Dept. of stooped and typing

Um, if it's a cliche to be blogging in the Tim Horton's right next to a blogging conference, it's a new one.

Today is Northern Voice, which describes itself as a "blogging and social media conference." You'd think all these hip, connected people could come up with a name that sounds less like a souvenir shop at YVR, where tourists buy maple syrup, vacuum-sealed smoked salmon, and deep-green sweatshirts emblazoned with stylized loons.

Silly me, I woke this morning, ate a bowl of Raisin Bran, grabbed a coffee by the bus stop, and was out here 70 minutes before the thing started. I'm working on workaday time, obviously. I'm going to chill out here with a breakfastwich, or whatever they call them.

Oh, there's activity around the registration table now. I'll tell you what I see.

One overweight, bespectacled guy in a blue plaid shirt punching the air, animating a story. Star Wars blogger.

A half attractive girl in a black skirt with a slit, carrying a packing tape dispenser. She has a limp, though. Maybe she's a hot blogger.

An artsy-looking guy with tight jeans, bright orange Chuck Taylors, high feathered bangs, and a scarf. Emily Carr blogger.

Three girls behind folding tables: one's shifting from foot to foot, one's looking at a piece of A4, one's talking to the sort of older man that proliferate at Canadian universities (sorry, the conference today is at UBC)—kind bearing; red Gore-Tex windbreaker; longer hair, usually white; backpack with laptop inside. A kind of dorky intellectual yachtsman.

I gotta get over there. They're giving out the lanyards.

More to come.

Describing: Orlando Tobón

Tobón, who is sixty, is of medium height and corpulent. He has wavy, wiry black-and-gray hair and a mustache. His features are slightly askew: his mouth slants down to the left and the line of his front teeth is uneven. His eyes are dark and heavy-lidded, and his gaze is direct and comforting. Sometimes, he closes his eyes before he speaks, as if making an effort of memory or will. When he is seated, the desk appears to bisect him. He looks like a bust of himself.

—Alec Wilkinson, in "The Patron" (Nov. 26), a profile of Orlando Tobón, the 'mayor' of New York's Little Colombia.

Hottest seat sales in Asia

I used to fly this airline regularly when I lived in Taiwan. It's the national carrier, and it's had four fatal crashes in the past 13 years. I know one of their pilots, and I'll pass on his advice: "Never fly China Airlines unless you absolutely must."



The cause of the fire was a loose landing-assembly bolt that punctured the fuel tank. It was a brand-new Boeing 737 and had just arrived in Okinawa after a 90-minute flight from Taipei. All 157 passengers and eight crew escaped alive.

Libel, American style

From a New York Daily News article about O. J. Simpson's recent robbery arrest in Las Vegas. Italics mine:

"They might actually nail him this time," said Marcia Clark, the Los Angeles prosecutor who bungled the Simpson murder case in 1995, when a jury let the Heisman Trophy winner walk in the slaying of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her pal Ron Goldman.

In this new drama, Vegas cops say The Juice led a group of pals - including a buddy who was in Sin City to renew his marriage vows - who burst into a hotel room Thursday night. Guns drawn, two of the men confronted two sports memorabilia dealers who were trying to sell some Simpson-related items as Simpson barked orders, Lt. Clint Nichols said.

"It was kind of scary," said Tom Riccio, another memorabilia dealer who tipped off Simpson about the sale and said he was there when the alleged theft went down.

Seems oddly sensitive, that second articulation, no? I suppose the reason that you can call him a murderer but only an alleged thief owes to the fact that the theft is still being prosecuted. To my Canadian ears, though, that first paragraph sounds presumptive and more than a little defamatory.

Of course, libel law here is much harsher than in the States. Canadian journalists are like that abused child from your primary school class—the one who, when the teacher raises her hand to fix her hair, recoils in fright.

On fruitful procrastination

This latest video project leapt out of an afternoon that should produced something else—namely, a job. But, well, you take your distraction where you can can get it. The outdoors have begun beckoning me less; summer is fading from my window, and I've turned the baseboard heater on, although just in the mornings, the last two days running. Take a look.

Moon Ascent


This one I assembled from a bunch of still photographs and an audio track I stitched together on Audacity, an excellent open-souce editing program. The song is Air's "Modular Mix," which has some celestial elements, although it's far from their best song.

All in all, it's the technically superior of the two "flight" videos, but to me it falls flat in the switchover from moon to earth, which is accompanied by a 16-beat song loop that feels like waiting. I may go back and edit it some more when I have my next burst of industry, but I probably won't.

(To potential employers reading this blog: After that first burst of industry, do the smart thing and hand my projects off to a closer.)

And Then So Clear


This second one is more crudely rendered, but it seems to hit a chord. I made it six or seven months ago, while in the blush of my first contact with YouTube, and then, after watching its meagre return of hits (200 or so after two months), forgot about it.

To my surprise, the video began to pick up momentum (and generous comments from viewers), and it now has nearly 16,000 hits. Of course, teenage girls' mugging for their digital camera generates seventy times that traffic in the same amount of time, and that can only mean that the world is spinning at the correct velocity. I think the market for tenderly-wrought electronica may be just about at its saturation point.

Dept.of Morning Light

It's six forty-two a.m. Just finished a bowl of granola and non-dairy "soygurt"—the latter a leftover from my aborted attempt to make a cilantro curry for someone who doesn't eat dairy. A half-cup of coffee left. The crows are squalling on Nelson.

70
My words are very easy to understand and very easy to put into practice. Yet no one in the world can understand them or put them into practice.

Words have an ancestor and affairs have a sovereign.
It is because people are ignorant that they fail to understand me.

Those who understand me are few; those who harm me are honoured.

Therefore the sage, while clad in homespun, conceals on his person a priceless piece of jade.

