Photo: Victoria Street Sunset

Say what you will about how the Pacific Northwest isn't equipped to deal with snow in winter, the fact of the matter is that once it's done and the skies have cleared, what's left generally looks a lot better than the usual dreary puddles. For me, a winter without snow isn't much of a winter at all, and more like early November but several months long. When snow's around, it makes things around it seem just a little bit brighter.

After the first series of snowfalls last weekend, I took this shot looking along Victoria Street in New Westminster. Looks a lot brighter than what we'd have got after a rain to me.


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The Trouble With TransCanada

Think of it as the circulatory system of the Alberta tar sands. The Keystone Pipeline System, which presently connects the petroleum town of Hardisty, Alberta with refineries in Illinois, is one of the main ways by which all that synthetic crude oil is shipped out of Snow Texas. It's been in the news recently thanks to dickering over the Keystone XL. This extension of the pipeline, in the works for the last few years, would run south to the United States Gulf Coast, where the oil could be refined and loaded directly onto tankers - much like how the Canadian government wants to ram the Northern Gateway Pipeline through the British Columbia upcountry, to be loaded onto tankers in Kitimat for shipment to China. The difference between the two is that since Keystone XL passes through the United States, it's the United States government that decides whether or not to let it pass.

After what seemed like an eternity of back and forth, with people in town halls speaking out for it or against it, environmentalists trying to raise the word against and the oil industry attempting to stack the debate in its favor with things like the "ethical oil" claim, the State Department yesterday denied TransCanada the necessary Presidential Permit to build the Keystone XL. Among its opponents, cheers and celebration all around.

TransCanada, of course, was ready for this contingency, and didn't waste much time in shooting back - though in this case "shooting back" takes the form doing pretty much the same thing they already did, since they're just re-applying for the permit. What really got me about this is the memetic angle they're using in their pursuit of the Keystone - though, to be honest, it's not really surprising in light of the "ethical oil" angle. In fact, according to them the Keystone XL is the democratic choice, because otherwise American oil will come from "countries who do not share democratic values Canadians and Americans are privileged to have."

TransCanada CEO Russ Girling put it bluntly, saying that "the U.S. will continue to import millions of barrels of conflict oil from the Middle East and Venezuela" without the pipeline - wait, WHAT? Did he seriously just utter the words "conflict oil" with what was presumably a straight face? I know exactly what he's trying to do here, draw a line connecting oil from the Mideast and Venezuela - in other words, current American rivals - with the conflict diamonds of Africa, mined in war zones and sold to finance wars or revolutions or insurgencies.

I found the sheer cheek in that statement to be despicable - how dare he? Sure, Saudi Arabia isn't exactly a hotbed of democracy and Hugo Chavez has spent the last thirteen years steering Venezuela onto a course that doesn't simply parallel the United States. Neither country is currently involved in a war or experiencing an armed insurrection. They just aren't assured providers, the way Canada is. Venezuela and Saudi Arabia can always take their balls and go home. Canada, thanks to the decisions of the last twenty-five years, lacks that option. Canada is trapped in an American orbit with insufficient delta-v to achieve escape velocity.

I wouldn't be as irritated about this, I suspect, if it wasn't so transparent on TransCanada's part. A society-wide push for "ethical products" would, if done correctly, do a lot of good for worker's conditions and the health of the North American economy; I mean, is it even possible anymore to buy something that wasn't made in some Pearl River Delta factory sweatshop, the sort of place where workers are threatening suicide over the conditions? For some things, like consumer electronics, it pretty much is impossible. Focusing just on "ethical oil" is a particularly narrow view, where "ethical" does not mean "the right thing to do" so much as it means "the right thing to do for those with an economic stake in the tar sands." The way I see it, an honest appraisal of ethical oil would include strong actions to minimize the use of it and switch over to other sources of fuel, because isn't it ethical to minimize the environmental impact we're going to leave our successors? Isn't it ethical to ensure that future generations have access to the same resource we did, so that they can get good things out of it as well?

Unfortunately, that kind of thinking is vastly out of step with the modern world, "ethics" and all.

