Photo: That Building Has the Right Idea

In this day and age, it's easy to feel down. No matter where you look you can find bad news without even wanting to, and it seems like it's been a long time since anyone honestly looked forward to the prospect of a better tomorrow. So it's good to find messages like the one on the side of the Wing Sang Building in Vancouver's Chinatown, a simple art installation with the message that "everything is going to be alright." It's visible from the SkyTrain between Stadium-Chinatown and Main Street-Science World, and there have been times after work where it's made me feel a bit better on seeing it. It's a message I wish could be reinforced more often in the media - when it comes down to it, a great many panics are sustained by the news telling people that they should be panicking, and people being too stupid too think about whether that's really the case.

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Lying On A Bed of Rails

"This subway plan is realistic, it's affordable, and it will deliver real benefits for people living and working in Toronto in time for the 2015 Pan-Am Games."
- Rob Ford, from the Rob Ford for Mayor Transportation Plan, September 7, 2010

These are strange times to be a transit supporter in Toronto - which is just as well for me, seeing as how I'm not in Toronto anymore. Despite that, as a member of the Torontonian diaspora I can't help but watch and listen as the city groans a little bit louder with each passing day. I think it may come from the gradual realization of certain truths - such as the way in which Toronto's transportation infrastructure is continuing to lag behind, the way in which Hizzoner da Mayor's ideological emphasis on subways - specifically, the Sheppard subway, a wholly suburban line connecting a mall in North York to another mall in North York - and staunch opposition to surface-running light rail is making sure that Toronto will continue to operate a 1970s public transit system well into the twenty-first century.

Many of the important truths in life are simple. So simple, in fact, it's easy to go past them without noticing, leaving them lying neglected on the pavement. One such truth is one of the key points of argument - correlation does not imply causation. Said another way, just because two things happened at the same time, it does not mean that one caused the other. This would be a good thing for politicians to know about, or at the very least not ignore quite so much. That's more than I can expect for Hizzoner, though.

Recently, Ford claimed that he "campaigned on the Sheppard subway and people supported my platform." Well, I'll give him this - both of those statements are true. He did campaign on building the stubway to nowhere out to Scarborough Centre, and enough people did support his platform to propel him to the Mayor's Office. The assumption here is that people supported him because of his subway plans. Myself, I don't buy that - but I don't imagine that matters. People voted for Rob Ford, so in Rob Ford's mind, every single person who marked his name on their ballot wanted the whole package. To be fair to him, too, he's not doing anything that he didn't warn us about in his pre-election transportation plan - which is one of the reasons I was so opposed to him.

Mostly because his transportation platform rested on discarding a plotted-out system with plenty of dedicated funding that had been in the offing for three years, in favor of back-of-the-napkin "plans" with no money to pay for them. Now, that proud brashness may finally be biting at Ford; Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty appears singularly uninterested, and rightly so, in giving Ford $650 million to pursue his dream of a completed Sheppard Line three years from now. Dollars which, by the way, come from the Eglinton Crosstown LRT construction - because the Ford camp is "already certain" that one of the most expensive infrastructure projects in Toronto's history will come in under budget.

Pull the other one.

A subway train departs from, or possibly arrives at, Sheppard-Yonge Station. Since they use the same tail track it's hard to tell sometimes.

There's ideology, and then there's just stupidity. Sure, I like subways; they're fast and smooth and have a lot more room for people to move around inside - unlike the SkyTrain here in Vancouver, where just because someone's standing next to the door it doesn't mean they're getting off at the next station. I feel that the Ford administration has already breezed past ideology and moved to stupidity in its monomaniacal pursuit of a subway underneath Sheppard Avenue East. If only Ford was pursuing his promise to not cut services with the same sort of mania.

