Snapping these photos was tough, I burned half a barrel of fuel getting one photo and haggled with a security guard for another. Most pictures were hard to get to, requiring a long walk in the harsh Eastern Canadian winter. Any camera enthusiast knows having dextrous fingers is a must, sometimes that wasn’t an option for this photographer. At one point I snuck into a swimming pool and secretly clicked a couple of pics; aware that if I was caught my student discount would be revoked. I guess that’s the price of the truth.
A good journalist usually comes with a bit of camera skill. I’m getting serious about applying to “J-school,” and since I’m not much of a camera guy I thought I should get some practice. Snapping these photos was tough, I burned half a barrel of fuel getting one photo and haggled with a security guard for another. Most pictures were hard to get to, requiring a long walk in the harsh Eastern Canadian winter. Any camera enthusiast knows having dextrous fingers is a must, sometimes that wasn’t an option for this photographer. At one point I snuck into a swimming pool and secretly clicked a couple of pics; aware that if I was caught my student discount would be revoked. I guess that’s the price of the truth. Finally, we have the most extreme slide on The Rock. Set up in 2011, this slide is located on the Water Street side of the TD Building. I have never seen anybody attempt it. At first glance I would say it’s steeper and has less of a run out than Mount Layton’s “Cannonball.” Not only was the pool empty on this one - it was also full of bricks and wood.
If you’re looking for a good water park, Newfoundland isn’t your place; now there’s evidence to support that claim. George Orwell once said: “Journalism is printing something that someone else does not want printed.” Who knows why us journalists do what we do, maybe we’re crazy, but maybe water slide enthusiasts will think twice next time they plan a trip to St. John’s.
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First, who the hell is buying all these swimming pool treadmills? If you haven't seen them yet you can find them here*:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/79228736/Whistleblower-s-Open-Letter-to-Canadians#source:facebook More importantly, this is a link to the "whistleblower" letter alleging foul play against anti-pipeline groups on the part of the government. It became public a few days ago and it warrants a bit of attention, mostly bad. There are a lot of key words being tossed around during this Enbridge pipeline debate: pristine rainforest, dirty oil, ethical oil, super tankers, double-hulled super tankers....that sort of stuff. None of these terms are particularly fresh for either side of the movement - none until this message surfaced. I read Mr. Frank's letter, I assumed it to be reasonably accurate if not a bit sensationalized. After reading it I wanted to get more of a feel for the genre. The few letters that I've read certainly look nothing like the one written by Mr. Frank in regards to either style, or content. Other letters that fall under the label "whistleblower" describe fraud of billions of dollars and attempted alerts of real terrorist threats, like, "hey some guys might try to kill a bunch of people on September 11 2001," type threats. These letters were alarming in their content and a complete snooze in their style. The letter from Andrew Frank is the opposite, it is alarming in style and weak in content. The summary is: somebody in the PMO said that we are enemies of the government and people of Canada. It made us sad and scared, nobody wanted to eat and the secretary cried. Sure this is not nice of somebody in the PMO, we should expect more. But if that's whistleblowing then maybe we're going to need something a little more serious for when a real issue come along; maybe Peter Jackson can fashion us one of those super-horns from The Two Towers. Another problem with this thing is an article that appeared in The Vancouver Sun a day later. http://www.vancouversun.com/opinion/op-ed/Harper+group+deny+allegation+threats/6047839/story.html Apparently the organizations this guy was a part of have distanced themselves from him while also saying that this sort of thing is in fact going on. The groups are comparing it to McCarthy era communist witch hunts. It's all a little bit bizarre. Either way, the conservatives can now check two things off as being hijacked by the radical environmentalists: The Enbridge proposal, and the definition of whistleblower. *Just realized these ads may not be on the webpage anymore. I'm guessing the company has since gone bankrupt. This is the only editorial type thing I've ever written. Wish I ran a newspaper...50 years ago. One of the more interesting things I’ve learned this term happened on my first day of a politics and media class. My teacher is Kimberley Mullins, most of this channels