On Saturday I travelled to Victoria for the 29th Annual BC Book Prizes awards ceremony (formally known as the “Lieutenant Governor’s BC Book Prizes”), which takes place at Government House under the auspices of the Lieutenant Governor, currently The Honourable Judith Guichon. All books published by British Columbia authors in the previous calendar year are eligible for the awards, which are divided into seven categories.

If for some reason you didn’t catch the news on the front page of your local newspaper, here is a link to the list of the finalists, and the winners:

http://www.bcbookprizes.ca/winners/2013

I haven’t much to say about the results. I was sorry to see that Anakana Schofield didn’t win for Malarky, which I thought deserving (though admittedly I’ve not yet read the other books in the category). In fact, I’ve read only a few of all of the books up for prize consideration, so I really have no grounds to second guess the more informed opinions of the judges, who were required to read all the books published in their categories.

The only prize that really seemed somewhat odd to me was the Bill Duthie Bookseller’s Choice prize, which was awarded for a book about the formerly-Canwest-now-Postmedia newspaper the Vancouver Sun, written by a Vancouver Sun employee (at the request of the Vancouver Sun), and published by… you guessed it: The Vancouver Sun. Did I mention that the Vancouver Sun is also a sponsor of the Book Prizes? I certainly don’t wish to bring into question the competence of author Shelley Fralic or the quality of the writing by any means, especially since I haven’t actually seen it, but the fact that the book is even eligible seemed slightly surprising to me.

This was my second time in attendance at a BC Book Prize ceremony, although my own book sits somewhere in between a figment of my imagination and a loose collection of poorly organised notes. In 2010 I attended as a guest of a nominee; this year, as the guest of a judge.

These ceremonies are curious things. On one hand, there’s something kind of phoney about the pomp and circumstance that seems rather a poor imitation of Esterházy-grade symbolism (think Vancouver Special with a pair of ceramic lions mounted on each side of the gate on the border of a 33 foot South Vancouver lot). It was annoyingly amusing when a stern-looking Government House employee arrived at our table to remove my companion’s dinner plate – despite the fact that she was still eating from it – because it was the time on the agenda for the Toast to the Queen.

“What?” companion asked, “I can’t have a plate on my table during the toast?”

“No!’ snapped the server, and snatched the plate away from under companion’s cutlery-gripping fingers, suspended now in futility above an empty place setting.

And then commenced the Toast to the Queen. This consisted of Grant Lawrence, standing on stage before the podium holding up a glass of wine. “To the Queen!” he and several people in the audience shouted, while the rest mumbled incoherently. I followed up with my own addendum (with appropriate sotto voce propriety, of course): “To Henry the Eighth!”

I find this whole matter of nostalgic admiration for the institutions of colonialism ridiculous, and it seems absurd that in 2013 we’re still sucking up to an old woman in a castle in England. An old woman whose claim to fame is being born into the family that controlled and directed the military force that destroyed civilisations of brown people all around the world in order to ship jewels, tea, and beaver pelts to London. Alas, Canadian republicanism doesn’t seem to be taking off as a movement (it doesn’t help that our southern neighbours have forever poisoned the marketability of the word), so there’s not much to do but suck it up and look for the humour.

On the more positive side, though, the awards ceremony is festive and celebratory of literary art and publishing, and in this age of arts funding cuts to the point of starvation (not to mention the apparent general decline in the reading of anything longer than a headline or a tweet) any public attention directed toward literature is more than welcome.

It’s easy to be cynical about the awards-and-marketing game, but it’s not unusual for me to experience a mild case of eye moisture in response to someone’s touching acceptance speech, too. I still love books, and book writers, and book foofaraw, and participating in the hubbub even peripherally is still exciting.

And it is kind of fun schmoozing around Government House, within convenient reach of the host bar (now there’s a phrase you don’t see on invitations with enough frequency these days), chatting up inspiring writers, dedicated booksellers, supportive librarians, and of course, others who simply fill out a pair of jeans with alarming perfection.

