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2010-04-04T15:55:00.001-04:00

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A Jubilee for Haiti

2010-01-18T11:48:00.003-05:00

I did not know that, in 2009, Canada "forgave" Haiti for $2.3 million in debt. I haven't done the research to see if Haiti owes any money to Canada still.

Haiti owes many countries millions of dollars from its long legacy of colonialism and dictatorship. And while million of people around the world are giving their money to the country, the IMF is instead increasing Haiti's existing loan program by $100 million to help it recover from the earthquake.

There is legislation being considered in the United States that would forgive Haiti of its debt so it can finally face a future unburdened by its past.

I so hope it catches interest and passes. I don't want to wait until 2051 for a Jubilee.

Mission 2

2010-01-02T19:40:00.001-05:00

Go through the plastic containers in your home and toss out 3�s, 6�s and 7�s.

Your first mission

2010-01-01T07:24:00.003-05:00

On December 30th, 2009, for the second time in as many years, Stephen Harper has asked the Governor General to prorogue parliament. Like last time, he will certainly get what he's asking for, forsaking his responsibility to be accountable to his employers, us Canadians citizens.

What can we do? Ask your MP to attend parliament anyways. What can we do? Ask your MP to attend parliament anyways. Think it can't be done? Check this out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Parliament

from Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament

Flooding the scriptorium

2009-10-27T21:37:00.002-04:00

I haven't been reading much as of late. Perhaps this is why when I happened to pick up two magazines from my towering unread magazine stack and randomly pick an article from each and find that both pieces are dedicated to the commoditification of text - well, then, its feels like what I've read is destined to be something worth sharing.

The first article is The Answer Factory from the November issue of WIRED. Its a profile of a company that cranks out HowTo articles and videos in pursuit of profit via Google ads. The magnitude and scope of the crap that they produce is breathtaking.

The second article is not available in its entirety online. Its Rebecca Mead, The Publishing World, �The Gossip Mill,� The New Yorker, October 19, 2009, p. 62 and it profiles another company that churns out words for coin as well, but these words form stories that are group- and ghost-written for the young adult market.

Thanks to these articles, I now believe that there is nothing inherently lovely about words.

Death of newspapers cliche is perpetuated. By me.

2009-07-05T21:13:00.003-04:00

I try to avoid clich� in my intermittent blog writings but sometimes I can�t help myself. And that�s why today�s topic is the death of the newspaper. And since I have already given into clich� once, why not do it again? Let�s start with a personal anecdote!

I grew up in a house that had, at a minimum, two newspapers delivered every day of the week. And until recently, I lived in the house that was the same: one local paper and one national paper. But then I found I couldn�t keep up with it all so I dropped my daily subscription to The Globe and Mail to Saturdays only. And then last week, I canceled my subscription to The Windsor Star.

Now there are a number of reasons why I canceled both my newspaper subscriptions. There�s part of me that would like to present the long list of my complaints and outline the necessary actions required to win me back over as a reader. But this is where the clich� must end.

Instead, I would like to bring to your attention to two essays that I have recently stumbled upon that better illuminate the scary predicament that newspapers find themselves in. The first is from a piece entitled, Old Media Blues.

Journalism is not being brought low by excess supply of content; it's being steadily eroded by insufficient demand for advertising pages. For most of history, most publications lost money, or at best broke even, on their subscription base, which just about paid for the cost of printing and distributing the papers. Advertising was what paid the bills. To be sure, some of that advertising is migrating to blogs and similar new media. But most of it is simply being siphoned out of journalism altogether. Craigslist ate the classified ads. eHarmony stole the personals. Google took those tiny ads for weird products. And Macy's can email its own damn customers to announce a sale.

Don�t believe it? Look at this photo:

After I stopped subscribing to The Windsor Star, I started receiving a massive batch of advertising fliers on Friday afternoon. I have a feeling that subscriptions of the paper have plunged due to the city's recent economic woes. (Local CUPE union members have also canceled their subscriptions to protest the paper's coverage of the current 'work stoppage'). Has it gotten so bad that the paper is continuing to deliver fliers for free in order to keep their advertising rates up? Evidently it has.

