Not a good day in the twitverse.

dates from 1999. I found it the other day.

This

depicts the apartment I lived in for two and half years while I was in artschool.

Forty-seven years left, meaning the days ahead are still greater than those behind.

Interestingly, the results skew with dates going further back in time. My grandmother, for example, is 96. Born in 1913, if I do the search query with her birthdate, I get a life expectancy of 99.31 years. She has an 83.3% chance of living past 97. Adding 99.31 years to her birthdate gives us an exact date of Sunday 29 April 2012 11:02:24am.

However, the life expectancy stats in 1913 did not project at 99.31 year lifespan. I searched for this info on Alpha, and got a ‘no data available’ message. A simple search ‘what was the life expectancy in 1913?’ gave me an answer for Canadian life expectancy in 1921 (presumably this is the earliest year for which the data is available). That result is 57.02 years.

Presuming then you were born on July 1st 1921. What is July 1 1921+57.02 years? Saturday July 8 1978. What does ‘life expectancy July 1 1921′ give us? 93.32 years.

Thus the statistical life expectancy in 1921 of someone born in that year was 57 years. Alpha is clearly interpreting these queries as coming from living persons, and thus is saying, ‘if you birthdate was July 1st 1921′ then you can expect to live to be 93. You have a 76.1% chance of living past 90 and a 69.8% chance of dying before age 95.

Thus the data in 1921 has skewed forward by 36.3 years, representative of the 20th Century’s extension of the lifespan.

Another sample: search-terms: ‘life expectancy july 1 1930′; ‘life expectancy july 1 1940′; life expectancy july 1 1950′ etc.

What this shows us is that those born in the 1930 and the 1940 currently have skewed data: in the case of the 1930s, they’ve already lived thirty years more than expected when they were born, and those of the 1940s by 20 years. My own cohort (1970s) has already increased by 9 years.

If we apply the difference already for those born in the 1930s to those born in the 1970s, (and specifically for myself): 73.49+29:86 = 103.35.

In that case, I can expect to live to exactly 6:00:00pm, Tuesday June 7 2078, which is 69 years from now.

Taking the Go Train home on Saturday 26 February 2005 (I had been at that afternoon’s panel discussion put on by the Canadian Art Foundation which I reviewed for BlogTo) I picked up that day’s National Post lying on the seat in front of me. I came across Peter C. Newman’s article on Michael Ignatieff regarding his keynote speech at the upcoming Liberal convention. The article suggested that Ignatieff’s long-term goal was to become the party’s leader and by extension a potential Prime Minister.

The following Thursday (3 March 2005) I saw Darren O’Donnell’s A Suicide-Site Guide to the City , and afterward went to a C Magazine launch on College St. That afternoon, four RCMP had been killed in Mayerthorpe Alberta. The day was already full of Canadian content, and so perhaps I was already primed to appreciate Ignatieff’s speech & vision for the country. I had a midnight snack with CPAC on and the speech mid-way through, I later shifted to the couch to finish watching it. Before retiring I put a tape in the VCR to let it run overnight, to catch the repeat.

With that in hand, I ripped the audio and made the transcription that I posted on Goodreads. Ignatieff had first come prominently to my attention in 2000 when he delivered that year’s Massey Lectures (I remember listening to one as I drove in the November rain) but even at that time I was already vaguely aware of him, having read the Globe & Mail review of his 1998 biography on Isaiah Berlin. Through the speech and the background I thought Prime Minister Ignatieff would be a good thing.

As I’ve written previously, part of this was the idea that ‘Canada deserves to have a Massey Lecturer as Prime Minister’. But that’s just my bias for intellectual public figures asserting itself. Privately, I share the reservations of many: that he’s an expat who left only to return when it suited his ambition. That he advocated for the Iraq war (writing in The New York Times using the ‘we’ implying he was an American citizen) and that he’s been an Imperial apologist through his ‘lesser evil‘ arguments. However, it would still be nice to have a Prime Minister who thinks out loud, rather than those who do not seem to think at all, yes?

So, at some point in early 2006, I went on the Ignatieff website and sent them a note, offering to volunteer toward his campaign. I got no response whatsoever, not even a email list auto-responder message. However, on 5 September 2006, while I was browsing in Ten Editions bookstore on Spadina, my cell phone rang with a number I didn’t recognize. My hesitant hello was matched with a female voice asking me to be a delegate for Ignatieff in Montreal’s November convention. I was like, uh, ok. What does that mean?

