Not my dog this time folks, I promise you!

I am always impressed by otherwise sane, rational people get so crossed that they take a huge personal risk and make a stand. I have only once really felt like personaly operating a one man boycott. I was sold a RX-7 at a used car dealership and the engine was already blown. I was fully conned. Grrr.

Others I know have created Blogs that act as gripe sites to villify their oppressors or shame the bad-baddies into ‘doing the right thing’. The sister Blog Awake to Dream has often been used in this way, as evil corporations are shamed into not oppressing the downtrodden or disabled:

I entered the store and to my chagrin, the arcanely narrow-minded attendant was behind the counter. Worse still, he recognized me.

Here, I stumbled accross a man in Maple Ridge BC whose dog had been inured by a Canadain Tire (Maple Ridge) employee in te store parking lot. The employee had offered to pay half of the vet bill but later the store managers had told him to revoke the offer on liability grounds. In the meantime the man fixed the dog and found he was unhappy with the way he was treated by the store. His name is Tom Demke and he is a brave, angry man. I am not saying he is sane… I don’t know him and he may be reasonable or otherwise, but still, protesting the Canadian Tire, alone but for his dog. I will answer more questions on this ,via email, for those who are interested.

I applaud you, who fight the man… Fight on. This means you too Jason. Rock On!

Could they not have called it “An Occasional Diiversion”? No it has to be “Second life“. I have been introduced to second life by some remarks on Darren Barfoot’s Blog“I’ve become convinced that it’s something important, and worth paying attention to.”

I was instantly hooked on the idea. Imagine a virtual world populated by hundreds of thousands of Avatars, spending and making real currency, operating real church ministries, stock exchanges, movie theatres (Mr. & Mrs. Smith any one?), casinos and “edutainment centers”. There are awareness campaigns for non-profits and even a Wells Fargo financial planning education island.

I read stories about companies meeting in the virtual land for employee orientations and project meetings. College students meet to do group assignments and thousands meet to dress provocatively and , erm, date…

. And here is a twist, you own the rights to what you create here. That means you can buy and sell items, apply copywright scripts etc.

With all of this free-form usability though, I worry for the future of the platform. So many questions arise as to copywright (movies, avatars shaped like Snoopy), property law, soverignty, currency trading (who operates the securities regulation anyway), criminal law, hacking, and who knows what else.

Certainly some one someone, somewhere will sue. I suppose that for now the jurisdiction is California as Linden Labis is there. Some are talking about decentralising the servers so Mr. Xeboperific can host his own Second Life integrated “real estate” separately, or that the server base in California could me moves to somewhere where the law is not a factor, like, um, Guantanimo Bay, Cuba.

I am in it now, with Bree, and we shall see that this new world holds.

(more…)

Recently, at work, I was participating in water-cooler type conversation when I learned something rather shocking. Some one had commented that I had just cut my beard short. These trimmings are always overdue so when I do get around to them I get a little crazy. My beard is, for the time being, significantly less fuzzy than usual. I replied to my co-worker that, yes, I had cut my beard very short and that I had lost all of my superhuman strength as soon as my chin hairs hit the sink.

Blink.

There were four persons in the room between the ages of 21-29 and none of them could pick up what I had just put down. I should have said, “ya I have Ryker beard now”. That they would have got but all I got were crickets.

Shocked (as referenced above) I explained, in brief that this guy in the bible named Samson was wicked strong and he would wrestle lions and then he met with this dame Dalila. He said his strength was due to his doo and so she went and truncated his fortitude, follicle by follicle. Amen.

No one had heard the story before. No one had heard of Samson at all. Strong like Samson? Is that supposed to mean something? Nope.

Now I may have it wrong but I thought that, like Noah and the Ark, the Samson story transcended the religious myths and had made it into the cultural ones. Noah they got.

Hmmm. Interesting.

Months ago, I had a dream where (for reasons forgotten or perhaps unformed) I killed a man. How and who is not important. I woke up immediately and I really couldn’t get my head around the fact that I had killed someone. Why, was I gonna get caught? Could I live with my self?

Not long after when I had woken up enough to realize it was all a dream and there was really nothing to worry about in this world, I was stupefied at how I could have concocted a dream that contained such violence. We weren’t spacemen or knights, just men, in the world; one murdered and one murderer.

Well last night I had another dream where the vague plot of the previous dream invaded everything I could dream about. I relived the murder. I was on the lam. I was ridden with guilt and worry and I even woke up and fretted in bed in a half awake middle realm of the subconscious.

What dreams are next? What come to you?