What�s particularly sad is the paper�s own pitch to subscribe to their paper. �Love sports? Love movies? Then you�ll love the newspaper!� -- which in our case, is stuffed with crappy wire copy coverage on these subjects from other CanWest newspapers. Are these newspaper folks stupid? Don�t they know that folks can just get on the Internet and have access to some of the best written coverage of every sport, entertainment genre, and niche interest? Well no, says Michael Nielsen. Newspaper folks aren�t stupid and they aren�t evil either. The newspaper industry is just stuck in an organizational architecture that doesn't allow for disruptive change.

Part of me feels badly about dropping my newspaper subscriptions on account that I really do believe in the societal importance of good journalism. But, as I have mentioned before, The Windsor Star is a bloated mass of advertising and bland wirecopy, peppered with bizarre right-wing syndicated columnists.

Each day there are only about ten items of local reporting and local opinion and that's what I want to read.

And the irony is that I find that I can find and read this local material much easier by following my local paper using Twitter.

Media and peaceful protest

2009-06-16T08:27:00.004-04:00

I've taken myself out of the ever-churning news cycle for the last year or so and I think it's time that I submerge myself again in the media. It would be an exaggeration to say that the recent protests in Iran brought about this change, but it has got me thinking again about the importance of an accessible and independent media on society.

I'm no Clay Shirkey, so I'm not going to weigh in on the whole Twitter pwns CNN matter directly other to say that we still greatly underestimate the importance of independent journalism. Please indulge me as I quote myself from 2003,

A story on NPR's Morning Edition has alerted me to the work of Peter Ackerman and Jack Duvall and a whole new way of thinking. These two men were responsible for the documentary, Bringing Down A Dictator. This documentary was shown on an independent television network in Georgia (funded by George Soros ("Georgia revolt carried mark of Soros", Globe and Mail, Wednesday, November 26, 2003 - Page A1) shortly before the country's 'velvet revolution'.

A free press doesn't just feed democracy. It feeds us. Want to end famine in Africa? Then support the work of a free press there. That's one of the recommendations of Amartya Sen that I learned from the Harper's article, Let them eat cash: Can Bill Gates turn hunger into profit?:

In the midst of a severe hunger crisis, agricultural subsidies do not make much of a difference. And in the face of famine, a reliance on market economies is as ineffective as a reliance on loaves and fishes or manna from Heaven. Even so, said Sen, famines are not terribly difficult to avoid. Prevention requires the speedy implementation of emergency income-creation and employment programs, in combination with the broader social infrastructure of representative democracy and a free press, which happens to be the best early-warning system. Famine happens when rulers are alienated from those they rule, he explained, and a functioning democracy is a simple way to remove such alienation. Famine happens when there is no free press, because rulers tend to feel embarrassed when photographs of starving children appear on the front page.

Even if the protests fail in their objective of an election recount, the images of thousands of people risking their lives to peacefully protest have provided a wonderful antidote to the vitriol we were -force fed in 2008 in order to prime the American public to support to 'bomb bomb bomb Iran'. Not to say that the American mindset that public protest is akin to low-level terrorism will go away quickly, if at all, from those who wield power.

In short, if can't find the information we need from the sources we are told to trust, we will look elsewhere.

Waiting for a Jubilee

2009-04-24T08:29:00.002-04:00

In some sense all revolutions fail, although the brief interval of true revolution, like carnival and disaster, can lead to substantial change. There was a particular carnival of sorts that sought this renewal specifically, the jubilee that has always hovered as a promise and never been executed as an actuality. The jubilee described in Leviticus is supposed to happen every fifty years and "proclaim liberty throughout all the land," free slaves, cancel debts, return land to its original owner (who might be God or no one), let the fields lie fallow, and bring about a long reprieve from work. American slaves sang of jubilee, early nineteenth-century revolutionaries embraced it as a great redistribution of wealth, a starting over with justice for all, and the British group Jubilee Research (formerly Jubilee 2000) seeks Athe cancellation of Third World debt as jubilee's modern equivalent.

[THE USES OF DISASTER: Notes on bad weather and good government By Rebecca Solnit, Harper's Magazine, October 2005]

Until I had read Rebecca Solinit's remarkable article excepted above, all associations I had with the word Jubilee were tied into a plastic commerative coin I received at school in 1977 to celebrate Queen Elizabeth's II 25 years of reign. But powerful ideas have a way of infecting you and the notion of jubilee has taken me.

