Boxing Week

Too Angry?
I may have to go off the political commentary for a while. It’s just getting me furious and there’s no point any more. I did what I could — more than most, I suppose — and it’s up to others to take on the fight. With any luck, Pam and I will have avoided the coming crash. Already I’ve seen some ominous signs of the US National Debt starting to appear in the news again. It’s unfortunate that Canada is still so dependent on the US as a trading partner, but even they are wising up and increasing oil exports to China, who I no longer have any doubt will be the dominant superpower in the coming decades. In the meantime, I am going to have to just shake my head and hope that my family and friends are able to dodge the bullets as well.

Boxing Week
You know that the holiday season has gained a larger footprint when people start naming the period between Christmas and New Year’s Day. With Christmas falling on a Sunday this year, Boxing Day fell on Monday. That meant that the entire rest of the week would be a down-time for a lot of companies (including mine), and stores are running post-Christmas/Year-end closeout sales to take advantage of so many people who now have time to shop. The result is that Boxing Day has become an entire week. We’ve even seen signs on merchant windows around town that say ‘Boxing Week Sale’ on them. I suppose that’s one way to avoid the crush of people all trying to take advantage of a one-day event.

A US Visit
Tomorrow, Pam and I are going to venture back into the US. While I’ve already done this a few times since we moved here, Pam has not. I wonder if I’ll start to notice more differences between the US and Canada. It will also be interesting to use our passports and my work permit when we re-enter Canada. I’m not expecting any trouble, but it will be yet another first.

Ah, I Remember that from French Class! Or was it Social Studies?

The Bush Administration’s arrogance concerning eavesdropping on citizens without even a momentary thought given to warrants or any kind of civil liberties reminded me of another arrogant dictator (besides Big Brother):

And you thought it was just your library books they were looking at!

Update:
I also caught this choice quote from an incredible essay with the title: Fear destroys what bin Laden could not by Robert Steinback of the Miami Herald:

President Bush recently confirmed that he has authorized wiretaps against U.S. citizens on at least 30 occasions and said he’ll continue doing it. His justification? He, as president — or is that king? — has a right to disregard any law, constitutional tenet or congressional mandate to protect the American people.
Is that America’s highest goal — preventing another terrorist attack? Are there no principles of law and liberty more important than this? Who would have remembered Patrick Henry had he written, “What’s wrong with giving up a little liberty if it protects me from death?”

There’s much more in this, and some of it is what I’ve been nearly screaming for the past 4 years, that America is not the same country that I knew. Steinback also says earlier:

…I would have expected such actions to provoke — speaking metaphorically now — mobs with pitchforks and torches at the White House gate. I would have expected proud defiance of anyone who would suggest that a mere terrorist threat could send this country into spasms of despair and fright so profound that we’d follow a leader who considers the law a nuisance and perfidy a privilege.
Never would I have expected this nation — which emerged stronger from a civil war and a civil rights movement, won two world wars, endured the Depression, recovered from a disastrous campaign in Southeast Asia and still managed to lead the world in the principles of liberty — would cower behind anyone just for promising to “protect us”.

It’s a call to arms. Is it too late for anyone to hear it?

PS: I noticed that this is my 100th posting in this blog. Guess I made it to triple digits by the end of the year!

Stille Tag, Eating Ballots and Uncle Edgar

A Few Creatures Stirring, but Not Many
Yesterday was a very quiet day indeed. We took a walk along False Creek and saw a few dog-walkers, joggers and bicyclists, but as we returned via Broadway, the only places open were the Asian restaurants, some of which were doing a brisk business.

