Sunday, January 27, 2013 Idylwylde Library, Edmonton
Some city pools and libraries are closer together than others, I have discovered by bus and foot in Edmonton. I think the two I visited today are the closest: I can see the Bonnie Doon pool building across the field outside this library windows. Even on Sunday, buses are adequate: Bus 1 took me downtown and Bus 8 took me to the pool within an hour today.
Most pools are within ten blocks of a library: Jasper Place Pool and Jasper Place Library, Peter Hemingway Pool and Woodcroft Library, Commonwealth Pool and Sprucewood Library, Hardisty Pool and Capilano Library, Confederation Pool and Whitemud Crossing Library, Londonderry Pool and Londonderry Library, Kinsman Pool and Stanley A. Milner Library, Scona Pool and Strathcona Library, and Mill Woods Pool and Mill Woods Library.
A few pools are more than ten blocks, from a library: Terwilligar Pool and Riverbend Library, and Grand Trunk Pool and Calder Library.
A few pools are not close to any library: A.C.T., Eastglen, and O'Leary.
A few libraries are not close to any pool: Abbotsfield, Lois Hole, and Castledowns.
I have been to all pools but Scona and Mill Woods, and to all libraries but Londonderry and Mill Woods.
My one-year pool pass for low income people gets me in free at all city pools. My $12 annual library fee gets me free internet access and borrowing at all city libraries. Had I gotten the pool pass first, it would have given me no-fee library use.
Each pool has unique features. Most are part of recreation centres which also have fitness centres and perhaps a skating rink. Terwilligar has four skating rinks. Eastglen and Confederation are saltwater, the latter a larger pool. Kinsmen is the biggest: two 50m, 8-lane pools. Commonwealth and Terwilligar have beach entries, the latter pool larger. Bonnie Doon and Peter Hemingway have large bleachers, the latter pool larger. Londonderry and A.C.T. are family-oriented, non-rectangular, the latter pool smaller. Hardisty and Jasper Place are about the same size, the latter's hot pool bigger, the former's steam room bigger.
Jasper Place's pool, the closest to where I stay, 14 blocks away, has a 5m platform. Most pools have diving boards. Some have ropes. Many have waterslides: Terwilligar's is the longest, Jasper Place's and Commonwealth's the steepest, I recall.
Bonnie Doon's steamroom, with three levels, is the hottest I found. Its saunas are in the change rooms, unlike other pool's saunas. Kinsman has no hot pool, and only a small sauna.
Each library has internet access. The most crowded are Stanley A. Milner and Jasper Place. The least crowded are Whitemud Crossing and Lois Hole. I can almost always get online within minutes of walking into a library.
The biggest library is Milner, the smallest Jasper Place, temporarily housed in an office building while a new library goes up a few blocks away. It reminds me of the Edson Public Library in the basement of town hall until Edson's new library went up in the 1970s. I'll be home in British Columbia before Jasper Place's new location opens in 2013.
Music and booksales are two remarkable library features I have found. I have borrowed a bewildering variety of compact disks. A pre-Christmas weekend booksale in the downtown library, Milner, formerly Centennial, charged $10/box of books and cds on its last day. An early February sale will do the same. I bought 20 cds and 20 books for $10.
If I keep visiting pools, and walking hither and yon, here and back in British Columbia, then I might live long enough to read all those books.
Sunday, January 27, 2013
Saturday, January 19, 2013
Pool Passionate Intensity and Reasons to Live
Saturday, January 19, 2013 Woodcroft Public Library, Edmonton, Canada
I found a crowded pool changeroom at 7:30 this morning. I went to relax. I seemed to be a minority of one. The men of all ages and shapes in that change room busily changed into and out of swimsuits. "I got here at six," one told another. "You slept in!" was the reply, in a tone of good-humored chastisement.
Out on deck, I saw each lane, "Slow," "Medium," and "Fast," occupied by at least one swimmer. I limbered up, backswam four 50-metre lengths in a "Slow" lane, and went first to the steam room, second to a deck chair to read from my latest New Internationalist ( http://www.newint.org/), third to the whirlpool, fourth to read on deck again, and fifth to the change room.
