With Canada's latest electoral campaign close to sewing up its first week, talk of coalition is always in the air. So I just thought I'd leave this photo here, taken in January 2010 during the protest against Prime Minister Stephen Harper's second proroguing of Parliament since the last election. Because we all know how democratic it is to lock the doors of the legislature.
You do remember that Harper has up and closed Parliament when he wasn't going to get his way, right?
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It's been more than two weeks since the one-two punch of earthquake and tsunami sent the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant down for the count, and still the news is not good. For a few days there, after the power was reconnected to the pumps, I thought things were taking a turn for the better - but in some respects this is looking more and more like some kind of trainwreck in slow motion. I believe the most recent updates I encountered were that engineers are running out of, or have already run out of, places to store the now-radioactive seawater used as emergency reactor coolant, and that plutonium is leaching into the soil around the plant.
This is one of the biggest problems with nuclear energy - its psychological aspect. Major incidents are rare - this is only the second such in my lifetime, and the only one I can actually remember, despite the hundreds of nuclear reactors that have been in operation around the world during the course of the last twenty-eight years. Still, for every day that problems persist at Fukushima Daiichi, those persistent anti-nuclear memes get that much stronger.
But Japan initially developed a substantial nuclear power base for a very good reason: it doesn't have many other options. There are few rivers in those mountainous islands that can easily be dammed for hydroelectric power; not nearly enough to supply the electricity demands of 127 million people. Too, Japanese oil and coal reserves are limited if they exist at all, and to base the country's generation on those sources would leave it utterly dependent on imports. Wind and solar still have yet to become viable options for replacing base-load generating capability; back in the mid-20th century, they didn't represent even the shadow of an option.
So what are the Japan's options now, if it finds it really wants to step away from nuclear? Maybe they might build more natural gas plants... or maybe they'll go beyond, live up to the idea that they're decades ahead of the rest of the world. Maybe the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi will provide the needed impulse for Japan to build an orbital infrastructure for generating space-based solar power.
Artist's impression of a solar power satellite in orbit over Central America, courtesy NASA.
This isn't as science fictional as you think. While people have been speculating about the possibilities of solar energy collected in orbit and beamed to Earth-based receivers for seventy years or more, the state of the art has advanced to the point where it's possible to start actually thinking about this. In fact, JAXA - the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, its answer to NASA - currently has plans to orbit a prototype solar power satellite in 2020 and a full-power version in 2030. Granted, plans are just that; a couple of years ago, after all, NASA planned to have boots back on the moon eight years from now.
Nevertheless, while a human return to the moon does have significant psychological resonance and brings home the possibility of new and potentially lucrative research avenues - just how does the human body respond to sustained periods of low-g, anyway? - orbital solar power is one of those space applications that has direct and obvious utility. A future Japan supplied by power satellites wouldn't have to worry about a Fukushima-type disaster: earthquakes may be monstrous, but they can't reach orbit.
The biggest hurdle is, of course, the cost. But look at it this way - how much will Fukushima Daiichi cost, in the long run? How do you assign a cost to all that radioactive seawater, all the plutonium leaching into the soil, all the heightened health risks to people in the area? If the Japanese power grid isn't able to cope with this summer's demands because of the lack of Fukushima's electricity, how much is that worth?
Sure it's expensive. But so was throwing a lifeline to the parasites of Wall Street. I know what I'd rather have my money spent on.
There's not many statues of the goddesses here in New West, but I've found at least one - Themis, one of the Titans and goddess of justice, who has been chilling on the south wall of the Law Courts on Carnarvon Street for the last thirty years. She was sculpted by Elek Imredy, a Budapest-born artist who's also responsible for the statue of Judge Begbie up the stairs at the Law Courts, and of Girl in a Wetsuit out in Stanley Park.
The plaque says that depictions of Themis in the Renaissance gave her a blindfold "as a mark of derision, implying an absence of judgement." Something I wasn't particularly aware of. Go, go instructional plaques!
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The idea of an artificial performer isn't exactly groundbreaking; hell, considering the degree to which modern pop stars are manufactured by the big entertainment companies, it barely needs any projection in order to become visible. What's more groundbreaking is that this concept has already left the realm of science fiction and entered reality, to a degree - and, unsurprisingly, it happened in Japan. Her name is Hatsune Miku, and she's software.
But software can still perform, and has. Despite Japan's place on the technological frontier, it still doesn't have the ability to create Hard Light holograms, so instead this artificial performer appears before the audience by being projected onto a wide pane of glass onstage. Check it out below.
Sure, I'll admit it's weird. The warbling voice is sampled from an actual singer, but sounds more like autotuned speech than anything sung. It's got that synthetic flaw. But keep in mind that this is a pioneering effort. Future artificial performers will sound less like synthesizers and more like actual people, though I doubt they'll all look real as well: things like the stylized anime look of Hatsune Miku can't be replicated in reality without a lot of tradeoffs. Colors don't look like that under real light, and some clothes just refuse to be worn that way. It'd be a selling point.
Whatever they look like, I fully expect to see attempts on the part of the companies to make them the new normal - to displace human actors in favor of synthetic performers. There are plenty of reasons for this. Money, of course, is a big one: a computer program won't demand millions of dollars per show or brown M&Ms at every gig. Tour schedules would be far more flexible - hell, the whole nature of tours would change, since you could have different iterations of the same program performing at the same time in a dozen or a hundred different cities at the same time.
