The rains came yesterday and last night with a persistent atmospheric river delivering over 100mm of rain to the communities like Agassiz and Chilliwack in the east end of the Fraser Valley east of Vancouver, All of the eastbound highways out of the region are closed right now due to flooding and landslides, and while not as catastrophic as the 2021 floods that cut off this part of the country from the rest of Canada for weeks, it nevertheless shows how easy it is for us to be isolated here. The highway down the coast to Washington State is still open, but they too are dealing with flooding.
This was the first time that our region has had an orange level weather warning, and I would say that the system did well in predicting and warning residents of the eastern Fraser Valley about the impending danger. It validates the heuristics I attached to the colours when the system was launched a couple of weeks ago.
Coincidently, we woke up early this morning to the sound of water dripping inside the house. It had nothing to do with the rain, but rather a broken pipe in our ceiling. So my day began a bit early today. We filled the kettle and turned the main water off and now I’m just surfing and waiting for the plumber to come. He’s currently dealing with a flooded basement elsewhere on the island.
For the rest of the day I have enough water stored in my emergency containers to easily get us through a few days without running water. It’s nice to have emergency preparations validated by non-catastrophic events. The rain has stopped outside but it’s code orange inside our house today.
Anyway, here are a few links that caught my eye this morning.
An interesting read on Liberalism and its intersection with African political thought and economics The comments contains a good discussion as well.
Sports gives you a really tangible view of how the intangibles affect performance, which is one of the things that fascinates me about games like football and ice hockey. These rely on very subtle intangible connections between players to enable rapid adjustment in a dynamic environment. At the highest levels, skills aren’t all that different, but what often makes the difference in play and performance is culture. Manchester United went through a massive culture change after Sir Alex Ferguson left, from which they haven;’t recovered. It was wholesale changes that made a difference. It was the way new leadership handled the legacy of culture that was handed to them. The guys at Anecdote explore this more.
A project after my own heart, weaving music and ocean conservation together. Explore The Oceansong Project.
Every Thursday Patti Digh shares a few links she found during the week. This week there is a lovely collection of before and after photographs showing Czech people as both young adults and centenarians.
My neighbour Alejandro Frid is an ecologist and works extensively with Coastal First Nations in British Columbia. I love his work as a scientist and as an author and I love the way he shares wheat he is doing such as in this story on Kitaspo/Xai’xais fisheries management. Last night he spoke at Speak the Spark, a n every-two-months storytelling even here on Bowen Island where local folks share stories around a theme. It’s a bit like The Moth. Last night the theme was Faux Pas’s and Unexpected Turns and we heard stories about giving up wealth for happiness, photographing New York on the morning of 9/11. accidentaly dressing up as a clown for a school carnival, making an innocent comment to a friend on a train that was taken the wrong way, and we heard Alejandro’s story about how a handwritten request for computer help led to a decades long collaboration with his dearest research partner.
Cory Doctorow is travelling around discussing the history of, and the antidote to, enshittification. Here a transcript of a recent talk which is a kind of call to arms for our participation in the current and ongoing trade wars by creating and selling tools that liberate the users of technology of all kinds, lower fees and prices, and secure some degree of tech sovereignty for Canada and others.
A short story from Thea Lim about a private investigator, his technique and his subject and how it is that we all fade into the totality of a city. The story takes place near where I grew up in Toronto so the setting is vivid to me. Anyone Could Be Anyone is published in The Walrus.
Life in the vast lane. Doc Searles reflects on how the internet has changed over the past 25 years for those of us who create and share our own stuff here.
Anything that, as Mark McKergow puts it “offloads cognitive strain” is valuable especially when a person needs to bring all of their cognitive abilities to the task at hand. Not surprisingly then, you find that the situations where there is likely to be chaos or catastrophic failure, tools like checklists are everywhere: in operating rooms, flight decks, factories, fire halls, kitchens. Mark shares some solid thoughts on these humble tools.
A major bridge replacement project across the Fraser River (Sto:lo) between New Westminster and Surrey is coming to an end, and the new name of the bridge has been released. My blog still annoyingly doesn’t have access to the character set needed to spell the name properly but stal’ewasem Bridge it is!
The new name was a gift from the Musqueam and Kwantlen Nations to the people of the Lower Mainland. It’s worth watching the video on the bridge name page to witness the generosity in the gifting of the name and to learn how to pronounce it, which is as easy as learning how to say Tsawwassen, to which it sounds similar.
It is so important to see this naming as the gift that it is, an offering from local Nations to all who live here to celebrate the place and root our collective identity in the land and water of the region and to join together in celebration the place where this new bridge connects.
A little section of the Litany of Becoming by m. jade kaiser and pointed out to me by Tenneson this morning.
To say, for the first time,
“This is who I am.
This is the truth of my body.
This is what I know about myself.
This is my name and this is where my path is leading me.”
And to have it heard. Have it received. Have it affirmed.
And then,
to say it again,
and again,
as we change
and as the world changes,
and to have each proclamation greeted with an open-armed embrace
New books to read from The Tyee.
Plus ça change, plus les mêmes choses. The Seven O’ Clock News from August 6, 1966 alongside Silent Night. We are in a collective noche oscura del alma.
Rick Rubin asks us to pay attention: “Creative is something you are, not only something you do. It’s a way of moving through the world, every minute, every day. The artist is always on call.” inspiration happens at fine granularity. The new comes from outside of what we know, at the very edges of our awareness. Novelty, by definition, strikes us with surprise. The ordinary is the fodder for the extraordinary. How could it not be?
Want a practical example? I spent a delightful 90 minutes on Friday with Cynthia Kurtz and Ashley Cooper and some lovely folks who are using Participatory Narrative Inquiry in different ways in the work. And it reaffirmed to me how the work of PNI is so much about generating these oblique insights, these moments of clarity and novelty. Ron Donaldson continues to delight and inspire and share such valuable stuff in his year end reflective posts, and today’s is about insight. I’m so chuffed to have helped inspire these beautiful offerings.
Dave Pollard begins his new series of speculative non-fiction, looking at possibilities for post-collapse, post-civilization human life. It’s a very stimulating exercise and as he is very active in his comments, I encourage you to dive in with him and see where the journey takes you. He’s doing it because it is an interesting exercise to do, which strikes me as exactly the best reason to do it. His first post is on language and it reminded me to look again at the semiotics theory I studied in second year Cultural Studies back in 1988.
There are some great conversations happening about AI here on my blog and elsewhere. For me the interesting questions are about the nature of AI and today I saw a great interview with David Krakauer, the president off the Santa Fe Institute discussing this topic in the context of complexity and emergence. (It’s an interesting interview becasue of Krakauer, not because of Neil deGrasse Tyson, who constantly interrupts the most interesting points. He’s just not a very good interviewer.)