Omega Point

On Haiti and Sarcasm

Dear CBC Com­menter:

I under­stand that “some of [your] best friends are Hait­ian” and that you’re only talk­ing about the “bad ones” when you say “Canada will be over­run by gangs and HIV” if we fast-track the immi­gra­tion process for Hait­ian refugees. I get that you’re not really a racist, I do.

In fact, I totally agree with your thoughts on it being “their prob­lem” for liv­ing on a fault line, or that “those peo­ple” should have taken mat­ters into their own hands and risen up against the suc­ces­sion of vile dic­ta­tors more fre­quently. Clearly a coun­try with such a rich his­tory of coups could do bet­ter. Heck, the Amer­i­cans were there for 20 years to help out, and where are their thanks?

And let’s face it, a coun­try that poor? “What would they do for us,” indeed?

…you com­plete asshole.

Catherine’s Vancouver is growing

While hang­ing out at a Main Street cof­fee shop this after­noon, I over­heard a con­ver­sa­tion between a mom and her four-year-old.

“We can go out to the air­port,” the mom said as they were leaving.

“Oh, that’s a long drive!”

Yes. Yes it is. With the open­ing of the Canada Line now moved up to August 17th, less than two weeks away, it will actu­ally be quite a bit faster–for me, at least. The clos­est sta­tion is a 2km walk, bus, or bike ride away, but I expect door-to-door travel time to be much, much shorter than call­ing a cab.

It remains to be seen how well the exist­ing bus ser­vice will inte­grate with the new sta­tions, and if more fre­quent east-west buses will be needed to fun­nel Van­cou­ver res­i­dents into the Cam­bie Street cor­ri­dor. In any event, by open­ing early, Translink and InTran­sit BC will hope­fully have some extra time to work out many of the bugs before the old bus routes out of Rich­mond get discontinued.

I prob­a­bly won’t use the Canada Line much myself, still being closer to the Main Street bus myself. Since I tend not to go to Rich­mond or Oakridge Cen­tre much, I don’t see a lot of oppor­tu­nity to use it, but it would def­i­nitely make get­ting to Yale­town or Davie Street from my neigh­bour­hood much more convenient.

Plus, as has been pointed out to me by friends and drink­ing bud­dies alike, now that I’ll be attend­ing Lan­gara Col­lege, the 49th Avenue sta­tion makes it extremely con­ve­nient to blast down to Gas­town for a drink imme­di­ately after class. (Guys, you get that school isn’t 9–5, right?)

Still, this really does ham­mer home the point that for a pedes­trian and tran­sit user, the shape of our city really is defined by which buses go where. (Hint: they go down­town.) Per­son­ally, when I’m a pas­sen­ger in a friend’s car, I never think about tak­ing 12th Avenue to cut across town because there aren’t buses that go there.

These fas­ci­nat­ing travel-time maps of Great Britain effec­tively illus­trate what even a densely-populated coun­try like the United King­dom must con­tend with when mov­ing peo­ple and goods around.

Also inter­est­ing is the impli­ca­tion of what “cen­tral” means to dif­fer­ent peo­ple. This week, there’s been some dis­cus­sion over at the Van­cou­ver League of Dru­palers, of hav­ing some cowork­ing mee­tups to chat about Dru­pal projects we’ve been work­ing on, get some cod­ing down, and so forth. But where to actu­ally meet? The Grind at Main and King Edward? Sweet, I’m there. Waves in New West? Yeah, not as con­ve­nient. How­ever, if I lived right beside any Expo Line Sky­Train sta­tion in Van­cou­ver proper save for Sta­dium or Main Street, it would be faster to go all the way out to New West­min­ster, hands down.

For­tu­nately, hav­ing my spiffy new bike has opened up a lot of options too, par­tic­u­larly with the abil­ity to switch to tran­sit when I need it, now that all the buses have bike racks.

