Halifax Shoes

The kids pointed out to me today that there are a lot shoes in Halifax hanging on telephone lines. We counted 5 separate incidences on our drive down to the Commons this afternoon. That's not five pairs of shoes, just five sightings. One wire had two pairs and the one in the Commons had about a dozen pairs.

I'm almost afraid to ask the locals what's up with that?

New Tom Waits album

I know that he's not to everyone's taste, but this three disk set of rarities and new material sounds excellent.

Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards is in stores Novemeberish.

Here's what he has to say about it:

"Orphans [contains] rough and tender tunes. Rumbas about mermaids, shuffles about train wrecks, tarantellas about insects, madrigals about drowning.

"Scared, mean, orphaned songs of rapture and melancholy. Songs that grew up hard. Songs of dubious origin rescued from cruel fate and now left wanting only to be cared for. Show that you are not afraid and take them home. They don't bite, they just need attention."

I dig his act.

Shamless sellout

It seems that lately my market share has been dramatically dropping in the demographic "Mike's female friends, aged 29-45".

This downward trend cannot continue, so in the spirit of appealing to your most understandably base needs I give you nearly four minutes of Ewan McGregor's smile.




And as value added here, for those who are looking forward to candid videos of Ewan's motercycle trip with Jude Law (I'm looking at you Trixie), here's a taste of what you will see.

Worst piece of writing I've read in a while

Okay, so I read some pretty sketchy stuff at times, but this is truely awful. Parts read like she's aspiring to be a third-rate fantasy writer.

Read it here.

I laughed particularly loud at the opening sentance and at this: "By definition, human embryonic stem cells have the almost mythical, immortal power to grow and divide indefinitely as they become the various tissues that make up the body."

I mean do we really need the hyperbole to let us know how amazing stem cells are? And I doubt very much that they are imortal, and given that they exist they are nowhere near mythical.

Sorry for the rant. Frustrated writer's syndrome.

Cheers

Mike

The art of dancing close...

Appologies for being so far behind in my blogging (blahging?).

Last Friday the neighbors offered to look after the kids while we went out on a date. I had looked after their three boys the weekend before and they wanted to repay me. Cate and I wracked our brains for something to do with our first night out alone in months. We didn't just want to go to a pub or a movie, both of which would have been fun, but not terribly special. Finally, late Friday afternoon, on the most whimiscal of whims we decided to take a tango class.

Cate spied a poster in a cafe for a special class that night on a form of Argentine tango called Close Embrace and it sounded like fun in a lot of ways. It was really enjoyable, but fun isn't exactly the right word. We were the only rank amateurs in the crowd -- although everyone was very helpful and welcoming -- and were both very nervous.

We didn't actually learn any steps or moves, which was a dissapointment. The class was designed to be the first of 6 workshops, so actual dancing didn't occur until some other day. We mostly learned how to walk in a straight line with our eyes closed. Which is certainly useful and bestows some tangible satisfaction when it is perfected. That alone would have been worth the price of admission.

I'm serious, mostly.

The second hour was devoted to learning to "invite your partner into the close embrace" of the dance, how to stand, where to put your chin and hands, how to walk in a straight line with a woman tightly pressing her breasts against you, how to elegantly set her back on her centre of gravity when the song is over, and how to not get too distracted while doing all of the above. Oh and the teacher insisted that we switch partners every other song or so and that we never dance with someone we know.

The grand-finale/final-exam was that everyone stood in two concentric circles, leaders on the outside, followers on the inside circle. First the followers had to close their eyes and random leaders would approach them, invite them silently into the embrace, rock rythmically side to side, then set her back on her balance. After approaching half a dozen strangers in this manner, I was sort of getting the hang of it. Then the leaders had to close their eyes and the followers moved around the circle.

Let me tell you, it is rather tricky inviting a stranger into a formal embrace when you have no notion of height, body type, etc. Personal space isn't an issue because there is none in this dance. Some worked out very well -- one guy, Peter, chalked it up to chemistry -- some were like dancing with your annoying aunt. Some were a mixture of both.

