Photo: It Blinded Me With Science

If there's one thing the geodesic dome at Science World does well, it's reflect the sunlight. Depending on the position of the sun in the sky, one of the panels can be lit up and shining bright while all the others remain silver and cool. When the correct arrangement of angles is in play, those mirror-bright panels have no trouble reflecting the sunlight down onto the waters of False Creek. I took this photo from the Cambie Bridge, just as a small one-person craft passed on top of the patch of light Science World was casting down.


I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

A Continuum of Thought

Outside the field of pure literature - and even then, it can be scarce - Canadian science fiction is rather thin on the ground. With the United States right next door, it's not difficult to understand why. With a shared language and historically porous border, it's always been all that Canada can do to keep from being overwhelmed by American cultural exports, and there are few things that dovetail with the American spirit as well as science fiction does. Nor did we ever have our own version of Doctor Who, not with the CBC grudgingly supported by governments but never given what it needed for true independence. Especially when it comes to televised works, generally the best we've been able to get are Canadian/American productions like Stargate SG-1 and its successor series.

But now there's Continuum, a science fiction television series that began airing its first run of ten episodes last Sunday - created by a Canadian, produced by a Canadian company, filmed in Canada, aired on a Canadian specialty channel, and starring a cast that is almost entirely Canadian... I'm starting to recognize a pattern here. Continuum is one of those rare discoveries, a Canadian science fiction series. It's not often I discover things while they're still new. Usually I'm just oblivious and hampered by my lack of cable. Fortunately, not everyone is; it blew away existing records by pulling in 900,000 viewers on the first broadcast, so it may well escape the fate of previous Canadian-made series such as The Starlost.

Nevertheless, I figured it might be instructive to take a look at the first episode, and evaluate how the crew's begun to set the story up and where they might go.

Quick summary, then: Continuum follows Kiera Cameron, played by Rachel Nichols, a Vancouver cop (actually, "City Protective Services Protector") from 2077, who along with a group of terrorists about to be executed is thrown back to 2012 in a last-ditch time travel attempt gone horribly right. Cut off and alone sixty-five years before her own time, it's up to Cameron to apprehend the terrorists and, somehow, get home. On its own, not particularly groundbreaking; there's a whiff of a Terminator vibe, but since none of the characters are soldiers or robots there's probably little danger of Harlan Ellison threatening legal action here. But there are options. It's one of the few shows both filmed and set in Vancouver, which means that our heroine can wander up Granville Street in a daze without the producers having to unfurl the Stars and Stripes or line the road with U.S. Mail and USA Today boxes beforehand.

Anyone in this photograph could be a time traveller.

That's not to say this series is a shining star. I've heard complaints about the acting, but that's not going to be something I focus on, since it has to skew pretty close to Manos: The Hands of Fate territory before I can really notice it without being told. Instead, I'm more interested in the writing - how the creators went about setting up their story, their conflict, and their future. After thinking about it for a couple of days, I can tell you right now that I definitely wouldn't have approached it in the same manner.

There's a rule in writing, possibly one of the most important rules: "show, don't tell." At its core, this means that good writing gets something across by demonstrating the truth of something, rather than just stating it. If a character is angry, you show them punching the walls, or being overwhelmingly calm, or whatever else is appropriate based on that character. You do not have them announce that something makes them feel angry.

It can be a bit more tricky when you're dealing with a visual medium, though it still exists - and I feel that the greatest flaw in Continuum so far is that it has told us too much. Take the terrorists, for example - they're part of a group struggling against a world where governments and corporations have colluded to such a degree that there's such a thing as the "Corporate Congress," where freedoms of speech and assembly have been stripped away. But the problem is they tell us too much about them. Until the episode specifically told me "hey, these guys are the villains," I was having a bit of trouble with it.

In fact, they tell us too much, too fast about the future. Personally, I think the nature of the future is something that should have been revealed slowly over the course of multiple episodes. Say, start off the episode with the prison scene, the characters are immediately transported back to 2012, and the future is gradually filled in not only through flashbacks where appropriate, but through the actions of the characters. The way people conduct themselves shows a lot about the sort of world they come from.

This sort of thing is present in the series' depiction of the future, to some degree - while for many people, the most striking thing about the 2077 SkyTrain Cameron rides to the prison might be that the announcements are made in Chinese only, for me it was that it was completely standing-room - no seats whatsoever. An implication of a crowded world, an uncomfortable world, just by the way it builds its transit. Likewise, the 2077 SkyTrain retains the same door-opening chime that you'll find on the system today - one of only a handful of elements connecting the Vancouvers of 2012 and 2077 together. In the establishing shot of the prison you can see the twisted, partially submerged wrecks of the cargo cranes at the foot of Main Street, and though I've seen media references to the Lions Gate Bridge remaining in background shots, I didn't pick up it. Nevertheless, the lack of many other familiar anchors works well, in its way - it's a sort of whisper, "something serious happened between now and then."

When it comes to Erik Knudsen's character, the 17-year-old technical genius Alec Sadler, I can't help but think his direct involvement in the episode's events was a negative. In-story, he's recently built the prototype of some kind of encrypted communication system that Cameron uses in 2077, and so he's able to hear and be heard by her, see through her eyes, and so on, presumably setting him up for the Mission Control role later in the series. In principle, there's nothing wrong with this; again, I just think it happened too fast. Cameron arrives in 2012, loses the terrorists, is disoriented and trying to report in, and Sadler immediately starts chiding her for breaking into his groundbreaking encryption.

It seems too convenient, really. Not only has he already developed the prototype of the technology that's used in the future, it has absolutely no compatibility issues with something sixty-five years more advanced, and when Cameron starts trying to report in he's already monitoring and jumps on it immediately. The problem I have with this is that it denies Cameron an opportunity for character development - we're denied the chance to see this person when she's completely cut off and completely alone, lost in an unfamiliar environment with little clue of where to go next.

