Photo: Duck, Duck, Goose?

Disclosure: I have no idea what sort of bird these birds are. This was taken in the Phoenix Zoo this past January, and while the Phoenix metro area is within the range of the mallard duck, I suspect these are in fact Canada Geese - they look the part, and Arizona is in their wintering band.

They're flying critters - that's enough, right?

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You Don't Know Me

Some people may be surprised, but it's true - we live in a world with masked superheroes in it, though these "superheroes" don't necessarily match what you might expect to see in a comic book. They're ordinary people trying to make a difference in different ways, whether it be the street patrols and interventions of Seattle's Phoenix Jones, or Thanatos passing out supplies and calling 911 when necessary in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Sometimes, though, it's easy to look past what they do and just focus in on the mask.

I know that outside of Halloween, masks have a bad rap, and understandably so; they're specifically designed to conceal the wearer's identity. Events such as the recent Vancouver riot forcefully demonstrated the necessity for people to be recognizeable - and if they're not, the Criminal Code of Canada makes it clear that "every one who, with intent to commit an indictable offence, has his face masked or coloured or is otherwise disguised is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding ten years."

In other words, not much room up here for the sort of masked vigilantism that was traditionally the bread and butter of comics. Which, honestly, is all for the better: vigilantism has no place in modern society, masked or otherwise. It's more the masks that get me. I've heard people express misgivings about the mere act of mask-wearing, even for characters like Thanatos - who limits himself to distributing food and reporting crimes in the DTES. Personally, I have difficulty getting behind a distrust of masks for distrust's sake... mostly because of my concerns about where this might lead us, ten or twenty or thirty years in the future.

what is this I don't even

Today, it's a rare person on the street who doesn't have a camera on them, usually in the form of a cameraphone - but when you stop to consider it, this is a staggeringly vast change that came about in less than ten years. Back in 2001, I don't know if I knew anyone who had a cell phone; hell, the fact that someone in my staircase at university owned a laptop was unusual. Even with the world teetering on the brink of financial collapse, I don't expect this pattern of change to alter much in the coming years. Augmented reality, which literally lets you see the world a different way, is speeding up and gaining traction.

What I worry about is a world where it's impossible to slide beneath notice on the street - not from the police, mind you, but from the people around you. Facial recognition programs exist today, and they're only getting better. What I worry about is the phone of, say, twenty years down the road; maybe it's linked into your glasses so that you can see the augmented reality layers clear as day, and to do that, it's got a camera that's seeing everything that you see. Every face that you see. How hard would it be for a facial recognition program to look at every face passing by, scour the internet, and have that face's name hovering above like a character in a computer game?

At that point, the game would be different. At that point, I would consider myself obligated to wear a mask, or at least something like really big sunglasses that obscure a huge swath of my face, day-to-day - because while I know I don't have any expectation of privacy in a public space, other people don't have the right to know who I am because there's an app for recognizing faces. It's one thing for the panopticon to be a prison, but to build it ourselves is something else again.

Photo: That Old Look Looks Familiar

Last Sunday, Columbia Street in downtown New Westminster was shut down for the Royal City Show and Shine, an outdoor car show that attracts exhibitors from across the Lower Mainland. Aside from the array of classic cars like the '57 Chevrolet Bel-Air with no seatbelts whatsoever, the Transit Museum Society - operators of Vancouver's Downtown Historic Railway - exhibited the Centennial Bus, a 1957 GMC Old Look bus which has been converted into something of a rolling transit museum.

When I first noticed it in the distance, I thought someone had invested a hell of a lot of effort in converting a PCC streetcar for road operation. But no, this is what they actually look like; these are the buses that replaced streetcar systems in city after city across North America. I'm not sure if the heavily PCC-inspired styling was meant to create a smooth link between the old streetcar-based systems and the new bus-based systems, or a cynical attempt to convince people that buses would be just as good as streetcars because, hell, they looked the same.

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Quaff Review #14: Mackinac Pale Ale

We've all done things we aren't particularly proud of. Sometimes things that seem perfectly normal and justifiable at the time can, with the weight of years piled atop, grumble and groan and be revealed for how pathetic they really are. For myself, I can think of few things I've done more pathetic than this - wandering the aisles of a Kroger grocery store in Swartz Creek, Michigan, shuffling from one battery of strange and wondrous and foreign American brands to the next, waiting for the clock to click past 7 AM so that they could sell me beer.