I thought of jubilee when read Jill Lepore's article �I.O.U.,� in the April 13, 2009 issue of The New Yorker where she traces the remarkable history of debtor's prison. There used to be a time - not that long ago really - when only traders were allowed to declare bankrupcy and thousands of ordinary people were jailed for the smallest of debts.

I thought of jubilee when I learned that there are more slaves today than any other time in history.

I can't help but pass on the idea of jubliee to others.

And I think I may have been successful in transmitting this idea a little farther along from my introduction to it in 2005. You see, last year I played an massively muliplayer forecasting game called Superstruct and in the game I proposed that we reinstate the jubilee. Berkley's Institute of the Future has recently released exerpts of its forecast based on the ideas generated in Superstruct and in it I learned that they've included a Jubilee year in its projected 50 year timeline [pdf].

Its going to be in 2051.

The Real World of Women and Technology

2009-03-24T21:01:00.006-04:00

It isn't often that you get to meet with one of your heroes.

I admired Ursula Franklin ever since I stumbled upon her Massey Lectures called The Real World of Technology at my university library. Not only did that book make me a fan of the Massey Lectures series but I would credit her work with forever banishing the idea from my brain that "technology is neutral".

But she wasn't one of my heroes until I had the honour of hearing her speak at a CAUT Status of Women Conference. That's because it was only then did I learn about her lifetime of work dedicated to science, to pacificism, and to equity. You really should learn more about her and her work too.

What I remember most fondly about that conference are the moments when I had to leave the hotel in order to make the long train ride home. Just before I left I gathered up the courage to say something to Ursula (I have no idea what I said) and then turned to the door to take my leave. And then Ursula Franklin also announced that it was also time for her to go and she turned her small and frail smiling self to me, took my hand, and we walked down the hallway out back into the Real World.

It isn't often you get to hold hands with one of your heroes.

(This post fulfills my Ada Lovelace Day pledge.)

News that stays news

2009-03-16T21:00:00.003-04:00

There was a time when I couldn't help but feel dismayed when I would hear someone say that they didn't follow the news. As a good citizen, I felt that one was obligated to follow the news of the day.

While I can't say that I have let go of that idea completely, I have mellowed my stance. With so much meaningless noise and chatter that is packaged as 'news', I am much more forgiving of those who decide to concentrate their attention and their energies to their immediate surroundings.

For my own mental health, I have shifted the time frame of my news consumption. Instead of a daily news intake, I concentrate my efforts on weekly and monthly news reporting through magazines like The New Yorker and Harper's Magazine. Now I feel saner and I would argue that I have a better understanding of recent events compared to the sorry souls who seek enlightenment by watching cable television on a daily basis.

Here's an example. Some of my favourite articles about the financial crisis have been from Harper's Magazine. In fact, in the latest issue there's a wonderful piece called Infinite debt:
How unlimited interest rates destroyed the economy by a labour lawyer from Chicago.

But what has impressed me most about Harper's coverage is that it started early last year:

The next bubble: Priming the markets for tomorrow's big crash - February 2008
Fear of fallowing: The specter of a no-growth world - March 2008
Numbers racket: Why the economy is worse than we know - May 2008
Our phony economy - June 2008

Harper's Magazine subscriptions start at $17 per year and with it, you get access to their archives that go back to 1850. Its probably one of the best investments you can make.

Art as ambiguity

2009-03-01T08:39:00.004-05:00

From Boing Boing, I learned about Sita Sings The Blues:

Sita is a goddess separated from her beloved Lord and husband Rama. Nina is an animator whose husband moves to India, then dumps her by e-mail. Three hilarious shadow puppets narrate both ancient tragedy and modern comedy in this beautifully animated interpretation of the Indian epic Ramayana. Set to the 1920�s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw, Sita Sings the Blues earns its tagline as �The Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told.�

I watched it online and if you'd like, you can too. Be warned: it's 2 hours long. If you just want to be entertained, watch up to 'Intermission; if you want to experience art, watch the whole thing.