In the change room, I overheard two young men lamenting "poor Vancouver," where one's friend had trouble finding a job before he relocated to a job in Kamloops. "It's only 130-140 hours per month. I want to work more," the man's friend said. I think of the words I heard years ago from a Catholic priest who later left the order for a woman and children: "At the end of the rat race, you're still just a rat."
Earlier this month, I met a Filipino woman who lives in a new housing development in southwest Edmonton. She complained that she did not know her neighbors. "We all just get up, go to work, and go home. That's not life," she said. She explained the community gatherings she remembered from Philippines, where neighbors knew one another. I suggested that she post a sign for a potluck dinner or other gathering.
A fall, 2012 Edmonton newspaper article said that speakers of Tagalog, a Filipino national language, number 495 000 in Canada. Tagalog is Canada's fastest-growing language. Arabic is second. Canada is a multinational country, a model for a combative world.
Someone told me that people in Edmonton's outlying neighborhoods "only stay about five years." Then they move toward the centre of Edmonton. Presumably life is livelier closer to the centre. Strathcona, her central neighborhood, seems to her too lively on weekends, "When Sherwood Park comes to town." Sherwood Park is an Edmonton suburb, much of it similar to the Filipino woman's southwest Edmonton neighborhood.
Before I met the Filipino woman, I met a man born and raised in downtown Edmonton. Now retired, he lives in Castledowns, in north Edmonton. He told me that his downtown childhood was in a community where people lived and worked, gathered for social activities, and knew and helped one another. His current community is less social, he said.
Many themes run through these situations, these lives, these laments. these memories.
First, the intense swimmers yearn to live healthier and therefore probably longer. Life is short and death is eternal, despite religious delusions. Multidimensional universe theories seem like sounder sects: somewhere you live and choose what you did not live and choose in this life. Perhaps compost is the surest immortality. We are made of organic molecules: immortality via decomposition, and absorption into other life forms.
So people swim furiously on Saturday mornings. Who would argue against longer, healthier life?
Second, one who works, eats, and sleeps, with minimal social activity travels an uncertain road to happiness. Canada has a higher rate of mental illness than Kerala, a poor state in southern India. Does a mundane, materialistic lifestyle with minimal social activity contribute to this? Is such life why "Sherwood Park comes to town" on weekends? Not everyone in inner neighborhoods lives a happy life, either. Perhaps they should socialize with Sherwood Parkers: exude civility, imbibe fun.
Indeed, inner city neighborhoods, stalked by police, burst with the many social and personal problems that such neighborhoods' poverty produces. As this city booms, and rents and prices outpace wages, material security diminishes, as do physical and mental security. Freedom declines, too.
The comfortable and the reactionary, groups that overlap some but not all, whine for safer neighborhoods. They belittle the social and economic forces that make neighborhoods unsafe, and people unhappy. They preach individualistic solutions to collective problems. They lock their doors and trust the police to hold back the poor. Police buttress the system which makes the poor, makes the crime, makes the unhappiness that creeps into nice neighborhoods, through locked doors.
When fascism comes to the United States, it will come wrapped in a flag and carrying a Bible, US political eonomist Michael Parenti wrote. Canadians, now as in the 1930s, welcome fascism more than they admit. Alberta's 1936-1971 Social Credit government ruled well for the war industry and postwar oil boom. Socreds promoted Christian fundamentalism, whose socially-choking legacy endures. Alberta's 1971-present Progressive Conservative government continues to serve the oil industry, and rant propaganda against the rising worldwide call for ecological sense and against the tarsands. "NATO's gas tank," I call Alberta.
Third, leaving a dull neighborhood helps it remain dull. Instead, stay and enliven it. Similarly, people who lament inferior public schools should help improve them, rather than move their children to private schools, which everyone cannot afford. Bridges, not walls, enhance civic life. A Czech proverb says that good neighbors are better security than good fences. Such neighbors enhance each other's freedom, too.
Everyone cannot afford to live in inner, older, livelier Edmonton. Nor has everyone the time and money to swim to fitness in a pool. Anyone can offer kindness and comfort, not "the cold hand of charity" but real attention and care, to those struggling to be happy via, or despite, the pursuit of material security, of wealth. Talk to your neighbors. Make it a neighborhood. Walk together. Eat together. Be together. Together we are stronger. Together we can design better ways to live. Perhaps together we can save our species from killing itself by killing its environment, physical and human.
