So we went to McDonald’s today, and for a variety of reasons wound up getting some Olympic mascot toys.
I know people have given them a hard time since they came out, but I kind of like them, and at the very least am fascinated by the design aspect of them. Olympic mascot-making is big business. Here’s some history:
The first official mascot was Waldi, the dachshund dog at the 1972 Munich Olympics. It apparently represents Resistance, Tenacity and Agility. I swear that I have a stuffed dog that looks a lot like this somewhere.
He was pretty awesome, as was Amik the beaver for the Montreal Olympics. I mean, I know it’s obvious and all, but the simplicity of the design is great.
The 80s mascots were pretty obvious, with the USSR selecting a bear and the United States selecting a bald eagle. The bear is far more win, though:
Seriously, look at this giant balloon at the opening ceremonies:
This was followed by another contender for best mascot ever with Hondori, the Korean tiger in 1988:
The winter Olympics have had some pretty terrible mascots, though:
As did the summer Olympics throughout the 90s and into the 2000s:
We all remember the Beijing mascots, of course:
And these are the first mascots I remember– the Snowlets of Nagano:
Apparently, they were originally going to have a snow weasel, but no one liked him. I would have liked to have seen it.
A while ago I put up a bunch of photos I took in January and February. These are the ones that caught my eye, and I wish I could take more like them:
Two stories that I’ve worked on have been credited to some degree with affecting change in Tumbler Ridge. From today’s edition:
“A grassroots community effort is to thank for Charles Helm’s spot in the Olympic torch relay through Tumbler Ridge on January 31, after the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) gave a last-minute nod to a local torchbearer.
But before that phone call was made, concerns from local citizens and the 2010 Spirit Committee were amplified by CBC Radio, Mayor Larry White, Peace River South MLA Blair Lekstrom, and Minister of State for the Olympics Mary McNeil. It culminated in a phone call to director of community services Cheryl Hayden at 5 p.m. the night before the relay.”
“A strong show of support by council in reaction to Dr. Charles Helm’s three-page letter led Mayor Larry White to update Lekstrom on the urgency of the issue. The difficulties posed by a “911 only” emergency room policy in Tumbler Ridge might also be taken to the Health Minister and Premier. Last Wednesday (Feb. 3), Charles Helm took his message to an audience across northern B.C., as he was interviewed on CBC Radio’s Daybreak North morning program…“Helm’s decision to air the issue may have spurred some new developments. A Northern Health spokesperson was on the line with CBC’s Daybreak North the morning following (Feb. 4) Helm’s interview. Later in the day, a Northern Health representative connected via teleconference to the interagency meeting taking place in Tumbler Ridge. And nine days after Helm told Northern Health he was going public with the issue, mayor and council and Tumbler Ridge’s seniors needs task force received Northern Health’s 26-page response to a report submitted by the district 16 months ago.”
For Black History Month, I made the proposal that we do a story about John Robert Giscome. The extent to which I knew about him was this one-line sentence from the Citizen:
“Closer to home, John Robert Giscome is the first recorded black person to spend time (1862-63) in the Fort George area, and is the namesake for the community of Giscome.”
So I started looking around, and Giscome’s story is fascinating. He was Jamaican born and came to the Americas to work on the railroad near Panama. He then followed the Gold Rush to California, before joining in the black American migration to British Columbia at the invitation of Governor James Douglas (who is also a great study).
He and his partner, Henry Dame of the Bahamas, came up to north-central BC and with the help of local guides “discovered” the Giscome portage, then known as “Lhedesti” or, “the shortcut.”
The two were successful in their mining efforts, and Giscome retired to Victoria with the modern day equivalent of half a million dollars.
Aside from the interesting turns in this story, including an encounter with cannibalism, it’s fascinating to hear a story of Canadian exploration not centered around a European (even if it does still result in a migrant to the area being credited with the ‘discovery’ of a route that had actually been in use for centuries). Here’s a guy who traveled across continents, started with very little, encountered the well-documented discrimination of the period, and still managed to settle down with $500,000 cash in modern terms.
A great coda to this story is that of Cecil Giscombe, an American poet who in the mid-90s traveled to Prince George and area to research a long-form poem/book about his potential relative and a wider exploration of the relationship between place and internal narrative, as well as the relationship between African-American thought and the abstract freedom sometimes symbolized (rightly or wrongly) by Canada.
Black History Month, an American-born event, can seem somewhat removed from the realities of northern BC, but through Giscome I’ve discovered a conduit into that narrative that I look forward to delving into over the coming month, and beyond.