When the last woman approached me, it seemed to be going well. I could feel her approach, when I made myself taller (Tango-ki, nach!) she moved into the embrace on cue and then she leaned in... and turned out to be about a foot taller than me and was wearing a very low-cut dance shirt. I was rather startled, and not entirely in unpleasant ways, when I felt soft skin on my cheek when she leaned in. Of course I immediately forgot how to concentrate. Luckily there was enough chemistry to carry me through and it didn't go too badly.

It was a rather classic movie moment -- comedy, not romance -- when the music stopped and the teacher told us to open our eyes. The awkward thank-yous followed by a quick, embarassed escape by both of us was rather funny. I hope that she saw the humour in it too. Probably. She was wearing a dance shirt, so she probably knew what she was signing up for.

Cheers

PS. It occurs to me, as things often do when I finally write them down, that she had her eyes open so the placement of her chest was not at all a shock or surprise to her. That makes me feel a bit better, I guess. Almost flattered.

Canada Post-Literacy Awards

I think that Moses Znaimer is behind this, but it was only a matter of time before all of these self-satisfied literary and film awards recieved their comuppance from those brassy but lovable new media...

Just kidding. It's all just a dream sequence based on a bad pun.

But if it did exist -- I mean an award, or awards, for new media -- what would it look like?

There are pretty standard categories for prizes in film, literature and music* but are we even close to understanding the structure and nature of electronic content? Without having this understanding, then how does one recognize excellence or achievement. To some extent we all get by with, "I know it when I see it".

Five years ago we might have conceived of a Best Website award. It probably would have been awarded to a site that has "must-have" content, presented in an interesting layout, with a balanced amount of both bells and whistles, all in a package with a half decent load time. Basically, books, movies or music by a different colour. A new wrapper on old media.

If the award were given out this week, YouTube would probably be the winner. Interestingly the content really isn't "must-have" - but the process of exploring the content is adictive. The act of surfing has always been the defining element of the web -- hypertext changed the internet from a glorified bulletin board to what it is now, whatever that is. And it is no coincidence that "surfing" was adopted early and stuck as the verb describing/defining what you do with the internet.

What I think is needed for the next phase of development of the web are adjectives that describe the the various qualities of surfing. I would prefer if they weren't totally goofy, but surfing isn't the most elegant term and it seems to have settled in well enough. Once people can talk and write about various types of surfing and various types of surfing experiences the way that they can talk about different types of music experiences(on functional levels -- protest vs dance music, or aesthetic levels: folk vs hip hop) then genres, forms and functions will eventually be agreed upon to the point where we can all complain about the acadamy being out of touch with the people and that "awardscasts" are really lame.


Cheers

*Note: Yes, I know that there are lots of disagreements over awards categories -- in music especially. But the core categories are rarely questioned. For example, why do acting or singing awards have to be split by gender? Anyways, there's enough of a common understanding of these media that we can easily and instantly start arguing about it, without defining a single term in advance.

MT

Surf Pics added.

Just a quick note to let you know that I've added pictures to the surfer post in the archives.

Quick Link

Cheers

Speaking of history

We took a short trip up to Grand Pre yesterday. I like that the province is so small we can drive an hour to the other side and still be in a region that is more different than the Ottawa Valley is from Southern Ontario (8 Hours if traffic is unusually good in Toronto).

Grand Pre is the place where the British expelled the Acadians. The origian village was torched after the expulsion but a memorial church* and information centre is on the site. Very cool. The engineering feats of the Acadians are documented -- how they reclaimed thousands of hectares from the sea to make arable land -- and the story of the expulsion, of course.

Again, nothing to feel proud of but interesting to connect to a different history in my new back yard. Even more cool, that there was a cat named Evangeline sleeping in the sunbeams streaming through the windows of the church. I'm profoundly ambivalent about the name "Thibault" (without an "e") appearing on the roll of the 100-odd family names of the expelled. My kin are Glaswegian, but it would be cool too to be of Acadian descent.