Linked here is a Baby Name Reference Tool with some wicked kool flash-happy tooling. Check it out even if you are not getting into the baby racket. It is truely a blast to playwith. Oh Oh Oh! Let’s try Wagner! Wallace, Eunice, Beatrice! Ahh….. Instant gratification.

Check Baby Check Baby 1 2 3.

The turtle pictured here is Harriet the Galapagos Turtle. She lived in the Australian Zoo (owned by Steve Irwin) where this picture was taken by either Briana or myself on our summer holiday to Bribane in 2005.

Harriet was born at an unknown locaton nearly 180 years ago and was suposedly studied and captured by naturalist Charles Darwin on his “Voyage of the Beagle” to the Galapagos Islands in 1835. Harriot died today after a short illness in her pen (in the photo). On her death, she was the oldest known animal in the world.

Who’s the fittest now?

I had a lot to think about today. My little boy who is now five and deep into his adventurous imagination fills me with pride and a keen and sweet remembrance on the small boy that I perhaps once was. With his “ho-hooongh! Avast yer scurvy Pirate!” or his Potteresque “rengaurdium leviosa!” I remember similar pasionate mimicry for spiderman, St. George (cave! Sic Dragones!), Robin Hood (and his rocket bound analog) and of course, the below showcased, Hercules. Olympiaaaa!

It is not just a good time for a laugh at the past. It is also Father’s day and this is a day that occasions much thought. Solomon was with me this weekend and for that I am thankful. We played, worked on holding a pen and making letters, had a lesson in dog training, visited a toy train store near the corner of Carnarvon and 6th street in New Westminster where we had a lesson in economy, and we played outside under the very trees I played under when I was a boy. The whole thing got me to think about my Dad a lot.

He is in Russia learning how to paint. St. Petersburg has the l’Hermitage museum and a bunch of painters that tell old dudes from Washington State how to paint like you need the money. I remember him today because in my son I see the same convinced passion about imaginative play that I remember in myself. It is a type of play that is both hilarious to the outside observer and truly serious to the “inside eyes” of the little boy.

I remember not really believing that I was doing battle with the Sheriff of Nottingham but that the idea of the battle and the forces (bravery, justice, history) at play were important and real. I had to try them on, like armor (or a blue toga) to see how they fit. My seriousness, and now my son’s can’t be laughed off. I don’t have the answers but I know that it is formative. So much of this play for little boys is verboten today, often by well meaning caregivers and teachers that can not tell that the outward pantomime of aggression is actually a minute examination on the qualities of mercy and the difference between right and wrong.

I give my son free rein (mostly) with this, as I was afforded by my parents. While he plays under the same canopy as I once did, and as my father also played (and as it happens in the same hobby store where my father shopped as a kid) I remember this continuity. It is comforting, but I often feel as if I am parenting from another age.

Time will tell.

Mary-Ellen Lang delights in being a mom, grandma, writer, teacher, gardener, and equestrian, usually in about that order. She has been teaching since 1972, and writing since 1980. Two of her three (award winning, Young Adult) novels are published in many languages in Europe, the USA and Canada.

Before the movie started, a row of rowdy young teenage boys three rows in front of us was annoying everyone with their coltish antics. Why they were there, no one could imagine, but there they were. The movie started; the story quickly drew us in. It drew me in because it was pressing hard on all my mother buttons. A mother gorilla’s baby was killed. She rescued the infant Tarzan, who quickly grew into a spunky and brave little person despite rejection by the alpha male gorilla. Also, the art was fantastic and the dialogue was clever. It was not hard getting me to buy into Tarzan.

What fascinated me was the reaction of the kids three rows up. They got quieter and quieter. Slumped in their seats, they were spellbound. When the show was over, they stayed where they were, silent and still.

I’m sure they responded to the movie’s very powerful male situation and message. The struggle between the alpha male to do his job — to protect this family — and Tarzan, whose most basic need was to find out who he was and fit in somewhere, drove the plot, as conflicts always do, and engaged the boys.

For one thing, Disney’s Tarzan is decidedly masculine in its situations, action and themes. Finally, after years of little mermaids and princesses, the boys have a protagonist they can relate to. He beats his chest, roars and plunges off cliffs.

Starved for father figures

But I suspect that at a deeper level, the movie Tarzan speaks to boys about a gnawing problem so many of them face in today’s world, perhaps more than ever before. I suspect that legions of boys (and girls) are starved for male involvement and approval in their lives. A story centred around a powerful male’s stubborn refusal (or inability) to accept or acknowledge the young boy and the youngster’s desperate attempts to win his approval hits lots of kids where they live.

