Up in Ontario

The Stats on World Cup Acting

SoccerBlog, a blog I contribute to on an irregular basis, has a great post on the statistics behind the diving / tantrums / referee bullying / fake injuries of the remaining 8 teams in the World Cup quarterfinals.

I love this analytics approach to the more annoying aspect of watching the World Cup, and I love that my hunch is proven correct about the top sham team of the tourney. I shake my fist at them!

Toronto: One Step Above Langley

I spotted some excellent hand wringing in Toronto about recent rankings released by Priceline.com's Top 50 Destinations: Toronto Drops On The Priceline Scale.

Of course, it's only provincial of us here in Vancouver to point to Toronto's despair. Hogtown is lovely at this time of year, the clear-grey skies above the new opera hall, the fine smell of the breeze off the lake. What direction is that lake again?

Paging Dr. Schadenfreude. It hurts because it's love.

Priceline.com's Top 50 Destinations - Summer 2006

Rank 2006 Neighborhood Rank 2005 Yr/Yr Change
--------- ------------ --------- ------------
1 Chicago, Millennium Park 35 +34
2 Chicago, North Michigan Ave. 5 +3
3 New York City, Midtown West 2 -1
4 New York City, Upper Midtown 3 -1
5 Las Vegas, Strip Vicinity 1 -4
6 New York City, Midtown East 21 +15
7 Vancouver 13 +6
8 San Diego, Coastal 4 -4
9 New York City, Soho NI*** --
10 Oahu, Waikiki South 8 -2
11 San Francisco, Union Square West 12 +1
12 Washington, DC, White House/Downtown 7 -5
13 Boston, Copley 49 +36
14 Seattle, Downtown 17 +3
15 San Diego, Point Loma/Shelter Island 39 +24
16 Boston, Downtown/Charlestown 19 +3
17 San Francisco, Union Square East 11 -6
18 Orange County, Disneyland Area 18 0
19 San Diego, Downtown/Harbor Island 16 -3
20 San Antonio, Downtown/Riverwalk 32 +12
21 Montreal 26 +5
22 Atlanta, Downtown 24 +2
23 Orlando, Universal Studios/Sea World 15 -8
24 Seattle, Lake Union NI --
25 Orlando, Disney World Vicinity 20 -5
26 Baltimore, Inner Harbor 14 -12
27 Las Vegas, Convention Center/UNLV NI --
28 Boston, Brookline/Brighton NI --
29 Maui, Wailea/Makena 29 0
30 Philadelphia, Downtown 36 +6
31 San Francisco, Fisherman's Wharf 42 +11
32 Anchorage 45 +13
33 Hilton Head 52 +19
34 San Diego, East County NI --
35 London, Bloomsbury/Marble Arch NI --
36 Washington, DC, Alexandria/Old Town NI --
37 San Diego, Del Mar NI --
38 St. Catharines, Niagara Falls 48 +10
39 St. Louis, Downtown 22 -17
40 Los Angeles, Beverly Hills/
W. Hollywood NI --
41 Orange County, Costa Mesa/Irvine NI --
42 Toronto, Downtown 30 -12
43 Vancouver, Langley NI --
44 San Diego, Mission Valley 40 -4
45 Los Angeles, Hollywood NI --
46 San Antonio, Medical Center Area NI --
47 Seattle, Airport Area NI --
48 Monterey, Monterey/Pacific Grove 23 -25
49 Oahu, Waikiki North 34 -15
50 Chicago, O'Hare Area 41 -9

'The Dragon's Den' Comes to Vancouver

From the Gagglescape blog (a blog I contribute to about the intersection of venture investing and technology in Canada) I learned this morning about CBC's The Dragon's Den, a reality show imported from the U.K. that works like American Idol for entrepreneurs. The 'Dragons' are the judges, a 'panel of major league investors.'

Dragon's Den is seeking contestants / participants / entrepreneurs and holding auditions in towns all across Canada to find them. They'll be in Vancouver on July 7th, location TBD. Maybe I'll see you there...

... with AdHack or another Harebrained Idea.

CBC Opens Archives for Canada Day

The Globe and Mail reports that the CBC will open its archives for Canada Day, July 1, to which I say, the CBC archives isn't open to begin with? Seems everything I try to access I can access. Am I missing something here?

