Fifteen Dogs - I'll never look at dogs the same way again

I have been remiss in posting lately (very busy) but I had to write about Fifteen Dogs.  This is André Alexis's 2015 book that won the Giller Prize, and it certainly deserved it.  Just as Animal Farm used barnyard animals to provoke readers into thinking about the nature of being human, so does this book.  In contrast to Orwell's work, however, his characters are not simply allegories for humans. They remain dogs - dogs who have suddenly gained human intelligence, but still dogs.

Orwell wanted to show us human behaviour; Alexis wants us to think about how our human intelligence would irrevocably change another species.  In so doing, we must think about whether the abilities that come with our intelligence make us happy or not.  As Hermes and Apollo (whose bet prompted the sudden changes in the fifteen canines) witness, it's not clear cut in any way.  Self-awareness, rational thought, and deeper emotional connections come with a price.  It's not all art and poetry.  They give us a tremendous capacity for love and art, but they also give us a capacity to suffer in new ways.

I want to recommend the book to some of my students who believe so passionately that to suffer and feel is what makes us human.  I'm not sure what they would think, but it would be a great book to teach and discuss.

Tap Dancing Star Wars

Gold Fame Citrus

Gold Fame Citrus is the future California (well, the Southwest in general) we all figure will come to be some day.  It's also the California a few (million?) 'love to hate it' people secretly wish for.  In its 'dystopian-ness', it might seem like just another well-written book about society after the accumulated effects of our avarice and consumption of every possible resource.

But Claire Vaye Watkins has done something 'more' with the apocalypse.  She has mined California's long-running love affair with cults and religious leaders to show us what California might be after the dust of modern civilisation settles.  We see the desperate willingness of some to believe in the false promises of others and their willingness to destroy those who stubbornly refuse to be absorbed into their world view.  It's compelling because she makes it seem somehow plausible and alluring that California will eventually revert to being, not the land of Hollywood and tech, but the realm of the misfits and the fringe.

It doesn't have the all-encompassing feeling of an entirely new world the way Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake trilogy does.  Instead it's a bit more rooted in the here and just a little bit later than now of a world we know, much like Walking Dead (but without the zombies).  Her characters, Luz and Ray, are beautiful in their loving dissimilarity.

It's not a middle school book (for the sex and a bit of language), but it would make a great IB or AP English novel.  It's fodder for imagining what we create out of our own fall.

It stopped being cute, Canada. Get your metric act together.

During my childhood, Canada decided to go metric.  It seemed like a good idea.  After all, just about every country on the planet had embraced a system that actually made sense.  Metric, being a system that was actually designed rather than being based, for example, on the distance between some lucky guy's thumb and pinky or the length of some other guy's foot, had a simple logic to it.  As long as you could multiply or divide by ten, you could understand the underlying principle of the whole thing.  If you couldn't multiply or divide by ten, well you could just remember to move that decimal point.

1 metre = 100 centimetres
1.78 metres = 178 centimetres
1 kilometre = 1000 metres
400 metres = .4 kilometres

Canada adopted the metric system in 1970.  To be more accurate, Canada started to adopt the metric system in 1970.  The problem is that we haven't really finished.  Look at this absurd photo from Grouse Mountain in Vancouver.  It's comical in a lot of ways, but the most comical thing about it is that most Canadians don't notice anything odd about it.

After living overseas for a long time (where everything is metric, because, well...duh!), I often ended up explaining our odd relationship to metric by describing a typical Canadian giving directions: "The hockey rink, eh?  No problem.  Drive north 3 kilometres and make a right.  Then the rink will about about 400 feet down on the right side."

Sure, it's cute, but forty five years after we allegedly went metric, it's also kind of annoying.  And to be honest, I have no idea anymore how far 400 feet is anymore.  400 metres, sure, but 400 feet, what the hell is that?

Now that I am living in Canada again, I am happy to see that we have made some more progress to metric.  When I went to get my new driver's licence, I gave my height in centimetres, and the woman at ICBC didn't bat an eye.  My licence includes both my height and weight in metric units.  Still, though, tons of Canadians cling to the habit of describing their body size in units that 6.95 billion people wouldn't understand.  Fruit and vegetables are sold in 100 gram increments.  Even building codes seem to have changed to metric.  [I say 'seem to have changed' because, for some bizarre reason, all the jurisdictions I looked up won't actually let you look at their building codes online. Instead, you have to pay a lot of money to buy them.]

For temperature, I think Canadians only use Fahrenheit when they want to make it seem really hot. Being a nation of people obsessed with making weather sound extreme, I guess it's more impressive to say, "It was 90 degrees!" (instead of 32).  If you're from Europe or Asia and you come looking for an apartment or house, don't expect square metres.  For some reason, real estate persists in using square feet.  Similar to talking about how hot it is, maybe it's because things sound so much bigger.