I was told that it wouldn’t cost me a dime, and at that point they merely wanted to put my name on the ballot in my riding. The Liberals would be voting for delegates, and elected delegates would then go on to Montreal. There was some paperwork. I was like, ok, cool, whatever.

My walk to the train station that evening was filled with thoughts of destiny by way of the weirdness of out of the blue phone calls that can change your life. I had literally be called to join to Liberal party and have politics become part of my experience. I kind of wanted that happen. I had thought about joining the party the previous June in order to vote for Iggy. I’d decided against it, but now it was back as a request.

Because I had a September 13th deadline, I joined the party via the Liberal website on Monday 11 September. (What I has always seemed odd to me was that I never received any form of official documentation stating that I was a member of the Liberal party. I think my membership expired the following year, but I’m not sure). There were forms I was asked to fax. I told my contact that I could easily drop them off at the headquarters.

I did the paperwork and dropped off the forms on Wednesday the 13th at the Ignatieff campaign headquarters on Bloor St. While walking down the street I saw the poster for The Fountain against a building, put there for the film festival, and sparking my interest in seeing it when it was released later that November.

At the headquarters, the girl who I’d dealt with over the phone was pretty and polished and this further gave me thoughts that maybe my life was changing for the better - I’d start to meet really interesting people who are involved with politics rather than the cultural scene. The prospect of going to the convention seemed exciting; I’d have a chance to participate in a small moment of the country’s history, like being at the convention which elected Trudeau.

The delegate election was set for September 30th. I’d emailed my contact at the campaign headquarters asking if I needed to attend, because I had a scheduling conflict - this being that weekend’s Copy Camp at the Ryerson University Campus. I was told it wasn’t necessary.

Personal monetary issues where also on my mind. At the end of September I began what would turn out to be a year-long temp-assignment with TD Bank. With my email-list background, and with a list of Liberals in my riding provided by the campaign, I drafted a letter to them on a notepad during my first day at the bank, while waiting to get settled. I set up the email list on my server but never sent the message, realizing that it really wasn’t worth my time.

Also, I had gotten a phone call from another Ignatieff candidate in my riding who seemed a social-austic. We had a nice chat, and I told him why I was supporting Ignatieff, and when I asked him for his last name, he asked me why I wanted to know. Uh, I don’t know, because it’s polite? (This is what Ignatieff’s is attracting?!) In the end, Gerrard Kennedy’s delegates won, but I didn’t find this out for two weeks. (Professional communication, FTW).

On October 18th, I wrote a friend:

And did I mention before that I was running in the Ignatieff Liberal Leadership campaign as a delegate? The process was the Liberal party members elect delegates to go to Montreal for the convention - the election was Sept 30 and I only found out on Monday [October 16th] that I lost. I was hoping to get 0 votes but I don’t know the tally. I’m just glad I can sort of ignore the Liberal email stuff from now on. My taste of it was not impressive. I thought going to Montreal would be awesome, and was led to believe the whole thing could have been subsidized, but it turns out that wasn’t entirely true. Attending the convention alone cost $1000, and to ’subsidize it’ they suggested hosting a fundraising dinner, where you could get ‘family & friends’ to donate $500 to $25 and have Mr. Ignatieff talk to them afterward. Like any of my family & friends care! And I’d hate to hit them up that way. I got a good impression of how disorganized and unprofessional they were, which was at the same time, not a good impression.

Here it becomes easy to acknowledge the inherent corruption within the democratic process that party politics represents. It is very much a pay-to-play system than in the end cannot truly represent the citizens who do not want or cannot pay to be a part of it.

At some point between mid-October and late-November, I got another phone call from the campaign, asking if I’d still like to go to the convention. I returned the call in the lobby of my building at the TD Centre. Biopic: the scene consists of I pacing while framed by Mies Van Der Rohe’s windows with my Nokia at my right ear; my dialogue: ‘I cannot make the time nor can I afford it, so no, I am not interested in being a delegate in Montreal’. Sound of regret, (and I must say, the evident desperation that I was even being asked) on their end.

