Up in Ontario

Zizanie's Third Anniversary Celebration

Tomorrow, Wednesday, June 1st, the lovely ladies of Zizanie Restaurant will be celebrating their third anniversary in style. The big bash kicks off at 5 pm and will surely last until the wee hours.

For interested souls, Zizanie offers authentic québecois bistro soul food - poutine, tourtière with fruit ketchup, pea soup, Montréal smoked meat sandwiches, raclette, the croque monsieur and la tarte au sucre - and soul drink - La Fin du Monde and Blanche de Chambly among my personal favourites. The live music will drive contagious sing-alongs and the atmosphere will remind you of nothing else in Vancouver. Come out and try it. Invitations below, comme vous voulez.

Our Neighbours are Having Sex Right Now

Oh lordy. 1:14 am. Our neighbours are having their sex, right now. If you don't want to read about it, skip ahead, or behind, or to the loo my darling, because it's all happening and it's all happening right backflippin' now and I've been living with this on my own for too long now.

She:

• Could be related to a squirrel.
  
• Consistently makes a strained, breathy 'hey, hey, hey' noise, which penetrates the wall between their bedroom and our bedroom like a hot knife through butter.
  
• Actually cries out phrases like 'oh baby' and 'o my god.' Over and over in repetition. For real. Between squeals of 'hey, hey, hey.' At first I thought a professional recording was involved, but no. It's for real.
  
• Could be a voice actor if Disney every needs a hummingbird voiced. Her pacing, cadence and pitch are perfect.

He:

• Sounds like an asthematic race horse, having a full attack, rounding the corner and heading for home. All. The. Time.
  
• Must have an extrodinary resistant pelvis, perhaps a hard bone plate similar to the ass of a wombat, to sustain the kind of damage he seems to be doing to himself.
  
• Runs from the bedroom after the bed stops its squeaking, every time, and not pitter patter but tromp tromp.

The Bed:

• Is really the showpiece of the performance. Its nasal squeaking provides the perfect counterpoint to her squealing 'hey, hey, hey' and his asthematic heaving.
  
• Has been stripped of its headboard and moved away from the wall, thank god. When we first moved in the headboard was in full effect, with the squeaking and a knocking on the electric baseboard heater. Their usual went something like this: hump noises at a moderate pace woke me, I'm awake, the ceiling is the same as it has always been, the bed begins to squeak - ear-urt, ear-urt - the pace picks up, the ear-urt continues - ear-urt, ear-urt - and the baseboard chimes in - ear-urt-ting, ear-urt-ting - and now they're into it - ear-urt-ting, ear-urt-ting - and with some vigour the headboard comes in - ear-urt-ting-thunk, ear-urt-ting-thunk - then she starts with the obabys and omigods - ear-urt-ting-obaby-thunk, ear-urt-ting-omigod-thunk. Repeat, for six, seven minutes, with very little variance in pace. Get up and have a drink of water. See if the Duck's awake. She's not. You're on your own - ear-urt-ting-thunk - buddy boy.

Of late they don't seem to have a usual routine, so we never know when to avoid the apartment and/or bedroom. This past week, they've been hitting it late at night. 1:14 am this time, 3:41 a few nights ago, as if one of them works late at a restaurant or bar job. Before this week though, nothing for weeks. Maybe he's a migrant worker, only in town for briefs stints in the sack, then off again? A fisherman chasing ling cod off the northwest coast of Vancouver Island for weeks on end? The imagination runs through its own tangential scenarios to create any kind of story out of this.

I'm preparing a care package of WD-40 right now. I'll drop it off at their door with a note on the merits of over usage. Updates? Perhaps.

Stalking the Recycled Tissue at Zellers

This past weekend I had the unfortunate opportunity to visit a Zellers store. Prior to the visit it had been many years since my last visit to a Zellers store, so long in fact, that I remember their slogan to be the additionally unfortunate, 'Where the Lowest Price is the Law.' Oh my.

So we visited the Zellers. I waited for the Duck while she waited to be helped. I spotted row upon row of paper products, stretching up to the ceiling 20 feet away, and I thought to myself, 'Hmm, we need to get ourselves some bulk paper products.' Buying in bulk is cheaper, I reasoned. Friends told me about their trips to Costco for ludicrously low-priced tissue, toilet paper and paper towels. I wanted in on some of that.

