Bandaged hands and a bloody phone

The phone was off the hook and there was blood splattered underneath. Nearby, outside a single-family home, seven or eight cop cars had their lights flashing. An ambulance was parked beside the phone booth and paramedics were walking around the area, not looking too urgent.

Police escorted a black woman out of the house. She wore a yellow t-shirt with a Superman logo emblazoned on the front in green and blue track shorts. There was a little blood on her t-shirt, just to the left of the logo and on her shorts as well. The woman’s forearms were in bandages and as the police gently led her away, they seemed to almost gently place her arms behind her back.

Several people stood near the phone watching. No one seemed to know what had happened. They were just curious.

The police led the woman to the ambulance and closed the doors after she entered. Later, they spoke to a tall man outside the house who also had bandages on his forearms. I left shortly thereafter.

A couple hours later I returned to use the phone. The blood had dried underneath and the receiver was back on the hook. As I pedalled past the house, the woman was in her front yard, speaking over a white picket fence with her neighbour. The police cars were gone.

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.

Priorities, priorities priorities

I guess the Vancouver airport policy was tazer first, interpret second.

Karol Vrba told the Braidwood Inquiry into Dziekanski’s death, currently underway in Vancouver, that he was in the airport’s operation centre when a call came in about a man who only appeared to speak Russian, causing a disturbance.

Vrba, who speaks Russian, Czech, Slovak and Polish, testified on Monday that he offered to help but was told instead to check on airplanes parked at the board gates overnight, so the airport could collect fees from them.

The Super Bowl of television (that would be the Super Bowl)

I’m not the only one to link to the following story today, but it is too timely and too interesting, considering everyone watching the game is intimately familiar with the work of sports television producers. Yet, we are also unfamiliar with the process, which makes this article so interesting.

If the production crew of a televised football game is like a symphony orchestra, Bob Fishman is its conductor. He sits front and center in the dark trailer, insulated from the sunshine and the roar of the crowd, taking the fragments of sounds and moving images and assembling the broadcast on the fly, mediating the real event into the digital one. He scans the dizzying bank of screens to select the next shot, and the next, and the next, layering in replays, graphics, and sound, barking his orders via headset to his crew, plugging into a rhythm that echoes the pulse of the game.

Good news, finally

Great news from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has been the centre of a decade long struggle for resources and vengeance ever since the Rwandan Genocide:

ENTEBBE, Uganda — Gen. Laurent Nkunda, the fearsome Congolese rebel leader whose national ambitions and brutal tactics threatened to destabilize eastern Congo, was arrested Thursday night along the Congolese-Rwandan border, United Nations officials said on Friday.

The arrest could be a turning point for Congo, which has been mired in rebellion and bloodshed for much of the past decade. It was also a stunning turn of events because Rwanda had recently been accused of supporting General Nkunda, who was widely considered to be an agent for Rwandan business and security interests in eastern Congo.

Value Miasto

An interesting story on the rise of Value Village-like stores in Poland from the New York Times:

At 9 a.m. on a recent December day, several dozen shoppers all hurled themselves at the door of a second-hand clothes store here, like a rugby scrum hitting a wall. Those stuck outside could only watch as a surprising mix of young hipsters and graying retirees sprinted upstairs, first to where the fur and leather coats awaited.

In a scene repeated daily, whenever the latest delivery has landed, the battle was on for the best finds at the store, called Tomitex, where everything, including the fur, sells for roughly $7 a pound the first week after delivery and as low as 75 cents thereafter.

But this is not a tale of people buying used clothes in the midst of recessionary gloom. The global economic crisis has yet to hit a majority of Poles.

Thank God

John Lennon can rest easy.

The Vatican’s newspaper has finally forgiven John Lennon for declaring that the Beatles were more famous than Jesus Christ, calling the remark a “boast” by a young man grappling with sudden fame.

To which Lennon, if he were alive, would probably respond: “But we WERE bigger than Jesus. Have you seen how many CDs we’ve released in the 38 years since we’ve broken up? How many books have been written about us. Now multiply that over 2000 years, fer Chrissakes.” One would also imagine he’d have something to say about the Catholic Church changing its mind. How can a church change its mind? Doesn’t that contradict the basis of the church’s authority? Just curious.

A green government?

It seems that a North American country may yet speak up and do something about climate change. No, not Canada, silly. Stephen Harper is cold on climate change and only uses the word turtle in front of neck (I realise the poke isn’t entirely appropriate given that turtles are not intrinsically associated with the environmental movement. But they’re a cute little animal that could be impacted and the joke is the best I can come up with on a breakfast of Honey Nut Cheerios). Rather the Americans seem to be coming around to dealing with climate change. Yes those Americans that live south of Canada! The same America where George W. Bush kindly said to the world, “Burn baby burn” for eight years.