So far today, I’ve rid­den just under 8 kilo­me­tres to three out of four sched­uled errands. The last one will dou­ble that. I’ll spend most of it on the cross-town 10th Avenue bike route. In the end, I will have spent about the same amount of time on the road as I would have, had I dri­ven, if you fac­tor in park­ing. It’s pretty lib­er­at­ing, I have to say.

But hey, even if it isn’t some­thing that’s totally use­ful for me, a link to Rich­mond and the air­port was nec­es­sary. I wish dif­fer­ent choices had been made in con­struc­tion and plan­ning, but it’s def­i­nitely some­thing we’ll be get­ting some use out of as a city. Plus, hey, Vancouver’s the first Cana­dian city with a sub­way link to the air­port. Go us.

Critical Pride

On his blog this morn­ing, Buzz Bishop posed the ques­tion: Are you proud of Pride?

In his post, Buzz asks if the imagery we’ll see in Vancouver’s Pride Parade this Sun­day is really the best way to demon­strate that gays are just like every­one else. This reminded me of another famil­iar argu­ment, about Crit­i­cal Mass: are 3000 peo­ple on bicy­cles block­ing com­muter traf­fic really help­ing the image of cyclists?

Hon­estly, Buzz does raise a good point, though it’s hardly a new argu­ment, going back to the exclu­sion of activists we would today con­sider to be trans­gen­dered in the imme­di­ate post-Stonewall era.

Still, as I wrote in Buzz’s com­ments, it’s a debate I feel is pretty well moot at this point. As of last week, it’s been four years since we for­mally enacted gay mar­riage nation­wide here in Canada, an anniver­sary that totally passed me by due to no men­tion what­so­ever in the media. Peo­ple don’t care.

At the same time, though, it’s impor­tant to remem­ber that Cana­di­ans are very cau­tious not to offend. At all. Ever. (We’re very passive-aggressive, though.) The prob­lem I have with this is that it’s fun­da­men­tally dis­hon­est. Frankly, as much as I like not hav­ing bot­tles hurled at my head should I choose to hold my girlfriend’s hand in down­town Van­cou­ver, it would be nice if peo­ple adver­tised their hate and intolerance.

“Cather­ine, stop blog­ging while drunk,” you might say.

No, I’m seri­ous. I want to know who to avoid. I want to know who’s trust­wor­thy and who’s biased against me. It may not be pop­u­larly accepted that we’re all prej­u­diced, but I’m sorry, we are. Frankly, humans are a bunch of xeno­pho­bic jerks. Our abil­ity to pigeon­hole “the other” is why, as I men­tioned to @_lisas on Twit­ter this morn­ing–in the course of explain­ing why I’m freaked out by birds of all things–there’s a sin­gle species of human sur­viv­ing today.

Everyone’s a lit­tle bit racist. Sure, we’re taught that it’s wrong, but I think this leads less to dis­cus­sion and edu­ca­tion, and more to big­ots becom­ing clos­eted themselves.

So… obvi­ously my friends are cool with it. Very few of the peo­ple I know are homo­pho­bic in the least. But I don’t date a lot. I haven’t had a girl­friend in… well, let’s just put it at “a while”. Very few peo­ple I know have seen me totally mak­ing out with girls. Doing so wouldn’t nec­es­sar­ily pro­voke a homo­pho­bic reac­tion, more “Cat does PDAs? Since when?”

Would my land­lady be on board with my being gay? Prob­a­bly not, but it’s never come up. She’s con­tent to assume that my extreme height is what has pre­vented me meet­ing a suc­ces­sion of hor­ri­ble, chainsmok­ing boyfriends to bring home to the hottest 300 square foot apart­ment ever known to mankind. But at the same time, it’s not like I would bring boys there if I was into that sort of thing either.