Today, however, is Boxing Day (always the day after Christmas), a holiday that I only got to celebrate when I lived in England. According to Wikipedia:

There is great dispute over the true origins of Boxing Day. The more common stories include:

• Centuries ago, merchants would present their servants food and fruits as a form of Yuletide tip. Naturally, the gifts of food and fruit were packed in boxes, hence the term “Boxing Day”.
• In feudal times, Christmas was a reason for a gathering of extended families. All the serfs would gather their families in the manor of their lord, which makes it easier for the lord of the estate to hand out annual stipends to the serfs. After all the Christmas parties on December 25, the lord of the estate would give practical goods such as cloth, grains, and tools to the serfs who lived on his land. Each family would get a box full of such goods the day after Christmas. Under this explanation, there was nothing voluntary about this transaction; the lord of the manor was obligated to supply these goods. Because of the boxes being given out, the day was called Boxing Day.
• In Britain many years ago, it was common practice for the servants to carry boxes to their employers when they arrive for their day’s work on the day after Christmas (26 December). Their employers would then put coins in the boxes as special end-of-year gifts. This can be compared with the modern day concept of Christmas bonuses. The servants carried boxes for the coins, hence the name Boxing Day.
• In churches, it was tradition to open the church’s donation box on Christmas day, and the money in the donation box were to be distributed to the poorer or lower class citizens on the next day. In this case, the “box” in “Boxing Day” comes from that one gigantic lockbox in which the donations were left.
• In Britain because many servants had to work for their employers on Christmas day they would instead open their presents (ie. boxes) the next day, which therefore became known as boxing day.

In fact, the way I heard it, because it was the servants’ day off, meals would be a ‘box lunch’ or something like that. Many of these stories follow the same basic idea of giving the working classes a special holiday of their own, which has since many on the Left to decry the holiday as further perpetuation of the separation of the social classes (someone had to serve the Christmas feast, so the servants couldn’t have that day off, therefore they had their own holiday while the rich folks slept in and ate leftovers). It was interesting to see that Granville Market was open Christmas Eve, but was closed both Christmas Day and Boxing Day, which lent further credence to the ‘give The Help a day off’ explanation.

In the Putting Your Ballot Where Your Mouth Is Department
Saw a strange story about Calgary in Boingboing about eating election ballots. Sure enough, it’s a kind of protest by the right-wing people there that there aren’t any choices that they approve of in the election (I’m going to assume that Steven Harper is not Conservative enough for them, since the protest is by followers of Stockwell Day, who lost his post to Harper in 2002).

Good-bye to Uncle Edgar
We just got a phone call that Edgar Johnston, Pam’s Uncle on her father’s side of the family, died at 1 AM this morning. Uncle Edgar, along with Aunt Mary and Uncle Jim, became what the rest of the family referred to as ‘The Traveling Trio’, when we found out that they had set off from Long Island, New York to Quincy, Massachusetts via train, ferry, another train and finally the subway, without telling anyone, so that they could go on an exploratory trip to Quincy, Mass, where Mary and Edgar had previously lived before selling their house and moving in with Jim in Long Island. They had made plans for months, and we suspect that Jim went along with the whole expedition because he had lost his driver’s license (after 4 accidents in the period of a month or so) and thought that the State of Massachusetts would give him a license if New York state would not. Their plan was to buy two small houses and ‘…live next door to each other’. We found out about all of this later but initially we got a call from a hospital in Quincy, at about 4 AM. The three of them had been found, exhausted and confused, in the Boston subway a few hours earlier. It was a pretty remarkable incident, and if one of them hadn’t had Pam’s brother’s business card in their wallet, they might very well have disappeared into the unseen world of the homeless in Boston. We scrambled to get them taken care of, and Pam and her brother became legal guardians of all of them, as they entered a Nursing Home in Weymouth, a nearby town. Uncle Jim died in January before we moved here, and now with Edgar’s death at the age of 93, the sole member of the three travelers is Mary, who is mostly blind and no longer coherent.
Whenever we visited Aunt Mary and Uncle Edgar in Quincy, she was the flamboyant and stylish lady, and he was the absent-minded professor. He was obsessed with his time spent in the army during World War II and as time passed he retreated more and more into that period. I tried to find out why these events in his life seemed to overshadow everything that had come before or since, but he had no explanation other than that was the way he felt. The last time we saw him, he had reverted to the state of an infant, permanently reclined, with soft hands and a vacant stare. He had been this way for months before then and continued living that way for a year, at least, until he simply stopped eating a few days ago. The phrase from Shakespeare’s As You Like It about “All the world’s a stage”, etc. came to my mind — the bit at the end:

Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

I’m glad that Edgar finally made his exit, because he spent far too much time in that last scene.

