The case has raised important questions about the division of powers among federal and provincial governments that need answers, said Justice Minister Rob Nicholson on Parliament Hill Tuesday.

“The case we’ll be presenting before the court is to ask for clarification,” he said. “I think it is important to do that.” Nicholson pointed out that there was a dissenting opinion in the lower court ruling. “I think it is appropriate for me to seek leave to appeal,” he said.

What, I wonder, is our federal government justification for this ongoing lawsuit? As this great Slate profile puts it, the site’s efficacy has been demonstrated by “dozens of peer-reviewed articles…published in scientific journals like the Lancet, the American Journal of Public Health, and the New England Journal of Medicine“. Those publications describe how Insite has reduced public injections, behaviour like needle sharing that increases HIV transmission and increased adoption of addiction treatment programs. In 2009 alone, the centre oversaw over 700 daily visits, and handled 484 overdoses without a fatality.

It’s that rarest of success–a drug program that works effectively. It reduces harm, saves money and introduces addicts to treatment programs. I’m ashamed that my government so aggressively opposes this success that they want to litigate it out of existence. The ongoing legal action is absurd, and a waste of taxpayers’ money.

Get Your Free Drugs Here

On a related note, I enjoyed the fourth part of the Slate profile of Vancouver’s drug problem. In it, writer Matthew Power discusses a more radical program that I’ve always thought made sense: free heroin for addicts. A trial has been run in Vancouver in recent years, and the results are pretty interesting:

Schecter found that 88 percent of the heroin maintenance group stayed on their course of treatment, versus 54 percent in the methadone group. Illegal activity in the heroin group was reduced 67 percent, versus 47.7 percent in the methadone group. Out of 89,000 injections, there were only 10 overdoses and no fatalities…Schecter claims opiate maintenance makes sense: An untreated heroin addict costs the state $45,000 a year in legal and medical bills; heroin maintenance costs $7,000. “Sure, it’s easy to say, ‘You’re giving heroin to junkies,’ ” Schecter says, but he witnessed the stabilization of the heroin group firsthand. “A subject told me ‘for the first time in 20 years I’m actually thinking about my life.’ That was the line that blew my mind,” he recalled. “They’re actually thinking about the future. Normally they’re thinking about eight hours.”

And, importantly, they’re not thinking about breaking into your house or car. Plus, by taking over the supply, you significantly reduce the much more serious crime of drug trafficking.

And the math is pretty compelling. 5447 unique individuals used Insite last year. Let’s imagine that we could convince just 1000 heroin addicts to accept drugs from the government instead of the street. We just saved ourselves $37 million. I wonder what Feds’ legal bill is up to on this case?

Our society probably isn’t ready for this approach yet, but I think it’s a sensible next step.

Take the word crèche, for example. I was introduced to the term when I lived in Ireland, where I learned that it referred to a daycare or nursery. When I subsequently lived in Malta, I heard the Maltese use crèche to refer to nativity scenes. Being the most Catholic country outside of the Vatican, they took their Christmas dioramas very seriously. Some of the crèches were sprawling, baroque affairs. Here’s part of one, with its creator for, uh, scale:

Here’s a little slide show with more photos.

I’m currently reading the witty Septic’s Companion, “a mercifully brief guide to British culture and language”. It’s written by Chris Rae. He kindly sent me a copy as a thank you for linking to his website a bajillion years ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the Internet.

Here’s his entry on creche (he omits the accent):

creche: n day-care. The place you take your children to be looked after, usually while you bumble off and make the money you’ll need to pay for it. The Brits do not use the word to describe a the revolting Christian Christmas scene that your child brought home from school and you’re not sure where to jettison (see “nativity”).

I found that puzzling. For who would the Maltese learn the word crèche from if not the English? What’s the word’s etymology?

“Christmas manger scene,” 1792, from Fr. crèche, from O.Fr. cresche, ult. from O.H.G. kripja, from the root of crib. Also “a public nursery for infants where they are cared for while their mothers are at work” (1854).