The big one, though, is control. I don't follow entertainment news, but the whole Charlie Sheen issue has been spun up enough in the papers that I can't help but absorb some awareness of it through osmosis alone. A synthetic performer would be beyond all that, because a synthetic performer would do only what its owner wanted. A synthetic performer would, aside from the possibility of BSODs, be perfectly reliable; it would not jump around wildly on the set of Oprah and it would not be bi-winning. It would be predictable, and perfectly under control: now that I think about it, an excellent channel to feed propaganda into the memescape.
The actors' guilds will fight tooth and nail, of course. Once it starts up I doubt the dust will settle for decades. But it's going to be an interesting thing to see.
I have no idea what was going on here. All I know is that I boarded the SkyTrain at New Westminster Station with my groceries, and practically everyone aboard was looking out the trackside windows at the westbound platform. This is the second of two photos I took, after my train had started moving. I don't know what the deal is with the person dressed as Gumby, or the person dressed as Pokey, or the dude who appears to be dressed as an Umbrella Corporation employee - but it's definitely not something you encounter every day on the SkyTrain.
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It's not even been a day since the date of the 41st Canadian federal election was announced, and already the sniping has started. Unsurprisingly enough it appears to have been Prime Minister Harper who started this particular show with a return to old methods: jabs at the Bloc Quebecois and implications that the Liberals, NDP, and Bloc are just waiting for the opportunity to create a coalition government that would more accurately reflect the voting choices of the Canadian people. I mean, would be unstable, and it would be a coalition with separatists!
As it is, if these first threads of the campaign get booted around by the Conservatives for the next five weeks, things are gonna suck. I'd much rather see the parties base their campaigns on even halfway-relevant ideas, not "THEY WANNA DESTROY ARE COUNTRY." For the life of me I can't understand why the Conservatives think pandering to anti-separatism will get them mileage, or why it even would. The 1995 Quebec referendum was pretty much the earliest political event I really understood, could really wrap my twelve-year-old brain around. I've grown up knowing that the breakup of my country was possible; perhaps that's one of the reasons why the concept doesn't fill me with anger or despair.
What really gets me, though, is Harper's statement that he doesn't think it would be "principled to have a party dedicated to break up of [our? the?] country having a hand in running the government." Aside from providing a telling look into his viewpoint, it's purely anti-democratic. Like it or not, the Bloc's message resonates with enough Quebec voters that the people have given them forty-eight seats in the House of Commons. Nevertheless, it's not necessarily true that every last Bloc voter have their hearts set on an independent Quebec. Isn't it more believable that Bloc voters do so because they like the idea of a party that will advance Quebec's interests on the national stage? Whatever their reasons, the Bloc has as much right to have a hand in running the government of Canada as any other party, so long as it has the support of the people to do so. To say that a specific party is unworthy to act in the government because some of its policies run counter to that government, outside of very rare and very specific circumstances that tend to end with "azi," strikes at the heart of the concept of democracy.
It doesn't matter, though. The Bloc is purely a regional party, and Harper is sure to get mileage by bashing it in the rest of Canada. Though I really don't like the implications of going down that path. I've never been one for the straightjacket theory of nation-states.
It was gradually approaching sunset - say, around 6:30 or so - last Saturday when I followed the elevated SkyTrain tracks from Metrotown in Burnaby. The train there on the rails isn't in service; it's one of the strategically-positioned empties that I presume TransLink keeps stationed around the system to sweep into service at a moment's notice. The car at the front has one of the new wrap ads going on about how many more people have been using transit now as compared to before the Olympics.
I can beat that. I was using transit way before the Olympics! Of course, it was in Toronto.
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Living in Metro Vancouver, I've been told, has that aspect of always looking behind the curtain. So many movies and television shows are filmed here that even if you don't stumble into an open-air shot, like Underworld 4 on Granville last week or the one they Brooklynized Front Street for over the weekend, all you need is a bit of attention to let the walls of suspended-disbelief come crashing down. The first time this happened to me, I didn't even live in New Westminster yet - I saw The A-Team in the theatre while I was on vacation, and even that handful of days was enough for me to pick out "Frankfurt" as just being downtown Vancouver. I don't think there's a Fairmont Pacific Rim in Germany.
This is one of the things that makes it even more distracting - when the camera includes blunt evidence that the city it's actually in is not the city it wants you to think it's in. Like how on an episode of Castle a few weeks ago, when a foot chase on a busy street in Manhattan inexplicably had a Los Angeles Metro Local bus in the background - noticeable because they're painted a rather distinctive orange color that tends to capture the eye. Sure, I didn't notice a lot of this while I lived in Ontario... but for that fraction of the audience familiar with the filming zones, which now includes me, the ride has got considerably bumpier. You're telling me that this is unfamiliar place X, but the evidence you've prevented demonstrates that it's actually familiar place Y.
This might be one of the scourges of the motion picture industry if more people than me actually cared. Thinking about it, though, there are some circumstances where this sort of thing is actually worthwhile - and far from being an interruption, could actually shore up the foundation. I'm thinking specifically, since I've been going back through the first two seasons on DVD recently, of Sliders.