What can I say, romance is in my soul. ;-)

Cheers

*I sort of thought that it was cool that the grounds around the church were geometrically designed. Very French. Not sure if the Acadians were hip to the Sun King's predilection for divine order, but it felt more right than a pseudo-rustic English country garden. So I didn't ask about the arcitectural choices made in the design of the monument. Best to let sleeping cats lie, if they won't tell the absolute truth.

Local History Minute

In Ottawa there is a ton of local history. We stroll around parliament hill as if it were just another park, Wilfred Laurier lived down the street from where I lived here, a constitutional accord was drafted across the lake from where we swim with the kids, Thomas D'Arcy McGee was assassinated near this pub over there...

I'm trying to learn a bit about the history of my new city and just found out that a piece of the anchor from the SS Mont Blanc, that was the source (if not the cause) of the Halifax explosion of 1917 landed just down the street from my house. That's about 5km from ground zero, which is impressive. Of course entire neighborhoods in two cities (Dartmouth on the other side of the Bedford Basin, as well) were leveled -- 1,600 homes were destroyed -- windows were broken throughout the entire city, the shockwaves were noticible as far away as Sydney, and over 2,000 people lost their lives and another 9,000 were injured.

So an anchor shank isn't really anything to be proud of, but history is about connections and hopefully understanding, not jingoism. So that's cool in its own way.

Cheers

Profile Views?

So 16 people have viewed my profile so far. I assume that everyone knows me already. What sort of information were you hoping to find there that you don't already know? Don't you people have better things to do? :-)

Unless the number represents one person viewing the profile 16 times, in which case I should be really creeped out.

Cheers

NSLA Conference

Sorry I haven't updated in a while. I was at a conference down the street all weekend and I lost my rhythm.

There were two obvious reasons to go to the conference: 1) To network to try to find a job, or information that might be helpful in my job hunt, and 2) to actually learn some new stuff.

I did meet a lot of new people. Most of them were from the Annapolis Valley region, so they weren't too helpful, but they made the Saturday night banquet even more fun that it would have been. Louise is going to have a good time working with these people after her grand tour.

I was purposefully trying to not schmooze. I didn't want to come off as either desperate or a jerk (or both), so I would just socialize and talk about the sessions. Usually people would notice that my conference pass didn't have a library printed under my name so I got really good at briefly describing my situation: "I just graduated and followed my wife (shorthand) to Halifax, I've only been here a couple weeks and am looking for work." Some people asked about Ottawa (or reminisced about trips to Ottawa) and others gave me pointers and introduced me to some people they thought I should meet. I met a guy who's on the hiring committee for a job I applied for last week, so if I get an interview he will already have some sort of impression of me. But again, I wasn't trying to schmooze, so we talked about Halifax mostly.

The director of Dal's library school was really nice. She was working the room, so she introduced herself to me. She gave me her card and seemed genuinely eager to show me around the faculty and introduce me to the cataloguing professor. She even suggested that I might be asked to give a guest lecture in one of the cataloguing classes because I've worked as a tech for so long. Can't look bad on a resume.

Oh and I went to a pub on Quinpool after the banquet called the Nail and Kneecap that is really nice. Sort of smooth-around-the-edges but the music was consistently great (Velvets, Iggy, Clash, Cat Power, Feist, Robert Johnston). It's a bit too far away to just hop down for a pint after the kids are in bed, though.

The sessions themselves were good, but perhaps not great. They mostly seemed aimed at introducing the audience to things that they've never heard of before. I was expecting a bit more knowledge sharing between experts from different circumstances and perspectives (Especially in the "Cataloguing is Public Service" session). But because I had two agendae (what is the proper plural?) I didn't want to show up at sessions that would connect me with people in specialties I have no interest in, even though those are the sessions I would learn the most from.

Most of the intellectual highlights came after a session was finished and a meaty, informal discussion would emerge over coffee. I suppose if I'd been out of school longer, these sessions would have been a nice, low-key reminder of the things that I knew but were no longer in the front of my mind.

So now it's back to the actual job-hunt. Wish me luck.

Cheers

Quote of the Day

"If a germ was running through the grass to Africa, would it be faster than a person?"

