That's a lie, straight up; like I said in my report on the system a couple of weeks ago, the trains in use on the Seattle Center Monorail actually ride rather roughly. You can't tell that from the ground, though. They may not have amounted to much in the grand scheme of things, but those monorails certainly are nice to look at on an unseasonably cloud-free Seattle day.
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The democratic process would be a lot healthier if, before marking the ballot or pulling the lever or whatever it is people do when they vote in their particular regions, the voters read through the party platforms so that their votes could be informed ones. It's all too easy for media coverage to give you one impression of what a party wants to do, only to find that their platform documentation suggests something entirely different - take, for example, the Ontario Libertarian Party, which included in its platform documentation its committment to disassemble Ontario's medical licensing system.
Depending on what corners of the media you poke your nose into, you may have been hearing things about the 2012 platform for the Republican Party of Texas - and even though I don't expect to ever be in a situation where I would have the option for voting for the Republican Party in any form, I read the platform anyway. A lot of it is ordinary stuff of the sort that I've come to expect from the Republicans: the repeal of minimum wage, the abolition of the US Department of Education, the immediate repeal of the Affordable Care Act, "which we believe to be unconstitutional" and which they will likely continue to believe despite yesterday's ruling, and so on. The usual sort of stuff you hear from the Natural Governing Party of the red states.
Like any document put together by a committee, there are certainly contraditions. According to the platform, the Texas GOP supports "equal suffrage for all U.S. Citizens of voting age who are not felons," and yet the very next bullet sets out their desire for the Voter Rights Act - the legislation that outlawed discriminary voting requirements of the sort that were commonly used to disenfranchise blacks - "be repealed and not reauthorized." It likewise comes out against state lotteries, recognizing "that it is now known to be a regressive tax on the poor," and yet the first two bullets on the very next page lay out its goal to get rid of property taxes by "shifting the tax burden to a consumption-based tax." Considering the sort of things a lot of people in Texas consume because they're necessities of life, like food and gasoline, that sounds like it could very easily be regressive to me!
Let's be honest, though, there's nothing unusual about this - in this day and age, plenty of right-wing parties build their bases on this kind of rhetoric. That's why one of the points buried in the "Educating Our Children" section is chilling... even more so than how they "unequivocally oppose the United States Senate’s ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child," because who gives a shit about child trafficking and child soldiers and child pornography, anyway? Any preamble I could give would only detract, so here it is, straight from page 12 of the platform.
Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.
I don't even know where to start.
I need a distraction. Hey, look up there, it's a photograph of a dirty elephant!
I do not think it would be an exaggeration to say that education is the single most important factor facing us today, the single most effective tool humanity has ever created to better its lot. It was education that took us from the savanna to the stars; education that allowed new generations of engineers and scientists, thinkers and doers to build upon the foundations that had already been dug. Education is the key to a dynamic people, an informed people, a healthy people. Without education, you are no better off than a medieval shepherd with dung on your boots - you are totally at the mercy of the world system, a system that grows more complex by the day, without any opportunity to understand or influence it. Education is, quite literally, the key to freedom - people like Frederick Douglass learned, and taught, that lesson well.
Yet here we have the Texas Republican Party seeking to eviscerate the entire concept of education; not just to overlook, but actively avoid giving people what they need to fill their skeptical toolchests, to refuse to give them the skills necessary to look at the world critically. The GOP says it itself - they do not want children or parents to be challenged. To believe that what you know is the be-all and end-all, that there is no possibility of improvement or revision, that it is immune to any sort of challenge... that is the utter, absolute height of arrogance.
Perversely enough, though, I can understand why a political organization would want to push through changes like these. A person who has been taught critical thinking, who looks at the world with a skeptical eye, knows better than to take things at face value. By contrast, someone who's never been taught to chew on difficult questions and answers will swallow anything. It's easy for politicians to tell big lies when the people they're lying to were never instructed in how to sniff out those lies in the first place.
In the end, it's all about fear and control to ensure political power. Who cares about what happens down the line? Who cares that Texas is such a large education market that it effectively sets the standard for textbooks used throughout the United States? For people such as this, power is self-evidently its own reward, and damn the consequences.
Incidentally, seventh on the Texas GOP's list of principles is "Having an educated population, with parents having the freedom of choice for the education of their children." Just one more contradiction that wilts under the harsh light of skepticism.
You can still go to the spot I took this photo, at Yonge and Gould in downtown Toronto, but you can't see this anymore. Sam the Record Man is long gone - the spinning records in storage somewhere, the rest of the building knocked down to make room for new facilities at Ryerson University. This was taken back in November of 2008, more than a year after its closure and a few months before its demolition. From what I understand, the empty gap where it stood has yet to be filled.
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Everyone has their own way of dealing with criticism. Some ignore it, some invite it, and some pay attention to what their critics say to improve themselves for the next time. Then there are the people who've let a modicum of power go to their heads, people who think that because they're in charge they therefore define reality. People like, say, Keith Ashfield, Minister of Fisheries and Oceans and the minister responsible for the Canadian Coast Guard.
You may recall that among the multifarious provisions of the recent Conservative omnibus budget bill was the closure of CCGS Kitsilano, a Coast Guard base at the foot of the Burrard Bridge and adjacent to the heavily-used waters of False Creek and English Bay. Responsibility for ensuring the safety of Vancouver's waterways would therefore devolve to CCGS Sea Island, a hovercraft base adjacent to Vancouver International Airport. Time and again, when the issue came up in the media, this was the talking point that the government rallied around - that since there were two Coast Guard stations reasonably close to each other, one of them was therefore superfluous.