Sliders, probably the single most mainstream appearance of the alternate history concept on the North American airwaves. Every week the four Sliders found themselves on a parallel Earth in a parallel San Francisco, but thanks to tax incentives most of those San Franciscos were in fact Vancouver with San Francisco establishing shots between scenes. When I first started rewatching the episodes after moving here, I thought the new familiarity might be distracting - but it's not!
It actually subtly advances the whole concept of the alternate history.
In a world where corporate hired guns are literally that: San Francisco, Texas. Vancouver's just on the other side of the street, though.
What I always disliked about Sliders was a reflection of the necessities of the medium: its alternate histories always seemed too artificial. You have a world where Texas not only remained independent but absorbed what would have become the Western United States, and yet Lyndon Johnson and George Bush not only still existed but still became Presidents (of Texas, that is). You have a world where J. Edgar Hoover became President and buried the Constitution, but the Internet nevertheless exists. You have a world where dinosaurs survived to the present day, and yet you still have humans. No concept of the butterfly effect at all. It's a far more simplified setup, wherein pretty much everything that isn't explicitly and directly affected by the departure from familiar history is unchanged.
It's in the filming that they get around this, even if they weren't trying to. Having never been to San Francisco, I can't say whether Vancouver looks anything like it - but what I do know is that Vancouver can't ever look exactly like it. The San Franciscos that the Sliders visit contain sights that you'd never find if you went to our San Francisco - and why should you? These are worlds with decades, centuries, or millennia of different history, that in some cases developed along entirely different (and entirely CRAZY) paths! While it's most likely that a sufficiently alternate San Francisco would resemble neither San Francisco nor Vancouver, using Vancouver can take advantage of that blunt evidence - that this is not the city they're telling you it is.
Even though pretty much every San Francisco they visit still has the Transamerica Pyramid on the skyline.
I've mentioned before that New Westminster, being essentially right on the end of the transcontinental railway, tends to see a lot of train movements; the Westminster Bridge, which carries the tracks across the Fraser River to Surrey and from there to the United States, is just a stone's throw from downtown and is crossed regularly. To be blunt it's not a strange thing for there to be big, long, heavy trains using the tracks between Front Street and the waterfront - you'd think people would pay them more respect.
If they did, I'd have never been able to get this picture of two people crossing the tracks at Begbie Street within sight of a train. Granted, they were about thirty seconds ahead of the train, and the signals hadn't cut in yet. I can imagine that maybe they didn't want to have to wait for the train to pass before they could cross... except that there's a pedestrian overpass. It's where I was standing when I took this picture. Actually, if you count the stairs that connect to the downtown parkade, there are two overpasses.
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One thing I've had to adjust to since moving from Ontario to British Columbia is the nature of the beer market. In my experience, the BCL just overall has a poorer selection of beer varieties than Ontario's LCBO; even the Signature BCL outlets I've come across don't have vastly better selection than the small but reliable Parkdale LCBO.
Fortunately, the BCL is not the only game in town here - there are also a profusion of private liquor stores, something that took a bit for me to get used to. Many of them are attached to bars, but some stand independently, and some give far wider selection than the BCL at the cost of being somewhat more expensive. But for some things, it's worth it.
Like La Loubécoise. Even in Ontario, I'd never come across this beer. I found it at Firefly Fine Wines and Ales on Cambie, right across the street from Vancouver City Hall, in the big walk-in cooler there. I could have gone the Dieu du Ciel route, since I've finally found a retailer in BC that sells its products - but that's the past. I wanted something new. I wanted the future!
La Loubécoise is actually a Belgian beer - strong Belgian ale, the label says, with 8% alc./vol. It's made by Brasserie d'Ecaussinnes in the town of Écaussinnes in Wallonia, which Wikipedia informs me has "well-known blues festival." The town, that is, not Wallonia. If my limited capacity for French literacy isn't failing me, the brewers describe La Loubécoise as a craft-brewed brown Belgian beer that is made with maple syrup from Quebec. The back label gives the particulars in French, German, English, and Dutch, specifying it as a "top-fermented beer" and misspelling "syrup" as "sirop" in the English text. But that's something I can overlook for a beer such as this.
I've had plenty of beers in my time that say they're brewed with some taste sensation or another, but in my experience very few of them actually measure up to the claims. Kinds like Route des épices from Dieu du Ciel manage well - because, really, how would you hide the taste of peppercorns in beer? - but they're rare. I was glad to find out that La Loubécoise wasn't talking itself up.
I tell you, drinking this is like drinking candy. Maybe you'd call it alco-candy or something. When I got the top off a bit of the head fizzed out immediately, accompanied by a good maple-and-wood smell. Going down, it was smooth and sweet and tasted strongly of maple syrup, and though the taste of the alcohol was detectable it didn't detract, just made it a bit weird and unusual.
My opinion - this isn't the sort of drink you should drink to get over how shitty your day was. That's what Lucky Lager is for. This is one of the best examples of beer that I've come across. La Loubécoise is something that should be savored.
And no, I don't know what the deal is with the wolf and beaver on the label. There are some mysteries, I suppose, that only the Belgians can explain.
Vancouver is the core of Hollywood North, but New Westminster plays host to the entertainment industry every once in a while itself. I stumbled into one of their setups, entirely by accident, this weekend while I was on my way to the grocery store. If you've never been to New West, Front Street is kind of an odd street - it's very easy to get into the "out of sight, out of mind" issue, as it's not only downhill from Columbia Street, it's also underneath the Downtown Parkade. It's called Antique Alley, and it's dominated by antique, surplus, and furniture stores.
