Category: That's life
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.
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.
Olympic roundup
Contrarian amused himself yesterday by seeing how long a non-sports fan living in Canada without television and with the radio turned off could avoid learning the outcome of the Canada-US hockey game.
Answer: Until a 6:59 p.m. AST email bulletin from the New York Times.
Herewith some of the very few Olympic nuggets that actually tweaked my interest:
What a difference a second makes:
Amanda Cox of the New York Times uses a musical interactive graphic to illustrate the extent to which elite athletes cluster near the winning time in various events. When you “play” each event, a staccato musical tone represents each contestant crossing the finishing line. In Men’s Downhill, the 14th finisher, Carlo Janka or Switzerland, crossed the finish line less than a second behind the winner, Didier Defago, also Swiss. Try it for yourself.
Olympic pictograms through the ages:
Also from the New York Times, Designer Steven Heller has assembled a fascinating video depicting the evolving style of pictographs used at each Olympic games:
Sports as opiate of the masses:
Those of us who believe the Olympics, from Canada’s repulsive “own-the-podium” campaign through the insipid opening ceremony up to and including the dramatic Cole-Harbourian finale, were a colossal mis-allocation of public resources toward people who are already over-celebrated and away from neglected priorities, generally learn to keep out mouths shut during the biannual orgy of self-congratulation. Not so Christopher Hitchens, writing in Newsweek:
[G]enial, welcoming, equable Canada, shortly to be the host of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, is now the object of a stream of complaints from British and American sports officials, who say that their athletes are being denied full access to the venue’s ski runs, tracks, and skating rinks… Nah nah nah nah nah: it’s our mountain and you can’t ski on it, so there, or not until we’ve had the best of it. “We’re the only country to host two Olympic Games [Montreal in 1976 and Calgary in 1988] and never have won a gold medal at our Games,” whined Cathy Priestner Allinger, an executive vice president of the Vancouver Organizing Committee. “It’s not a record we’re proud of.” But elbowing guests out of your way at your own party—of that you can be proud.
I didn’t have to read far to find the comment I knew would be made about this spiteful, petty conduct. A hurt-sounding Ron Rossi, who is executive director of something snow-oriented called USA Luge, spoke in wounded tones about a supposed “gentlemen’s agreement” extending back to Lake Placid in 1980, and said of the underhanded Canadian tactic: “I think it shows a lack of sportsmanship.”
On the contrary, Mr. Rossi, what we are seeing is the very essence of sportsmanship. Whether it’s the exacerbation of national rivalries that you want—as in Africa this year—or the exhibition of the most depressing traits of the human personality (guns in locker rooms, golf clubs wielded in the home, dogs maimed and tortured at stars’ homes to make them fight, dope and steroids everywhere), you need only look to the wide world of sports for the most rank and vivid examples. As George Orwell wrote in his 1945 essay “The Sporting Spirit,” after yet another outbreak of combined mayhem and chauvinism on the international soccer field, “sport is an unfailing cause of ill-will.” As he went on to say:
I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn’t know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles.
What is science?
Symphony of Science offers a musical answer:
A nation of ‘fraidy cats
By 7:30 a.m., today, it had stopped snowing at Kempt Head.
Total accumulation: 2-5/8ths inches.
Cancellations: Cape Breton Victoria School Board; Strait Richmond School Board; NSCC Marconi Campus; NSCC Strait Campus; Mayflower Mall (until noon, except for anchor stores); and pretty much every other event you could think of.
Imagine! Two and five-eighth inches of snow! In February, in Nova Scotia! Gadzooks! Why hasn’t the army been called?
What on earth has happened to us? What has turned us into a nation of cowering, cringing, ‘fraidy cats who darsn’t get out of bed in the morning, lest something bad happen.
Something bad might happen. Get over it. Haul on your galoshes. Brush off the car. Get to work.
[Yes, dear readers, I understand there was significant snow in parts of the province, including Halifax. But not where I live. Our province is dominated by Halifax-rooted reportage, so we were bombarded all morning with the shrill weather warnings that have become the norm for Environment Canada and the CBC. Our province also has huge school boards, whose administrators seem to feel that if it's snowing in Bay St. Lawrence, they must cancel classes in Louisbourg, where is may be five degrees and drizzling.]
As a people, we have lost the ability to assess risk. An unachievable, zero-risk approach has infected every aspect of our lives. How this happened, the huge price we are paying for it as individuals and as a society, and what can be done to rein it in, will be continuing topics on Contrarian.
Adopt a booth
In response to our post about pay phones, Contrarian reader AN points out that people concerned about the vanishing phone booth can adopt one of the gorgeous British Telecom kiosks at left. Well, you can if you are a British municipal authority. The cost? Free, without a phone; £300 per year with pay phone service.
Not sure who would want to adopt the booth at right.
Who still uses a pay phone?
The New York Times checked out a sidewalk booth outside the Fast & Fresh Supermarket Deli & Grocery on Queens Boulevard in Kew Gardens, NY.
Benjamin Patir called his son because he was lonely and, perhaps more important, because he had a quarter. Robert J. Covelli called his son, too, to find out if, at some point during the more than 24 hours he spent in custody, he had become, for the first time, a grandfather. Frank Federico, fresh from a courthouse jail cell, called his mother, who spared him any lectures and asked him if he needed a ride home.
The three men used the same curbside pay phone on a busy block of Queens Boulevard last week. So did Carlos Luciano, who lent his cellphone to his wife. And Alex Santana, who bought a banana to get change. And Marvin McCain, a subway conductor trying to call in sick, and two men uninterested in giving their names or explaining why, at midnight on a neon-lit stretch of Kew Gardens, Queens, they had to make a call.
Blogger truancy
A combination of actual paid work, managing the film series, and unusually exotic travel have kept Contrarian away from WordPress much of the last month. We will try to do better, dear readers.