But one problem existed. You see, I'm one of those obnoxious shoppers who thinks that what I buy matters, that my purchases reflect my support for a company and its values. I wanted to buy 100 percent recycled toilet paper, tissues and paper towel. I browsed the aisle and came across the recycled paper towel, Zellers' own in-house brand. Hoorah, I though to myself. Good on them.

I turned to the tissue paper and, now that the Zellers brand had proven itself to align with my notions, I sought it out. And found it. And tried to see if it contained 100 percent recycled paper. No information. I assumed it was not recycled, but rather, that it was, like almost all tissue paper available in Canada made from ancient forests clear-cut from the Canadian shield, a landscape just like the country around Lake of the Woods, where we have a camp and where I love to visit and where my novel, Up in Ontario, is set.

I found a store clerk and asked him if they carried any recycled paper products. He didn't know. Maybe I could call in three days when the next truck came in. But did they carry recycled tissue paper or toilet paper? No, we established, they didn't. So I pointed out to him that the next truck would certainly have no recycled tissue paper or toilet paper. He thought I was probably right about that, but he could check with his manager. The Duck and I headed to Customer Service.

At the counter we found a friendly clerk who told us that no means existed to order in products that they did not routinely stock. Could I ask to order something new, I asked. No, people don't do that, I was told. The Duck pointed to the Customer Service Champions Comment Card. Super, I thought. I filled out one irregularly, since it was designed only to provide feedback to Zellers when one of their representatives had gone beyond the call of duty, when they'd been a Customer Service Champion. Most of the Customer Service Representatives I had seen in the store, unless they were penned into cash registers or service desks, had quickly scurried the other way when customers approached. The store shelves appeared to have adopted a shabby-chic aesthetic, as if a pawn shop owner had been hired to give the place some character, though everything seemed to not have been pre-owned or recently stolen.

So to make a long story short, I filled out the card and asked to be contacted. That was Monday, I'm still waiting to hear from them. I feel like a bit of a self-righteous twit for wanting my precious recycled paper and for trying to work on getting it through Zellers, but at the same time, if they want to survive (they're owned by The Hudson's Bay Company), they've got to do better. Even if they're not targetting fancy shmancy consumers like me with their bargain basement value proposition. The onslaught of Sprawl-Marts goes on as we speak.

P.S.: If you want to see how different tissues rate on their environmental sustainability / friendliness, Greenpeace has a great Tissue Products Shopper's Guide that includes toilet paper, facial tissue, paper towels and napkins. After all, tissue is a convenience product designed to be used once and thrown away. We might as well not cut down ancient forests to wipe our collective ass and blow our nose.

Buying a Digital Camera Where You Shop

Yesterday the Duck and I bought our first digital camera. So while we're pretty advanced in some aspects of technology, in others we're late adopters. I feel like we're the last kids on the block to get the cool new toy.

In researching our digital camera purchase, I give all credit to herself. She sought out the right information. Weighed comparisons from various websites, magazines and personal anecdotes from friends against each other and made a decision to buy a specific model. I happily tagged along, offered an opinion here and there, but basically stayed out of the way. I'd already done some research and it felt great to hand over the reins and let her choose.

So we bought a Canon Powershot S500. It fits in the palm of my hand or the pocket of my jeans, so long as they're not freshly washed. I love it. It's a sleek brushed-silver brick of image-capture wonder. We'll use it for the summer, see how we like it and how we use it, then decide if we need a fancier digital SLR model for our big trip to Turkey and Greece in the fall. If we do, then we'll have 2 cameras to tote along - one pocket, portable model and one higher-end creator of scene-stealing images.