Skip now to the first days of December 2006: I watched the convention on CBC that weekend. I remember seeing Bob Rae look amazed when one of the drop-outs came over to his side. I remember seeing the two-channel shot of Ignatieff vs Dion while they awaited the final count, this shot also projected in the convention centre, and thus keeping both men pinned to their chairs while the count was being officiated; the voice-over commentary saying it was cruel. The cruelty being that Stephane Dion had won but they were awaiting the count to be formalized and the announcement prepared. It was known because it word-of-mouthed on the convention floor during the interim. I believe it was Susan Bonar who reported that Jean Chriten was seen checking his Blackberry and showing his wife, who mouthed ‘Stephane!?’

From my Journal, 2 December 2006:

5.17pm, awaiting the announcement of the fourth ballot results. The feeling seems to be that Stephane Dion has won the leadership, but we have to wait and see. I’ve had an underlying anxiety all day, I want Ignatieff to win, but at the same time recognize that he’s too much of a rookie. Dion as Liberal Leader? As a Prime Minister? I’m looking forward to this being over so that I can relax. In September I had such a sense of certainty that Ignatieff would become leader.

Back in September, after I dropped off my papers on Bloor St, I met with a friend and we had lunch. During our talk, I said to him, ‘Ignatieff is going to be the leader. I’ve seen it in my crystal ball’. My crystal ball was off by two years, but it’s evident to me that a hundred years of movies have embedded scripts into our thinking to such an extant that once you get the narrative going, it takes on a life of its own. Michael Ignatieff will be Prime Minister of Canada one day. That was decided in 2004, and the media was seeded with this idea by Peter C. Newman’s National Post piece, and an interview in April 2006 in MacLeans (also by Newman), and a profile in the Globe & Mail (which was reprinted last December).

Gerrard Kennedy and his supporters threw sand into the gears of the story when they backed Stephane Dion. Theirs was an attempt to say that democracy should work on merit and occasionally on surprise, not through elites and backroom deals. I, as a newly minted Liberal under dubious circumstances shrugged. Whatever. We have to live with it, not so bad.

6:32pm - Stephane Dion did win. They dragged out the process so that it was announced at about 6pm; Dion is giving his speech but I have the TV on mute and the left-ear bud in since I’m back to working on the transcription. I’m disappointed that the Liberals didn’t see the potential of Ignatieff but there’s nothing one can do.

Maybe it did turn out so bad. So be it, bygones being what they are. However, my crystal ball did not anticipate a Parliamentary insurrection due to the bastard-politicking of Mr. Harper. Stephane Dion, having “lost” (he did not lose, his party simply didn’t get as many members elected to Parliament as the Conservatives) the election, and bungled a coalition attempt, was forced out, and Ignatieff appointed in his place. Thus, my 2006 vision became a reality. Through a back room deal.

A lifetime of Star Trek (and this is written also in light of the release of the latest movie, which was supposed to be released last December) makes me want to speak of alternative time lines here. The Kennedy-Dion alliance in November 2006 seems to have altered history, postponing Ignatieff’s Prime Ministership by a number of years. And so, as part of this fucked-up time line, we have another election won by Conservatives (which wasn’t supposed to happen in 2008), the attempt at coalition (which is never supposed to happen because politics is so cut-throat to forgo cooperation), and the shut-down of Parliament ahead of schedule last December. That whole ‘crisis’ was a series of avoiding should-have-beens.

Which is to say: had Ignatieff become leader in 2006, I doubt Harper would have ‘won’ another election. But Harper did so in October 2008, and then played the scene wrong and brought down the wrath of Parliamentary procedure. Dion is disgraced, and Ignatieff (who should have been just another candidate this weekend, a replay of the Montreal game) is appointed by the party hierarchy. Dion was supposed to remain leader during this time. Bob Rae and Dominic LeBlanc were supposed to be candidates for the leadership. All this is swept aside. The scripts of a year ago are now trivia in light of the extensive rewrites.

And so, one evening last January while I walked down Yonge St, on my way to catch the streetcar after work, my phone rang with an unrecognized number. It was the Ignateiff campaign calling asking if I’d like to stand as a delegate in Vancouver. By this time I’d already ignored three messages left by them, calling to see if I would be interested (messages which had begun in late December). So, on this call, I told them no. When asked why, I said, because I can’t afford it, I can’t make the time, and it’s just going to be a coronation anyway, so I didn’t see the point.