I used to think that the difference between art and entertainment was related to popularity vs. morality. Entertainment gave us the stories we wanted but art gave us the stories we needed. When watching a depressing art flick or looking at an incomprehensible collection of art work sometimes feels punishing, its no wonder that this definition comes to mind.

But my definition has evolved to something closer to Steve Martin's definition: art is permanent conversation. Or, as Raph Koster says in his A Theory of Fun for Game Designers:

We also often discuss the desire for games to be art�for them to be puzzles with more than one right answer, puzzles that lend themselves to interpretation. That may be the best definition of when something ceases to be craft and when it turns into art.

Ramayana certainly lends itself to wonderful interpretation by animator Nina Paley, who has kindly and wisely released her work into The Creative Commons for further re-interpretation.

I don't know whether its the greatest break-up story ever told but its certainly a breakup story that never gets old.

The point of points

2009-02-28T07:49:00.007-05:00

Judith Thurman, in describing Scrabble, calls its scoring system a work of �finesse and calculation� (�Spreading the Word,� January 19th). I would argue that it needs to be adjusted for inflation. The original scoring system was developed according to �educated English usage� in the nineteen-thirties, but the current Scrabble word list admits words far beyond that usage. As the word list has grown, certain letters have become overvalued and others undervalued. �X,� an eight-point letter, is now far more easily played than �C,� a three-point letter. When �za� and �qi� were added to the official word list a few years ago, no adjustment was made to the ten-point values of the �Z� and �Q� tiles. The result is that the current game encourages players to exploit the inefficiencies of an outdated scoring system. It also increases the role of luck: the player who draws the �X� is virtually guaranteed a big play. Meanwhile, the fifty-point bonus for using all seven tiles, what was once a home run, now seems like a ground-rule double. If the scoring was recalibrated to the current word lists, we might get to play Scrabble with the finesse of its original points system.

The above letter to The New Yorker is a wonderful example of how even small shifts in a game's mechanics can have an effect on game behaviour.

To non-gamers, the idea of playing for points may come across as hyper-competitive but that's not the intention. While points allow for a measurement of players against each other, the primary function of points is to provide personal feedback against the game. Spend the time to understand a game's point system and you can understand what behaviour the game designer is trying to reward.

For example, from the scoring system of the crowd-sourcing, micro-content, forecasting MMO called Free Space (think Delphi Method 2.0), one can see that you get twice as many points to create an idea as opposed to responding to an existing idea. And, if take the time to come up with a really strong idea that generates lots of discussion or attracts the attention of "The Lab" and you can earn five times the amount of points.

But points can also be a distraction. In A Theory of Fun for Game Design, Raph Koster puts forward the idea that we play games until we master that game's pattern. Once its mastered - tic-tac-toe, anyone? - the game becomes boring. I mention this because I now realize that, in general, I don't like to play for points. That's because I like to play for the feeling of flow and I don't like to interupt my fun for cognitive work. Unlike most real gamerz, my favourite part of the game tends to be those first levels in which the purpose of the game is to figure out how to play the game (Here's an example to play).

In the best games, the work that it takes to figure out the game doesn't feel like work and - as a bonus - it's rewarded with points.

Outliers: The Story of Class Struggle

2009-02-22T16:40:00.002-05:00

I'm still a big Malcolm Gladwell fan even through Blink was disappointing and I don't deny some of things that his critics hold against him . Still, I was surprised how much I enjoyed Outliers: The Story of Success and how many times I have revisited the book's anecdotes in my mind.

Recently we had our neighbours over for dinner and they had noticed Outliers on my bookshelf. I pulled it down, handed it over and just as I started to tell them told them how much I enjoyed it, my neighbour opened its cover and started reading the inside jacket cover, which begins...

Why do some people succeed far more than others?
There is a story that is usually told about extremely successful people, a story that focuses on intelligence and ambition. In Outliers Malcolm Gladwell argues that the true story of success is very different, and that if we want to understand how some people thrive, we should spend more time looking around them -- at such things their family, their birthplace, or even their birth date. The story of success is more complex -- and a lot more interesting -- than it initially appears.

It didn't take long - seconds, really - for my neighbour to hand the book back to me. I stopped my pitch because I knew that by that time it was too late : she thought that I was trying to sell her a self-help book.