Last year, I remem­ber her express­ing skep­ti­cism about Obama and his abil­ity to han­dle the finan­cial cri­sis, which I pre­sumed to be of the usual Cana­dian vari­ety: “Can you believe he doesn’t sup­port single-tier health­care!?” It turned out that, no, she liked McCain bet­ter. I had def­i­nitely never heard this view expressed by any­one in Van­cou­ver. I real­ize I’m stereo­typ­ing, but there is a bit of a cor­re­la­tion there.

The major­ity of Cana­di­ans are in favour of gay mar­riage, with an over­whelm­ing major­ity at least being on board with some sort of “sep­a­rate but equal” equiv­a­lent. The most con­ser­v­a­tive gov­ern­ment of my life­time has stated the mat­ter is set­tled. That may be debat­able, but it’s just not some­thing we’re spend­ing time on.

At the same time as this was going on at Buzz’s blog, there was a con­ver­sa­tion occur­ring on my Twit­ter feed about the VPD advi­sory regard­ing the esti­mated 3000 cyclists par­tic­i­pat­ing in this month’s Crit­i­cal Mass. (Mind you, I’m highly skep­ti­cal about the like­li­hood that so many peo­ple will brave 30° Cel­sius weather just to irri­tate com­muters and climb up on top of the Lion’s Gate Bridge.) Still, the eter­nal “yay, Crit­i­cal Mass”/“stop being ass­holes” debate rages on.

You know what? I sup­port the Bur­rard Bridge bicy­cle lane project — which seems to be work­ing out just fine at this point. (I do agree with Van­cou­ver City Coun­cil mem­ber Andrea Reimer, how­ever: “Enough about the Bur­rard Bridge.”) I sup­port the con­struc­tion of increased cycling and tran­sit infra­struc­ture. We need bil­lions of dol­lars more for tran­sit and mil­lions more to improve bike lanes.

But is Crit­i­cal Mass the way to con­vince other peo­ple to get on board with this plan, nec­es­sar­ily? Yeah, prob­a­bly not. I actu­ally do under­stand the “now dri­vers know how we feel!” argu­ment. But, dude? No they don’t. Now they hate cyclists even more. And the dri­vers who didn’t ever con­sider cyclists much? Yeah, they remem­ber that it took them two hours to make their 20-minute com­mute home after a long week.

And ulti­mately, this acts against my inter­ests as a cyclist.

At the same time, Crit­i­cal Mass looks like a lot of fun. It’s just fun at the expense of other people’s day. And I’m a staunch believer in the idea that we’re all enti­tled to do what­ever we want until such time as what we want inter­feres with oth­ers’ abil­ity to do what they want. Also, sep­a­ra­tion of church and state.

So how do I pair my this with my moral out­rage towards post-Stonewall activists fight­ing for “straight-acting” gay and les­bian rights 30 years ago, or my posi­tion that it was was wrong and ulti­mately self-defeating to delib­er­ately exclude the rest of the LGBT community?

I don’t know. I’m judg­ing his­tory from the per­spec­tive of some­one who didn’t live through it, who just inher­ited the world activists worked towards a gen­er­a­tion ago. And frankly, that’s dan­ger­ous. Today, it may seem obvi­ous that includ­ing bisex­u­als, effem­i­nate men, butches and trans­gen­dered peo­ple has always been the right thing to do, but I have to con­sider the pos­si­bil­ity that I can even assert that posi­tion today because of the fact that they were effec­tively booted out of the move­ment decades ear­lier. Which is actu­ally really depressing.

So, would a 21st-Century-style Pride parade and LGBT move­ment have flown in the early 1970s? The spec­ta­tors and par­tic­i­pants def­i­nitely wouldn’t have been the same, but the fact of the mat­ter is, if you think The Queers are doing things to the soil, nobody’s going to con­vince you oth­er­wise with a float cov­ered in incred­i­bly ripped guys wear­ing thongs.

So maybe that’s not what Pride’s for any­more. Maybe it’s just a party. As Buzz’s com­menter Eter­nal­Cana­dian points out, hon­estly, what’s the dif­fer­ence between Pride and Mardi Gras or Carib­ana?