I shared a table with some interesting, engaging, smart, and personable people, including Half Blood Blues author Esi Edugyan (who is completely charming), Virginia Hong from the SFU Library, Jo-Anne from the UBC Library, writer Theresa Kishkan, and Esther, a recent UVic History graduate currently employed by the BC Legislature.

Since we’re over here, we’re going to spend a couple of days in Sooke, relax by the sea, get some sun, and, undoubtedly, catch up on reading. There are so many good books and so little time to read them all.

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Two events took place in Canada this weekend that have the potential to alter the landscape of political power and influence in Canada’s federal government. Whether anything substantial actually comes about as a result of these events remains to be seen, but the possibilities inspire cautious optimism.

The events in question are the New Democratic Party’s annual convention, in Montreal, and the Liberal Party of Canada’s leadership convention, held in, um… cyberspace.

I don’t pay much attention to political conventions generally. I’ve been to a few over the years – of parties across the perceived spectrum – and unless there’s something big on the agenda, like the election of a new leader (or more fun, a putsch), they’re pretty much circle jerks for the ideologically like-minded. Left wing ones tend to be particularly earnest (ie: tedious), while right wing conventions tend to be more playfully upbeat, mainly because of the generous supply of money and alcohol provided by corporate interests. What the two have in common, most notably (and also in common with almost any other form of convention), is what is not on the official agenda: campaigns of incidental congresses of a sexual nature.

Wither, socialism?

First, the big news out of the NDP convention: delegates have (apparently overwhelmingly) voted to drop certain references to “socialism” from their constitution. Those phrases about the “means of production” that sound so terrifyingly Marxist to average Canadians conditioned by decades of shameful red-scare discourse are to be replaced with descriptions of “sustainable prosperity”.

Thomas Mulcair

I’m reminded of when the Social Credit Party sought in the 1980s to strike from its constitution’s Aims and Objectives section the paragraph “To liberate the country from the yoke of the present financial system and its enslavement of a constitutionally free people.” For decades they had been forming governments whose policies were fundamentally in direct conflict with their stated objectives, but when the time came to deal with this incongruity no one asked, “where have we gone astray?”

I’m also reminded of a passage from a darkly humorous novel written by Charles Demers. I’m abusing the context only slightly (the passage comes from a section that makes a joke about the problem of some communist newspapers that are yellowing with age), but like much of Demers’ writing, it’s packed with meaning:

“Red yellow journalism. Anywhere outside of Ireland or Ontario, you could call it Orange (though not really; in Canada, social democracy has already staked that colour as its own – fittingly, too yellow to be red.” (The Prescription Errors, Charles Demers, p. 58)

Taken on its own, this change to the NDP constitution can simply be read as a modernisation of language. The philosophical objective isn’t necessarily different (unlike the Social Credit example, which, on paper at least, was effectively a complete philosophical reversal of staggeringly hypocritical proportion), for the language still promotes the idea that the common wealth should be distributed more equitably than it is. Now it’s just saying it in language that might be less likely to trigger sensitive listeners to conjure phrases about running dogs.

The problem is, this can’t be taken only on its own. As I suspect the more ideologically driven members of the NDP base might complain, the party has been moving centre-ward for some time now. It probably started most aggressively under former leader Jack Layton, who cannily exploited existing weaknesses and leadership struggles in the Liberal Party by appealing to that party’s base. It would have been a good tactic politically had it resulted in Layton’s securing the Prime Ministership. But he didn’t – not even close.

I didn’t approve of Layton’s liberalisation tactic at the time, but I can’t really fault him for giving it a shot. Despite having a reasonably plausible leader (in Liberal terms) in Michael Ignatieff, the Liberals were still in a weakened state, and Ignatieff was vulnerable to Harper’s dirty campaign tactics. I’m not sure that Ignatieff could have won that election regardless of what Layton did.