But that marketing copy is the not the book I read. The stories that I remember are the ones that describe and espouse education and work. Now I don't believe in soul-eating busyness but it would be a sin not to acknowledge how much labour - work that sometimes is carried across generations - that immigrants and the poor must continuously and tirelessly shoulder until the stars align and their children can enter the promised land of The Middle Class.

Gladwell missed a chance to to express just how much 'white privilege' is actually worth. I'm not the only one who thinks so:

But I still can't help but feel that Outliers represents a squandered opportunity for Gladwell�himself an outlier, an enormously talented and influential writer and the descendant of an African slave�to make a major contribution to our ongoing discourse about nature, nurture, and race. [Slate]

I guess having to write books that stay away from such dangerous subjects is the price of success.

Thank you for adversting how to get cancer

2009-02-21T08:40:00.005-05:00

Two months after a cover story on the merits of early cancer detection I was a little taken aback when I saw two ads for cigarettes in the March issue of WIRED. It feels like years since I've seen such ads. The other thing that struck me was how few advertising pages were in the issue.

I'm not sure whether the cigarette ads are the result of WIRED suffering from the financial crisis and taking any advertiser they can get or whether the cigarette companies deliberately sought advertising in WIRED in some sort of return fire in their ongoing PR wars. And there's a third option: that when times get tough, cigarette and alcohol companies make themselves available to help fill the void.

maglog backlog : Wired Magazine, February 2009

2009-02-10T20:06:00.001-05:00

Outsourcing is common in the art world, but when MDM was established in 1993, its specialty was constructing props for theater productions and sets for theme parks. Then Damien Hirst came calling... As a rule, Schofield estimates, pieces command approximately 10 times their production cost. Yet despite the fact that Schofield and his team are literally the hands that make the artwork, he never confuses his role with the artist's. "It's their work that's being made," he says firmly. "It's not our work. It's theirs." While some artists collaborate intensely with the fabricators and closely oversee the production process, others provide little more than the fragment of an idea or perhaps a quick sketch. Either way, Schofield says, "they're the ones who have driven it on. You've just got your set of instructions to follow to make the piece."

From: Little London Prop Shop Turns Ideas Into Art, Wired Magazine, February 2009

Suck it blog-haters!

2009-02-04T20:35:00.002-05:00

Its my blogging birthday - I've been at it since 1999!

Maglong: Maternity Dept.: Baby Food

2009-01-28T08:39:00.004-05:00

By the end of the eighteenth century, breast-feeding had come to seem an act of citizenship. Mary Wollstonecraft, in her �Vindication of the Rights of Woman� (1792), scoffed that a mother who �neither suckles nor educates her children, scarcely deserves the name of a wife, and has no right to that of a citizen.� The following year, the French National Convention ruled that women who employed wet nurses could not apply for state aid; not long afterward, Prussia made breast-feeding a legal requirement.

from: Baby Food: If breast is best, why are women bottling their milk? by Jill Lepore
The New Yorker, January 19, 2009
(recommended reading - currently online in full)

Working for the future

2009-01-22T13:26:00.003-05:00

I had a million thoughts and feelings flow through me as I watched and listened to Barack Obama's inauguration but as my daughter is due to wake up from her nap any minute now, I'll try to keep it down to one thought.

While covering the event, CBC Television went to a northern Toronto school of primarily black students to capture some personal reactions. A number of students said that what they learned from that day was that with hard work, they can do anything.

These reactions came from kids so I'll go easy on them but I will say that they completely missed the point. There are times - many many times - when hard work is just not enough. You may be a slave. You may be a lower class of person. Misfortune or ill health may fall upon you. You may be victim of the ill will of others. You may never have a chance to succeed. But, through a combination of sacrifice, cleverness, luck, hard work and opportunity, it is possible that your grandchildren can do anything.

I don't have the time to do justice to this idea but it struck me that it is almost always immigrants who say that they are working for their children. The notion of working for unseen generations isn't something that established middle class folks say out loud. I recently read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success and what I took from it was how much an individuals success was built upon hard work and the hard work of their family, generations back.