Still, I'm interested in seeing where they take this. I just wish they could have left some more things unsaid for a while. If you're interested in checking the series out, Showcase has it up for online streaming here.

Photo: Blue Sky Regatta

There was a great deal of activity in eastern False Creek last Saturday while I was crossing the Cambie Street Bridge. Specifically, it was the False Creek Women's Regatta, with teams from throughout the Lower Mainland and across Cascadia competing. It was, I think, a particularly nice day for a regatta.


I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

Memorials and Elevens

Everyone knows about the Fourth of July. That day of flags, fireworks, barbecues, and unchained patriotism is practically synonymous with many depictions of the United States outside its own borders. Aside from that, though, there are a lot of American holidays I really don't know much about - like today, Memorial Day. It was actually the earlier American holiday commemorating war dead - Veterans Day is the American version of Remembrance Day, and Memorial Day had already been in existence for decades when the First World War ended. Given the experiences of the Civil War, which provided the original impetus for what became Memorial Day, and the First World War, it's understandable why the United States has two separate holidays recognizing the armed services, much like Australia and New Zealand recognize Anzac Day.

What I have a bit more difficulty understanding is what Memorial Day seems to have become. The other day I noticed that Perfect World Entertainment, operator of free MMOs like Star Trek Online and Champions Online, is "in honor of Memorial Day" having a sale on their electronic scrip, the in-game currency you buy with real-world currency. It's hardly an isolated phenomenon - "memorial day sale" turns up about a hundred and thirty-one million hits on Google. I've never been in the United States at this time of year, so I'm not really sure what it's like on the ground - but from what I'm seeing over here, the idea of taking a holiday meant to honor war dead and using it to push 50% off merchandise out the door strikes me as distinctly skeevy.

Run, don't walk, to our fabulous Remembrance Day Sale! 11% off everything in the store until the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month!

Of course, like I said, I don't know exactly what Memorial Day is like; I'm viewing it through the lens of Remembrance Day, which was always a somber, reflective occasion. When I was still in school, every year on November 11th we'd all file into the gym or auditorium, the principal would have some remarks, one of the teachers would recite "In Flanders Fields," and we'd have our moment of silence. Even here in British Columbia, where unlike Ontario the day is a statutory holiday, it's not an excuse for rampant commercialism - Metropolis at Metrotown, the largest mall in the province, remains closed until after the ceremonies on that day. There are no Remembrance Day sales. As far as I'm concerned, that's exactly as it should be.

Honestly, the idea feels sacrilegious. There's a time and a place for everything, and I can't help but wonder whether the commercialization of Memorial Day goes to show how much American culture really does care about its fallen.

Photo: A Sign of the Times

Like everything else, signage evolves. It has to. The memetic environment has grown consistently fiercer over the last hundred years, with arrays of things all vying for the strictly limited attention of passers-by. Eighty years ago people used hand-painted signs on the sides of buildings, after the war Vancouver became one of the world capitals of neon signage, and today you'll find signs that are mostly clear, bold, and simple.

Still, there are some survivors from old times - and far from being out of style, their very uniqueness and out-of-step nature makes them more successful in drawing attention. Take the Safeway at Lonsdale and 13th in North Vancouver; unlike the streamlined, boxes of today, it hearkens back to the Googie architectural sensibilities of the 1950s and early 1960s.I took a picture of the sign when I was through there last weekend; a piece of a different world that managed to survive into this one.


I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

The Mistake By the Lake?

In the years after the Second World War, a particular idea became popular in cities across North America: the downtown expressway. Usually elevated, but sometimes buried underground as in Montreal, these expressways would provide fast, smooth routes into and out of a city's downtown core, so that commuters would not have to spend their mornings and evenings stuck in traffic on roadways that had not been meant to carry that kind of load. San Francisco got into the business with the Embarcadero Freeway, Seattle built the Alaskan Way Viaduct through its downtown, and Toronto built the Gardiner Expressway between the skyscrapers and the waterfront.

At the time, of course, it was a perfectly rational choice. In the 1940s, the automobile was the latest "it" thing and people everywhere were springing for the luxury of their own sets of wheels. At the time, an expressway like the Gardiner was seen by planners as necessary to ensure that traffic continued to flow; it wouldn't be for some decades before the traffic issue began to be seriously questioned. Decades during which the Gardiner was heavily used, and let's face it, things don't stay pristine forever when you've got tens of thousands of trucks and hatchbacks jouncing down them every day.

Which brings us to the present day. The Gardiner is close to sixty years old in some parts, and chunks of concrete fall off it so often now that it barely qualifies as news. ("The Gardiner is still falling apart, and Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.") The city is expediting its repair calendar, in which loose chunks of the highway are removed before gravity has a chance to do the job, but that's only treating the symptoms. The core problem is that winter salt and meltwater and rain infiltrate cracks in the concrete, corroding the steel supports and introducing new weaknesses into the structure.

According to the city engineering department, it's essentially cosmetic damage and the highway itself remains in good shape. Nevertheless, I can't help but feel that the Gardiner can be taken as a microcosm of our modern infrastructural deficit.

A portion of the Gardiner Expressway in downtown Toronto.

In those long-vanished years, before and after the Second World War, things were built. In the United States, there were the hydroelectric dams of the Tennessee Valley Authority and beyond, which brought jobs and electricity to places which wanted for both, and after the war the Interstate Highway System made it feasible for new-minted car owners to drive from one end of the country to the other. In Canada, construction on the Toronto subway's first stage began in the late 1940s, and transportation projects such as the Gardiner were joined by Highway 400 and Highway 401, and in subsequent decades Ontario addressed its electricity needs by building some of the largest nuclear power plants in the world. Simply put, in that time they built things; it was not difficult to get infrastructure projects off the ground.

