One hundred and twenty-three years ago today, a boy was born in the Austrian town of Branau am Inn. Fifty years later, the man that boy became launched the bloodiest, most destructive war in the history of the world. Tens of millions died trying to bring him to justice, but in the end he took his own life beneath the ruins of Berlin before justice could catch up to him. There's no physical trace of him left today - the Soviets made sure of that - but in spirit, Adolf Hitler will always be with us; a midnight presence just beyond our vision, an echoing reminder of what humans can do when they sacrifice their humanity. We can't forget him, because to do so would be to invite him back into the light and allow his cycle to start all over again.I can't help but think of Hitler when I read of the trial of Anders Behring Breivik, the self-proclaimed "Justicar Knight" responsible for the murder of seventy-seven people last summer because, in his fundamentally broken mind, he was fighting "anti-European racism" generated by "media and the Marxist elites." I can't recall if the media had enough power by the 1920s for Hitler to fulminate against it in Mein Kampf, but it nevertheless sounds starkly familiar. During his latest day in court, Breivik described hunting down teenagers on Utoya, specifically searching for ones hiding themselves away.What's clear enough is that Breivik is cold and Breivik is remorseless. There's no question on the verdict that will be handed down at the end of the trial. On Wednesday, articles began to surface that Breivik only sees two "just and fair" ways for it to go; either acquittal, which is about as likely as Germany deciding to celebrate Adolf Hitler Day, or execution.
Hey, just because they said you're going to hang by the neck until dead, it doesn't mean you can't do it in a colorful way. Also, I suspect this might actually be a shoelace.
You get an elevated perspective when you're in flight, sure - the only complication is that once you're at cruising altitude and your departure airport has gone beyond the horizon, it can be difficult to realize what it is you're looking at. I caught this lake view while flying back to Vancouver from Toronto last summer, but it wasn't until I was able to pore over Google Maps that I figured out what I'd been looking at. As best as I can tell, this is the south coast of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, a bit northwest of the Straits of Mackinac. The small body of water in the middle-left is Brevort Lake, and that's Lake Michigan beyond it with the sun-gold water.
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Canada Day is coming up in just a couple of months, and with it the hundred and forty-fifth Canadian birthday; only a few more years until the centennial and a half, no? National anniversaries have always done their bit to attract attention and dominate the news cycle. Even I can manage some vague recollection of Canada 125, back in that swingin' summer of 1992 when, in retrospect, it may well have seemed like the country would not last to see Canada 150.At least, 1992 was what people agreed was Canada 125. But like Napoleon said, what is "official" history but a set of lies agreed upon?If you don't follow the media or aren't very familiar with the structure of Canada's government, it would have been an easy thing to miss - yesterday marked the anniversary of Constitution of Canada and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms being passed into law, at last giving the country a written constitution that Quebec didn't - and still hasn't - signed on to. You may have heard of it in the context of our Dear Leader doing nothing to mark it, because he's awfully busy gutting environmental protections and working the zippers for oil industry lobbyists. You might have figured it's not that important... if you did, keep in mind that sometimes the most important things hide in plain sight.In school, the teachers tell the students that Canada was founded on July 1, 1867, when Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia came together to establish the core of the Dominion for mutual benefit, trade, and defense. After all, the Union had just finished curbstomping the Confederacy, and the White House wasn't too impressed with the tacit support that the United Kingdom had shown to the CSA. What many of them don't tell is that this is a simplification of history. Canadian independence didn't happen the way it did down south, with the flourish of signatures on a declaration and clouds of gunsmoke wafting across the battlefield, but was a work of degrees that happened over many, many years.If you want to be really persnickety about it, you can easily make the argument that Canada did not truly gain its independence until April 17, 1982; hell, if Canada was a person, one could make the argument that we should have only now stopped trusting it.
That, of course, will depend on how far a given person can throw it.
Although planes from Vancouver Harbour Water Airport only fly to Whistler and a few destinations on Vancouver Island, it can be a busy place nevertheless - seaplanes accelerating across the waves, landing with a thrash of whitewater and the roar of engines being throttled back, leaving the city and mountains behind. Last weekend I caught a Harbour Air seaplane picking up some speed as it buzzed by Canada Place - enough that even in the fraction of a second the shutter was open, the plane moved enough that the spinning blades of the propellor left afterimages of themselves.