I think people should organize their lives around living, not around working to pay bills and buying what others tell them will make them happy. This lifestyle can lead them to expensive, unfulfilling thrills such as gambling, drinking, and shopping.
Perhaps you, like the 1700s English poet Alexander Pope, think I "should hold my piece nine years." That is, I should not write such things. Perhaps I add to the sea of ill-considered speech that floats online, like the garbage that floats on the oceans. If you have a piercing insight or two to offer, I welcome you to shine it through what garbage you find in my words. Perhaps we can join dialectically to enhance life, above and below sea level.
I found a crowded pool changeroom at 7:30 this morning. I went to relax. I seemed to be a minority of one. The men of all ages and shapes in that change room busily changed into and out of swimsuits. "I got here at six," one told another. "You slept in!" was the reply, in a tone of good-humored chastisement.
Out on deck, I saw each lane, "Slow," "Medium," and "Fast," occupied by at least one swimmer. I limbered up, backswam four 50-metre lengths in a "Slow" lane, and went first to the steam room, second to a deck chair to read from my latest New Internationalist ( http://www.newint.org/), third to the whirlpool, fourth to read on deck again, and fifth to the change room.
In the change room, I overheard two young men lamenting "poor Vancouver," where one's friend had trouble finding a job before he relocated to a job in Kamloops. "It's only 130-140 hours per month. I want to work more," the man's friend said. I think of the words I heard years ago from a Catholic priest who later left the order for a woman and children: "At the end of the rat race, you're still just a rat."
Earlier this month, I met a Filipino woman who lives in a new housing development in southwest Edmonton. She complained that she did not know her neighbors. "We all just get up, go to work, and go home. That's not life," she said. She explained the community gatherings she remembered from Philippines, where neighbors knew one another. I suggested that she post a sign for a potluck dinner or other gathering.
A fall, 2012 Edmonton newspaper article said that speakers of Tagalog, a Filipino national language, number 495 000 in Canada. Tagalog is Canada's fastest-growing language. Arabic is second. Canada is a multinational country, a model for a combative world.
Someone told me that people in Edmonton's outlying neighborhoods "only stay about five years." Then they move toward the centre of Edmonton. Presumably life is livelier closer to the centre. Strathcona, her central neighborhood, seems to her too lively on weekends, "When Sherwood Park comes to town." Sherwood Park is an Edmonton suburb, much of it similar to the Filipino woman's southwest Edmonton neighborhood.
Before I met the Filipino woman, I met a man born and raised in downtown Edmonton. Now retired, he lives in Castledowns, in north Edmonton. He told me that his downtown childhood was in a community where people lived and worked, gathered for social activities, and knew and helped one another. His current community is less social, he said.
Many themes run through these situations, these lives, these laments. these memories.
First, the intense swimmers yearn to live healthier and therefore probably longer. Life is short and death is eternal, despite religious delusions. Multidimensional universe theories seem like sounder sects: somewhere you live and choose what you did not live and choose in this life. Perhaps compost is the surest immortality. We are made of organic molecules: immortality via decomposition, and absorption into other life forms.
So people swim furiously on Saturday mornings. Who would argue against longer, healthier life?
Second, one who works, eats, and sleeps, with minimal social activity travels an uncertain road to happiness. Canada has a higher rate of mental illness than Kerala, a poor state in southern India. Does a mundane, materialistic lifestyle with minimal social activity contribute to this? Is such life why "Sherwood Park comes to town" on weekends? Not everyone in inner neighborhoods lives a happy life, either. Perhaps they should socialize with Sherwood Parkers: exude civility, imbibe fun.
Indeed, inner city neighborhoods, stalked by police, burst with the many social and personal problems that such neighborhoods' poverty produces. As this city booms, and rents and prices outpace wages, material security diminishes, as do physical and mental security. Freedom declines, too.
