the pod bay door

¦¦ It’s lunchtime here at the ol’ SciTech Library, and as I munch down my spinach salad, covered with cooked chicken breast, tomato, and shredded mild cheddar cheese, I discovered a story that makes me so proud to have been born and raised in Manitoba. A pizza delivery driver in Selkirk MB, also a single mother, stopped to help a gunshot victim, and was dismissed from her job shortly afterwards. In fact, her boss had driven by and saw her before she’d even left the scene. He stopped and told a policeman that she would be dismissed. The manager noted: “She wasn’t dismissed because she was at the shooting scene,” he said. “She was away from her job for no good reason” (my highlight).

The story is receiving North American press coverage. The Winnipeg Sun received dozens of e-mails denouncing the restaurants owners and calling for a boycott.

Now that’s compassion defined, dontcha think? I hope the residents in Selkirk rally around her, and stop buying pies from Frank’s Pizza. Maybe it needs a new slogan: Our Pies Are Delivered Hot, Unless You Get Shot. The story has been picked up internationally, and the manager, Jason Boyd, is getting skewered royally. Read some of the comments on Foodinc.ca. I encourage you to submit comments here as well.

¦¦ With all due respect to my many dear American friends, occasionally you shake your head in disbelief at what some of them do to get attention, especially in the name of so-called patriotism. Will the “average” American ever learn that there is sentient life outside the 48 contiguous, and, gosh darn it, that it matters too?

¦¦ Another pronouncement from the established media that blogging is now mainstream.

¦¦ Late night musical discovery: Secondsight, from North Carolina.

¦¦ It makes good sense that my friend and colleague Stephen Abram is a member of the Internet Librarian Hall of Fame. My question is: how does one qualify, and who makes decision to induct?

¦¦ It was great to see SNL pay tribute last Saturday to Fred Rogers. Horatio Sanz sat on stage near the end and sang a song in his honour. In the past, SNL skewered him mercilessly, the high water mark being the early 1980’s with Eddie Murphy, when he did Mr Robinson’s Neighborhood. National Lampoon was in on it as well, satirizing him on one of their first albums. Read a most heartfelt tribute to Rogers from PopMatters.

¦¦ Make your own online kaleidoscope! The Internet justs gets better every day.

¦¦ So it’s come to this: in the USA, you must use caution when wearing a t-shirt that reads: Give Peace A Chance and Peace on Earth. A 60-year old lawyer was arrested in a mall in Albany NY for refusing to remove his t-shirt, featuring the aforemention phrases. His 31-year old son avoided arrest by removing his t-shirt, which read, No War With Iraq and Let Inspections Work. The capper: he bought the t-shirt in a store in the mall. The good news is the mall owner has dropped the charges after protestors entered the mall wearing similar t-shirts, and refused to leave until the charges were dropped; what’s insane is that the charges were ever laid in the first place.

Since Sept 11 2001, free speech is America isn’t as free as it was once perceived to be. I watched Politically Incorrect the first night it was back on the air after the attacks, and heard Bill Maher suggest that the pilots of those planes were not cowards, but that the American military was, for lobbing missles from hundreds of miles away. He was admonished by Ari Fleischer, in what smacked as censorship from the White House.
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¦¦ Indeed it is. The highlight today was a haircut at 10:00 am. But I digress. Ten years ago, when AAA radio began to take off in North America, I lamented in a letter to the Edmonton Journal that no such station was to be found in these here parts. Around that time, Calgary and Vancouver had AAA stations (Mix 1060, Coast 1040), but both were relegated to the AM band, rather than FM, and they could not build an audience big enough or sell enough advertising to stay solvent. Mix 1060’s playlist was so diverse and interesting that one time on a trip from Edmonton to Calgary, I listed every song they played in three hours to get a sense of the range of music, and I was impressed. My letter drew a response from the then-pop music writer, Helen Metella, who agreed. However, she interviewed local rock FM music directors, who insisted such a format would never work in Edmonton.

It’s ten years later, and Edmonton still features five faceless, interchangable pop-rock FM stations, populated by idiot djs, with playlists as bland as you can imagine. K-97 likes to play a lot of Supertramp, and 100.3 enjoys hitting us with Zeppelin. Hey, I like LZ, but time and a place, guys, ok?

Well, I should maybe make that 4.5 stations. A few days ago, Mix 96 because 96X, The Hit Music Alternative. I’ve listened to it for four days, while driving, and can report that the playlist is, well, diverse and interesting. There are problems, of course: the djs still talk to us like we’re 10-year olds, and often they will not tell you the name and/or song title of the tune(s) just played. This infuriates me – the Calgary and Vancouver stations always listed the song info after a set of tunes. Regardless, I hope they survive, and do well, if only because they’ve already been dissed by the sockheads at 100.3 – the radio station that growls at you 300x a day.