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When possible, I endeavor to break out of the everyday when it comes to beer and try something outside my experiences; it's a bit difficult when local beers are always the easiest to find, but if you're dedicated you'll turn up lesser-known labels here and there. In particular, I'm always interested in seeing what the state of the quaff is like in other lands - and if I don't have to leave Metro Vancouver to discover that, so much the better. That can be a bit of an irritating road when you find that a great deal of "foreign" brands are actually just brewed by license in Guelph; it kind of defeats the purpose, at least the way I see it. At minimum it's not even the same water, and the nature of the water you use for anything has a great influence on it.That being said, in one of my recent lookarounds I was intrigued to find a bottle of Asahi Black, produced by Asahi Breweries Limited of Japan. It's not an unfamiliar name - another one of their brands, Asahi Super Dry, is commonly sold in beer stores across British Columbia and Ontario, and there's a big advertisement for it opposite one of the escalators down to the Granville Station platform, but like I said, it's produced under license in Guelph. This bottle of Asahi Black is different - the real deal, imported from Japan. I can tell because the back label is nothing but Japanese writing.I tried my hand at translating some of it. Unfortunately for me, written Japanese involves a damning density of kanji, imported Chinese characters that are rather opaque if you don't already know them. I was able to recognize a few terms, like chigaimasu, so Asahi Black is different from something - perhaps Asahi's other beers - and it's possible that its taste is without rank, if I'm reading it right. Also, it contains hops and starch, has an alcohol content of 5%, and is an Asahi beer.Yep, I'm only a few steps from mastery of the Japanese language now, for sure. Ganbatte!
My first thought on pouring it was "man, that's a deceptively small amount for a bottle that size." I doubt it would even have filled my San Francisco Living Sober 1991 coffee mug, except I wouldn't try, because that would be disrespectful. It's a 334-milliliter bottle, which gives it less drinkable content than even an ordinary can - looking at it now, it is significantly more tapered than North American bottles, but it was never obvious until it came time to pour. I would not be surprised for breweries over here to cotton onto this - charging the same price for less - eventually, so keep your eyes open.Not that your eyes can tell you much about Asahi Black other than that, well, the name is appropriate. It's very dark, opaque even when held in front of a light, and had a vague woody smell. As for the taste, well...It took me by surprise, because it wasn't there. I found Asahi Black to be a particularly watery beer, and though I thought there'd be some twist of flavor or a hint of bitterness - I've never had a Munich-type beer, to my knowledge, so I wasn't sure what to expect - there was nothing. No taste and no aftertaste. I might as well have been drinking alcohol-infused water, assuming my tastebuds did not all choose that moment to malfunction.Asahi Black is a strange beer - it doesn't match what I would have expected at all. Where I expected taste, I got no taste. Where it has the look of something heavy and viscous, it's instead smooth and light. This is the first from-Japan Japanese beer I've had; I'm not sure if it's representative of the state of the brew over there or not. I think this calls for additional research.ANDREW'S RATING: 2.5/5 - mostly for the questions that it raises.Previous Quaff Reviews
Burrard Inlet is one of the finest natural harbors on the world - that's what it says right there on the interpretive plaque - and the First Narrows, spanned by the Lions Gate Bridge, is where the relatively calm waters of the inlet meet English Bay and the beginnings of the wild Pacific. "Narrows" is right - it's only about four hundred and fifty meters wide at the narrowest point, about a third of the size of the Golden Gate into San Francisco Bay. Every ship bound for the port of Vancouver has to pass through here, and on Friday, I was there while the cargo ship Wren Arrow steamed under the bridge after a long, long sail from Shanghai.
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For the last couple of weeks, the news cycle has been in love with Alberta's Wildrose Party. They're branding themselves as "conservative alternative" in what is easily Canada's most conservative province; the Alberta PCs have been in power continuously since 1971, but with the way the polls are turning, it doesn't look like they're going to get the chance to finally knock Ontario's Big Blue Machine off its pedestal. Over a very short while, Wildrose has gone from tilting at windmills to demolishing those windmills; the latest polls suggest that Wildrose is poised to secure a comfortable majority come April 23rd.For my part, it's a bit refreshing to write about an election that, for once, doesn't directly affect me - still, I wouldn't be surprised if it did in the end. When I first heard of Wildrose, it was in the context of them eventually growing into a federal conservative alternative and once more splitting the right, the way it was back in the 1990s, bringing some balance back to elections. After all, if Harper could no longer count on Albertans voting Tory blue en masse, he might just have to work for a living.Fact is, though, I don't know much of anything about Wildrose except that they're Alberta's conservative alternative and that Danielle Smith wants to give a fifth of all oil and gas royalty surpluses to the Albertan people. Still, even if there's no chance that Wildrose ever challenges the Conservatives federally, Alberta is still British Columbia's rowdy next-door neighbor, and the Rocky Mountains only block so much of the noise. Aside from a few offhand references here and there to how the party has something of a libertarian bent, the media hasn't been too helpful in explaining what Wildrose is actually about. So I went to their website to get it straight from the source... and what was the very first thing I saw?"Wildrose is under attack!"Oh, Alberta... oh, boy.
Fortunately it has not got so bad yet that they've needed to activate Calgary's hidden city walls. They up the defensive value of any military units in the city by three times when attacked by land units!
When I was but a lad, my grandfather took me to see the trains - if not riding them from one place to another, then just going to the quiet sidings on a weekend and taking a look at the cars waiting to go somewhere. My hometown Barrie was on a main line between Toronto and northern Ontario before the rails were lifted in the mid-1990s, and on a weekend it was easy to find plenty of boxcars, hopper cars, tanker cars, cabooses, and so on adjacent to what's now Allandale Waterfront GO Station.There were also, on occasion, more unique cars - ones like this railway snowplow, which could be pushed along by the locomotive if the drifts were too heavy to power through. They're not seen as often anymore, I understand; for one, 21st century locomotives have more power than a lot of 20th century workhorses. Pretty eye-catching, though - and that's me standing by it, for a sense of scale. This photo is actually a framegrab from a camcorder video my grandfather took, made on March 16, 1991.