Except this weekend. At first I didn't notice anything off at all with the stores that all had bilingual English and Hebrew (or perhaps it's actually Yiddish) signage. Nor did anything seem odd about the sudden profusion of tailor shops and kosher bakeries; it had been a little while since I'd last been down to Front Street, and I was pleased that empty storefronts were filling up. It wasn't until I saw a sign for the New York Lottery in a "new convenience store" that I really realized.
So, this weekend, Front Street was turned into a slice of Brooklyn - Borough Park, to be specific, thanks to the subway sign they installed on the stairs up to the parkade. Filming happened yesterday, and I have no pictures of the set fully developed because there were plenty of dudes around with radios who I'm sure would have been rather cross had I just started going around with my camera.
I don't know what movie it is, though. If anyone does, I'd be interested in hearing.
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As I write, they're still fighting to bring the nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi back under control. I understand that reactors 5 and 6 have been cooled to safe levels, and even though they were the ones least affected by the earthquake and tsunami, any victory here is a good one. We need all the victories we can get at Fukushima; the entire concept of nuclear has already taken a hell of a beating from it. A recent poll found that eighty-seven percent of Switzerland's population wants to terminate the Swiss nuclear power infrastructure, and the Vancouver Observer carried an article from the head of Greenpeace's nuclear campaign about how Fukushima should be an example to us all about why we should dismantle our nuclear plants and dedicate ourselves to renewable power.
Personally, at this point, I think it would be folly to go nuclear-free; it wouldn't result in a pure renewable-power utopia, but an even wider reliance on coal, oil, and natural gas power to replace the massive baseload generating capacity that nuclear generating statiosn are built for. I'm glad that Ontario is continuing to go ahead on its nuclear replacement project; hell, while I lived there, I was thankful that so much of Ontario's electricity was nuclear-generated, so that I could be assured that my lifestyle wasn't built upon a foundation of burning coal.
In the end, it's all about psychology. It's the same reason, I think, that a lot of people don't accept the idea of climate change: it's too slow to be seen, and it's practically impossible to specifically connect any one event to it. Nuclear accidents are something else entirely. They dovetail perfectly with the way humans have developed to perceive threat; it's something immediate, demonstrable, and obvious. Except, of course, that it isn't obvious - we can't see radiation, and as I wrote about the other day, I believe this is a significant factor in why some people are especially skeptical or fearful about nuclear power. The Swiss nuclear reactors are exactly as dangerous today as they were a month ago, but people are keyed up and seeing patterns everywhere.
And I think it's a bit unfair, anyway. It goes back to that whole "black magic" aspect that I believe a lot of people have regarding nuclear power. Would we be reacting this way over something like a hydroelectric dam collapse?
An aerial photograph of the Revelstoke Dam in the interior of British Columbia. This photo was originally taken by Wikipedia user Kelownian Pilot, and is used here in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license under which it was released.
The Revelstoke Dam on the Columbia River is one of the linchpins of British Columbia's electrical generation system; it was dams like these that allowed this province to keep the lights on without burning coal. It holds back enough of the Columbia that it's created Lake Revelstoke, five kilometers north of the town of Revelstoke. I've checked terrain maps for this area on Google; the Columbia winds through a rather narrow and deep valley here, and it's in this valley that you'll find Revelstoke and its 7,500 people.
What do you think would happen if the Revelstoke Dam were to be compromised? For now, let's not concern ourselves over the how - maybe it was an earthquake, maybe it was an asteroid, maybe the dam just didn't want to be a dam anymore. The result of the failure is stark: Lake Revelstoke empties itself back into the Columbia River in the form of an exceedingly large and exceedingly fast wave. A lot, in fact, like a tsunami! With only a five-kilometer separation between the dam and the town, there's a very limited window of opportunity for people to get out. People would die; it's probable that thousands of people would die. It would be a terrible, horrible disaster.
But do you think that, in the days afterward, you would have environmental organizations agitating to bring down the world's hydroelectric dams, or the people of Ontario polling in favor of turning off the turbines at Niagara Falls? Would we take a collective step back from hydroelectric power? Would we remember, in the same breath, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Revelstoke?
Somehow, I doubt it.
It all goes back to psychology in the end, I think. A wall of water's something we can see with our own eyes; a wall of water is something we can try to get away from, even though once it's got to the "wall" stage you'd have to be damn lucky to make it to safety. But radiation is black magic; it kills invisibly, and we can't even agree on how many. I've seen estimates of Chernobyl-attributable casualties range from four thousand to one million.
In my time there, Trent University was a fertile field for message-based graffiti; mostly chalk, taking advantage of the all-concrete construction of Symons Campus. Some of it was more entertaining than others, particularly when it engendered a back-and-forth. This picture comes from November 2004, but I cannot remember exactly what it was dealing with anymore. At the time, food services at Trent were provided by the private company Aramark, but after seven years I can't remember what the deal was anymore.
Other graffiti was more along the lines of "sex kills but abstinence sucks," found in the library, and "Dopefish Lives."
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It's not going to be another Chernobyl, but that doesn't seem to make much difference anymore. Even though the struggle to cool down the reactors at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear generating station continues, the mere fact of the crisis has pushed nuclear energy back into the spotlight, out in front of a public that after seventy years still has deep reservations about the whole thing. The public's vague unease, and general unfamiliarity with, the basics of nuclear power is itself fueling a critical reaction in the Western memescape.
