Thanks to an invitation from Chris Breikss, I submitted a photo to a Flickr contest being run by imagine1day, a non-profit focused on child education in Ethiopia.
The contest asks participants to “submit a photo and 50 words or less that represent greatness for your chance to win”. Here’s the photo I offered:
The photo is totally banal, but I love the story. Here are my 49 words:
This is Robben Island, a prison in South Africa. Nelson Mandela was imprisoned here for 18 years, and he worked in this lime quarry. During breaks, Mandela and fellow political prisoners sat in a cave, debating politics. Together, they created the soul of an Apartheid-free South Africa.
The prize is two tickets to the premiere of “Facing Ali”, a boxing documentary I wrote about earlier in the summer. It’d be neat to go, as I’m friends with the director Pete McCormack and his partner. If you want to help me out and have a Flickr account, drop by the photo and leave a comment. That’s the criteria for winning the contest.
It’s probably the first time I was ever published, and it’s a sad little essay about being an environmental defeatist. Click to brobdingnangate (an awesome term I stole from Phil):
We talked a lot about TckTckTck, activism and social change in the five days I recently spent on the far side of Cortes Island, at the Web of Change conference. It’s the second time I’ve been.
The first time I went was back in 2006, and I found the conference a bit vexing. As with this year, the people were awesome–smart, dedicated and incredibly welcoming. However, I felt pretty intimidated by the high woo woo factor and Hollyhock’s particular philosophical–one might say downright religious–bent.
I tried to go back this year with a more open mind and a higher tolerance for the woo woo. I once again found my fellow attendees–there were only 90, so I met nearly everyone–friendly, super-smart and all seemingly world-changers. The sessions were mostly good. Zak Exley’s talk entitled “Revolution in Jesusland” stands out as particularly excellent. He’s a labour-organizing progressive who moved to Kansas and ‘infiltrated’ the Christian Right because he married an evangelical Christian. He’s been blogging about the experience, and about a remarkable thing that he sees happening in Middle America:
There is an incredibly large and beautiful social movement exploding among evangelicals right now that stands for nearly all of the same causes and goals that secular progressives do. Those goals include: eliminating poverty, saving the environment, promoting justice and equality along racial, gender and class lines and for immigrantsâ€â€and even separation of church and state.
In terms of our work, I was kind of an outsider compared to many other attendees. They’re advocates, campaigners and change-makers for organizations like the David Suzuki Foundation or BC Health Coalition or Knowledge as Power. Me, I run a marketing company. They know a ton about advocacy, online and off. I have never actually made a protest sign.
Still, I learned a ton and will hopefully be back next year. As with my occasional work in the arts, I’ve always found it stimulating to step a little outside of my daily focus to gain insights and meet new people. I often find that, down the road, I draw fruitful connections across these domains which I would have never otherwise seen.
Now, if I can only convince Hollyhock to serve the occasional piece of chicken.
This Saturday is Vancouver’s fourth annual BarCamp. A bit like Northern Voice, the event has doubled in scope over that time. The first one, back in 2006, had 120 people (as many as would fit in Workspace). This one apparently has 299 people coming.
Boris the BarCamp Organizer (unofficial title) hooked me up with some information about this year’s registrants. For 122 attendees, this will be their first BarCamp, which is always good news. About 20% requested women’s t-shirts, so we’re assuming that they’re either women or very svelte men.
Speaking of t-shirts, I stuck the aggregate requests for t-shirt sizes into Wordle, and produced this little tag cloud:
I’m looking forward to attending and not actually speaking. I mean, in front of people. More than three people at a time. You get the idea. That said, I will be playing the role of Room Selection Bad Cop (unofficial title) during the scheduling jam.
Last night, courtesy of the Vancouver Comedy Festival, we watched George Strombopolous interview Steve Martin at the Orpheum Theatre. There was no particular framing around the evening–Martin wasn’t promoting a book or movie–just a reasonably informal chat in front of an adoring, apparently sold-out crowd.
I’m not a big fan of Strombopolous’s public persona, but he’s a reasonably capable interviewer. The conversation meandered through Martin’s youth, his stand-up career, his movies and other sundry pursuit–he’s a bit of a Renaissance Man.
Though I don’t consider myself a huge Steve Martin fan, I’ve actually consumed a ton of his work. I’ve seen most of his movies (excepting those made ‘for the whole family’) and at least one of his plays, and I’ve read both his novels and his autobiography. He writes charming, readable books, and his autobiography was a fascinating study of one artist’s mind.
Having read Martin’s autobiography, a number of his entertaining anecdotes were familiar to me. Still, it was a funny evening. After 35 or 40 years on-stage, he’s just an innately amusing performer. Looking dapper in a linen jacket and striped socks, he was kind of everyone’s funny uncle. Though I’ve never made this connection before, his physicality reminded me quite a bit of Alan Alda–skinny, white hair, all elbows and knees.
An Adoring Audience
And everyone else seemed to agree. I was surprised by the youthfulness of my fellow audience members. I wasn’t particularly scientific, but I’m pretty sure the majority of the audience was born after 1976, when Martin stopped regularly doing stand-up comedy. I saw a couple of my friends from the theatre community there, which seems natural, but I was, frankly, shocked at how many people paid $60 to $185 to watch Martin chat with Strombopolous and play a couple of bluegrass tunes on the banjo. And they were so smitten. They gave Martin a standing ovation when he walked out on stage.
Maybe it’s a supply and demand question: the opportunities to see him locally, in any guise, are pretty rare.