But that's not the point of today's post. Riding the bus in to work this morning I read through a great little pocketbook I received in my care package back in October at the Web 2.0 Conference. The book is called Tim O'Reilly in a Nutshell and is a collection of the title character, Tim O'Reilly's, essays and articles of the past 5-or-so years (O'Reilly is the founder of O'Reilly Media, a web and print publishing outfit he started to self-publish and that has grown into a technology book empire). Some of the essays are required reading for understanding the intersection of web technology, culture and business, and some I could pass over. This morning I came across an essay entitled, Buy Where You Shop. Its introduction goes like this:

May 2003

Most issues aren't black-and-white, though it's often easier to fall into thinking of them in that way than to wrestle with the subtleties and consequences. In this piece, written for one of our catalogs, I make the case that value is more than price, and that it's in our self-interest to support what we value

Ah-hah! I though to myself. This is perfect timing. We bought our camera from a shop called Lens and Shutter, in the Pacific Centre Mall. Before buying the camera we must have been in there, between the Duck and I, 4 or 5 times, asking questions, handling the cameras, thinking our purchase over. Every time I was present, we worked with a sales representative whose name we could never remember, so we just started calling him the Grumpy Guy. He had greying sandy blonde hair and beard, some heavy glasses and blunt fingertips with small nails. I know because he spent lots of time with us and pointed out how the features of the different cameras worked (or at least that's how I remember him, reliance on memory being our truly agnostic original sin).

Grumpy Guy was great to work with from a practical point of view. He wasn't exactly sunshine and lollipops but he knew his stuff. And he wasn't exactly grumpy, more abrupt and focused on reading his customers to find out how close they were to purchasing. He knew when to guide your opinion and when to shut up and let you work things out for yourself. At the same time, I imagine that he'd spent a lot of time working with customers who then had turned around and bought their camera somewhere else. When it was clear you weren't buying, it was clear he was done serving you.

So when the Duck actually laid down the plastic for the purchase yesterday, she noticed that Grumpy Guy wasn't in the store to see the fruits of his labour, which is a shame. I feel some obligation to tell him how helpful he was for us and that his work and patience paid off. So here's to you, Grumpy Guy! Thanks for the help. We'll let you know if we need anything else and if you don't hear from us, assume the camera is great and we're snapping like fiends.

(Soon, photos for the website. Gawd, I may become really obnoxious and join Flickr.

Concert Alert: Patrick Brealey and the Knives

A few weeks ago I purchased the debut, 3-song album of Patrick Brealey & the Knives from the online storefront of Boompa Records (the Boompa Booteek).

Since then it has occupied a place on honour in our car CD player and its 3 songs have been played over and over again. I picked up my brother at the ferry terminal and he requested a listen to Patrick Brealey & the Knives. The Duck does a little seat dance when we queue up the CD. When my friend Josh, the chef of Big Night fame, heard the first song, Escaper (MP3, 5.3 MB), he burst out at the melody shift about 2/3 of the way through, "Handclaps! I love handclaps! I always want handclaps in my songs."

So hot into the inbox today arrives a note from Patrick Brealey announcing a concert he'll be playing tomorrow night, Thursday, May 19th, at the Marine Club here in Vancouver. If you have the chance to come, you simply must. They slay in concert. You'll hear better songs than you can find on 80 percent of the radio stations in the city. Live. Take it away, Patrick...

Hi there. It's me. Patrick. I'm here to tell you about a charming little band I have called Patrick Brealey & the Knives.

You see, we have a show this Thursday, May 19th at the Marine Club in downtown Vancouver and I think you should come. It's going to be really fun. We will be going on stage around 10pm and will be followed by new-wave-country-kitchen-party-popsters The Burnettes, rounded out by the ember-hot-alt-country stylings of Leeroy Stagger & the Sinking Hearts. All in all, a show that'll make your skin tingle. And that's a good thing.

What do Patrick Brealey & the Knives sound like? Well, if you haven't already, or even if you have, you can download a song at www.patrickbrealey.com to get an idea. Otherwise, imagine Elvis Costello threw a dance party for a troupe of circus performers and Joe Jackson crashed the bash with a gang called Fleetwood Mac. That's right, I said Fleetwood Mac.

Hope to see you there.
Patrick

Thursday, May 19, 2005
Patrick Brealey & the Knives (10pm)
The Burnettes (11pm)
Leeroy Stagger & the Sinking Hearts (12am)
The Marine Club
573 Homer Street (at Dunsmuir)

Baseball Superstitions and the Mariners' Religion

In honour of spending this past Saturday down in Seattle at Safeco Field watching the Mariners play the Boston Red Sox, I present a the Top 10 Superstitious Athletes from CBC Sports. 7 of the top 10 are baseball players, with Wade Boggs leading the list, eating chicken every day before the game. The Chicken Man, as he came to be known, made a way of life of his superstitions.

