As happens from time to time, I was thinking. In this instance I was thinking about how I used to have a bicycle and in a small way I yearn to have one again.
On the plus side, a bike lets you get exercise without beating up your shins and feet like running does.
On the negative side, bikes require a lot more maintenance than running shoes and despite being a lot larger, are more prone to being stolen (as my last bike–and several before it–was).
On the plus side again, you can cover a lot more ground on a bike, zipping and gliding along.
Negatively, you can crash at high speed or get hit by a bus. I hardly ever crash when jogging. It’s really only happened once (stupid dog).
On a bike you ought to wear a helmet and no one ever describes helmets as “hugely sexy-looking and comfortable.” I wear a jaunty cap when I run and it adds a dash of flair, unless it rains, then it looks like some limp white blob died on my head.
Mainly, though, if I got a bicycle, I’d become one of them–the people I loathe at Burnaby Lake. Which people? These people:
I just completed a three day Conflict Resolution course at the Justice Institute of British Columbia (I know, I was also expecting to be greeted by spandex-clad superheroes when I entered the lobby–it even looks like a superhero headquarters) and the course requires a certain amount of roleplay (the third day is devoted entirely to it), with you taking on both the role of person causing conflict and person trying to resolve it. We had bonus roleplay when we divided into groups to demonstrate the different styles of conflict resolution. My group opted for a live demo of the right and wrong ways rather than go with flow charts and bullet lists.
I attended with two co-workers and both of them commented on my apparently convincing acting when playing conflict-creating people. One had me playing an indifferent IT guy who couldn’t understand why anyone would be confused by IT’s avalanche of changes accompanied by an avalanche of email, while the other was even better–I was a co-worker who openly bad-mouthed others in the office to the point of making a fellow co-worker and friend decide I was a poophead.
It was fun. I am normally quiet and polite to the point of being deferential, so playing against type is always a good time. That I can allegedly do it so well makes me yearn a little for the old days when I actually pursued an acting career (the last time I acted was in a 1988 Fringe Festival show. Think about it–that’s pre-Internet. There are adults out there who do not realize such dark times even existed). Interestingly, with the advent of the same Internet and more affordable consumer technology (eg. phones that shoot video) I could actually pursue acting again, post my efforts to YouTube and watch my efforts go viral. In this case “go viral” means getting four or five views, depending on whether I tell four or five people to watch the video.
But that’s what acting is all about, the impossible dreams.
> Look Your bedroom is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
> Turn on light The bedroom is filled with a warm light. You look at the carpeting and can’t remember the last time you vacuumed.
> Don’t judge me I don’t know the word “judge.”
> Good Good to know you, too.
> Eat breakfast You can’t do that here.
> Leave for work Are you sure you want to do that?
> No You leave for work.
> Bah You don’t see any bah here.
> Look out window of SkyTrain and enjoy the view You see a slate gray sky and rain comes down in sheets.
> Close eyes You close your eyes. For a moment it is silent, then the intercom squawks to life with an announcement.
> Listen to announcement “This is SkyTrain Control. A family of squirrels is on the track between Broadway and Nanaimo stations. Your train is being momentarily held while SkyTrain personnel investigate. We apologize for the delay and thank you for your patience.”
After thirty seconds the announcement repeats.
> Listen to music on phone Your phone has no charge as you did not plug it in last night.
> $#%&^! You don’t see any $#%&^! here.
> Wait You wait.
“This is SkyTrain Control. A family of squirrels is on the track between Broadway and Nanaimo stations. Your train is being momentraily held while SkyTrain personnel investigate. We apologize for the delay and thank you for your patience.”
> Wait You wait.
The intercom comes to life and someone on it loudly clears his throat.
“This is SkyTrain Control. A family of squirrels is on the track between Broadway and Nanaimo stations. Your train is being momentraily held while SkyTrain personnel investigate. We apologize for the delay and thank you for your patience.”
> Wait until train is moving The train begins moving.
> Check time It is 7:49 a.m. You are going to be late for work.
> Call work on phone Your phone has no charge as you did not plug it in last night.
> Well that’s just great You don’t see any well here.
> Shut up How rude.
> This sucks Can you be more specific?
> Look You are in a SkyTrain car.
In the car you see the following:
Several passengers Crumpled newspaper (under seat) Spilled soda A bicycle
The floor is covered with a sticky liquid that is slowly snaking toward yor feet.
> Cry Do you feel better now?
> No. How negative!
> Save Are you sure you want to save? Your score is 10 out of 500, giving you a rank of Newbie Commuter.