Following on from that, Minister Keith recently announced a funding boost of $100,000 to the Royal Marine Search and Rescue Auxiliary - an organization that I wasn't able to find anything out about, as the only hits for it on Google are for news articles talking about this funding boost. So what is the RMSRA? I have no idea, but Minister Keith obviously thinks that a thousand C-bills are enough to let it step into the spot the Coast Guard is vacating.
Minister Keith likewise has a message for his critics, here - namely, that claiming the impending closure of CCGS Kitsilano will put lives at risk is instead "propagating false information." I wish I could be that confident, that certain at times. It makes me wonder how Keith puts his pants on in the morning on account of the massive, hairy, swinging cojones he must have to make a statement like that with a straight face.
How long will it take them to get here, again?
Let's take a look at the numbers. Under the Conservatives' plan, the hovercraft of CCGS Sea Island will be the primary search-and-rescue vehicles for the entire Lower Mainland; in addition to their current area of responsibility in the Strait of Georgia and Fraser delta, they'll now also have to deal with people in distress on the waters in Burrard Inlet, False Creek, and English Bay. The Vancouver Sun reports that according to Minister Keith, "the closure of the station in no way endangers people using Vancouver-area waters" - but is that really the case?
The fact is this: the two stations are about eleven kilometers apart as the crow flies, but that's not much of a help, since those hovercraft are not exactly built to go roaring up Granville Street. By water, the rough distance is more like twenty-five kilometers, with potential straight-line paths complicated slightly by the breakwaters that keep Richmond from drowning. The two hovercraft stationed at Sea Island, CCGH Siyay and CCGH Penac, are faster than almost anything else on the water with maximum speeds of eighty-nine and eighty-three kilometers per hour.
At pedal-to-the-metal maximum speed, Siyay would need about seventeen minutes to cover the distance from CCGS Sea Island to CCGS Kitsilano; Penac would be only slightly slower, at eighteen minutes. In both cases, in case of trouble that's almost twenty minutes before any search and rescue activities can even begin, and since I doubt it's feasible for a hovercraft to be burning at maximum speed for the entirety of its run, it could well be even longer.
A lot can happen in twenty minutes, especially if what's already happened is serious enough that you've called the Coast Guard.
My own opinion on this is simple - it may not happen tomorrow, this year, or next year, but sooner or later someone will die on Vancouver's waters because, for whatever reason, the Coast Guard could not make it in time. On the water, seconds can count - and should that come to pass, it is this current government and Prime Minister Stephen Harper in particular who will bear responsibility for such death. We know, after all, where the buck stops in the Harper Government.
There are plenty of coin-operated binoculars installed in tower viewers along the shore in North Vancouver; you know, for the tourists and the interested to get a look at the city skyline. I was by there when I did the tourist thing two years ago. This one wasn't working, and it seemed to me they picked an unusual way to get across to potential viewers that it was out of service. Still - it is more straightforward than something like "PC LOAD LETTER."
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It's not been the greatest few days for aficionados of the printed word. Last week, the Toronto Star reported that the World's Biggest Bookstore, which isn't really but no matter because it's one hell of a catchy name, may be closing in December 2013 when the lease runs out. The condo developers are already circling like vultures, because everyone knows that the best way to ensure a livable, sustainable city is to build a thirty-story green-glass condo tower on every last parcel of land.
Here on the west coast, that sort of thing is already the way things go. Yesterday Does Your Mother Know? in Kitsilano, to my knowledge the only dedicated magazine store in Metro Vancouver, closed its doors thanks to steadily slowing business, attributed to the rise of smartphones and ereaders. I'll be honest, I only ever went in there once or twice, but that's just because Kits is way the hell out of my way. I don't know of any other place in the city that sells Atlantis Rising Magazine, which with its focus on UFOs, healing pyramids, free energy, and so on is probably the single most Fortean thing on the stands. I've certainly never seen it at Chapters.
This news, again, makes me glad that I do not own a smartphone or an ereader, because it means I do not need to feel a twinge of guilt about how my purchasing habits affect the broader economy. What it does mean is that Ray Bradbury had a certain point when he said "we've got too many internets." The internet's biggest problem is easy to overlook - it's what it overturns, it's what's left wrecked in its wake by its passing.
I feel like this ties in to what I wrote about earlier this month, regarding the practical invisibility of science fiction magazines to the people who'd be most likely to buy them. Put simply, the end of physical stores means the end of a certain kind of serendipity, the end of traditional discovery.
The World's Biggest Bookstore in Toronto. You'd think I'd have a shot or two of it somewhere in those forty thousand photos, but apparently not.
When I go to a bookstore, unless I'm checking to see if the new Analog and Asimov's are finally out yet, I don't know what I'm getting or even if I'm going to get anything. That's even more true when I visit a used bookstore, the sort of place that made me aware of the possibilities that were out there to begin with. Walking the shelves in a magazine store leaves you open to discovery, primed for finding things you didn't even know you were looking for. In a store you look this way and that, bouncing from thing to thing, making discoveries you would never have thought to look for yourself. Perhaps you didn't even know they existed.
In contrast, the online catalogs I've used on the exceedingly rare occasions I've bought books off the internet - cases in which the particular book I was looking for just couldn't be found anywhere in the physical realm - have been set up with the assumption that you already know what you want. None of the online directories I have experience with are able to replicate the ease of browsing, of having your attention drawn by a particular book's spine or title or cover. Sometimes it's the unexpected finds that are the sweetest, like when I found a weathered copy of The Third Industrial Revolution in Powell's, a book that's been out of print for decades.