An Interesting Question

Since I’m going to be a designer in Canada, I was curious to see something written on a web site for a design local design shop that I had not known of until recently, Industrial Brand Creative.

The question was: Is There Anything Canadian About Our Design? It was raised during a Design Competition that was held here in November (and I was unfortunately ignorant of that as well, not because I wanted to enter, but I feel that I haven’t yet learned enough about the design community here. I do know there is a lot of talent here. That’s pretty evident wherever you look.)

The discussion included some observations that could apply to a number of disciplines, design just being one of them:

Canada is a very big country, but our population, just twice the size of most of the world’s major cities, is concentrated primarily in three urban centres with vast bodies of water, prairies and mountain ranges separating them. Added to these factors are the dizzying array of cultures, religions and languages our mostly immigrant populace brought with them, it would be easier to argue that these geographic factors would lead to regionalism within Canada more than producing any common style. Perhaps any “Canadian style” is a direct result of post modernism and the mix of these many backgrounds, perspectives and cultural predilection for travel and exploration which makes us flexible, skilled (if not rather underpaid) producers of high quality design. This celebration of diversity is our key strength, and is arguably the only real Canadian truism.

I guess I like everything about that quote, except for the word ‘underpaid’.
written while listening to: Carl Nielsen - Wind Quintet - iii. Praeludium: Adagio - Tema con variazioni’

The Blogger Meetup

Sunrise, 8:05 AM, Sunset 4:17 PM. The Winter Solstice has come and gone

Some of the Vancouver bloggers gathered together at Subeez, on Homer Street (I wish I could write that street name without hearing Marge Simpson’s voice, or rather, Julie Kavner’s voice, to be precise) for a little get-together before the holidays. I got there a little early, feeling a little weak as I’m just still getting over a little cold and flu. (I suspect I got it because I’m not used to the particular bacterial soup that is my new workplace. It’s not that the place is particularly dirty - it’s not - it’s that I haven’t yet developed resistance to the bugs that are there yet. This is pretty common.) Rather than go for a brew, I had to settle for some Chamomile tea and honey. It’s a bit of a relief when restaurants can be understanding about these sorts of things. I felt better as people arrived.

It was a small crowd, but we all got comfortable and I think everyone was in a pretty good mood. Despite the lack of sunlight, we all seem to be coping pretty well. The conversations drifted from coming holiday trips to the Vancouver Cooperative Auto Network (which I’ve written about before) - Susie Gardner and Travis Smith think it’s great, so I’m now more inclined to think more seriously about it, having known no one up to this point who had actually joined it, much less recommended it.

For those who didn’t make it to Subeez, the report from here on the venue is: A little loud on the music, but great, funky decor, much better food than Steamworks (and I’m probably not the only one to say that), and a more varied menu with better prices. The service was excellent and they dealt quite adroitly with all of the complications of staggered orders and multiple cheques. We’ll be back there in January. I wouldn’t give up on Calhoun’s, though. That might be good to try in February.

Here are the blogs of the Meetup attendees:

Walter Selent’s Web Page
onomatopeia
Web2
Buzz Marketing witth Blogs
Unvarnished
Maktaaq
DaneBrown.org (in 2 weeks)

I uploaded a few holiday snapshots of us around the table to Meetup.com. The camera flash was pretty extreme, but there’s not much you can do in a dimly lit place. Besides, it was after all, the solstice.

Besides all of the holidays and besides all of the darkness, it’s also that time of year when many of us (myself included) grin and say ‘See you next year!’ at the end of evenings. We aren’t being particularly clever, but it’s fun to say it all the same.