*NOTE* The aforementioned Cecil Giscombe will be on the show tomorrow around 7:45 Pacific. He’s a fascinating talker, and I highly recommend a listen CBC Radio One in northern BC or online here.
Further reading: “John Robert Giscome” via the Huble Homestead/Giscome Portage Heritage Society
The perspectives expressed in the blog are those of the author and the author alone, and do not reflect the views of anyone else.
This morning on the show there was a discussion about Coca-Cola’s Aboriginal Art Bottle program. When I first started working on this, I wasn’t expecting much. After all, there’s been a fair amount of criticism surrounding certain Olympic sponsors’ use of indigenous symbolism, and if our own homegrown companies could have such a huge miss in this arena, what are the chances a huge multinational could do a successful job?
I don’t have the background, academic, cultural, or otherwise, to provide a proper evaluation of this campaign, but I can say that at a glance it’s far, far better than I expected. For one, unlike most mainstream uses of Aboriginal art, this one actually goes beyond Inukshuks and Bill Reid (not that I have a problem with either of those) and represents artists from across the country. The show spoke to Garry Oker, a member of the Doig River First Nations near Fort St. John, and here in Prince George Kim Stewart was selected for her piece representing Metis culture. A quick glance at the iCoke gallery reveals pieces from Labrador, the Pabineau First Nation, and Winnipeg, with more still to come. While the canvas is distinctly Coke, it seems each artist has put their own personal style into place.
Of course there’s always debate over whether it’s right for a product such as Coke to start mucking around in other cultures, but in this case the artists chose to become involved in the brand and it seems to have been handled as well as could be expected. I have mixed feelings towards this very complex debate, but at a gut level I think its unfair to the artists and the wider cultures to assume that they lack the resilience to adapt to a changing world, including a commercial one. That’s not to say there aren’t valid concerns that could be raised, but by the same stroke it’s probably too simplistic to assume that Coke and the Olympics will automatically fail at any attempt to incorporate indigenous culture into their ‘brand’ (for lack of a better word).
Another thing I find really interesting here is that in an attempt to ‘brand’ Canada in the months leading up to the Olympics, there’s been a huge influx of Aboriginal motifs into arts and advertising. I’m curious if this will lead to foreign visitors having a false sense of the amount that Aboriginal cultures make up the mainstream Canadian identity, and if so, what the longer term implications of this might be.
Thoughts?
A while ago, I started trying out Flickr, and I simultaneously started trying out photography more. I’ve been getting better (I think), and by far my favourite set so far is the Listen Bird. This is a piece of graffiti that’s been cropping up around the city for the past half-decade or so, and through a group I found on Flickr I’ve discovered it’s actually all over the country. I keep finding more and hope to eventually collect shots of all the Prince George ones, and would really like to know who’s behind them all. If anyone has any thoughts or information about this, please contact me.
| www.flickr.com |
Recently, I managed to bluff my way into becoming a freelancer for CBC Radio One.* Even better, in an effort to get me fully trained in CBC standards and protocol and because they had a brief period of time where they could use an extra team member, I’m working with the morning show Daybreak North for most of the month of January.
I know a lot of people take issue with our public broadcaster, but I am a huge fan, especially of the radio department. I’ve made the argument in the past that CBC Radio is as essential a component of nation-building as the railway was, and I believe it stills play a very large role in leading and contributing to a national conversation. So to be even a very small part of it is, for me, a pretty big deal.
During my first week, I worked as a hybrid researcher/associate producer. What this essentially boils down to is I pitch story ideas and then pursue those that have been approved. For our purposes, stories can take the form of on-air interviews or self-contained tapes (think of them as mini-documentaries. Really, really mini-documentaries).
If the story is going to be an on-air interview I find guests and conduct a pre-interview. A pre-interview for radio, by the way, is awesome. If you’re working in print and conduct an interview, you have to make sure your quotes are exactly as your subject said, and often have to transcribe the full thing, which is not a fun task. Radio doesn’t have this problem, because, well, listeners actually hear the subject. And since I’m conducting a pre-interview and not the on-air interview, I don’t have the pressures of being on the air. I can just take part in a conversation with someone interesting, jotting down notes about which questions have the most interesting answers. I then write a script, including some background info on the story, and turn it over to the producer and hosts who use their experience to make everything sound radio-worthy.
I never knew such a job existed, but I love it.
For most of my first week, my role was mainly working on pre-interviews, and in that time I received what I think is probably a pretty fair representation of how things might work. On day one, everything went smoothly, including when I had to use a name and a position to track down someone who used to live in Prince George, currently lives in Canmore, Alberta, and was at present somewhere in Europe (fortunately, he was using his Canmore-based cell number and didn’t seem concerned about roaming charges).