The migration to electronic readers takes away a lot of that. Nothing has to go out of print when it's digital, and there goes the thrill of finding something that's hard to find. So too goes the ease of serendipity. Granted, it's not like things are on the ropes yet - though things aren't looking quite as resilient as they were a few years ago.
But if places like Powell's end up closing, then we might as well just let the world wind down.
What I know of protests in the United States comes from books and the media; I sure as hell don't involve myself in them when I'm down there, being a foreigner and all. I stumbled upon one while I was in Portland, though - a small one, assembled on the occasion of Mitt Romney being in town for some reason or another. What struck me were the number of police officers on the scene, practically one cop per demonstrator. I wouldn't be surprised if this is a normal sort of turnout.
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Long ago, back in a far-off and golden time that some of us call "the 1990s," people like Bill Nye appeared regularly on our television sets to tell us that science rules. But there was a problem here; more and more people came to the realization that scientific fields were disproportionately male, that a lot of women just didn't seem to be that interested in science.
It's an issue that people and organizations have been trying to crack for years. Yesterday, the European Commission - that is, the European Union's executive branch - launched a minute-long teaser advertisement for its "Science: It's a Girl Thing" project, launched as a well-intentioned effort to convey that science, well, rules... that it's okay for women to be interested in it. It's sad that something this basic is a necessary message in this day and age, but the fact is that for decades and centuries, women were told that science was off-limits to them. There's a lot that needs to be done to make up for our unenlightened, white-dude-focused past.
As for the European Commission's offering, well... what was apparent from the start was that it must have been conceived, scripted, designed, and produced entirely by traditionally-minded men. I mean, if you want to get women interested in science, you've got to appeal to what they're already interested in, right? Women love makeup and high heels, don't they? Focus on the high heels, make it look like a fashion commercial! And pink! Don't forget pink, women love pink. Just slather it everywhere! And where there's the word "science" at the end, replace the I with a lipstick applicator!
It's the sort of thing you'd expect to find accompanying an Onion article, but it was completely sincere. It took so much flak from the internet, all of it justified, that by 4:30 PM Pacific Time yesterday the original video had been made private on YouTube. What the European Commission forgot, though, is that the internet never forgets.
Brought to you by the same people who thought it was a good idea to create a fiscal union without a political union.
Look at that. Just look at it. Ignore the fact that until the very end, if you encountered this on television you wouldn't have any living idea what this was trying to sell you; hell, I don't watch TV anymore, maybe commercials honestly do look like this now. Consider instead the layers that this had to pass through to go from concept to realization. Consider the number of people who would have had to weigh in on this, consider this, sign off on this before it appeared on YouTube.
You have to ask yourself, how could they be so stupid? Not only that, but in asking, you realize the scope of the problem. I, personally, have difficulty believing that women were involved in creating something something so facile, so patronizing, so utterly vacuous. What I would expect to find is that the European Commission tendered the work to some public relations agency, and this pink-slathered mess is the result.
This is the sort of thing we can't forget. They would like it, they'd like it very much, if it would just slip away down the memory hole and be quietly forgotten. But this sort of thing is the problem: Ouroboros-like, it tries to encourage women to study science by itself encouraging the perceptions that discourage women from studying science. It was made by people whose hands are made of ham - they are ham-handed.
At least it's not all for the bad. It can be argued that the European Commission did, in fact, conduct a scientific experiment to determine whether people get pissed off when women are condescended to in the guise of extending a helping hand. In that case, EC, I'd like to see your error bars.
Back in July 2008, when the temperature in Toronto wasn't high enough to make the railway tracks themselves deform, I staked out the part of the route behind my Parkdale apartment and waited for the morning GO trains to come by. This here is a Milton Line train only a few minutes out from Union Station, and even with twelve cars being dragged behind that engine I would be surprised if there was an empty seat in any one of them. While the West Coast Express here in the Lower Mainland feels like something of a sideshow, the Greater Toronto Area would grind to a halt if it wasn't for GO.
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You don't have to look hard on the internet these days to find someone going on about the prophetic nature of RoboCop. Maybe not when it comes to cybernetic police officers - not yet, anyway - but in terms of the ongoing decay of Detroit, Michigan and the growth of corporations seeking to take over parts of the public sphere for pure profit, sometimes it seems that every day brings us closer to a world of corrupt corporate executives and robots unable to climb stairs and privatized police forces.
You might expect that to all be happening in the United States; in that, you'd be wrong. Instead, the spectre of a police force that is accountable not to a government and citizens but to a board of directors and shareholders is emerging in the United Kingdom, where the local head of G4S - a private security company, probably the world's largest employer you've never heard of, and the official security provider for the upcoming 2012 Summer Olympics - has gone on record with his prediction that by 2017, much of what British police services do today will then be done by private agencies.
It's already begun, of course, with the United Kingdom battered by recession; earlier this year, the Surrey Police and West Midlands Police entertained bids for a seven-year, £1.5 billion privatization scheme. While supporters are mainly drawing attention to "middle and back office functions" that would be given over to private companies, a contract note made public by the Guardian indicated that some of the fields up for privatization included beat patrols, management of high-risk individuals, the investigation of crimes, suspect detention, case development... you know, the sort of things that are at the core of police work. Though the plans have been put on hold, and were unpopular with citizens and police officers alike, I can't help but think this is a juggernaut that's going to keep on rolling. The first stabs have been taken, there's blood in the water, and the corporate sharks are circling.