The problem, the problem we live with today, came after those projects were finished - when it seems like society collectively elected to rest on its laurels. Perhaps the threat of nuclear war had something to do with it - maybe the subconscious recognition that everything could be destroyed tomorrow, so what was the point of it? The future could take care of itself. Now we're in the future, and we have to deal with infrastructure that's steadily aging in the worst economic climate since the Depression.

It's not as if there weren't opportunities. There were many. If you could bring a random traveller from, say, 1969 to the modern day, they would probably be shocked by how much hasn't been done, by the degree to which heavily-used infrastructure in their day has not been supplemented or replaced. I'm not sure what the problem was - all I know is the effect; that it seems to be we've simply got out of the business of building for the future. In the United States, the American Society of Civil Engineers argues that an investment of $2.2 trillion over five years would be necessary to bring that country's infrastructure up to par. Five years ago, a report from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities argued that Canada's infrastructure needed a $123 billion infusion to head off a "collapse."

It all boils down to the fundamental weakness of governments, and the willingness of officials to kick the can down the road to future generations - the casual assumption that things will only get better, and that in the future society would become so much more wealthy that it'd be cheaper, all things considered, to put off maintenance until tomorrow and keep taxes low today. For decades, Canada and the United States have been saddled with leaders who made a science of kicking the can, who made the present day prosperous by writing the future IOUs.

The future isn't just soon. It's now, and there's not much we can do with a few fistfuls of paper.

Photo: A Succession of Bridges

You can see a lot of bridges from New Westminster. Here, looking from the eastern edge of downtown, the old Pattullo Bridge dominates; well beyond it in the distance are the two instances of the Port Mann Bridge, the older one taking after the Pattullo and the newer bearing a striking resemblance to the SkyBridge. In ten years, this view will look rather different - the old Port Mann will be gone, and the Pattullo may have joined it too.


I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

The Crazy English Language

For some reason, people around the world are learning English to a degree unprecedented in history, to a degree that the number of English second-language speakers now exceeds the number of native speakers. Thanks to the worldspanning influence of the British Empire and the United States, and with major English-speaking countries found on almost every continent, English has become a lingua franca to a degree that French could only have dreamt of back in the day. Hundreds of millions of people are learning English... you almost have to wonder if they're gluttons for punishment.

Yes, yes, I know the value of English, particularly in terms of its widespread nature meaning that people from diverse areas are likely now to have it in common. But that doesn't change the fact that it is English, this ramshackle, kludged-together contraption of nouns and adverbs that hangs together with spit and prayer and bailing wire. Tens of millions of native speakers don't appreciate this, because the flipside of English's new universality is that it gives native speakers a reason to remain unilingual - why go to all the effort of twisting your brain around some other language, when so many of its speakers are likely as not already learning yours? This is a significant problem, especially in North America - English Canada's relations with Quebec and the United States' positions on Mexican immigration might not be as fraught if more of the majority spoke the language of the minority.

Still, learning another language doesn't solely involve maneuvering your mind to pick up the ins and outs of how it works; the same process happens with your own, giving you the opportunity to see your native language from more of an outsider's perspective.

English of the 1920s - remarkably little language drift since then!

I've recently renewed my attempts to learn Japanese through language exchange as well as textbooks, which means that I use my shaky grasp of my native language to help someone else learn it, and they in turn help me out with their native Japanese. So far, one of the greatest attractions I've found with Japanese is its simplicity in comparison to the Romance languages; there are only two tenses, many things don't have to be stated once it's obvious what you're talking about, and words aren't gendered! Not like in languages like French, where you have to remember whether or not a desk or a pencil is masculine or feminine. Even when the class had a talking pineapple on VHS to help us out, trying to get down the whole je/tu, il/elle, nous/vous, ils/elles thing in French represented a huge barrier of entry to me in my elementary and high school classes.

English's weirdnesses aren't necessarily as obvious. I certainly would never have thought about them if it hadn't fallen to me to explain them. For example, take the following sentences: "While hiking in the woods I encountered a bear" versus "I encountered a bear while hiking in the woods."

My Japanese exchange partner expressed confusion that these two sentences had exactly the same meaning, to the extent that I had to ask around at work the next day to make sure they did have the same meaning, and I wasn't just moving bad freight. I couldn't even explain at first why they were the same! These are things that a native speaker doesn't need to consciously know; after being brought up in the language, surrounded by it, native speakers understand and speak it less through education than by a sort of socially-inculcated instinct, no matter what language it is - I would imagine mostly, though, for people who are brought up unilingual.

Beyond that, there's English's array of modifiers, "on" and "by" and "of" and "with" and so on, used in differing ways from sentence to sentence and generally only known to be right by native speakers because it sounds right. Confronting something like that head-on forces you to appraise it in an entirely new way. With another native speaker, you might just say "don't talk like that, it's wrong" - when it comes to a learner, that doesn't go far enough. You have to know the rules before you can start breaking them with confidence.

The English language, as it stands today, is a premier example of evolution in action - memetic evolution, certainly, but many of the same factors still apply. English is not even close to being an ideal language - the fact that that word isn't spelled "langwij" is just one piece of evidence for that - just like the human body is not even close to being ideal for a species of thinking, industrial beings like ourselves. It doesn't need to be ideal; it just needs to work sufficiently well, just like the reverse wiring in the human eye. The English language is a memeplex that has evolved piecemeal over a thousand years and more, incorporating bits and pieces from here and there, working well enough to be understood and lucky enough to be piggybacking on peoples that bent the world to their will.

That doesn't change the fact that, also like humanity, it's a miracle that English managed to get anywhere at all.