The comfortable and the reactionary, groups that overlap some but not all, whine for safer neighborhoods. They belittle the social and economic forces that make neighborhoods unsafe, and people unhappy. They preach individualistic solutions to collective problems. They lock their doors and trust the police to hold back the poor. Police buttress the system which makes the poor, makes the crime, makes the unhappiness that creeps into nice neighborhoods, through locked doors.
When fascism comes to the United States, it will come wrapped in a flag and carrying a Bible, US political eonomist Michael Parenti wrote. Canadians, now as in the 1930s, welcome fascism more than they admit. Alberta's 1936-1971 Social Credit government ruled well for the war industry and postwar oil boom. Socreds promoted Christian fundamentalism, whose socially-choking legacy endures. Alberta's 1971-present Progressive Conservative government continues to serve the oil industry, and rant propaganda against the rising worldwide call for ecological sense and against the tarsands. "NATO's gas tank," I call Alberta.
Third, leaving a dull neighborhood helps it remain dull. Instead, stay and enliven it. Similarly, people who lament inferior public schools should help improve them, rather than move their children to private schools, which everyone cannot afford. Bridges, not walls, enhance civic life. A Czech proverb says that good neighbors are better security than good fences. Such neighbors enhance each other's freedom, too.
Everyone cannot afford to live in inner, older, livelier Edmonton. Nor has everyone the time and money to swim to fitness in a pool. Anyone can offer kindness and comfort, not "the cold hand of charity" but real attention and care, to those struggling to be happy via, or despite, the pursuit of material security, of wealth. Talk to your neighbors. Make it a neighborhood. Walk together. Eat together. Be together. Together we are stronger. Together we can design better ways to live. Perhaps together we can save our species from killing itself by killing its environment, physical and human.
I think people should organize their lives around living, not around working to pay bills and buying what others tell them will make them happy. This lifestyle can lead them to expensive, unfulfilling thrills such as gambling, drinking, and shopping.
Perhaps you, like the 1700s English poet Alexander Pope, think I "should hold my piece nine years." That is, I should not write such things. Perhaps I add to the sea of ill-considered speech that floats online, like the garbage that floats on the oceans. If you have a piercing insight or two to offer, I welcome you to shine it through what garbage you find in my words. Perhaps we can join dialectically to enhance life, above and below sea level.
Saturday, January 12, 2013
Libraries, Housing, Multinational Edmonton, Water, and Hope
Saturday, January 12, 2013 Capilano Library, Edmonton
This sunny, chilly Saturday, -15 degrees, one bus took me across Edmonton. This library, in its namesake mall, is less busy than Jasper Place Library, the closest to my apartment. I will leave Edmonton in March, before the Jasper Place Library leaves its temporary location in an office building,
http://www.epl.ca/about-epl/branches-and-hours/jasper-place-branch
for its new building,
http://hcma.ca/jasper-place-library/
In this library, people ranging in age from toddler to senior bustle around, many signing out books. Others write or read at carrels by the sunny windows that face west. There are more than a dozen internet terminals, more than the three at Jasper Place. Many terminals are unoccupied here now, unlike the crowded Jasper Place ones. Indeed, the Stanley A. Milner Library downtown has about 40 terminals, always busy when I am there. Sunday is the busiest day, a librarian told me last Sunday, when street people come from the cold to get online. Download a place to live?
Edmonton's expensive and crowded housing is a sign of the national embarrassment which Canadian housing is. The housing of many indigenous people is not only crowded, but unhealthy:
https://www.google.ca/search?q=attawapiskat+crisis&hl=en&tbo=u&tbm=isch&source=univ&sa=X&ei=6qTxUKvIMOiWjAKr-oCoCg&ved=0CF4QsAQ&biw=1680&bih=924
Those images are from Attawapiskat, a community in Northern Ontario. One could find similar or worse images in many indigenous places.
Communications technology, such as the internet and social networks, connect Edmonton and Attawapiskat, as yesterday's Edmonton rally implied:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/story/2013/01/11/edmonton-idle-no-more-rally-churchill.html
In March, I will happily return to Williams Lake, British Columbia, where my family has lived in a nice, affordable public housing apartment building for most of the time since 1996:
https://maps.google.ca/maps?q=529+Carson+Dr,Williams+Lake,BC
Baker Manor, named after the late Earla Baker, is a British Columbia Housing Corporation building for disabled and low-income people. The Society for People in Motion, the Williams Lake group which continues Baker's disability activism, operates the 23-suite building.