Well no matter, it's still a pretty cool place to noodle about. The archives aren't complete, but they're as complete as the time and money they have to work on the project allow them to be, which means that we can look back at Getting Physical: Canada's Fitness Movement and wonder how we got so fat if we're so fit.

And while we're on the topic of the CBC and sports, Robert Ouimet thinks that cutting the tie between CBC television and sports programming like Hockey Night in Canada means not just the end of some very good sports coverage but the downfall of the CBC overall. Personally I'm not looking forward to CTV's coverage of the next few Olympic Games, including the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. I'll take Ron MacLean's puns and Brian Williams repetitive phrases over, well... who does CTV have doing sports?

Alice Munro's Vancouver

Last weekend the NY Times ran an article in their Travel section entitled Alice Munro's Vancouver, an overview of Munro's stories set in Vancouver.

One of the interesting discoveries for me was that Munro first lived in Vancouver just a few blocks from where I live in the neighbourhood of Kitsilano. Kits was a very different place when she lived here, its progression from student hangout full of hippies and priviledged counter-culture revolutionaries to outdoor mall and lifestyle advertisement mirroring the movement of her generation from its coming-of-age experiments to its middle-aged mainstream complacency.

The other aspect of the article I really like is the idea of travelling through a city with a writer's views of that city in mind. Great idea. I love it. The problem though, is that Munro's Vancouver doesn't resemble today's Vancouver at all.

In Alice Munro's Vancouver nobody eats sushi. Nobody jogs along the seawall or browses Granville Street galleries or shops for organic herbs at the Granville Island market. Ms. Munro, the 74-year-old Canadian whom the novelist Jonathan Franzen dubbed "the best fiction writer now working in North America," set a handful of her marvelous short stories in the damp British Columbian metropolis, and the urban geography is so exact you can practically map the city off her fictions. But though the addresses match, the vibe is unrecognizable. Young but hopelessly uncool, lustful without being sexy, dowdy, white, blind to its own staggering beauty, Ms. Munro's Vancouver is an outpost where new wives blink through the rain and wonder when their real lives are going to begin.

The one portion of the article I take exception with is the assumption of Munro's greatness. I find her a tremendously divisive writer. People either love her stories or find them dull as dishwater. I am firmly in the second camp. I've tried to read a few of her books, as much for the broccoli approach as anything - it will be good for me. But I can't stand them. The praise others heap on her writing completely by-passes me. I don't get it. Sure she can set a scene, but I just can't stand her whiny characters or the fact that every story of hers that I've read feels like the same story retold.

I know it's not safe to say these things. The Canadian publishing industry is small and no one wants to rock the boat. But if we can't agree to disagree about these things we're just kindergarten writers and literature.

Tonight Only: 3 Martinis for $10

Tonight at Mark's Fiasco (2486 Bayswater at W. Broadway - map), my friend Holden will be competing in the battle of the bartenders. If that's not enough to draw you out, martinis are on special: get 3 for $10. And pizzas too: $7.99 each.

We're heading there right now. Hope to see you with bells on.

Canadian Airlines Price Collusion

Just a quick observation: I think the two main airlines in Canada - Air Canada and WestJet - are colluding on price.

This morning I built an itinerary to travel from Vancouver (YVR) to Winnipeg (YWG) in early August for my grandparent's 60th wedding anniversary. Air Canada's Tango brand has been advertising a seat sale so I figured it made sense to shop earlier rather than later.

I fired up my web browser of choice with two tabs and did the exact same search on both AirCanada.com and WestJet.com. Flights came up on both sites with scheduling within minutes of each other. I selected my flights and went to the dreaded tally screen - the screen where they add a third more to the price you thought you were going to pay for the inane miscellany that seems de facto part of air travel.

I flipped back and forth between the sites and compared the prices. They were exactly the same: same price, same schedule of flight. For all I knew they were only flying one plane, co-branded for each of them. I tried a few more searches for different destination, different schedules and they all each matched or were within $20 or each other.

Now that's competition!

WestJet recently settled a lawsuit with Air Canada. In the settlement they admitted to corporate espionage - one of their new employees was a former Air Canada employee and still could log in to the AC extranet to grab their pricing. But they discontinued that, right?

