And now for some good news…oh, right

The Globe and Mail squares up to the fact that young people are in big trouble as far as the whole “prosperity” thing goes. Not too much of a surprise really, though I couldn’t have said it better.

I found two comments interesting.

First (reason: self explanatory):

You can bail yourself out all you want now, but when it comes to write the cheques in 15 years or so, me and my cohort will simply bail ourselves out by puting you into homes or icebergs.

Icebergs seem a lot cheaper, although global warming might pose a problem.

Second comment:

…. yes, they will surely demand more of their leaders. Like all youth, when they get really frustrated, about their prospects in life, they don’t go quietly into that good night. Bet on it. They will not lobby and protest in a ‘nice’ way. The street is their forum.

Sounds like either a deluded student government type or someone born in the 60s. Don’t they know it’s much easier to sit at home and watch TV than do anything about it. And more effective. Given voter turnouts and the general gray-hair-to-peach-fuzz ratio, it would take a pretty organized bunch of people to get something done. And we youth aren’t known for our organization.

Fatally Injured=Killed

Metro Employee Fatally Injured Near Vienna Station

I suppose that WashingtonPost.com headline is technically accurate. It just seems like there’s a better word for “fatally injured.” Oh, right. There is. Killed.

Investigate this!

Looking into documents that contain embarrasing information can be a thrill. Until one realizes just how much work is to be done. That’s where the Guardian is using its readers in an innovative way to employ free labour.  On its website anybody can pitch in and help sort through 700,000 documents on the UK’s MP expense scandal, where MPs billed taxpayers for everything from their husband’s porn rentals to a duck island at their house.

More on Iran

While my previous post on Twitter and Iran stands, I have ditched following Twitter first hand. I’m still tracking the New York Times’ Lede Blog and am also now following Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, which functions as something between the Lede Blog and Twitter. It posts a daily recap of the events as recounted on Twitter, functioning as something of a Twit-editor.

These are great news sources for people with internet access at work. For others, it seems traditional news media are probably more helpful.

——

The impact of Twitter itself might be less than some of stated, Nicholas Thompson argues.

But Thompson doesn’t take his point (that Twitter is acting more of an international news disseminator) to its logical conclusion; that is, at a time of great upheaval Twitter allows unprecedented journalistic access to even a closed country. Even if Iranian protesters are not communicating that much among themselves via Twitter (on a per capita basis, at least), the reports that are coming from Twitter are the backbone of news sources that fellow Iranians will rely on to understand what is happening in their country.

This, to me, seems very important.

Iran and Twitter

You can follow events in Iran two very good places;

The New York Times does a good job of aggragating information, citing it, verifying it, and getting it out quick on their blog. If you want to know what’s going on, this is the place to get it.

If you want to feel and live what’s going on, you can read first hand, real-time comments on the action on Twitter. It’s quite spectacular, although I’m not sure how, as more people begin commenting and overwhelming first hand reports, time will shape the reportage.

My nice city

It seems I now live in the most liveabile city in the world.

That’s nice. And although the Economist, which did the study, explains how it categorizes the cities, you have to wonder just how arbatrary such rankings are. After all, different cities are more liveable than others depending on what one is looking for. If you’re looking to get out of the city each weekend, Vancouver is close to mountains and such, but the traffic is killer. Calgary might be better, but there’s less around. Toronto…. Where ya gonna go?

But then, if liveability depends on how many concerts you can get to, well you’ll have a whole other list of cities.

Which isn’t to debunk any ratings of cities, but to kind of emphasize the fact that the appeal of any city can depend on the person doing the rating. Of course, the Economist rates general attributes most people consider universally positive so it is objective. But I’d like it to compare the big cities with smaller more regional cities as well (although that would obviously be too much work for a publication that looks at the whole world).

Richard Florida has a book called Who’s Your City. I’m not sure if he considers this (he’s an urban planner), but his title seems to relate.

Just a thought

Resurrected

Well, this seems to be as good a time, and as good a place as any, to start writing on this blog again. I’m a little worried that my current job is so lacking in creative opportunities that I’ll slowly turn into Joey from Friends (or, almost as bad, start wanting to watch Friends).

One is self-serving; to a story of my own that I wrote for Okanagan Life magazine. The story was tricky to write, considering there was still snow on the ground when I visited the farm in early April. As I write in the piece, it didn’t exactly look like the garden of Eden. But the couple who showed me around were very nice and the concept quite interesting. I don’t know if it’s possible to grow the world’s food organically or with such practices; but they are clearly more human than mass farms. Still, to get back to old-fashioned farming, I think we’d have to get back to old-fashioned numbers of people, which would require something none of us want to live through.