On Wednesday, Randy McDonald at A Bit More Detail asked whether it was worth it for McGuinty to throw sand in Ford's eyes, for Toronto's sake - "is it worth taking down Ford if Toronto's left with no major transit expansion plans?" Personally, I say yes. Despite what we may be inclined to believe, there are circumstances where it's better to have nothing than to have something that's not appropriate for the situation. A completed Sheppard Line would be a money pit for years; the TTC is struggling to afford its current operations, and that doesn't even take into account the additional fiscal pressures that will kick in once the extension to Vaughan opens in 2014.

It was the suburbs who voted overwhelmingly for Rob Ford, drowning out the old city of Toronto's support for Smitherman. It was the responsibility of the suburban voters to know what they were in for when they marked Ford on their ballot. It's the suburbs who will suffer because they decided to listen to the subway crusader, without stopping to consider that the choice wasn't between LRT and subways - it was between LRT and nothing. This isn't the same category as people voting for Ford on his gravy-drinking bona fides, only to find him preparing to close libraries left and right - this was his plan for the start, regardless of whether the money was there.

The money isn't there. So there won't be much of a start after all.

Photo: Treads and Wheels

For a while, there have been tanks on Beatty Street. Two of them, to be precise, placed as static installations outside the Beatty Street Drill Hall - an M4A3E8 Sherman and a Ram Mk II, both of Second World War provenance. I was thankful to see that they'd been cleaned up; some weeks earlier I'd been going down the far side of Beatty Street, and one of the tanks had been covered by graffiti - probably the work of some group of morons completely ignorant of both historical importance and simple respect, perhaps a result of the riot.

Photographed here is the Sherman, contrasted against the more common sort of wheels you'll find in Vancouver today.


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A Chip Off the Old Book

"Most importantly, putting many titles into a story makes it easier to find your place if you happen to use your book to smash an irksome buzzing fly, and you hit the fly so hard that pieces of metal and plastic go shooting out of the book mechanism, so then you are forced to put the story chip into a new reader and you cannot remember where you were.

"This happens more often than you might expect."
- James Alan Gardner, Ascending

Technological advance rarely goes in the directions it's expected to. It can be argued that today we live in a world of electronics, but fifty years ago electronics was something of an also-ran; in 1961, people looked ahead to a future of personal helicopters, space colonies, and too-cheap-to-meter nuclear power. By the same token, it's an assured bet that the future will not look like what we expect it to - while the tranformative technology that will throw our projections out of order may well exist already, it takes time for technology to mature to the point where it can really influence the world. Even when we're pretty sure what we can reasonably expect, the future has a tendency of buggering up all our neat estimations.

One significant example of this is the present-day ebook revolution. Now, the idea of an ebook was something simple, simple enough that it's been a fixture of science fiction for decades; it did not require much of a logical leap to assume that in the future, it would be easy and economical to read books on a computer rather than paper. Where those visions ended up conflicting with reality was in the details of how they worked. It's understandable, as these visions tended to emerge when the internet was less capable than it is now, and when "filesharing" was letting your colleague use the papers socked away in your cabinet.

The quote at the top, from James Alan Gardner's 2001 novel Ascending, marks one of the common ways to visualize how ebooks would be adopted into society: like books, but more advanced. Rather than going to the store to get a couple of hundred pages glued together and sandwiched between covers, you'd instead get a computer chip that contained the book, and which you'd need to insert into an ebook reader in order to use - now that I think about it, greatly similar to the way Nintendo DS games are packaged and used, though I always imagined those "book chips" as looking more like SD cards.

Heavy, ain't it?

Presuming that they come with "covers" sufficient to keep out dust and so on, a library of book chips would be substantially less bulky than actual, physical books, and far easier to move around - though considerably more vulnerable to being fried by electromagnetic pulses. A book chip-based model would also preserve the book market in the form that was familiar right up to the last couple of years. Sure, if you have a blank book chip you'd likely be able to download the public domain texts from Project Gutenberg or a Creative Commons-licensed work onto it, but digital restriction technologies may well have been in place to prevent you from downloading an ebook to one of your blank book chips. Why? Because it lessens their control.