This badge was worn by my grandfather, Les Parkinson, in the Manchester City Police from 1939 to 1968. This news would probably make him turn in his grave if he hadn't been cremated.
They're already working to shape the discussion in their favor. David Taylor-Smith, G4S's head of UK operations, tried to cast aspersions on opponents of privatization, saying that "the thought that everyone in the private sector is primarily motivated by profit and that is why they come to work is just simply not accurate... they are primarily motivated by pretty much the same as would motivate someone in the public sector."
I don't think anyone's questioning the motives of the actual people on the line there, chief. Generally speaking, someone who works a job will want to do well at that job, if for no other reason than they'll be fired if they don't. This is not about the employees - this is about the bosses. Bosses that will cease to have even a theoretical responsibility to the actual citizens, because keep in mind that G4S is publicly traded on the stock exchanges in London and Oslo, and it is the duty of such companies under capitalism to make as much profit as they possibly can. In some circumstances this sort of setup is all right, but when these companies are providing necessary services - services like policing and criminal justice - "service" and "profit" are incompatible. One of them's gotta give, and I'm pretty sure which one it'd be.
It's ridiculous, that's what it is. Policing is one of the core responsibilities of a state. If things have got to the point where you think you can't afford it, where you're seriously considering farming out not just back-office stuff, but actual boots-on-the-ground, to entities that exist solely to make money, then that's it. You're done. You have failed as a state. Well done, dudes.
Although I picked up plenty of Portland Streetcar photos while gathering the details for a future Tunnel Visions post, most are from very similar perspectives thanks to the limited choices available to me. Not having access to the upper story of a building along the streetcar route where I could camp out and wait for one to come by, I had to take what I could get for alternate views. Fortunately, streetcar #007 was kind enough to head off northbound just as the Aerial Tram was crossing Moody Avenue.
That roof is a real departure from the streetcar's otherwise smooth, streamlined appearance. But all that mechanical stuff has gotta go somewhere.
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Some folks are naturally suspicious of government, and thereby primed to react strongly whenever it suggests an action they disapprove of. Take the example of the United States, where a general distrust of the government is one of the unifying factors of the modern right wing. While it's wise not to take anything a government says at face value with no critical analysis, it's equally wise to do the same for everything; in many respects, for-profit corporations have far more incentive to do things worthy of suspicion than do governments.
In Canada, that anti-government suspicion has been surfacing in fits and starts over the last year, ever since Stephen Harper got his majority and decided it was time to show Canadians what happens when the Conservatives have no checks on their power - for the record, what happens is along the lines of "fuck you, we're doing this anyway." The petulant refusal of the Conservatives to even consider breaking up their omnibus budget bill last week, the robotic party discipline which fuels the flames that lick at Canadian democracy... what, I ask, are they trying to hide from us? That is the sort of thing we should be focused on, the sort of thing we should hold the government to account over, the sort of thing we should make sure that we do not forget.
When it comes to this sort of situation, it's all about picking battles... but some people are so fired up that they want to pick them all.
Recently, the Canada Border Services Agency stated that it is working toward the installation of HD cameras and microphones capable of "[eavesdropping] on travellers' conversations." It didn't take long for this news to spread across the internet; Boing Boing pointed to it with the delightfully unbiased headline "Canadian government wants to fill airports with KGB-style hidden microphones." I've seen others react with surprise at the announcement... surprise that this wasn't already being done. I mean, these are airports we're talking about; places where my mom instructed me to never so much as utter the word "bomb" in any context whatsoever. To be honest, I was a bit surprised this wasn't already going on myself.
To be really honest, I'm having a hard time getting worked up over this.
"I'm sorry, I didn't catch that. Please repeat your threat in the direction of the microphone."
I understand that when a government agency suggests surveillance, opposition is the appropriate automatic reaction; otherwise, democracy would probably last about half an hour. But we can't just build our policies and our outlooks based on automatic responses. This is not Nineteen Eighty-Four; this is not even close to it. Nobody's installing telescreens in our homes, nobody's wiring up public squares for audio/video monitoring, no one's tagging dissidents or making them disappear. These are, realistically, airports - places where something like eighty-seven percent of all the conversations these microphones could capture would deal with how some Air Canada flight is delayed yet again, or Air Canada lost someone's luggage, or that Air Canada is expensive and sucks.
They are, traditionally, not places that are vital to free expression. Airports are not public squares, and there wasn't any "Occupy LaGuardia" or "Occupy YVR" last year. Unless you work there, if you're there for more than a couple of hours than either you've gone through security really early, or Air Canada is delaying your flight by five hours. If this was something different, something more wide-ranging like banning all usage of photography or recording devices in airports, that would be a serious affront to our rights and cause for pushback; after all, that sort of law would have allowed the RCMP to sweep the circumstances regarding the death of Robert Dziekanski right under the rug.
Really, it's the idea of the slippery slope that has so many people fired up, I think. I wouldn't be surprised if Boing Boing's rather hyperbolic headline is at least partially motivated by that; Cory Doctorow, though originally from Canada, now lives in the United Kingdom and is well aware of what a surveillance state is like, and a UK-style ubiquitous CCTV setup should absolutely be prevented from being built in Canada.