Day two started seemed to start out in the same way. I had two fairly straightforward stories to set up: the first one was a wilderness story in which most of the leading experts were based in northern BC and the second was based on a series of press releases that had no less than five media contact people available. But this is where I learned about the unpredictability of the job: I managed to get the first story done using a contact from the southern part of the province and the second story was killed because I couldn’t find anyone to talk to us.
The other two days were about a mixture of the first two, as I learned new parts of the in-house communication systems and formatting and the like. On Thursday, my last day for the week (not counting Friday, when I was called in for a breaking news story), I put together my first tape piece, a story I discovered through a Facebook event invitation. To combat the January blues, a local couple had started a tradition they dubbed “International Souffle Day” which has been growing since its inception six years ago. I got in touch with one-half of the couple, conducted a phone interview, and then spliced it together with some music, taking my own voice out in the process, to make it sound as if she was giving one continuous narrative. I was pretty happy with it, and even happier when I learned it was picked up the national syndication service and broadcast on morning shows across the country including Yellowknife, Toronto, and Charlottetown.
That is one obvious highlight of my first week, but the other is a little more satisfying. I found out about an author up in Telkwa, and contacted him to set up an interview. After preliminaries had been taken care of, he sent me an email thanking me for contacting him and saying that his parents were really excited because someone from the CBC had called. Up until that point it hadn’t really occurred to me that I was “someone from the CBC”, but in his context, that’s what I am. Again, I know there are people who take issue with CBC, and many who never listen to it, but there are lots of people who do, and I think you’d be hard-pressed to find someone in this country who doesn’t know what it is. My previous media experience has been pretty small-scale to the point that more often than not the first couple of minutes of setting up interviews were focused on explaining what and where the publication I was representing was. That is not a problem when you say, “I’m calling from the CBC.”
So all in all, it’s been a good first week. My only complaint so far is the fact that the office computers are locked into the archaic Internet Explorer 6 (it doesn’t even have tabbed browsing!), but that’s pretty small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. I’m feeling really lucky to get a foot in the door without any j-school background (nice to know experience, even as limited as mine, still counts for something) and am pretty positive about the idea of freelancing for the foreseeable future. For a more up-to-date commentary on my experiences, you can follow me on Twitter. Daybreak airs from Monday to Friday in northern BC from 5:55 to 8:37 a.m. Pacific Time on CBC Radio One or streaming online here.
*Actually, I didn’t bluff my way in because it implies I somehow fooled the very astute folks in charge of hiring. So let’s just say I’m very, very lucky.
“Just this side of heaven is a place called Rainbow Bridge
When an animal dies that has been especially close to someone here, that pet goes to Rainbow Bridge. There are meadows and hills for all of our special friends so they can run and play together. There is plenty of food and water and sunshine, and our friends are warm and comfortable. All the animals who had been ill and old are restored to health and vigor; those who were hurt or maimed are made whole and strong again, just as we remember them in our dreams of days and times gone by.
The animals are happy and content, except for one small thing: they miss someone very special to them; who had to be left behind. They all run and play together, but the day comes when one suddenly stops and looks into the distance. The bright eyes are intent; the eager body quivers. Suddenly he begins to break away from the group, flying over the green grass, his legs carrying him faster and faster. YOU have been spotted, and when you and your special friend finally meet, you cling together in joyous reunion, never to be parted again. The happy kisses rain upon your face; your hands again caress the beloved head, and you look once more into the trusting eyes of your pet, so long gone from your life but never absent from your heart.”
Rest in peace Oreo. ‘Til we meet again.
During my brief foray into the provincial bureaucracy, I became loosely connected with a group of individuals working throughout Canada to make government more open, engaging, and engaged through the use of new ideas and new technologies. Since leaving government, I have continued to follow the conversations taking place on blog posts and on Twitter with interest, but have found myself going from “active participant” to “passive observer” to the point I’m at now, where I feel like the conversation really has nothing to do with me. This is not a criticism of these individuals– they are preoccupied with how to best do their jobs, which is breaking down barriers in government to increase the flow of information. But what I want to know is how I can best do my job– as a citizen– that helps promote the ideals these groups are working for: transparency, accountability, efficiency, ingenuity from our governments agencies (municipal, provincial, and federal).
So the question I’m asking of anyone involved in “government 2.0” is what does a “citizen 2.0” look like? How do we engage with our elected officials and, maybe more importantly, the non-political administrators, public servants, and policy-makers? How do we demonstrate that open government works, that we want to be engaged, that we are intelligent enough to understand that if you make government more human you won’t be opening yourself up to criticism for your flaws but respect for your transparency?
