Headlines that make you crave 김치 (kimchi)

Better diplomacy through food… saw the following headline on the BBC News website:

Spare rib diplomacy in Pyongyang

Which of course brought to mind Korean Barbecue, and to go with it, naturally, some kimchi on the side.

And speaking of unusual ways to get closer to a notably closed country like North Korea, Jesse Brown interviewed Curtis Melvin on a recent episode of the Search Engine podcast on TVO in which they spoke about how Curtis and a network of contributors has created “the most authoritative map of North Korea on Google Earth“

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition

Saw this headline on the BBC News website:

US pastor opens church to guns

Now, I’m not anti-gun, per se, since I have in the past participated in the shooting sports (using small calibre target pistols owned by the club I was a member of; I don’t own any kind of firearms myself), but as far as I’m concerned, handguns belong only on shooting ranges (or safely transported in a locked case back to where they are kept in locked storage when not at the range).  In a public space like a church, though?  Nope, they don’t belong there — unloaded or not.

The BBC News article says:

“Pastor Ken Pagano told parishioners to bring their unloaded guns to New Bethel Church in Louisville for a service celebrating the right to bear arms.”

Apparently he did this in “an effort to promote safe gun ownership.”  The article goes on to quote a parishioner, Doreen Rogers, as saying to the Louisville Courier-Journal:

“For some reason, most people think that carrying guns is sinful. It’s not. I think my life is worth protecting.”

From that, I would conclude that Doreen’s gun was very likely not unloaded…

Fortunately, there seem to be more sensible folk in the area, as the BBC News article goes on to note:

A coalition of religious groups and campaigners held a rival gun-free event at the same time on the other side of Louisville.

“The idea of wearing guns to churches or any sacred space I think many people find deeply troubling,” organiser Terry Taylor told AP.

Amen.

Headlines that make you go Strewth!

An interesting tidbit on the BBC News website from Down Under:

Stoned wallabies make crop circles

And I will let the article stand, er, walk unsteadily, that is, on its own with no further comment.

The Epic Awesomeness of Podcasters Across Borders 2009 – Part 2

For the explanation of the title of this post, go back to “Epic Awesomeness of PAB09 – Part 1“.  And to find out more about Podcasters Across Borders in general, go to the PAB website.

Epic Awesomeness #2

Two of the most awesome things about PAB, in any of the years that K and I have attended (2007, 2008 and now 2009 — we fall short of being “PAB Lifers” by just missing out on the inaugural PAB in 2006 because we found out about it too late ), have been the organizers of PAB — Bob Goyetche and Mark Blevis.

Bob and Mark do an amazing job of putting together a conference for the podcasting/social media community that just keeps on getting better every year — and if you don’t believe me, ask almost anyone who’s been to PAB.

OK, there may be the odd person or two who went away less than satisfied by the experience, but I doubt that I would need more than the fingers on one hand to count all of them, from all the PABs that have taken place.

I think I can call them pillars of the podcasting/social media community without much fear of contradiction — they collaborate regularly on the most excellent Canadian Podcast Buffet show, they are involved in organizing local meetups and Podcamps in Ottawa and Montréal, and they’re always willing to help out others with advice.

Organizing PAB is a tremendous effort, with myriad details to attend to as well as difficult choices to make in selecting who will present each year.  And they do all this while keeping the cost to attendees amazingly low and without taking any profit from the event — the registration fee is an absolute bargain for what you get: a day and a half crammed full of presentations (actually two full days if you can make it there for Friday afternoon, when there’s generally a workshop/technical session — this year it was presented by Paul Lyzun on video techniques with consumer camcorders; we didn’t arrive in time to catch the whole session, but what we did see was quite interesting), a buffet lunch on Saturday, a boat cruise and the opportunity to connect face-to-face with other members of the community.