Edit: Also see Crit­i­cal Pride Part 2: Mid­night Mass and the Dyke March.

Blogathon 2009: “Legally, we have to refer to you as Catherine December.”

After hear­ing Dave Olsen talk a bit about the restric­tions being applied — in par­tic­u­lar, to the “pedes­trian cor­ri­dors” being estab­lished here in Van­cou­ver dur­ing the Olympics, I’m con­cerned about the impli­ca­tions for free speech, as well as the poten­tial for these laws to endure after the Olympics have ended.

I’ve been con­vinced for a long time that the biggest threat to free speech in the 21st cen­tury is not, as in past eras, some kind of trend towards author­i­tar­i­an­ism, but rather, intel­lec­tual prop­erty encum­brances. The idea that VANOC can trade­mark lines from O Canada is appalling to me. It’s bad enough that the Olympics have become so branded and mired in the exclu­siv­ity of the brand that they’ve threat­ened Olympia Pizza in Vancouver’s West End, to say noth­ing of the actions taken since then.

Thus, I whole­heart­edly sup­port the choice to the True North Media House in response to the line trade­marked by VANOC.

But I’ve been think­ing about sit­u­a­tions where The Author­i­ties have con­fis­cated mem­ory cards or deleted pho­tos and so, I’m won­der­ing about tech­ni­cal workarounds to this: I would con­sider using an EyeFi card in my cam­era to tether with a 3G phone (say, a jail­bro­ken iPhone or pos­si­bly some­thing with rea­son­able bat­tery life.) to auto­mat­i­cally upload my pho­tos to my web­site or Flickr so that I wasn’t actu­ally stor­ing any pic­tures, I was post­ing them live. Short of jam­ming or Iranian-scale net­work mon­i­tor­ing and packet inspec­tion, there would really be lit­tle any­one could do, assum­ing the images them­selves were legal.

If I take a photo of a poster with the Olympic Rings, is dis­tri­b­u­tion of that photo a trade­mark or copy­right vio­la­tion? Is my use of the words “Olympic”, “2010”, “Win­ter”, or “Games” in this post action­able? No, but what if I’m doing so in protest of some­thing involv­ing one or more of those words?

I mean, I don’t seri­ously con­sider myself at risk for hav­ing the last name “Win­ters”, or for writ­ing under that name, but it’s so impor­tant to explic­itly affirm that I have the right to do so when propos­ing –or pass­ing!– any law that pur­ports to restrict speech.

Blogathon 2009: Dave Olsen & the True North Media House

Dave Olsen stopped by Work­space this evening to cheer some of us on and tell us a bit about the social/indie/citizen media project he’s work­ing on for the 2010 Olympics this year, the True North Media House.

From the TNMH website:

We intend to cre­ate a space in down­town Van­cou­ver to serve as a media resource cen­tre with high-speed inter­net, audio and video pro­duc­tion facil­i­ties, green screen and inter­view space, press con­fer­ence space and workstations.

This project was launched by a group of media mak­ers who cov­ered the past sev­eral Olympic Games as un-accredited media. The orga­ni­za­tion has grown into a exten­sive group of vol­un­teers from var­i­ous indus­tries and bring­ing diverse skills and moti­va­tions to the project.

Nice, right? Dave notes that they’ve been care­ful to iden­tify as a group dis­tinct from anti-Olympic pro­tes­tors as well as the IOC itself. He says that his inter­est is in find­ing the sto­ries the main­stream media can’t or doesn’t cover. He wants to make friends with peo­ple from other coun­tries, hang out with them and enjoy a game or two: this is what breaks down the dif­fer­ences between us and makes it hard to hate peo­ple from “over there”, wher­ever that may be.

And he’s right. Stud­ies demon­strate resid­ing in large, diverse cities, or inter­na­tional travel — even reli­gious pil­grim­age — increases tol­er­ance, respect and under­stand­ing for peo­ple lucky enough to be able to make the trip. And isn’t that what the Olympics are sup­posed to be about?

