Today is the day of the (does it get a definite article?) Twestival, a kind of Twitter-powered meetup in over 175 cities around the world, in support of Charity: Water. It’s a terrific idea, and the best example yet of a non-profit organization or charity wielding new communications channels for good.
Here’s the blog for Vancouver’s Twestival. The event will be in the Opus Hotel in Yaletown, organized by Rebecca of Miss604 fame.. I’d thought about organizing one in Victoria (as that’s where I happen to be today), but ran out of bandwidth.
Sameer points to this effective ad for Charity:Water featuring the hotness that is Jennifer Connelly. Fetching celebrity + hot social media trend = victory.
For whatever reason, when I hear “Twestival”, I think of the prologue from Into the Woods.
The total number of people who play has declined or remained flat each year since 2000, dropping to about 26 million from 30 million, according to the National Golf Foundation and the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association.
More troubling to golf boosters, the number of people who play 25 times a year or more fell to 4.6 million in 2005 from 6.9 million in 2000, a loss of about a third.
Those numbers are pretty shocking. I wonder if this is some kind of Tiger Woods-related backlash. A bunch of people started playing golf because of Woods’s stratospheric popularity, but didn’t stick with the game. The article cites the duration of the average game, the high costs, reduction in corporate treats, American apathy towards athletics and shifting family responsibilities as possible reasons for the decline.
The article also discusses declines in other sports–tennis, swimming, hiking, biking and downhill skiing. I also connect this trend with an ongoing reduction in the number of hunters.
Classist, Sexist and Racist
I think this is great news. Golf clubs remain some of the most classist, sexist and racist institutions on the continent. More importantly, golf courses are vast swaths of monoculture grass and huge consumers of fresh water. There are occasional water shortages here in Essaouira because the nearby golf course uses too much of the local water, which is already in short supply. That’s not to mention how inefficient they are in terms of people-per-square-kilometer.
I have a dream. In the next decade, I want cities, provinces and states to buy every bankrupt golf course and turn them into parks, rec centres and other public spaces. I’m sure that this would prove financially inviable, but that’s why it’s a dream.
Morocco’s first and official language is classical Arabic. Nearly everybody between the ages of five and sixty also seems to speak French. As Wikipedia indicates, French is “taught universally and still serves as Morocco’s primary language of commerce and economics”.
The situation reminds me a bit of things back home, though obviously most Canadian anglophones (while spell-checking that, I learned a new word: Anglophobia. I’m anglophobic about British tourists.) don’t use their French very often. One similarity is how often the two languages–Arabic and French–appear on packaging. Canadians will be familiar with this two-sides-of-the-cereal box phenomenon.
I particularly admired how gracefully Oulmès mineral water deals with this issue. They integrate the two languages into one logo:
The Arabic is interwoven into the French. Isn’t that clever? Admittedly, it makes both a little difficult to read, but I think people will recognize the word mark and brand more than actually read the words.
I’m starting a regular feature called “Boring Facts About Me”.
Just kidding.
I mean, in a way, the whole site satisfies that description.
I just left money on our stoop for the water man. This process amuses me. Each week we put our two empty 19-litre water bottles outside the front door. I leave 3.58 mL (CAN $12.47) in cash under one of the bottles in an envelope. Early the next morning, the water man comes by, collects the empty bottles and money, and leaves two full bottles. No invoices, no online banking. We just pay the guy, and he brings me water.
Anyhow, we drink almost the water each week (oddly, it hasn’t been influenced by the cooler weather). So I figure that’s about 18 litres for me (a couple of litres remain in the ceramic basin). Is 2.5 litres a day a lot?
Ordering bottled water is a bit of a luxury in terms of living green. We tried and couldn’t get used to the taste of the water. I gather most of it is desalinated sea water, and it’s pretty bitter.