Back in Edmonton, a 2012 essay by Ricardo Acuna, whose family fled Chile after a 1973 coup overthrew the progressive government of Salvador Allende, argued that the Alberta economic boom's benefits flow very unequally. Indeed, high living costs make upward social mobility harder than in other parts of Canada:
http://vueweekly.com/front/story/divided_wealth/
My one-bedroom Edmonton apartment rents for $775. Our two-bedroom Williams Lake apartment rents for $174-$576, depending on our income in a given year. I'm glad we kept it. Affordable housing enhances social mobility, and mental and physical health.
Acuna's arguement has stuck in my mind for months. A Vancouver study has stuck in my mind for years. The study found that housing is the most important action to reduce poverty and the destructive effects that flow largely from it: addiction, family violence, low educational achievement, and poor mental and physical health. Poverty hurts the rich as well as the poor, as Denmark proves. Danish income distribution is among the most equal in the world, and Danish mental and physical health are among the best in the world.
As I type this, I listen to Radio Ecoshock:
http://www.ecoshock.org/
"It's all connected," as the Carleton University professor of my graduate English course in Canadian Ethnic Literature said in 1989. A healthy environment helps make a healthy people, of whatever ethnicity.
Multicultural Edmonton rides in the courtesy van I drive for a local auto dealer. This week's passengers included a man originally from Spain, one from Azerbajan, and others from Wales, India, China, and Philippines. Earlier weeks included passengers originally from Kuwait, Syria, the United States, Burundi, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sri Lanka, Ukraine, Ireland, Pakistan, Guyana, and Venezuela.
Perhaps Edmontonians who resent the world landing in their city will remember their own ancestors coming here only a few generations ago. Indeed, perhaps all will respect the indigenous people who trod this land for centuries, and still exist.
Land, like housing, is a right, not a commodity.
Water too is important. I remember this when I swim for free in City of Edmonton pools, to which I have a Leisure Access Pass by virtue of my low income. One pool worker said that the city envisions free recreation for all, a social investment that would repay several fold in reduced health care costs.
Here is a link to Hardisty Pool, a 15-minute walk from Capilano Library:
http://www.edmonton.ca/attractions_recreation/sport_recreation/hardisty-fitness-and-leisure-centre.aspx
Water is more important than oil in many places in the world. This trend is growing. Alberta motorheads who waste water to unearth tarsands and natural gas, like developers who pave over the good farmland that surrounds Edmonton, cause problems for us all, and for our descendants. Pipeline mongers, who would despoil hundreds of kilometres between the Alberta tarsands and the British Columbia Coast, meet growing resistance:
http://pacificwild.org/site/our-work/no-tankers-no-pipeline.html
Closer to my Williams Lake home, the Friends of Nemiah Valley protect water and life against a mining scheme that threatens the Fraser River, the most productive salmon river in North America:
http://www.fonv.ca/
Halfway around the world, Palestinians know the importance of land and water, both stolen from them by Israel, a late-1940s European and American colonizing invasion that continues. For news of their resistance, listen to "The Voice of Palestine:"
http://www.voiceofpalestine.ca/?p=3604
For your health and happiness, listen to the crunch of snow underfoot, children at play, the wind in the trees. Join people who talk and act together for justice, the only durable way to justice. In a few weeks, hear the birds sing, the melting water trickle, people holding babies, signs that where life is, hope is.
This sunny, chilly Saturday, -15 degrees, one bus took me across Edmonton. This library, in its namesake mall, is less busy than Jasper Place Library, the closest to my apartment. I will leave Edmonton in March, before the Jasper Place Library leaves its temporary location in an office building,
http://www.epl.ca/about-epl/branches-and-hours/jasper-place-branch
for its new building,
http://hcma.ca/jasper-place-library/
In this library, people ranging in age from toddler to senior bustle around, many signing out books. Others write or read at carrels by the sunny windows that face west. There are more than a dozen internet terminals, more than the three at Jasper Place. Many terminals are unoccupied here now, unlike the crowded Jasper Place ones. Indeed, the Stanley A. Milner Library downtown has about 40 terminals, always busy when I am there. Sunday is the busiest day, a librarian told me last Sunday, when street people come from the cold to get online. Download a place to live?
