Twitch

My right eyelid sometimes twitches like an epilectic at a Pink Floyd concert. I’m not sure why. It doesn’t look like its twitching (I’ve glanced in the mirror while it twitches).

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.

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!

The city that forgot tourism

Krakow may have had the culture, the ancient and prestigious university, the tourists and the stunning castle but residents of Lodz could always note that their city, in fact, was bigger. No more, while the manufacturers of Lodz struggled towards the 21st century, Krakow raced ahead, becoming a tourist and student mecca.

We are in Lodz again this week, visiting Magda’s family. The city is often compared to Manchester; a gritty past focused on clothes manufacturing having given way to an identity crisis in the post-industrial world. And while Manchester has recently taken great strides towards developing a tourist and shopping-oriented economy, Lodz is just starting to take baby steps.

There are posters everywhere touting Lodz as the best choice to be named the 2016 European culture capital and the Manufaktura, a huge shopping and entertainment complex, seeks to use the city’s past to move forward. Piotrkowska Street, meanwhile, is a large shopping stretch with many good pubs. Still, it’s hard to visit and not see untapped potential everywhere.

In many places, sides of buildings never meant to see the light of day lay bare and windowless, the structures on which they used to hug gone. On the above mentioned Piotrkowska Street many buildings have magnificent facades that nevertheless have been neglected. In a Vienna or a Dresden or a Warsaw the columns and the architecture flourishes would be lit up. Here they aren’t even cleaned.

It could be better, but it also allows one to take a look back in time and, like in Lokrum, revel in a tourist attraction without all the polish (no pun intended.)

Texting, one, two, three

Yesterday I sent my first ever cell phone text message. It felt just as icky as I always thought it would. Sending a message over the phone? What’s the point? Why not just call?

But, it turns out you feel less like you’re harassing the people on the other end of the phone when you text message, which is ironic since texting has probably only increased the growing ranks of the cell-phone-annoyed.

As for the text itself, I unfortunately forgot that texting apparently permits gross abuse of the English language. Thus I spelt ‘you’ Y-O-U and only shortened the word ’season’ to S-E-A-S. Still, I’m on tricky territory. The next blog posting may just be three letters and a smiley emoticon. You never know.

Granny ghettos

Wherever you look in Warsaw, you’re liable to spot an elderly man or woman trudging along the sidewalk or sidling onto the subway, cane in one hand, grocery bags in the other.

Observing this, Magda pointed out today that there seem to be a lot of old people out and about in Warsaw, more than back home in Vernon or Kamloops. I’m not so sure but there does seem to be something there. As compared to Warsaw, in Vernon, which has a very healthy (if that is the right word) pacemaker-per-capita ratio, the elderly seem less visible.

Why? I have a couple theories. One, there are simply more pedestrians here, ourselves included, than back home where more people drive. More pedestrians mean more old pedestrians. My second theory, I think, is more interesting and perhaps worthy of further investigation.

In Warsaw, the elderly seem to be rather spread out. The hundreds of apartment blocks provide plenty of housing (some reasonably priced, some not so much) for the elderly all around the city. Those apartment blocks are also home to young families, teenagers, professionals and kindergartents.

In Vernon, however, elderly populations are very much confined to certain neighbourhoods. Granny ghettos, if you will. They live, play and go for walks within their closed communities, in their courtyards and, in downtown Vernon, between their apartment buildings, the Schubert Centre and Safeway. The result is a more age-homogenized population.

It is also, as Tom Lancaster, the man in charge of Vernon’s OCP, told me a couple years ago unhealthy for cities.

“You need the vibrancy of youth, you need the vibrancy of children, you need the whole spectrum and I think for a long time we’ve developed cities where we segregate people of the various age groups,” said Lancaster.

“It doesn’t work. You’ve got to mix all these things together to the point where older folks are no longer walking down the street and are afraid of the youth because they don’t live by them or youth are not going around making jokes at the expense of older folks or you don’t have people complining about the noise of young children bouncing a ball on the street.

“It’s ridiculous,” Lancaster said of gated age-restricted communities. “Part of life is all the different age groups and we need to wrap our minds around that.”

Centre of the universe

Just finished googling Nicolaus Copernicus. Found out that he is credited with putting forward the theory that the earth does not lie at the centre of the universe.

You would have thought I’d have already known that. Not only because he’s a pretty famous guy but also because I visited his house (and museum) earlier today. We’re in Torun, Copernicus’ birthplace and, right there on Kopernika Street, sits a pair of old 16th Century tenament houses where Copernicus is thought to have lived as a child and where he may have been born.

The buildings themselves are interesting, the layout sort of antithetical to homebuilders today, involving lots of stairs and something of a terraced floor plan. Inside the rooms are various instruments, documents, paintings and drawings linked, in some way, either to Copernicus or to Torun or Krakow, where he studied.

As we made our way from room to room, though, I had no idea why Copernicus was such a big deal. Of course I knew he was a big deal – we paid five bucks to enter the museum after all. But I didn’t have a sense of the big picture. Unlike the Warsaw Uprising Museum, there was no storyline holding together all of the scattered documents and artifacts. And it wasn’t just the fact that I was reading in English. Everything was displayed equally in Polish, English and German. Not once did I ask Magda for a translation.

No, it seems the museum just needs to learn that putting together a good story isn’t just important for movies, novels and cheating couples. Museums also thrive on a good plot. Unfortunately, as the British would say, the Copernicus Museum lost theirs.

Crazy, drunk, weird or evil marketing ploy?

There was one other person in the hostel when we showed up at Torun’s only backpacker’s refuge around supper time today. It stayed like that until 11:30. The one person at the far other end of the large 12-bed room, we at the near end.

Then around 11:31 we got another roomie, a fellow who entered the hostel, had a loud chat with the front office staff in Poland and subsequently was led into our room, where he subsequently selected a top bunk near the other person (thankfully).

He seemed weird, despite not speaking to us. Something about the noise he created gave off that vibe. Magda thought three people had entered the room. Then, with midnight passing, he needed  to take a shower. To prepare himself, I guess, he started playing Polish rap on his cell phone. The other person, for what it’s worth, was plugging away on her laptop. The entire rap song passed and another started before roomy took his stereo to the shower to play while noisily showering. Every now and then he would let out an awkward, loud sigh.

Is he mentally ill? Drunk? Just plain weird? Or, more cynically (and admittedly unlikely) was he hired by the hostel to “encourage” us to upgrade to a more expensive private room?!? Okay, probably not. Still, some laughs to be had.

Thankfully the music ended after the shower and he seems to be asleep.

You’re not cool, you’re crazy

A brief observation:

You don’t look cool walking around town talking into a wireless phone or bluetooth. You look crazy. Bona fide talking-to-yourself-crazy.

Just thought you’d want to know…

Maybe rain isn’t so bad

Before we leave for the internet-less Polish hinterland tomorrow, a quick thought:

While I’ve been complaining about the rain here in Warsaw, including the fact that what little  snow we got a couple nights ago was quickly melted by the drizzle, a check on the ol’ Weather Network website put my mind at ease today.

When I first saw that it was -28 in Vernon (with a windchill of -34), I honestly wished I was there. The cold weather always makes the indoors feel warmer and there is sort of an under-seige atmosphere that is, in a sick little way, fun. But then I remembered the fact that if I was back in Vernon, I would likely be working tomorrow, when the temperature will remain in the minus-teens, apparently. By work, I mean taking photos while driving around in a car in which the heater only works in the summer. By the end of the day my fingers would begin to resemble grape popsicles.

So if we don’t have a White Christmas this year, maybe that’ll be okay.