Photo: Hey Hey, Ho Ho

Yesterday, while hundreds of thousands took to the streets of Montreal in protest against Quebec's draconian Bill 78 - which I wrote about the other day, if you're unfamiliar - smaller sympathy demonstrations rose up across Canada. A relatively small group, perhaps a hundred people or so, made its way through downtown Vancouver yesterday afternoon, though it wasn't long before the demonstrators were herded away by the police. First time I've ever seen a police cruiser driving on the sidewalk.

The events in Montreal, and the inability of the police to control something so massive, is just one more reminder that ultimately, all governments require the consent of the governed to function - and that any government's first priority is to keep as many of the governed as possible from realizing that.


I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

All the President's Genes

Ten years ago, the only reason anyone really talked about the need for the President of the United States to be a natural-born citizen was in connection with whether Arnold Schwarzenegger's mail would ever come to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Today, it's a bit more heated than that; despite the presentation of fifty-year-old certificates and newspaper announcements, there are still quite a few people who believe that the evidence is a hoax and that Barack Obama (aka B-Rock "The Islamic Shock" Hussein Superallah Obama) was born outside the USA. Presumably, they also believe that a nice man in New York has a bridge to sell them and that once they hear back from that exiled Nigerian prince they'll be millionaires.

Although the meaning of "natural-born citizen" isn't defined within the Constitution, it has gained the established legal meaning of someone who was born an American as opposed to someone who acquired their American citizenship at a later date - this was an important consideration back in the eighteenth century, as it slammed the door on the possibility of European aristocrats coming over, starting a political storm, and ending up in the White House. Since then, the electorate has often had its hands full dealing with American aristocrats. Sure, it's practically unique when it comes to developed countries - not even as homogeneous a state as Japan has that kind of limitation written into its constitution (a constitution which, incidentally, was written by the United States).

For now, this is a sufficient definition... but I don't believe it'll stay that way forever. Why not? It's as simple as this - "natural-born citizen" doesn't necessarily have just the one meaning. Who defines what a "natural-born citizen" is in an age of genetic engineering?

Lookit that! It's DNA. Hey, give me a break. It's hard to illustrate abstract concepts.

Plenty of people have, shall we say, a thing against genetic engineering, most notably reflected in what seems to be a common reaction to genetically modified plants that end up in the human diet. The prevalence of the term "frankenfood" in the media tells you all you need to know about how a lot of people view it - that we're playing God, that we're going too far, nonwithstanding that humans have been genetically engineering plants for thousands of years by uprooting ones with attributes we don't like and planting ones with attributes we do like. The difference today is that genetic engineering is down to a science, and science is bad, mm'kay.

This opposition to genetically modified organisms manifests in a number of ways; recently, a group of anti-GM protestors in the United Kingdom threatened to destroy a test crop of wheat genetically tweaked for greater resistance against aphids, and over the weekend an organic farmer broke into the research centre and vandalized crops. Personally, outside the prospect of "terminator" genes - that is, food crops genetically modified for sterility, so that farmers have to continually purchase seeds from the manufacturer - I have difficulty understanding just what it is about genetically modified food that gets people so worked up.

Bear in mind that these are just genetically modified plants, and they're already getting this reaction. What the hell's going to happen when we have genetically modified *people*? Would a genetically engineered Presidential candidate face opposition because he or she wasn't "natural-born," but cooked up in some laboratory? The obvious answer, unless people really change their ways over the coming decades, is yes. When it comes to Obama and the birth certificate "controversy," what it comes down to is the claim that he's not American. When it comes to President Future, it would be as simple as suggesting that he or she isn't human.

Harsh? Yes... but wholly in line with what I've come to expect from people.

Photo: Bridging the Creek

I've probably said it before, but it bears repeating: the Burrard Bridge is easily one of the most aesthetically pleasing bridges in Vancouver, with only the Lions Gate giving it any real competition as far as I'm concerned. It was designed and built in a different time, when form didn't just simply follow function. Compare it to the Granville Street Bridge, an aesthetically dead elevated roadway that remains a perfect product of the staid 1950s, from which this photo was taken.

Give me Art Deco any day.


I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

Quebec's Demonstrations of Authority

Quebec is no stranger to authoritarianism. In 1970, the only peacetime declaration of martial law in Canadian history came as a result of Quebec's FLQ crisis. From 1937 to 1957, the province's Padlock Law allowed the government to close properties and incarcerate people found to be involved in the propagation of "Communism or Bolshevism" - concepts which weren't defined in the law - until it was struck down as unconstitutional. In the 1930s Adrien Arcand, one of Canada's most prominent fascists, operated out of Montreal.

So it wasn't particularly surprising when I heard that the National Assembly passed a bill that, in small but significant part, hews back to these traditions. Though Bill 78 is primarily concerned with things like preventing the forcible denial of peoples' access to educational institutions, there is one clause buried within it that goes rather broadly beyond the current student crisis. Because, you know, there ain't nothin' you can't justify if you first hitch it up to the maintenance of peace, order, and public security.

DIVISION III
PROVISIONS TO MAINTAIN PEACE, ORDER AND PUBLIC SECURITY

16. A person, a body or a group that is the organizer of a demonstration involving 10 people or more to take place in a venue accessible to the public must, not less than eight hours before the beginning of the demonstration, provide the following information in writing to the police force serving the territory where the demonstration is to take place:

(1) the date, time, duration and venue of the demonstration as well as its route, if applicable; and

(2) the means of transportation to be used for those purposes.

The police force serving the territory where the demonstration is to take place may, before the demonstration and to maintain peace, order and public security, order a change of venue or route; the organizer must comply with the change ordered and inform the participants.

Now there's a triumph of our democratic freedoms right there.

Not a demonstration - or maybe it is. How does one tell the difference?