But that’s all history. Now the NDP has as its leader Thomas Mulcair who, not surprisingly, wishes to continue with Layton’s attempts to become the new centrist choice in the next election (most likely October 19, 2015) and seems determined to continue to fight with the Liberals to be the single alternative to Harper.

Trudeau, Too

This brings me to the other significant event this weekend – the election of Justin Trudeau as the new leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. Conservatives and New Democrats will, of course, discount him vigorously, but his election is likely to be a turning point in the recovery of the Liberal Party. Whether or not he deserves it remains to be proven, but he is clearly popular with enough Canadians – at the moment – to raise the possibility of a Liberal victory over the Conservatives in 2015. Just being a frontrunner in the race was enough to put the Liberals ahead in opinion polls for the first time in years.

Justin Trudeau

The Liberal Party has long been referred to (in media, mainly) as the “Natural Governing Party”. It got this nickname not because of some qualitative measure particularly; it’s more a popular reflection of the party’s historical success rate at winning elections.

But there is, I think, also some cultural truth to it, too. Some Conservative (Harper? Manning?) once said something to the effect that “Canadians are inherently a conservative people”. This raised the ire of many non-Conservatives, but the speaker was somewhat correct, as long as a lower-case “c” was intended. Canadians are conservative, but they’re not “Conservative”.

Despite the vilification by right wingers of the CBC as a hotbed of leftist revolutionary sedition, the national broadcaster has, in my opinion, been promoting for generations a very culturally conservative definition of what it means to be a Canadian. (Just try listening, for instance, to Stuart McLean’s noxious Dave and Morley stories on The Vinyl Cafe, or try to tune out the incessant drumbeat promoting hockey as the pre-eminent indicator of Canadian-ness.) That’s the sort of cultural conservatism I’m thinking of, and to what I think the previously mentioned speaker was getting at, even if he wanted it to be taken otherwise.

But I digress. Wildly.

My point is, Canadians are kind of conservative, but they’re not inherently mean. Harper’s brand of conservatism, on the other hand, wants to make us mean. It wants to exploit our mental and emotional weaknesses in order to divide us and subjugate us to the interests of a few. The Liberal Party, for all of its faults, represents – at least in theory – a natural meeting place for Canadians, a polite political compromise where those without ideologically rigid agenda – whether left or right – gather to negotiate our national common. If Liberal governments have failed, I submit that they have done so – to some degree – less because of ideology and more from apathy of Canadians.

The Natural Opposition Party

In the last election, Stephen Harper’s majority government was elected with 39.6% of the 61.1% of Canadians who voted. I’m shitty at math problems, so I can’t tell you what that works out to, but it’s not good. I’m not going to harp on the past, but I’ve got to say this:

If Thomas Mulcair and the NDP continue to campaign from the centre, the Conservatives will almost certainly win hold power after the next election, too. Put another way: barring huge blunders by Trudeau, if Harper wins the next election, it will almost certainly be Thomas Mulcair’s fault.

I am not saying that I don’t think the NDP has a place in federal Canadian politics. I absolutely think it does. In fact, I think it has a critically essential place.

But Canada does not need two liberal parties. What Canada does need in a pluralist, multi-party democracy is a voice of conscience uncorrupted by power, a voice for those who exist on the margins, and a voice to remind us of the dangers of unregulated capitalist excess. It needs a party that can amplify the voices of those not easily heard and those to whom we fail to lend ear. In its attempt to gain power through centrist appeal, the NDP sacrifices those it is most empowered to help. It can do far more for Canadians if it sticks to its principles.

The NDP and the Liberal Party are not wholly discrete entities. It’s unquestionably awkward, but Canada is served best when the two have a symbiotic relationship. By continuing its attempts to occupy the centre, the NDP will only hasten our conversion to a two-party system in which marginal voices and issues will receive even less attention.

It may bear tarnishes, but “Liberal” is a long and established federal “brand“ with national credibility. Practically, it would be foolish to ditch it in favour of a brand that has less national electoral credibility and – though possibly not through direct fault of its own – an inferior reputation for economic management.

