Photo: Skylines and Segways

The Chicago skyline is an inspiring sight when the sun sinks low to the ground, and the local tourist companies are more than aware of that fact. Therefore, when I had the chance to take in the view from the grounds of the Adler Planetarium, I was hardly the only person doing so--a whole gaggle of tourists taking a Segway tour had come by for it.

Personally, you'd have to pay *me* to get on one of these things. I mean, when you're riding around on a gyroscopically-stabilized two-wheeled conveyance while wearing a bright yellow helmet, you might as well be wearing a giant neon sign that flashes "TOURIST" over and over.


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Redistributive Like A Fox

I was flipping through the channels on the hotel television last night, and what did I light upon but the Fox Business Network, one of the arms of the Fox News empire? I was drawn in by the spectacle immediately--since Fox News doesn't have a Canadian presence, all I know of it is its reputation, but a few moments of watching demonstrated that some reputations are not without merit.

The show was Lou Dobbs Tonight, and the current segment was an interview with Stanley Kurtz, author of Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, which has gotta be one of the most unbiased titles I've ever seen, what? The thrust of Kurtz's argument was simple: Barack Obama wants to get rid of American suburbs. Why? Well, because he's a Democrat, I suppose, and according to Fox this is bad because "America is a suburban nation."

As interviews go, it wasn't much; Dobbs asked softball questions while Kurtz fulminated about how a second term for President Obama would see a Sustainable Communities Initiative used to "hold federal aid hostage" in a bid to encourage people to move from suburbs to cities, and that he would preside over a "redistribution of tax money" by "[forcing] regional tax base sharing on suburbs."

This is not a revolutionary idea. Even in the segment they acknowledged that something of the sort is currently used in Minneapolis-St. Paul, and it sounds similar to what happens in Metro Vancouver--Surrey is nothing if not a suburb, after all--or the regional municipalities of the Greater Toronto Area. In the eyes of Fox, though, it's anathema. "Redistribution," I've come to conclude, is one of those heavily loaded words in American political parlance, and it sounds very much like one of those data points that would be eagerly picked up on by people who claim that President Obama is a Marxist.

Which itself, incidentally, is a ridiculous idea. If he was really a Marxist he would've made it clear by now--I mean, look at the banks. Why would a Marxist president not just nationalize them when given such a sterling opportunity? Claims that he's waiting for the second term are ridiculous; even now there's no guarantee that he'll get it, since Nate Silver gives Romney and Ryan a little less than one chance in three right now. But I digress.

What I found interesting about this was the unspoken assumption that tied it all together: that the suburbs are economically independent, the "rugged individualists" of settlements, and that asking them to combine their tax bases with those of cities is stealing from them. Indeed, if you don't look at the numbers too hard it's easy to think that suburbs are independent--but that overlooks a lot. The biggest thing is that the suburbs were subsidized from the get-go, and still are today; it can be expensive to provide necessary services such as sewer, water, power, garbage collection, road maintenance, and so on due to the scale of some low-density communities, after all. Some suburbs have larger footprints than major metropolises, but they don't have the capacity to generate tax revenue the same way dense cities can. For a lot of suburbs, the natural choice is to build out because building out brings in more property tax revenue... except that brings further costs due to the extension of those services.

I don't think regional coordination of tax revenues would be a bad idea, because with the spread of suburbs plenty of things are regional--it's the standard sort of refrain you hear in Toronto, with people complaining about 905ers filling the roads and the subways to get to work and back without paying the taxes that maintain them. Nor do I think there's any need for active federal intervention to get people to move out of the suburbs. As the gasoline that the suburbs are founded on becomes more expensive, they will shift into more tenable patterns. It doesn't matter if the United States is a "suburban nation" now. Just because the United States, or any country, can be described in a certain way now, it doesn't mean that it should continue along the same trajectory indefinitely. Sameness breeds stagnation.

Though that might explain why Lou Dobbs was so opinionated about the extension of a federal offshore drilling moratorium. On the whole it didn't seem particularly "fair and balanced" to me.

Photo: Those Old and Rusty Rails

Seattle used to have a waterfront streetcar. Not so long ago, heritage streetcars ground down the rails along the waterfront of Elliott Bay, but for seven years now the rails have been left to the elements. Here at Bell Street, one of the eight surviving stops, the right-of-way remains wide and clear for something that may never roll there again.


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Tunnel Visions: Seattle's Link Light Rail

Every once in a while I hop out of New Westminster, land in some other city with some other light- or heavy-rail transit system, and look around at different ways of getting around by rail, whether it's on the ground, under it, or above it all.


Seattle is another one of those cities whose reputation precedes it. From where I grew up in the grinding, posterboard sameness of the Central Ontario suburbs, Seattle was always the epicenter of cool--an incredible, happening city filled with interesting people where awesome things happened, a forward-thinking place that left the hidebound East in the dust. Sure, this is true to a limited extent if you squint, but not nearly as much as you're led to believe from a distance... but that's true with all things. As the Amtrak Cascades pulled out of Portland's Union Station this past June, I was eager to find those spots where reality managed to live up to the hype.

When it comes to Seattle's light rail transit system, there is no hype. Therefore, literally my very first experience with it came in the form of some guy in Westlake Station grousing at a busker and then overturning a garbage can and screaming incoherently, all while I was trying to ignore everything and buy a ticket. But you can't ignore something like that.