And of course, it would be remiss of me to not also thank Mark’s wife Andrea (with whom he does the Just One More Book!! podcast) and Bob’s wife Cat (with whom he does The CatFish Show podcast) who not only lend moral support to them but also put in a lot of behind the scenes efforts to make PAB happen.

Let me just close by saying how glad I am to count them among my friends…  here are pictures of them I took at PAB09:

The Epic Awesomeness of Podcasters Across Borders 2009 – Part 1

Got back from Podcasters Across Borders 2009 (hereinafter PAB09) Sunday evening and wanted to go over some of the weekend while it was still fresh in my mind.  This was going to be one long post, but given the speed with which I compose entries, I realized it was going to need to be a multi-post affair.

And the post’s title?  It refers to the closing presentation by Tod Maffin, which was called “Twenty Sixteen Moments of Epic Awesomeness” (in a sequence of events involving mosquitoes, changing hotels, internet connection at said new hotel going down 5 minutes after arriving, Tod had to cut it down from 20 to 16…) and “Epic Awesomeness” seemed appropriate to apply to PAB09 since it was definitely filled with many moments of Epic Awesomeness (now, K tells me “awesome” is used far too often on the web these days and that I should avoid using it, but I don’t want to set a dangerous precedent by doing what she tells me )

Epic Awesomeness #1

Friday night: keynote speaker Jowi Taylor addressed the PAB09 attendees, telling us about the Six String Nation project he founded.

PAB09 Voyageur closeup

The concept is wonderfully simple: create a uniquely Canadian guitar, made from materials with some cultural or historical significance, from all across our nation.  Then tour the guitar across Canada, telling the story of the making of the guitar itself, and the stories that go with the individual pieces that went into it.  Let people hold it, play it, have their picture taken with it — all for free — so that they will all get to know their country a little better and take some pride in its history, our achievements and our multi-cultural roots.

PAB09 Voyageur held by Rob & K

I can’t do the story of Voyageur, as the guitar has been named, or the Six String Nation project, justice — Jowi has released a book on it and I encourage you to support the project by buying it if you can, or if you can’t afford it, go get it from your library (submit a request for them to purchase copies if they haven’t already done so).

I can tell you that there were a whole lot of moist eyes and lump filled throats by the end of his presentation.  Here’s a few reasons why:

• While Jowi did receive initial funding for the project from Mike Lazaridis of Research In Motion (RIM, the maker of the Blackberry™), Westerkirk Capital and The National Capital Commission, and has some tour specific and on-going sponsors (see the list on the Six String Nation website), but he’s also run up a substantial personal debt to keep the project going and to continue touring Voyageur across the country.  He’s been given the run-around by various government agencies who manage to pass the buck everywhere but where it would do some good — funding the project.
• He recently asked a Toronto promoter to back the summer tour with $23,000 in funding and was told, because there is no charge for people who come to see Voyageur and get their photo taken, that he “had no business model” and that he should go pitch the project in the US, then come back to Canada when he’d been successful there.  The Canadians in the room were unsurprised but still dismayed at the promoter’s attitude; I’m not sure what the attendees from the US and elsewhere thought but it was probably a bit incomprehensible to them that we seem to place so little value on our heritage, our history and our culture.
• Jowi told the story of the legendary Golden Spruce, a unique “albino” spruce tree on Haida Gwaii (a.k.a. the Queen Charlotte Islands) that was sacred to the Haida native people.  A paper products company with logging rights in the area had agreed to not cut down the Golden Spruce and to preserve a certain buffer zone of the forest surrounding it; they were still clear-cutting the forest outside that area on Haida Gwaii.  He went on to tell us about how one of the company’s employees, who worked in isolation out in the field marking which trees would be cut, became unhinged and decided that the company was hypocritical in leaving the area around the Golden Spruce protected while clear-cutting everywhere else.  He went told us how the man went out in the middle of the night with a chainsaw and cut the Golden Spruce down.  You could have heard a spruce needle drop in the room — everyone was in shock, reeling at the incomprehensibility of such an act.  The Haida decided that the Golden Spruce would be left where it had fallen, and never be cut up but left to return to the land.  After many meetings with the chief, Jowi was able to convince them to allow a small piece of the Golden Spruce to be harvested and used in the construction of the guitar — the wood from it forms the soundboard, the front face of the body.

