I back from a week in Orange County, California. The hotel I stayed at, the Ayres Country Inn and Suites featured a room that opened on to a French country-style courtyard on one side and a California suburban parking lot on the other. Every ten minutes a plane streaked 100 feet overhead on it’s approach to John Wayne Airport, which lay across the street.

Within the hotel itself, were photos of Newport beach and environs in the 1920s. One telling shot showed the Pacific Coast Highway in 1920. It was four lanes even then packed bumper to bumper with Model T Fords. The title of the shot was “Traffic Jam, Newport Beach, 1920.” That’s a long time for a community to have lived with the worst of the car. And it appears as if no one has learned anything. In the 1930s for example, GM bought up the popular interurban streetcar service called the Redcar, fearing that if public transit caught on it would ruin their market. It was probably the best business decision they ever made. With that one acquisition, car culture was entrenched in southern California and as the archetypical California suburb exported its design across North America, the car followed suit.

It’s good to be home in the rainy embrace of Howe Sound.

In reflecting on some thoughts by Steven Biko, Brian Alger has this to say about the role of language in learning:

This is a fundamental point to note in the journey to understand how deeply colonization has affected indigenous communities, societies and organizations. For those of you who are not First Nations, you can graps the magnitude of what Brian is saying by reflecting on the fact that almost every reference you see to First Nations people is couched in the past tense, even if the author is referring to contemporary situations.

Take this for example:

Everything in that passage is true right now, as of this very moment. The ARE six principal tribes of the Pacific Coast (actually that’s a simplistic statement in itself, but nevermind), and the Kwakiutl (Kwa’kwa’awakw) STILL live at the northen end of Vancouver Island. And if you scroll down in the article, you will see discussion of the spiritual lives of these people placed in the past tense like it’s extinct. It’s not. There are ceremonies happening everywhere every day. Soon the Coast Salish communities will begin preparing for the winter ceremonies which still go on. If you live in Vancouver for instance and you cross the Lion’s Gate bridge, you can look down to the east on the Squamish First Nation lands and often see smoke coming out of the longhouse. Come winter, the smoke will be there everyday.

This is by no means uncommon. First Nations people are usually found in chapter one of the history books, having had the whole place to ourselves from time immemorial, and then dropping off the map somehow. In fact literally, as most Canadian road maps and general atlases won’t show First Nations communities.

Anyway, we’re still here. And we still do some things in very traditional ways, meaning that these are actually contemporary ways of expressing identity and community.

So look at the narrative about Aboriginal peoples with new eyes. Once you start to notice how it’s all couched in the past, ask yourself who wants us to be written out of the contemporary world. And if you have kids that you teach and work with, try to be accurate in your descriptions of us. We’re still here although we might not be what you expect. Our languages are still spoken, and our lands are still occupied and our ceremonies still go on.

And YAY for that.

From Jim Lehrer’s comments at the opening of the presidential debate:

If the essence of democracy is dialogue, then something very strange is going on down in the USA.

Matthew Baldwin has a humorous take on the “rules of engagement.”

So, how can we do this better? Democracy, it seems to me, needs to be enlivened at all levels by dialogue and conversation. Debates between people running for office at the highest levels both here in Canada and in the USA have taken on the character of candidate window dressing. Shoppers are encouraged to choose an item based on how it looks in the window.

What if the candidates sat down together on a stage in a circle with eight randomly selected citizens and were given two hours to hash out ideas together about how to move forward? What if they were given the task of coming to an AGREEMENT after two hours on a specific question relating to the future and well being of the country? Everyone could contribute and the only rules of engagement would be David Bohm’s rules of dialogue.

That would really be something, eh?

Nushu text which reads “Beside a well one does not thirst, beside a sister one does not despair.”
From Intersol

Nushu, a secret language of Chinese women, has lost its most accomplished and perhaps last surviving writer and speaker. Yang Huanyi was a well known speaker and writer of the language which evolved 400 years ago as a secret script used exclusively by women to communicate with each other usually about initmate and domestic issues. Many Nushu songs and poems were composed and the written legacy of the language survives in letters and embroidered handkerchiefs.

Some Nushu resources:

• Yang Huanyi’s obituary from Xinhuanet
• Report of a Symposium on Nushu, including an interview with Yang Huanyi.
• Some articles on Nushu
• The world of Nushu

Recently I have received phone calls from CIBC Visa, TD Canada Trust, Telus, and a few smaller companies asking me to buy things. (I’m not providing links to these companies. They can generate their own markets.)

I would like you to know, if you are a telemarketer, that I don’t like cold calls. I consider it phone spam. If I’m looking for a line of credit, or a cheaper long distance plan or a VISA card with 5000 bonus airmiles, Google and I are perfectly capable of finding it.

So if you do call please be aware that I will subject you to one of the following treatments:

• The phone will be put on my desk while you prattle on and I continue working (the world record for this treatment is a full two minutes from someone soliciting funds from a police benevolent society).
• You will be passed to my three year old and be invited to try selling to him (let’s see how good you REALLY are).
• You will be subjected to an uncontrollable fit of laughing, coughing, sneezing or worse.
• You and I will have a conversation about spam.

I’m not a mean person, trust me. But if you phone me looking to sell me something I don’t need, I will respond to you with the same courtesy. If your company’s products and marketing are so shabby that you have to resort to phone spam, then you are not a step above the emailers who get trapped in my mail filters. The difference between them and you, is that you are on the end of my phone line and I’ll have a word with you before I delete you.

Argh. It drives me crazy how people always figure out the basest uses for the best technologies.