Even though I don't live in Quebec, and these provisions will fall out of force on July 1, 2013, I have some big problems with this bill. The biggest one is this: who defines what a "demonstration" is? The bill comes with definitions for such arcane terms as "college," "employee," and "student association," but what they're talking about when they refer to demonstrations is left frustratingly vague. What's the difference between a simple gathered crowd and a demonstration? Who's responsible for making the call? What if a group doesn't believe they're a demonstration, but the police does?

The last thing a government needs is more legislated leeway to restrict personal rights. The vagueness of this law, its unwillingness to define just what qualifies as a demonstration, leaves it ripe for abuse.

The usual suspects, like the Globe and Mail, are already working to shore this up. On Friday, it published an editorial reminding us that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms provides for "freedom of peaceful assembly." Yes, it does - but that doesn't make a difference. The Charter rights of people in Quebec are still being abridged by this bill, because it does not distinguish between peaceful and violent protests; it does not make reference to "a demonstration involving 10 people or more who plan to wreck shit."

Demonstrations have a place within a healthy democratic society - but when all demonstrations are clamped down upon to restrain the violent ones, that health is diminished.

Photo: Green Lens Flare on Granville

Today's photo comes from a late afternoon on Granville Street back in December, when the sun has this irritating habit of setting before 5 PM. I don't have much to say about it otherwise - it sort of speaks for itself. I do like the way the green on the traffic light got flared, though. Not something I could have expected or planned for.


I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

Highway to the Future Zone

When thinking casually about the future, it's tempting for some to make straight-line predictions - that tomorrow will be today, only more so - since the alternative of things changing in unsettling ways isn't the sort of thing a lot of people like to consider. Things will keep on going, that clock will keep on ticking, no unexpected outside event will show up to knock our plans out of kilter, and the things we like will still be riding high.

That's a comfortable way of thinking, but it makes those who follow it particularly vulnerable to unexpected surprises. The fishermen of Newfoundland, for example, probably thought that the future would look a lot like the present right up until 1992, when the cod fishery collapsed from decades of overfishing and one of the Maritimes' oldest industries came to a virtual halt almost overnight. Surprises are inevitable, and while you can't expect them specifically, there's nothing stopping people and organizations from planning for them in general.

At least, when ideology doesn't get in the way. Then you tend to get roadblocks of the sort that have appeared in the United States recently, specifically in regard to its transportation infrastructure. This has already happened in Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin, where the local governors rejected federal high-speed rail network funding because of concerns that it would be too expensive; there's also opposition from those who feel that government spending on high-speed rail would be wasteful, and that the Interstate Highway System is good enough for America.

That's intercity transit, though. When it comes to transit within cities, the roads aren't the only answer - can't be the only answer; the implicit assumption behind urban road networks is that not everyone will be using them. People find their own ways to get around, and it's not always behind the wheel of a car - from public transit to bicycles to their own two legs, when you're in a sufficiently large, well-designed community there's a multiplicity of ways to get where you're going. But...

The other day I ran across the article "Oops - wrong future!" on Salon by Michael Lind, asking what sort of infrastructure was really vital for the United States to build in the twenty-first century. Most of it was the sort of thing I've heard before, except for a point several paragraphs down about self-driving cars; that when it comes to moving passengers, "robocars may be fatal for fixed-rail transportation."

Pictured: robotic fixed-rail transportation.

Lind's idea here is that self-driving cars, once the technological and regulatory hurdles intrinsic in putting computers in the driver's seat are overcome, may not only replace inter-city transit, with trains competing with "high-speed convoys of robot cars on smart highways," but even within cities could eventually "relegate light rail and inter-city rail to the museum, along with the horse-drawn omnibus and the trans-atlantic blimp."

Somehow, I have difficulty believing that last part - partially because it seems to spring from that whole idea of the future being the present, only more so. In the future cars will still be the way to get around, only they'll be even better at it than they are now! Once the taxis are automated, the price will be competitive with subways and light rail, and the comparative advantage of those modes will vanish!

There's a big assumption present here, one that is no doubt invisible to a great many people but stands out clear as day to me - that in the future, everyone will own a self-driving car. The alternative, that a fleet of self-driving cars would replace established public transit systems, strikes me as ridiculous. Self-driving car or not, they're not free. Fuel still needs to be paid for. Maintenance still needs to be paid for. They need to be kept somewhere when they're not in use. In the future, even self-driving cars will not be free, but the idea that a large city would replace its public transit with a self-driving car system strikes me as ridiculous.

Let's take a look at the numbers: let us compare a modern, self-driving four-car Mark II SkyTrain with a self-driving car that will be represented, for purposes of comparison, as having identical dimensions to a ninth generation Honda Civic. One four-car Mark II train is sixty-eight meters long, and can accommodate five hundred and eighty people crushloaded. The Civic, which is 4.3 meters long and approximately as wide as the train, could carry about 6 people crushloaded - that's with them all scrunched together in the back seat.

Here, while one Mark II train has the physical footprint of sixteen Civics, those sixteen Civics could only carry ninety-six people in admittedly tight quarters. If you wanted to move as many people as the train you'd need ninety-seven cars - parked end-to-end they'd make a line more than four hundred meters long, and they'd fill a good-sized parking lot on their own. That's just one train; during rush hour Vancouver runs more than fifty trains, though admittedly they're not all as spacious as the modern Mark IIs. For me, the numbers just don't add up.

That's not to say that self-driving cars wouldn't be revolutionary in their own way; however, they'd be far more of a threat to taxi companies than fixed rail. Rail transit operates on economies of scale, when there are so many people regularly going from A to B that it's sensible to have frequent, high-capacity service to connect them. While point-to-point service is more efficient, it founders when you consider that most people will be going to and from different points. Self-driving cars and public transit will complement each other - self-driving cars won't bring back the old, supposed "glory days" of the freedom behind the wheel.