Sure, that's just a hopefully isolated incident, but it was telling in its way. I didn't need the four days I spent in Rain City to come to the conclusion that Seattle has the worst rail transit system for a city of its size among any I've experienced. I mean, even Phoenix's is better--Phoenix, the city of desert and sprawl and an empty downtown on weekend mornings. Seattle acts like the New York of Cascadia, but when it comes to getting around it's more like Poughkeepsie.

Not that I have anything against Poughkeepsie. I just doubt that its transit is up to the standard set by New York City.

System

A southbound train departs SODO Station.

The first thing I need to establish is that describing this network as Seattle's Link Light Rail isn't strictly accurate. Not only is it not just Seattle's, but it's not even a unified system. Link Light Rail, owned by the regional transit provider Sound Transit, consists of two physically separated lines--Central Link, which serves Seattle and is the main spine of the system, and Tacoma Link, which serves Tacoma, is separated from Central Link's southern terminus by about twenty-three miles, and was actually finished first. I didn't have an opportunity to get myself down to Tacoma, so this overview is thus limited to just the Central Link.

The fact that I have to make that sort of explanation, something I've never had to do for any other transit network I've studied, really sets the bar for me.

The Central Link consists of one line, beginning in the north underneath downtown Seattle at Westlake Station and ending in the south at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, with a total of thirteen stations for good luck. Outside of downtown it proceeds along a pretty strict north-south axis, if for no other reason than local geography forced Seattle itself to develop in the same manner.

The nature of the areas that the Central Link serves, however, make it distinct from a lot of other systems. Sure, the Phoenix light rail may pass through a lot of hollow-seeming areas, like downtown Phoenix, but it links up with places like downtown Tempe and Papago Park and Sky Harbor International Airport along the way. For the Central Link, the airport is more of a destination in and of itself. That's not a bad thing, mind you. There are plenty of cities out there that are only connected to their airports by buses, and if you haven't tried to carry your luggage home on a bus, you are surely missing some kind of fun.

In Seattle, it felt less like the airport was one of the potential destinations along the line, and more like the line's route was specifically chosen to connect to the airport. Again, nothing wrong with this on the surface, but here's where Seattle's rather stark urban geography comes into play. Travelling south from International District/Chinatown Station, immediately adjacent to the city's train station and close at hand to the downtown core, you will encounter Seattle's two primary stadiums, and then you will be surrounded by warehouses. Further south, the neighborhoods transition into a more residential character along Martin Luther King Jr. Way, but they give the impression of neighborhoods that didn't previously have transit service, the way that rapid transit or light rail lines in other cities were built along former streetcar routes.

At least, that's what it seemed like to me. My experience with these areas is admittedly superficial. The point is, though, that there don't seem to be many trip generators outside of the northern and southern termini. Construction is underway to extend the light rail north, deeper into Seattle proper, but service isn't expected to begin on those lines until at least the early 2020s. If you're talking about extending it down to Tacoma and finally combining the system into a coherent whole, you'll more likely be waiting until the 2040s before you see something like that.

Central Link ticket machines at SODO Station. Hmm, with a slogan "ride the wave" you think it'd have made sense to call the system something like "Wave Light Rail." Unless that was thought to be stupid.

Ticket vending machines are pretty much the same anywhere, so I'm not going to belabor the point. Where the Central Link differs from the crowd is the manner in which it charges fares. Despite its simple layout, there are fare zones here, and not the usual kind of zones where the core city is zone 1 and the inner suburbs are zone 2 and so forth. Instead they're based on distance, where each mile of the trip adds five cents to the $2.00 base fare, with the resulting zones depending on the station you're starting from. Even day passes are influenced by this structure; rather than the "pay one price, get unlimited use" that's standard elsewhere, on the Central Link a day pass is just twice the one-way fare between the two specific stations you intend to be travelling between.

Yes, it's strange. No, I don't know why it's done like that. It is, at least, better than the system used by King County Metro, operator of the Central Link. There isn't even such a thing as a day pass on KCM buses. Because, you know, the prospect of getting around Seattle wasn't irritating enough already.

Stations

The high, curved roof of Pioneer Square Station not only keeps people in the station from asphyxiating, but may make it more welcoming to claustrophobes than underground stations elsewhere.

When it comes to transit downtown, the Central Link and Vancouver's SkyTrain have an element in common; their routes in the core were determined by the route of the pre-existing infrastructure they use. In Seattle, this is the 2.1 kilometer long Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel, opened in 1990 to give buses an alternative to Seattle's traffic-clogged streets. Structurally, the tunnel stations are reminiscent of something you'd find on the Montreal Metro, and they're the only transit stations I know of where the same platforms are shared between light rail and diesel hybrid buses.

Beyond the downtown tunnel, designs are varied. Many of the stations, like SODO and Columbia City, are built at grade in the right-of-way, while a few are elevated or underground. Each station has its own unique logo to represent each station, like the Fukuoka City Subway or the Mexico City Metro--Rainier Beach is a stork, Pioneer Square is a clipper ship, and so on. These logos are used on the ticket machines when you're selecting the active stations, and they do help to bring a touch of character to the system.