Last week on BBC's Start The Week, there was an interesting exchange between an expert on kindness and the author of Q and A (which is the basis of the movie, Slumdog Millionaire). The kindness expert was suggesting that hope, such as for a lottery winfall, can be damaging because it often fails us and may even keep us from concentrating on our present situation. But Vikas Swarup was admament that hope was essential to humankind and said that in India even the poorest in the slums dream of a better life for their children.

Two of my heros, Steward Brand and Jane McGonigal both have been preoccupied with projects that try to encourage future thinking. Its making me think that I should be doing some future thinking myself. Perhaps the profoundly deep troubles that I know in my heart that will not be resolved or abated in my lifetime (global warming, peak oil, ecological devestation, global poverty, etc) need to be re-cast as something on a more historic timescale.

As aptly put by Obama in the last passage of his inagural speech ,

Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.

Maglog: Saveur December 2008

2009-01-18T21:52:00.002-05:00

What I learned from "Oh, Canada!" in Saveur, December 2008:

Until the mid-20th century, Canada had no national library charged with collecting and recording culinary texts (and unfortunately, the cache that was shipped to the British Library for storage was destroyed by a bomb during World War II), so Driver had to prepare her project from scratch. Indeed, nearly half of the volumes profiled in Culinary Landmarks were discovered in private homes.

Maglog: Harpers Magazine January 2009

2009-01-14T14:39:00.003-05:00

What I learned from Harper's Magazine, January 2009, Lewis Lapham's Notebook:

... they might wish to consult Robert Patton�s Patriot Pirates, a history of the Revolutionary War at sea published in a timely fashion last spring soon after the prize crew from JPMorgan Chase swarmed aboard the wreck of Bear Stearns. Patton suggests, and offers a good deal of evidence to demonstrate, that our war of independence was won by the stout-hearted greed of New England ship captains licensed by the Continental Congress in the autumn of 1775 to plunder, burn, or sell at auction British vessels bringing munitions and military stores to the king�s regiments quartered on the merchants of Boston. The colonists at the time had few other means of acquiring weapons with which to give voice to their rebellion, and General George Washington understood that his ill-equipped and untried troops were not likely �to do much in a land way� against the superior force of the British Army. It occurred to the general to admit the servants of Mammon to the kingdom of Heaven with the thought that a squadron of privateers steered on the compass bearings of murderous self-interest might inflict enough damage on Britain�s overseas trade to persuade the British Parliament that war with its North American colonies was a losing proposition.

Opponents of the policy thought it unworthy of Christian gentlemen, one likely to encourage practices both vicious and depraved, tending to �the destruction of the morals of the people.� ... the objections were overruled by the advocates of piracy as public service, among them John Adams, who informed his fellow representatives in Philadelphia that the innovative investment strategy securitized the criminal collateral. �It is prudent,� he said, �not to put virtue to too serious a test. I would use American virtue as sparingly as possible lest we wear it out.�

Maglog: Wired 17.1

2009-01-11T08:32:00.004-05:00

What I learned from Wired January 2009:

For many cancers, if its detected in its early stages there is a 90% survival rate. If its found late, the rate plumets to 10%. The National Cancer Institute spends 8% of its research funds on early detection. This cover article begins with the story of 69 year old Brenda Rosenthal's experience with ovarian cancer although the piece is largely a profile Don Listwin, the founder of the Canary Foundation which is dedicated to developing new means of detecting cancer in its early stages. Listwin became involved in this cause after his own mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. But there isn't an elderly woman on the cover of WIRED - it's a naked young woman. Because evidently technology will revolutionalize everything in our lives -- with the exception of magazine stand sales.

Living in the biggest ponzi scheme of them all

2009-01-06T22:10:00.002-05:00

Tim O'Reilly wrote this today:

I grew up on the idea that humanity would grow out into space, and that resources were for all practical purposes infinite. It may well be that in some possible worlds, that could still be true, but it's increasingly looking like we're going to be stuck here with only one world's resources to draw on. And while most reasonable people are aware that we're using up much of our children's inheritance, and handing them debt in exchange, I don't think as a society we've really come to grips with the consequence of that knowledge.
We're rather like the investors who were complicit in Madoff's scheme, playing along while the getting is good. At least some of us know that the game is rigged, but we're not going to be the first to blow the whistle...