Huh. Maybe they learned the word from the French? At least the two meanings–nativity and nursery–have vaguely similar meanings. Another example from Chris’s book is “momentarily”. He says that in the UK, it means “for a moment” and in the US it means “in a moment”. In Canada, I feel like I hear both cases used all the time.

By the way, I’d heartily recommend Chris’s book to Anglophiles everywhere. I particularly liked this bit about the Royal Family:

The Royal Family has three main functions in modern Britain. The first is to invoke antagonism amongst the chattering classes about what the bloody Royal Family ever does for anyone. Bloody social leeches. The second is to provide the tourist industry with ceremonial events, tea towels, commemorative spoons, postcards and other overpriced memorabilia which will be snapped up by enthusiastic tourists and displayed in homes all over the modern world. Their third is to generate C-grade scandal for the chattering classes by having sex with supermodels, smoking pot or making obliquely racist comments on television. Elizabeth II’s son, Charles, was hampered by his looks from humping any supermodels and prevented by his personality from scoring weed, although his children, Princes William and Harry, are considerably better looking and attempting to make amends. Elizabeth’s husband, Prince Philip, is a much more enthusiastic scandalmonger and is famous for asking an Australian aborigine whether they still threw spears at each other, and telling British students in China that ―if you stay here much longer, you’ll get all slitty-eyed.

The target demographic for these commercials is surely wives and girlfriends. The cliche here is the wife sitting beside her husband on the couch, a little bored as she half-watches LePeiter pass to Huckenchuck and go offside. Then she immediately perks up when Doctor McDreamy or whatever his frackin’ nickname is shows up on-screen.

The ad’s subtext is simple: “Buy this for your man, and he’ll be slightly more similar to Patrick Dempsey”. That’s fair enough–ads employ aspirational messages all the time. That doesn’t make the ad or the product line any less ridiculous. L’Oreal for Men? Seriously? This is one wrong-headed brand extension.

On the other hand, this excellent Old Spice commercial seems to intentionally spoof the Dempsey ads. And I think, given its mix of hunk and humour, it’s going to reach both people on the couch:

“If he stopped using lady-scented body wash, he could smell like he’s me.” Bonus points for the subtle reference to the SNL digital short, “I’m on a Boat” (rated PG for cuss words).

The conference, by the way, will be held out at UBC on May 7 and 8, 2010. Why so late this year? We didn’t want to schedule it during the Olympics, and, preferring to keep it out at UBC, we needed to wait until classes weren’t in session.

The deadline for submitting a talk is March 9, 2010. I’ll be one of the people filtering through the submissions. We get more than 100 now, and the amount grows every year. As such, I thought I ought to brainstorm some topics that I’d like covered at this year’s conference:

• Why do location-based social networks like Foursquare and Gowalla matter? Will they catch on? What are original ideas around how to use them?
• Dying on the social web. I’ve discussed this topic occasionally, and obviously it’s kind of an uncomfortable one, but as the Internet and its users get older, it’s increasingly germane.
• Sex and the social web. Not to sound all dirty, but it’s been five years and we’ve never had this topic. We’ve had ‘relationships and blogging’, which is great, but nobody’s owned this subject.
• How does the average 15-year-old use technology and the social web. As I get older and continue to have zero children, I feel less and less in touch with how the average teenager uses the web. I might actually submit on this topic, in the hopes of convening a panel of teenagers to take questions from the audience.

That’s all I can think of. What topics would you like to see covered at this year’s conference?

Rebecca and her team had been struggling along and working as hard as they could to rebuild and care for the children and the community. And then along came the US Marines. As Rebecca explains in this interview with the Marines, it turns out that the Marines had been monitoring social media channels to help deliver aid:

How does it feel to know that you were the first person to receive aid using a new system utilized by the Marines to focus on social media to gain information for the location and type of care needed?

I actually didn’t know that until now! I have always realized the importance of my blog in connecting North American with the reality of what is happening in Haiti and the opportunities to help but I never imagined my audience would be so large.

They discovered Rebecca’s blog posts, and sent in 25 strong-backed soldiers to help clean up the orphanage. Subsequently, the Navy also pitched up to help, and delivered a baby on board the USS Bataan.