With the immense scale of the tunnel stations, it's likely they'd be able to handle any length of train that Seattle's demand could require, and outside of it the stations are generally built with future expansion in mind. Eyeballing it, they look to be able to accomodate four-car trainsets, double the size that are in use today, but it's evident that some prepatory work would have to be done before that extra platform space could be comfortably used. At some stations, there aren't enough shelters to cover even the footprint of the two-car trains that are used today, and the misery of waiting for a train in Cascadia rain isn't exactly going to endear a lot of people toward using transit, I'd imagine.

Equipment

A Central Link train waits in what I believe to be International District/Chinatown Station.

The trains themselves, at least, were familiar--Central Link uses the same Kinkisharyo rolling stock as does Phoenix, and what's true for one is true for the other, though the air aboard the trains I was on did seem somewhat stale; in a city like Seattle, with overcast skies a fact of life, it's not necessary to constantly run the air conditioning to make sure the passengers keep breathing.

I actually don't have anything else to say about them, really. They're powered by pantographs, they seem to run smoothly, and their digital rollsigns make it easy to know where they're going, which presumably would become a factor only on occasions when they're short-turned. They're low-floored and there is plenty of seating room and they're generally clean except when people flout the "no eating" rule. What else is there, really?

Ease of Access and Ease of Use

There are no barriers to entry at Stadium Station.

In some respects, the Central Link reflects what Vancouver's SkyTrain could have been. You won't find any turnstiles on the system; instead, when you're entering and leaving you'll hear the constant electronic beep of ORCA cards touching the readers. The unified electronic card of the Puget Sound area, ORCA seems to be extremely common among Seattle's transit riders. The fare inspector who came through the train with a handheld reader seemed almost bemused that I had a paper ticket to present instead, the same way you might react to someone seeking to purchase a movie on VHS. I'm not sure whether fare evasion is a significant problem in Seattle, but it does demonstrate that electronic farecards and turnstiles don't always have to be combined.

Like other new-built systems, Central Link stations are unstaffed save for the cleaning crews that pass through and some security personnel here and there. If you're having an issue with one of the ticket machines, there's nothing to do but hope some other traveller comes by who can give you a hand. Depending on where you are, though, even that may be unlikely.

The Central Link connects marginally well to the rest of the urban transit network. At its Westlake terminus, it's only a few flights of stairs to the Seattle Center Monorail, and the southernmost stop of the South Lake Union Streetcar is only a block or so away. I'm not sure to what degree intermediate stations beyond the tunnel are connected with the bus system, but at Tukwila International Boulevard Station--originally the southern terminus until the line was extended to Sea-Tac, literally on the other side of the highway--there's an impressive array of bus connections underneath the towering railbed. There's plenty of information provided at the stops here, from route maps and arrival times to full-on system maps and fare information for King County Metro's bus system. That sort of integration is necessary, of course; with the light rail being as limited as it is, and directly serving such a small area of the city, most passengers would likely be relying on the bus system for outlying parts of their journey.

Conclusion

It was hard writing this, as hard as I've ever experienced writing about a transit system. In other cities, I've found it to be easy--there are plenty of new things to find, curiosities to trip over, and weaknesses to exploit. In Seattle, I had a hard time coming up with strengths. Whenever I tried to take myself onto the Link it was an ordeal, simply because from all appearances there was nothing particularly interesting for me to take it to, and I don't think it was just the fact that my hotel in Queen Anne was a bit of a walk from the nearest railhead. Plenty of times I just didn't step on the Link at all, because I couldn't think of anything it would take me to that would be worth the money it cost me to get there and back again.

Honestly, I found it an embarrassment. If it was a city like Spokane, say, that operated such a system, I would be far more understanding. The simple fact of the matter is that Seattle is not only the prime city of modern Cascadia, but it has been so for over a hundred years, and it nevertheless waited until the twenty-first century to get serious about building a system with rails on--and even then it's not much. The Central Link, as it exists in 2012, strikes me as the result of "well, we've got to build SOMETHING, so what's the easiest and cheapest route to do?"

Sure, it's still in its early stages, and last week Sound Transit officially broke ground on the 4.3-mile extension to Northgate, and when it opens in 2021 or wherever it does it'll significantly expand Seattle's transit-accessible area. What gets me is that I feel like Seattle is pursuing these early stages way too late. Especially for a city with the reputation of Seattle, what's going on now would have been more appropriate back in 1982. If that was the case, Seattle would have a far bigger, more comprehensive transit network, one far more appropriate to its size than the current Central Link.

That's what there is, though. Especially when it comes to higher-order transit, sometimes people just have to take whatever it is they can get.

Previous Tunnel Visions

• Portland's MAX Light Rail
  
• The Seattle Center Monorail
  
• Bay Area Rapid Transit
  
• San Francisco's Muni Metro
  
• Phoenix's Metro Light Rail
  
• The Kenosha Electric Railway
  
• Vancouver's SkyTrain
  
• The Toronto Subway and RT
  
• The Los Angeles County Metro Rail
  
• The Chicago 'L'
  
• The Montreal Metro

Photo: Shadows in the Sky

There was a lucky arrangement of clouds in the evening sky over New Westminster a couple of weekends back, lit up amid shadows in the sunset that spread across the sky like an unfolded fan of darkness and light. I took this shot looking north, across the street from New Westminster City Hall.


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For Neil

When my right index finger starts going numb, something that I've only experienced in the context of funerals, I know it's a serious thing. So it was when I heard the news that Neil Armstrong, first man on the moon, died yesterday. While it's the sort of news I knew that I'd hear one day, for it to be extracted from that comfortably distant future and dropped into the present was a shock. You don't ever wake up and expect that particular day to be the Day.