I hope that the NDP will, by rediscovering its traditional purpose as a movement of influence, save us all from having to watch Stephen Harper continue to dismantle this country until 2019.

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When Michael Turner posted, on Saturday morning, a link on his blog to this photo-montage-video about pre-revolutionary Iran, I spent a chunk of the day revisiting Iran’s past – and in a tangential way, my own.

Because I was in the middle of turning sixteen at the time of the 1979-ish Islamic Revolution, my attention wasn’t exactly riveted on the details of the events, though I was a daily reader of newspapers as a youth. I had a general awareness of the existence of the Shah, Reza Pahlavi, and remember the demonstrations against him in New York City when he spent some time there after fleeing Tehran.

For some – particularly people younger than I who may have had less exposure to Iranian history – this video might seem as fluffy and amusing as one made of stills of photos from any major urban centre in the United States: clothing and hairstyle fashions that now seem quaint, for instance. However, the video provides some very interesting food for thought.

The most obviously notable depiction is that of the role of women in Iranian society prior to 1979. Except for the apparent racial makeup of the faces depicted, and some characteristics of the physical environment (Persian signage, for instance), these could easily be scenes from California in the same era. Women are shown participating in daily life without the restrictions that have subsequently been imposed upon them by the theocrats who took over from the Shah.

Most of the images were likely taken in Tehran, Iran’s cosmopolitan capital, a city of over twelve million (the world’s fifth largest), so it’s important to remember that these images should not be assumed to tell ‘The Story’ of pre-revolution Iran. The creator of the video, clearly, thinks of the days of the Shah as the good old days and – relatively speaking – that would not be a difficult conclusion. Even comparing the Shah to the leadership of only other Middle-East countries makes nostalgia easy.

But of course, stories are always more complicated, and as with most other things, I wonder about the photographs from Tehran in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, that do not appear in this collection; photos that may never have been captured, stories of others who were never a part of the popular narrative, whatever their reasons for being overlooked.

Nevertheless, Tehran clearly appears to have been, by conventional liberal measures, a far better place to be – for many – under a heredity monarch with too much power (and too much CIA pressure) than it’s ever been under a series of Ayatollahs.

I learned nothing about Iran, or Iranians, in school, and I learned relatively little about Iranians from reading the Winnipeg Free Press or the Vancouver Sun. Where I learned the most, at least about a certain class of Iranians, was from expatriate Iranians. Over the years, I have met a number of people from Iran who were doctors, lawyers, engineers, university professors, and other professions.

At least, they had been those things before fleeing Tehran with absolutely nothing but the clothes on their backs and the contents of their pockets. When I met them, they were dishwashers, janitors, line cooks, convenience store clerks. As a scarcely educated seventeen year old busboy in a crappy restaurant in suburban Winnipeg, it seemed that I had considerably more cultural power than the ex-banker who was scraping the crusty egg yolk off of the plates that I was continuously dumping in front of him.

The Iranians I met in the late seventies and early eighties didn’t tell me who they were as much as they revealed to me who I was, though significant comprehension of the lesson didn’t come until much later.

After I watched this video, I couldn’t help but imagine what a similar, future, retro video might look like about, say, Vancouver. You know, the good old days, when we all* had iPhones and Fluevogs and plenty of water to drink and no one was threatening to hang us for our moments of dissidence, resistance, irreverence.

(* Exceptions undocumented)

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Sometime in late January, I noticed (as I undoubtedly always do, so much I miss it) that Vancouver’s relatively scant supply of daylight was spending just a few minutes more illuminating us. Now here I am in February, the tenth of it, and it’s *not* dark at 5pm!

Snowdrop

Honeysuckle

Rhubarb

Though I witness it yearly, and have done so for the better part of a half-century, the pace of the transition of the seasons, winter to spring and fall to winter, always surprises me anew. Somehow, I have it fixed permanently in mind that the days lengthen and shorten by the same amount of time each day, throughout the year.