The important thing is to pick one's battles. There are a lot of people who won't get worked up about this sort of surveillance in airports, who wouldn't see anything wrong with it, who would look at the people closing ranks against it and wonder what their problem is. Raising awareness about this kind of surveillance in airports is always a good thing, but unless it threatens to go beyond the airport... there are plenty of battles to be fought, and choosing the wrong ones only weakens the whole.
In and around downtown Seattle, you'll find representatives of pretty much every major architectural movement of the last hundred and twenty years - even Googie. Within every style, though, there's ample opportunity to go beyond what's ordinary and leave a striking impression. I got that from Rainier Tower, a skyscraper that doesn't seem unusual at all until you notice that it's balanced on top of an inverted concrete pyramid. Really, it almost looks like the realization of a Jenga tower, something that shouldn't be able to stand up at all, but does anyway... like a sufficiently strong breeze would knock it over.
It's still got one hell of a look, though.
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Every once in a while, Acts of Minor Treason hops out of New Westminster, lands in some other city with some other light- or heavy-rail transit system, and looks at different ways of getting around on two rails, whether it's on the ground, under it, or above it all.
There was a time, not so long ago, when monorails were the future. Those sleek, shiny railways of the sky would glide as softly as clouds on unbending tracks across all the great cities of the world, lifting people above the choked and crowded streets and into the future. Culturally speaking, in the immediate postwar years the monorail was, like the rocketship, seen as intrinsically futuristic thanks in part to the promotional efforts of monorail manufacturers working to carve out a niche for themselves while the idea of mass transit was being reinvented. In North America, the average person's first encounter with a monorail would more likely than not have come at one of the Disney theme parks; the Disneyland Monorail opened in 1959, the first of its kind on the continent.
Perhaps, in the end, that was part of the problem.
Three years later, a second monorail started rolling on the west coast. As part of 1962's Century 21 Exposition in Seattle, Washington, the Seattle Center Monorail was built to connect the World's Fair grounds with downtown Seattle, two kilometers away. For seventy-five cents - more than five dollars today - an adult could board at the Westlake Mall station, and in a matter of minutes emerge at the foot of the Space Needle, centerpiece of the fair. It was quick, clean, and airy, and on the covers of the magazines right next to the Needle as an example of what America would look like in years to come. Granted, other World's Fairs also had their monorails, but unlike Vancouver in 1986, Seattle chose to keep its one-railed remnant of the exposition running.
Fifty years later the fair has moved on, and the future didn't unfold exactly the way they expected it to back in 1962. Nevertheless, the monorail is still there, making it one of the handful of American monorails that are not in an amusement park, a zoo, or Las Vegas - a reminder of what people looked ahead to once, but which the future never quite delivered. Today, while it's got long headways, relatively limited service, and seems to be mostly a tourist shuttle, it nevertheless has some role to play in the greater Seattle transportation network, such as it is... but if things had gone another way, it could have been so much more.
System
Red Train waits at Westlake Center Station.
If you want to visualize the Seattle Center Monorail, draw a backwards L and mark a dot at each end, one for Westlake Center and one for Seattle Center. Congratulations! You've now created your very own rough monorail route map, though it does gloss over some important bits: namely, it's more of a diagonal than a simple straight line. To put it in a Vancouver context, imagine if Expo 86 had seen the construction of the SkyTrain, but only between Main Street-Science World and Commercial-Broadway; sure, potentially useful in certain circumstances, but far too limited to be of significant value to the urban fabric.
From its western terminus at the Space Needle, the Monorail soars over the EMP Museum and runs south to 5th Avenue, which it follows southeast all the way to the Westlake Center terminus, just north of Pine and adjacent to the mall's food court. You'll find most of the track elevated above the median of 5th Avenue at approximately a third-floor level. For fifty years, that's been it - the two original World's Fair trains have been going back and forth across that stretch of track from morning until night, never able to venture further.
It's not like it's isolated from the rest of the urban transit network, though. At Westlake, passengers can transfer to the Seattle Streetcar or the Link light rail system, as well as the buses that provide service through the area, but there's no integration between the services. In particular, if you need to get from the monorail to the streetcar and it's raining, as it frequently does in Seattle, take an umbrella or resign yourself to getting wet.
This lack of integration extends to the fare structure; it's perhaps the only public transit system in the Seattle area that doesn't accept ORCA, the regionally integrated fare card system. I would imagine this comes down to it being privately owned, and in fact it may be one of the only transit systems in the West to pull in a profit. When it comes to fares the system is, in one respect, exactly where it was in 1962; it's cash-only, $2.25 for a one-way ticket or $4.50 for a round trip. In other words, only slightly more expensive than if Link trains served Seattle Center instead, based on that system's downtown pricing. Fares can be bought either at old-style ticket booths or, if it's a bit later in the evening, aboard the moving train itself. Depending how long it takes to get your change together, you might end up putting your wallet away just in time to alight at the far end of the line, and even though Frasier and Niles managed to sneak aboard without paying in that one episode of Frasier, it's the sort of thing that I can't see being easily pulled off in reality... beyond the bottlenecks, there just don't seem to be that many people boarding any particular train.
If you're a heavy monorail user, though, the operators have something special for you; a regular monthly unlimited-use pass can be got for the low, low price of $45, which makes me curious as to how big the potential market is of people who are literally just going from point A to point B. I suppose if you work at the Space Needle and live downtown, it just might be the deal of a lifetime as long as you have a sufficiently broad definition of "deal."
Stations
The monorail station at Seattle Center has changed significantly since 1962.