Unlike a few friends and blog­gers, I’m not a huge sports fan myself. At the same time, I’ve been known to enjoy watch­ing a game, tak­ing in an event. But it’s the sto­ries Dave’s inter­ested in telling that are most inter­est­ing to me. And that’s why I’m going to go to the next TNMH meeting.

Blogathon 2009: Infographics, Part 1: Why the CBC sucks

Okay, this is some­thing that has bugged me for a while. Peo­ple who say “inter­ac­tive” when they mean “hard to use” and “Flash scroll­bars”.

While oth­er­wise a com­pe­tent, irri­tat­ingly under­funded news orga­ni­za­tion, the CBC sucks at info­graph­ics. Most of their “inter­ac­tive fea­tures” are just text that requires a lot of click­ing and scrolling to read. That’s not “inter­ac­tive”, guys. That’s “bro­ken”. (In fair­ness, a lot of these come from the Cana­dian Press, which pre­sum­ably also sup­plies these hor­ri­ble clicky things to the two other^[1] Cana­dian news organizations.)

But I digress. A tad.

Yeah, that’s a shame.

This graph of the depress­ing fail­ure that is North­ern Tele­com is pretty good because it ties news and events to stock price over time. There’s still ridicu­lous amounts of click­ing on tiny lit­tle dots though. Mouseover, anyone?

(In fair­ness, there are at least forward/back buttons.)

I find it really bizarre that the two most effec­tive “inter­ac­tive” fea­tures on CBC’s web­site are both incred­i­bly mor­bid: a “where did peo­ple find feet washed up on beaches?” map, and a map of gang hits in Metro Van­cou­ver. (Wow, that map cer­tainly makes the Down­town East Side look quiet. “DTES: Too poor for gang-bangers.”)

Both of these, pre­dictably, use Google Maps, and colour-code the dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories of event at that loca­tion. (“Rac­coon paw hoax” or “stab­bing”, for exam­ple.) This con­veys a decent amount of infor­ma­tion with­out hav­ing to select the icon to view addi­tional details. How­ever, you still do have to click the thing to find out any­thing more.

I will say, though, that the effec­tive­ness of both of these hor­ri­ble death maps could be improved by tak­ing time and date into account: per­son­ally, I want to see how long ago those peo­ple down the street got mur­dered in their attic. I mean, really, now. (I remem­ber see­ing a Google Maps mashup that did this, with a slider at the bot­tom. Can any­one help me out with a URL?)

The New York Times, on the other hand, takes online info­graph­ics to a whole new level, rival­ing the qual­ity of their print fea­tures. I’ll explain more about this in 30 minutes.

[1] Yes, seri­ously. (Stu­pid Con­rad Black. Stu­pid CRTC.)

Trackballs: A part of our heritage

In the sum­mer of 2007, I learned I had a bit of an RSI prob­lem when a can of Coke I was hold­ing sud­denly slipped from my grasp and plum­meted to the ground. I couldn’t apply enough pres­sure with my thumb and fin­gers to hold it in my hand.

One short diag­no­sis of ten­nis and golfer’s elbow later, (“Cather­ine, you use the mouse a lot, don’t you?”) my doc­tor ordered me to find a less dam­ag­ing point­ing device. Since then, I’ve mostly relied on my laptop’s trackpad.

That’s all well and good while using my lap­top, but for desk­tops, I needed a bet­ter solu­tion. It’s really just Cirque that still makes USB track­pads, and those aren’t super either.

The Apple iTunes store pro­vides a dozen or so “track­pad” apps, most of which use VNC to func­tion as an input device alone. These let you use your wifi net­work to get your iPhone going as a track­pad. Sur­pris­ingly, this works fairly well, but it really does take gad­get overkill to a whole new level.

So that leaves track­balls. Which is good, because I like them! ^[1]

So beau­ti­ful. So majestic.