Mustard planted last fall

Clematis

Heather

But it doesn’t work that way (here in the north). The days change rather slowly in summer and winter, but in spring, the days get longer at a much faster pace until things slow down again in late March. Don’t ask me how this works: it has something to do with latitudes and Earth’s axis tilt and the relative position of the Moon in Uranus, or something). The opposite, of course, happens in autumn.

Garlic shoot

Unknown shrub

Bluebells

All I care is that my (natural) world is slowly/quickly coming back to life again as the plants and trees and bugs reanimate. I wonder: might I now safely remove the snow tires from my bicycle? They are kind of useful in frost too, but as they run at a lower pressure than my standard tires, they also slow me down, so I’m looking forward to going back to the summer slicks.

Macroscopic growth on the Japonica

Little poppies, little hell flames,
Do you do no harm?

The locally ubiquitous Rhododendron

Most of Vancouver’s annual snowfall allotment – the quantity of which is hardly worth mentioning relative to what much of the rest of Canada receives (or the east coast got in the past week) – comes in December and January, but February has its share too, historically, and it can snow here as late as April. It might be premature to change tires just yet.

Last year’s fig, this year’s growth

Those lily-like things that shoot up all over the damned yard

Broom? I’m not sure.

For now, though, I shall revel in the extra daylight, browse the seed catalogue, look forward to the gradual withdrawal of the remaining untrapped rodent life from my basement, and keep my blanket and sunblock at hand in anticipation of those long, luxurious summer evenings on Wreck Beach.

Rose

A pestilence of Lemon Balm

(All photos on this page taken in my garden, February 10, 2013)

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As I was finishing a long, hard day at my day job yesterday, Companion called and suggested that we go out for dinner. I was tired and dishevelled, but we agreed to meet at Burgoo.

There was only one table available, awkwardly placed between a divider and the bar, with just a narrow channel between our table and those perched on the barstools, along which servers and diners frequently squeezed on journeys to or from the kitchen or lavatory.

A heating vent under our table blasted air that must surely have been 120 degrees. Because I’d come directly from my day job and was still clad in a holey old white t-shirt covered in chocolate and whipped cream splatters, I felt compelled to retain my fleece pullover, inappropriate considering the elevated temperature rising from below the table. There was nowhere to put my bike bag, so I had it under the table, which prevented me from putting my legs in a comfortable position. Burgoo is also very noisy, and I was constantly straining to hear what the server or Companion said. Off to a bad start.

I have an odd relationship with Burgoo. This was my third visit ever. The first, to the North Vancouver location, was sometime early in the current century, which places my visits approximately three years apart.

That first visit was with Ex Companion, and except for the food being unmemorable, the visit was otherwise pleasant, though I seem to recall fairly clearly that she and I drank an awful lot of water that evening. [Note: foreshadow]

The second was with a Prospective Companion, the possible nature of which, at that moment, was unclear. We’d met years earlier, but had only recently become more intimately acquainted at a party at which, uh, costumes were not a feature, and neither was social intercourse of a vertical nature. You can fill in the rest.

As it happened, Prospective Companion suffered from an unfortunate lactose intolerance – unfortunate primarily because he’d ordered a meal that was apparently high in dairy content, which one might think would be challenging in a restaurant that specialises in stews. Regardless, I spent much of the evening at our table, while he spent much of it in the same lavatory mentioned in paragraph two.

There was never a second date, although I was interested. I’m not sure if this is because he felt too embarrassed about the circumstances, determined that I was not Mr. Right, or just because we were Vancouverites and therefore simply forgot to call.

Back to the current visit.

The idea of Burgoo is appealing to me because, generally speaking, stew is a highly desirable comfort food that in normal circumstances would make me feel better. I’d forgotten, though, that Burgoo’s stews seem decidedly unspectacular and disappointing, at least in relation to my stew expectations.