Basically, how do we support the work that you, the government 2.0 evangelist, are doing?
Replies welcome via comments, email, Twitter, or your own blog post responses.
I just left these comments on David Eaves‘ post about the Public Policy and Governance Review in response to his interview with the publication, but I thought I’d share them here, as well:
“1. I think you’re dead-on when you talk about “young people” (or more accurately, maybe just people geared towards new ways of sharing, creating, and communicating) who are interested in implementing ideas becoming frustrated with how slow government/bureaucracy tends to move when it comes to adopting new ideas. I spent some time with a provincial ministry working on a wiki-type model for information sharing, and even though there was a lot of support from just about every individual person I encountered, at every level, it remains that the number of meetings and consultations that need to be held prior to doing something is… if not discouraging, certainly not conducive to encouraging ideas that go outside the status quo, and as a result I’m a lot more keen on working with smaller organizations than something as unwieldy as provincial or federal government. And again, this despite the fact I was given a lot of encouragement from everyone inside the system.
2. For a certain group of people, these discussions are going to happen with or without the implicit blessing of the overarching system. For my purposes, I was able to use Twitter and blogs such as your own to find people across the country who are involved in “government 2.0″ projects and solicit information and advice. As more people used to communicating in this way enter the system, this trend is only going to grown. Government (and other organizations) would be well-served to recognize and embrace it.
3. I continue to be struck by the differences between the political and bureaucratic branches of government when it comes to using new technology. It seems as if almost every MP and MLA has their own Twitter feed, and yet how many ministries are there using these methods to communicate their initiatives? Even something as simple as an RSS feed attached to a Twitter account and Facebook page would increase the likelihood that people find the information at a cost of what? The two hours it would take to set something like that up? I understand there are security concerns over what would be shared over these channels, but it misunderstands the technology. Any public servant *could* use Facebook to share confidential information, but then so could any public servant send that same information out to the media using email, or print off copies and leave them in a coffee shop. We need to abandon the assumption that people can no longer exercise judgment the minute a new method of communications comes along.”
I haven’t done the best job of keeping an updated list of my favourite reads on this blog (though you can track my reading here and here, but this morning I’ve come across three articles worth sharing, and the time to share them.
Michael M’Gonigle – Against Copenhagen
Wasn’t sure what to expect from the title, but this is basically an argument that what’s likely going to happen at Copenhagen will not be the systemic change needed to truly combat the problems at hand. Basically:
” If you were to pass around a single piece of information at Copenhagen, it should be the two pages of graphs at the beginning of an interesting book written by Gus Speth, this generation’s leading environmental bureaucrat in Washington D.C. The book is The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability. Speth sets out 16 hockey stick graphs that portray increases in water use, in the damning of rivers, in CO2 concentrations, ozone depletion (hopefully now slowing down), rates of increase in average surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere, the rising frequency of great floods, depletion of ocean ecosystems, loss of rainforests, biodiversity decline, increases in fertilizer and paper consumption, and the explosion in the number of motor vehicles.
And three others: growth in the size of the global economy (GDP), foreign direct investment, and population.
Together, these graphs — all hockey sticks — provide a single message. We are killing the earth in every way imaginable, getting rich in the process, and providing a model for a growing world population to join in on. “
Against Copenhagen »
Gil Shochat – the Dark Country
This is a story that really needs more play– the difficulty citizens, journalists, etc in Canada face when trying to get access to information about our governments, and the causes and implications of that difficulty. One interesting point (from one of my favourite bloggers):
“In Canada, citizens could be granted “access” to information by the government, if they followed certain rules set by that same government. As open government advocate David Eaves points out, this follows from a tradition in which sovereignty resides with the Queen. Government data “isn’t your, mine, or ‘our’ data,” he writes. “It’s hers. It is at her discretion, or more specifically, the discretion of her government servants, to decide when and if it should be shared.” In the United States, the American Revolution put an end to any such notion.”
Some other highlights from the article to amuse and alarm:
the Dark Country »
This Magazine – Legalize Everything Series
In what was apparently a five-day series a month ago, This Magazine urges us to legalize suicide to fix the health care system, legalize (music) piracy to fix the music industry, legalize drugs to save addicts, legalize raw milk to… make tastier cheese, and legalize hate speech to save democracy. Aside from the raw milk argument (a lot less hot button then the others, no?), I’ve heard them all before, but it’s interesting to delve into these debates from time to time.
