to let them charge fees for carriage to cable and satellite providers. If they don’t get it, stations may close, or at the very least, say goodbye to home-grown programming.
In contrast, while TV stations struggle to stay alive, during the worst part of the recession this spring National Bank Financial analyst Greg MacDonald called Canadian cable companies a “safe haven” for investors based on stable profit margins. And just this month, Shaw Communications reported that “despite the worst economic recession in seventy years, revenue and operating income for the year climbed 9 per cent in fiscal 2009. The company earned operating income of a whopping $1.54 billion on record revenues of $3.39 billion.”
Wow. What does that tell you? Maybe cable companies can afford to eat the new fee, which by the way is charged to them, not the customer. Cable companies are trying to paint the fee as a “tax” on customers, which is only true if they decide to pass it on to you.
They could choose to pay the fee out of their healthy profit margins. Pause for uproarious laughter.
Meanwhile, the war of words between cable companies and broadcasters is getting ugly as the Nov. 2 deadline looms. Cable companies accuse broadcasters of incompetence. Broadcasters accuse companies of greed. Customers shift uncomfortably in their La-Z-Boys as they struggle to decide whether or not to care.
Viewers could always turn off their TVs and read books instead, but we know that’s not going to happen. So I’ll make it easy. If you want to back the cable companies, go to the CRTC’s website and file a comment opposing the fee for carriage. If you want to back broadcasters, follow the same procedure, but file a comment in favour.
It’s easy, and you can at least say you had a chance for input.
And you can do it during the commercial break.
E-books trend is paradise lost for book nerds
The experience of finding an unexpected treasure in a used book store always gives me a buzz.
Guess I’m a book nerd.
This summer, at a dusty old shop in New Westminster, my attention was captured by an ugly, leather-bound monstrosity on the bottom shelf in the poetry section. Burned into the thick leather cover by an amateur hand was a picture of a log cabin in a forest by a river, with the word “Milton” underneath.
I sat down in the aisle, my back resting against a stack of dog-eared Beatles records, and opened the stiff leather cover. Inside was a homemade leather bookmark attached to the cover, as stiff as a steel-toed boot. I flipped it out of the way to discover a rare treasure – a 125-year-old printing of John Milton’s “Paradise Lost.”
The pages were gilt, like an expensive Bible, and the engraved illustrations exquisite. The words appeared to gently rise off the page, a side-effect of the printing techniques and quality paper used in making books a century ago.
But that wasn’t the best part. As I flipped through the pages, I came across an unusual bookmark – a carefully-clipped piece of newspaper, an 1897 birth announcement for Nellie McClung’s first-born son. Nellie McClung, who Canadian women can thank for fighting to get them the right to vote in 1916. It made me wonder whose book this once was.
I looked at the home-made cover again. Obviously someone loved this book enough to recover it once the original cover tore off. I imagined McClung, or her son, sitting by the woodstove on a freezing cold Manitoba night, reading by flickering firelight one of the greatest works of English literature.
I caught a whiff as I closed the cover again and brought it to my face to take a sniff. My nostrils filled with the aromatic smell of pipe tobacco. I again imagined one of the McClungs sitting on their porch at dusk, reading the book and smoking a pipe.
Guess I’m a romantic book nerd.
Fighting to keep a neutral, disinterested expression on my face, I dropped $8 in toonies into the hand of the bored-looking store owner and carried my treasure out of the store, striding nonchalantly around the corner before I felt it safe to crack a huge grin. I have no idea if the book’s actually worth anything and I don’t really care. To me, it’s priceless.
That’s why I think e-books are stupid. Once we’re all reading disposable Word documents on yet more Internet-enabled glowing rectangles, who will go into used bookstores looking for priceless treasures?
I also wonder what will happen to our libraries. It seems people would rather spend $300 to $400 for an awkward Star Trek display pad device that lets them read Dan Brown books electronically, looking like quasi-futuristic idiots in the airport lounge, than go to the library and borrow a book for free.
I suppose there must be some good reason to drop that kind of cash on a device to read books you can get for 50 cents at the thrift store, but I don’t know what it is. I’ve tried e-books. I’ve read lots of books on my Palm Pilot, mostly during city council meetings. It’s not fun, and not just because I’m at a council meeting.
The only good thing about e-books is the massive amount of classic books available for free through Project Gutenberg. For some of them, it’s worth staring at a glowing rectangle. Other than that, I can only think of two reasons why paper books will someday be replaced with e-books: one, humans are technology magpies who will adopt anything that looks futuristic and shiny, and two, there’s a lot of money to be made from them. Ergo, the powers that be will do whatever it takes to make them the de facto standard.
And there is a lot of money to be made. E-books sell online in Sony’s e-book store from 50 cents on a special deal to $10 for a new bestseller, to up to $20 for other “specialty” stuff. What a ripoff, it’s all the same to the publisher. Once the book is electronic, it costs them pennies to host a server somewhere for you to download it, regardless of whether it’s on “special” or not. A quick look through the store shows it’s actually cheaper to go buy a paper version you can read without charging the battery.
Out of curiousity, I found an electronic version of Paradise Lost in the store for $2, but I wouldn’t buy it. It’s just 3.5 megabytes of ones and zeros, and I’d never remember or absorb any of it by staring at a screen.
But I will remember and cherish the passages I read by firelight from my ugly, leather-bound monstrosity.
A deeper look: why e-books are stupid
As soon as you enter the electronic world, you quickly discover that not everything works the way you think it should.