When I was a kid I was a fussy eater. I would have been content to live on pizza and chocolate if it had been permitted, but my parents were strangely not amenable to such a limited, if delicious diet. Instead I ate most of the food put before me. But not all of it. Here’s a few items I regularly passed on:
tomatoes
onions (unless they were onion rings, because deep frying makes everything better)
broccoli
mushrooms
cauliflower
peppers
Brussel sprouts
meat loaf (I actually ate this, but grudgingly)
bread crusts (I didn’t actually dislike bread crusts but somehow my mom thought I did. I eventually told her to leave them on.)
liver
turkey necks
mincemeat tarts
anchovies
As an adult I became much more open to eating just about anything, as long as it was edible and wasn’t still moving on my plate when served. That said, there are a few things from the above list that I still won’t touch:
Brussel sprouts are horrible anti-food. You will never convince me otherwise.
I still don’t care much for meat loaf. Something about the combination of textures and flavor puts me off.
liver is yuck, like chewing on sour shoe leather
eating turkey necks is just weird
mincemeat tarts are grossbuckets; if you also happen to have butter tarts, all is forgiven
anchovies on pizza is disgusting. Why not just roll a salmon over the pizza then cover it with a box of salt? The taste experience will be largely the same.
I can’t explain why I find this so funny, but I do.
In case the link goes down in our dystopian future, it’s a page that allows you to blow a horn at Donald Trump’s head, causing his hair to fly up. It may be the best thing related to Trump we will see this year.
We get an extra day this month, but February 29th lands on a Monday so it’s really just a bonus day of drudgery and work.
And we still don’t have practical flying cars yet. Or impractical flying cars. Do I even need to mention the lack of functional robot butlers, the promised life of leisure as machines handle all menial work, leaving us humans free to create, explore and invent ever-better chocolate chip cookie recipes? I think not.
All told, 2016 is merely okay so far. It could be worse (Yellowstone super volcano erupting without notice), but it could be better (being able to control the weather–and super volcanoes–would be handy).
You may be asking yourself, “What happened on January 23rd that was so utterly unremarkable that it ironically merits mentioning?” More likely you are asking yourself something like, “What should I have for lunch?” or “What’s the deal with the Canadian dollar?” but I can only answer one of these questions.
On January 23rd this website had zero visits. Think about that for a moment. With over seven billion people on the planet, with over 1.5 billion people on Facebook, not a single one visited this site on January 23rd (I did, but the site analytics don’t count me. It’s kind of like using your mom as a job reference.)
I’m not really bothered by this. It’s kind of liberating in a way. I can ramble on about anything I like without the bother of attracting attention. Or maybe I’m actually shattered by the impressively obscure nature of creolened.com and despair over the pointlessness of waxing philosophical about various topics while no one listens. Well, reads.
Except the only waxing I do is of my chest.
(I don’t really wax my chest; the very thought makes my toes reflexively curl up in horror.)
As a bonus, here are the answers to the two other questions:
Have a slice of pizza. You’ve earned it.
Falling oil prices and economic uncertainty, coupled with a strengthening US dollar, are the primary reasons for the precipitous drop in the value of the Canadian currency.
I’ve had a couple of dreams lately where I’ve been able to remember a few details, sometimes even when I’d be better off not remembering.
In one I was kayaking, something I’ve never done because water kind of terrifies me, especially the large oceany type you can drown in. In this dream I was quite comfortable with it as I and two others (I can’t recall who they were, alas) paddled along the coastline. At one point we ended up on a ferry and any dream I have that features a ferry never ends well. In this one we were planning to leave the ferry in our kayaks while the boat was still sailing. One of us then floated (ho ho) the notion that we could leave after the ship docked, so it all ended unusually well.
The other dream was one I woke up from this morning and as befits a Monday morning dream, it was quietly horrible.
In it I was back working as the operator at the concession, the kind of employment I relish the same way a mouse would anticipate an evening with a hungry cat. Various employees were doing various tasks while I took it upon myself to manage the inventory. This seemed to consist primarily of sorting and placing very tiny packets of something edible (looking back on the dream now I haven’t the faintest idea what these might have been) into very long slatted wooden shelving units. The work was fantastically tedious and involved. The whole dream had a terrible dreariness to it and I woke up feeling kind of depressed. Then it was off to actual real work, my mood ashen gray.
I’d next like to have a dream where I win the lottery or something and it’s not one of those ironically nightmarish things like an episode of The Twilight Zone.