There were lots more anecdotes, more than I can recall in detail, but after the presentation there was a “Q & A” session — a lot of the questions were about why the Canadian government wasn’t prepared to provide funding to sustain the project and allow Voyageur to be seen by Canadians all over the country.  And finally, Mark Blaseckie stood up and asked the question that was probably on the minds and in the hearts of most of the people in that room — he just asked “How can we help?”.

So all of us there agreed to use our social media connections to spread the word about the story of the Six String Nation project and the need for financial support to keep the project alive and Voyageur on the road — not in some museum, behind glass.  This is a piece of our history, our culture that exists to be held by everyday Canadians across our land and played by those who can.

There’s a PayPal donation button on the Six String Nation website that you can use to contribute — we certainly will be.

So, that’s Part 1 of The Epic Awesomeness of PAB09.  I will try to get some more of these out quickly while events are still fresh in my mind.

Because a mime is a terrible thing to waste

So the headline on the BBC News website’s RSS feed read:

Marcel Marceau debt auction ends

And the first thing that popped into my head was: I wonder if it was a silent auction?

Headlines that make you hold your nose while smiling

OK, so this headline showed up in my BBC News website feed (I have it bookmarked in Firefox as a Live Bookmark):

Tasmania’s wombat poo paper a hit

What sort of comment could I possibly make that would do justice to this headline?  None, I’ve tried and can’t even begin.  Oh, well…

Headlines that show just how little we have evolved

From the BBC News website, this report in the Science & Environment section about research by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (part of the Max Planck Society, named for German Physicist Max Planck) was headlined:

Chimpanzees exchange meat for sex

In the article, researcher Dr Cristina Gomes is quoted as saying:

Dr Gomes thinks that her findings could even provide clues about human evolution.

She suggests this study could lay the foundations for human studies exploring the link between “good hunting skills and reproductive success”.

“This has got me really interested in humans,” she said. “I’m thinking of moving on to working with hunter-gatherers.”

Methinks she needs to get out more often…

Whoa! This is either the luckiest or unluckiest dude ever

The BBC News web site had this headline today:

Man survived both atomic bombings

I just can’t decide whether Tsutomu Yamaguchi is incredibly lucky for having survived being in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki on those fateful dates (and still being alive at 93!), or incredibly unlucky just to have been in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki on those fateful dates…  or maybe he’s both the luckiest and unluckiest dude ever.

And speaking of luck, which I suppose is in some way a form of probability, the BBC News web site also had an article under their Magazine rubric today titled:

What do you get if you divide science by God?

The article starts by mentioning a French physicist, Bernard d’Espagnat, has been awarded the Templeton Prize for contributions to “affirming life’s spiritual dimension”.  He has worked on quantum physics, which is a field dependent on probability (which is how I segued into this from the piece on Mr. Yamaguchi).

The author then goes on to interview 5 notable physicists on “the meaning of physics”, and assigning each a spiritual category corresponding to their view on the overlap between science and spirituality, ranging from the “Atheist” to a new-agey “Pantheist” at either end of the spectrum with various flavours in between: “Sceptic”, “Platonist” and “Believer” (the latter being a quantum physicist turned Anglican priest).

As for me, if I were a betting man (hmm, there’s that probability thing again…) I don’t think I’d bet against there being some kind of “meaning” to Life, The Universe And Everything – after all, if there isn’t then there’s nothing much to lose in betting for it being there, but on the other hand I’d feel a right prat coming face to face with, well, whatever it was I’d bet against.

Of course, YMMV.

