The Mayor of Timbitsville

My hometown of Parksville has a new mayor: Ed Mayne, the owner of a local Tim Hortons franchise. Hooray! I’m sure he’ll make wonderful planning decisions, especially considering his comments to the press in which he promised to attract more young families to the city (read: allow more subdivisions), to re-zone a contentious piece of the Agricultural Land Reserve for housing development, and to cut funding for downtown revitalization – a waste of money in his mind, and no wonder (Tim Hortons isn’t downtown, of course). Mayne’s Tim Hortons franchise is one of the many, many drive-thru chains strung along the bleak stretch of Old Island Highway at the outskirts of town (snugly nestled between about a dozen car dealerships and other assorted detritus). Why would he care if Parksville’s core was vital, walkable or inviting? Answer: he wouldn’t.

In actual fact, Mayne doesn’t even live in the city of Parksville, but rather in Nanoose Bay about 20 minutes to the south. His only interests in Parksville lie in his business ventures – and that’s exactly how he’ll behave as mayor. Way to go Parksville! You’ve not only halted all progress by electing this new mayor, but you’ve actually taken several steps backward.

Oh well, there’s always Qualicum Beach nearby, one of B.C.’s few small towns to maintain some sanity in terms of development and planning. Maybe Qualicum’s secret lies in the fact that it doesn’t allow any fast-food chains within the city limits – Tim Hortons franchises (presumably) included.

I don’t get it

I keep hearing all this “buzz” about Twitter but after checking it out I was distressed to realize that I have absolutely no idea what the big deal is. Isn’t it basically a Facebook status update but without all the other social networking stuff? And yet it seems so popular, and is apparently growing in popularity all the time. I set up an account as an experimental kind of thing, but I honestly don’t know how often I’ll use it. Who knows, maybe I’ll somehow find myself becoming addicted…there has to be a reason for all the hype?

America’s Islamic roots

Paul Lovejoy visited UBC this week and gave a lecture on the legacies of slavery. One of his contentions was that Muslim slaves brought Islam to the United States from the very beginnings of its history. Rather than being foreign or in some way “un-American,” Islam is (according to his argument), very much a part of America’s earliest history. Lovejoy’s contention is provocative and well-timed, as America stands poised to elect its first African-American president (a man, McCain-supporters are all too eager to point out, named Barack Hussein Obama).

There are surprisingly few courses about African history at UBC, but there does seem to be a growing interest. Perhaps there is a trend away from viewing Africa as merely a source of “issues-of-the-week.” It’s an incredibly diverse continent with a vast history that has been generalized, painted with broad strokes or outright ignored and left uninvestigated for too long.

A recent National Geographic cover story about the Black pharaohs of Nubia is one sign that general interest in the subject is on the rise. Soon, we may have a black pharaoh in America, the first in history – and with a gursh-darned Mooslem middle name!

Evolved

Yesterday I achieved fame by having a letter printed in the Globe & Mail. I felt like I had to write in after reading Margaret Wente’s idiotic tirade about the supposed inferiority of Canada’s First Nations cultures, which was an editorial response to the Dick Pound controversy (in which the IOC member stated that “400 years ago, Canada was a a land of savages”).

Wente’s contention is that Pound’s comment was stupid but true – an argument she attempts to back up with outdated theories of cultural evolution. She also quotes an academically discredited author who believes that PC hype has caused everyone to turn a blind eye to the truth: that indigenous cultures in North America were less evolved than European culture.

This absurd notion is easily refuted. If our industrialized Western society were truly superior, would it really have produced things like nuclear bombs, species extinctions, global warming and “torture porn”?

Wente also goes on to assert that traditional knowledge is academically overhyped and essentially useless. Before making such claims, maybe (just maybe) she should sit down and take a look at some of the research that actual, you know, academics, have undertaken in the past decade? If she did, she might realize that if we don’t try to learn from other peoples’ ways of knowing about, experiencing, and living in the world, we might just destroy it with our “enlightened” Western approach.