But it was, and the man who took one small step forty-three years ago is gone. There are other moonwalkers, of course; Buzz Aldrin is still alive, still healthy, and still punching out moon landing deniers. Neil Armstrong was different, though--he was the first. First in a way that it's difficult to conceive of without some thought, first in a way that's utterly foreign to Earth.

Barring an ancient extraterrestrial scout mission or some previous technological species that's been obliterated from the fossil record, he was the first thinking being to step out among those rocks in the history of time. Not just the first man, not just the first human, but the first sapient being in all the universe.

The first, and he returned to Earth to live a modest life. He didn't allow his experience to go to his head. He didn't take advantage of his fame for political ends. He did things no one had ever done before, and as long as there are those who look up in wonder at that silver world in the sky, he will never be forgotten.

see you space cowboy...

Photo: One of These Things Ain't Like the Others

For your consideration: an ordinary wood board on an ordinary street in New Westminster, perhaps covering a broken door or window. Graffiti has been left on it, as graffiti tends to be. Given the experience of the last few years, I can understand why some would be attracted to brutally simplistic economic solutions and new political modes... and then there's the "Harry Potter Rules" at the bottom.

Kind of a departure from the previously-established theme.


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Don't Implausibly Mess With Texas

You've probably heard about what's come out of Texas lately. If you haven't, well, you're in for a hell of a trip to the other side of the looking glass. In recent television and radio interviews, Lubbock County Judge Tom Head--who, despite his title, is in fact the county's chief executive--attempted to justify the tax increase his government is trying to levy by saying that it's necessary to properly equip Lubbock County's law enforcement personnel so they can resist a United Nations invasion.

Let that one just sink in for a minute.

Fear of the United Nations has a long provenance in certain parts of the United States. I really have difficulty understanding why. If the United States had, say, turned over its nuclear weapons to the organization in 1946 to give it the necessary teeth to enforce world peace, as people such as Robert Heinlein advocated at the time, it would make sense--after all, I mean, when words are backed with NUCLEAR WEAPONS they're not quite as easy to ignore. But words are all the United Nations is about. It's the biggest debating society on the planet. So, instead, it seems that much of the anti-UN fear has coalesced around the concept of the UN leading a "one world government" charge in line with some Biblical prophecy of the End Times or another.

Fear because if President Obama gets re-elected, he's going to surrender American sovereignty to the United Nations and become a dictator, even though I always thought that in order to be a dictator of something you had to retain sovereignty over it. Maybe he means that Obama would instead become the dictatorial viceroy, like the Vice President in Metal Wolf Chaos. Sure, that would trigger civil war, and so Obama would call in the UN troops. Yes, the 124,000 UN peacekeeping troops, significant chunks of which are provided by such cutting-edge military powerhouses as Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Senegal. I can certainly see such a force making progress in a country where there's a rifle behind every blade of grass.

But he's serious. Judge Head wants to keep the UN invaders out of Lubbock County, and so his brilliant plan to defend American liberty is to "[stand] in front of their personnel carriers and say, 'You're not coming in here.'"

Yeah, I think the gas pedal over here has something to say about that.

There's a certain amount of doublethink that's necessary for people who think like this. First off, there's the simple fact that the United States is a juggernaut, commanding the single most powerful military force that has ever existed. Yet, nevertheless, it must also be vulnerable. How? Well, that's the crux of it, isn't it? The new Red Dawn had to give its North Korean invaders a way to turn off technology, and even then it's still ridiculous.

To put it simply, people who believe that this sort of thing is possible, that this sort of thing is a legitimate threat, do not live in the same world as the rest of us. I mean, where are all those UN troops going to come from? How are they going to be brought to the United States? How are they going to be supplied in the United States? Why not just nuke a few American cities to demonstrate that they mean business?

The killer part of it is, Head's plans don't even make sense in the context of his fears. If he was seriously worried about an invasion, he should be organizing things like hidden ammo dumps and supply caches out in the countryside, known to the local defenders but not officially marked, so that they could have equipment reserves to fall back on once the invaders arrive in force. He should be arranging things so that a county police force has the equipment it needs to fight a military. Most importantly of all, he shouldn't be bloody well telling people about it! The United States government is intelligent enough to hide its black ops budgets underneath $30,000 wrenches. I mean, do you think the activities of Area 51 are going to show up as individual line items in a publicly-available budget?

The other possibility is that Head knows this is all bull, but is using it as a necessary smokescreen to get the voters to approve a tax increase. If that's the case, well... if that's the case maybe Texas would be better off invaded by the UN.

Photo: A View From the Edge

This is Oregon Health and Sciences University, one of the big educational institutions in Portland. I just went up there for the view, myself, a quick trip up the Aerial Tram and back again. The view was nice, if cloudy, but the architecture struck me as well--this is only a fraction of it. The total effect of it all, modern glass-and-steel buildings rising out of a forest on a tall hillside, made it seem like the place a director would film establishing shots for the capital complex of some future independent Cascadia.


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Can I Believe the News Today?