Just how untransparent can they be?

In the snailmail today was a notice from Bell Canada:

We’re going green.

Dear R LEE

We are writing to notify you about an important change to our eBill program.

You are currently receiving a paper invoice, along with a monthly email notification advising you that your online bill can be viewed by logging in at the Bell Web site.  Following your next bill, we will be discontinuing your paper invoice to help reduce paper waste and protect our forests.

If you would prefer to continue receiving a paper bill in the mail, you have the option of keeping this arrangement now and in the future.  Simply log in to bell.ca/staypaper and click on “I wish to keep receiving paper bills”.

Thank you for choosing Bell.

Sincerely,
Jim Myers
Senior Vice-President, Customer Experience

OK, let’s start with “We’re going green.” — this has become the “ISO 9000″ of the 21st century IMHO.

What I mean by that is back when the ISO 9000-series standards were first developed, they were initally the business equivalent of cod-liver oil — they were told it was good for them, but implementing the requirements for certification wasn’t always terribly palatable.

For companies that already had good quality and documentation practices in place, it wasn’t that difficult, but for many it was a real sea-change — and when they came out the other side, they probably really were better companies, with more consistent quality in their products and services (note: I didn’t say better quality, since implementing any of the ISO 9000-series requirements doesn’t guarantee that quality will improve, just that you will have documented the quality — good or poor — of what you do.)

But as more and more large companies insisted on their vendors being ISO certified, an industry of consultants sprang up around certification (and training to go with it) to make it cheaper, easier and more palatable, with the result being that getting ISO certification became a part of the price of entry into the game.  I won’t go so far as to say it became meaningless, but it certainly has lost some of its value as a differentiator between a supplier you want to deal with and one you don’t.

So, what I mean is that being green in the noughties is something companies have to do just to stay in the game, and which any good profit-seeking company will want to spend the least amount of money on to acheive the appearance of.

Which for me means that they may as well have said “We’re still here to make as much profit off you as we can.”  Fair enough, that’s what they’re in business for — I just object to the lack of transparency in cloaking it with green.

Next: I don’t particularly enjoy having them shout out my name in the salutation, I mean really, how hard is it to automate putting it into proper upper and lower case letters…

Then, the use of the Royal “We” — alright, so that’s a stylistic letter writing formula that I’m quibbling about, but the letter is written over the name of one individual, the Vice-President of Customer Experience.  Why not say “I am writing you…” — it’s certainly not as if the whole company was in on writing the letter…

OK, on to the part that really gets up my nose:

Following your next bill, we will be discontinuing your paper invoice to help reduce paper waste and protect our forests.

Now, as an individual concerned with the environment, I will certainly choose ways that I can “reduce paper waste and protect our forests”, but their statement says that they will be doing it for that reason.

Which is a load of crap: they’re doing it to reduce their costs and maximize profit.

As I’ve said before, I don’t have a problem with a company wanting to make a profit and reducing costs can certainly be a legitimate way to do that — I just take issue with it when there’s a attendant increase in the cost to society as a result (but that’s a rant for another day…)

So if they would not be so untransparent and just admit that they’re eliminating the paper bill using a “negative option” strategy (something which got the Rogers Cable company into hot water some time ago…) I would happily elect to not receive the bill in the mail.

Maybe if enough of Bell’s customers insisted the same thing, that they come clean and say the reason for eliminating the paper bill is to cut their costs and increase their profit, before allowing them to discontinue sending it, then maybe they’d do it.

Well, I don’t plan on holding my breath waiting for Mr. Myers to ‘fess up and admit that Bell is just trying to squeeze a few more pennies of profit out of each customer this way, but if you are a customer of Bell Canada and feel the way I do about this, then why not let them know how you feel and just perhaps we can get him to do it — particularly if we all threaten to click on “I wish to keep receiving paper bills” if they don’t.

And thank you for choosing Unconventional Wisdom.