a) I have no idea where we keep flashlights in this house. (Perhaps Jean took them all camping?) In case of evening power outage, I would just be stumbling around in the dark. Or playing with matches. (Fortunately, no power outage occurred.)

b) That if it was also happening in Algonquin, that would make canoeing really difficult. Since I did have power, though, a web search seemed to indicate that Algonquin was not in the wind warning region. Snow was a definite possibility, but winds were moderate.

Yep, the Internet is certainly great for finding out stuff. And for getting stuff. Like, I wanted to get a new audiobook for an upcoming trip. I went to Audible.com to see what I could find.

An aside: I used to be a member of Audible.com, but in recent years I’d realized that everything they had seem to also be available on iTunes. And cost less. But the Audible.com website it still a far superior place to go when browsing. It has categories, it has reviews, it has recommended lists. By comparison, shopping for audiobooks on iTunes really sucks.

After poking around for a while on Audible, I settled on Lori Lansens The Wife’s Tale. I wanted to read it anyway; it had great reviews; I thought Jean would also like it; it had a bit of a travel theme…

I did find it a bit odd that it wasn’t available in iTunes, but figured I’d just get it direct from Audible. I filled in the form, credit card number and all, clicked Submit… And was told I couldn’t have it, because I live in Canada.

Lori Lansens, of course, is a Canadian author. But apparently her Canadian publisher, unlike her American one, doesn’t want to bother making an audible version of her novel available. Sucks for me. But also sucks for her, because after ranting and fuming for a while, web searching to see if there was any other obvious way to get the Lansens audiook (not that I could find, and was surprised to that library audiobooks are sometimes listed as not available? I guess it’s part of the deal of them being free that only so many people can access them at once?), I ended up purchasing the audiobook Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked instead.

Then today I got to wondering if software existed that could create sheet music from a song on a CD. Because there are some songs I’d like to play that I don’t have the sheet music for, and I’m really not good at playing by ear.

I wasn’t able to find software quite like that, but I was able to find software that would take a MIDI file and “notate” that. So I downloaded a trial version of that. And then, in two clicks, I was able to find a free MIDI file of exactly the song I was wanting to play, even though it was a fairly obscure album track.

The software will take a little figuring out, but it’s fairly cool. It reads in the file intelligently, then allows me to make some modifications (add lyrics, hide the drum score). Now I seem to now have a pretty decent score of this song. Assuming I continue to like it, I’ll buy it once the trial period ends, as apparently my being Canadian does not prohibit me from owning this particular piece of software.

Though I don’t think it’s directly connected to this issue—I don’t understand it all well enough to say—the apparent randomness of what digital files I am permitted to access (even when willing to pay) nevertheless reminded of this post I that also read this week:

Canadian Prime Minister promises to enact a Canadian DMCA in six weeks

What a goddamned disaster. The Tories have shown — yet again — their utter contempt for public opinion and Canadian culture and small business when these present an invonvenience to more windfall profits for offshore entertainment giants.Remember: thousands of us responded to the Tory inquiry on copyright law, and overwhelmingly, we said we did not want a US-style copyright disaster at home. Remember: hundreds of thousands of us wrote and called our MPs. Remember: Canadian artists’ coalitions fought against the imposition of a DMCA in Canada. Remember: America’s copyright war has been an absolute trainwreck, with tens of thousands facing lawsuits, competition and innovation eroded by DRM, free speech challenged by copyright takedowns, and no improvements for creators or creativity.

There’s only one thing stupider than being the first country to enact the DMCA, in spite of its obvious shortcomings: enacting the DMCA after the first country has spent a decade showing how rotten and backwards this approach to copyright is.

On the one hand, it seems, corporations feel they can use our personal information for whatever purpose. For example, Facebook declares that privacy is so passé, and why should anything stand in the way of them selling us stuff? And insurance company decide they can run credit checks on their clients, and raise their house insurance rates accordingly—without any prior consent.