A significant chunk of the evening was given over to questions from the audience. As they always do, these ranged from the inane to the insightful, and people frequently started by gushing about how much they loved the comedian. I could have done without this. I’d rather watch a succinct, well-run 80 minute interview–I came to hear from Martin, not his fans.
My only technical complaint is that the sound seemed pretty poor. I was toward the back of the main floor of the house, but I often had to strain to hear what Martin and Strombopolous were saying. Strombopolous, in particular, is a bit of a mumbler. If that was the best the venue could do for amplification, they might have been better off not using microphones at all.
A few random quotes from the evening:
Martin described the movie poster for The Lonely Guy as “the worst movie poster ever made”. He’s right.
“3:00pm is the worst time for comedy.”
When asked, he admitted to occasionally reading the message boards on his website. He said, “if there was a discussion forum about you, wouldn’t you read it?”
Rebecca scored an interview with Canada’s boyfriend yesterday, in case you’re looking for more Strombopolousity.
I’m at Web of Change, so updates are likely to be pretty intermittent this week. On my way up–I took the train for the first time from Victoria to Nanaimo–I read the latest issue of Wired magazine. In it, there’s a really fascinating article about the placebo effect, and how, remarkably, it’s increasing:
Why are inert pills suddenly overwhelming promising new drugs and established medicines alike? The reasons are only just beginning to be understood. A network of independent researchers is doggedly uncovering the inner workingsâ€â€and potential therapeutic applicationsâ€â€of the placebo effect. At the same time, drugmakers are realizing they need to fully understand the mechanisms behind it so they can design trials that differentiate more clearly between the beneficial effects of their products and the body’s innate ability to heal itself. A special task force of the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health is seeking to stem the crisis by quietly undertaking one of the most ambitious data-sharing efforts in the history of the drug industry. After decades in the jungles of fringe science, the placebo effect has become the elephant in the boardroom.
The article uses a term I hadn’t heard before: nocebo. Here’s an explanation:
Like any other internal network, the placebo response has limits. It can ease the discomfort of chemotherapy, but it won’t stop the growth of tumors. It also works in reverse to produce the placebo’s evil twin, the nocebo effect. For example, men taking a commonly prescribed prostate drug who were informed that the medication may cause sexual dysfunction were twice as likely to become impotent.
Check out the awesome cake my nephew Paul enjoyed for his fourth birthday party (click for buccaneer bigness):
It comes complete with licorice cannons and Malteser cannonballs. Paul’s party was pirate-themed, coincidentally coinciding (can one say that?) with International Talk Like a Pirate Day. I wonder, is Paul destined, therefore, to a have a lifetime of pirate parties?
As I’ve mentioned in passing a couple of times, I’m excited to be working with the TckTckTck campaign. It’s an unprecedented coalition of global NGOs (Greenpeace, Oxfam, WWF, Amnesty International among others–here’s a complete list on the website or Twitter) dedicated to urging world leaders to agree to a binding, fair and ambitious deal in Copenhagen this December, where they’ll negotiate the sequel to the Kyoto Protocol.
There’s a series of global events happening over the next three months. The first of these is the Global Wake Up Call, more than 2000 flash mobs and other events that occur all over the world next Monday, September 21. There are 188 events happening in Canada, and at least a dozen–like this one–are happening around Vancouver. If you’re looking to do something over lunchtime next Monday, maybe you’d like to join one?
This generation of children is the most pampered and protected of its kind in all of history. Of course, that’s probably been true of every subsequent generation of the past 150 years, if not longer. Still, some instances of helicopter parenting are particularly exasperating. One is the radical change in children being restricted from walking to and from school on their own.
In 1969, 41 percent of children either walked or biked to school; by 2001, only 13 percent still did, according to data from the National Household Travel Survey. In many low-income neighborhoods, children have no choice but to walk. During the same period, children either being driven or driving themselves to school rose to 55 percent from 20 percent. Experts say the transition has not only contributed to the rise in pollution, traffic congestion and childhood obesity, but has also hampered children’s ability to navigate the world.
The article, as it happens, describes an incident from “a Vancouver suburb”:
Lisa Reid, who lives in a suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia, had signed a permission form, but when her first-grader proudly told his teacher he was walking home himself last spring, a distance of six houses, the teacher was incredulous. She took him to the office and called Mrs. Reid, who didn’t hear the phone. That was because Mrs. Reid was pacing at the end of the driveway, waiting for her son, her worries climbing exponentially as the moments ticked by.
The article goes on to explain that–the math here is mine–a child is more than 2000 times likelier to be injured in a car accident than be abducted by a stranger. There are the 62 million American children under the age of 14, and only about 115 of them are abducted by strangers every year. In Canada, there are about40 to 50 stranger abductions a year.
I wonder why it’s so much higher, per capita in Canada? Maybe there are differences in how the crime is defined? In Canada, a stranger is apparently anybody other than a parent or guardian–”a close friend, neighbour, uncle, grandparent or another family member”. I wasn’t able to find a definition for ‘stranger abduction’ in the US.
In short, the odds of a particular child being abducted are extremely small. Not to be all “when I was a young’un”, but the truth is that the abduction risk hasn’t changed since I walked about 500 meters home from elementary school in the eighties.
I should recognize that there are still many levelheaded parents out there. Derek, for example, lets his kids walk to school (and take other risks). It’s a little sad, if not surprising, that our the majority’s perceptions have so overruled the very safe reality.
While writing this post, I remembered the excellent map that accompanies this Daily Mail article.