Photo: Cargo Cranes, All in a Row

Usually when I see the big orange cargo cranes on the Vancouver waterfront near Granville Square, their arms are angled about forty-five degrees upward - their inactive position, I suppose. The other day they were busy loading up the container ship Hyundai Long Beach, and they looked like this while they were doing it. I've never seen them in motion before; too bad I wasn't able to get one with a container in motion.


I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

Ruling From the Echo Chamber

It's a hard lesson, but it's true: no one group, be it an individual or a government in power, has all the answers. They may think they do, as people are wont to do, but that just demonstrates humanity's boundless capacity for arrogance and self-deception. Everything we see, everything we know about the world is filtered through many lenses: what we believe, what we know, what we want to achieve, and so on. Be it one person or one group of like-minded people, they're incapable of coming to a nuanced understanding of the world just by interrogating it from their own perspective. Outside input is necessary to challenge us, to find the weaknesses that we never would've noticed ourselves.

You know what else, though? Challenges hurt. Something in our heart of hearts, the most primitive sectors of the brain, doesn't like it when someone else points out flaws in our view. What do you mean there are flaws? There aren't any. It's perfect. You're just trying to displace me and become alpha male of the troop, aren't you? You're trying to replace me!

It's a deep-seated drive, sure, but it's easy enough to overcome with the application of enough conscious will and intellectual vigor. So it should come as no surprise that Canada's Conservative government embraces it.

On Monday, the Globe and Mail reported on the fate of the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, an independent advisory group which had been around since 1988 and was defunded in the Conservatives' first majority budget last year. While Harper's mouthpieces initially claimed the defunding was because the group was redundant, with advice on sustainable development far more easily available from a multitude of sources now than it was in the '80s, we now know that it was really just nothing but governmental capriciousness.

"Why should taxpayers have to pay for more than 10 reports promoting a carbon tax, something that the people of Canada have repeatedly rejected?" John Baird said in the House on Monday. “It should agree with Canadians. It should agree with the government. No discussion of a carbon tax that would kill and hurt Canadian families." [CITATION NEEDED]

I don't even know where to fucking begin.

This isn't really a concept I can illustrate - so here, have a nice, calming photo of Cariboo Park.

Let's put the typically shrill Conservative arguments aside for a moment. The issue here is not their defunding of an environmentalist advisory board. No, the real issue is that this government is so arrogantly self-assured, so convinced that it is the font of authority and knowledge and wisdom, that there is no room for anything which does not already agree with its preconceived notions. This government doesn't want challenges - Harper has never wanted a challenge, and I can only imagine how much he raged for the five years his power was restrained by those idiotic citizens not making the obvious right choice and sweeping him into a majority in 2006.

The issue here is that, by its actions, this government is making it clearer and clearer every day that it has no business being in power. This is a government to which ideology is paramount, and a government that is too stupid to realize that ideology is an artifice. Events will not unfold a certain way because it would be politically convenient for them to do so, and all the ideology in the world won't hold back the relentless tides of reality. Entertaining disagreements and alternate viewpoints are vital if you want to remain dynamic, if you want to keep yourself from being blindsided by what you can't see yourself.

For some people, echo chambers are comforting - they provide a place to be right. In an echo chamber, you don't have to worry about some stranger barging in with some new information, frightening information, information that threatens your view of the world. No, in an echo chamber you have a place where everyone agrees with each other--at least, superficially so. But no group has complete consensus on everything, even a group kept in as tight an ideological lockstep as Harper's Conservatives. The details may seem irrelevant to outsiders, but inside an echo chamber, irrelevancies are magnified... particularly when people have the temerity to disagree.

There are still three years before the next scheduled election; I can't help but wonder if Harper won't be able to keep a tight grip on the reins, if the overwhelming importance of ideology will create cracks in the great grey Conservative edifice. As long as there's life, there's hope...

It's enough to make a man pine for Cascadia.

Photo: On Guard Toward the Sunset

Perhaps you've noticed those terracotta warrior statues that have begun appearing recently around downtown Vancouver. Until October these fiberglass statues, each painted in unique designs by local artists, will add novelty and color to the streets. At Howe and Cordova you'll find the Tlingit Warrior statue, and on Sunday evening I caught the sun setting at just the right angle for a photo like this.


I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

Quaff Review #23: Secession Cascadian Dark Ale

There's something to be said for self-determination and for independence. People always want to be masters of their own destinies to as great a degree as possible, and the whole of the New World has been shaped by those who wanted to pursue their futures on their own terms, from Nunavut to the United States and from Panama to Argentina. While today the borders are firmly drawn with thick ink on the maps and stern guards at the crossing points, that doesn't mean they won't stay the same through tomorrow and tomorrow.

Cascadia! Not just a more aesthetically pleasing name to describe the Pacific Northwest, but a region made up of British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon. On occasion it's been tapped as a country of the future, and perhaps one day that will be the case after all - granted, in order for that to happen something would have to happen to the United States first, as history shows that it takes a rather dim view of secession. Secession Cascadian Dark Ale, on the other hand, is nothing to look at dimly. Indeed, it's dark enough that even when you shine a light down on it, it remains resolutely opaque. Brewed by Hopworks Urban Brewery of Portland, Oregon, Secession is an organic, carbon-neutral beer that urges us to "join the party and uncap a revolution." I've been looking for a bottle of this particular brew for months, and was pretty much resigned to having to go down to Portland to find some, when during an unsuccessful search for a bottle of Rogue's Voodoo Bacon Maple Ale I found it on the shelf at the Central City Liquor Store in Surrey.