Con­se­quently, for the past 18 months, I’ve been using a Kens­ing­ton Expert Mouse 7.0, the lat­est ver­sion of the clas­sic ADB track­ball. Kens­ing­ton track­balls are so good, in fact, that some­times I print out trackball-advocacy lit­er­a­ture and go door-to-door, invit­ing peo­ple to hear the good news.

The lat­est ver­sion of the Kens­ing­ton Expert Mouse boasts the same four but­tons in a but­ter­fly lay­out, as well as a one-dimensional “scroll ring” around the ball. The ring’s move­ment could be a lit­tle smoother, but it moves eas­ily and is dif­fi­cult to nudge by mistake.

So yes, I strongly rec­om­mend the Kens­ing­ton Expert Mouse to any­one, if only because I rely on other people’s con­tin­ued inter­est in track­balls to ensure com­pa­nies keep pro­duc­ing them. Aside from that, track­balls are gen­er­ally fairly good, ego­nom­i­cally speak­ing, and also make it more dif­fi­cult for mouse-only friends to use your com­puter, pro­vid­ing you with ample oppor­tu­nity to look smug. If you’re into that sort of thing, I mean.

For my key­board, I’ve been alter­nat­ing between my Mac­Book Pro and a 2005-series white/clear Apple key­board. I own a Microsoft Nat­ural Pro ergonomic key­board, but I never liked the “mushy” feel­ing of the keys. The last-generation Apple keyboard’s keys aren’t buckling-spring. so it’s no Model M, but they def­i­nitely have suf­fi­cient give and are nicely clicky — within the lim­its of dome-switch keyboards.

Aside from feel, many Microsoft key­boards have a bit of an issue that’s always bugged me: they tend not to detect the left shift key being depressed when char­ac­ter entry keys have already been hit. This makes my hastily-typed smi­ley emoti­cons look ter­ri­ble: ;0

I am pleased to say that Apple’s key­boards have never exhib­ited this problem.

Track­balls: A part of our heritage.

[1] Little-known Cana­dian trivia: the Royal Cana­dian Navy devel­oped the first track­ball back in the 1950s.

How­ever, astute Cana­di­ans will note that this photo from Wikipedia shows the DATAR track­ball assem­bly using flat-head screws, rather than supe­rior, patri­otic Robert­son screws. For shame!

Mobile data rates: Canada’s national shame

With the US release of the iPhone per­me­at­ing even Cana­dian news, I’m find­ing that my cur­rent smart­phone solu­tion just isn’t as desir­able as that which I can­not buy. These days, I’m more than happy with my Treo 650, despite Pal­mOS show­ing its age. I expect a Linux-based Treo will fol­low the recent Palm Foleo by the end of the year. How­ever, I don’t actu­ally even use the data side of my smartphone.

That’s right, I have a smart­phone with no web access at all. Why? Well, the 650’s wifi capa­bil­i­ties kind of suck, but it’s usable. How­ever, if I want to use EDGE, I don’t have a lot of options.

Canada has three national mobile phone com­pa­nies: Bell and Telus, which are both CDMA, and Rogers, which uses GSM. (It’s actu­ally four national com­pa­nies, if you include Fido, which is now owned by Rogers, and which uses the Rogers net­work, but has sep­a­rate brand­ing and billing plans, includ­ing things like per-second billing.)

Despite hav­ing an oth­er­wise highly devel­oped telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions net­work, there is a flaw: Canada’s cel­lu­lar com­pa­nies are goug­ing us on data fees. Observe. Sadly, at one point, Fido had a $20/month unlim­ited EDGE plan, as well as a $30/month unlim­ited incoming/outgoing calls plan. Need­less to say, after their acqui­si­tion by Rogers, both of these were qui­etly canceled.