Regardless of how you feel about the military or missionary work (Heart to Heart is a church-supported project), it’s a pretty fascinating example of getting aid via (this word feels charmingly outdated) the blogosphere.

If you were going to give money for Haitian relief, you’ve probably already done so. If not and you want to support this orphanage, you can do so here. It’s a pretty unofficial-looking PayPal account, but I can vouch for the work Rebecca and her team are doing.

When you decipher the code, it reads “what is our duty”. This wasn’t the publicly accessible part of the building, so presumably this was written by a government worker. Is this a public servant asking his colleagues about their commitment? Or is he just making a bad pun on the term “doodie”?

I was reminded of Ms. Yanofsky recently, so I thought I’d see what progress she’d made in the last two years. Here’s an MSNBC profile that suggests her fame is increasing (hilariously, you can hear her ask her mother “why does Daddy have Twitter?”):

And here she is singing at Carnegie Hall.

I’m lousy at predictions, but I could definitely see her fitting into the Norah Jones (here’s Ms. Yanofsky covering Jones’s “Don’t Know Why”) and Diana Krall easy-listening vein. Maybe she doesn’t achieve the same level of fame, but it’s worth noting that both of those singers are easy on the eyes, and Ms. Yanofsky is also pretty (he says, trying to sound as non-creepy as possible). There are no doubt hundreds of as good or better teenage singers in Canada, but few probably have the same savvy parental support and good looks.

I see that Nikki Yanofsky is also the singer of CTV’s ultra-cheesy Vancouver 2010 song, “I Believe”. I suppose that’s good press, in a David Foster kind of way.

And here’s what I said. If you’re looking for the best artistic experience, I wouldn’t go on opening night. There are always jitters among the performers, and that can result in an uneven or less nuanced performance. Also–this is particularly the case with Lepage’s highly-complex work–the risk of a technical issue declines with each performance. Last year, I know somebody who attended an opening night at the Belfry Theatre in Victoria and the lighting basically failed. The very-professional actress had to do her entire one-woman show under house lights.

I’d also avoid the closing night show, for some of the same reasons. The ideal show might be a Friday night in the second-half of the run. There are often matinees on Saturday, and I figure the actors may be pacing themselves to handle the demands of doing the show twice in the same day.

I’m going to see that Lepage play this month as well, and I’m pretty psyched. What night do you like to go to a play?

It’s a big, thin iPod. And it’s dead sexy. And surprisingly cheap, with prices starting at US $499.

It looks like a cool toy, but which of my computing, communications or entertainment problems does this device actually solve? It’s a sexier Kindle (with, no doubt, the same level of vendor lock-in)–a cool-looking reading device, for newspapers, books and the Web. I’ve been pretty ambivalent about the Kindle and other ebook readers up to now. I’ll probably buy one eventually, but I find I have an affection for the analog reading experience of dead tree books and New Yorker magazines.

And I don’t sit down to ‘read the Internet’. My ‘web surfing’ experience, if you will, is this mix of reading, blogging, tweeting, sending emails and chatting online, and all of that is usually intermingled with my doing actual work. The iPad looks to be great for reading the web, but worse than a laptop for each of these other functions.

I do watch TV and, rarely, feature-length movies on my laptop. I’m usually either on a plane or in bed. In either case, I appreciate the fact that my laptop can sit all on its own, without me holding it up. I know there will be docks and sundry other, uh, mounts for the iPad, but I’m not sure how else it would be superior to my MacBook Air.

In short, it’s a great-looking device, but I’m not sure it’s right for me. What are your initial impressions?

I was reminded of this phenomenon over the weekend, when a friend and I were discussing a new Olympics-themed video game called Vancouver 2010. Like many Olympics computer games before it, it enables you to play a number of the sports from the Winter Games. Here’s a trailer:

It’s noteworthy that the Games’ three sports that are most popular among Canadians–ice hockey, figure skating and curling–don’t appear in this game. It’s not surprising–hockey has its own franchise games, figure skating would be tricky to program effectively (imagine the control scheme) and curling, well, is curling. That said, I think curling would make a great game for the Wii.