Imagine A World Without Free Knowledge

Quaff Review #19: Eel River Açaí Berry Wheat Ale

It seems like all this açaí berry stuff came out of nowhere in the last five or so years; I certainly never heard of it while I was in university, but now it's got to the point where the net is full of scams pumping the supposed healing and energy-giving qualities of the berry, scams that give your decidedly non-açaí berry-related workplace telephone number as the cancellation line. They come from the South American açaí palm and are a key food source in the Amazon region, to the extent that açaí palm groves are starting to rebuild damaged portions of the rainforest.

So it should come as no surprise that someone's taken this Brazilian "wonder fruit" and mixed it into a beer. Specifically, it's the Eel River Brewing Company in Fortuna, California - well, technically Scotia, California, a nearby census-designated place - that's done it. Their Açaí Berry Wheat Ale is the first product of theirs I've seen on any shelves in British Columbia, but that's all right, since it's also the first beer I've encountered that contains açaí. I'm pretty sure that that, in itself, was a major component of the marketing for this particular beer - allowing it to sell itself through people doing a doubletake at the label. It's something you expect in health juice drinks that cost $10 per bottle and go on and on about how much of an antioxidant it is, not a $3.50 bottle of beer.

In fact, the label doesn't give much space to anything else. Aside from the government warning that comes standard on American beer labels, there's just the basic refund notes and beer information - 12 fl. oz., 4.0% alcohol by volume, and its organic certifications. That last one isn't exactly surprising, though - the bottlecap is given over to a USDA Organic logo, and it appears that every last beer in Eel River's lineup is organic. No notes about the beer itself, why they made it this way, and so on; their website isn't much more helpful, and spares only a sentence describing it as "a light-bodied wheat ale... a flavorful mix of pomegranate and berries" before launching into what foods it's best paired with and what awards it's won.

I didn't look up the website until I started writing this, and so when I drank it I was coming in with no preconceived notions to the extent that I couldn't even remember if I'd tasted açaí berries before. I picked it up to ring in 2012, and yet I didn't get around to drinking it until January was at least a week old.


The first thing I noticed was that for all of its ingredients, the scent of this beer is dominated by it being a wheat beer; I found the smell very similar to KLB Raspberry Wheat Beer and generally unlike most other beers. The wheat likewise dominated the taste at first though was quickly overwhelmed by the açaí which, to my tastebuds, seemed rather like blueberries. While strong, the fruit taste didn't take over the beer but merely supplemented the wheat.

In body, this was a smooth, non-viscous, somewhat watery beer, though no less flavorful because of that and by no means weak. Still, with 4% alcohol content it's not particularly strong either; call it welterweight. It's the sort of beer to be enjoyed rather than simply consumed - go with something cheap like Rainier or Lucky Lager if that's all you're looking for. It's a good beer to accompany a good relax.

And if you've been wondering, it's pronounced "ah-SIGH-ee." Portuguese, you see.

ANDREW'S RATING: 3.5/5

Previous Quaff Reviews

• #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: This Bird's Got Places to Be

There were three crows and a seagull chilling on the parkade railing after the snowfall, keeping a calm watch over the Fraser River and presumably looking for something to eat. I was setting up a shot of all of them when they started to take off, one after another, in a flurry of feathers and snowflakes. This crow here was the last to take flight, and I still can't believe I got to the button in time. Usually when I try to capture a crow in motion, I'll get a few tailfeathers at one end of the photo if I'm lucky.


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It's "Due to the Dead," Not "Do to the Dead"

It's a simple truth of life that no matter how pure and good something is, you can easily find someone standing against it - a task that has become far, far simpler with the ubiquity of the net. The natural corollary is that there is nothing so coarse and vile that you won't be able to find someone cheerleading it. Case in point - the recent storm surrounding the video that made its way into the world, depicting United States Marines in Afghanistan pissing on the corpses of dead Taliban fighters. This is undoubtedly something that has happened times uncountable in the long and bloody history of humanity, but it's not often that the world gets a direct window on it - and just because it's been happened time and again, it doesn't make it any more excusable.