Even though there are only two stations along the Monorail, they're at least distinguished from each other architecturally. The Seattle Center station still retains echoes of its World's Fair appearance, most notably in the "ALWEG MONORAIL" sign above the entrance. At the Seattle Center station, the usual station design is turned on its head; while there's no fixed barrier to entry aside from the cashiers' booths, there are banks of turnstiles to pass through upon exiting. The Westlake Center station additionally incorporates platform doors and a barricaded boarding area, made necessary due to the station's elevation; it would hardly be good for business if someone took a thirty-foot swan dive into traffic.
It's easy to forget that the Monorail is a transit system. The design of the stations themselves, the cashiers' booths in particular, put me more in the mind of an amusement park attraction - and, realistically, that's what it was built as. The souvenier penny grinder on the Seattle Center platform is just another reminder of that. Both are open, airy and covered, though at Westlake Center there is a small gap between the train and the station roof; not enough to get more than a drizzle on you if it's raining, but enough to remind you that dammit, it's raining again.
Equipment
The interior of Blue Train, looking toward the rear.
The Seattle Center Monorail runs two trains, which have been consistently in service since 1962 - Red Train and Blue Train. They were built in West Germany by Alweg, the same company that built the Disneyland Monorail and which had great plans to build a monorail in Los Angeles, only to see them rejected in favor of the City of Angels building nothing at all for the subsequent thirty years. They hold up well for fifty-year-old machinery, and while they're not nearly as loud as a SkyTrain when moving at speed, they run very rough; I'm not sure if this is an intrinsic issue, or just a result of the trains' age.
The trains' interiors are wide, airy and bright even under cloudy Seattle skies; after all, the first passengers would have been gawking at the brand new Space Needle. In addition to the wide windows that take up most of the wall space outside the articulation points, there are rows of long, thin windows where you'd find ad space on a bus or subway car. Likewise, the layout of the seats is designed to maximize sightseeing opportunities during the short ride, to the extent that you'll find rows of sideways-facing bench seats in the middle of the train. The seats themselves are comfortable, but it's not as if you'll be staying in them for long - I do recommend sitting during the trip, though, if only because of the bumpy nature of the ride.
Ease of Access and Ease of Use
It's not exactly a "just walk on" honor system thing here.
You'd be hard-pressed to simplify the Seattle Center Monorail beyond what it already is. There's no need for rollsigns, destination screens, and only a scarce requirement for next-train departure notifications; the signage states fifteen minutes or better, but the pamphlets claim "every ten minutes" and in my own experience, I barely had to wait at all; I suppose I just got lucky. For a point-to-point transit system, it delivers precisely what it promises.
Unusually for something designed and built in the 1960s, the Monorail's stations are fully accessible, with elevators in addition to stairwells provided for access to the elevated Westlake Center platform. These separate access points likewise guarantee the Monorail's accessibility after the mall itself closes for the evening, a necessity since the Monorail continues running until 11 PM.
Conclusion
Red Train glides above Vine and 5th en route to Seattle Center, as photographed from the Space Needle.
Fifty years ago, Seattle was given a seed that could have grown into something great, a system that could have brought rapid transit service to all the corners of the city. As recently as ten years ago, exactly that was in the offing: the Seattle Monorail Project pledged to deliver a network of half a dozen monorail lines radiating outward from the 1962 core, delivering a degree of service that the new light rail system isn't planned to rival until decades from now. Yet its monorail dreams were dashed by the harsh light of reality, and what was built in 1962 is still all there is in 2012.
My own belief is that it's Disney's fault, the fault of the amusement parks. When the monorail was installed at Disneyland in 1959, it was an emblem of progress, of the future, a piece of the new world that people in the immediate postwar years were still eager to seize. However, with the Seattle monorail remaining locked in its original scale and other monorail projects failing to get off the ground, the idea of monorails became more and more associated with amusement parks and tourism. Riding it today, the Seattle Center Monorail seems almost emblematic of lost promise; after all, there's no reason monorails couldn't be a vital part of the rapid transit mosaic, as they are in places like Japan. The Seattle Center Monorail is like an old murky, window that looks into another time - in some way, it's the barest fragment of what could have been.
Canada Line trains are no stranger to wrap ads, but most of them are only around for a limited time. An exception to this are the trains - I believe there are two - wearing the River Rock wrap ad, which has been consistently out there since at least the summer of 2010, and possibly since the line opened for service. This shot was taken from one of the turboprop departure lounges at Vancouver International Airport; given the way the line's built, there aren't that many opportunities to catch a train from a perspective like this.
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When you're creating something set in a world other than our own, be it the future or a wholly fictional place, there's always a temptation to throw in something big, something stunning, something utterly foreign to underline that the audience isn't in Kansas anymore. It can be the way the starships look, the in-your-face unreality of magic spells being tossed around, or just landscapes of such epic scales that it seems impossible you'd be able to find them in reality, like in the Lord of the Rings movies.
Yet, it's also possible to get carried away with this sort of thing; to take hold of an idea and charge toward the end zone without stopping to think about it, to allow the ooh-ah majesty of your chosen Big Dumb Object to take a prime role in whatever you're putting together, regardless of whether or not it actually makes sense. That, unfortunately, is one of the impressions I'm getting from the preliminary reports I've seen about the new Total Recall movie - and I can only hope that those reports are, in some way, incomplete or misrepresenting the movie's Big Dumb Object. The 1990 film had the Martian reactor, but since nobody will be getting their asses to Mars in 2012, something new had to be brought in to replace it - something that, for me, goes beyond "god damn, that is awesome" to "god damn, what were they thinking?"