her thoughts, which channels somebody else’s thoughts. I suspect it all comes back to Marshall McLuhan - “medium is message,” guy. There are many places to get your news from these days. In theory, everyone with a smartphone is now a journalist. All these sources have been, in some ways, bad for people’s ability to actually think about what they are reading. It’s an issue of cynicism versus criticism. In the recent past there was a choice of two or three papers that the average citizen could get their hands on. It encouraged readers to think critically about what they had read. Did they agree with what was written? If not where did their ideas conflict? Now, with multiple platforms and a proliferation of journalists and pretenders that way of critical thinking has been shoved aside by cynicism. These days if you don’t like what you’re reading you simply move on to something you agree with. It’s that easy. Sometimes you only have to do it once, and you are set up for years of nodding your head at your chosen sources. Everyone has their favourite news sites to visit once they’re online, some people read a great variety, but even a great variety can give you the same message. To be informed now takes a lot of work and it’s important to remember to read things that you don’t like. Being cynical helps nothing, being critical allows for real debate to happen. It allows ideas people care about to be both stated and listened to. It’s probably apparent I’m saying this in relation to all of the spin going on by all sides of the controversial Northern Gateway pipeline proposal. It’s an issue that’s stirred much of the population into action, and the new audience has encouraged both sides of the debate to top up their rhetoric and rotate their cliches. For that reason it’s all the more important to think carefully about what you’re reading. Sorry for the Mr. Rogers tone. Sincerely, Aaron, Editor - The Blog of Aaron Williams A lot of hate for the Cana..... I mean, Harper government has been circulating on the internet lately. Mostly I try to stay away, but I really liked this one simple web page set up by some guy named Jamie Calder. The website is called sorryworld.ca. I did a retelling of this many-times-facebook-liked site. Sorry, World. Apologies, is there anything white people like more? We messed up. If you don't mind, I'll just address planet Earth on behalf of every single Canadian We know you look to us as one of the last great strongholds of common sense in a swirling sea of crazy on this big ol’ crazy planet of ours. It almost goes without saying how much better we are than everyone - we are the Jesus of countries - but I'll say it anyway. Decriminalized marijuana, same-sex marriage, our peace keeping force, universal health care, education, our stance on environment, human rights, and religious freedom made us look pretty darn awesome. Like I said, waaaay better. That’s the long and the short of it right there. Now we're realizing that those things that made us awesome are being taken away from us, and it's not just us Canadians who are paying the price. Our lives are crumbling, but it’s not just us that stands to lose. It’s most people on the Earth. Turns out some of us thought it would be a grand idea to put this fucking guy in charge. That’s him below - Pontious Pilate. Well, actually, it wasn’t so much that we put him in charge as it is we failed not to. Fine, fine, some of this is on us - but mostly it's on the people that didn’t vote. We goofed. We took our stick off the ice. We pulled a real boner. For that we apologize. Look, we like hockey as much as the next guy, boners too. However, that doesn’t excuse us from allowing people to vote for a party we don’t like. Once again, we apologize. But, hey. 2015 is just around the corner. Hopefully, we’ve learned our lesson, and we’ll do better next time. Even the best country in the world makes mistakes sometimes. We’ll correct this by presenting a different government next time, cool? I first heard about Sex and the City when I was 15. I was in logging Camp, upstairs in the Rec Hall playing a game of pool by myself. The real loggers were watching TV. A show had ended and next up was a show that had the word "sex" in the title. The loggers scoffed, and headed for the exit while making comments about how little actual sex there was in this Sex and the City, “yeah I think i saw a boob once,” said one old guy jokingly. I stopped my solo pool game. There were boobs? - on TV!!!??? This pool game is over. I settled on the couch, ready for the tit parade. 