There's a little thing, after all, called having respect for the dead. After all, when the crew of RML 497 recovered the body of Obermachinist Pigorsch in the North Sea during the height of the Second World War, they didn't urinate on it - they buried it at sea in sight of Europe. War is a notoriously dehumanizing thing, and it's through even small courtesies like paying proper respect to the dead that people involved in it can keep from having the abyss swallow them.

History, however, has amply demonstrated that the abyss is plenty hungry in Afghanistan; take the First Anglo-Afghan War, for one example among many. What it hasn't had so much opportunity to show is people back home standing up and applauding barbaric actions - and yes, that's exactly what I think this is, a barbaric action. Pissing on the corpse of a dead fighter is something I'd expect from some grunting Visigoth tearing down the walls of Rome. I goddamn well expect better than that from a member of the United States Marine Corps. People today are supposed to stand above that sort of base revenge - sure, everyone stumbles from time to time, but this is more like throwing oneself off the edge.

Like I said, though, you can always find someone cheerleading for something, no matter how heinous. So it goes with this. Recently Dana Loesch, editor-in-chief of the CNN-contributing news blog Big Journalism, used her talk radio pulpit to argue in support of pissing on the dead. I found coverage of this on Little Green Footballs, a blog that incidentally has changed a vast, staggering amount since I was in university, along with the audio itself on YouTube. Listen to it. Since I don't listen to talk radio myself, particularly conservative American talk radio, I have no idea how "fringe" this is, or even if it is. Certainly the idea that "progressive" is a pejorative term has been spreading slowly but steadily through the American right wing since 2008.

"Can someone explain to me if there's supposed to be a scandal that someone pees on the corpse of a Taliban fighter? Someone who's part of an organization that murdered over three thousand Americans?" she asks, rather rhetorically. "I'd drop trou and do it too. That's me, though."

In situations like this I find it somewhat difficult to fully come to grips with the other person's thought process, mainly because we're hammering at the same situation from two vastly different perspectives. In her subsequent defense against "the usual mob of progressive haters," which I suppose applies to me now as well, she chooses to defend herself by saying, "In my Twitter timeline yesterday progressives called our military 'killers, kids, barbaric trash, murderers...'" and that because the same people didn't raise a stink over the Air Force dumping some cremated partial remains of dead soldiers into a landfill, their arguments are automatically invalid.

That last one is a horrid thing, disrespect for the dead - but disrespect of a different sort, one that should be dealt with a different way. Yet it's not material to the subject at hand. Loesch's defense is a scattershot attempt to discredit the people who disagree with her - which isn't really surprising; she evidently believes from what she's said and written that there was nothing wrong with Marines pissing on dead Taliban fighters, and so she doesn't see any reason to justify it. At least, that's what it seems like to me.

Still, it remains a bad thing, an intensely negative thing, something that's worth being called a scandal no matter how much people like Dana Loesch argue. To see why, simply turn it around - consider a situation where a bunch of Taliban fighters killed some US, or Canadian, or any ISAF troops, pissed on their corpses, and the video got out on YouTube. Would people like Loesch still be saying that this wasn't a scandal? Not likely. If the reverse happened the right-wing blogosphere would be on fire.

"I’ve seen more outrage towards our troops over this incident than I have ever seen towards the Taliban themselves who’ve beheaded soldiers (American and Afghan), raped and tortured women, sent out suicide bombers, and carried out horrific attacks," Leisch wrote. Allow me to be blunt in response.

We expect that sort of thing from the Taliban.

We expect our people to FUCKING BE BETTER THAN THAT.

Photo: The Sort of Snow I've Known Before

Finally it's starting to look like a real winter; last night, the first snowflakes of 2012 fell on New Westminster and across the Lower Mainland. It kept up all through the night and is still coming down as I write this, though more softly than before. Nevertheless, the snow I've encountered since moving out west has just been a pittance next to what growing up in Central Ontario taught me was "normal." Take this photo, for example - taken on December 1, 2003, it's one of the oldest in my files, a view from the window of my old university apartment as the snow comes down around the intersection of Charlotte Street and Aylmer Street North in Peterborough, Ontario.

You don't see many GM New Look buses like that around anymore, either.