-- Mika

My response: I think that they're faster over short distances, but people are faster in the long, endurance races.

That seemed to satisfy her.

Cheers

Shout out to Jason and Shea

Speaking of miracles. Just a quick congratulations to Jason and Shea, who are now expecting their first child.

I'm putting my vote in for the name Heironymous if it is a boy. My second pick is Dunstan.

Cheers

It's a miracle

Yesterday the kids and I were hanging out in the back yard. When we were going inside -- the kids ran ahead as usual -- out of the corner of my eye I saw something fall from the sky and bounce off the driveway onto the lawn.

A fish fell from the sky. I mean straight down, from the top of my peripherial vision.

Earlier we had seen a hawk or eagle (don't know what they have out here) fly overhead. It was just above the tree-tops, so we could see the mottled brown feathers on its head. I told the kids that it must have seen them (they have excellent vision) and thought that they were good kids and deserved a gift. This tickled them immensely.

I tend to trust that the universe will provide. I take opportunities as they arise even if they are risky (my Master's, moving to Halifax, etc.). But I decided that it would be pushing my luck to clean and eat a fish that probably came from the ocean within 50km of the Halifax Harbour.

Easy come, easy go.

Speaking of the harbour, we took a walk down at the harbour after I picked Cate up from school and there was a pod of dolphins playing out in the middle of the cove. There were dozens of dorsal fins breaking the surface and the occasional spray from a blow-hole. They were probably more than 500 metres away, but that's the closest I've ever been to wild dolphons. It was conceptually cool, if not visually impressive.

A local passer-by told us that they don't usually come this deep into the cove so it wasn't just the folks from away who were stopping to gawk. That made me feel even better about it. There's nothing worse than giving yourself up to the wonder of nature only to have a jaded local make you seem foolish for being in awe. I usually curse them (or myself, when I do it) for taking it for granted. Luckily not this time, though.

Cheers

PS Kudos to the generous raptor.

Hockey Barns

So Connor and Mika started ringette on Sunday. For those of you that don't know, it is a spin-off from hockey that is essentially the same except that you play with a ring instead of a puck. The sticks don't have a blade and you poke the end in the middle of the ring. There are other differences, but those are the obvious ones. Passing is harder, stickhandling is easier. Seems a bit redundant to me, but Cate's been playing since Christ was a carpenter (and Harrison Ford, come to think of it) -- back when girls played ringette and boys played hockey.

So Connor was one of only a handful of boys at the first practice and he's at the upper age limit for the level, so they had to pull him aside to assess his skills. So the registrar went down to the bench and sent a helper to bring Connor over. This was a portion of the exchange that took place.

Helper1: Bring him over here for the assessment.
Helper2: She's a girl.
H1: He's a boy.
H2: She's a girl.
H1: He's a boy.
H2: She's a girl.
H1: He's a boy.
H2: She's a girl.
Registrar: [Calling down from the stands] He's a boy.
[Pause]
Registrar: They're not from around here.

Granted with all of the equipment and his long hair, I can understand the confusion. Perhaps they could have asked him his name?

Cheers

Home

A recent email from a school-chum has got me thinking more immediately about home. She noticed that in one year London has become the "home" that she misses most immediately. Even after living elsewhere for much more of her life.

For the first month I've been here (more or less) when people ask me where I'm from I say "Ottawa". If the conversation progresses beyond small talk and the subject comes up again, I tell them that I've actually been living in London, Ontario, for the past year. (Does a quick tabulation... I've been in Ottawa about 60 of the past 390 days).

A few days ago, it struck me that I won't be back there for more than a few days for another year. That will make two years living away from Ottawa. And it doesn't completely feel like home anymore. But not completely not-home, either.

I definitely missed my family while I was away, no doubt about that. In that way home is wherever they are -- and even better now that we're all together again. And I miss my oldest friends, who mostly ended up living in Ottawa (Brad, I'm looking at you.) I miss going to the local with Ivan, who actually moved away around the same time I did. But those are relationships that happen to be in Ottawa.