Personally, I think that a big part of it is that a lot of people still think of nuclear power, in deep in their hearts of hearts, as some kind of black magic. Like something out of myth, some shadowy evil thing that can kill silently, invisibly, and poison the land. Make no mistake, radiation is dangerous - but I have to wonder how many people subconsciously assign agency to radiation, who deep down think of it not as a force of nature, but some ghostly, stalking predator.
The news media hasn't been much help. The news media is never much help in this regard. Hell, yesterday CBC News ran an article dealing with concerns raised about Columbia Nuclear Generating Station in south-central Washington state, the Pacific Northwest's last active nuclear plant and the only source of nuclear power within 1500 kilometers of Metro Vancouver. We should be concerned because Columbia "uses the same kind of radioactive fuel rods as the Fukushima reactors."
Not that it's not built to withstand a magnitude 9 megathrust earthquake, hundreds of kilometers away from the fault line where this quake is most likely to occur. Not that its emergency diesel generators are vulnerable to ten-meter tsunamis of the sort that are the actual cause of the Fukushima crisis, which we all know are totally common on the Columbia River. That it uses the same "radioactive fuel rods." You know what? I guess that makes it - gasp - a nuclear reactor! I'm no nuclear engineer, but isn't it safe to say that the problem with Fukushima Daiichi was not that it uses radioactive fuel rods, but that it was designed in such a way that mechanical pumps were necessary to get coolant to the reactors, and not in such a way that gravity would do the pumps' work?
None of that matters to the media, it seems. Right now, people are keyed up and scared shitless about atoms and radiation. The other day I saw a news ticker about how people in British Columbia were stocking up on "iodine" pills - putting aside the question of whether this was a typo or people were actually stocking up on iodine instead of potassium iodide, which is what you want when you want to protect yourself from thyroid cancer - because of fears of a radioactive cloud blowing across the Pacific.
Keep in mind that the Pacific is big. It is, in fact, more than seven thousand kilometers from Tokyo to Vancouver. If radiation is such that iodide would become a good investment here, I very much doubt that any human would be able to survive on Honshu without glowing. But many people only have a surface understanding of it - for many people, it's a case of radiation coming, and radiation is bad.
The Pacific Ocean, viewed from the west coast of North America. Not pictured: Japan.
Here, I think, psychology plays a role again. The ocean is big and wide, without any barriers - but that bigness is in itself a barrier to something like radiation. According to an article in the Deseret News, which demonstrates that even people in Utah are worried about transpacific radiation, the main health risk comes from iodine-131, which has an eight-day half-life. If you're only familiar with the term in context of Gordon Freedman, half-life refers to the amount of time required for half of whatever stuff you're talking about to decay. So if you have one hundred units of iodine-131, after eight days only fifty of them will still be radioactive. And it's not as if they'll stay in a big lump during the time it takes the winds to blow them across the ocean.
I mean, really - it's not even 3700 kilometers from New Westminster to Pickering. If there was a radioactive crisis at Pickering Nuclear Generating Station, while I would be deeply concerned for my friends and loved ones and the millions of people who live within a hundred kilometers of its reactors... would people on the Pacific coast still be stocking up on potassium iodide?
As a culture, we've needed to deal maturely with the pitfalls and possibilities of nuclear power for decades now. It's unfortunate that in this time of crisis, the media seems dedicated to the idea of the worst-case scenario.
god damn when I started writing this it was going to be about dams
On the north side of St. Clair Avenue West in Toronto, just past the railway bridge that marks the western border of Corso Italia, there are a couple of hydro towers standing in the middle of a small park. The towers would have been there first, of course, unless I'm completely off in my interpretation of the weathered metal.
It's not that often that these towers are situated such that I can walk right inside them. It was a new perspective, and rather interesting at that.
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Once upon a time, it was well within the realms of possibility - even probability - for a writer to make a living off their work. Back before the Second World War, when the pulps were one of the largest sources of popular entertainment there was, there was always a demand for short stories and novelettes to fill their pages - and while contributors may only have been a cent per word, that works out to $50 for a 5000-word story. May not sound like much, but that's $50 in 1939 dollars, which translates to $764.19 in 2009 dollars. A sufficiently driven writer able to burn enough typewriter ribbons could manage to live on that sort of pay.
The writer's market is a different place today. Sure, there are still markets for short stories, but unless you're selling one every other day you're going to have difficulty living off them - and the market isn't big enough to support that kind of glut anyway. Professional authors haven't lived off shorts for decades; it's all about novels now. So it's not that surprising that some people are starting to get worried about the impact of digital piracy on the livelihoods of authors.
The Globe and Mail carried an article dealing with this the other day, asking whether piracy and electronic publishing might be a one-two punch that could knock out mid-list authors. Personally, I think that's bunk. There will always be authors as long as people read for pleasure - I'm more concerned about the impact that AI writing software may have on the world of authorship in the years ahead, but fortunately for wordsmiths we're not quite at that point yet. But there are plenty of people who don't agree.
Alan Cumyn, chair of the Writers' Union of Canada, doesn't seem to. His quote in the Globe's article suggests that he's skeptical of e-publishing opening up new avenues for authors - rather, it looks like he's worried about a race to the bottom, with ebooks going for cheaper and cheaper amounts in the hope of driving up sales among those who would pay $0.99 but not $9.99. "That's worrisome," he says, "because how do you make a living?"