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

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Popping the Hood, Checking the Bucks

Vancouver transit riders have been able to breathe easy for a while when it comes to fare hikes - after all, there haven't been any since 2010. It's a much preferable situation to the one which prevails in Toronto, where fares have gone up twice in the last two years, most recently from $3 to $3.10, because fare increases aren't irritating enough on their own without throwing dimes into the mix. Still, even though the fares have held pat, the costs of living and operating haven't, and so earlier this week TransLink applied to raise transit fares in Metro Vancouver in 2013, subject to approval. If approved, a one-zone fare will go from $2.50 to $2.75, while two- and three-zones would be increased to $4.25 and $5.50, respectively.

2013 is a ways away yet, but there's already grumbling in the comment threads. I noticed one person for whom this increase was the last straw, that thanks to TransLink they'd be putting their car back on the road and nuts to them. It's not an unexpected result. One thing Toronto papers repeat time and again as TTC fare increases loom is that each increase will drive a certain percentage of riders back to their cars. Fair enough; everyone has their breaking point, and some people only merely tolerate transit. I know that my view of it certainly isn't universal. Encountering comments like that, though, of people fulminating against a few more quarters every day, made me wonder about the economics of getting around with four wheels instead of on the train - whether a car would make economic sense for me, so that I can have a better understanding of the people who do use them.

For this hypothetical, my assumption is that one day I wake up and have decided to reinvent my life. The first priority is, of course, to buy a car since I currently have none. For this I consulted Craigslist, and found someone selling a 1997 Honda Accord for $2,700 - it's within what I would imagine to be my price range, so I'm using it here. For the purposes of figuring out the cost, I'll assume that it's bought outright.

One advantage of purely hypothetical car purchases off Craigslist is that you don't have to worry about ornery sellers or unwelcome surprises under the hood.

According to the US Department of Energy's Fuel Economy website, the '97 Accord gets 22 miles per gallon, which works out to 9.35 kilometers per liter. Not the greatest mileage, but not the worst either. From my apartment in New Westminster, it's about twenty kilometers to my workplace in downtown Vancouver by Google Maps - which interestingly enough quotes a travel time of thirty-three minutes, actually slightly longer than my SkyTrain commute; must be all that traffic on the Kingsway. Thus, my travels to each work shift would consume 4.27 liters of gasoline, which resolves to 21.35 liters per week and 85.4 liters per month. The '97 Accord has a 64.45 liter tank, so with that consumption pattern I would need to refuel once in the first month.

When I entered the job market back in 2000 I started out as a gas monkey, pumping fuel at a full service station along Highway 400 in south Barrie. Prices then, even for the premium fuel, were far lower than they are today, which may be another one of the reasons why so many people of my generation are re-evaluating the value of car ownership. According to VancouverGasPrices.com today's average gasoline price is $1.29/liter trending upwards. At this price, my fuel cost to get to and from work per day would be $5.50 - the cost of a one-way three-zone ticket in 2013 if TransLink's request goes through. This resolves to a monthly cost of $110.16, which is effectively equal to my $110 two-zone FareCard.

Looking at those numbers, some people might say that the car makes economic sense - I wouldn't have to cram myself into a train packed full of Canucks fans heading back to Surrey, for example - but that would be disingenuous. Fuel isn't the whole story here, no matter how much some people are tempted to read it as that. My car would have to exist somewhere while I was at work, after all - so I consulted three EasyPark lots in the downtown core. The cheapest, Lot 3 at 535 Richards, would cost me $15 per day with my shift, and the one under the Pacific Centre would be most expensive at $29 per day. Going with the least expensive option of these takes my effective daily transit cost to $20.50 - at that rate, I'd spend the cost of my FareCard in six days. Plus, at home there's costs to consider - my building charges $10/month, I believe, for the use of one of its spaces.

Then there's insurance. I can't put down an honest dollar figure here, as I have never held my own car insurance policy. I'll just have to leave that as a significant but undefined number. The same with maintenance - a fifteen-year-old car could just as easily purr like a kitten or need a $2000 cough suppressant.