That said, perhaps we have to better use the land we have next door, the acres and acres that are used as large front lawns and empty space. Local food isn’t just a trend after all; it’s also a response to the need to cut down on the distance our food travels.

The other link is, I suppose, tragic. Unfortunately, the headline is just too juicy to pass up:
Accused in lesbian axe-murder trial acquitted

The headline is completely accurate. Hardly sensational. And yet, I imagine that the copyeditor who wrote it giggled like a mad hyena while typing the words. And how can you resist reading it?

On a somewhat related note to the resurrection of this blog. I am now living in Vancouver. If you like what you’re reading and need someone to write, tutor or give travel advice, contact me via the email address listed on my contact page.

Thanks!

True north strong and (relatively) nuclear apocalypse free

One day, possibly, Canada will become the new chosen land; the place humans flock to find safety and a stable living environment. They may not even care about the cold.

At least that’s the conclusion Guardian journalist Tanya Gold came to after several days spent trying to survive a hypothetical apocalypse in Britain. Britain!

Still, I would hate to deprive you of the entertaining article, in which the urbanite Gold rips the head off a pheasant. Now that’s entertainment!

I am (vaguely) confident I will not starve. But there is one other thing I am sweating over: nuclear power stations. Professor Alan Weisman wrote The World Without Us, a description of what he believes would happen to Earth if we all vanished. I call him. He says I am right to worry. Why? Because most nuclear plants are water-cooled. Water, he explains, in a dry, calm voice, needs to circulate around the reactors, or they will explode. If there were no humans to operate it, the plant would shut down automatically, and the water would be cooled with diesel fuel. For about a week. Then the heat from the reactor would evaporate and expose the core. “It will either melt down or burst into very radioactive flames,” he says. So what would you do, Professor Weisman? “I would probably go to Canada,” he says. “There aren’t many nuclear power stations in Canada.”

Too funny to be true…

You’ve heard the line, “if it’s too good to be true, it probably is.” Well the same applies to humour.

I’m talking about a letter that appeared in the Guardian five years ago in which the writer – supposedly a customer service representative for the Inland Revenue Service – responds to an unseen acerbic letter from a dissatisfied taxpayer, supposedly a Guardian columnist.

An exerpt:

“Which brings me to my next point. Whilst there may be some spirit of truth in your assertion that the taxes you pay “go to shore up the canker-blighted, toppling folly that is the Public Services”, a moment’s rudimentary calculation ought to disabuse you of the notion that the government in any way expects you to “stump up for the whole damned party” yourself. The estimates you provide for the Chancellor’s disbursement of the funds levied by taxation, whilst colourful, are, in fairness, a little off the mark. Less than you seem to imagine is spent on “junkets for Bunterish lickspittles” and “dancing whores”, whilst far more than you have accounted for is allocated to, for example, “that box-ticking facade of a university system”.

The letter, which was later revealed to be a stab at fictional humour by the Guardian columnist himself, was picked up by several news outlets and otherwise spread across the internet as fictional items tend to do:

It began as a spoof letter from the Inland Revenue written for Jobs & Money by back-page columnist, comedian Chris Addison. But, plucked (unauthorised, we’d add) from the Guardian’s website, it has found its way into countless emails and websites across the world. You’ve may even have seen it in your own email box, telling you it’s a “real” letter from the taxman.

So four years later the matter is clear, right? Of course not. The Daily Telegraph recently picked the letter as one of the top five complaint letters:

Of course, acerbic, incisive and sarcastic letter-writing is not always confined to the complainant – here, an Inland Revenue customer relations employee responds to a complaint politely but with unexpected underlying dark humour.

Remembering a man who couldn’t remember

Two very interesting pieces on the death of a man who lost his capacity to remember after a surgery in 1953 when he was 27:

He knew his name. That much he could remember.

He knew that his father’s family came from Thibodaux, La., and his mother was from Ireland, and he knew about the 1929 stock market crash and World War II and life in the 1940s.

But he could remember almost nothing after that.

-from the New York Times

and another from Slate on whether amnesiacs realize they have amnesia:

Yes, usually. Whether they lose their memory through physical brain damage or psychological trauma, most amnesiacs—or “amnesics,” in professional terminology—have some awareness of their condition. But it depends on how intact their brains are overall. Amnesia usually results from damage to the hippocampus, part of the brain’s medial temporal lobe, which is responsible for short-term memory. When only the hippocampus is affected, patients tend to be aware of their state.