There's another quote from Saskatchewan writer Cliff Burns, about whom I know little because he does not have a Wikipedia article; in his blog he describes himself as "a literary writer, specializing in slipstream/alternative/surreal/science fiction." He seems to think that the "explosion of the amateur and the wannabe and the will-never-be writers" is not only making it hard to find quality writing, but that it's actually damaging to "the legacy of the printed word."
This... I can't get behind this. People, the sort of people who read at least, are not complete idiots. People can tell when what they're reading is poor, when what they're reading is crap. They'll respond by not reading it any more. Sure, in a large enough sample size you'll likely find a few people who like something, but "a few" is not enough support for an author to build a livelihood on. What's more likely, in my mind, is that the amateur explosion will result in a lot of dross from which a small number of worthwhile pieces will emerge. Everyone had to be an amateur at one time; it took twelve years from the time I started actively writing until the day I sold my first story. All we're seeing today is the largest and most transparent slush pile in history.
Amateurs are the next generation - it's understandable that they might want to figure out where they stand by seeing if people are willing to pay for their ebooks. I know how damn hard it can be to get feedback on my own works; readers plunking down their hard-earned dollars represents a kind of feedback all its own.
Nothing's getting wrecked here. It's just a change. Authors should be all about that - the more things change, the more problems there are to introduce into the narrative's conflict.
Here's a photo from last July, back when the sky was reliably blue and when I could go out without a jacket, back when I was still taking photos in Toronto. Framed by trees, it's the bell tower of Old City Hall in front of 20 Queen Street West, part of the Eaton Centre development that was originally set to demolish and replace Old City Hall in the name of progress.
I think it looks better this way.
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I really hate the term "meltdown." Sure, it is technically accurate - for nuclear engineers, who know what they are talking about. If you are not a nuclear engineer, a meltdown means that the nuclear fuel has overheated and melted, causing damage to the reactor core. I would be willing to bet that the average person on the street, for whom The Simpsons is likely their only source of information about nuclear power, thinks that "meltdown" means something along the lines of "the entire nuclear plant melts down into the center of the earth and leaves a big, sizzling, glowing green hole behind it."
With the crisis still underway at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan - a plant which is, mind you, still intact after being hit by the fifth largest earthquake in recorded history as well as a tsunami - the word "meltdown" or its non-English equivalent probably appears on the front page of every significant newspaper in the Western world. This is not going to be another Chernobyl, but no matter what happens, nuclear power is going to take yet another bruise.
You'd think the media could use this opportunity to educate the public - to expand awareness of how nuclear power actually works, the pitfalls and the possibilities, rather than just go to ridiculous extremes like articles about fallout being carried across the Pacific to the West Coast. But no. The atoms are going to kill us - they're going to melt us, then kill us.
The Pickering Nuclear Generating Station in Pickering, Ontario
This post's title comes from the early Simpsons episode "Homer Defined," which dealt with Homer averting a meltdown at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant - and I can't help but think that that episode, and things like it, have been incredibly influential in shaping the nuclear memescape. Simply put, these nuclear plants are not going to explode like nuclear weapons - that is entirely impossible. People only think so because unless you make the effort to educate yourself, nuclear reactor design and nuclear weapon design are equally black-box. It's not as if they taught me about gun-trigger vs. implosion nukes back in high school.
It's almost as if the debate has been consciously engineered over the decades to be as scary as possible for the average person. I mean, just look at that word "meltdown." Melting means really super hot, which means get away! Go! It pushes primal buttons. It doesn't matter that, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, seawater injections are underway at Fukushima Daiichi to cool the reactors. The media has already pushed out its narrative, and that's "this is terrifying and you should be terrified."
You don't need to spend much time in New Westminster to realize that it's built on a hill. A pretty big hill, in fact, one that was little more than steep, thick temperate rainforest only a hundred and fifty years ago. Those trees have been cleared out, but the hill remains. It's one of the reasons I don't go to Uptown New Westminster very often.
Not necessarily the steepest in the world, but enough so that I can force the perspective of the buildings just so.
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I've only been through one significant earthquake, so far as I know, and I didn't even feel it. The 2010 Central Canada earthquake set the ground shaking from Halifax to West Virginia, but since I was on a streetcar or something at the time I had to find out about it from people who I thought were pulling my leg at first.
It's been six months since my move to British Columbia, and I haven't felt an earthquake here either. This state of affairs, I hope, will continue for a long time to come. But I feel that recent events demand a re-examination of this sense of security. From the quake that levelled parts of Christchurch, New Zealand last month to Japan's record-breaking devastation, the clear and present threat of a major earthquake in British Columbia is something that we - the people and, more importantly, our government - must not ignore.
The 2011 Sendai earthquake, in particular, had better be a wakeup call for British Columbia's leadership - as a megathrust earthquake with a moment magnitude of 8.9 to 9.1, it falls well within the calculated strength of the 1700 Cascadia earthquake - and given that the seismic zone that created that quake rumbles every three hundred to five hundred years, on average, what's happening in Japan today could happen in Vancouver tomorrow.