On the other hand, governments and related agencies have to be fought tooth and nail to release information in the public interest:

• The Conservatives would not release files on Afghan detainees to members of Parliament, our representatives, until ordered to do so by the house speaker.
• All media coverage of court appearances related to Victoria (Tori) Stafford’s murder trial has been banned. (Apparently, even commenting on stories about the ban has been banned. So don’t comment on the ban here, please. I guess.)
• Though ordered to disclose the files on Ashley Smith, the young woman who killed herself as guards at the correctional institute watched, Corrections Canada has refused, saying they will appeal. In this case, note that Ashley Smith herself first requested her own files, and was supposed to get them within 30 days. Corrections gave themselves a 30-day extension from that, but didn’t meet that deadline, either. 123 days after the request, Ashley Smith died.

So corporations can use our personal information however they see fit, but we are not allowed to know what is being done in our name by our politicians, military, courts, and corrections.

Seems like someone should get upset about this, or something.

What a day it was. Monday May 11, 1970.

Thirty-five women, with chains hidden in their purses, infiltrated the public galleries of the House of Commons. They shackled themselves to their chairs. During Question Period, they started to shout. The business of parliament came to a halt. It was the culmination of what became known as the Abortion Caravan, a defiant country wide trek aimed at putting the issue of abortion access on the national agenda.It called to mind some of the more audacious tactics of the suffragettes more than fifty years earlier – in the first wave of feminism. But this was very much a “second wave” event, in which abortion on demand symbolized a fight for women’s autonomy on every front.

Listening to a documentary about this on CBC Radio’s Sunday Report a few weeks ago was pretty riveting. First of all, I hadn’t heard of this event before. Secondly, it was quite extraordinary to hear so many women proclaim, so loudly, the importance of choice. Everyone seems to tiptoe around the subject these days. Ssh. Wouldn’t want to offend anyone.

One of the most striking clips was one of the women speaking with one of the male (of course) politicians—I didn’t catch who. She pointed out he, being a privileged, wealthy man, would be able to arrange for a woman in his life to have a safe abortion, if she wanted one. But other Canadian women, those of lesser means and lower social standing, could not do this.

“So?” he replied.

“I couldn’t believe it, ” she recollected, this many years later. “It was so arrogant, so dismissive.”

Then today, there’s this:

No abortion in Canada’s G8 maternal health plan

International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda said the government would consider funding family planning measures such as contraception, but not abortion under any circumstances.

“They just reopened the abortion debate,” [Bob] Rae told reporters outside the House of Commons. “We are saying to the countries that are the poorest: ‘We won’t apply the law that we have in Canada’.”

Or to paraphrase, we are saying, “So?”

Failures

• Ben Heppner, to show, for the Grand Philharmonic’s performance of Edgar’s The Dream of Gerontius. If you’ve never heard of this work, don’t worry; neither had we. I don’t know if having the big star there would have made a difference, but we had to conclude that we aren’t necessarily fans of all great choral works. Cause we seemed to enjoy this way less than the rest of the audience, though the quality of performance was clear.
• Avatar, because it sold out before we got there. Seven weeks later and it’s still that popular, eh? Guess for next time, we’ll order our tickets online in advance.

Successes

• Up in the Air, well-attended but not difficult to get into, and quite a good movie, to boot. No 3-D extravaganza, but a clever script and compelling characters.
• The Waterloo anti-prorogation rally! Yes, we went. Pleased to see a good turnout. Hadn’t been to a political protest in decades. Wasn’t sure what would happen. Mostly, we politely listened to speeches of varying quality. Found the whole thing kind of heartening.
• Participated in an unofficial canoe club gathering around the Banff Mountain Film Festival. Only we skipped the Film Festival part (one grows weary of watching short films about people doing risky stuff outdoors) and just joined on the preliminaries of a hike and dinner. Made for a good day in this surprisingly mild January we’ve just had.

Upcoming

Sigh. Though I’m kind of grumpy about it, I feel somehow compelled to watch next Sunday’s Superbowl halftime show, to see how The Who does. I’ve actually never watched any part of the Superbowl before. Obviously I saw the Janet Jackson thing afterward on YouTube, and I’m a bit sorry now that I didn’t take the time to watch Prince’s half-time performance, but there you are. This will be a first.