Edmonton's expensive and crowded housing is a sign of the national embarrassment which Canadian housing is. The housing of many indigenous people is not only crowded, but unhealthy:
https://www.google.ca/search?q=attawapiskat+crisis&hl=en&tbo=u&tbm=isch&source=univ&sa=X&ei=6qTxUKvIMOiWjAKr-oCoCg&ved=0CF4QsAQ&biw=1680&bih=924
Those images are from Attawapiskat, a community in Northern Ontario. One could find similar or worse images in many indigenous places.
Communications technology, such as the internet and social networks, connect Edmonton and Attawapiskat, as yesterday's Edmonton rally implied:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/story/2013/01/11/edmonton-idle-no-more-rally-churchill.html
In March, I will happily return to Williams Lake, British Columbia, where my family has lived in a nice, affordable public housing apartment building for most of the time since 1996:
https://maps.google.ca/maps?q=529+Carson+Dr,Williams+Lake,BC
Baker Manor, named after the late Earla Baker, is a British Columbia Housing Corporation building for disabled and low-income people. The Society for People in Motion, the Williams Lake group which continues Baker's disability activism, operates the 23-suite building.
Back in Edmonton, a 2012 essay by Ricardo Acuna, whose family fled Chile after a 1973 coup overthrew the progressive government of Salvador Allende, argued that the Alberta economic boom's benefits flow very unequally. Indeed, high living costs make upward social mobility harder than in other parts of Canada:
http://vueweekly.com/front/story/divided_wealth/
My one-bedroom Edmonton apartment rents for $775. Our two-bedroom Williams Lake apartment rents for $174-$576, depending on our income in a given year. I'm glad we kept it. Affordable housing enhances social mobility, and mental and physical health.
Acuna's arguement has stuck in my mind for months. A Vancouver study has stuck in my mind for years. The study found that housing is the most important action to reduce poverty and the destructive effects that flow largely from it: addiction, family violence, low educational achievement, and poor mental and physical health. Poverty hurts the rich as well as the poor, as Denmark proves. Danish income distribution is among the most equal in the world, and Danish mental and physical health are among the best in the world.
As I type this, I listen to Radio Ecoshock:
http://www.ecoshock.org/
"It's all connected," as the Carleton University professor of my graduate English course in Canadian Ethnic Literature said in 1989. A healthy environment helps make a healthy people, of whatever ethnicity.
Multicultural Edmonton rides in the courtesy van I drive for a local auto dealer. This week's passengers included a man originally from Spain, one from Azerbajan, and others from Wales, India, China, and Philippines. Earlier weeks included passengers originally from Kuwait, Syria, the United States, Burundi, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sri Lanka, Ukraine, Ireland, Pakistan, Guyana, and Venezuela.
Perhaps Edmontonians who resent the world landing in their city will remember their own ancestors coming here only a few generations ago. Indeed, perhaps all will respect the indigenous people who trod this land for centuries, and still exist.
Land, like housing, is a right, not a commodity.
Water too is important. I remember this when I swim for free in City of Edmonton pools, to which I have a Leisure Access Pass by virtue of my low income. One pool worker said that the city envisions free recreation for all, a social investment that would repay several fold in reduced health care costs.