Not one of my better moments, but it couldn't be avoided. When my dad and I started our trip west from Toronto to Vancouver last year, we crossed the Ontario-Michigan border at something like four in the morning. By the time we reached Swartz Creek, a small town off I-69 just west of Flint, the sky was beginning to lighten and I was coming up on twenty-four hours straight of wakefulness. By then, I'd already formulated my idea - pick up some beer from every state we travelled through on the way to British Columbia. It didn't work out as well as I'd hoped. Still, in that Swartz Creek Kroger I started things off with a six-pack of bottles of Mackinac Pale Ale, produced by the Michigan Brewing Company.


Mackinac Pale Ale - presumably named after the Mackinac Bridge, which connects Michigan's Upper Peninsula to the Lower Peninsula and is featured on the label - is one of two pale ales produced by MBC. It's definitely a mellow sort of pale ale, which has become more important to me recently; as a beer gets hoppier and more bitter, my ability to take it just keeps going down. While Mackinac has the somewhat watery aroma I've come to associate with pale ales, its bite is modest and it's got a smooth taste. While the somewhat bitter tang is present, it's not overwhelming, which is all I ask - I've run into occasions where I've had to pour beer down the drain because it was just too bitter to finish.

Its label is succinct; to be honest, I don't think I can recall another label with this little information on it. Aside from its size - 12 fl. oz./355 mL - There's the Surgeon General's warning, the note about bottle redemption, a Michigan Brewers Guild logo, MBC's address, the bar code, the machine-printed date 01/13/11 - which I really hope wasn't a best before date - and that's it. I had to look it up on Beeradvocate.com to find out that it's 5% alc./vol. I'm not sure if it's that understatement that led me to buy it; honestly, knowing me it was probably the picture of the bridge.

The six bottles were priced at $8.49 at that Kroger, which is still a pretty good deal when I look around at the prices here in British Columbia. It's doubtful I'll find this particular kind any time soon, though - from my reading of the MBC website, it's only distributed within Michigan. While I know the state of Michigan is one of the modern world's tourist utopias, this beer isn't good enough to justify going there on its own. It's a beer; it's enough for itself.

ANDREW'S RATING: 3/5

Previous Quaff Reviews

• #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: There's No Gridlock on the Rails

What the impending Carmageddon in Los Angeles has really underscored to me is the necessity for major cities to seriously invest in their public transit infrastructures - and what it's demonstrated to me is that Los Angeles wasted a lot of time before it started getting around to that necessity. I know that all the cool cities were tearing up their streetcar networks in the years after the war, but subways were also cool in the 1950s. Hell, Cleveland of all places built a subway in the 1950s. I have to wonder if LA would be in this situation today if it had been building up a subway network over the last sixty years.

Still, at least it has one now... it's a start. In this photo from 2009, a few riders wait to board a train at Union Station.

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Ten Miles to Midnight

Two days from now, Los Angeles will be burning! There will be no escape for the millions trapped in the City of Angels as chaos and despair descends upon the Southland, turning the air yellow with smog and the surface streets into blood-and-gold rivers of headlights and brake lights! It will be madness, I tell you! Disastrous! It's Carmageddon!

At least, that's the impression I've been getting from the media. To put it in more prosaic terms, a sixteen-kilometer segment of the 405 freeway between the 101 and the 10, a route that carries hundreds of thousands of vehicles every day and one of the busiest stretches of highway in the United States, will be shutting down Friday night and not reopening until Monday morning for a lane widening project associated with the partial demolition of the Mulholland Bridge. For Torontonians, if you think of it as two and a half Don Valley Parkways, I don't think you would be far wrong. But I remember times when there was no movement on the DVP and it didn't break the city - we called it "rush hour." ZING!

In all seriousness, this is a hell of a thing to watch. Not being an Angeleno, in fact barely knowing anyone from Los Angeles, and having about a week's worth of experience with it, I know that I can't understand Carmageddon the way someone living there understands it. From what I'm seeing online, this seems utterly earthshaking, in the metaphorical sense. The Los Angeles Times has an entire section devoted to Carmageddon stories. The LAPD solicited the assistance of celebrity tweeters like Ashton Kutcher, Lady Gaga, and Tom Hanks to spread the word of the closure. People are being urged to shop as locally as possible and stay close to home. Metro is going zero-fare for the entire weekend, which would be pretty nice if you like tooling around on the subway. Though, I do note that as of this writing, #Carmageddon isn't a trending Twitter topic in Los Angeles.

They say that it's in times of trial that a person's true colors emerge. I suspect the same may be true of cities, too. If that's the case, and if the news and reports I'm getting are credible, the general reaction to impending Carmageddon can tell an interested observer a great deal about Los Angeles... though a lot of it is nothing that wasn't already taken for granted.

