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I pity anybody who has had to learn English as second (or third or fifth) language. It’s a confusing language to begin with, the regional differences are sometimes staggering (or downright opposing).

Take the word crèche, for example. I was introduced to the term when I lived in Ireland, where I learned that it referred to a daycare or nursery. When I subsequently lived in Malta, I heard the Maltese use crèche to refer to nativity scenes. Being the most Catholic country outside of the Vatican, they took their Christmas dioramas very seriously. Some of the crèches were sprawling, baroque affairs. Here’s part of one, with its creator for, uh, scale:

Here’s a little slide show with more photos.

I’m currently reading the witty Septic’s Companion, “a mercifully brief guide to British culture and language”. It’s written by Chris Rae. He kindly sent me a copy as a thank you for linking to his website a bajillion years ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the Internet.

Here’s his entry on creche (he omits the accent):

creche: n day-care. The place you take your children to be looked after, usually while you bumble off and make the money you’ll need to pay for it. The Brits do not use the word to describe a the revolting Christian Christmas scene that your child brought home from school and you’re not sure where to jettison (see “nativity”).

I found that puzzling. For who would the Maltese learn the word crèche from if not the English? What’s the word’s etymology?

“Christmas manger scene,” 1792, from Fr. crèche, from O.Fr. cresche, ult. from O.H.G. kripja, from the root of crib. Also “a public nursery for infants where they are cared for while their mothers are at work” (1854).

Huh. Maybe they learned the word from the French? At least the two meanings–nativity and nursery–have vaguely similar meanings. Another example from Chris’s book is “momentarily”. He says that in the UK, it means “for a moment” and in the US it means “in a moment”. In Canada, I feel like I hear both cases used all the time.

By the way, I’d heartily recommend Chris’s book to Anglophiles everywhere. I particularly liked this bit about the Royal Family:

The Royal Family has three main functions in modern Britain. The first is to invoke antagonism amongst the chattering classes about what the bloody Royal Family ever does for anyone. Bloody social leeches. The second is to provide the tourist industry with ceremonial events, tea towels, commemorative spoons, postcards and other overpriced memorabilia which will be snapped up by enthusiastic tourists and displayed in homes all over the modern world. Their third is to generate C-grade scandal for the chattering classes by having sex with supermodels, smoking pot or making obliquely racist comments on
television. Elizabeth II’s son, Charles, was hampered by his looks from humping any supermodels and prevented by his personality from scoring weed, although his children, Princes William and Harry, are considerably better looking and attempting to make amends. Elizabeth’s husband, Prince Philip, is a much more enthusiastic scandalmonger and is famous for asking an Australian aborigine whether they still threw spears at each other, and telling British students in China that ―if you stay here much longer, you’ll get all slitty-eyed.

In recent months, while watching hockey games, I’ve noticed these L’Oreal For Men commercials featuring Patrick Dempsey:

The target demographic for these commercials is surely wives and girlfriends. The cliche here is the wife sitting beside her husband on the couch, a little bored as she half-watches LePeiter pass to Huckenchuck and go offside. Then she immediately perks up when Doctor McDreamy or whatever his frackin’ nickname is shows up on-screen.

The ad’s subtext is simple: “Buy this for your man, and he’ll be slightly more similar to Patrick Dempsey”. That’s fair enough–ads employ aspirational messages all the time. That doesn’t make the ad or the product line any less ridiculous. L’Oreal for Men? Seriously? This is one wrong-headed brand extension.

On the other hand, this excellent Old Spice commercial seems to intentionally spoof the Dempsey ads. And I think, given its mix of hunk and humour, it’s going to reach both people on the couch:

“If he stopped using lady-scented body wash, he could smell like he’s me.” Bonus points for the subtle reference to the SNL digital short, “I’m on a Boat” (rated PG for cuss words).

Last week, we opened up speaking submissions for Northern Voice, the social media and personal blogging conference I help organize.

The conference, by the way, will be held out at UBC on May 7 and 8, 2010. Why so late this year? We didn’t want to schedule it during the Olympics, and, preferring to keep it out at UBC, we needed to wait until classes weren’t in session.