...Boggs would eat poultry before every game and was obsessively compulsive about his routine.

He took exactly 150 ground balls during infield practice and had a fixation on time. He entered the batting cage at exactly 5:17 p.m. and ran wind sprints at 7:17 p.m.

Before each at-bat, he would write the Hebrew word "Chai" – meaning life – into the dirt of the batter's box.

Between pitches, he had a habit if he was playing defence: he'd swipe the dirt in front of him with his left foot, tap his glove two or three times and adjust his cap.

That just seems like so much wasted energy to me. But everyone has their own religion.

For instance, the Mariners game this past Saturday was the first professional baseball game I had ever seen live, and it did not disappoint. My first impressions were rich and vivid.

We showed up early to the park just in time to see last of the Red Sox batting practice. Manny Ramirez stroked a few out of the park, then Dave Ortiz skulked in the cage and dug in with his cleats. Pock! after Pock! followed as he stroked the turkeys served up by the coach into the sky, every single ball arcing higher and higher, white dots clearing the fence in right field, left field, over centre field and into the upper deck. The crowd loved it and the half-full stadium buzzed with noise and energy. After the monster stroke to the upper deck Ortiz skulked out of the cage to the dugout. He was done with warm up.

Once the game started it took me awhile to get into it. Everything seemed so slow: the warming up, the wait between pitches, the changeover between innings. My friend cb, whose tickets we had luckily snagged just that morning and a big baseball fan in his own right, told me to watch for the nuances of the game. "I believe this is what they call a pitchers duel," he told me after the third inning ended with zeros across the scoreboard - Runs, Hits, Errors.

I bought some peanuts and baseball beers for all three of us and started noticing the finer details of the experience. After each pitch the scoreboard displayed its speed and we started to distinguish between a 98 MPH fastball (which we saw - wow!) and a 78 MPH curveball. By the sixth inning I had found my stride, or rather, I had aligned myself with the pace of the game and began to enjoy the deliberateness and ritual of the game. And the scoring started, highlighted by a bases-loaded Grand Slam!

In total we saw 4 home runs, each one accompanied by a wonderful rising feeling in the crowd that paralleled the arc of the ball above the field. Every time Ortiz came to the plate he was a threat to hit any meatball pitch out of the park. Every time Suzuki Ichiro readied to take a pitch we saw his methodical stance and alignment routine. We saw old men dancing with children, more than 6 pitchers between both teams (including a sidearm slinger), peanuts thrown by vendors with pinpoint accuracy and dozens of foul ball, each one accompanied by the wave of rising in the crowd as everyone stood with the expecation of catching the ball, being discovered on the jumbo screen, high fiving a neighbour they'd never met. I bought a game-day program and popcorn and took it all in. It was baseball - an arcane game mixed with high-tech showbiz production values and the romantic mythology of a simpler, imagined past - in all its effect. And it was great to see.

If you don't believe me, you can read the Duck's account of the whole thing on her newfangled blog, So Misguided.

The Walrus Joins this Conversation

Yesterday I received an email with the simple subject line, "The Walrus." I hesitated for a second before opening it, wondering if spammers had taken their customization of subject lines to another level of sophistication. Then I boldly clicked the link.

The email ended up truly from The Walrus magazine. One of their young thought leaders named Andrew sent along the following text:

Dear James Sherrett,

My name is Andrew _____, and I work at The Walrus Magazine. Regardless of your attacks on the magazine, I really like your blog. I think you have a good solid literary blog on your hands and wish to congratulate you upon it.

Because your website reflects many of the values of The Walrus, including your unabashed boldness, I am contacting you to see if you would be interested in receiving a subscription to The Walrus in exchange for linking to our site.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Andrew _____
The Walrus Magazine

Well! I wrote back:

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for your note. Despite my criticism of The Walrus, I am a reader of the mag. I suppose the root of my criticisms of The Walrus is high expectations. The concept and ideas in the magazine show strength but I find the execution offers opportunities for improvement, on both the design and editorial sides. I have never worked in the magazine industry, but to me the newsstand product feels rushed to press, as if everyone involved wished they'd had one more pass to sharpen the final version. I'm just one voice out here, and, as my grandfather used to say, we all have a navel, an anus and an opinion, so perhaps it's best to take my attacks on the magazine with a grain of salt. After all, I do keep buying it.