It's hard times for the good old newspaper. Fewer and fewer people are picking them up off the stands, not enough for them to continue in old patterns without making up the money lost in cancelled subscriptions that aren't coming back. It's been ages since I, personally, read a physical daily newspaper--not since the Toronto Sun back in 2000, and that was only because its tabloid format fit conveniently on the counter behind the cash register of the gas station I worked in at the time. I would imagine that most people of my age group have a similar experience.

The march of the paywalls across the online mediascape has been slow but indefatigable. Yesterday, they took more ground when the Postmedia Network announced the raising of paywalls on four of its newspapers: the Vancouver Sun, the National Post, the Ottawa Citizen, and the Province. Fairly straightforward, that. I don't read any of those newspapers on a regular basis, but only visit them from time to time, and they're welcome to institute this policy if they feel it's what's needed to keep them publishing. They do offer the whole "ten free articles per month" like the New York Times does, and really, that's fine.

What's not fine is what the raising of these paywalls served as a reminder of--namely, that the Vancouver Sun and the Province, the two largest daily newspapers in British Columbia, are both owned by the same company. I mean, it's not exactly as if it's a secret; hell, you'll find both of their head offices in the same skyscraper, even if that's not the sort of thing people dwell on. But it leaves towering implications for the established state of journalism in Vancouver.

I wonder if that band in the middle separates Province territory from Sun territory.

When I first moved here, what surprised me the most was that there was no equivalent of the Toronto Star, an unabashedly left-wing paper that looked at causes with a liberal bent; consider the stereotype of Vancouver as a bunch of granola-chewing, pot-smoking hippies if you have difficulty understanding why I'd expected to find something. Sure, there's the Georgia Straight, but as a free weekly dependent on advertising revenue, there's a limit to how much news it can tackle. In contrast, the Province and the Sun hit the streets every day.

That wouldn't be an issue if there was at least some independence. Back in Toronto, the land of four daily newspapers, each are owned by a different media conglomerate. The coverage of an event you find in the Star will differ markedly from what you'd find in the Toronto Sun; just look at any given story regarding Rob Ford for evidence of that. Instead, in Vancouver we have the Postmedia newspaper, and... the Postmedia newspaper. Sure, there are differences... the Sun is right-wing and the Province is even more right-wing. But it's not exactly the wide-open field that I'd imagined I would find here.

I'd ask who allowed this to happen, who permitted British Columbia's major print mediascape to become dominated by a single company, but that's a stupid question. This government doesn't care about those kinds of permissions. The concentration of journalistic outlets into fewer and fewer hands is no problem for them. Balanced, measured coverage based on multiple viewpoints? Who needs it! There's money to be made here, ladeez and germs.

Photo: Nose to Nose

Everyone remembers the F-14. After all those aerial sequences in Top Gun, how could we not? Though the Tomcat has been phased out by the U.S. Navy, leaving those ones shipped to Iran just before that late-1970s unpleasantness as the only ones in active service, it's not hard to find them on display across the United States. This one sits on the grounds of Seattle's Museum of Flight, and mostly gets rained on.

It looks a lot less menacing from this angle, I think.


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White People Don't Understand

If there's one key truth about the modern world that many Westerners don't understand, it's this: white people do not understand racism. I know I don't! I know as much about racism as I do about what it's like to walk on the moon; I can read the accounts of people who know what it's like, but I have no personal experience with it. The problems come when white people, as white people are wont to do, assume that they are in tune with the world and its complexities.

First off: the $100 issue. There's been a flap across Canadian news outlets lately regarding the redesign of Canada's new $100 polymer bill. With its reverse bearing an image of a woman peering into a microscope, it's supposed to emphasize Canada's role in the sciences--after all, these designs were originally made back in 2009 or so, before certain recent events. However, the bill we're getting isn't the bill that was first designed. Originally the woman was depicted as Asian, but it seems that some focus groups thought an Asian scientist was "stereotypical" or that such an ethnicity "doesn't represent Canada."

So the Bank's designers redrew her, with the intention that it would not depict "a specific individual," and we end up with the bill we have today. A bill which, as the Bank of Canada's Mark Carney acknowledges, "appears to represent only one ethnic group."

I would theorize that it's because the woman does represent only one ethnic group. Specifically, the white ethnic group. I don't know who aside from the ultimate higher-ups at the Bank of Canada were responsible for approving it, but considering Canada's ethnic makeup I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I hypothesize that most of them were probably white. They may have been trying to go for something "non-ethnic," but that's a ridiculous mirage--there's no such thing as ethnic neutrality. What's more likely is that you perceive your own ethnicity as somehow "neutral," the same way a lot of North Americans insist that they don't have an accent or how people tend to perceive a stick figure as being of their own ethnicity in the absence of contradictory information.

Bears do not approve of people who think "non-ethnic" is a thing.

The other factor to this I just discovered today, but apparently it's been a thing for some time already. While Save the Pearls: Revealing Eden by Victoria Foyt dovetails with the whole "crapsack dystopia" thing that appears to be common in Young Adult novels lately, it takes a sharp turn away from the pack with the way it treats racism. See, Save the Pearls is set in a world where whites are the weak, oppressed lower class, known as "pearls," and society is dominated by black people, called "coals."

Are you beginning to see the issue already?