The deadline for submitting a talk is March 9, 2010. I’ll be one of the people filtering through the submissions. We get more than 100 now, and the amount grows every year. As such, I thought I ought to brainstorm some topics that I’d like covered at this year’s conference:

• Why do location-based social networks like Foursquare and Gowalla matter? Will they catch on? What are original ideas around how to use them?
• Dying on the social web. I’ve discussed this topic occasionally, and obviously it’s kind of an uncomfortable one, but as the Internet and its users get older, it’s increasingly germane.
• Sex and the social web. Not to sound all dirty, but it’s been five years and we’ve never had this topic. We’ve had ‘relationships and blogging’, which is great, but nobody’s owned this subject.
• How does the average 15-year-old use technology and the social web. As I get older and continue to have zero children, I feel less and less in touch with how the average teenager uses the web. I might actually submit on this topic, in the hopes of convening a panel of teenagers to take questions from the audience.

That’s all I can think of. What topics would you like to see covered at this year’s conference?

Julie’s uncle (jazz band available for gigs) sent along this interesting story about social media, the military and delivering aid to Haiti. British Columbian Rebecca Larkin operates an orphanage called Heart to Heart Children’s Home in Grand Goave, Haiti. The orphanage is home to 110 children, and 450 children attend its school. Its buildings were badly damaged during last month’s earthquake. Here’s one of her photos of the damage:

Rebecca and her team had been struggling along and working as hard as they could to rebuild and care for the children and the community. And then along came the US Marines. As Rebecca explains in this interview with the Marines, it turns out that the Marines had been monitoring social media channels to help deliver aid:

How does it feel to know that you were the first person to receive aid using a new system utilized by the Marines to focus on social media to gain information for the location and type of care needed?

I actually didn’t know that until now! I have always realized the importance of my blog in connecting North American with the reality of what is happening in Haiti and the opportunities to help but I never imagined my audience would be so large.

They discovered Rebecca’s blog posts, and sent in 25 strong-backed soldiers to help clean up the orphanage. Subsequently, the Navy also pitched up to help, and delivered a baby on board the USS Bataan.

Regardless of how you feel about the military or missionary work (Heart to Heart is a church-supported project), it’s a pretty fascinating example of getting aid via (this word feels charmingly outdated) the blogosphere.

If you were going to give money for Haitian relief, you’ve probably already done so. If not and you want to support this orphanage, you can do so here. It’s a pretty unofficial-looking PayPal account, but I can vouch for the work Rebecca and her team are doing.

I was in a government building recently, and visited the bathroom. This odd graffiti was on the stall wall:

When you decipher the code, it reads “what is our duty”. This wasn’t the publicly accessible part of the building, so presumably this was written by a government worker. Is this a public servant asking his colleagues about their commitment? Or is he just making a bad pun on the term “doodie”?

About two years, I wrote about the very young chanteuse Nikki Yanofsky. Commenters rightfully pointed out at the time that she was an impressive if non-amazing singer.

I was reminded of Ms. Yanofsky recently, so I thought I’d see what progress she’d made in the last two years. Here’s an MSNBC profile that suggests her fame is increasing (hilariously, you can hear her ask her mother “why does Daddy have Twitter?”):

And here she is singing at Carnegie Hall.

I’m lousy at predictions, but I could definitely see her fitting into the Norah Jones (here’s Ms. Yanofsky covering Jones’s “Don’t Know Why”) and Diana Krall easy-listening vein. Maybe she doesn’t achieve the same level of fame, but it’s worth noting that both of those singers are easy on the eyes, and Ms. Yanofsky is also pretty (he says, trying to sound as non-creepy as possible). There are no doubt hundreds of as good or better teenage singers in Canada, but few probably have the same savvy parental support and good looks.

I see that Nikki Yanofsky is also the singer of CTV’s ultra-cheesy Vancouver 2010 song, “I Believe”. I suppose that’s good press, in a David Foster kind of way.

A reader wrote with an interesting question. They’re planning on going to see a play this month–Robert Lepage’s “The Blue Dragon”, and wondered “do I go to opening night? I’m sure they had months to rehearse, but maybe there’s jitters?”