I miss my friends from library school as well, though. But most of them aren't in London anymore (Trixie's even in Ottawa, ironically). And there's the rub. I definitely don't miss London as a place. I miss it as a social network, a thing other than geographic; a space that can't be mapped; relationships between points that defy the mathematics of mercator projections.

Or maybe they don't. Maybe like a mercator projection the relationships are not independent of physical distance but they are not to a uniform scale. Some people that are far away -- Ottawa, Montreal,London, Fort St. James, China -- mean more to me than people next door.

That's all very reassuring in so many ways. But I still miss all of my friends and family and I miss Ottawa less and less. Then again, I'm not a maritimer either. I don't even know if Halifaxians consider themselves maritimers or maritimer's urban cousins. But here, physically, is as much home as anywhere right now.

So, er, come and visit any time. :)

Cheers

A mellowness of surfers

I've never been very much attracted to surfing or surfers. Recently I've come to appreciate the genius of peak-performance Beach Boys but wondering at the layers and loops of God Only Knows or Wouldn't It Be Nice never really made me want to pick up a surf board and head to California or Hawaii.

But I realized this weekend that if the stars had aligned just right, I'd be sleeping on a beach and talking funny instead of surfing the web and, well, talking funny in a different way.

Backing up a bit. The last time we were in Nova Scotia we rented a cottage on Hell Bay, half-way down the South Shore. It was well named, actually. I swam in the surf at high tide and it was the most exhilerating experience I've had. Really. Not like Spaulding Gray's "perfect moment" in the rip-tide in South-East Asia (cf. Swimming to Cambodia) -- I never felt seriously in danger at any time. But I was being buffeted around by the forces of nature in a way that I've never been before or since. There were no intermediaries just water picking me up and throwing me around. Being alive feels more fragile and more powerful after that.

Last Sunday, on a whim, we took a ride over to Lawrencetown and Mauritius (I think) beaches. We were actually going somewhere else and changed our minds en route. That seems to be the way we operate. We drove over a hill and about 3km of Lawrencetown beach was laid out in front of us. The shore was packed with bathers and the water was speckled with surfers waiting for the next big wave. We walked the beach and got soaked (no swimsuits), but it looked like a lot of fun. I'm old enough that I don't mind an intermediary or two.

We had dinner at a chip stand down the road (off the road, in the bush, really) called Happy Dude's Fish and Chips. The bus was painted all funky and the fish was local, fresh and fried to within an inch of our lives. The fries were salted to suit the tastes of people who had been swallowing sea-water all day. I liked it, Cate not so much.

A surfer-guy, who was on a first name basis with the staff, sat down with us and started shooting the shit. His name was Buck. He's from Vancouver, but his family has a house in Hawaii. He's been surfing since he was young. Normally the constant references to "the Beach-House in Hawaii" would bug the crap out of me, but he just seemed so otherwise good-natured that it didn't put up my defences. I'm still not sure if he was bragging or appologizing. Nova-Scotia's short surfing season and relatively small waves might be some sort of penance.

Then we moved on to the next beach. It was after dinner and starting to chill out, but this beach still had surfers. One group left the water and started bedding down for the night. Some doing their evening yoga others just wrapping up in blankets and sleeping bags. It just seemed so mellow and nice.

When I was in my late teens, I might have easily fallen in with that sort of crowd. I'm not sure how mellow I was, but the surfing might have worn me out enough or gave me a bit of perspective so that I would have been more laid back.

Last Sunday was probably the last decent swimming weekend of the year. Next summer, I might rent a boogie board or something and try out the smaller waves. Cate wants to sign the kids up for Surfing Camp next year. Connor would probably think that it's "tight". He can't help but dance when his feet are in the Ocean. I can see him growing up to be a surfer. He won't really be able to brag about a beach-house in Hawaii, though.

Cheers

EDIT: Then again, Mika might be the surfer. On Monday she was bragging to her friends about how many times the waves knocked her over. She likes to be in the thick of things.