The Heady Days of Microsoft Decathlon

My friend reminded me of a slightly earlier sports mini-games-within-a-game for the PC. It was called Microsoft Decathlon, and, believe it or not, it was published in 1982. 1982! The first version of PC-DOS, on which is ran, was only released in August, 1981. I probably didn’t play the game until 1984 or 1985, but I played it a lot. When I watched this video, the sense of nostalgia was visceral:

The crazy midi theme, the four colour interface, the high jump mat labeled “FOAM PIT”–it all came back to me. The whole video is 10 minutes, so don’t bother watching the whole thing. I might draw your attention, however, to the awesome rendering of the shot-put event.

When you compare those two videos, it’s a little shocking how far games have come in 25 years. What will they look like in another 25 years? How much will innovation slow down, as has happened in television and film?

Do you have a secret source of online nostalgia?

The Haida Gwaii is the backdrop for Bruce Ruddell’s “Beyond Eden”. The musical premiered last Thursday at the Vancouver Playhouse, one of the many events of the Cultural Olympiad. Here’s the plot summary:

In the abandoned Haida village of Ninstints stand totem poles. They have stood there for decades. Lewis Wilson and his long-time friend and colleague Max Tomson are on an expedition to rescue these totem poles and save them from their waterlogged, beetle-infested and fragile condition. On their journey both men struggle: Wilson with his authority and resistance to removing the poles; Max to find his place between the white world and his Haida ancestry.

The play is based on actual events. A young Bill Reid–bound to become a famed sculptor–made the actual trip in 1957.

Clever Projections and Inoffensive Songs

Director Dennis Garnhum and set designer Bretta Gerecke cleverly realize this world–the deck of a ship and the trees of Haidi Gwaii–through crisscrossing ramps, intersected by huge timbers that reach into the theatre’s fly tower. They make excellent use of projections, both to simply establish location and, in the more mystical scenes, to evoke mood. During one song–”Carving”, I think–the Haida totems are brought back to life through tricky use of animated projections, a technique which so often goes wrong in contemporary theatre.

The cast is mostly strong, with John Mann (yes, of Spirit of the West fame) and Jennifer Lines (a former UVic classmate of mine) standing out. There were some opening night jitters, and a little clunkiness from some of the chorus members, but Mann’s performance carries us through the meandering storyline.

It’s hard to write one good song, let alone fifteen. The music was unremarkable and, for the most part, inoffensive. A few days later, I find I can still hum the tune from the title song, so that’s something. More interesting was the a capella First Nations music–it’s a form you usually don’t hear outside of tourist traps and documentaries.

Though the play is set in 1957, the script is oddly free of period slang or more than a few token cultural references. Elvis is mentioned a couple of times, but that’s the extent of it. I was also thrown by phrases like “I get that” and “is there a problem here?” which have a much more modern feel to them.

Reid’s Work Makes a Strong Case

The play’s central question–should the characters take and preserve these totems or leave them to rot?–seems at first like a question ripe for debate. In his director’s notes, Garnhum refers to “the true cost of the removal of the [sic] Totem Poles”. While the village where the totems stand has long since been abandoned, the play’s Haidi characters demand that the totems should be left in their rightful spot, to decay and be reclaimed by the forest, as has occurred for thousands of years. However, there will be no new poles to replace the old ones. As the play points out, that cycle has been broken.

At the same time, the Bill Reid character–born of a Haida mother, both in the play and in real life–wants to take and preserve the poles so that he can learn from them. He says, “When I am ready, I will raise a pole of my own. And another and another.” Of course, Reid turned out to be an extraordinary artist and preserver of Haida culture (I count his Raven and the First Man as one of my favourite pieces of Canadian art). From the year 2010, Reid’s accomplishments since taken the poles are incredibly convincing evidence in support of his decision.

