What’s up with this, Pete?
A diesel-powered Pete’s Frootique truck idles unattended on Doyle Street in Halifax Saturday morning, needlessly spilling volatile organic compounds into the crisp spring air.
Big Mac v. salad – feedback
Contrarian reader Ken Clare thinks Contrarian’s standards slipped with our post of a chart comparing US food subsidies:
Edward Tufte, the “Galileo of Graphics” you introduced us to back in June, refers to images like these as “chartjunk.”
I haven’t taken the time to measure the images you copied (from a committee of physicians who may have had a passing relationship with math sometime in their pasts), but the subsidies pyramid eyeballs closer to a 100-to-1 ratio than the 75-to-25 ratio it is labeled.
Literary fire hazard
The Halifax Fire Marshall temporarily halted a reading by Alistair MacLeod (standing, back to camera, left side of photo) tonight so the overflow crowd of more than 600 could be rearranged to clear clogged aisles. Officials turned away another 100 people as the 73-year-old MacLeod, who splits his time between Windsor, Ontario, and Dunvegan, Cape Breton, read his 1976 story, The Closing Down of Summer. The Saint Mary’s University event marked the first time MacLeod had publicly read the story in its entirety.
Moneyquote:
When I write a story, when I’m halfway through, I write the last sentence. I think of it as a lighthouse.
Why a [U.S.] Big Mac costs less than a salad
This comparison, from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, is, of course, based on U.S. farm subsidies and U.S. dietary guidelines. Any data geeks out there want to take a stab at Canadian pyramids?
The nation that pees together
Here’s a curious Olympic postscript: a printout of Halifax water consumption on the afternoon of the Olympic gold medal hockey game:
The spikes correspond with the three intermissions, and with the immediate aftermath of Crosby’s sudden-death goal and the medal ceremony. Epcor, the company that runs Edmonton’s water system, produced a similar graph for that city on the same afternoon, with the previous day’s spikeless consumption superimposed in green:
Hat tip: R.S.
OK Go
I don’t normally post videos with 6.8 million views, but the Chicago band OK Go’s latest home-made, Rube Goldberg, paint-ball spectacular is irresistible. Plus it comes with a great yarn about the counter-intuitive value of giveaway Internet content, and the pea-sized brains of record company dinosaurs.
Ira Glass, host of the great National Public Radio show This American Life, calls OK Go “living catnip.” They direct their own videos, shoot them on shoe-string budgets, and, in the words of singer Damian Kulash, Jr., “we see them as creative works and not as our record company’s marketing tool.”
In a recent New York Time op-ed piece, Kulash explained how OK Go posted its homemade 2006 video, “Here it goes again,” on YouTube without record company EMI’s knowledge or permission, a technical violation of its recording contract. The video won a Grammy, tens of millions of fans saw it, thousands poured into OK Go’s concerts, and EMI made lots of money.
How did the record company react? By pressuring YouTube to curb the viral spread of its videos. Technically, they did this by blocking embedding. Kulash explains after the jump:
Revolving into light
Around this time of year, I like to dig out You May Know Them as Sea Urchins, Ma’am, Ray Guy’s 1975 collection of newspaper columns, and re-read the last essay in the book: “This Dear and Fine Country (Spina Sanctus).”
Well, we made it once again, boys! Winter is over.
Oh, but there is still snow on the ground.
So what? It hasn’t got a chance. It is living in jeopardy from day to day. We should pity it because it will soon be ready for the funeral parlour. It is only a matter of another few paltry weeks and we shall see it disappear into brown and foaming brooks; we shall see the meadows burning green and spangled with little piss-a-beds like tiny yellow suns. Winter is over.
Oh, but there is still ice on the water.
So what? The globe is turning and nothing can stop it. We are revolving into light.
The fisherman tars his boat on the beach and is heated by two suns, one in the sky and another reflected from the water, and the ice on the cliff behind him drips away to a poor skeleton.It is only a matter of a few more paltry weeks and we shall see the steam rising from the ponds andfrom the damp ground behind the plow; we shall see the grandmother sitting out by the doorstep for a few minutes watching the cat; we shall see the small boats a’bustle, piled high with lobster pots in the bow, and the days melting further and further into the night.
Winter is over now.
Praise God and all honour to our forefathers through generations who did
never forsake this dear and fine country.
Ray Guy is a Newfoundland writer. The joke underlying the book title is that sea urchins are sometimes called whore’s eggs on The Rock. The Latin phrase Spina Sanctus (sanctified by the thorn) was a motto used by George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, an early settler on Newfoundland’s Southern Shore.
The photograph shows the sun setting over Baddeck at 5:54 p.m. today, itself a sign that winter’s goose is cooked.