So now I have to figure out things like, when is half-time, anyway? (My husband is absolutely no help in these matters.) OK, I do realize it’s a live sporting event, so the exact time halftime begins will vary, but around when will it be? Online TV guide has some pre-Superbowl thing happening from 2-6, with the game from 6-10. (And here I thought the game was actually played in the afternoon, not at night.) So am I naive to think halftime will be somewhere around 8:00, then? And they aren’t going to interview Townsend and Daltrey during the pre-Superbowl thing, are they? I really don’t want to PVR that whole thing, nor do I want to lurk in front of the TV all day.

Ah well. I suppose if I somehow miss, I can still catch it on YouTube later…

I also appreciate the journalists who pointed out that apart from the much-publicized goal of evading questions on Afghanistan, and adding Conservatives to the Senate, they are also delaying no less than three commissions probing areas that could prove embarrassing to them, such as campaign spending. It also killed all the bills in currently in progress. While I don’t much care whether that they killed their own fairly dubious crime bills, I do feel kind of bad for those diligent MPs whose private member bills also go back to square one now.

I say this even though I’m aware that it may not make that much difference in the long run. Canadians aren’t warming that much to Ignatieff either, so the next election is still the Conservatives to lose. Heck, they could even get a majority—who knows. Our democratic system has a lot of flaws. But it’s nice that not everyone has completely given up on it, regardless. I think Rick Salutin said it best:

Lorne Gunter says in the National Post that most Canadians today couldn’t tell you if Parliament is in session, and he’s probably right. But most Canadians don’t watch the CBC, either, yet they often want it there, just to prove the country and its culture exist. The same for Parliament: It proves democracy exists. I think most people sense it’s a pile of political pretense that is only minimally democratic, and that elections are what they give us instead of a real democracy in which we’d have a genuine say.

But why shut it down? At least it’s a token acknowledgment of what we deserve. And even as a pile, it is the achievement of centuries of popular political contestation, from the Magna Carta through the Chartists, the Canadian rebellions of 1837-38, the women’s suffrage movement etc. These are historic, if half-assed, victories that ought to be built on, not trampled on.

Canada went to war twice for “democracy.” Today, Canadians come back from Afghanistan dead to protect our democratic values and way of life. Do the Harperites think nobody gives a damn when you defecate all over those values, even if it’s a symbolic defecation over symbolic values and a largely symbolic way of life? Democracy isn’t just practical, it’s aspirational. It’s about trying to exert some control over your life, individually and collectively. Otherwise, what’s the point of a life? People draw a line, maybe more so when it’s about symbols, because once those are gone, there’s nothing left to take pride in and hold out hope for. So don’t treat our Parliament as a piece in your private chess game of power, eh? Show respect.

Of course, they don’t mean everything, everything. There’s no passionate defense of rape and grand theft auto, for example. But it was a good, thought-provoking set of articles.

The most in-depth article was Legalize Hard Drugs. And they do mean hard drugs, not just pot; and they do mean legalize, not just de-criminalize; and they do mean in the sense of being able to go into some LCBO-like entity to pick up your heroin, not having to get a prescription from your doctor. So rather farther than most Canadians would agree to go.

Still, it’s a surprisingly compelling argument. Prohibition hasn’t worked all that well so far. All it’s done is fund the gangs and dealers who make the world more dangerous for everyone. Ounce per ounce, marijuana is more valuable than gold, the article points out—even though it’s a weed. And the only reason it’s that expensive is that it’s illegal.

Money current spent prosecuting and jailing the never-diminishing number of dealers willing to take the risks for profit margins like that could be spend on product quality control, reducing the dangers of the drugs, and addiction treatment and prevention. It’s certainly a queasy-making idea to think of government supplying cocaine, which can bring on an instant heart attack, but they do sell cigarettes, which kill when used as intended. And alcohol, which has damaged many lives. And gambling, which is a terrible addiction problem for many. The line between legal and illegal substances is arbitrary.

But my favorite article was Legalize Music Piracy, because it laid out a plan that apparently has been tossed around for some time, but I hadn’t heard of it before:

• All broadband Internet users who want to share music files would pay an extra monthly fee (estimated at about $3).
• Those users could then download as much music as they wanted, keep it as long as they wanted, and share it with others.
• Fees would be pooled to pay the artists.
• Download stats would be maintained so that the more popular an artist, the greater their share of the fee pool.