That doesn't even cover the use of blackface, references to black characters as "beastly," and so on. The book's reviews on Amazon are overwhelmingly negative, and as of this writing it has a two-star review due mainly to a handful of higher reviews... including that of Marvin Kaye, editor of Weird Tales magazine, who calls it "a thoroughly non-racist book." I, for one, am relieved by the assurances of this aging white man that it's non-racist. I mean, if you can't trust a white man who grew up in the mid-20th century as the final arbiter of whether or not something is racist, who can you trust?

For the record, I don't think that Save the Pearls was written to be racist, or that the $100 bill was redesigned for that reason. Instead, it's more of a problem that's endemic to white authors tackling racism--they don't understand it, but they think they do anyway, and they are incapable of recognizing how the unspoken assumptions of their upbringing affect their work. They are taking something they don't understand and filtering it through their own lens, a lens that does not see things in quite the same way as other people do.

I, for one, understand that I don't understand it at all. Still, that puts me ahead of folks who not only don't recognize their lack of understanding, but charge ahead nevertheless.

Photo: The Mountain and the Beach

Even from north of the Fraser, Mount Baker dominates the horizon when clouds or haze don't get in the way, and when you're high enough for its reaches to be lifted over the treeline. Further south, in White Rock, it doesn't so much dominate the view as it conquers it and makes it its own. Here Mount Baker towers over East Beach in White Rock, snowcapped and clear as day.


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From the Gardiner to Kelowna, A Flagging Link

What do Rob Ford and Kelowna, British Columbia have in common? Considering that one is a man and the other is a city in the BC Interior, probably not all that much. Nevertheless, some isolated bits of recent news have drawn a connection between them that's all the more important for being not immediately obvious.

The first news: earlier this week, Rob Ford was photographed reading papers while driving on the Gardiner Expressway, and after the photo appeared on Twitter it quickly spread through the Greater Toronto mediascape. It's easy to understand how this came about if you know anything about the man--not only does he have mayoral responsibilities, but he's practically allergic to delegation. He made his name in city politics by eschewing perks like "office budgets." He's not going to let 80 km/h traffic keep him from absorbing the information he needs to absorb.

Fortunately for Ford, reading while driving isn't illegal in Ontario, but soon enough he's going to be given a driver--causing an accident while distracted by mayoral papers would not be good for his reelection prospects. The media is on him, the police are on him, even his brother and other mayor Doug Ford is on him to accept a driver. Sure, some people are capable of coping with that sort of split attention in ideal situations, but situations aren't always ideal and lives are more important than documentation that can be dealt with just as easily inside City Hall.

Now, the second news: Kelowna is currently considering whether or not it will fly a pro-life flag over City Hall during its Protect Human Life Week, and when I Google that phrase the first hit is of Pro Life Kelowna, a site of the sort that comes as no surprise at all, featuring stories of "abortion caravans" and a ticker of "Babies Killed Since 1969." According to Kelowna Community Resources this is the website of the Kelowna Right to Life Society, the same agency whose executive director is quoted by CBC News as saying that "there's nothing controversial there's nothing particularly political or religious" about a pro-life statement.

I'm not questioning the city of Kelowna's right to fly a flag in honor of whatever time it chooses to recognize. After all, it's flying a rainbow flag right now. In this case, I'd say the important issue is the source of the flag. It's not something that already existed that Kelowna is just going to run up the pole--it's something that's being created for this specific function, the first version of which has already been rejected by the city.

If you're looking for a flag that's "for human life," why not just fly the World Health Organization flag? Oh, wait, it's part of the UN, and they've distributed contraception...

I said there was a commonality here, and there is--it's the necessity of using good judgement in politics. Rob Ford may have been a busy man, and he may have thought there was no problem reading and driving, but he demonstrated poor judgement by actually doing it. Likewise, when it comes to the flag situation, the Kelowna city government's judgement is of paramount importance. The politics of pro-life and pro-choice are lightning rods here as they are in the United States. So is the whole issue of gay rights, but they're fundamentally different issues--the rainbow flag represents an entire group of people that were systematically discriminated against for generations. The pro-life flag, in contrast, represents an organization with an axe to grind about that specific issue.

If the situations were reversed, and Kelowna was considering flying a pro-choice flag over City Hall, I don't think it would be appropriate. The whole issue is a fundamentally personal one that should be dealt with at the personal level, not at the level of the state. It all comes down to exercising proper judgement, and demonstrating that the people holding positions of power are worthy of having been placed there.

Besides, when you get down to it, the flag design itself is horrible. Writing "PRO-LIFE" on the flag defeats the whole purpose of having a flag--it's supposed to be a simple but standing-out design easily recognizable from a distance. Don't these people know the first thing about vexillology?

Photo: From Kite to Waves

There's not much that I can say about this one that isn't immediately apparent. I don't have any real experience with water sports or kitesurfing or anything like that. So instead, here's a shot I took of a kitesurfer taking advantage of a good wind over Semiahmoo Bay just off White Rock, on the sort of blue sky day that brings everyone down to the beach.

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Quaff Review #26: Betty Stogs

Aside from the usual suspects, Fuller's and Tetley's and St. Peter's and so on, it's not particularly easy to find English beer in Canada--particularly my part of Canada, which is almost as far away you can get from England without starting to get closer to it again. As in all things, though, if you keep your eyes open for long enough, eventually you're going to come across something you never expected to find. So it was that at Legacy Liquor Store, occupying a space formerly used as the prayer room for the 2010 Winter Olympics, I came across bottles from an English microbrewery that I'd never seen before.