The ebook model we've got, that of direct downloads to reader devices, has its advantages and its disadvantages. When it's working, it's efficient - you don't have to truck your butt down to the store to get the next book in the series, you can just order it online and zap it's there. That, incidentally, leads into one of the model's great disadvantages - if for some reason the company doesn't want you to have a book that you've previously bought, they can just sound the recall on their devices and zap, the book is gone. This is not just idle speculation; Amazon has already demonstrated it can do this, as demonstrated by its remote recall of Kindle-purchased copies of 1984 back in 2009. Afterward Amazon said it wouldn't do this again... but corporations say a lot of things, and Amazon is not the only ebook retailer out there. Whereas if I buy a book from Chapters, I can be reasonably confident that a couple of Customer Experience Representatives won't break into my apartment in the dead of night and return it to their shelves.

There's another thing that "book chip" ebooks gives us that actual ebooks don't - a used market. Whenever you've got any sort of physical media, you can be assured that someone out there will be in the business of buying and reselling it, sometimes to ridiculous extremes - the last time I was in the Salvation Army Thrift Store, they had for sale the CDs for Total Annihilation, a 1997 RTS computer game that would be hard-pressed to run under modern operating systems. I recognize the value of the used market; it was a used book store on Dunlop Street in downtown Barrie, a couple minutes away from my high school, that started me into things that I wasn't then able to find in the dedicated bookstores. For non-physical media like modern ebooks, though, there's no such thing. It puts a disproportionate amount of power in the hands of the producer and the provider, and not of the buyer.

I think I prefer the older, speculative ebook model because of familiarity - it provides new opportunities within a framework that's already known.

Photo: Crowing Over Plastic

Even though I've been here for nearly a year, I still find it a bit odd how crows are absolutely ubiquitous in Metro Vancouver. Everywhere you look, there's one chilling on some telephone lines or hopping around on the ground. Over the weekend I caught this one in Thornton Park, across from Pacific Central Station - I presume it did not much care for the taste of the discarded plastic bag some thoughtless person left in the grass.

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Gaucheworld

As a creator, it's easy to make paradoxes without really meaning to. It's easiest for people who make television and movies, and it manifests in the form of the Celebrity Paradox - that is, with a given show that stars a specific celebrity, the generally non-stated assumption that it exists in an alternate universe where neither that show nor that celebrity exist. Otherwise things would get pretty meta, as the celebrity's character could conceivably run into the celebrity on the street, and they could gain insight into their situation by buying the series on DVD.

Recently I've been giving more thought to a subset of this - think of it as the Creator Paradox. Simply put, it's this: within the context of a specific work by a specific creator, what becomes of the rest of that creator's output?

The reason I've been thinking about this is Robert L. Forward's 1985 novel Rocheworld, the story of a voyage of exploration to Barnard's Star. Thankfully, the trigger didn't come until the last few pages, at which point the story was winding down and it didn't trip me up the way it could have.

"George was in his bed, staring up at the viewscreen in the ceiling and scanning through an old science fiction novel, Dragon's Egg. He'd read it many times before, but it was so full of scientific tidbits that he always enjoyed dipping into it before going to sleep. His favorite part was when the alien 'cheela' came up from the surface of a neutron star to visit the humans in orbit above them, riding on miniature black holes."

Granted, when I first read that, it didn't trip me up. Instead, what I thought was something along the lines of "nice, a shout-out to Larry Niven!" Because I've never read Dragon's Egg, you see. It was only later that night while I was tooling around Wikipedia that I went over to the novel's page, found that it had won the 1981 Locus Award for First Novel, and that it was written by... Robert L. Forward.