Tim then expands into considering something called steady state-economics, but for my intents and purposes, I'm just stopping at the quote about because, to me, it captures something not often expressed when we think about "the environment" : we know a horrific crash is coming but we shut ourselves against it and what minute conscious part of our brains does remember can only hold on to the hope that the reckoning doesn't come when we're around.

I just finished reading Margaret Atwood's contribution to the Massey Lectures series, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. Its lightly written literary criticism that informs how mythology, religion, and literature have informed us about the notion of debt. I enjoyed it except the last chapter which I could only skim over. I've since I learned from a profile on Atwood in the latest issue of Toronto Life that I'm not the only one; critics hated her modern retelling of the Scrooge story to fit an environmental parable.

I attribute that bad chapter to the small matter that Atwood wrote the lectures in a little less than 3 months instead of the original year that she had first committed to. Ironically, it was marketing pressures that forced her to release her next novel in a non-election year that rushed Payback. Its too bad that even Atwood was forced to submit to Mammon because her message -- that the only debt that we should be worrying about is the one to the living Earth that sustains us -- cannot be told enough.

Return of the Maglog: Toronto Life, Feb 09

2009-01-01T20:10:00.003-05:00

What I learned from the February issue of Toronto Life:

from Upwardly Mobile By Mike Miner:

Canada lags behind the rest of the developed world in both usage and quality of cellphone service. Here, only 60 per cent of consumers aged 16 to 60 own a cellphone. Eighty-four per cent of all Americans have them, and in many European countries, cellphones outnumber people...

According to a recent survey by Merrill Lynch, Canada's wireless companies have the highest profits among 53 developed and emerging countries... 45.9 percent....

Eartha Kitt survived from dirt

2008-12-26T07:31:00.004-05:00

Ten years ago, I read an interview that haunted me. Yesterday Eartha Kitt died.

excerpts from:
LUNCH WITH EARTHA KITT
Kitt's yellow brick road marked by constant rejection
BY JAN WONG, 4 June 1998, The Globe and Mail,C1

... Her cafe-au-lait skin is gently wrinkled. Asked whether she considers herself black or white, she arches her back like an angry cat. "I have no colour," she says. "I have no race. I was given away because I was mulatto."

Rejection has scarred her life. Cosmetics tycoon Charles Revson loved her, but feared shareholders would dump his stock. Cinema-chain heir Arthur Loew Jr., couldn't defy his mother. He married Tyrone Power's widow instead.

In 1968, even her country rejected her. Kitt was blackballed after criticizing the Vietnam War at a White House luncheon given by Lady Bird Johnson. Work dried up at home for the next 12 years.

"Those hurts never go away. That's why I'm so grateful to the public. Because they became my family. And they make me feel wanted. Going on stage, I'm a nervous wreck, because I never want to be rejected again."

She relaxes when her salad arrives. At home in Bedford, N.Y., Kitt eats her own produce -- garlic, tomatoes, squash, collard greens. Her only hired help is for her large garden...
Kitt thinks her father might have been a plantation owner's son. When her mother, a Cherokee-black, wanted to marry another black, the man objected to Kitt's light skin. So her mother gave her away.

She was maybe six. "Old enough to remember everything in detail," Kitt says. She only recently discovered her actual age after a professor in her native South Carolina assigned students the project of unearthing her birth certificate.

She lived with a black family, but they weren't relatives. They abused her sexually and sent her to pick cotton for a penny a pound.

She remembers hunger, too. "I'd follow the birds and snakes, the deer, and ate whatever they ate." She survived on wild grapes and scallions, dandelions, hickory nuts and the soft inner leaf of cattails. She sucked the sour juice from a purple-flowering weed.

Two years later, she was sent to New York to live with someone else, who beat her. So did other kids at school. "Nobody wants you if you're a yella gal, because you don't fit in. And because you're illegitimate."

She ran away repeatedly. She snagged loose change from under subway grates, using sticks primed with gum. She slept in subways and on rooftops.