And here’s what I said. If you’re looking for the best artistic experience, I wouldn’t go on opening night. There are always jitters among the performers, and that can result in an uneven or less nuanced performance. Also–this is particularly the case with Lepage’s highly-complex work–the risk of a technical issue declines with each performance. Last year, I know somebody who attended an opening night at the Belfry Theatre in Victoria and the lighting basically failed. The very-professional actress had to do her entire one-woman show under house lights.

I’d also avoid the closing night show, for some of the same reasons. The ideal show might be a Friday night in the second-half of the run. There are often matinees on Saturday, and I figure the actors may be pacing themselves to handle the demands of doing the show twice in the same day.

I’m going to see that Lepage play this month as well, and I’m pretty psyched. What night do you like to go to a play?

The trouser-rubbing hordes of Macolytes are all in a lather about Apple’s newest device: the oddly-named iPad (insert menstrual humour here). If you haven’t seen it yet, watch the introductory video. It features the usual legion of starry-eyed, breathless Apple senior staff speaking reverently about their newest saint.

It’s a big, thin iPod. And it’s dead sexy. And surprisingly cheap, with prices starting at US $499.

It looks like a cool toy, but which of my computing, communications or entertainment problems does this device actually solve? It’s a sexier Kindle (with, no doubt, the same level of vendor lock-in)–a cool-looking reading device, for newspapers, books and the Web. I’ve been pretty ambivalent about the Kindle and other ebook readers up to now. I’ll probably buy one eventually, but I find I have an affection for the analog reading experience of dead tree books and New Yorker magazines.

And I don’t sit down to ‘read the Internet’. My ‘web surfing’ experience, if you will, is this mix of reading, blogging, tweeting, sending emails and chatting online, and all of that is usually intermingled with my doing actual work. The iPad looks to be great for reading the web, but worse than a laptop for each of these other functions.

I do watch TV and, rarely, feature-length movies on my laptop. I’m usually either on a plane or in bed. In either case, I appreciate the fact that my laptop can sit all on its own, without me holding it up. I know there will be docks and sundry other, uh, mounts for the iPad, but I’m not sure how else it would be superior to my MacBook Air.

In short, it’s a great-looking device, but I’m not sure it’s right for me. What are your initial impressions?

One of the undervalued aspects of the Internet is its endless capacity to enable nostalgia. Whether you had a childhood love of My Little Pony, Dungeons & Dragons or a defunct hockey team, there’s a website (and probably an eBay auction) where you can revisit that pleasure of your youth.

I was reminded of this phenomenon over the weekend, when a friend and I were discussing a new Olympics-themed video game called Vancouver 2010. Like many Olympics computer games before it, it enables you to play a number of the sports from the Winter Games. Here’s a trailer:

It’s noteworthy that the Games’ three sports that are most popular among Canadians–ice hockey, figure skating and curling–don’t appear in this game. It’s not surprising–hockey has its own franchise games, figure skating would be tricky to program effectively (imagine the control scheme) and curling, well, is curling. That said, I think curling would make a great game for the Wii.

The Heady Days of Microsoft Decathlon

My friend reminded me of a slightly earlier sports mini-games-within-a-game for the PC. It was called Microsoft Decathlon, and, believe it or not, it was published in 1982. 1982! The first version of PC-DOS, on which is ran, was only released in August, 1981. I probably didn’t play the game until 1984 or 1985, but I played it a lot. When I watched this video, the sense of nostalgia was visceral:

The crazy midi theme, the four colour interface, the high jump mat labeled “FOAM PIT”–it all came back to me. The whole video is 10 minutes, so don’t bother watching the whole thing. I might draw your attention, however, to the awesome rendering of the shot-put event.

When you compare those two videos, it’s a little shocking how far games have come in 25 years. What will they look like in another 25 years? How much will innovation slow down, as has happened in television and film?

Do you have a secret source of online nostalgia?