Skinner's is a family-owned brewery in Truro, Cornwall's only city, and they've been working the brews for fifteen years now. They brew a number of seasonal ales, but their flagship beer is something apart, "the Queen of Cornish Ales," Betty Stogs. She rather resembles Britannia's Cornish understudy on the bottle label, a label which strangely doesn't tell us how many units of alcohol you'll find inside it. It does, however, tell me a few important things. First, it's 4% alcohol by volume, so fairly chipper in its own right. Second, its name didn't come from nowhere. Betty Stogs is a character from Cornish folklore, a lazy woman who neglected her infant and had it briefly abducted by faeries--a cautionary tale against alcoholism, perhaps?

Whatever the case, the beer Betty Stogs is looked upon rather more fondly; back in 2008, it was recognized as a CAMRA Champion Beer of Great Britain, winning a gold in the Best Bitter category. In North American terminology, that's an ordinary pale ale. It's been a while since I've tried new pale ales, or really anything that identifies itself as being bitter; I've recently shied away from them, especially IPAs, because so many of them taste like liquified hops in water. Is Betty Stogs different?

I'll have to say that it definitely wasn't what I was expecting.


Betty Stogs took me by surprise from the very start. I poured it the standard way, into a stein held a bit askew, and no head formed. Once I'd finished pouring and set it on the table for the picture above, a bit of foam bubbled up from the beer's depths, but only that slight amount, and it didn't take its time disappearing. I didn't find it particularly aromatic either, with no detectable smell at uncapping or after pouring.

It's got a nice, clear amber body, though I was at first disappointed by the taste--my notes call it "hoppy and watery." Still, I've had watery beers before, and if watery beer is a good enough reason to stop drinking beer, the United States would have been dry long ago. It was the hops that made me keep on, and in Betty Stogs the hops work far better with the beer than other pale ales I've tried. Rather than a hop flavor that dominates the beer and lingers past its welcome, the hops in Betty Stogs are transitory things--they brush against the back of the tongue but are quickly washed past, leaving little aftertaste. It's a nice way of doing it, actually.

The bottle says it's an "easy drinking copper ale," and it doesn't exaggerate. At first I found it flat, but this beer has a way of endearing itself, it seems.

ANDREW'S RATING: 3/5

Previous Quaff Reviews

• #25: Polygamy Porter
  
• #24: Voodoo Doughnut Bacon Maple Ale
  
• #23: Secession Cascadian Dark Ale
  
• #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: A False Forest

In Burnaby along the SkyTrain line, I believe somewhere in the neighborhood of Royal Oak Station, there's a building with a mural that looks toward the pathway. These days, with development sprawling over much of Metro Vancouver, it's easy to forget that only two hundred years ago it looked pretty much like Stanley Park. This mural is almost like a window back through the years, in that respect--a look back to the distant days when wild forests grew where Burnaby now sits.


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How Not to Invade the United States

It's been with us since the beginning: a nagging fear that no matter what we've earned, no matter what we've achieved, there's a stranger out there in the darkness who is waiting for the opportunity to take it all away. It manifests in a thousand different ways, depending on culture and context, but it's always there in the background guiding the actions of everyone from individuals to international alliances. The invasion literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was one manifestation of this expectation that the other shoe had to drop sometime, and another is the modern remake of Red Dawn, at last removed from the vaults and scheduled for release in November.

The original Red Dawn was memorable; not only was it a rah-rah patriotic cornball action movie, but it was a high concept film that even now still doesn't have much in the way of spiritual competition. "The Russians invade the United States" isn't exactly a common movie plotline--the only thing similar to it I remember crossing the screens in the last ten years is Tomorrow, When the War Began, with the plot of "countries that are TOTALLY NOT Indonesia and/or China invade Australia." Nevertheless, those two movies are reflective of certain national fears. Australia has historically had a rather uncomfortable relationship with its neighbors, being a large and thinly populated country surrounded by potential rivals overflowing with people. In 1984, when the original Red Dawn came out, the Cold War was heating up again after the 1970s détente. Ronald Reagan had called the Soviet Union an "evil empire" only a year before, and a significant chunk of the world was formally aligned against the democratic powers.

Red Dawn was hardly the only example of 1980s American invasion literature. There are plenty of lesser-known adventure stories and science fiction novels that depict America under the Soviet heel, enough that "post-cataclysmic rag-tag armies struggle to kick the Rooskies out of the good ol' US of A" is the very first entry in the Grand List of Overused Science Fiction Cliches. They were products of their time--sure, the Soviet Union was being pushed to the brink of collapse, but people didn't realize it at the time. The abrupt end of the Cold War in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later pulled the carpet out from under invasion literature quite neatly.

Now, though, times have changed. We're nervous again, especially in the United States. People have lost a lot of what they had and are afraid that they'll lose even more, and they're feeling compromised and vulnerable... in other words, people are in a receptive state of mind for invasion literature. How fortunate the new Red Dawn is there to come along. Here, have a trailer.


WOLVERIIIIIIIIIIINES

Lookit all those explosions of patriotism. Also a typo in the very first written thing we see. But I digress.