That said, your offer of a subscription to the mag is something I'm interested in. Can I use your email in a post on my blog, linking to The Walrus? I won't change any of the email except to remove any personally identifiable information of yours - name, phone number, etc. Or you could do a guest post on the Up in Ontario blog. To contextualize, I'd like to write the post complimenting you on your marketing technique (if you're not insulted with me calling it that). You've recognized that folks are out there in the world talking about your magazine and you've joined the conversation. That's the jist of it. What do you think?

~James

PS: For my own market research, how did you come across my blog?

I nailed the send button and went to bed. Today when I checked my account, a reply was waiting. I can't hold out on you, dear readers, so here it is:

Dear James,

Criticism is a grand thing; no need to apologize.

In regards to the subscription, we are putting together a little icon for this program (the standard little blog-size icon) that we are hoping you will post on the sidelines of your page. In exchange for that link to our website, we will give you a one-year subscription to The Walrus.

In regards to your article, feel free to do as you wish. If possible, please don't include my email and phone number. I don't mind if you use my name, I just don't want my inbox to be flooded.

I came across your site months ago when I was looking for good blogs—a friend of mine has read it for a while and recommended it. When I was researching for this project, I found that you were one of the most linked-to Canadian blogs that are general interest or writing.

Thank you,
Andrew.

Very civil, non? A polite, complimentary, courteous meeting of the minds (or at least marketeers). Notwithstanding my dilettante criticisms of The Walrus, this feels like a good move. The magazine *is* worth reading and maybe a few of the editors there will click over here for a quick read, like what they see, and spread some of their per-word cheese my way.

Links from the Remainder Bin

I have an ever-expanding folder of items labelled 'To Blog' that dammit just needs to start coming out. So now, here comes the first installment, in brief: all the hoo hah that I've been meaning to write about over the past few weeks but haven't had the chance to write about.

• Want to be notified of something sometime in the future? Well then, check out FutureMail from Ben Sinclair, and get ready to divorce your email from the present. Once you go through the light registration process you can set the application to email you or send you an RSS feed for any topic at any time. Use it for simple things like remembering birthdays or take a chance and create a digital time capsule.

• If you want to totally geek out for an hour, and you can stand watching high-quality video at 3” x 3”, then you will love this behind the scenes look at the computational management model of Google. I kind of liked the video up to the point when the presenter, Jeff Dean, mentioned that Google runs so many machines and serves so many queries in so many data centres that they have run up against the speed of light as a limiting factor and consideration in how they build their business. Then I loved it.

• Chris Anderson, the fellow who started much hullabaloo when he coined the phrase The Long Tail to describe the effect of abundance on choice in culture and the emergence of millions of dozens of markets, seems to have a knack for describing the problems and conditions of our current life, as he demonstrates again in The Three Body Problem: how working for a living, maintaining some semblance of a life and writing a blog often pull is divergent directions.

• The Word on Word-of-Mouth: A UK survey conducted in conjunction with World Book Day reaffirms that word-of-mouth is the strongest force in book sales alongside recognizing and wanting to read another book by a favorite author. Twenty-five percent of people responding said the last book they read was based on a personal recommendation from someone else (with the percentage rising to nearly a third among people under 35). Six percent cited advertising as the major factor in their selections; seven percent pointed to the cover design. Trying to harness that information to a positive end, "As part of World Book Day 8m postcards are being distributed to enable one in seven Britons to recommend a book to a friend," the Guardian reports.

  (If anyone knows where this snippet is from, please let me know so I can properly attribute it. I know I didn't write it.)

McSweeney's Reasons to Fear Canada

I came across a great posting from the McSweeneys.net website last week and have been meaning to post it on the Up in Ontario blog since discovering it. So without further hullabaloo, here is the list of Reasons to Fear Canada.

And speaking of lists, Marni Jackson explores our Lust for Lists in a recent issue of the consistently underwhelming The Walrus magazine. Jackson's articles have been one of the few bright points of the tenure of publisher Ken Alexander, who has succeeded most notably in firing everyone he hired to start the magazine. I suppose the natural evolution of this process is fairly simple to see. Either Alexander ends up taking a long walk off a short plank at some point or the endowment that launched, finances and blesses the magazine runs out.