For many British Columbians, the words ‘Haida Gwaii’ speak of mystery. The words mean ‘Islands of the People’, and refer to the misty, cold Queen Charlotte Islands on BC’s coast. They’re familiar to most of us from Emily Carr’s paintings, if nothing else.

The Haida Gwaii is the backdrop for Bruce Ruddell’s “Beyond Eden”. The musical premiered last Thursday at the Vancouver Playhouse, one of the many events of the Cultural Olympiad. Here’s the plot summary:

In the abandoned Haida village of Ninstints stand totem poles. They have stood there for decades. Lewis Wilson and his long-time friend and colleague Max Tomson are on an expedition to rescue these totem poles and save them from their waterlogged, beetle-infested and fragile condition. On their journey both men struggle: Wilson with his authority and resistance to removing the poles; Max to find his place between the white world and his Haida ancestry.

The play is based on actual events. A young Bill Reid–bound to become a famed sculptor–made the actual trip in 1957.

Clever Projections and Inoffensive Songs

Director Dennis Garnhum and set designer Bretta Gerecke cleverly realize this world–the deck of a ship and the trees of Haidi Gwaii–through crisscrossing ramps, intersected by huge timbers that reach into the theatre’s fly tower. They make excellent use of projections, both to simply establish location and, in the more mystical scenes, to evoke mood. During one song–”Carving”, I think–the Haida totems are brought back to life through tricky use of animated projections, a technique which so often goes wrong in contemporary theatre.

The cast is mostly strong, with John Mann (yes, of Spirit of the West fame) and Jennifer Lines (a former UVic classmate of mine) standing out. There were some opening night jitters, and a little clunkiness from some of the chorus members, but Mann’s performance carries us through the meandering storyline.

It’s hard to write one good song, let alone fifteen. The music was unremarkable and, for the most part, inoffensive. A few days later, I find I can still hum the tune from the title song, so that’s something. More interesting was the a capella First Nations music–it’s a form you usually don’t hear outside of tourist traps and documentaries.

Though the play is set in 1957, the script is oddly free of period slang or more than a few token cultural references. Elvis is mentioned a couple of times, but that’s the extent of it. I was also thrown by phrases like “I get that” and “is there a problem here?” which have a much more modern feel to them.

Reid’s Work Makes a Strong Case

The play’s central question–should the characters take and preserve these totems or leave them to rot?–seems at first like a question ripe for debate. In his director’s notes, Garnhum refers to “the true cost of the removal of the [sic] Totem Poles”. While the village where the totems stand has long since been abandoned, the play’s Haidi characters demand that the totems should be left in their rightful spot, to decay and be reclaimed by the forest, as has occurred for thousands of years. However, there will be no new poles to replace the old ones. As the play points out, that cycle has been broken.

At the same time, the Bill Reid character–born of a Haida mother, both in the play and in real life–wants to take and preserve the poles so that he can learn from them. He says, “When I am ready, I will raise a pole of my own. And another and another.” Of course, Reid turned out to be an extraordinary artist and preserver of Haida culture (I count his Raven and the First Man as one of my favourite pieces of Canadian art). From the year 2010, Reid’s accomplishments since taken the poles are incredibly convincing evidence in support of his decision.

“Beyond Eden” isn’t without its cliches. Growing up on the West Coast, I got exposed to a lot of First Nations-themed art. I’ve seen plenty of magical realist plays where there’s some raven or eagle or muskrat who wears a goofy costume and dances around the stage prophesying and telling fables. “Beyond Eden” has ‘The Watchman’, clad in Haida regalia, who serves a similar purpose. Plus, the play name checks the familiar injustices the white man inflicted upon the Haida–residential schools, banned potlatches and small pox.

They’re familiar stories, capably told. I’d probably discourage my more cynical Vancouver friends from attending. On the other hand–and this seems to be the litmus test, in light of the Olympics–I’d probably recommend the production to out-of-towners who didn’t know this part of our province’s history.

It is so Canadian that, when the world comes to visit, we trot out our historical misdeeds for their entertainment. It’s an impulse that both frustrates and delights me.

“Beyond Eden” runs through February 6. You can watch a trailer for the show on the Playhouse’s website.