There are lots of reasons so many children lack a father figure in their lives. I’m sure you’ve heard them all many times. Apart from death, divorce, disappearance or disinterest, political correctness inhibits us now from even mentioning that a lack of men in the lives of children is serious and sad. We’re all supposed to hold hands and skip off to the wonderland of genderless equality.

Well, humbug.

I would like to suggest for one thing that most of the bad-boy behaviour we see in schools would be alleviated by positive connections to committed men. When a troubled boy is taken under the wing of a caring man who pays attention to and values him, the chances of that boy developing more healthy attitudes and behaviours increase dramatically.

In schools, boys and girls are in desperate need of men. There are lots of caring, nurturing, effective women teachers and they are worth their weight in gold. Schools would collapse overnight without them. Still, for lots of kids, a dose of masculine energy, style, outlook and inclination would be a more than welcome relief.

A life-changing influence

So many kids arrive at school poverty-stricken when it comes to parents. For those who lack a mother figure, there are lots of women who can meet this need on some level or another. Even a pat on the head and an inquiry into last night’s sleep may be appreciated by a young person. For those who do not get enough fathering in their lives (maybe dad isn’t there or maybe he’s too busy), the men they encounter in school can be a life-changing influence.

One of the best years one of my sons had in school was Grade 7. His life in school up to that time had been dismal and dominated by some very good, albeit female, teachers. (I can see I could get into trouble here). Anyway, he needed a man. Pure and simple. No disrespect intended, but another woman was not what I thought he needed. I went to the middle school to which he was headed with a shopping list. I wanted my son to have a good-humoured, no-nonsense, structured but flexible, wise, calm, high-energy and intelligent male teacher. Did they have one? They did.

My son blossomed in school that year. He desperately needed a man in his life and there was one, waiting at his desk every morning for the high-strung pubescent hordes to arrive. I will be eternally grateful.

Men who bring their confident, masculine enthusiasm for life to a school enrich kids in ways that only they can. Men who are willing to connect with children, to recognize, value and encourage them, are doing a necessary job. Men who choose, as does Tarzan, to commit everything they are to those who need them play a powerful role in the good order and health of society.

Good men who go into teaching can be assured they will be important in ways they cannot imagine and have a profound and lasting effect on generations of people.

La Signeurie On Sark

Originally uploaded by Will_Tom.

This month on the independent isle of Sark in the English Channel, what was once the world’s only surviving feudal system has been dragged into the 21st century by the European Convention on Human Rights. It seems that the island’s 600 or so residents were not all ready to throw off the velvet yoke of rural privilege for the dirty, pedestrian tedium that democracy will bring:

“Feudalism is a great system and has worked very well for the island. What people wanted was an option of no change at all,” resident Jennifer Cochrane said by telephone from her island home.

Since the 1560s when a group of colonists settled there from another small, obscure self-governing island in the Channel, the Island has been officially owned by the Queen but not part of the UK. It has been ruled, since then, by the holder of the Signeurie, essentially the Lord of the Manor.

There are no cars. The island is very small and from a recent radio show, those on it seen to have rural, upper class English accents.

This little island reminds me of the Peter Sellers movie “The Mouse who Roared” where the backwards inhabitants of a miniscule island kingdom stuck in the Middle Ages some how manage to steal the newest of the new Q-Bomb form the United States and thus become world powers.

I am sure the Bush Administration is sleeping easier at night knowing one more tyrannical regime has given way to the enlightenment of democracy. Sark Today, Iraq tomorrow… or the next day.

9oclockgun

Originally uploaded by Will_Tom.

One of the things I really like about living in downtown Vancouver is the ways the city has of keeping you in time with its rhythm. The office buildings disgorge at 430 and the streets are filled with suits and skirts popping into HMV to buy a disk they didn’t know they wanted until they saw it. Another example is the horns on the Hydro Building that I (used) to hear moaning “O Canada” across the skyline. It is connective. It is visceral. It is…. kind of parental.

Vancouver even tells me when I should think about going to bed. I don’t, but every time I hear the 9 o’clock gun I think:
1) it is 9 o’clock
2) I should think about going to bed
3) what am I twelve? I ain’t goin’ to bed yet!
4) Oh, isn’t that sweet. Vancouver really cares!
5) Pirates… or the French! “Heart of Oak! Rule Brittania!”

Well ok, not neccessarily in that order.

Still, soon I will move to New Westminster where my father was born, his father and his father before that. The cannons on the river are filled with concrete and I have to wait until the Hyack festival to hear any really good black powder explosions. Oh well. I think the trains go by at the same time each day.