Here is a link to Hardisty Pool, a 15-minute walk from Capilano Library:
http://www.edmonton.ca/attractions_recreation/sport_recreation/hardisty-fitness-and-leisure-centre.aspx
Water is more important than oil in many places in the world. This trend is growing. Alberta motorheads who waste water to unearth tarsands and natural gas, like developers who pave over the good farmland that surrounds Edmonton, cause problems for us all, and for our descendants. Pipeline mongers, who would despoil hundreds of kilometres between the Alberta tarsands and the British Columbia Coast, meet growing resistance:
http://pacificwild.org/site/our-work/no-tankers-no-pipeline.html
Closer to my Williams Lake home, the Friends of Nemiah Valley protect water and life against a mining scheme that threatens the Fraser River, the most productive salmon river in North America:
http://www.fonv.ca/
Halfway around the world, Palestinians know the importance of land and water, both stolen from them by Israel, a late-1940s European and American colonizing invasion that continues. For news of their resistance, listen to "The Voice of Palestine:"
http://www.voiceofpalestine.ca/?p=3604
For your health and happiness, listen to the crunch of snow underfoot, children at play, the wind in the trees. Join people who talk and act together for justice, the only durable way to justice. In a few weeks, hear the birds sing, the melting water trickle, people holding babies, signs that where life is, hope is.
Sunday, January 6, 2013
Short Review of an Anti-Fracking Feature Film
Sunday, January 6, 2013 Stanley A. Milner Library, Edmonton
I recommend The Promised Land, Matt Damon's anti-fracking feature film. I saw it today here in downtown Edmonton. Sent to a depressed farming area to pay locals to lease their land to his natural gas company, Damon finds that money isn't everything, even to the poor. Fracking's threat to water and life outweighs the temporary wealth offered to the people "to scorch the land under their feet," in co-star Hal Holbrook's words. Holbrook plays a Cornell University physics PhD, retired from a Boeing factory and now teaching science in the local high school. Perhaps a sequel could critique Boeing and other war profiteers. The petro-state Abu Dhabi helped finance this film; interesting. I'll say no more, lest I reveal at least two interesting plot twists you would see in this film.
Ths music included country, rock, and folk, none explicitly about fracking. Have a song explicitly about fracking:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=timfvNgr_Q4
Merry Christmas on the Julian Calendar, which Russians and others with a Christian Orthodox history follow.
I recommend The Promised Land, Matt Damon's anti-fracking feature film. I saw it today here in downtown Edmonton. Sent to a depressed farming area to pay locals to lease their land to his natural gas company, Damon finds that money isn't everything, even to the poor. Fracking's threat to water and life outweighs the temporary wealth offered to the people "to scorch the land under their feet," in co-star Hal Holbrook's words. Holbrook plays a Cornell University physics PhD, retired from a Boeing factory and now teaching science in the local high school. Perhaps a sequel could critique Boeing and other war profiteers. The petro-state Abu Dhabi helped finance this film; interesting. I'll say no more, lest I reveal at least two interesting plot twists you would see in this film.
Ths music included country, rock, and folk, none explicitly about fracking. Have a song explicitly about fracking:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=timfvNgr_Q4
Merry Christmas on the Julian Calendar, which Russians and others with a Christian Orthodox history follow.
Saturday, January 5, 2013
Dramatic Film on Fracking, "The Promised Land," Opens
Saturday, January 5, 2013 Sprucewood Library, Edmonton
Fracking, the pressurized retrieval of fossil fuels from underground, poisons water and threatens life.
Here is a link to the new Matt Damon film "The Promised Land," about resistance to a fracking scheme:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promised_Land_(2012_film)
I plan to see it here in Edmonton tomorrow.
Fracking, the pressurized retrieval of fossil fuels from underground, poisons water and threatens life.
Here is a link to the new Matt Damon film "The Promised Land," about resistance to a fracking scheme:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promised_Land_(2012_film)
I plan to see it here in Edmonton tomorrow.
Bethlehem, Historic Edmonton, Book Show, and Cloud Atlas
Saturday, January 5, 2013 Sprucewood Library, Edmonton
Hello from another of Edmonton's great public libraries,
Before I return some compact disks and borrow more, I listen to Bethlehem resident Clare Anastas discuss Christmas in Occupied Palestine. Hanna Kawas, the Bethlehem-born host of the internet show "Voice of Palestine," has not been there since 1967. Here is a link to their January 2, 2013 conversation in Vancouver, where Kawas broadcasts "Voice of Palestine:"
http://www.voiceofpalestine.ca/
"Next year in Al Quds," the ancient Arab place that many now call Jerusalem?
Back in Edmonton, history lives in a house built a century ago of rejected bricks:
http://www.rewedmonton.ca/content_view_rew?CONTENT_ID=2511
The cornerstone that the builders rejected has become the building block of the new house, to recall the Bible quote.