[Cross posted on Goodreads 09w18:3]

For a while now I’ve been thinking of something I read when I was following Babylon 5 back in the mid-90s. JMS had written of how formality arises in a post war period. Spent the early afternoon trying to track this down, and came up with the following messages. I think this one from 2 July 1996 is probably what I’m thinking about:

From: J. Michael Straczynski (71016.1644@compuserve.com)
Subject: Don’t wanna hear that!
To: CIS
Date: 7/2/1996 7:07:00 PM

(original post unavailable)

My sense is that these things tend to go in cycles; if you were around in the Roaring Twenties, with flappers, jazz, and (to say the least) a lapse in morals that went into the first part of the 1930s, you’d extrapolate from that to say that the 1950s, by virtue of being 20 years down the road, would be even MORE loose, more immoral, wilder. But, in fact, the 50s were extremely conservative. And most of the SF of the time looked to a future that was as button-down as the present of their writers. Then the looser 60s and 70s, and a rebirth of some extent of conservatism in the Reagan 80s and for health reasons.

The day someone perfects, and distributes, a guaranteed Aids vaccine, I think you’re going to see another sexual revolution that’ll make the 60s look like a dinner party.

So by the time of B5, we’re in a bit of a conservative swing again, in terms of sexual matters (which often tends to come about post-war).

jms

Which is two years after he posted this on 12 January 1995

From: jmsatb5@aol.com (Jms at B5)
Subject: Re: Attn: JMS. counterculture
To: rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated
Date: 1/12/1995 2:51:00 PM

This to Katherine Teague…you’re among the first to pick up on a deliberate writer’s choice in the writing of the series. In looking toward the period of B5, I tried to construct a society that had to come together on a planetary scale to fight a war for simple survival. My thinking was, “Okay, let’s assume that formality has come back into vogue; clothes tend not to be revealing, lines are more streamlined or severe, people address each other or refer to each other formally (”Mr. Isogi,” “Ms. Winters,” and so on).

I suppose a conservative could derive some satisfaction from this choice…though to quote Mephistophilis in “Faustus”……”Aye, think so still, ’till experience change thy mind.”

jms

which was because Teague commented on this, posted a day earlier

From: jmsatb5@aol.com (Jms at B5)
Subject: Attn: JMS. counterculture on B
To: rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated
Date: 1/11/1995 5:34:00 PM

By 2259 the “counterculture” as we understand it is absolutely old fashioned and retrograde. Seems like everybody’s working to get In, not be Out. Sort of an extreme gingrichification effect….

jms

There was also this, which seems closer to my memory

Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated
From: Jacob Corbin (cor…@swbell.net)
Date: Nov 14 1998, 4:00 am
Subject: Re: Civil Rights in B5? WAS: River of Souls ( *Spoilers* )
Reply to Author | Forward | Print | Individual Message | Show original | Report Abuse

And as JMS has pointed out from time to time when people have asked why everyone in B5 wears heavy clothing and listens to old-style swing, populations generally tend to become more conservative after a major war (the 20’s and the 50’s are both good examples of this). I’m still not sure if denizens of the 23rd century would be jazzhounds or not, but it’s a fun extrapolation and one of the things that initially attracted me to B5–along with neckties.

Jacob

And there was this, from September 25 1996

[...]
(I’ve also made the mental assumption of a return to a newformality in 2260, since styles go in and out of fashion. People use the word Mr. and Ms. more often, there’s a more formal stance with people you often get when a culture comes out of a major war, as we did after WW2.) [...]

And I like this from 27 October 1995:

From: jmsatb5@aol.com (Jms at B5)
Subject: ATTN JMS: Influences?
To: rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated
Date: 10/27/1995 9:00:00 AM

[...]It saddens me a bit now that anybody who sounds too literate is often put down as showy or being theatrical. Listen to the speeches of Kennedy and Churchill and FDR, look to the great orators of our long history of a nation, from Lincoln to Jefferson. Their use of language, of an idea well formed and delivered, propelled this nation toward its current destiny, forged one country out of dozens of squabbling states. I listen now to politicians, hoping and waiting for the one who understands that the words have to dig into our souls and take root, must have power and the purity of language well-used. And I just don’t hear it anymore…which is perhaps why we have consensus takers and not leaders these days.