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If you've never heard of Google's Project Glass before, well... now you've heard of Google's Project Glass! It's something that's been in the science fiction pipeline for more than a decade, and its imminent emergence is just another data point confirming that we now live in the future. Project Glass is a wearable augmented reality interface; present prototypes look like ordinary glasses frames with the lenses removed and replaced by a small screen; once this technology matures, it will probably be integrated into more ordinary-looking designs. This idea is nothing new to me - I've been using it in the stories I've been writing for a few years now, but it's something else entirely to see it leaking out into reality.If you're not up on augmented reality, it's a process that adds computer-generated input to your view of the world. Right now, it's only available via smartphone - if you have the right app, you can hold your iPhone up to the street and it can splash information from, say, Google Maps on top of the "real" layer. It echoes some of the things that were being predicted about VR back in the mid-90s, but is distinct in that while virtual reality systems are difficult to find outside of amusement park arcades, augmented reality has been hitting the streets for a while now.Google is aiming to take Project Glass as far beyond the modern state of the AR art as the SkyTrain is beyond Catch Me Who Can, likely attempting to beat Apple at its own game. At this point, I don't think that simple descriptions really work best - check out the promotional video Google made for Project Glass, aking us through a day in the life of a New York City hipster dude whose life has been immeasurably improved by augmented reality and demonstrating a product that will blur the lines between the artificial and the real to a degree that I don't think anyone is really prepared for.On the face of it, it's all techno-wonder. Look how easy it makes things! They prompt you when you've got appointments to go to, give your friends a seamless way to get in touch with you no matter what you're doing, lets you adjust your plans on the fly without you having to lift a finger, simplifies meetups and removes that "just hanging around" time by allowing you to broadcast your location, and even lets someone else see through your own eyes, practically. It's vastly beyond what smartphones are capable of, at least in terms of the relative cumbersome nature of smartphones; I mean, you have to hold them up, you have to press buttons, you have to get your digits involved. With augmented reality glasses, it seems, all you really need to do is talk, blink, and move your head.Part of me can't help but feel that it makes things too easy - that the sort of AR implicit in Project Glass will undercut the formation or practice of certain skills because it's easier to have the glasses handle them. Take, for example, the map issue; wayfinding is not going to become any less important in the future. I was raised in a way that made me want to pay attention, to understand where I was going even though it was my mom behind the wheel and to know the many ways I could get from point A to point B. Today, when I find myself in a strange city, my first order of business is to wander around downtown until I've seen enough that I can make connections and carry a map around in my head.Some people didn't have those advantages growing up - some people were just driven around by their parents and didn't have any say in what route they took to get where they were going, some people weren't able to wander around and explore, and as a result some people end up with poor wayfinding ability, unable to conceptualize the street grid and easily able to lose their way. The active maps that Project Glass makes available would be a boon to people like this, sure - but I can't help but think that those maps would also guarantee more generations of people who are severely lacking in the internal wayfinding department. I can imagine kids only being let out of the house with their augmented reality glasses on, ordered by their parents not to deviate from the route they suggest or else. Not every kid would be capable of cracking the parental controls, either.Likewise, it suggests possibilities for abuse, if people come to rely on those active maps. Imagine a situation like Toronto's G20 - remember the kettling at Queen and Spadina, and how plenty of the people caught up in it were just folks going about their business until police are everywhere and they're not letting them go? In an AR future, the police wouldn't need to kettle; they'd just need to pull a "public safety necessity" thing and see to it that the active maps, when prompted for some kind of escape route, lead straight to a police checkpoint and processing zone.What these glasses really connote to me is the further commodification of our time, of our existence. Watch the video carefully - except for a brief moment looking out the window, from the instant the glasses boot up at the beginning, Hipster Dude is always doing something. Realistically, it's because we're watching a video and we want to see the interesting bits, but art - if this can be called "art" - does influence life. I know that waiting around for something to happen can be boring, but that sort of boredom has been with humans since we've been human. Sure, it was probably exciting for our ancient hunter forebears to chase down a deer with lots of meat, but waiting for that deer to show up? Less so, I would imagine. Useful things can be extracted from quiet times; by putting your circle of friends perpetually in your face, innovations like these threaten to drown out that quiet.I can't imagine that that would be good for everyone.
It's finally, finally, finally spring in Vancouver, and it feels like we've got more sunlight and blue skies in the last week than in the last month before that. All over the city the cherry blossoms are appearing, like flowers growing out of thin branches, and some have already begun to fall on the sidewalks. The cherry trees down at Granville Square are producing starkly white blossoms this year, almost a last gentle reminder of winter.
I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).
Hey, just because they said you're going to hang by the neck until dead, it doesn't mean you can't do it in a colorful way. Also, I suspect this might actually be a shoelace.