I downloaded a pile of interesting (and free) books from Project Gutenberg, classics of religion, philosophy, archaeology and science. But some of the books displayed with errors on my Palm Pilot, and I had to mess around with changing settings, installing better reader software and formatting the downloaded files to work properly. Some of them were worth the hassle, others were not.
With a boring old paper book, you just open it up and start reading. It works on any platform, from tables to pillows to floors to your lap.
Holding an electronic device is just not as comfortable as a paperback, although engineers have tried valiantly to overcome this. You can read a paper book from any angle, and your eyes miraculously adjust in almost all lighting conditions to make reading comfortable. With an electronic device, you are stuck looking at a small, glowing rectangle which – at least in the case of my Palm – emits a slowly-maddening buzzing sound and is hard to see from even a slight angle.
Paper is the standard, whether e-book reader makers like it or not. I find it amusing that Sony’s e-reader offers “astonishing” paper-like display.
Why not just read a paper book, instead of an electronic device painstakingly designed to look like paper? What’s the appeal?
I guess you could argue that an e-reader lets you carry a whole library with you. But why? You can only read one book at a time anyway. When you’re finished the book, put it back on the shelf and take another one. Easy.
And be aware, e-books are not cheaper. A quick look through the e-book store run by Sony shows that while some books are available for 50 cents, and bestsellers are often on for about $10, the average price is the same or more than what you would pay for a paper book. This is absurd when you think about it. When books are first released, hardcovers are always more expensive, but those are the best quality. Wait six months or so for the $10 paperback if you don’t want to pay $30 for a hardcover. The price point for an average new e-book seems to be $13-14. Pretty pricey for something that only exists as ones and zeros.
I shouldn’t pick on Sony. There are other e-book sellers out there, but even if I wanted to buy an Amazon Kindle and download and read e-books, I can’t do it in Canada. Brilliant! Hooray for international copyright and digital rights management!
But I guess I must be one of a small number of people who think that paper book technology is just fine, thank you, and needs no electronic upgrade with all the headaches that brings. Even Disney has launched an e-book store which, for an annual fee, lets kids read “interactive” books featuring all their favourite Disney characters. Now, you don’t even need to read with your kids anymore, or encourage them to use their imaginations while reading a story. Disney will do it for you.
Do your kids a favour. Read with them. Read real books from your local library. Don’t just hand them another glowing rectangle to keep them amused while you watch TV.
“Three-quarters of Americans OK with General Motors, Chrysler falling into bankruptcy,” says the Dallas News headline.
Yeah, that’s about right. People are waking up to realize they’ve been sold a load by the “Big 3″ for the past 50 years. They’ve been trying to convince people they need a new car every two to three years, and millions believed it. Now we realize it’s a nice-sounding lie. Nobody NEEDS a car every two years. Few people actually NEED a car and even fewer need more than one. But they’re just so convenient!
The truth is we have more cars than we know what to do with. Now that people are realistically living within their means — or trying to — new cars are just taking up space. Toyota is storing unsold cars in the Port of Long Beach and has rented a cargo ship to store unsold cars off the coast of Sweden.
But wait, there’s more… watch this video. It’s breathtaking.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InEP23Oz44U]
It appears the media is hard at work, censoring itself the second the slightest whiff of legal action is in the air.
This article, which originally ran with the headline “Rich white folks slap natives down” before it was mysteriously changed this afternoon, was written by Tom Fletcher, provincial columnist and legislative reporter for Black Press.
The article is still online in some places with the original headline, but some papers in the Black Press chain have removed the article entirely from their websites.
In Kitimat, the article prompted an angry response from Mike Bruce, director of communications with the Canadian Office and Professional Employees Union Local 378. However, his response was taken offline earlier today.
It is still available through Google’s cache.
What’s going on? Did someone cry “libel” prompting the immediate chilling effect in several Black Press newspapers? I don’t see what the problem is here. Columnist states opinion; union replies. Why were the stories modified and the union’s letter removed? I certainly hope this is not a sign of things to come, a media that is too eager to censor itself is of little use to its readers.
Bird flu strikes again in the Fraser Valley.
The government will overreact, kill everything that moves, people will shy away from buying domestic poultry and soon enough we will be buying imported chicken and turkey from overseas. Hooray!
Just watch — it will happen with pork, too. Once all that cheap pork in the grocery store is gone, and all the Canadian farmers are bankrupt, where will we get our meat?
Cheap protein from countries with dodgy regulations will be in our grocery stores soon enough.
The New York Times has an excellent article on Mark Driscoll, pastor of the Mars Hill Church in Seattle, his comception of a “macho” Jesus and the “New Calvinism” which drives much of his theology.
I have to admit I find a lot of what Driscoll has to say is attractive. I am sick of hearing about the wimpy sky fairy Jesus. However, he takes a lot of inspiration from classic Calvinism.
I am struggling enough with faith, with trusting the Bible and stripping away years of bad theology from my mind to search for what is true and right. I have huge problems with Calvinism, writing everything off as pre-ordained. A great exploration of this theology taken to its ridiculous conclusion is “The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner” by James Hogg who shows how a deeply-disturbed young religious fanatic uses the theology to justify a series of more and more depraved actions.
It’s satire, but its view of the theology is sound. This is not the answer. John Calvin burned heretics at the stake. What happened to Jesus’ “turn the other cheek?” That doesn’t mean “be a wuss” but Jesus definitely didn’t advocate going out and forcing the Kingdom of God to come by force.
Faith is not black and white. Jesus’ message, however, was simple. The hard part is figuring out what it actually means for each one of us.