Speaking of Maltese Lira, this will be the second time I’ll be living in a country when it switches over to the Euro. We’re going to be Valetta on December 31st, and apparently New Years will be extra exciting due to the change-over. Maybe I’ll be the first Canadian to spend a Euro in Malta?
I really dig Kevin Kelly’s awesome Cool Tools newsletter–there’s always a fascinating recommendation on a new device. This week there’s a glowing review of the SteriPEN, a little flashlight-shaped water purifier that uses ultra-violet light.
The reviewer describes uses the SteriPEN at restaurants on his trip to Africa:
On my trip, often when I asked a waiter for a glass of tap water, my request would elicit a smile or a laugh. In some cases, they simply would not bring me a glass of water. Most of the time, though, I convinced them — and then, to their amazement, I would take out the SteriPEN, push a button, and stir the water with the glowing purple UV light that always brought stares from other diners. After less than 60 seconds, I would take out the SteriPEN and drink the water, occasionally hearing gasps from other tables.
It’s US $125, but it sounds like it delivers pretty reliable peace of mind. Now, I must start going to more places where such a device is required.
I was reviewing the product info, and happened upon this line of text:
Now you can carry hundreds of gallons of purified water in your pocket, purse or travel bag.
It took me far too long to figure out that they meant, you know, metaphorically carry. I’m a bit thick that way.
If I’d been paying closer attention in Physics 12, I might know the answer to this question. We have a small pool in our backyard, and a small ocean about 10 minutes away. All summer, the Mediterranean has felt warmer than our little pool.
This seems counter-intuitive, because I’d imagine that, over the summer, the sun would heat up the relatively-small amount of water in our pool. The water and surrounding stone would store some of that heat over night, and so would get cumulatively warmer over the summer. That’s happened to some degree, but it’s no match for the ocean.
When I went swimming at Xlendi this morning, the ocean was bathtub warm. What gives?
Our farmhouse has a cistern on the roof. As I understand it, water from the mains–the city waterworks keeps this shiny, metal tank full. You can see some of these tanks if you click on the thumbnail photo. The water’s then gravity-fed into our pipes.
It’s been really hot over the past few days–anywhere from 35 to 40 degrees, depending on who you ask. The sun, as you might imagine, has been blazing down. The farmhouse has crazy-thick walls, so we’ve been okay.
The tank on the roof, however, is just a big heat magnet. The peculiar result is that, first thing in the morning, there’s literally no cold water. It’s always a bit of a shock when brushing my teeth. Once we use some of the water, the tank seems to cool down a bit.
It’s no big deal, certainly, just an odd reversal for a Canadian accustomed to the reverse problem.
While walking around downtown Vienna, we happened upon a cool kinetic sculpture. It was a large metal frame, about the size of a soccer goal. Along the top of the frame, there were 320 water nozzles.
The whole thing was connected to the web, and it randomly grabbed sentences from the web and spelled them out in fleeting water words. It was quite remarkable to see. The project was called bit.fall, and here’s an excerpt from the description that accompanied the installation:
Key words from the daily news are only temporarily perceivable as transparent images before they again dissipate. BIT.FALL is a contemporary memento mori, which critically draws attention to the continual flood of information that manipulates our reality.
I found it difficult to capture a decent image of the water spelling anything. This was my best effort.
“The next war in the Near East will not be about politics, but over water.” -Former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali
You wouldn’t know if from today’s weather here in Vancouver, but I suspect that water will supplant climate change as the world’s green cause celebre by the mid-century. For most of the world, there’s too many people and too little potable drinking water.
World Water Day is an international day of observance and action to draw attention to the plight of the more than 1 billion people world wide that lack access to clean, safe drinking water. Celebrated since 1993, World Water Day was designated in 1992 when the United Nations (UN) General Assembly passed a resolution. With each passing year, the observance has grown larger and stronger.
There’s a bunch of walks to raise awareness for this cause. Alternately, if you have some extra cash burning a hole in your wallet, why not donate to my friends’ project to drill a well for a village in Liberta?