I'm not saying it will. Over the last three millennia, the shortest estimated separation between major quakes was three hundred and ninety years, so the Lower Mainland likely has some leeway yet. Plus, it's not like earthquakes are a new thing for British Columbia - a significant temblor beneath Vancouver Island in 1946 shook much of the Lower Mainland, and the city didn't come tumbling down. What I can't say, because I have no way to know, is how well the Lower Mainland is prepared to deal with this sort of disaster.
This sign, one of many throughout Metro Vancouver, identifies the Kingsway in Burnaby as an emergency services-only road in the event of a disaster.
Japan, like British Columbia, is right atop the Pacific Ring of Fire. Earthquakes have been a fact of life in Japan for as long as there has been human life in Japan. Its cities are built to withstand earthquakes, to take the worst the shaking ground can give and stay standing - and despite that, the death toll already exceeds six hundred, and ten thousand people are still missing. This is in a country that holds regular earthquake drills. By contrast, here in British Columbia the Vancouver Island quake is getting close to the point where it'll pass out of living memory. Even though anyone here can see a stratovolcano on a clear day just by looking to the southeast horizon, I would not be surprised to learn that a substantial fraction of the Lower Mainland's population is unaware of the geological risks inherent in this land.
More than anything else, we need information. Spurred by the earthquake in Japan, Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson told CTV News yesterday that many buildings in Vancouver would be vulnerable to just the sort of earthquake that will hit the Lower Mainland at some point in the future. Sure, investment's being done to ensure that bridges, public buildings, and schools won't collapse in the event of a quake - but what's the value of that if we end up facing a death toll in the tens of thousands thanks to apartment buildings that didn't make the grade?
These buildings need to be inspected. The potential dangers need to be made clear to the people who are living in them, and those dangers have to be addressed. It's literally the difference between life and death. Governments exist to protect their citizens - and with Christy Clark due to be sworn in as Premier of British Columbia next week, it's my hope that she starts BC on a path to ensuring that when the ground does shake, as many walls as possible stay up.
Expo 86 was built around the themes of transportation and communication. From it, Vancouver got things like the SkyTrain, Canada Place, and McBarge - but there was more than that to the World's Fair. I know because my grandfather was there twenty-five years ago, and took pictures.
One of his pictures is, on the face of it, ordinary: it's an ice cream vendor. But this is an ice cream vendor in the context of transportation, communication, an dthe future - so it's not just some ordinary truck with a set of chime speakers on the roof. Hell no. This appears to be nothing less than a rocket-powered off-road ice cream delivery helicopter. I mean, just look at it! I haven't been able to find any information on it, though; if any Expo attendees can shed some light, that'd be pretty awesome.
If it truly wass representative of the future, I presume that it sold only Dippin' Dots.
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Power is a tricky thing. It's one of our basest natures to seek power, to accumulate more and more of it, so that we and our family might be secure or so that we can reshape the world according to our ideas of how it should look or because of the sheer rush of having power over others. The pursuit of power is behind practically everything in human history, and it's led us to no shortage of dark places. With that in mind we should be careful to whom we entrust the reins of power, and always wary of those who actively seek it with good reason to believe that they will find it.
I know this might sound a bit hypocritical considering that a year ago I was running for Mayor of Toronto. I qualify that because my campaigning was pretty much entirely limited to this weblog, and next to candidates like Ford and Smitherman and Joe Pantalone, I didn't expect to even come close to winning.
Keeping tabs on who has what power becomes particularly important in government. There are always people jockeying for position, seeking to favor themselves and their group over the other guys, governments looking for leverage against oppositions and oppositions probing for weak spots to bring the government down. They have to be watched carefully, because if they think they can get away with a something they're apt to try to run away with the legislature.
This is particularly important now. With Wisconsin the focus of what little news coverage there is that isn't following Charlie Sheen, governors in other states are able to practically hide in plain sight, and push through their own "dream bills" while no one is looking. Take, for example, Missouri's SB 222, which modifies the state's child labor laws and "eliminates the prohibition on employment of children under age fourteen," which will of course absolutely not have any negative consequences!
Or, more to the point, look at Michigan - where Republican governor Rick Snyder and the Republican majorities* in the state House of Representatives and Senate are working to push into being the "Local Government and School District Fiscal Accountability Act." Sounds bloodless enough, right? Don't forget that one of the arts of politics is coming up with new names for odious things. Tocqueville said that, I think, or something like it - or someone else did.
Regardless! Do you want to know what this bill does? Well, in a process vaguely consistent with its name, it allows Michigan's financial authority to review the financial problems of a municipal government or school district - and based upon this review, the Governor can declare that government or district to be in a state of "financial emergency," which would require the appointment of an emergency manager "to develop a financial and operating plan for the local government."
It's a dark road that Michigan will go down if it follows what's in this bill.
Sounds understandable enough, right? Just wait. Once this emergency manager has been appointed, he or she has the authority to modify, terminate, or renegotiate any contracts entered into by the municipality, and - if you thought what was happening in Wisconsin was just on its own - the personal authority to "reject, modify, or terminate the terms of an existing contract or collective bargaining agreement (CBA)." This is given its own bullet point.
Oh, and that's not all. These appointed, unelected emergency managers, presumably answering to the Governor of Michigan, are also granted the power "to disincorporate or dissolve the municipal government with the approval of the Governor; or recommend consolidation with another municipal government."
...