Legalize Everything »
So, apparently the last decade had the best TV shows of all time in it. But I didn’t see them. I guess I never watched much TV, but just how little I watch has really been presented to me with these end-of decade lists. So, while I’m currently working on my list of my favourite albums of the last decade, let me now present to you a list of TV shows from the last decade that I didn’t watch, should have, and still might, shows I didn’t watch, should have, and probably won’t, shows I should have watched and did, and shows I shouldn’t have watched, but did, and don’t regret it. The worst part is, even in the category of shows I have watched, there’s only eight that I’ve seen every episode of, and about five more that I’d say it’s safe to say I’ve seen over 50% of the episodes. What was I doing with my time? Catching up on Oz, I guess.
15 shows I didn’t watch, should have, and still might:
1. The Wire
2. The Sopranos
3. Six Feet Under
4. Mad Men
5. Freaks and Geeks
6. Battlestar Gallactica
7. Big Love
8. Dexter
9. The Venture Bros.
10. Flight of the Conchords
11. the West Wing
12. Band of Brothers
13. Torchwood
14. Extras
15. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
12 shows I didn’t watch, apparently should have, but probably won’t:
1. Lost
2. Breaking Bad
3. Deadwood
4. The Shield
5. Veronica Mars
6. Friday Night Lights
7. Firefly
8. 24
9. Alias
10. Desperate Housewives
11. Rome
12. Big Bang Theory
10 shows I should have watched and did:
1. Arrested Development
2. 30 Rock
3. The Office (both versions)
4. How I Met Your Mother
5. Futurama
6. Curb Your Enthusiasm
7. Undeclared
8. Easbound and Down
9. Planet Earth
10. Better Off Ted
12 shows I shouldn’t have watched, did, and don’t regret it:
1. Scrubs
2. Being Erica
3. South Park
4. Everybody Hates Chris
5. Corner Gas
6. Heroes (the first season– I bailed midway through season two and am not going back)
7. Clone High
8. Pushing Daisies
9. Malcolm in the Middle
10. Modern Family
11. Weeds
12. Entourage
(actually, for the last two I sort of regret watching more than the first two seasons).
“Two weeks ago, I wrote here about how the ‘real time web’ is turning all of us into inhuman egotists. How we’re increasingly seeing people at the scene of major accidents grabbing their cellphones to capture the dramatic events and share them with their friends, rather than calling 911. Last week I went even further with my doom-mongering, suggesting that the trend of adding people’s homes to Foursquare without permission was indicative of a generation that prioritised their own fun over the privacy of their friends.
In the actions of Tearah Moore at Fort Hood, we have the perfect example of both kinds of selfishness.
There surely can’t be a human being left in the civilised world who doesn’t know that cellphones must be switched off in hospitals, and yet not only did Moore leave hers on but she actually used it to photograph patients, and broadcast the images to the world. Just think about that for a second. Rather than offering to help the wounded, or getting the hell out of the way of those trying to do their jobs, Moore actually pointed a cell-phone at a wounded soldier, uploaded it to twitpic and added a caption saying that the victim “got shot in the balls”.”
The above quotation makes it look like more of an indictment of an individual than it actually is; he is just using Ms. Moore as an example of a trend that is everywhere from the cellphone shots of British subway bombings to YouTube footage from Iran– people are watching, not helping.
After Fort Hood, another example of how ‘citizen journalists’ can’t handle the truth »
also from Carr: Weezer, plane crashes and everything else that’s worrying about the real-time web »
Ad nauseam
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January 17 2010 | ∞
Today, I turn 25, which I guess I’m no longer in my young 20s, and which I also suspect means I’m pretty much an adult by any standards. Some people have a problem with birthdays, but I don’t, really. It’s occasion to take stock of what I’ve been doing with myself, and I’m glad to say I’m pretty happy with where I am, what I’ve done, and where I’m headed. I’ve had a blessed life, with plenty of supportive people helping me along the way, and as a result, since leaving high school I’ve been able to do the following:
On top of it all, I’m in a happy relationship approaching six years, have numerous rescued pets, great friends and family, and I’m in the process of starting two new jobs that capture my imagination and interest and (gasp) might actually lead to me having a real career. I can’t imagine that I could ask for much more.
Again, there’s no way I could have done this without the support of some great people along the way, whether I see them on a day-to-day basis or only interacted with them a few times. So, for everything I have and everything I’ve done, thanks– to all of you. It’s been a great 25 years (even I don’t remember the first few). Here’s hoping the next 25 go as well.
Filed under: personal | Discussion