Books can have hard lives, as this local art exhibit shows:
http://www.ninahaggertyart.ca/home.php
Salmon Rushdie, whose novel The Satanic Verses incurred religious wrath from Islamic autocrats, recently wrote the screenplay for his novel Midnight's Children:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight's_Children
A United States Christian recently burned The Koran in public. Today I walked past a Christian church sporting the sign, "Jesus loves you whether you like it or not."
Here is a link to another book made into a film:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Atlas_(film)
I plan to see this film this afternoon, after a leisurely walk across the North Saskatchewan River to pick up my ticket to tomorrow's Edmonton showing of films from the Banff Mountain Film Festival:
http://www.banffcentre.ca/mountainfestival/worldtour/listings/regions.aspx?cat=NA&location=ca
Life abounds in possibilities. Love is the only real religion, USian folksinger Woody Guthrie said.
Hello from another of Edmonton's great public libraries,
Before I return some compact disks and borrow more, I listen to Bethlehem resident Clare Anastas discuss Christmas in Occupied Palestine. Hanna Kawas, the Bethlehem-born host of the internet show "Voice of Palestine," has not been there since 1967. Here is a link to their January 2, 2013 conversation in Vancouver, where Kawas broadcasts "Voice of Palestine:"
http://www.voiceofpalestine.ca/
"Next year in Al Quds," the ancient Arab place that many now call Jerusalem?
Back in Edmonton, history lives in a house built a century ago of rejected bricks:
http://www.rewedmonton.ca/content_view_rew?CONTENT_ID=2511
The cornerstone that the builders rejected has become the building block of the new house, to recall the Bible quote.
Books can have hard lives, as this local art exhibit shows:
http://www.ninahaggertyart.ca/home.php
Salmon Rushdie, whose novel The Satanic Verses incurred religious wrath from Islamic autocrats, recently wrote the screenplay for his novel Midnight's Children:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight's_Children
A United States Christian recently burned The Koran in public. Today I walked past a Christian church sporting the sign, "Jesus loves you whether you like it or not."
Here is a link to another book made into a film:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Atlas_(film)
I plan to see this film this afternoon, after a leisurely walk across the North Saskatchewan River to pick up my ticket to tomorrow's Edmonton showing of films from the Banff Mountain Film Festival:
http://www.banffcentre.ca/mountainfestival/worldtour/listings/regions.aspx?cat=NA&location=ca
Life abounds in possibilities. Love is the only real religion, USian folksinger Woody Guthrie said.
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
Hello 2013, in Calmar, Alberta
Tuesday, January 1, 2013 near Calmar, Alberta
Happy New Year to all, from my brother's and sister-in-law's acreage near Calmar, a town 30 kilometres southwest of Edmonton. One of our two sisters and I came last night for a nice New Year's Eve dinner. We welcomed 2013 on the deck under the stars. Now we prepare to return to Edmonton under sunny skies.
They designed and built this airy, sunny house. Their several cats live in the barn, their dogs in a shed and the house. My generous sister-in-law gives us leftovers from last night and this morning, which featured tortiere, a Wynne Yule tradition from our dad's Quebec-born dad.
In three months I will leave Edmonton and return home to the British Columbia Cariboo. This is the longest I have lived near my siblings since I moved to B.C. in 1991. I am glad to see them again.
Have an inspiring 2013, dear readers.
Happy New Year to all, from my brother's and sister-in-law's acreage near Calmar, a town 30 kilometres southwest of Edmonton. One of our two sisters and I came last night for a nice New Year's Eve dinner. We welcomed 2013 on the deck under the stars. Now we prepare to return to Edmonton under sunny skies.
They designed and built this airy, sunny house. Their several cats live in the barn, their dogs in a shed and the house. My generous sister-in-law gives us leftovers from last night and this morning, which featured tortiere, a Wynne Yule tradition from our dad's Quebec-born dad.
In three months I will leave Edmonton and return home to the British Columbia Cariboo. This is the longest I have lived near my siblings since I moved to B.C. in 1991. I am glad to see them again.
Have an inspiring 2013, dear readers.
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