Eastbound traffic crawls in a stereotypically Los Angeles manner along the 101 at Vermont Avenue in December 2009.

None of the cities in which I've lived have been particularly dependent on highway systems. Neither New Westminster or Vancouver have any, and Toronto's is just a fraction of what had been planned back in the glory days of the automobile. In the event of a closure in Toronto, people would be irritated but people would be able to deal. Los Angeles, on the other hand...

Los Angeles practically defines highway dependence. It is a city addicted to the automobile, married to the idea that freedom comes with a patch of asphalt and your own set of wheels. The reaction of Los Angeles to the 405's closure is almost sad, in its way - I can't help but imagine an alcoholic who wakes up on Saturday morning to find the booze chest empty and all the liquor stores closed for the weekend.

It's got to the point where I really think the time has come for Los Angeles to admit that it has a problem, one that goes beyond the simple closure of the highway. Its real problem, the real thing people should be angry about, is the series of choices that led to it being put in this situation. In previous posts, I've written about the importance of the network effect in public transit - that chopping routes damages the network to a greater degree than one would expect, because with more options comes more choices. The same is true for roads and highways. A city should not be so utterly dependent on its highway system that the closure of one sixteen-kilometer segment of it paralyzes the whole. Is Los Angeles really that fragile, that vulnerable?

When taken together with the pressures of rising gas costs, a growing environmental awareness, and the problems that come with an atomized society linked only the superslabs, I wonder if it's possible that this whole Carmageddon thing might catalyze some thinking in the Southland; be a reason for people to change the region's course. Certainly, Los Angeles County's current public transit expansion work is probably the single largest program in the United States - but there's a lot to do, and not just in Los Angeles. We've got to catch up after resting on our laurels for half a century.

It's time to admit that we have problems - everywhere, not just in Los Angeles - and it's time to get busy.

Photo: A Distant Peace

When I took my bike down to White Rock this past weekend, my original objective was the Peace Arch at the Surrey/Blaine border crossing; the only problem was that my maps were insufficient for the task at hand. Unlike the Point Roberts border crossing, which is extremely easy to get to via regular roads, it seems that access to the Peace Arch crossing is intended to go mostly by highway; King George Boulevard just ends at 8 Avenue. I did find detours on Google Maps after returning home, but that didn't do me much good.

I didn't make it to the Peace Arch, but I was still able to see it. I got this shot of it on the far side of Semiahmoo Bay from the White Rock waterfront. It's funny, in its way; the border looms so large over everything, but in a photo like this, if you didn't know it was there you might never suspect it was there.


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I Would Have Made a Better Mayor than Rob Ford

Sometimes, it's best to lead off with utter arrogance. Maybe I'm way off base; I know that being Mayor of Toronto is an extremely trying position with heaps of responsibility and is, in a lot of respects, utterly thankless. I know that, as a 27-year-old unknown, my chances of victory were less than the chance of Boehner's Republicans agreeing to tax increases to keep the American economy from imploding. Nevertheless, after having observed the situation in Toronto from my perch in New Westminster for the last nine months, I can't help but think that I would have been a better mayor than Rob Ford.

For a while, it was something of a joke. But recently I've started wondering if it shouldn't be serious. Now that the Gravy Train is emerging from that long, dark tunnel, letting us see just what that chuffing engine Hizzoner da Mayor warned us about is pulling, we're in a better position to appraise Rob than we ever were before.

This is a man who made the Gravy Train the centerpiece of his campaign. This is a man whose proposed cycling infrastructure seemed specifically designed to be as inconvenient to use and serve as few people as possible. Fundamentally, this is a man who appears to be led by ideology: a man who does not judge the utility of a concept on its own terms, but only by the manner in which it fits into his existing political worldview. Cycling infrastructure? It takes space away from cars so it's bad. Surface-running LRT? It takes space away from cars so it's bad, despite the fact that surface-running LRT has taken hold in such car-centric sprawltopias as Phoenix and Los Angeles - but I don't expect Rob to know anything about that. Subway? It's underground and fast and people like subways and it doesn't get in the way of cars, so it's good. Who cares if it's a white elephant addendum to a white elephant project that should never have been built the way it is in the first place?

I wouldn't have cancelled Transit City - I liked Transit City. I wouldn't have cancelled the vehicle registration tax, either - in my view, tax decreases are things that should come when things are on an even keel, not when the storms of deficit and debt are tossing ships of state and city around the world. I would have worked to build Toronto to be a better place than I found it, to as much as I could have managed.

I guarantee that I am not crazy, just arrogant as hell.