My reaction was along the lines of "man, how gauche." Giving a shout-out to one of your friends or fellow travellers within your work is one thing. Giving a shout-out to yourself is something else again. Sure, I know that as an author you're going to think your stuff is gold, that it's platinum, that it's so awesome that people will be appreciating it long after you're gone. A touch of arrogance is necessary in a starting writer, or that writer wouldn't believe their stuff is good enough to be published anyway. But outright stating it... it's a big bump in the road that adds nothing to the story. In fact, I think it subtracts from it. It's not smart or witty or anything like that. It's tooting your own horn, and it just looks sad.

Presumably, though, Rocheworld takes place in a world where Dr. Forward never wrote The Flight of the Dragonfly and never expanded it into Rocheworld. This is something I've thought about for myself in the past for my own stories, if only so that I'd have an answer at the ready in the unlikely event anyone ever posed the question. In the context of what I write, I died in 1996 after an unfortunate bicycling encounter with a rusty mailbox. We all have our solutions.

Photo: Distorted Harbour

You don't have to get close to the speed limit of the universe for light to behave in interesting ways. Sometimes, the right kind of reflective surface is enough. Last Friday evening as the sun was landing low in the sky, I caught this shot of the Harbour Centre tower distorted in the windows of Vancouver Community College on Dunsmuir at Hamilton.

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A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Lock

People change their minds all the time. They change their minds about what route they're going to take to work, what they're going to have for lunch, and what they're going to say to the boss when they finally win the lottery. I happen to think that changing your mind is good; it demonstrates that you're open to new information, new knowledge, new experiences and new conclusions, and that you're willing to allow that newness to influence the manner in which you look at the world.

In politics, however, it almost seems like this is a cardinal sin.

Changes of mind and direction have been somewhat prominent in the news recently. In Toronto, there haven't been many recent stories about city councillor Giorgio Mammoliti, he with the communist-detecting nose, that have skipped over his past involvement as a union leader and a member of the New Democratic Party - posts practically diametrically opposite from his current place as an ally of the Ford administration. Before that, federal NDP interim leader Nycole Turmel took heat in the media for her ties to the Quebec sovereignty movement - ties which were, incidentally, dissolved once she became interim leader.

I've seen politicians been lambasted in the world of public opinion for daring - daring - to change their opinion on an issue. Note that this is something entirely distinct from not living up to platform promises, as I suspect that aside from circumstances where a dog is elected mayor of a small town, you're not going to find a politician who doesn't renege on electoral promises in one way or another.

I can't help but see this as completely backwards. The last sort of person I want in a position of power is someone who will hold on to their view of the world come hell or high water, despite new information or changing circumstances. The modern world is a protean thing, and it will not be forced down the same old channel no matter how much you want it to. A proper leader should be able to go with it, to change course mid-stream, and not stand resolute against the current. That's the problem with leaders such as, say, Rob Ford - he knows what he knows and he'll be damned if anything's going to change his mind, so the world had better adapt to the way he wants it to be.

Too bad the world doesn't actually work that way.

Photo: Totally West Coast (Express)

Though I've been in New Westminster for nearly a year, so far I've never had a reason, much less an opportunity, to ride the West Coast Express - however, I understand that this is fairly common for people who have spent much of their lives in Vancouver or the immediately surrounding cities. I wouldn't mind trying it out sometime, if only to see the manner in which the West Coast Express distinguishes itself from GO Transit, Metrolink, Coaster, Agence métropolitaine de transport, and all the other commuter rail networks that use Bombardier Bi-Levels - the Cappuccino Car. It hosts a small coffee shop that sells coffee, cappuccino, snacks, juice, and so on while the train is in transit.

Surprisingly, Seattle's Sounder commuter rail doesn't appear to have an equivalent to this. But it's a reminder that sometimes, a regional stereotype has a basis in fact.

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A Smell of Communism

Toronto is, I'm sure, becoming more of a laughingstock by the day, and by the time 2014 rolls around I expect the administration of the Brothers Ford to have provided textbooks worth of object lessons for "what not to do" in the world of public relations. The most recent event isn't even that much of a surprise when you put it into a Fordian context... but just because something isn't surprising doesn't mean you expect for it to happen.