“Beyond Eden” isn’t without its cliches. Growing up on the West Coast, I got exposed to a lot of First Nations-themed art. I’ve seen plenty of magical realist plays where there’s some raven or eagle or muskrat who wears a goofy costume and dances around the stage prophesying and telling fables. “Beyond Eden” has ‘The Watchman’, clad in Haida regalia, who serves a similar purpose. Plus, the play name checks the familiar injustices the white man inflicted upon the Haida–residential schools, banned potlatches and small pox.

They’re familiar stories, capably told. I’d probably discourage my more cynical Vancouver friends from attending. On the other hand–and this seems to be the litmus test, in light of the Olympics–I’d probably recommend the production to out-of-towners who didn’t know this part of our province’s history.

It is so Canadian that, when the world comes to visit, we trot out our historical misdeeds for their entertainment. It’s an impulse that both frustrates and delights me.

“Beyond Eden” runs through February 6. You can watch a trailer for the show on the Playhouse’s website.

To whom it may concern,

This weekend, I planned to attend a movie at your Vancouver cinema, Cinemark Tinseltown, with three of my friends. Wanting to ensure that we got tickets, I planned to purchase them on your website. During this process, I noticed that Cinemark charges a $1.00 service charge per ticket when I buy them online.

At a $12 ticket price, that works out to an 8% premium. This surprised me, as it surely costs your organization much less money to sell me an online ticket–you incur no staffing or printing costs–than to sell me one in person. In an ideal world, all of your patrons would buy their tickets at home. Why, then, are you charging me extra to make your life easier?

Your ludicrous service fee convinced my friends and I to attend a film at a Cineplex theatre instead. They charge no service fees for online ticket purchases. I was delighted to give them my money. Can you guess where I’ll spend my movie-going dollars in the future?

The device hasn’t worked perfectly. The first one pretty much gave up the ghost after a year–the motor appeared to have rusted out. After some hemming and hawing, the manufacturer sent us a replacement, though, and that one’s been working like a charm for six months or so.

I have learned a few things about optimized composting, though:

1. The composter is sensitive to humidity. It rains in Vancouver nearly twice as much as it does in Victoria. We keep our composter on our deck, though out of the rain. Still, the additional humidity means the composting material can get too wet. When this happens, we just chuck in a cup or two of sawdust. Top tip: get free sawdust at Home Depot.
2. Compost can get smelly. This is only a problem when you open the bin to add material, and it doesn’t matter since it’s on the deck. If you’re keeping your composter inside, you can add some baking soda to reduce the odor. Besides, I kind of like this smell. It’s very loamy.
3. It helps to poke at the dirt every few days with a spade. That way it doesn’t stick the walls of the bin, or gunge up the churning arm.
4. To my dismay (per Lauren’s comment in this earlier post), the composter won’t break down so-called compostable containers made of corn resin.
5. In Victoria, we didn’t have a garden, so I would, oddly, illegally dump the compost in a local park or something. In Vancouver, we’re hopefully going to have one of the community garden plots associated with our building. In the meantime, on moonless nights, I’ve been stealthily dumping dirt into a couple of the garden plots.

Rollip is a very simple website that enables you to apply stylized filters to your photos. You can generate an expired film effect, sepia tones, black and white and so forth. It emulates functionality that you can find in Apple’s iPhoto, and other similar programs.

I don’t need to do this sort of thing very often. When I do, I usually search for a Photoshop tutorial online and follow the steps. This would enable me to have much finer control over the output, obviously. For those without iPhoto or Photoshop, Rollip seems like a viable quick and dirty alternative. Are there other online tools that do this sort of thing?

Rollip offers a freemium model, where you can filter low resolution photos (up to 600 pixels, I think) for free, while you pay for higher res conversions.

One reason Rollip appeals to me is that it’s so obviously a totally boot-strapped, no frills start-up project. The website is aesthetic free–it’s functional only. It’s a bit like Nitobi’s PhoneGap (they’re a client) project, though they’re in the midst of redesigning.

Here are a couple of samples of, uh, Rollip’d images that I generated. That’s the original on top–me emerging from the water after a successful (in that I didn’t get stung by a jellyfish or bitten by an eel) snorkeling session–with two filters applied:

She’s got a whole fagile-voiced Regina Spektor-Feist thing going on that, given my taste for female singer-songwriters, appeals. She has an album out, and I gather she’s a bit of a YouTube star. You can learn more about her on her MySpace page.