I bring this collusion up because it typifies so many industries in Canada. The side effect of restricting foreign competition in large industries - telephone service, mobile telecommunications, cable service, banks, ISPs, bookstores - is that we have one, two or three choices to choose from, with nothing to differentiate between them. It always devolves to a choice between the least evil of the unsavoury choices. The companies feel they can push people around and bully their suppliers and customers. They suck because they can. No alternatives exist.

Sigh. The outcome? I booked the tickets from WestJet because their planes are newer and have those keen seat-back televisions.

Anthony Bourdain Gives Good Quote

Yesterday morning the Duck and I walked over to Barbara Jo's Books to Cooks and met Anthony Bourdain at what can only be described as a book signing / author worship event.

The morning was glorious and sunny, the coffee excellent and the mini blueberry muffins provided by Barbara Jo's really rocked - little bakery shots of sweet goodness. Bourdain showed fashionably late from an earlier media appearance and quickly rounded into fine form. The Sharpie flashed as he tore through a pile of his latest, Nasty Bits, signing with a practiced flurry. A line up formed around the perimeter of the store. Rumours circulated that he'd been out late the night before, out beyond the endurance of those accompanying him. And this morning, there he was, chipper as can be, smiling and gracious and looking well washed.

We spotted the Grill Bitch, Beth, Bourdain's personal assistant and laughed along with her as she ogled the Lamborghini dealership across the street. 'Think they'll let me take out the green one?' she said in her thick new york voice. I held my well-worked copy of Les Halles, a book I hold in high regard, one I use almost every week, one I have learned more from than any other cookbook I own.

When my turn came around I presented it to himself and he signed it. I asked how he was doing and he replied with something that made it clear he was at ease with the whole situation; loving it, and grateful for the attention. Cool.

Folks drifted out, books in their arms, and Bourdain signed his way through another stack of books. He sipped his coffee and, when the book piles were exhausted, he strode out the front door and smoked in the sunlight. We left a few minutes later.

In the next few weeks a new version of the Raincoast Podcast will be out, featuring highlights from a day-long interview / tour with Bourdain. I'm looking forward to it. In the meantime, to whet your appetite, check out the great coverage and interview with Bourdain on The Tyee:

I'm afraid of karaoke, I'm afraid of clowns and nurse's shoes and rats. I won't be eating rat. I don't care how delicious some might believe it to be. But I'm really afraid of mediocrity. Like, that terrifies me, especially when it's deliberate. Paris Hilton makes a living by pretending to be even more stupid, vapid, useless and untalented than she is, and is famous for it. That seems to be a career for a lot of people on these reality shows. I find that frightening.

Sure, there's public appetite for the opposite. But I think that excellence is still rewarded. Not always, but then it never was. If you look at Renaissance artists, they had to paint portraits of inbred idiots, to find a rich patron, to get by. I'm not saying a certain amount of bullshit and hustling isn't useful in any profession. And I come from a business where there's a certain amount of artifice and show business involved. I always understood it's not enough having something good to sell. But a lot of other people have something to sell, so a good line of patter doesn't hurt.

The Tyee launches Tyee Books

Announced today, the Tyee has launched a books section with the tag line Reading BC and Beyond. Here's what arrived in my inbox:

NOT JUST ANOTHER DEAD B.C. SCROLL

This week, The Tyee, B.C.’s thriving independent online source of news and
commentary, launches Tyee Books (www.tyeebooks.ca). The innovative,
interactive forum will showcase and discuss books from B.C. and beyond
with equal measures of innovation, provocation, humour, and intelligence.

Our goals include creating effective online sales tools for independent
B.C. independent bookstores, frequent excerpts, eclectic lists of
recommended reading, a lively conversation that brings writers and readers
together, and a blog that interprets and covers books events in B.C. and
from elsewhere.

You can read more about the site and peruse our debut week coverage at
http://thetyee.ca/Books/2006/06/12/TyeeBooks/

Please join us as we try and create a unique new forum for books in
British Columbia.

Charles Campbell
Tyee Books Editor

I'll be watching the Tyee Books space in the coming weeks and months to see what happens and what they cover. A Tyee Books Blog appears to be the main driving source of stories, with RSS subscription for us nerdlingers. As with the rest of the Tyee site, the writing can be a little uneven, which makes it just as good or better than the local newspapers here in Vancouver.

So, for their first day or any day, the site looks great. Congratulations go out to The Tyee team on an auspicious start to a tough and worthwhile project.