With those numbers, then, my transit cost to work comes to $410/month - a significant portion of my pay; it would in fact work out to be my second-largest monthly expenditure after rent, though since the charges would come in ones and twos scattered throughout rather than in one lump sum, it would probably be easier to look past. Yet that's not the whole story, either. For the purposes of this hypothetical I replaced my commute only, trading my regular SkyTrain use for car use. I regularly use the SkyTrain and bus system on weekends or vacation days to get places around Metro Vancouver; I imagine it would be the same if I had a car, and that would just send the dollar amount ticking upward again.

So, for me at least, would a car make economic sense? It appears that the numbers reflect the conclusion I've held for along time, which is hell no!

Photo: Bike Lanes Make Me Hornby

I recall, a year or so ago, that it was a rather big thing in the media when the City of Vancouver installed separated bike lanes along Hornby Street; in particular I recall business owners along Hornby claiming that the lane would put them out of business because of the loss of parking spots that had to be removed to make room for it. Similar arguments are being raised now in New Westminster regarding the bike lane along Columbia Street. From where I've been standing, it doesn't look like the openness to bicyclists and pedestrians has been that damaging.

This is them, the Hornby bike lanes, looking south from the foot of the street. I can't take credit for the title - I saw it on a line of T-shirts that Vision Vancouver had around the time the lane was completed.


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

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Another Flag for Free Cascadia

For a movement that has essentially no real-world political presence, there's a surprising variety of iconography available on the internet for the purely theoretical Republic of Cascadia. After having been west of the Rockies for this long, I have to admit that the idea of a union between British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon has become an increasingly appealing prospect. Even a year ago I thought it was real low-probability stuff, but the more I read about the political and economic situation in the Western world in general and the United States in particular, the more I can hear those distant, tortured groans as the world buckles under the weight we've piled upon it. The more I doubt that the map of North America several decades hence will closely resemble the maps you'll find today.

Granted, it's still low-probability; it just seems less so than before. Even in the salad days of the early 2000s and 1990s, there were those who explored the notion of Cascadia independent. One of the touchstones of that has always been a flag - after all, what's a country without a flag? The flag is a symbol to bind peoples together, to represent a country's situation or struggles on a piece of fabric waving in the wind - it's something to rally around.

It's just that some of the Cascadian flags out there are really... meh, in my opinion. Not bad, not with so many actual country, province, state and city flags that are manifestly horrid - for example, the flags of Pocatello, Idaho and Provo, Utah, which resemble nothing so much as the box art of personal productivity software. Right now, the effectively official Cascadian flag - as "official" as something like this can get, anyway - is the Douglas fir flag, which consists of a Douglas fir tree charged on a horizontal blue, white, and green tricolor.

I've never liked it, really - there was always something about it. Having thought about it more recently, it's because of the tree itself; it just looks too complicated to me. One of the core necessities of a good flag, as related by the North American Vexillogical Association, is to keep it simple. While the idea of the tricolor is simple, the tree isn't - it's got a realistic appearance, with branches and void space here and there, and thus brings what I feel is an unnecessary complexity to the flag. Granted, that alone hasn't kept flags down in the past; the alternately straight and wavy sunrays on the flag of British Columbia have a level of complexity to them as well, though not to the same degree.

There are other flags, of course; perform an image search for "flag of Cascadia" and you'll run across plenty. The only thing they tend to have in common is the blue-white-green color scheme; specific references to nature are common but not universal. I rejected those flags. Instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... one that I made myself.


Here, my intention was simplicity first and foremost; this flag of Cascadia is made entirely of geometric shapes while retaining the straightforwardness of the standard Cascadian tricolor. Here, the green symbolizes the forested land, open fields and environmental awareness of Cascadia, the white for the mountains that give it its name, the three joined peaks to represent the unity of British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon within Cascadia, and the blue both for the sky and the Pacific. My original concept for the flag had it rotated ninety degrees counterclockwise, to represent Cascadia's north-south geography, but I couldn't get it to look quite right.

I'll admit that I'm not much of a flag guy; this is only the third one I've designed and the first that's entirely from scratch, not reusing any elements from other flags in order to connote a connection. Still, this is what I made. Maybe you like it, maybe you don't - personally, I like it fine.

Here's hoping I haven't just recreated some flag I've never encountered before.