It's been fourteen years, but I still remember how wildly unpopular the forced amalgamation of the cities of Metro Toronto was - that didn't stop the government from doing it anyway, because it was convenient for Mike Harris. And even then, the Conservatives couldn't turf the Metro councillors out of power just like that.
Some people - I don't think I'm assuming overmuch when I suggest "Republicans" - may not think this is particularly serious, that this is nothing more than a government taking drastic action to avoid some grim meathook future. That is total disingenuous bullshit. Michigan is set to codify not only union-busting legislation, but city-busting legislation, and if you think this won't be abused you're delusional. The contents of that bill go way, way beyond what any government should have without proper oversight and civic involvement. Just read it! The definitions, processes, and functions are absolutely opaque - this could be very easily abused. By anyone, come to that - what some people forget is that their guys won't be in power forever. Just watch this.
We need to keep a firm eye on our governments - because down in the States, it looks like they're getting ready to run off with them.
* Would "The Republican Governor and His Republican Majority" make a good name for a band?
I captured this shot somewhere along I-5 between Seattle and the Canadian border, the last leg of a very long journey through the United States. I have to wonder what, exactly, could have caused that kind of damage to the SUV on the trailer - or whether this is just after wreckage has already been stripped away. The general lack of damage to the main body, though, gives me reason to hope that whoever was in it wasn't injured. This vehicle would fit in perfectly with the rest in the parking lot of the ICBC salvage yard in Queensborough.
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People will always need to get around. Even if we withdraw into ourselves, hide in our bedrooms and use teleoperated robots to do everything that needs to be done under that ball of fire known as the "daystar," those robots will always need to get around. Transportation planning is, thus, one of the more important roles of a government - and I feel it needs to come down to a government, since it's far easier to get a government to look at the long-term than a private, profit-centered agency.
They'll need to get around, and they'll need places to live/control their robots from. One of the concepts that's been tossed about time and again over the twentieth century is the death of the city - the idea that we're poised on the edge of a technological revolution that'll finally make concentrations of people, businesses, services, and infrastructure obsolete, and allow us all to live in low-density sprawl scattered across the land; sometimes so scattered that you need a personal helicopter to get anywhere in a reasonable time. In reality, though, the cities have proved resilient. Even those cities that were hollowed out by white flight in the mid-20th century have at least survived the rise of suburbs that have done their level best to strangle them. But there are still people, like The Province's Jon Ferry, who believe that suburbs need to be encouraged even more - that all of us want a life that, to me at least, seems like something as relevant to the modern world as Leave It to Beaver.
The problem is that, whether by an active memetic engineering campaign, cultural drift, or both, the term "suburb" has pretty much come to be associated with the typical city-fringe, spread-out, low-density areas - I hesitate to use the term "neighborhood" in the context of such a suburb - dominated by houses, local businesses generally limited to strip malls and big boxes, with limited public transit options and a general dependence on automobiles in order to get around in a reasonable manner.
Suburbs such as these, in the Levittown mold, are artifacts of the twentieth century - remnants of a time when fuel was cheap, land was cheap, and there was a strong, healthy middle class that could afford what The Onion called "ant-like conformity." Honestly, I don't think those factors will prevail in the twenty-first century like they did in the twentieth. As demand ramps up in the developing world, and as oil speculators prove themselves time and again to be panicky squirrels willing to drag the global economy to the brink of ruin because of what a civil war in Libya might do to supply, petroleum and gas will become steadily more expensive. Electric cars could feasibly pick up some of the slack, but not nearly enough - we're still a ways away from being able to convert from an oil-based transportation model. Suburbs tend to be built on good agricultural land; as transportation becomes more expensive, we'll need all the agriculture we can get as close to the cities as we can get it, to cut down on transportation costs.
That doesn't mean, however, that I think we've got no option but to huddle in urban sardine can apartments. There's more than one way to build a suburb, even if we've been using the same blueprint for seventy years now.
A Metro Light Rail train passes through Tempe, Arizona
A hundred years ago, there were suburbs - streetcar suburbs, made possible by the streetcar lines that then criss-crossed major cities across North America. Places like Parkdale in Toronto and Kitsilano in Vancouver still retain the character of that early suburban push, a push that made it possible for people to walk from their home along a side road to the streetcar, and take it whereever they needed to go. It was the proliferation of automobiles after the Second World War, and the resultant collapse in ridership, that saw streetcars disappear from all but a handful of North American cities.
Today, we might do well looking at this concept in a different way - a concept which I'm sure someone else has already come up with before me, but if that's the case, it means it's more than just disorganized neurons firing. Light rail villages - combining the space and freedom aspects that are attractive about suburbs, but avoiding the sprawling, dehumanizing, atomizing effects of modern suburban sprawl.
Start with a village square. There will be a light rail station here, and a small business area - the sort of thing you'd expect to see in a small town's downtown, or what you still see along the main streets of surviving streetcar suburbs. Beyond this, side roads radiate out to the residential areas where you'll find houses with big yards and plenty of space - but not that endless rows of them. This is supposed to be a village - only a couple of thousand people would live here. The village would be surrounded by a small greenbelt, perhaps of forests or farms - the light rail would connect to additional villages in both directions, and ultimately to a transit exchange or major urban center. There'd still be roads, of course - but the point of the design would be to reduce the degree to which an automobile is a necessity, to make driving a choice.
It is all about choice, in the end. But when there's only one dominant option, it's not much of a choice at all.
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