According to the label, Secession is a Cascadian Dark Ale - this is a relatively new style of beer, the result of experimentation by craft brewers across Cascadia, making use of Northwest hops as a key ingredient. The style was pioneered by Rogue Ales of Portland with its Skullsplitter in 2003, and has been catching on since. Technically it's a kind of India Pale Ale, and while I know that the "pale" here refers to the nature of the malt that was used to make the beer, there is nevertheless something off about taking something as dark as Guinness and calling it "pale," sort of like calling East Germany "democratic" with a straight face.


As far as the beer itself goes - it's got something of a spicy smell, one which brings to mind pine trees in springtime. The taste is recognizably that of an IPA, somewhat bitter with a vaguely metallic, hoppy aftertaste that is nevertheless much more tolerable than other IPAs I've tried. With a 6.5% alcohol content it hits somewhat hard if you're not eating anything with it... and you really should be eating something with it, if only to cleanse your palate of the hoppy aftertaste once it's run its course, like big, thick, dripping sausages and a mound of mashed potatoes. At least that's what it made me hanker after. Keep this one cold before you uncap it, too - it was easy enough to tell that it would taste a lot worse if you give it the chance to warm up. The label gives it "15 degrees Plato," but this isn't an instruction to serve it at a temperature of 15 degrees - this refers instead to its sugar content. Apparently it's a popular measure in at least the Czech Republic, but this is the first time I've encountered a North American beer using that particular yardstick.

As the old commercials say, you have to live here to get it. Secession is pretty much only available in Cascadia, though you may also be able to find it in parts of Idaho and Alberta, even though Alberta has never been part of Cascadia and would in fact stink up the place with all its coal and dirty oil. We keep all those all-natural pine-scented air fresheners all along the Rocky Mountains for a reason. At Central City, a bottle of this set me back about $8.65 before taxes.

Stepping back from the beer for a moment, I have to give Hopworks kudos on Secession's graphic design. It's a clear, individual label - not many beers have national maps on them - done in the colors of the Cascadian flag, using Hopworks' specific, eyecatching font; both in design and taste it strongly outperforms the other independence-themed beer I've tried, L'Independante of Quebec, and that one was an honestly pro-independence brew.

I don't normally like pale ales, but Secession was worth a go - so if that's up your alley, uncap a bottle and raise a stein to a free Cascadia.

ANDREW'S RATING: 4.25/5

Previous Quaff Reviews

• #22: Asahi Black
  
• #21: Howe Sound Rail Ale
  
• #20: Olympia
  
• #19: Eel River Açaí Berry Wheat Ale
  
• #18: Bah Humbug
  
• #17: KLB Raspberry Wheat Beer
  
• #16: Mana Energy Potion
  
• #15: HE'BREW Messiah Bold
  
• #14: Mackinac Pale Ale
  
• #13: Ola Dubh Special Reserve 40
  
• #12: Hitachino Nest Japanese Classic Ale
  
• #11: La Loubécoise
  
• #10: Summer Honey Seasonal Ale
  
• #9: Earthquake High Gravity Lager
  
• #8: Route des épices
  
• #7: Sparks Plus
  
• #6: Hurricane High Gravity Lager
  
• #5: L'Indépendante
  
• #4: Antigravity Light Ale
  
• #3: Nektar
  
• #2: Innis & Gunn Original
  
• #1: Abbey Belgian Spiced Ale

Photo: Thank You For Storing With Us

The other week I found these padlocks, in varying states of disrepair, already secured to the chain-link fence under the SkyTrain tracks where they cross over Clark Drive. Normally, if you wanted to get rid of an old lock such as this I'd figure you'd just throw it in some bin, rather than just leaving them on a streetside fence and forgetting about them - presumably so, considering how rusted that one on the left is. Yet I feel like the arrangement has some kind of artistic merit to it.


I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

New Westminster, the Brooklyn of the West?

I guess that, for once, I was ahead of the curve. when I moved to New Westminster in October 2010, I knew very little about it; I'd visited once, for about five minutes, walking from Columbia Station to Royal Avenue and back again. When I was looking for apartments, the city's attraction was three-fold: it was built on bedrock and so not vulnerable to earthquake liquefaction (I did not look in Richmond for precisely this reason), the rental rates were reasonable, and it was well-served by the SkyTrain while at only a modest remove from downtown Vancouver. Had I gone with a Vancouver address, I'd more than likely have been taking a bus to get to the train - not that I have anything against buses; just that in my experience they can be significantly less reliable, schedule-wise, than modes which run on rails. In New West, I can walk straight there.

It took some adjusting once I set up here - for the first couple of months the only supermarket in downtown New West was the IGA in Columbia Square, which despite being next door to New Westminster Station feels remote as Burnaby - but in the last year and a half, I've watched downtown's candle burn brighter and brighter. There's an energy here that gets more palpable with each passing day.

I'm not the only one. A couple of weeks ago the Georgia Straight had New West's rise as its cover story, so I guess New West is now "officially" cool, and last week The Tyee posted an article on how New West may be set to become the Brooklyn to Vancouver's Manhattan, and not just a Brooklyn set for television and movie productions - that is, a place where young creative professionals can actually afford to live. I can understand the cachet Vancouver has - Keith MacKenzie put it as wanting "to be part of a community, not a matrix of parking lots and six-lane freeways" - a problem which, honestly, is in vast oversupply in the Lower Mainland. I guess that's down to the relative recency of European settlement here; outside of Vancouver, only a handful of communities were able to put down roots before the postwar suburbanization boom swept the rest under a relentless tide of subdivisions. New West is, bluntly, too small to be that rambling and disconnected.