So right now, my want-to-buy device seems to be the Nokia N800 tablet. It’s a tiny 800x480, WiFi/Bluetooth web brows­ing, media-playing, handwriting-recognizing, 8GB-extensible Linux device. There’s no phone, but then again, I already have a phone.

So, who wants to buy me one?

Social Tech Brewing Vancouver — Learning in Virtual Worlds!

This Wednes­day, (March 21st, 2007) I and the rest of the Social Sig­nal team will be at Social Tech Brew­ing Van­cou­ver, for this month’s topic, “Learn­ing in Vir­tual Worlds”.*

From the Social Sig­nal blog:

If you work at the inter­sec­tion of tech­nol­ogy and community-building, we hope you’ll join us for the March gath­er­ing of Social Tech Brewing’s Van­cou­ver chap­ter. Social Tech Brew­ing brings together folks from social media, non­profit orga­ni­za­tions, com­mu­nity ser­vice, social activism, social ven­tures and tech­nol­ogy to share ideas — and beer!

Beer! Vir­tual worlds! Community-building! It’s got it all! If that sounds like your mug of beer, you should join us!

From 7–8 PM, we’ll be at Work­Space at 21 Water St. (See Google Maps)
After­wards, we’ll be mov­ing across the street to Six Acres.

See the blog post at SocialSignal.com for more or RSVP here!

* You know, like that Sec­ond Life thing.

Jack Bauer wouldn’t have stood for that!

I thought this was kind of inter­est­ing: “RCMP Spied on Tommy Dou­glas”. I don’t just mean the cul­ture of J. Edgar Hoover-esque agency creepi­ness that would ulti­mately lead to the down­fall of the RCMP Secu­rity Ser­vice and the sub­se­quent cre­ation of CSIS, Canada’s mod­ern intel­li­gence agency. (For those of you out­side Canada, CSIS is known for such classy oper­a­tions as help­ing to form the white nation­al­ist Her­itage Front and par­tic­i­pat­ing in the USAUK ECHELON pro­gram. Nicely done, guys.)

No, what I actu­ally found inter­est­ing was that I’d never made the con­nec­tion that Don­ald Suther­land was Tommy Dou­glas’ son-in-law. I knew who they both were indi­vid­u­ally, and I knew Don­ald was father of Kiefer, but I never actu­ally asso­ci­ated the two.

When I men­tioned this bit of trivia to a friend, he didn’t seem to under­stand why I was telling him this. Why was this fact impor­tant? At first, I couldn’t tell whether he meant its impor­tance in the arti­cle or in our con­ver­sa­tion, but that got me think­ing — did it actu­ally mat­ter which he actu­ally meant? Why would some­one con­sider that sort of trivia impor­tant? More­over, if it’s not, why did the CBC see fit to include it?

Upon a lit­tle con­sid­er­a­tion, this is easy. To be fair, nobody knows who Tommy Dou­glas was. How­ever, sev­eral mil­lion peo­ple watch 24. By asso­ci­at­ing “Tommy Dou­glas”, a rel­a­tively unpop­u­lar brand, how­ever impor­tant a fig­ure he may have been, with a highly pop­u­lar, well-known brand like “Kiefer Suther­land”, the article’s details are reframed for a broader audience.

The audi­ence, see­ing the man’s grand­son hack­saw off ter­ror­ists’ heads every week, have formed an emo­tional famil­iar­ity with him. See­ing the vast num­ber of peo­ple: A) who try to kill him, B) who he kills, and C) who he chooses not to kill — in a sin­gle day — causes us to become inter­ested in his day. For those of us who choose let him into our homes, he’s very much a part of our lives.

So, when we see this story — police pur­sue pop­u­lar pop­ulist — placed in pop-cultural con­text for us, what do we come away with? “Hey, the Moun­ties spied on Jack Bauer’s grandpa! What the hell?”

Pre­dictably, Ze Frank already spent time think­ing about this stuff… pre­sum­ably so I didn’t have to.

(Orig­i­nal link via Rob Cot­ting­ham)