I can't help but feel that's part of the problem. Rob does not strike me as a builder or improver. He's a business manager, looking for efficiencies and not really too concerned with the effects of finding them. He's proven the maxim that it's easier to destroy to create - after all, from Transit City to the Fort York pedestrian bridge, it seems as if he's focused disproportionate energy on preventing things from being created.

Creation is a fundamental part of the city. Hopefully Toronto will learn this well in time for 2014. But meanwhile, it's going to be a long three years in Hogtown... and if the city wakes up one fine October morning to find Tim Who-Dat in Queen's Park, it's probably going to seem like forever.

Photo: A Long Train in White Rock

White Rock, British Columbia is an interesting sort of city. Squeezed in between Surrey and Semiahmoo Bay, between the beach and the towering bluffs, it reminded me a lot of California - and I'm not the only one, as I later found that the producers of Psych use it to stand in for Santa Barbara. Its waterfront is long but narrow, and is separated from the rest of the city by a rail line. Not just any rail line, either - it's the main BNSF line leading into the United States, and the only railway that crosses the border between Vancouver and Abbotsford. As there aren't any sirens that start going when trains approach - though the trains do sound their horns in daylight hours - it's a good idea to be aware of your surroundings whenever you're going to the White Rock waterfront. Fortunately, they're not moving too fast at this stage; the people in the photo got across with no problems.

Also, the effect of the heat distortion around the engine reminds me of an Impressionist painting.


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Evergreen, Ever Needing Green

I've been following the details of the Evergreen Line since before I moved to British Columbia; in my understanding, it's been somewhat like a more well-known version of Toronto's proposed Downtown Relief Line, in that people have been talking about building it for a long time but nothing ever gets done about it. In the meantime the cities of Coquitlam and Port Coquitlam, which have been developing for years along the planned route of the Evergreen Line, continue to wait. If it hadn't been for the Olympics, they might have had it done by now - but if that was the case, it would probably be the Richmond-Airport-Vancouver line that everyone would be talking about now.

The big issue has been where the money to build the line is going to come from. A little while ago, the council of mayors on TransLink rejected a property tax increase to pay for it; a few days ago, they came out in favor of a two-cent gasoline tax increase with which to finance the construction. This has, predictably, not played particularly well in large parts of Metro Vancouver's motorist class, with the tax on a liter of gas already standing at forty-five cents.

While I'm glad that the mayors have finally agreed on something to move the Evergreen's construction forward - despite the fact that I would rarely if ever use it, being in New Westminster and very rarely having a reason to visit the Tri-Cities - I can't help but feel that this gas tax is based on short-term thinking. Sure, taxing gasoline is a reliable source of government income right now, because gas is, regrettably, an absolutely necessary component of society as it currently stands. It also fuels people who like to fulminate about how transit should completely pay its own way, who think drivers shouldn't have to pay one red cent for transit improvements, without any consideration of the nature of the society we live in.

It's purely wishful thinking to believe that this state of affairs will endure forever. It might come in the form of inexpensive and easy-charging electric vehicles. A change could be fueled a steadily decreasing supply of oil matched with ever-increasing demand, particularly among the new motorist classes of China and India. There has to be another way.

A Millennium Line train makes its way through New Westminster.

I've banged this particular pot before, but not for a while - not since I was in Toronto, and the Toronto Transit Commission's state of penury was very relevant to my day-to-day life. It's something that, I think, should be discussed here in Metro Vancouver as well - in fact, it's probably more easily applicable to Metro Vancouver than Toronto. It's stolen from Los Angeles, where it has been demonstrated to actually work. It's Measure R.

What is Measure R? It's simple - approved by a two-thirds majority of voters back in November 2008, it is a half-cent sales tax levied throughout Los Angeles County, with the proceeds funneled solely and explicitly to transportation improvements. Not just transit, mind you - as Los Angeles County is a patchwork of independent cities, some of them have little transit to fund, and so in many cases the Measure R funds go to work on roads or highways. As TransLink is responsible for roads as well as the public transit system, this could make things far more equitable for motorists as well as transit riders.

It's Measure R that backstops Los Angeles' 30/10 Initiative - a project to get thirty years of transit expansion done in ten, the centerpiece of which is the planned extension of the Purple Line subway from central Los Angeles to the Westside Cities and, eventually, Santa Monica. It may be that Los Angeles' history as a car-choked land of smog and sprawl has primed the people there for this, made them get behind the prospect of something better. I don't know many Angelenos, so I'm not sure if this is actually the case.

No matter what happens with gas in the near future, people will always be buying things. I believe something like Measure R would not only be a windfall for TransLink; it would be a windfall for all of us who want to get around Metro Vancouver easily and smoothly.