As I write, the top story on the Globe and Mail website is about how going green may help the faltering economy.

Saving the economy and saving the planet at the same time were once considered two mutually incompatible goals. But not any longer.

A chorus of proposals from liberal-leaning think tanks and conservation organizations is suggesting that the best way to revive the faltering economy would be to finance solutions to pressing environmental problems.

Supporters are calling the idea “green stimulus.” They argue that directing new government expenditures to wind farms, solar panels, gas-sipping cars and mass-transit infrastructure, among other items, would give a far bigger boost to the economy than tax cuts or government rebates.

The environmental funding would have the side benefit of helping solve such problems as global warming by spurring the development of less-polluting energy sources and increased energy efficiency.

Meanwhile, a story leading the New York Times has the following tidbit tucked within:

In his only public appearance on Tuesday, Mr. Obama indicated that he intended to move rapidly on one of the most ambitious items on his agenda, tackling climate change. Speaking to a bipartisan group of governors by video, the president-elect said that despite the weakening economy, he had no intention of softening or delaying his ambitious goals for reducing emissions that cause the warming of the planet.

“Now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all,” Mr. Obama said. “Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response.”

Of course whether Obama’s able to actually do something while being pressured to prop up automakers and the entire global economy is another thing. But one idea I’ve read about is the potential to tie an auto-bailout to provisions that will force the major manufacturers to start building electric cars and the like. So in that sense, it’s very possible that the bad economy may help green standards, rather than green standards helping the struggling economy.

Not THOSE All Saints

Yesterday was All Saints and Magda and I, along with her aunt, uncle and two cousins, visited the grave of her grandparents. I’ll keep my summation of All Saints experience brief, because I hope to write about it in the future and don’t want to spill all my notes.

All Saints day is a national holiday and has religious roots. But the main feature of the day are Poles flocking to cemeteries around the country to visit graves. Flowers and candles are placed. We visited a cemetery in Zgierz (a suburb of Lodz) during the day and another cemetery in Lodz in the evening. During the day there were almost as many people in the cemetery as graves, which easily number in the thousands. It is not necessarily a sombre occasion. As Magda explained it, it’s more of a celebration of the deceaseds’ lives.

During the night the candles light up the cemetery. It’s a beautiful sight and not at all spooky. It really brings home that each grave houses a real person, rather than just a name.

Of course, any holiday has its curious aspects and one that gets an observer, rather than a true participant thinking.

People have different strategies for decorating graves. Magda’s family carefully arranged a few lamps and a few bundles of flowers on the family grave. Most take a similar tact and many times the candles and the flowers on the grave are placed by successions of visitors, be they friends, acquaintances or admirers (certain graves or memorials to war heroes attract hundreds of candles). But other graves have quite obviously been purposely bombarded with as many flowers and candles as possible. Those people, it would seem, take the look-how-many-flowers-my-family-grave-has!!! approach.

Which, come to think about it, isn’t that dissimilar from the huge gothic family tomb of an obviously wealthy industrialist in the centre of the Lodz cemetery. It’s mighty impressive, and there were about 20-30 candles arranged at its base (it’s probably 30-feet-high and looks like a small gothic church). I hope that the candles were lit by family members and not people just impressed with the tomb. That, it would seem, would prove that money can buy prayers, if, like many, those who place a candle at the tomb also say a prayer.

And those annoyed about the commercialism of Christmas should take note that, in post-communist Poland, All Saints isn’t immune either. It’s clearly the make-or-break day for the flower and candle sellers that line the street outside the cemetery. I saw a guy selling blow up balloons in the shape of dalmations and other animals and priests take the opportunity to solicit money for their churches.

Still, all those minor gripes aside. It’s a mighty impressive day and its basic theme – remembering the deceased, seems as good an excuse for a public holiday as any.

Not that the holiday makes everybody happy. It seems it results in a good deal of carnage too.

“Police reported 334 serious road accidents with 32 dead and 421 injured in 48 hours, on what is the annual carnage on Poland’s accompanying one of the most widely observed Roman Catholic holidays, All Souls Day, otherwise known as the day of the Dead.” – Polskie Radio

Not everyone’s a Catholic here

Just ninety-six per cent of the population. But there are Muslims too, according to this story. I’ll have to look into this.