I’m kind of fascinated by the split-screen, deconstructed style of the video. It’s a classic example of turning a constraint–no band or recording studio–into a virtue.

Heading down the Internet rabbit hole, I also discovered that Ms. Dawn is one half of Pomplamoose. They’ve got a bunch of tunes on YouTube, and they’re mostly videos shot and edited in this same style. It must be pretty time-consuming to cut together, say, this version of Beyonce’s “Single Ladies”:

• THE HFPA only has 95 members. Compare that to the ‘Academy’ of the Academy Awards, which currently clocks in at about 6000 voting members.
• The membership mostly comes from the West. There are, oddly, three members from Egypt and five from Japan.
• Canada is represented by Noemia Young, Ray Arco and Dagmar Dunlevy. I’ll admit to never having heard of any of these people. They’re certainly not household names of Canadian entertainment journalism.

I gather the Globes are quite influential in the run-up to the Academy Awards, which in turn can have a huge impact on the long term prospects of a movie’s revenues. It’s striking that less than 100 people have that much economic power. They must get simply inundated by PR people for the months before the event. The whole thing feels vaguely like a racket.

Peter Howell of the Toronto Star draws a similar conclusion:

Current HFPA members include real-estate agents, car salesmen, showbiz publicists, hairdressers and even a few journalists. All that is required to maintain membership is permanent residence in Southern California (so much for “foreign”) and a mere four published articles per year, often in obscure publications that aren’t freely disclosed.

The good (if a little opportunistic) folks at GeoEye sent me a really big satellite photo taken yesterday of Port-au-Prince, shot after the tragic earthquake there. At full size, it’s 11, 445 pixels by 15,403 pixels and 47 MB–surely the largest photo I’ve ever uploaded to this site. You can view or download the full-size photo here (or here–this one might load faster).

Otherwise, click the image below and it will pop in a light-box. If you’re on a slowish connection, it’ll take a while, so click at your own risk:

The photo was apparently taken by a satellite from 423 miles in space at 10:27 am EST on January 13 as it moved from north to south over the Caribbean at a speed of four miles per second. The ground resolution is a half-meter.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve reluctantly taken up running. I run 5 km three or four times a week. When I get home from my run, I often have the oddest ammonia smell in my nose. It’s not like you can smell me across the room or anything, but I’m definitely aware of it.

After noticing this two or three times, I was all ‘what gives, body? Why do you smell like Windex?” So, I asked the Internet. This seemed to be the most cogent explanation:

The smell of ammonia in sweat is common among runners. Ammonia comes from the breakdown of amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) within the body. It is made up of nitrogen and hydrogen. The hydrogen atoms are converted to glucose and used as fuel. The nitrogen is a waste product that needs to be excreted by the body, and is processed in the kidneys to form urea that is excreted in urine. If there is too much nitrogen for your kidneys to deal with, it will be excreted as ammonia in your sweat.

So how does one address this peculiar issue? From another article:

The key to avoiding that ammonia smell is to ingest sufficient carbohydrates. If you eat an ample amount of carbohydrate with every meal, then you should have plenty to fuel your exercise activity. Even people who work out on an empty stomach should have some glucose in their bloodstream upon rising - unless they subscribe to the myth that cutting out carbohydrates before bed helps you lose fat. If you find that the ammonia smell persists (even when you consume carbohydrate with every meal), try having a low glycemic carbohydrate before you workout.

A little oatmeal, a small apple, or even a piece of sprouted grain bread can provide the fuel that your body needs. Remember, your body requires fuel to burn fat! So don’t think that providing some carbs before cardio is going to eliminate the fat burning process.

And here I thought the only side effects from exercise would be looser-fitting clothes and smugness.

Surely there are more effective ways to get me to wash my hands. Which, for the record, I did.

I’m also troubled by the lousy rhyme between ’soap’ and ‘joke’.