Doesn’t that sound perfectly reasonable? Musicians like it. Music fans like it. ISPs are OK with it. The only ones truly and deeply opposed are record companies. And they just haven’t done much to endear themselves to most of us.

Site 41

Nobody expected the little people to win. Yet this week in the hinterland north of Toronto, a ragtag alliance of farmers, natives and knitting grannies saved an aquifer with the purest water on earth. Joe Friesen explains how the subjects of Tiny Township defeated the King of Simcoe politics and all but killed the dump.

The water bubbling to the surface is so clean the only match for its purity is ice pulled from the bottom of Arctic ice cores from snows deposited thousands of years ago, well before any high-polluting industries existed.

So naturally, they’re planning to put a bunch of garbage on top of it, turning the whole area into a big landfill site.

This, despite the fact that there are plenty of alternative dump sites (this isn’t Toronto; there are plenty of open spaces around), and that:

Paradoxically, given how much people are willing to pay for clean water, the pristine water is a nuisance at the dump site.

In order to dig out a pit for the dump, the county will have to pump millions of litres out of the ground to prevent the landfill from becoming a pond. The pure water Dr. Shotyk uses for his laboratory experiments will be dumped into a nearby creek.

The amounts wasted in this way will be large, enough to slake the needs of up to 250,000 people a day for months.

The landfill is designed so that clean groundwater is supposed to seep into the dump and become contaminated with garbage residue.

So to repeat — Canada — Ontario — has the source of the cleanest, purest water on Earth.

And our big plan is to contaminate it.

Now, when water shortages are one of the many looming disasters the world (if not Canada itself, as much) is currently facing.

When I first read about this — it was a couple years ago — I tried to ignore it and hope it would go away. But this thing could start in a couple months if a group of local citizens don’t succeed in getting a one-year moratorium imposed on it.

So when the Council of Canadians called me (no, I don’t have call display) for donations, I was working up to let them down gently, until they mentioned that this issue is what they were working on. Then I had to donate to their efforts to stop it. Because I didn’t what else to do, other than feel embarassed, and enraged.

See what I mean?

So of course it became overrun by skateboarders, which has caused many complaints. But, as many have pointed out, what else are you going to do on that thing? It pretty much does look like a big old skateboard park.

A recent Record editorial pointed out what I hadn’t quite realized, and am somewhat relieved about, which is that this is just the first phase of this thing. There is supposed to be more stuff, like trees, and “bistro-style” tables, and a skating rink. Actually, I found a picture:

(And more pictures at http://urbanitydesign.wordpress.com/category/waterloo/).

In the meantime, though, I don’t know that it makes so much sense to ban skateboarding completely, especially when that’s going to cost $50,000 to $100,000 year in security. Wouldn’t it be better to spend that money on finishing the thing, so it’s no longer just a skateboard slab?

And in the meantime, I kind of like this suggestion:

However it came to be, let us accept and indeed glory in our new skateboard park. We can have skateboard festivals and competitions. We can host conferences on skateboarding. We could become a world leader in skateboarding culture.

Perhaps we can be called the “Most Intelligent City on Wheels”.

• Reducing corporate taxes
• Imposing a carbon tax
• Harmonizing the PST and GST

At the time, all were dismissed by Dwight Duncan, Liberal Finance Minister. And I thought of posting on it at the time, that it was sort of unfortunate they were ignoring that advice.

Now that the situation has changed, I guess I owe some kudos. Especially as I see all the commentary and poll numbers about the sales tax harmonization as a “tax grab”. This isn’t going to be popular.

Now it isn’t, from what I can tell, actually a tax increase for the government overall, as it’s being combined with lower corporate and personal taxes.

But the government is not going to get any credit for that. People will notice paying the PST on things they didn’t have to before, and they won’t notice that their pay cheque (if they still get one) is now a little bigger (unless it isn’t for other reasons).

So, it was kind of a brave move.

Don’t want to overstate that—they do have the comfort of fairly weak opposition parties at the moment, and they were able to defuse criticism by keeping the PST off hot-button items like books, tampons, and diapers. And of course, all those cheques most will be getting that first year.

Still. Going from 0 to 2 out 3 ain’t bad. (Got that song in your head now?)