Oh, and I should probably hoard these so I can offer a new and improved Twisted Site of the Week on a regular basis, just like the old days. But I can't sit on this one:

Concept aside, the stunned looking kids don't give me much faith that the armor is working.

http://www.armorofgodpjs.com/

Again, thanks to Xine -- whose kids will thank her for surfing the web so much while she's on maternity leave.

-- The Management

A chirpy post for a change

I realized yesterday that my first two posts were rather negative. I really do love it here. Really.

I actually think that once I'm used to it, I'll really be proud of living in a city where the streets change names 2-4 times within a kilometer stretch. Cate and I laughed and laughed yesterday when we got lost because Dutch Village Rd. is called Titus St. for exactly one intersection before it changes again to Lacewood. Guess which intersection we were driving through when we were looking to turn right onto Dutch Village? Yeah. Hillarious, eh?

Okay, so in the interest of lighting up the mood of this blog, I present you with kittens!!!

http://www.stuffonmycat.com/

Everyone loves kittens.

Cheers

PS Kudos to Xine for the link.

Sexist Halifax School Board

Okay, I know that's a rather contentious post-title. I trust you, gentle reader, to decide for yourself, of course.

So on the first day of school, I'm hanging out with our Aussie neighbour whose kids are in classes with my kids and we're discussing the differences between Canadian and Australian schools. This and that. The he says "It's sort of inconvenient that you have to pick them up every day at lunch."

Eh?

Yep. Whereas in Ottawa you have to fill out a dozen forms if your child is going to be off school property at all between 9:00 and 3:30, here they not only assume, but they insist that you pick up your kids for lunch. There is a program run by the YMCA for $100 ($90 for each additional child) and they'll look after your kids for the 90 minute lunch period -- food not included. There are only 24 spots for the entire school, though, and they were filled up long before we even considered coming to Halifax.

If we lived accross the street it wouldn't be too bad, but we have a 10 minute drive (through the dreaded Rotary) to the school. That is 4 round-trips per day -- 1 hour and 20 minutes of driving -- every day, to the school.

Have I mentioned that intend to find a job soon? If I work a 9:00-5:00 job, I will have to take 2 hours off in the middle of each day to get the kids for lunch. Then have to pick them up at 3:00. Hmmn. I'm now looking for a job that is either part-time, lots of evenings and weekends, or so well emunerated that I can hire a chauffeur for the tots.

The whole system seems to assume that mom is staying home with the kids. If mom does need to escape an abusive relationship and find a job to support her independence (or some less dramatic, but valid and realistic, scenario) she had better have supportive friends, family or neighbours.

Our neighbors are in the same boat, so for now we are switching off the pick-up/drop off until the schedule gets messed up by Claire and me becoming employed.

I think that the economy would see instant benefits in productivity if the schools would just let the kids eat their lunches in the school.

A tyranny of pedestrians

I have no real emotional attachment to driving. I do it when I have to, and walk or bike when I can. I have political and social reasons for wishing that cities were more pedestrian/bicycle friendly.

But this is crazy.

Okay, I've only been here a week or two and it might not seem that bad once I get used to it. But there are crosswalks on almost every street corner, most of which do not have amber lights, just signs and painted lines. Not only do you have to be aware of the usual hazards and concerns when you are driving in the city, but you have to watch out for pedestrians that might dart out in front of you without looking. I'm a good driver, or at least a cautious one, but the erratic behavior of these very manoeverable pedestrians is much harder to read and react to than the erratic behavior of motorists. The key-difference, ideally, is that if a car-driver screws up a bit (everyone makes mistakes) the result is a fender-bender but if a pedestrian dekes me out, he's going to the infirmary. But it doesn't appear that the pedestrians around here understand nor care about that and give new life to the Anglo-Saxon term "willy-nilly".

I feel like I'm being held hostage to the whims of pedestrians.

Ideally, no one would be held hostage to anyone else. It just bugs me, I guess, when any group feels entitled and has that entitlement enforced by law. That's the death of civility, if not actual civilisation.

Cheers

Edit: Okay, so my first real post has some overlap with Cate's blog. I reserve the right to elaborate on points she touches on. She has more ideas than me, so I get to beat the few I have into the ground.

Thank you,

-- The Management