10 minutes in and I, like my gruff elders, was disappointed. The episode, as I recall, had something to do with a sex swing. More importantly, this first viewing of Sex and the City instilled in me a mysterious uneasiness around the show that would continue for the next decade. I was too young to understand what the discomfort was, it was like watching The Sixth Sense for the first time. The twisted ending came last night while watching the SATC movie on television. Sitting there, now 26 years old, I figured out what it was that made me uneasy about the show. It was nothing complicated. I wasn’t worried about whether or not SATC had a feminist slant. I read a snippet once, a feminist interpretation of Carrie and her hats; which were a point of contention between her and Mr. Big. Final score, Big Hats -1 Feminism - 0. I forget how the argument went - point is, the phenomenon that is Sex and the City has been picked apart by many, but in the depths of a feminist hunt for exploitation something is overlooked. Those women never had fun. My girlfriend protested this conclusion, said I haven’t seen enough episodes. Not true; I’ve seen at least half the episodes of that show. When I first moved away for work I had few friends and a lot of TV. Nestled amongst the bearskin rug, wolf paintings, and rifles of my new home in Smithers I would watch a show about four nice looking ladies on a hopeless trudge through problem after problem. They went to parties, well dressed men wooed them, money was no object. The characters on the program were as close to joy as Jack Dawson was to survival in Titanic. Very close. More and more, the lives of the women depressed me. I felt lonely, each episode I watched was like drinking a bottle of Nyquil. Yet still, at 20 years old, I thought there was some female secret that would be revealed to young men that watched the show. When the rider is ready the trail will appear....maybe. I had searched for the same thing in the past - a formula for female expertise, it started with Seventeen Magazine, it ended with Cosmo, none took me any closer to the solution. Carrie and her girls were the last attempt and slowly I realized that these New Yorkers would only depress and never enlighten. The good times never get rolling in SATC; they’re having some drinks, they’re laughing a little, somebody is wearing a nice blouse. But then minutes after this enthusiasm Charlotte can’t get pregnant, or Samantha has cancer, or Carrie can’t find big hats. Just once I wanted their lunch time chatter to stop and one of them to say: "Hey girls, how fucking sweet are our lives? You know - am I right or am I right?" (I suspect Samantha would have said it). Sadly, their lives remained so lush and so hopeless. Something was probably wrong with the food too. I’m told that the show Entourage is SATC for men, it’s basically a bunch of young guys living in Hollywood and being successful, every episode ends on a high note. Why can’t the same thing happen on the other side of the country? Why can’t it happen to the other side of biology? Can’t these women ever just be having a good time? I know that the show did have its moments of joy, but they felt like a parole violation. The happiness police will find them. The phenom that was Sex and the City has inspired much garbage since it ended in 2003: Desperate Housewives, Lipstick Jungle, even Cougartown has similar themes. Hopefully the success of a movie like Bridesmaids spawns something new in the world of female entertainment, a show where happiness infects the theme, where shoes are allotted no more than 10% of a woman’s Gross Personal Joy. The world can do better than that “edgy” women’s prison that was Sex and the City. This will not be a fair book review. It can’t be because Chuck Klosterman is my favourite writer of all time. He has published somewhere in the realm of 800 000 words and I’ve read 750 000 of them. I saw him read at UBC once and it remains the most worried I’ve ever been about how I should dress. He signed a philosophy textbook of mine - the same textbook he had used in college. He was pleasantly surprised by the coincidence. I was nearly catatonic. Three years ago, when traveling home from school, I met a woman at the tourism agency in Fargo, North Dakota that used to work with him at the Fargo paper. This was a highlight, possibly the highlight, of my journey home. I purposely spent extra time in Fargo just because he had once lived there. Quietly, I am more obsessed with this guy than Bin Ladin was with infidels. With that said, I will do my best. The Visible Man is Klosterman’s seventh book and second work of fiction. It follows the story of an insecure therapist named Vicky and a patient, known simply as Y__, who has devised a suit that leaves him invisible to the human eye. The novel is structured as a manuscript sent to a publishing company by Vicky after her sessions with Y __ come to a disturbing close. The rough draft nature of the structure allows Vicky to digress into laments about the sloppy nature of her transcriptions; Vicky never stops trying to convince us that Y__ is the invisible man. As for Y__, his thing is breaking into people’s homes and observing their behaviour when they are completely