Anonymity in news stories
A mea culpa in yesterday’s Washington Post, criticizing the use of anonymous sources in a story widely regarded as a puff piece on Obama lieutenant Rahm Emanuel, sparked these comments from Salon.com’s excellent Glenn Greenwald:
In very limited circumstances, anonymity is valuable and justified (e.g., when someone is risking something substantial to expose concealed wrongdoing of serious public interest). But promiscuous, unjustified anonymity — which pervades the establishment press — is the linchpin of most bad, credibility-destroying reporting. It enables government officials and others to lie to the public with impunity or manipulate them with propaganda, using eager reporters as both their megaphone and shield. It is the weapon of choice for reporters eager to serve as loyal message-carriers and royal court gossip columnists. It preserves and bolsters the culture of secrecy that dominates Washington — exactly the opposite of what a real journalist, by definition, would seek to accomplish (though most modern journalists seem to prefer anonymity, as it makes them appear and feel special and part of the secret halls of power, and allows them to curry favor with powerful officials as their favored loyal message-carrier). In sum, petty or otherwise unjustified uses of anonymity are the hallmark of the power-worshiping, dishonest, unreliable reporter (which is why its most indiscriminate practitioner is Politico). As Izzy Stone put it about the Vietnam War: ”The process of brain-washing the public starts with off-the-record briefings for newspapermen. . . .”
Blaming unions
Saint Mary’s professor Larry Haiven thinks blaming unions for unnecessary snow days is silly:
This is part of a syndrome of “if in doubt, blame the unions.” So convenient. So wrong.
A few years ago I was taking a tour of the new Toronto opera house. We were allowed to go everywhere except on stage, even though the stage was bare, with no current production going on.
One of the tour members asked the docent why we couldn’t go on stage. The tour member said he had been on tours of all the great opera houses of Europe and had never been barred from the stage. The docent looked serious and said “union rules.” All of the tour members (except me) nodded their heads sagely in rueful agreement.
It just so happened that I had an interview with the head of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (the stagehands’ union) on another matter later that day. So I asked him if this were true. He got very angry and told me that there was no union rule, no union prohibition and, in fact, the union was very much in favour of tours visiting the stage when there was no production going on. He said that “union rules” have become a pernicious legend in his field. I later phoned the management of the opera house to complain about the docent’s mistake.
What I found most interesting was not the docent’s duplicity but the tour group’s acceptance of it. As a former union staffer and a person who researches and teaches about unions, I’m amazed at the difference between the real power that they actually lack and the perceived power people think they have.
As I said before, I regret making the union issue part of this discussion, because it permits people like Larry to wrap themselves in solidarity’s flag and ignore the core issues:
- In the management of risk, our society increasingly allows knee-jerk caution to trump common sense, and important social values like child-rearing suffer as a consequence.
- After their sub-par performance during Hurricane Juan was criticized, Environment Canada and the CBC began to over-hype forecasts of routine weather. Ironically, this monomaniacal focus on safety has created a very unsafe situation.
- Senior managers in our school system either belong, or kinda-sorta belong, to the teachers’ union. The apparent willingness of class-struggle buffs like Larry to countenance this absurdity is astounding.
- We have far too many snow days, and the ones we have apply to far too wide an area.
I honestly don’t know whether point three plays any major role in point four, but it ought to be changed anyway. No one above the level of small-school teaching principals ought to belong to the Teacher’s Union, and the law should be changed to reflect this.
As for the accelerating trend toward a New Jerusalem of ‘fraidy cats, Contrarian will continue to rail.
Snow days – another view
Educational consultant Paul W. Bennett, a former principal of Halifax Grammar School, thinks we should not be too quick to dismiss the connection between unsnowy snow days and the provisions of the teachers’ collective agreement.
[T]he key factor [in school closures] is the collective agreement which has been in place in Nova Scotia since the mid-1970s. In that sense, the Education Department is just as culpable as the NSTU.
The teachers’ agreement originally included an understanding that about five days a year would be written off as “throw-away” snow days. The Agreement with the NSTU also stipulates that if buses are cancelled and schools closed to students, then teachers do not have to report for duty. This is very unusual and has been eliminated in most other provinces.
What’s the impact? No one in NS worries if four or five days are lost each year. The problem only surfaced when school boards canelled from eight to 14 full days last school year. Then it became apparent to everyone that there was no provising for reclaiming lost days, or any real policy to contain or even limit cancellations.
I am just completing a major comparative study of school storm days, demonstrating conclusively that Maritimers are the biggest “fraidy cats” of them all. It also shows that Maritimers are the outliers when it comes to protecting valuable teaching-learning time and that this is a major factor contributing to our chronic “below Canadian average” student performance results.
