Vancouver ( a work in progress)

The lights of Vancouver shimmer across false creek
Bouncing from the cloud cover to water and back again
Even in the dead of night the city is alive and vibrating
Singing its song of humming skytrains and police sirens

The  flicker of bus lightening lights the damp streets
The city is born anew in the damp drizzle
yesterdays sins washed clean, ready for more
under the watchful eye of the twin peaks

...over coffee

Occasionally I am graced with a customer who doesn't just treat me like an baristabot and wants to engage in more than just meaningless banter about my day while they only have listen to my response. One of those customer is a computer techie names Justyn...not sure if he spells his name with a Y but to me he just seems more like a Justyn then a Justin. Justyn is a very well groomed man, crisp pants, shiny shoes, trimmed beard and stylish sunglasses. He is well spoken, polite and witty. All the things I ask for in good customers. We've had an ongoing debate for several encounters over the virtue of e-readers. Our last encounter left me deeply puzzled over the place of books in the new millennium. He said that he to can appreciate a good book and even owns a few 18th century 1st editions (!) but that he sees nothing beautiful in the mass produced, artless tombs currently rolled out of a factory that Chapters sells. Part of me conceded a point to him there, where is the art? Can we compare the individually bound books of the past to the mass produced paperbacks of today's bookstore. And if the content is truly all that matters then shouldn't I to succumb to getting an e-reader and store up to 20,000 books in one tiny machine rather then continue to let mountains of books take over my apartment.

Where is the art in modern book binding?


(I have not given up my POV that the tactile emotional response I get from touching, seeing and even smelling a book will ever be replaced by the sterility of and e-reader, although the portability of the e-reader may result in my purchasing one at later date)

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Re-imagining

The Re-imagining is coming...

Thought Du Jour #2

We throw Out 40% of our Food...

"America thinks it's Robin Hood but it's Friar Tuck. A swordsman priest who gorges by taking one bite out of each chicken leg in a huge horde and then throwing the rest over his shoulder."

Maybe we have to change too

I am so very tired of people whining and moaning that Obama isn't living up to his hype. He's barely had a year in office, and personally I think we've had enough of the cowboy politics of yesterday when Presidents and Prime Ministers shot first and asked questions later. So if it means our leaders have to take a few extra weeks or months to decide how best to handle situations like the so called 'war on terror' or  operation Iraqis 'Freedom' then good on them. After all I think I give more thought to what beer I'm going to drink after work then Bush and Cheney did on where they were going to drop bombs next. Change; that is long lasting positive change, takes time. Its not something that you can just wave a presidential wand and make happen.After eight years of the Bush regime its going to take alot more then 10 months to right the wrongs and still manage to garner at least moderate consensus* (which is what democracy is all about). Change has happened, health-care reform is now well on its way to happening, something that Canadians need to keep note of since our provincial and federal governments seem hell bent on doing away with the very system Americans have fought so hard to get. The whole 'Don't Ask Don't Tell' nonsense of the American military is on the chopping block. Which if history teaches us anything is the first step to legal gay marriages (at least it was in Canada with the two happened just over a decade apart from each other, 1992 and 2005 respectively). So give it time people, stop expecting him and his team to right all the wrongs created over the last decade (or century) in 10 months. Change is a slow, sometimes painful process and its not just the system that has to change. We have to change too.



* Consensus does not mean majority rules or that you even have to truly agree with something to consent to it, but rather that a) you believe that other understands your point of view, b) that your understand the others point of view and c) Whether or not oyu prefer this decision you will support its outcome because it was reched openly and fairly.

Dirty Socialist!!! (warning..rant ahead)

Are you a socialist?
Do you believe in a democratically equal country where there is no direct correlation between wealth and political power?
Do you believe in public education?
Public healthcare?

If so then you better listen up. Because the war on our very identity has picked up the pace.Lately newspapers like the National Post and other more right leaning publication have started spewing out the terms socialist and socialism as tho they are concepts that are poisoning their lives. And we're letting them get away with it and giving them a reward as well (bailouts).

I don't doubt that many readers don't truly understand socialism as the entity it has evolved into today. Socialists haven't done a very good job of distancing themselves from the misuses of the term by Stalin or Hitler and our opponents have done a very good job of making sure that those few who do want to make some noise are politically neutered.

Enough is enough.

Are we going to give in? Bend over and the let them turn socialism into a insult, turn us into the red demon of the new cold war; without so much as a halfhearted reach around?

FUCK THAT!

We've been passive in all the wrong ways. Our passivity has molded into apathy. Time to take a page from Ghandi's book of passive resistance and fight (non-violently) this nonsense.

So lets take back our word and tell them all to go to hell. We're socialists and proud.

Whatcha got to say to that CanWest?


....oh thats right, you better say nothing because dispite all the fire and misinformation you been spewing about socialists your more then willing the take a socialist handout from the taxpayers when you vaunted capitalist endeavor of a media monopoly has failed.






This work by Ophelia3 is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.