It saddens me that literacy has become suspect, and degraded, given how many millions of years of evolution spent developing the ability to create language. The quality of our thoughts is bordered on all sides by our facility with language. The less precise the useage, the less clear the process of language, the less you can achieve what you want to achieve when you open you mouth to say something. We have slowly bastardized and degraded and weakened the language, abetted and abided by a growing cultural disdain for literacy, a cyclical trend toward anti-intellectualism.

So I write my characters as sharp, and as witty, and as intelligent, and as literate as I wish I would be under those sorts of circumstances, which of course I never am. Maybe to remind people of the power of language…mainly because I just love the sound of words carefully stitched together. My dramatic conceit is that in 2259, we have had a moderate rebirth of formality, and the kind of literacy you would often see in letters from the turn of the century, and the 1930s. Because it allows me to write it the way I want.

This especially makes me think of a scene in the first season, when Sinclair is listening to the room’s computer recite ‘Ulysses’ by Tennyson in ‘The Parliament of Dreams’ (1994-02-23).

Now, the question I ask - is this happening? If you look at the Conservatism of the 1980s (which Bush II & Co seem to be echoing) this follows ten years after Vietnam. So it would seem to say that the next decade will be even more conservative then this one? (Oy vey). And yet, JMS talking about needing an Aids vaccine before another sexual revolution - this was written ten years before amateur internet porn, and there’s still no vaccine (although in ‘96, antiretroviral treatments which keep people alive today were only then beginning to become available). Anyway, I guess I have my eye out for a developing conservatism.

A Comparison Between the Russian Revolution and the Irish Revolution

Century City (2004)
My Life and Times (1991)

When I couldn’t remember the title of My Life and Times I did a search for Helen Hunt. I also remember her from her two episodes of Highway to Heaven in 1985 when her character was dying of cancer.

Then she got famous on a sitcom and disappeared. But in My Life and Times she played the lead character’s wife. In an episode set in the late 1990s, during an economic depression, they huddled together on a bed, holding each other, providing comfort amid the dismal. The scene was depicted in a gray colour scheme, in order to highlight the dreariness.

Harold Innis, the first and still the most piercing philosophyer of communications wrote a great deal about the problem of the written or what George Steiner calls “the decay into writing”.

The deeper we go into the written, the deeper we go into mistaking the snake for the apple - the messenger for the message. I’ve said before that one of the signs of a healthy civilization is the existence of a relatively clear language in which everyone can participate in their own way. The sign of a sick civilization in the growth of an obscure, closed language that seeks to prevent communication.

[
•blogging vs. academics & mainstream media journalism & the language of a press release;
•participatory vs. dictatorial
]

This was increasingly the case with those medieval scholars know as teh schoolmen. This is the case today with those who wield the thousands of impenetrable specialist dialects. They plead complexity, given this century’s [20th] great advances, particularly our technological breakthroughs. But the problem is not one of complexity. Not many outsiders actually want to know the nuts and bolts of building jumbo jets or writing post-modern novels. It is the intent that is in question - teh intent to use language to communicate, or alternately, through control of it, to use language as a weapon of power.

Unconsciousness - even hysterical unconsciousness - is not a surprising characteristic in a corporatist society where the language attached to power is designed to prevent communication.

“A life without this sort of examination is not worth living,” Socrates said in the most famous sentence of his trial defense. He was referring to the ongoing self-examination that public philosophy involved. And philosophy is a matter of public debate or it is nothing. Philosophy as just another specialist corporation is a flagrant return to medieval scholasticism.

Of course, misinterpretation or inadvertent interpretation is the great fear of writers who have any sense of the real world into which their language flows. Perhaps that is why so many of the key thinkers - let me call them the conscious thinkers - have feared the written word and expressed themselves through the oral. Socrates, Christ, Francis of Assisi are obvious examples. Shakespeare’s plays were almost oral, written down in bits and pieces, changed repeatedly on stage. Even many who wrote - Dante, for example, or the great figures of the Enlightenment - consciously sought to use a language polished into a simple clarity that could both evoke and be used as if it were oral.

Harold Innis, the first and still the most piercing philosopher of communications wrote a great deal about the problem of the written or what George Steiner calls “the decay into writing”.

[...; p. 62]

Socrates, on the other hand, had reached 70, and his trial, full of ironic humour, questions and a terrifying consciousness. He was a force of doubt and thus of disorder from the utopians’ point of view.