Vancouver Music: ThisCityRocks.com

ThisCityRocks.com just launched to give folks in Vancouver access to news and happenings in the city's music scene. Every week they promise to roll out a 5-to-7-minute long video highlighting bands, music and concerts out here on the left coast.

I watched this first video, their first episode, and was impressed. The audio and video were great. The compression was tight and made for a crisp image. The composition, cuts and transitions also were excellent - well above average for web videos and on par with anything on any CHUM station (MuchMusic, etc.).

My only quibble would be that when they roll through the What's Happening This Week section at the end, they don't flash up the dates to go with the days of the week. So if I'm watching last week's episode by accident (as I might be doing) I wouldn't know it just by watching or listening. Oh, and in the concert footage, there's a little too much shaken-camera syndrome for my taste.

Check out ThisCityRocks.com.

Subscribe to ThisCityRocks.com weekly videos through iTunes.

Yup, that's all. Just blatant promotion this Friday. Go watch the world cup. Or follow the coverage where I do (and where I contribute) on the SoccerBlog.com.

WhistleBlogger Covers Story Where No Media Go

CBC Radio 3 reports on what they call a WhistleBlogger in northern BC:

Jacob Hunter alleges that he had been performing work for a company contracted to clean up a spill for a major oil company operating in Northern BC when he was "let go for refusing unsafe work". He had been serving as the site medic, and claims that the sizable spill contains unsafe levels of benzene - strong enough to give him a pounding head ache and make him vomit after 45 minute exposure.

What really bugged him though is that nobody knows this has happened, because nobody has reported it. That is until now. Despite risk of blacklisting and/or lawsuit he went ahead and blogged about the situation, complete with photos.

Here's Jacob's first post on the oil spill, his follow up post on the oil spill with photos and his latest post on some of the fallout from his active reporting.

Reading through them I get the distinct sense that Jacob Hunter has very specific political leanings and he (like all of us) sees the world framed by him perceptions. But don't let his politics get in the way of the heart of this initiative - citizens' ability to bear witness and report on what they see.

Examples of the Results of Lobbying

Health Canada is in bed with the pesticide industry, one of the industries it is supposed to be regulating.

The Smithsonian Institution exhibitions are for sale to the highest bidder, which commonly is the oil industry.

World grows more toxic. World continues heating up. World keeps turning.

Human civilizations draw themselves nearer to their own destruction.

McDonald's Path to Global Destruction

Courtesy of David Weinberger, I read that McDonald's Interactive has announced it is leaving its parent company, McDonald's, the global fast-food superpower. What?

McDonald's Interactive announced today that it is striking out on its own from parent company McDonald's... "We can no longer stand by while McDonald's corporate policies help lead the planet to ruin," said Andrew Shimery-Wolf, co-director of the former Interactive Division.

...

"We began developing a simulation of the fast-food industry, for use by managers in developing market strategies." said Division CTO Sam Grossman. "When we added a climate simulation module, it showed those strategies helping lead to global calamity."

"Management doesn't seem to care, and we can't sit back and fiddle while Rome burns, so our team has decided to break away from McDonald's and do something about it," said Grossman.

This may be the most bizarre announcement I've heard in a long time. Is it real? (Without getting into a debate on what constitutes 'real.')

Doesn't look to be, but damned convincing nonetheless. The whole website is well worth a read, regardless of the reality of the announcement. Somehow, now I have the chorus to that Dusty Springfield song wishin and hopin' and thinkin' and prayin' in my head.

Upon further thought and reading, this stunt may be a real backfire for its organizers. It makes their whole message suspicious and untrustworthy. Are any of the statistics valid? Is any of the message accurate? I'm even sympathetic to their message and I find myself distrusting.

Take aim, shoot foot.

What if they gave a war and no one came?

Tony Long is mad as hell and he's not going to take it anymore. He writes in a Wired article entitled What if they gave a war...?:

But as bad as things were then, they seem infinitely worse now.

So why aren't the streets clogged with angry Americans demanding to know why their president lied and deceived them so he could attack a country that had absolutely nothing to do with his so-called war on terror? To an extent, we got suckered into Vietnam. We can't make that claim about Iraq. Iraq was the premeditated, willful invasion of a sovereign nation that was threatening nobody. "Saddam Hussein is a prick who treats the Kurds miserably" is no justification. By the principles established by the Nuremberg Tribunal and international law, our president is a war criminal.