As a sidenote, here’s one of the dazzling achievements created by our highly evolved Western culture (with funding from the U.S. military of course). I’m sure most people have seen this video about 500 times already, but it was new to me and insanely disturbing.

Out of stock

The Canadian government is facing a lawsuit being brought by environmental groups across the country because of its failure to protect critical habitat for B.C.’s endangered resident killer whales. From Ecojustice:

Frustrated by the federal government’s failure to take steps [to protect orcas], the David Suzuki Foundation, Environmental Defence, Greenpeace Canada, the International Fund for Animal Welfare, the Raincoast Conservation Society and the Wilderness Committee have turned to the courts as a last resort.

According to a recent Globe and Mail story, shrinking salmon stocks might also be to blame for the rapid decline in the already small number of resident killer whales on the southern B.C. coast. Apparently, resident orcas are dying faster than they are reproducing, in part because there aren’t enough salmon to keep them going.

Salmon are so integral to all forms of life in coastal British Columbia. If B.C.’s rivers and watersheds are its veins, then it seems salmon are the blood cells that pump energy to its diverse ecosystems. Whales, eagles, bears, humans – all rely to one degree or another on salmon stocks and would suffer (or disappear) if they collapsed.

Growing up, I remember exploring the Englishman River estuary on Vancouver Island and being amazed by the sheer amount of life that permeated from such a small area. Every autumn decaying salmon would add to the mix, bringing an even greater flurry of activity. There always seemed to be a certain magic and mystery to the life cycle of the salmon.

Luckily, I don’t think all of the news is necessarily bad. In the Englishman River, restoration efforts have made the watershed more suitable for salmon again. Stream daylighting projects in Vancouver – like that of Still Creek, once a natural stream before being converted into an underground concrete channel and now partially restored – provide some optimism. Other developments are not so encouraging. On the Englishman River near where I grew up, the Regional District of Nanaimo approved an idiotic plan for a riverfront subdivision called “River’s Edge” that will undoubtedly disrupt a sensitive ecosystem (and add more cars to the road).

With the regional and national governments acting so erratically on environmental issues (a carbon tax, and a new 10-lane bridge across the Fraser? What?), it’s no surprise that somebody eventually thought of resorting to the courts. Hopefully it will prove to be a more effective strategy.

(Update: Americans are noticing the problem too.)

Mac-curious

So the new Macbooks are out, and they look really nice. They’re also quite a bit more expensive than the old Macbooks, but with a rather dubious claim to increased value; the processor speed is actually slightly slower in the base model, and not much else has changed performance-wise except for the addition of a graphics card that some have reported to be underwhelming.

I just don’t get it. I’m one of (I would assume) millions of PC users who are Mac-curious and would consider picking up a Mac if it weren’t for the inflated price tag. Prior to this month’s Macbook release, rumours were swirling that Apple was planning to offer a base price of around $899. It sounded too good to be true – and of course, it was. There is a base model being offered (which looks exactly like the old Macbooks), but it has pathetic specs for the price ($999 in the US and more in Canada). For the same price an HP or Dell laptop features 2 or 3 times the memory and hard drive space, and probably a better graphics card.

The new Macbooks definitely look nice. The problem is that here in Canada, a basic entry-level aluminum Macbook would cost me (even with the now-decreased student discount) just over $1500. For the same price I could get a Sony, HP or Dell laptop with a far better processor andgraphics card, and more memory.

Is this the ultimate triumph of form over function in the Apple universe? Are people really willing to spend over $1500 on what is essentially a base model laptop when they can get top of the line Windows machines for the same price? Vista was never as bad as it was made out to be, and Windows 7 sounds even more promising. The new Macbooks will sell, though, especially to those who really do value form over function – and there are plenty of those people.

The new, environmentally-friendly assembly process, along with the expensive design, probably cost Apple a lot of money in terms of research and development. Early adopters will, as always, help pay for this, and in due time the prices will probably come down. In the meantime, I just bought myself an HP.