A few months ago the cherished if somewhat moribund forum for the Martian Cartel, the gaming group I’ve been part of since 1999 (!) went down with a database error. Since the forum gets little traffic these days it wasn’t a high priority for me to figure out what happened.
Tonight I finally decided to have a look. This is where the puzzle begins.
I am a database expert in the same way a doorstop is an excellent brain surgeon. My cursory appraisal confirmed the database was still there. Whether it was repairable or mangled beyond recognition I could not tell.
I had a Xenforo license kicking around so decided to install it and then attempt to import the vBulletin database from the old forum, a feature Xenforo handily supports.
Don’t be fooled into thinking I managed any of this with any sort of grace or intelligence. I bumbled around a fair bit, battling errors both obscure and infuriating. In the end the import completed without error. It also completed very quickly and with little data imported. I did a check and found the following:
0 subforums imported
0 messages imported
3 users imported
Well, the three users was something, at least. I checked them out and found one of them was me (yay) and the other two were spam accounts from 2012.
The year seems appropriate, somehow.
As of now I have a functioning if spartan Xenforo forum with a bunch of non-existent data imported from the downed database. It doesn’t seem like much given the hours I spent on this.
It was kind of fun working on it when I solved one dilemma and moved onto the next. It’s less fun to have nothing useful at the end to show for it.
But I have not given up yet! I have merely gone to bed. For now.
The Tyee story Postmedia Cuts Confirm Newspapers’ Days Are Numbered documents how Postmedia is planning on major cuts to its newspaper holdings across the country. Since buying the Canwest papers it’s been losing money and responding with cuts and more cuts.
From the Tyee story:
In Vancouver, the Sun and Province will merge newsrooms.
For readers, this week’s cuts mean poorer quality newspapers. Postmedia plans to have reporters file a single story, and then editors will create versions for the two newspapers. Short and snappy for the Province, longer for the Sun, for example. It’s not real competition, and fewer people will be available to cover the news.
This is not only not real competition, it’s not even good fake competition. It also makes no sense. Why have two papers that will literally print the same stories, just tweaked slightly to fit the given format of a broadsheet vs. a tabloid? If Postmedia wants to save money, they could just kill one paper entirely and allow the survivor a smidgen of integrity and perhaps an opportunity to develop a unique voice, perhaps even draw a few new readers. There are no other local major dailies in the Lower Mainland, so it’s not like they will lose out to direct competition (The Globe and Mail and National Post [the latter also owned by Postmedia] are nationally-focused so while they may eat into the readership of the Sun and Province, they target a somewhat different audience).
The story’s writer, Paul Willcocks, doesn’t offer possible solutions to the death of newspapers, but cites a need for an urgent discussion on the matter, bringing up the old “bad for democracy” bit–which is certainly valid when news (in all forms, not just newspapers) either dries up or becomes so thoroughly controlled by a small number that it no longer focuses on anything but serving its own agenda–but I don’t think we’re there yet.
And frankly, I don’t think there is any way to save the traditional paper. People get their news from TV and the Internet now. They get quick, bite-size chunks in free dailies like 24 Hours and Metro. Will they get the same depth and breadth of coverage as they would have during newspapers’ heyday? It really depends on the source. A paper like Metro doesn’t try to be comprehensive. A web site like The Tyee does, but the fear there is that without a sustainable revenue model, Internet-based news providers will also fail and whither, just like newspapers.
On that point, people want to read content for free and without ads. To that end, they resist pay walls, they use ad blockers, they get their news from Facebook or Twitter. We are in a time of transition and there’s no clear path going forward on how news will survive, especially quality long form and in-depth reporting that simply can’t be done for free.
But however news reporting moves forward, I don’t think it will be through the traditional newspaper. It’s dying and there will be no miracle revival.
Prediction: Postmedia will formally merge The Sun and Province into one paper within a year. Likely name: The Sun-Province. [UPDATE: As of October 8, 2017 both newspapers are still sputtering along, so resist the temptation to make wagers based on my predictions, unless your intent is to lose money.]
As a postscript, the rise of the Internet has not only hit newspapers hard, but other print media, too. A few days ago I walked by Mayfair News on Broadway for the first time in quite awhile. This was once one of my favorite places to buy magazines as they had a huge selection. Today they have what appears to be half of one aisle devoted to magazines, about 1/6th of what they used to have, with the rest of the store converted over to a dollar store model, shelves stuffed with cheap plasticware and other small goods. On the one hand, it makes me sad to see the change, but on the other I admire their resilience and ability to adapt to a changing market.