¦¦ While searching for info on AAA stations, I came across a web site called EdmontonStories.com. It is set in MT, and is a site to which readers can contribute Edmonton stories. It looks new, and I don’t think anyone other than designer has posted yet. Among the links there is one to another Edmonton blog, from Ray vanderWoning, rightfully titled Caustic Sense. This is why. So I look at the bottom page, and read “This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.” I am further intrigued to read about what they are:

“Creative Commons has developed a Web application that helps people dedicate their creative works to the public domain — or retain their copyright while licensing them as free for certain uses, on certain conditions. Unlike the GNU GPL, Creative Commons licenses are not be designed for software, but rather for other kinds of creative works: websites, scholarship, music, film, photography, literature, courseware, etc. We hope to build upon and complement the work of others who have created public licenses for a variety of creative works.”

Watch an animated short about their mission (complete with cheesy roller-rink organ). Creative Commons wants to help us “skip the intermediary”, i.e., copyright. CC wants to help you let others make “some use” of your creativity on the internet, without having to jump through legal hoops. If copyright is a red light saying “stop”, CC is the green light, saying “c’mon in.” Their licences are explained here. CC has its own blog as well.

I think this is a great idea, long overdue. Copyright is important and necessary, but can be stifling and suffocating. CC is an US-based initiative, and I am not sure if it can applies outside that jurisidiction, but their licences are being used by non-Americans.

I also note that the Creative Commons movement is old news, from 2002, and I wasn’t surprised to learn that it is chaired by Lawrence Lessig. To those of you already familiar with CC, thanks for your patience.

¦¦ Look carefully before you decide to close this window after it opens. Thanks, Sharon.

¦¦ I am friggin’ tired tonight.

¦¦ I didn’t know that “yo la tengo” means “I have it” in Spanish. I did know that “husker du” means “do you remember” in Norwegian and/or Danish.

¦¦ Blogging is moving into the mainstream very quickly. Now, Harvard has hired Dave Winer to head up its new Weblogs at Harvard Initiative. So the question is begged: if blogging has made it to Harvard, have blogs moved into the mainstream? If so, I’m wondering what comes next, in whatever embryonic stage it might be at this time. Will blogs become passé? I don’t think so, at least not for a while. I think blogs will continue to evolve and mutate and morph into other formats. Time will tell.

¦¦ Norah Jones and Christopher Cross? Will she suffer his fate? I doubt it.

¦¦ Napster, seemingly forgotten these days, is set to return later this year.

¦¦ I was driving to work this morning, west on 23rd Avenue. I sped up a bit to catch up to vehicle in front of me, so that I wouldn’t have to yield to a whack of cars about to turn north on 119th Street. As I approached my turn (from 23rd, turning right, i.e., north on 119th Street), I hit ice, and lost control of my car. It spun to the right, did a 180, jumped the curb, and slammed into the windrow of snow that had been pushed up onto the boulevard by graders a few days earlier. Wearing my seat belt most likely prevented me from slamming into the window of my door. I was lucky that another vehicle wasn’t following me at that moment.

I was stunned for about a nanosecond, realized immediately that I couldn’t open my door, and crawled out through the passenger door. No, I don’t own a cell phone, and realized I had to walk back to Saddleback Road (approx 115th Street), and call the Alberta Motor Association to come pull me out. I left the car with the hazard lights on, praying that no one would hit it coming around the corner. Eight minutes later I reached a phone, I made the call, and started to walk back. I noticed from afar that vehicles were slowing down to a stop at the yield where I’d spun my car, and started running, thinking it might have been hit. As I got closer, I saw that another car had spun into the windrow to avoid hitting me. Three men were trying to dislodge the car from the snow for the driver, a woman, who told me she saw my car as she was rounding the corner, and panicked.

One of the men had a shovel. I had one in my trunk, so we both shovelled more snow, and then four of us dislodged her car, and she left. Then two of the men tried to help me with my car, despite the impending arrival of the AMA tow truck. Less than 5 minutes later, the tow truck arrived, and using the winch, slowly pulled my car out of the windrow (which, btw, is what we call a long row of snow piled up from grading, even though the word means a row created by wind.)

In the end I was mostly embarrassed for driving like a idiot. Trying to save myself 10 seconds, I lost 45 minutes. Lesson learned, I drove off to work. At 51st Avenue, I came upon a large pickup truck, which was stalled. The driver was trying to push it himself. I thought, one good turn deserves another, and pulled over to help him push it off 119th Street, away from the other vehicles.