Why aren't we marching to demand an end to the illegal surveillance of American citizens by their own government, again under the pretext of waging war on terror? Why do we so blithely surrender our civil liberties -- the very thing that supposedly separates us from other societies -- to the illusion of security? All the high-tech snooping in the world won't stop a determined terrorist from striking. If it could, Israel would be the safest country on earth.

Why aren't irate Americans camping out in the lobby of every newspaper and TV station from coast to coast, demanding that the press reassert the right to perform its single most important function, that of government watchdog? The ghost of Richard Nixon, and a very corporeal Bill Clinton, must be cursing their rotten luck.

Why aren't enraged college students occupying their campus administration buildings, demanding that the United States sign the Kyoto Protocol? Hell, it might already be too late, but is the luxury of driving your mom's SUV really worth the coming dystopian world that you, more than I, will inherit?

Why aren't we storming the battlements of every filthy oil company in America, demanding that their executives be tossed into fetid dungeons for cynically manipulating gas prices while raking in obscene profits?

Why aren't we demanding that religion return to the pulpit, where it belongs, and keep out of the White House and the courts?

In short, where the hell is everybody?

It's fun to read a good, from-the-gut rant every now and then; invective, revisited.

Patrick Brealey and the Knives Tonight

No plans for tonight? Looking for a rocking good time that supports a good cause?

Here it is: Patrick Brealey & the Knives - playing the Croatian Cultural Centre - $20 bucks - money to The Weekend to End Breast Cancer. Consider your evening planned.

Want to know what it will sound like? Visit the Patrick Brealey & the Knives website and click the PB Army Knife's corkscrew.

Sit back, enjoy. Three songs, let it loop, Friday en plein effect.

Fight Clubs are the stories we tell ourselves

Today I read on the Globe and Mail website about real fight clubs, places where men meet to fight. It felt surreal to learn. Here was reality imitating fiction. Specifically, Chuck Palaniuk's novel Fight Club, and, more importantly, the film of the same name with Edward Norton and Brad Pitt that has developed a cultish following.

...underground bare-knuckle brawling clubs have sprung up across the country as a way for desk jockeys and disgruntled youths to vent their frustrations and prove themselves.

"This is as close as you can get to a real fight, even though I've never been in one," the soft-spoken (Shiyin) Siou said (34, a Santa Clara software engineer and three-year veteran of the clandestine fights).

Despite his reserved demeanour, he daydreams about inflicting pain on an attacker. "I have fantasies about it," he said.

In recent months, police in New Jersey and Pennsylvania have broken up fight clubs involving teens and preteens who posted videos of their bloody battles on-line.

Earlier this month in Arlington, Texas, a high school student who didn't want to participate was beaten so badly that he suffered a brain hemorrhage and broken vertebrae. Six teenagers were arrested after DVDs of the fight appeared for sale on-line.

Adult groups are more likely to fly under the radar of authorities.

Menlo Park police hadn't heard about the local club and said they wouldn't be likely to take action because the fights are on private property between consenting adults. That could change if someone complains or is sent to a hospital, police said.

Between these fighting clubs and the Japanese phenomena to pay for women to serve and talk to them in cafes, I wonder if public wish fulfillment is going too far and we're moving back to base values and need fulfillment in a kind of post-needs-fulfillment world. We are certainly all animals at our core, a fun fact that folks too often overlook when looking for reasons things are the way they are or happen the way they happen. But this seems to be moving further to a primal, individual society where collective norms imitate the more basic levels in Maslow's hierachy of needs, without actually needing those levels. We're regressing voluntarily.

The best part of the article is when one of the interviewees parrots part of Fight Club to the interviewer: '"You get to be a superhero for a night," Klimanis said. "We have to go to work every day. We're constantly told to buy things we don't need, and just for a couple hours we have the freedom to do what we want to do."'

I know I'm beating a deadened horse here, it makes me think again of how important the stories we tell ourselves or let ourselves be told are to the way we make sense of the world. They are the foundation. Our myths make our reality.

(Image courtesy of Andrew Goodman, who got it from an article in The Atlantic, which he summarized very nicely in Does Values Research Explain Where Global Opportunity Lies?, an article definitely worth reading if you like these sort of big-picture, sociology questions.)