First off, keep in mind that the concept of Red Dawn is utterly ridiculous. Not only does it depict an invasion of the United States, which is hard enough to believe--the original movie began with a brief explanation of how NATO fractured and the United States became isolated just to help justify the premise--but it depicts an invasion of the United States by North Korea. Originally it was China, but there are the Chinese box office receipts to consider these days, and not many North Koreans go to the movies. The recent video game Homefront tried to do things this way too, making North Korea into a new evil empire by absorbing South Korea and Japan and bits of China and so on, but that didn't make it any less ridiculous. Just the opposite, in fact. The trailer implies that the invaders have some new weapon that enables them to turn off equipment, or something, but even something like that ignores the fact that a state like North Korea doesn't have the means to invade the United States even if it wanted to.

Logistics are important--an army without supply can't fight, and neither can it fight if you can't move it to where the war is. In the modern world of satellite surveillance and a dominant American military, the preparations to transport an army capable of putting a dent in the United States couldn't be overlooked. I suppose you could posit a world where things had changed, where the United States was isolated and unable or unwilling to respond until it was too late... except that world would not closely resemble our own. This is the sort of thing they did in the strategy game Red Alert 2, in which the United States remained quiescent as even Mexico joined the camp of its opponents... and even then, Red Alert 2 was a cornball strategy game with military dolphins and battle squid and combat zeppelins and psionic mind control and time machines built by Albert Einstein.

Because in this day and age, that's what it takes to invade the United States.

Works like Red Dawn are indeed telling; they illuminate aspects of the American psyche that aren't generally spoken about. They reveal America's fears. In Red Dawn, you don't see a country that spends five times more on its military than its closest competitor, and whose military budget is more than the rest of the top 15 countries put together. You see an idea of the United States of how it sees itself--a newcomer to the international stage, still convinced that everyone's gunning for it and trying to knock it off its perch. Maybe that's so. Still, attitudes like this reinforce uncomfortable memes. Spending $700 billion a year on defense isn't sustainable, not with the condition the US economy is in, but movies like this help to reinforce the notion that there are always enemies out there, and that the United States has to be armed to the teeth to keep them at bay.

Photo: Pier to the Breakwater

One pier, built nearly a hundred years ago, anchors the waterfront drag of White Rock. It's easy to miss even if you head over to West Beach; the first time I was there I missed it entirely. It's far more low-key than other piers you might think of, but that's part of its charm. There's no amusement park or midway-by-the-sea here, just people walking back and forth and diving into the cool Pacific just short of the rocky breakwater.


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Aiming for Accuracy

As an author, one of the things I try above all to avoid is an inaccuracy seeping into one of my stories. If you've ever written, you know this is far easier said than done. Especially for the sort of stuff I write, in many cases I can't fall back on my own personal experience; I've never been to space or the moon, because do you know what they charge to bring even one carry-on item? For things you're not personally familiar with, it's easy to trip into inaccuracies without realizing it because you're basing your speculations on something else which itself is incorrect.

I ran obliquely into this with my first story, The Platinum Desolation, though I didn't realize it for a while afterward, and when it came to how I described things I came off lucky. The climax of the story takes place in a craggy, broken lunar cave, my mental image of which was drawn almost entirely from the Tintin book Explorers on the Moon. The only problem is that the book predates the lunar landings and the knowledge they brought back, which is how the gang got there ahead of Neil Armstrong. A cave like that can be explained away as a partially collapsed lava tube, but while I was writing the thing, the facts of how caves form wasn't anywhere in my mind. I just needed a cave for the character to be in.

That sort of process is, I imagine, rather common in writing. Events unfold in a certain way, and writers build the world in such a way that the path is an interesting one. The problem is that depending on the writer, accuracy can suffer when it's put in competition with what the plot requires. It's a common temptation to go the easy or convenient or exciting route rather than the correct one, but it's a problem that compounds itself.

Writing a thing doesn't make it so.

It's a problem because people are notoriously easy to influence through cultural media, especially when you're talking about things that the average person doesn't have any direct experience with. For a minor one, take the idea of sound in space. It's among the simplest and most common of errors, but it's absolutely ubiquitous. While the production staff may know that there's no sound in space--since there's no medium for the sound to propagate through--we continue to see visual media use sound in space scenes because that's what the expectation has become. As I recall, there was no course in my high school dedicated to teaching people about such common errors.

Not all such inaccuracies are as far removed from the average person's daily life than the propogation of sound in a vacuum, though. You can find some right here on Earth. Take the apparent ease of knocking someone unconscious, something you'll find across TV, movies, and literature. Some unlucky person gets knocked on the head and is down for the count for hours at a time. In reality, if they're out for more than a moment or two that unlucky person is the lucky recipient of a traumatic brain injury, and depending on how hard they were hit they may never be able to operate a fork again.

Nevertheless, because it's so convenient for stories--hero gets a hard punch upside the head, hero is knocked out, hero gets moved to villain's hideaway and wakes up in a death trap, hero escapes and proceeds to wreck stuff up, and that's just one potential iteration--it gets used again and again. It gets used, and people think that because it's used it's true, just like the way forensic shows have colored the opinions of juries. As a recent Cracked article discussed, we get a lot of what we know from cultural properties, and we subconsciously assume that they're true. Hell, it wasn't until I was in my 20s that I understood that the way the starship Enterprise flew around didn't match what it would be like in reality.

As authors, we think we're just telling stories--but stories are more influential than that. People have always learned from them, and as such, I feel that authors have an obligation to ensure accuracy wherever possible. To do otherwise is to do a disservice to the reader.