But, as the Grouse Mountain ad shows, we still have a way to go.  Or  maybe it's just a cultural trait to be confused.

Canadians talk about the bible

Lawyer from office upstairs: Hi. You don’t happen to have a bible in the office do you?

Me: Laughing.  No…I don’t think we would.

Lawyer from office upstairs:  Yeah, that’s pretty much how everyone reacts around here.  We have a client who wants to swear an oath on a bible.  

Me:  Sorry.  No bibles.

Lawyer from upstairs:  I thought maybe when the past tenants did a smudge ceremony, maybe someone left one lying around (laughing).

The Potato: The best souvenir

Being a teacher comes with a lot of unquantifiable perks.  There is bonus or anything like that, but you have moments that stick with you a lot longer than money. 

Once, after teaching a unit on the Columbian Exchange in which we spent a lot of time looking at the impact on Europe of foods from the Americas, a student went home and created this. 

It may not look like much, but it's a potato. At the time of the photo it was 15 years old. Laura, the student went home and freeze-dried and pressed the tuber in the style of the Inca empire (though she used a freezer instead of cold mountain air). 

When she brought it to me, I don't think she had any idea how much it would mean to me (or that I would carry it all the way to Thailand).  In the end, this prized potato floated out to see on the Chao Phraya River. 

Mt. Seymour - Changing light

Today's hike from Mt. Seymour up to Dog Mountain was a wonder of changing light.  With each cloud that shifted and each ray of sunlight that cracked through to the forest floor , the scene was repainted by a different artist. 

New Year's Eve 2015/2016 - The Route

So a few years ago, we started doing this thing where we put together a route for New Year's Eve, trying to hit new places that we had always wanted to go while also throwing in some old favourites. It worked out way better than going to a New Year's Eve party since those almost never live up to expectations.

Since this year is our first on the B side in our new Vancouver lives, this year's plan took a some thought.  We started around mid-day with many stops throughout the day for refreshments.  This is what we came up with...

1. Commodore Lanes - This is probably the oldest bowling alley I have ever been in.  It's right in the heart of Granville St., one of the big 'going out' areas of Vancouver.  It's a throwback, and a truly awesome one.  Someone has been taking really good care of the place, and it's packed full of crazy tchotchkes from all the years it's been around.  Even better, it's FIVE pin, something I haven't done since I was in elementary school.  [Side note: five pin is hard.  In ten pin, if you hit one pin, it's almost guaranteed that the pin will knock over another pin.  In five pin, the ball is so small and the space between pins big enough, that it's almost more likely to just knock down one pin.  Fun.]

2.  Robson skating rink - Right at Robson Square by the VAG, we decided not to skate because it was so crowded.  And it also looked like skating for people with a death wish.  There were so many people, and so many of them not good skaters, that someone who can skate would have to worry constantly about someone falling in front of them or falling into them.

3.  Bao Down - This is one of our favourite spots for a cheap meal in the city.  Sandwich on a bao and incredible fries...can't go wrong.

4.  The Bourbon - I had always wanted to go the Bourbon, not on a Friday or Saturday night, but during one of those times where it's just people hanging out and having a drink.  We have a lot of lo-so bars in our neighbourhood, but this one has a mechanical bull.  So, yeah.  Cheap beer and a fireball were great choices.

5.  Home - After the Bourbon, we went home for a while to eat, drink, and be merry for a while.


6.  T&T - For New Year's we decided to have a T&T feast.  T&T is our closest Asian grocery, and they have a great prepared foods section.  We took forever to choose then came home with way more food than we could ever eat.  It was packed with people picking up party food.

7.  Home (again) - We came home to snarf.

8.  North Shore/Lonsdale Quay - All the Vancouver transit was free on New Year's Eve [Thank you, TransLink.], so we took the SeaBus to the North Shore.  This was new territory for us, so we walked around for a bit to check out the quay, the views and the lights.  It was weird looking at Vancouver from the North Shore since we usually spend so much time looking the other way.

9.  Home again for more celebration - We came home and went out one more time to go to Canada Place where there was music and throngs of people.  We didn't last too long here.

10.  Last stop - We rang in the New Year from our balcony.  Seeing the fireworks from your balcony is one of the perks of the B side.  The bizarre thing was that a few hours after midnight, the fog rolled in and we couldn't even see where the water (where the fireworks were launched from).

It's been cold this winter

It doesn't happen too often that Lost Lagoon freezes over in Stanley Park.