Something like this.
"The lynchpin of Wiseman's action movie," wrote Meredith Woerner on io9, "is The China Fall. A massive elevator that takes thousands of people from one side of the Earth to the other. Through the center of the Earth."
This was pretty much my reaction.
This idea isn't original to the movie. It's called a gravity train, and the idea - as many ideas are, in a vacuum - is simple: you dig a straight tunnel through a planet and drop in a capsule. Gravity will accelerate the capsule until the midpoint, and as it climbs out the other side gravity will work against it until it arrives at the other end with zero velocity. In this regard, it works just like a constant-thrust spaceflight except with no thrust at all. On paper, it's a hell of a transportation system; the only fuel that would be required would be for whatever has to catch the cab on the other end, though you'd need systems in place to take care of atmospheric friction; otherwise, you'd run the risk of a bad catch resulting in a capsule trapped in the center of the shaft.
However, as anyone who's seen The Core may know, the innards of Earth aren't that simple. In particular, there's a certain thing called pressure; even The Core didn't ignore this, which is why the craft's unobtanium hull was so vital there. In the inner core of Earth, a section that you'd need to pass through in order to make a functioning gravity train, the pressure is more than three million times what it is at sea level, and so hot that even an Arwing might not be able to take it - over nine thousand degrees Fahrenheit. There's something else you might be familiar with that has the same kind of temperature - the surface of the sun.
I'll admit the concept is not impossible - just horrendously difficult and hideously expensive. If you're going to bring something like this in, though, you can't just do it piecemeal: the techniques and materials needed to build a tunnel through the world would of necessity find far wider applications in general society. If you've got enough unobtainium to build a twelve thousand kilometer-long tunnel through the planet in any kind of believable time frame, you've by necessity also got enough unobtanium to do whatever the hell you want with it. Buildings should be made out of this. Imagine active volcanoes plugged with unobtanium tubes that, upon eruptions, feed the ash and lava and what have you into huge storage tanks, rather than have it spat into the sky.
I have difficulty suspending my disbelief in regard to the notion that the people behind the new Total Recall seriously considered these issues... and consequently, I don't think I'm going to have an easy time accepting this movie. An ancient alien reactor on Mars? It's out there, but I can get behind it. A tunnel through the world? ...Let me get back to you on that.
These "ducks" are everywhere in Seattle - amphibious buses like the Hippo Buses in Toronto and, soon, vancouver which cart tourists around hither and yon for ordinary, directed tours they can do sitting down. In the area around downtown it seems like you can't get away from them, and even when I made my way up to Fremont this one still showed up, passing under the Aurora Bridge. The guide is probably pointing out the Fremont Troll while heading toward something the last thousand groups of tourists saw as well.
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"Oh, neat," the Chapters cashier said when I handed over the lastest issues of Asimov's and Analog. "I didn't even know we had these."
If you're looking for the genre short story magazines, things like Analog or Fantasy & Science Fiction or Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, it's a real crapshoot as to where or whether you'll find them. In the Robson Square Chapters, which is my usual haunt now, they're kept on a top-floor magazine rack practically as far from the escalator as it's possible to be. In the Metrotown Chapters, they're hidden behind digests and literary magazines near the outside entrance, and it's possible to spend ages searching for them even if you already know exactly where they're supposed to be. The Barnes & Noble in downtown Seattle doesn't seem to carry F&SF at all. These story magazines are, to be blunt, difficult commodities to get hold of depending on where you are.
Recently I was reading the October 1995 Asimov's, a last-minute rescue from a Portland used bookstore (cover story: "The Death of Captain Future" by Allen Steele). Robert Silverberg's column for that issue, "The Audience Grows Older," struck me. In it, he raises concerns over an F&SF survey indicating that only seven percent of its readers were below the age of 25, and fifty-five percent were older than 35, and that while many readers remain loyal they're not being replaced.
The greying of science fiction is a concern that's been batted around for decades now, and there is some truth to it - at the World Science Fiction Convention in 2009, one of the things that stuck with me was the age distribution; there were a lot of folks there of my parents' generation. For this year's Worldcon, as of the end of last month they'd sold fifty-six Young Adult (that is, under 21), one hundred and twenty-five Child, and seventeen Kid-In-Tow memberships next to more than three thousand attending memberships. Anecdotal data, sure, but anecdotes can add up.
It's easy to understand why this is happening. Back in the original boom era of science fiction, when a lot of those now-aging readers first got into the genre, there was a wealth of magazines to read through; although Asimov's didn't get its start until 1977, magazines like Analog, Amazing, If, Galaxy, and so on had already set down roots. What was also the case before the late 1970s was that there was only limited competition for science fiction from any other media - then, of course, Star Wars came out and the world began to change. It changed, and new readers who would have gone to the magazines in a different era, now didn't.
As someone who was one of those potential new readers in 1995, I think I can shed at least a flickering light on this. My introduction to science fiction was through Star Trek, not a newsstand magazine - Star Trek V is the first movie I can remember seeing in a theatre. At home, we had all of the original Star Trek episodes on VHS and a bookshelf of Star Trek tie-in novels. When it comes down to it, though, the main reason I wasn't following the threads of science fiction, devouring the magazines and so on was that I didn't know they existed.
There's just so much on the shelves...