alone. It’s weird, but it’s his thing, and though the book at times feels like a work of 21st century horror, there is relief. Vicky and Y__’s banter can be darkly humourous, particularly when Y__ reconstructs the life of somebody he is observing. As a long time reader of Klosterman’s work it was about time he wrote about this kind of hypothetical scenario. Vicky and Y__ are simply two-dimensional outlets for Klosterman’s infinite curiosity about human nature, the value of science, and the root of ambition. The flat characters he creates are offset by his infinite ideas, laid out crisp as fresh 20s from a bank machine. It’s easy to see bits of ourselves in all the different people Y__ secretly observes, from a young woman possessed by both exercise and food to a young man that can’t stop masturbating. Humanity’s secret joys and secret shames are put out on the clothesline all through The Visible Man. Of particular note is a section of the book that could only be conjured by this great American writer. The scene involves a group of people named (much to my delight) “The Heavy Dudes.” These “Dudes” gather in a sparsely decorated apartment, sit their Mack truck frames on amplifiers, discuss philosophy, drink huge glasses of dark beer, and are vaguely reminiscent of modern day vikings. This is exactly the sort of thing that drew me to Klosterman when I was 19: Characters that are a strange hybrid of both rural and urban values. The Heavy Dudes have a great depth of knowledge contained in bodies and habits that most would pass off as just another rural slob. It’s essence of Chuck. As mentioned above, this novel finally allows Klosterman to ponder at length about some of the things he has evidently been concerned with for many years. The most important are questions of reality - are we ever more ourselves than when we are alone? One of my favourite quotes of his comes from his 2003 novel “Killing Yourself To Live” in which, seated alone at a diner, he remarks, “I see no difference between romance and solitude.” That statement is at play during many of Y__’s voyeuristic discoveries. Also at work is a critical eye on technology and communication, he makes a poignant statement about one lonely man’s addiction to the internet: “It was the single most important aspect of who he was. It removed his present tense unhappiness while facilitating the possibility for future joy...maybe this was bad for Bruce’s humanity, but I think it was probably good. I think it took a sad man and made him mostly happy. The degree of authenticity doesn’t matter.” Similarly, his brief sojourn into Facebook reads like the raw truth of a good comedian “This is why Facebook caught on with adults: It’s designed for people who want to publicize their children without our consent.” Finally, as is the norm with his writing, there is a fantastically detailed sports story. One amazing quip about baseball: “The bases were loaded. The sacks were juiced.” If I don’t stop myself I’ll end up block quoting 1/3 of the story. In his first fiction book, Downtown Owl, KIosterman disappointed me. I wanted him to go back to writing bizarre sports stories and musings about the dangerous lure of nostalgia. With The Visible Man he has discovered a better process to get his thoughts across in novel format; and he’s done it while retaining the fun and urgency of his numerous columns. All is right in the literary world. Despite it's grainy quality, the photo above was taken only a few months ago at a coastal BC logging operation. This is the last logging camp of its kind in British Columbia. Land based logging operations in remote areas were a part of life for thousands of people for most of the twentieth century. They had married quarters, bowling alleys, and basketball courts. They provided good employment for anyone from alcoholics that couldn't mesh with society to men that had escaped from communist countries on foot. A cross section of interesting outcasts and fortune seekers. Bunkhouses had nicknames like "The Snake Pit," if the food was no good you expressed distaste by scraping your threadbare spoon on a boom chain hanging on the cookhouse wall. They worked like treeplanters, only harder, and with less pretense. These places were human nature in a petri dish, there were friendships, bears in bunkhouses, rookies tied up with bull kelp, suicides, and abalone feasts. People found themselves and lost themselves in an environment that, to the rest of the world, slowly became the heart of darkness.
These are the stories I grew up on and the places I surely would have worked had I not been born in 1986. It's a way of life that has been making its way to the exit for many years. A fiery business model for getting lumber has met a fiery death. I'm sure it's what any old logger in my family would have wanted, torch it and move on. |
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