That's why today she supports Green Chimney, which teaches ghetto kids how to grow food. It's also why she went to South Africa before the end of apartheid, and stood on the street, signing autographs for one rand each, eventually raising enough money to build two schools...
She orders a bowl of blackberries. She picks one up, musing, "I lived on these when the family I was with didn't have enough," she says as the waiter adds the olive oil to The Globe's tab.
"Diamonds and fur are wonderful, but give me land. I know how to survive from dirt."

I am hopelessly addicted to Naruto

2008-11-16T20:36:00.003-05:00

It was a couple of years ago when I remember checking out Google Zeitgeist and being shocked to find that I - once an oh, so media-savvy youth - found an item in the top 10 that I had never heard of before. What was this thing called Naruto? One Wikipedia search later I and had my answer:

Naruto (NARUTO�???�, Naruto romanized as NARUTO in Japan) is an ongoing Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Masashi Kishimoto with an anime adaptation. The plot tells the story of Naruto Uzumaki, a loud, hyperactive, unpredictable, adolescent ninja who constantly searches for recognition and aspires to become a Hokage, the ninja in his village that is acknowledged as the leader and the strongest of all.

This primed my curiosity for my next encounter. Months later, I stumbled upon the Japanese animated show on TV and was immediately impressed by its rocking theme music. Shortly thereafter I learned that my co-worker had become a fan of the show through his daughter and had the first season on DVD. �Don�t judge the series by the first episode�, he told me, �you need to watch a few before it really gets going�.

I borrowed the DVD.

I watched over 250 episodes.

I am hopelessly addicted to this anime.

Every Thursday night, I periodically wander over to my computer to see if the next episode of the saga, freshly broadcasted in Japan mere hours before, has been dubbed and ready for consumption via torrent.

The show can�t be compared to any North American cartoon as these are only vehicles for promoting character-driven toys and merchandise. The closest comparison that comes to mind is the Harry Potter series in terms of its imagination, emotion, detail, depth and scope. You watch the characters grow and grow up. There is slapstick comedy. There is teen romance. There are ninjas. But while there is much fighting and the occasional death, there is also grief expressed.

This series also contains scenes with smoking, potty humour, and sexual innuendo � all of which is excised from the painfully dubbed version that can be found on North American television. Part of my enjoyment comes from that I find I enjoy discovering the otherness and the nuances of Japanese culture that are largely new to me. I�m also new to anime. Naruto may be a pastiche of the genre, as others have claimed, but for me it�s an introduction to a new world.

When I�m watching Naruto, I find myself lost in it. Days after, I find my mind returns to the latest cliff-hanger. Thursdays are now the anchor of my week and the day I look forward to the most. I have not been so emotionally engaged in a TV show since I was a little kid.

I remember the frustration of being a kid and trying to watch serialized cartoons of the late 1970s. (What happened at the end of The Battle of the Planets? Who won the Laff-A-Lympics? Did the folks in The Land of the Lost ever make it home?) I cared about these shows. I was invested in them. I wanted to be in a gang like on Scooby Doo. I wanted to be in Scooby Doo�s gang. I wanted to have adventures. To be tested and succeed.

Like most kids, I think I had an unsaid longing to be sublimated into the stories I watched on Saturday mornings � a strange desire to transform your messy life into the neat, defined outlines of a cartoon. I think this desire is one small reason why so many kids who are very into anime express their longing through fanfict, deviant art and cosplay. It makes sense that while these adolescents, who are trying on new ways of being in the world, are trying on these anime characters for fun. Its classic learning through roll play (related TED talk).

And also, like most kids, the television was always there for me to alleviate the loneliness of childhood. As a friend of mine once put it, �TV is the friend that never leaves you�. I have come to think that most of the emotions that I get caught up in when I watch Naruto is actually a perverse nostalgia for the painful longing I would feel when watching cartoons as a kid. It�s a strange wound that I don�t think may ever heal.

But I can�t shake the feeling though that I�m too old for anime as I don�t want to buy into the current zeitgeist of infantilism. And I can�t help but think that adventure stories are for the young who have still have their life ahead of them. Kids still hold the potential to imagine a future � however slim the chance � in which they are transformed into a future wizard or next Hokage. What�s particularly depressing is that I can�t think of a single adventure story where the future of the universe suddenly hinges on the choices made by a middle-aged mother of two.

So since the universe is safe from the likes of me, I will choose to keep watching Naruto.