Italics mine. Eastern opacity aside, I'm back, and I'm considering my comment John McPhee's excursion (why does it always have to be a synonym of voyage?) onto Oakmont, the site of the just-past U.S. Open, won by this man.

Dept. of Richochets and Gooseflesh

Jon Lee Anderson establishes some field cred, and Ian Frazier horripilates at the "uncanny scent of our beginnings."

I never read thrillers growing up, unless you count the Hardy Boys. And no spy novels, apart from "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy," by John LeCarré, which I had to read for a fourth-year class on espionage at SFU—the class I was in, incidentally, when the attacks of September 11th took place. I didn't play with G.I. Joes, and, frankly, never understood the ecstasies my Egyptian friend Kareem found in them, flinging himself, and the figurines, around the pool deck at his Toronto home, spittle flying from his mouth—Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat, Snake Eyes, noooo!!!

All of which is to say I was unprepared for Jon Lee Anderson's ducking, barrel-rolling, ricocheting account of American opium eradication efforts in Afghanistan, "The Taliban's Opium War" (July 9, 2007). About midway through the article the prose turned all And then we heard an explosion over the ridge; there were shell casings and bone fragments all around. We poked our head out of the foxhole, and I had to remind myself that I wasn't reading a paperback I'd found wedged between two bus seats. And just seconds after that admittedly disparaging thought, I had another: Shit, the guy got shot at, for four hours, in Afghanistan. He's got more street cred—field cred, whatever—than Fitty. (Audio here.)

I had two more thoughts, too:

1) Invite more goateed, tatooed DynCorp employees to my next barbecue. How cool would it be to get them all hopped up on Bud and amphetamines and pair them off in human cockfights?

2) Save a little of that opium juice from the knocked-over and broke-open poppy, fieldworker Khalil! I'll swing by around eight. You can show me what to do—we'll make some tea, rub it on our gums, whatever.

Ah, I was going to write more about the insouciant little article that followed Anderson's (hence the post title), but I've run out of time for the moment. It was Ian Frazier's "On Impact," the tale of a meteorite (or perhaps something more sinister) that recently fell into the New Jersey home of Srinivasan Nageswaran. Although I know Frazier's name, I can't call to mind another of his articles. In this piece he's delightfully breezy, and he has a fine ear for slang. Tell me you don't love a guy who could write three opening sentences like these:

"People get excited when strange objects fall from the sky. We seek portents and meaning, we venerate the object, and we horripilate at the uncanny scent of our beginnings, or end. Even wised up by science as we are, we tend to freak."

("Horripilate"—I looked it up—means "to cause one's hair to stand on end and get goosebumps," as in "I horripilate at the sight of blood," or "Hitchcock movies horripilate me.")

Dept. of As It Is Lived

Woke this morning and rolled over to read the last two columns of a David Denby film review. It's my fifth morning in my tiny new apartment.

My curtains are drawn, but the windows are open, and on Nelson Street I can hear the cars and fire trucks, of course, but also bicycles and four kinds of birdsong—a squall, a hoot, a gurgle, and a pinched whistle—and pedestrians and their low conversations, footfalls, and pockets jangling with change.

The Denby review, of a film called "Evening," had a beautiful line, and I very much like the idea behind it:

"The two women look at the past, compare marriages, and make an accounting of their mistakes—which turn out to be merely life as it is lived, not as is hoped for."

I'm going out for a coffee, as it is drunk and not hoped for. That means a choice between the 7-Eleven and the better, pricier cafe, with something existential hanging in the balance. You want anything?

Dept. of Our Home and Native

I spent my Canada Day on Mayne Island, in the company of two old friends. I took a ferry to get there; it was slow and the passengers were few. There's something about an empty ferry—the expanse of vacuumed carpet, the odd reassurance of the cafeteria and its fixed-seat tables with raised edges, the whole enterprise heaving and shuddering like a fat lover. The diesel and creosote of the car deck. A cup of coffee and a magazine.

The Sunday run from Victoria hits Pender Island, Saturna, and then Pender again before getting to Mayne's Village Bay. I got a good ways into this week's New Yorker, but I stalled in the middle of John Cassidy's article about the hedge-fund machine. With 45 minutes left in the voyage, I reclined on a moulded plastic bench, flipped the magazine over my face, and began promptly to snore.

Thanks to Finnigan, late of Playa del Carmen, for the illustration, which has Ontario in a bit of saucy contact with Michigan. Does this mean Canada is a Red State? Quick—what's the past tense of "drag"?

Happy Canada Day, all.

Dept. of the Sultry Look

Cat Stevens and his hair. 

Many thanks to Roland for pointing out that Cat Stevens's conversion to Islam has nothing to do with hair, hair products, or envy, at least not in the formal, obvious sense. But he should bear in mind that everything is connected to everything else—Buddhism reduced to a sentence, or so an old humanities professor told me. I mean, it isn't a huge leap from religion to hair. I myself wore a goatee during my experiment with Seventh Day Adventism. Neither suited me. Photos to come.

Work has been hectic, so my posts have been thin. I may yet have to resort to pilfered photos and free association to get something up on New Yorker Comment each week, but consider it a sorbet between the heavier courses of whatever the hell else I'm thinking about.

This current issue, the one with the Lou Romano cover of newlyweds in a taxi, looks so good I can't believe I haven't got around to reading it. If you're a newsstand buyer and not a subscriber, let me whet your appetite. It contains:

• Calvin Trillin on psychos in Nova Scotia
• Seymour Hersh on the shunned US Army General Antonio Taguba
• David Owen on the crazy-ass-looking National Stadium in Beijing
• Nancy Franklin on "John from Cincinnati," a show that smart people who like TV are rumbling about
• Anthony Lane on [movie name here]

"None of this fits together? How very true!" —Albert Camus