On Monday, Toronto city councillor Giorgio Mammoliti, one of my opponents in the mayoral election last year and now a strong ally of the Brothers Ford, opened a new page on Facebook: “Save the City..Support the Ford Administration.” In itself, it wouldn't be newsworthy; people create Facebook pages all the time. What's different about this, though, is that Mammoliti has explicitly set it up from the get-go as a political echo chamber. Only posts that agree with and support the direction Toronto is taking under the Fords will be allowed; posts from "people who are clearly working for a living, and wanting their tax dollars to be used in a particular way." Why? Because Mammoliti is "trying to wean out the typical communist thinker who will be doing nothing but whining."

After all, if you didn't vote for Ford, you don't deserve to have your voice heard. Ford won (with a plurality of a minority of valid electors), so for the next four years what he says goes. Granted, it fits within the letter of democracy, but it savages the spirit of it. The point of leadership is to lead.

But it doesn't matter, not to these folks. Because, you see, there are communists in Toronto. Not only have they smashed open the gates, they're attending all-night deputations at City Hall to speak out against service cuts! Amazing that out of one hundred and sixty-nine speakers, one hundred and sixty-six would thus prove to be communists, but don't worry. Mammoliti and Doug Ford and Denzil Minnan-Wong have determined, presumably through science, that the speakers at the deputations were unrepresentative of Toronto's population and thus their opinions can be safely ignored.

Except for one thing - it's goddamn ideological bullshit. Either Ford's supporters are too lazy or self-interested to go down to City Hall to support their leader, or... gasp... Ford's supporters supported him because "no service cuts" was the core of his platform. The political doublethink here is amazing, if also disgusting. So, magically, people who oppose the Ford administration's current priorities, who want Hizzoner da Mayor to live up to the commitments he made on the campaign trail, become communists... and who ever cared about what a communist thought, anyway?

This is what Giorgio Mammoliti sees when he sleeps, presumably; only Ford stands between Toronto and this.

To me, this is just another example of how hopelessly out of touch this administration is with the modern day and with people of my generation and after. Rob Ford is forty-two and Mammoliti is fifty; I can understand that when they were growing up, in those heady days of the 1970s and early 1980s, Canada's popular culture was vastly influenced by the Cold War and the idea that communists were the bad guys was a given. They grew up surrounded by the threat of war, with the idea that the Reds over the horizon were just waiting for an opportunity to nuke the hell out of them.

Today, it's vastly different. I don't remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, the effective end of the Cold War; I was six years old at the time. By the time I started becoming really aware of the greater world during Operation Desert Storm, the Soviet Union had less than a year of life left to it. It's been twenty years since there's been a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and for an increasingly large segment of the population, communism is effectively irrelevant. It's something people learn about in school. Communism doesn't keep Canadian sunseekers from the beaches of Cuba, it doesn't hamper the flow of trade between Canada and the People's Republic of China, and North Korea is almost as much a monarchy as it is communist. When Mammoliti says he's not going to be accepting comments from communists I have to laugh, because it's meaningless.

It still has an effect, though. It legitimizes polarization. It demonstrates that the administration is concerned only with its supporters, and that it does not care about those who disagree with the direction it's moving in. Which is a problem, as the government of the City of Toronto is supposed to represent all Torontonians. It poisons political discourse in the city, and it makes me thankful that I was able to escape to British Columbia when I did. I mean, were there ever any city councillors during the Miller years who dismissed their opponents as fascists or Nazis? Mammoliti is doing the same damn thing right now.

Speaking of the Soviet Union, though, there is a very good Russian term that deserves to be brought into this, I think: nekulturny. Literally translated it means "uncultured," but like many insults there's a hell of a lot more oomph packed into it, and so far as I know it is one of the strongest insults available in the Russian language.

If Mammoliti can smell communism, it's only because he and the Fords - since if they really didn't agree with his direction, they would've come down on him by now - are simply nekulturny.