It wasn't until I was almost out of my teenage years that I stumbled across them. As far as I can remember, my first encounter with a science fiction magazine came at some point after January 2001, when I found and read that month's issue of Asimov's - a fact I only remember because Allen Steele's "Stealing Alabama" was the lead story, and because the opening chapters of Coyote were inexplicably familiar when I read it last year (and that only because both times, I thought Alabama was a really strange choice for Earth's first starship). I don't know if I ever owned it; I certainly don't have it any more. It wasn't until I reached university that I found these things for sale, in the student bookstore - but then, because I was a broke-ass student, I bought them only occasionally; I'd missed the window for them to sink their jaws into me. It wasn't until 2007 that I really started in on them, and that because I'd resolved to start writing short stories and needed to get more experience with how they worked.
I certainly find it as cause for regret today. I can't help but wonder what sort of person I might have been, what sort of ideas I might have grappled with, what sort of writing challenges I might have tackled if . The solution to the problem of the aging audience is exposure - introduction of these magazines to people who would be interested in them, but who are wholly unaware of them. The modern ebook revolution can, I think, change that. There are plenty of magazines out there that publish electronically, like Andromeda Spaceways or Lightspeed.
The audience is there; the audience has always been there. The people in the audience just need to know that they can be an audience.
Seattle has something that makes it practically unique in North America - and it's not the Space Needle; every major city has its tourist trap. No, I mean its embryonic streetcar system, which is one of the few modern streetcars on the continent, rather than a heritage trolley or prewar survival like Toronto's system. There's nothing heritage about these. While I was in Seattle, I caught one of its three streetcars about to depart from the Westlake terminus to South Lake Union during a hard, but thankfully brief, downpour.
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There have been some strange match-ups when it comes to beer. Mustard beer, oyster stouts, pizza beer... the list goes on but it isn't very long, because beers such as that are effectively special editions, experiments by breweries that have made their names and founded their profitability on more traditional, pedestrian offerings. But there's something to be said for letting loose, and creativity is just as acceptable in the beer world as elsewhere. I imagine it was in that spirit, then, that large, uncommonly pink bottles started appearing in beer stores recently.
I've been seeing beer from Rogue Ales of Newport, Oregon for some time now, even while I was still in Ontario - for a Pacific Northwest craft brewery, it has an uncommonly wide reach - but despite that, I hadn't tried any of its products. It was the pink bottle that put an end to that, since pink is a color you very rarely encounter in the bottle-o; when every other bottle is either green, black, or clear, such uncommon brightness tends to capture the eye - and the idea of Voodoo Doughnut Bacon Maple Ale tends to capture the imagination.
Depending on where you are, you might think that this is a rather arbitrary or quixotic combination, but it really isn't... it was Voodoo Doughnut's idea originally, after all. This Portland, Oregon-based donuttery, which has only been open for nine years but has already carved out international renown across from the "KEEP PORTLAND WEIRD" sign, counts among its lineup the Bacon Maple Bar, a "luxury model" donut on which this brew is based. It's exactly what you'd expect from the name; a bar donut with a couple of strips of bacon on top. You might say that it's a miniature culinary revolution... but can something that works as a donut be transformed into something you can quaff down without losing what it is?
Rogue's Voodoo Doughnut Bacon Maple Ale certainly gives it the old college try.
Left: Voodoo Doughnut Bacon Maple Ale. Right: a Bacon Maple Bar from Voodoo Doughnut, which I acquired for research and familiarization purposes during my recent visit to Portland. It was late enough in the evening that the lineup was only twenty-five minutes or so.
Most likely, the first thing you'll notice upon popping the cap is the smell. From the scent alone it's no surprise that this is a bacon maple ale; it's as strong as what you'd find coming from a bottle of actual maple syrup. Unfortunately for syrup fans, that's pretty much where its involvement ends. Unlike La Loubécoise, which was the first maple-based beer I tried - yes, there are multiple varieties - in Bacon Maple Ale, the actual maple taste is sidelined to the point of being indistinguishable.
When it comes to the tongue, it's all about the bacon. In my experience, at least, the bacon absolutely dominated the taste - and it's unquestionably bacon, with a seared edge to it as if it's just been peeled off the pan with the bubbling grease and dropped into a blender. The vaguely salty bacon aftertaste likewise endures, hanging around for minutes while the maple receded further and further into memory. It's not nearly as salty as Hitachino Nest Japanese Classic Ale, however, and it's just slightly hoppy - enough that the bacon nearly drowns out the hops entirely.
The beer itself pours with a thick head and is clear and bright, and since it comes in opaque bottles there isn't an opportunity for light to infiltrate and have its way with the taste. One bottle measures in at 750 milliliters with a 5.6% alcohol content, so I'd suggest splitting this with a friend; not only can you compare notes about how well it works, but you can defray the cost this way - it's a bit hard to find here in Metro Vancouver, and when I finally came across a bottle I had to shell out upwards of $18 for it.
Would I try it again? Potentially. The price, for one, is definitely a thing to consider; it's considerably easier to find in the United States and easy as hell to find in Portland itself, where it would also be significantly cheaper. I didn't bring any more back with me because, well, that'd be all the less space for Utah's own Polygamy Porter. When it comes down to it, I tried it not just for the purposes of review, but because I wanted to be part of a spectacle... just like when I tried a Double Down.
Incidentally, when it comes to the Bacon Maple Bar itself, that tastes exactly as you'd expect a maple donut with bacon on top to taste like. incredible oh my god so good
And why pink? It's simple - the takeout boxes at Voodoo Doughnut are pink. Like the neon sign says, good things come in pink boxes. Or bottles, for that matter.