Nevertheless, I have to admit a bit of concern when I see the media finally taking notice of New West. With each passing year, rising condominium projects are defining more and more of the city's skyline, and there's very little unoccupied land to sink their foundations into. Building in New West necessarily involves replacement; the Plaza 88 and Multi-Use Civic Facility replace low-slung commercial strips, and the Trapp+Holbrook project they're now advertising on the SkyTrain roofs will rise behind the facades of neglected heritage buildings downtown. Up on Royal Avenue, only a short walk from my front door, a multi-storey all-wood condo project is rising on what was a block of rental apartments eighteen months ago.

That's what concerns me; that as more and more people recognize New Westminster as a hip and cool and affordable place to live, that rush to densify will see the foundations being rearranged under renters like me.

For every hole that's dug, there was something up top that had to be demolished first.

You don't need to look particularly hard to find that an emphasis on property ownership is present all throughout human history. In medieval Europe, the nobles were noble in part from all the property they owned. In the early days of the United States, you had to own property (and be a white man) in order to vote. The desire to have a piece of the world that has your name on it and will be all yours once you finish paying the bank its blood money is a deeply-seated one.

But that doesn't mean it should be catered to at the expense of everything else. Not all of these young professionals have the financial resources or the desire to be hooked into a decades-long mortgage - I certainly don't, and the ongoing trainwreck of the American housing crash has not improved my outlook. It's incumbent on the city government to make sure that downtown New West can continue to be a place where people can afford to live, whether they buy or rent.

Because if it doesn't, what happens to renters who get priced out? New West differs from Brooklyn in one important factor: size. Even with a population of 2.5 million, Brooklyn's 183 square kilometers can absorb a lot of people; New West's 15.6 square kilometers, not so much. Here, New Westminster's size works against it; the downtown core is small, and there just aren't that many potential neighborhoods for the priced-out to relocate to. Nor do I much like the implications of less affluent renters being forced to decamp for more distant ground - sure, New Westminster has four SkyTrain stations, but there are huge chunks of the city that don't exactly have convenient, walkable access to them; the idea of easy SkyTrain access becoming the province of the affluent irks me greatly. I don't want to have to buy a car; how many options would that leave me, and people like me?

New Westminster is a fine city. I'd just like some assurances that as more people recognize that fact and come to call it their own, they don't end up turning it into a Yaletown on the Fraser.

Photo: It Appears To Be Some Sort of Spire

When I was briefly in Dublin eight years ago, among the things I encountered during a rather whirlwind introduction was the Spire of Dublin, which is a spire... in Dublin, surprisingly enough. It fills the spot that was until 1966 occupied by Nelson's Pillar, and is rather blunt in its "being a piece of public art" qualities - well, sharp, actually. It tapers to a point nearly four hundred feet off the ground. Looking at it now, it almost puts me in the mind of a space elevator cable, vanishing into the sky... but that's ridiculous. It'd be completely inefficient to anchor a space elevator at Ireland's latitude.


I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

To Form A More Fabulous Union

A few of the lines still have to be drawn, but mostly the paint's had a long time to dry. Ten years ago, the idea of same-sex marriage in the United States wasn't on the political radar in any significant way; today, New Mexico is the only state where it isn't specifically recognized or prohibited. While full same-sex marriage is presently on the books in New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Iowa, and Washington and Maryland are working on updating their laws accordingly, in most of the rest of the country - and across the entire former Confederate States of America - same-sex marriage is not only prohibited, those prohibitions are enshrined in the state constitutions. Contrast this to the Canadian experience, where over the course of two years it went from not being recognized anywhere to everyone except Alberta, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and Prince Edward Island having brought it in already before the federal government acted.

And you know what? In the last ten years, Canadian society hasn't collapsed because of what some people would likely call a "betrayal" or "abandonment" of traditional marriage. I'm sure that if you brought this up to some of the bigots who headed up the recent, victorious anti-same-sex marriage campaign in North Carolina - you know, the ones who say they're not anti-gay, but pro-marriage - you would get some special pleading or a dismissal of the Canadian experience as irrelevant. But that's how it is; the battle lines have been drawn, and for many people this sort of thing is a battle.

Yesterday, the supporters of equality received some unexpected reinforcements - that is, President Obama. Granted, it didn't come entirely out of nowhere; Vice-President Biden's recent expression of support clearly was a sounding rocket sent up to determine reactions. Though Obama's fresh stance on this issue does potentially create a new vulnerability for him in the coming election, it's still the right thing to do. Besides, in addition to at last providing a way to distinguish him from Romney, it's a way for him to shore up his support among his base, to recapture a part of the hope-and-change days of 2008, without actually having to do anything.

Dark blue indicates full recognition of same-sex marriage. Light blue indicates limited rights, light red indicates that it is banned by law, and the darker reds indicate it is banned by individual state constitutions. This file, created by Lokal_Profil, is used in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license it was made available under.

Though Obama already has the authority to indefinitely detain whoever he wants without the necessity for a trial or a charge and to order the extrajudicial assassinations of American citizens with drone attacks, that doesn't mean he can do anything he wants. The system itself prohibits it. How much of that "hope and change" platform philosophy was he able to implement during his Congressional majority, back before the Tea Party tidal wave in 2010? While his expression of support is an energizing gesture, undoubtedly reassuring to LGBT people who have seen people who want to restrict them and limit them win votes from coast to coast, it's just a gesture.

There's not even any room for a Constitutional amendment to prohibit the establishment of an "official definition of marriage," the way things stand. Thirty-eight states would need to vote in favor for that to pass, and thirty states have officially defined marriage in their constitutions. If something as innocuous as the Equal Rights Amendment couldn't pass - with a few outliers, held up in the main by that same hard core of ex-Confederate states - there'll have to be a seismic shift in American culture before the situation changes much.

The lines have been drawn, and attitudes will harden; people tend to get like that when they see the prospect of equality denied them. Though the opponents of same-sex marriage are, ultimately, on the wrong side of history, there's going to be a damn lot of history that has to unfold before people figure that out.