Back at the ranch, Jackson's article on lists sheds some light on something I've often joked about with colleagues and the Duck: we're obsessed with formatting and categorizing items that seem to make up a whole. Magazines live by lists. Check the covers at any newsstand and they almost all (or at least all the magazines for a general readership) use lists as ways to orgazine and sell their content. It's horseshit but it works.

Reading Jackson's article on lists I appreciated the thought she'd put into the subject and I'd like to add a few more items to her, ahem, Reasons We Love Lists list.

1. We're lazy readers and lazy writers. Do I have to explain this?

2. Everything we do now lives in computers, which are, at their origins and in everything they do, glorified calculators. Nothing else. They enable their users to accomplish all kinds of great things but all these things are done through core, simple, binary arithmatic. (More about this, in a longer, more-well-thought-out, interesting format, soon, I believe.)

3. Lists provide the illusion of organization in a world of unpredictable, unrepentant calamity. I should know, I'm a list maker. I come from a great line of list makers. My mother is perhaps the best list maker in the world, with lists to organize and reference her various other, more-specific lists. Parent lists begat children lists in our house growing up, always posted in common places, hanging from cabinets, attached to the phone, laying on the kitchen counter.

Lists were like the currency of activities. Summer mornings I would get up and my mom would have already left for work and she'd have left a list, somewhere where I couldn't miss it, with things that needed to be done. Without a list there was nothing to do. So you don't have to work too hard to imagine that I rebelled against lists, because they meant obligations, duties, responsibilities, itemized and unmistakable, and yet now they are part of my standard operating procedure for dealing with life.

Air Pollution Kills 5,900 Canadians

Health Canada reported this week that it has revised upwards its estimates for the number of Canadian killed annually by air pollution to 5,900. Previously they had estimated 5,000 Canadian were killed annually. The Ontario Medical Association estimates that 1,900 of those deaths occur in Ontario, where air quality is the worst in the country.

At the risk of grave robbing (what I'd prefer is to use this news announcement as proof for something I have been thinking for a long time), I present a few questions to consider:

• Regardless of the mechanics of its implementation, can anyone say with a straight face that the goal of the Kyoto Protocol is not one that we should be pursuing?
  
• Slowly and steadily we are degrading our ecosystem, the same natural systems we all rely on, everyday, for the basics of life. Can we realistically dispute this?
  
• Luckily we can invent and commercialize a solution to this problem: private air supplies. Will it be long before the rich are breathing their own, private air, just like many of us now drink privatized water?

Where I live in Vancouver they call air pollution haze, as in, "I can't see Mount Baker today because of the haze." On weather reports we call a significant density of air pollution hazy conditions. A friend tells me that a common forecase in summers in Toronto is "hot, humid and hazy." I think all this repackaging of reality is a real disservice to all of us - it obscures the reality of our situation. Let's call air pollution Air Pollution and make the connection to our actions: driving our vehicles, buying imported products, hosting shipping and freight infrastructure. Let's cut through the haze.

The numbers for air pollution deaths don't really compare with the big 3 killers of Canadians: heart disease (74,000 deaths annually), stroke (16,000 deaths annually) and lung cancer (18,000 deaths annually). But the majority of people affected by the big 3 have made lifestyle choices to increase their risks. Fatty diets high in cholesterol, smoking and sedentary habits make people sick.

I don't mean to sound insensitive, but anyone looking around them in Canada can see the fat, lazy asses of our citizenry. Whether through ignorance or conscious decision, many people take their health for granted. Yet no one makes a lifestyle choice to breathe. It's sort of inherent to the species. Air pollution affects us all.

Stories like the Health Canada release make me feel very aware of the perception of threat that different diseases and causes of death carry with them. People worry about West Nile Virus but get killed crossing the street. Parents go to great lengths to protect their children from stalkers but more kids die in the bathtub than anywhere else. The public profile of air pollution and the resources dedicated to controlling and reducing it pale in comparison to other, high-profile problems. Someone with a morbid sense of humour might find laughter in our great human comedy of worry and waste, but tragedy seems to me the genre we're working in.