It may well be that my expectations are the biggest problem. Before I’ve even come through the door, my taste buds – in conjunction with cultural and genetic experience of the word “stew” – have generated an expectation that simply doesn’t match the multi-cultural reality of what Burgoo has to offer.

I’d like to point out that I’m not gastronomically conservative. I like foods from all cultures of the world. In fact, like many people of Scottish-Irish-English origin, I very understandably prefer foods from other cultures. I’ll take a good curry over a conventionally English dish almost any time (of course, one could argue that curry is among the most English of dishes).

So, when I get to Burgoo, I could, and probably should, order an Irish Stew, which presumably contains some variation of a traditional mutton-potato-vegetable-gravy combination.

I seldom do what I should do, however. Instead I ordered the Kentucky Burgoo, which contains “beef and smoked ham with lima beans, corn, tomatoes and okra”. That all sounds very innocuous. What could go wrong?

It was immediately apparent that it was going to be vastly too salty, and that the smart thing to do would be to drink lots of water with it. Unfortunately, Companion and I had ordered a bottle of wine. It’s not that we particularly wanted a whole bottle of wine – one glass would have been sufficient – but the stuff was $12 a glass, and a bottle was $30, and now that you can take home your un-drunk wine, the bottle seemed a mathematically superior choice (although no wine would have been mathematically more superior still).

Now, it could be that there was some other combination of circumstances to blame. Maybe the heat, that I was very tired, the noise, and the uncomfortable physical environment all conspired to wreak havoc on my constitution. Maybe drinking a bit of wine while being reminded of regrets about “what might have been” had things gone differently with either Ex Companion or Prospective Companion (funny how self-congratulation for “what-might-have-been-averted” doesn’t come up first) triggered an undesirable physical reaction.

Nevertheless, despite being exhausted upon arriving home, and despite being in bed and asleep by 9:45pm, I was wide awake at 1:00am and felt like I was on fire despite a cold bedroom. I was tormented by racing thoughts and acute anxiety and my mouth was so dry that my tongue could have been used as one of those little desiccants they pack with new electronics that have “do not eat” stamped upon them (despite the fact that the people most likely to think of eating them can’t read).

Possible combinations of circumstance aside (and barring a previously undiagnosed allergy to okra), I suspect that the primary cause of my distress was that there was something in my Kentucky Burgoo undocumented by the menu, and of which I know myself, from previous experiences, to be particularly sensitive: high levels of monosodium glutamate.

I’ve consumed a variety of substances through the course of my life, some fairly questionable, but I’ve never experienced anything as unpleasant an an MSG overdose. Even now, at 4:30 in the afternoon, I can still feel a remnant shakiness from its effects, and instead of working on my primary writing project, I’m writing about salt. I just want to hibernate, hydrate, and feel relaxed, safe, and comfortable again.

A nice bowl of stew would go very nicely right now!

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A dish washing catastrophe, on cHRISTMAS morning!

From Fisher of Men…

To holder of pens:

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It’s snowing in Vancouver today, and if you’ve even been here you know what that means: innumerable diatribes about how Vancouverites don’t know how to drive in snow. It’s an absurdly tiresome bit of small talk that is simultaneously both accurate and bullshit.

Too implausible not to be a staged photo! From the Vancouver Sun: “Traffic stops to let a pedestrian cross at a crosswalk on Cambie street. Photograph by: Ward Perrin, PNG”.

Usually, the people relating this opinion once lived somewhere else in Canada where snow is a more dominant aspect of winter (ie: almost anywhere else in Canada). The funny thing is, almost everyone in Vancouver is (at least perceived to be) from somewhere else. I couldn’t guess at the number of times I’ve been at a cocktail party or some such and, after being asked where I’m from and answering “here”, been told once again what a rarity I am, like I’m a goddamn Ivory-billed Woodpecker or something (I’m channelling Holden today). Why, if I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard that, I could afford to move somewhere that has both snow and culture.

If those of us who were born here are such rarities, who the hell are all those people out there slippin’ and slidin’ and bumpin’ their cars into poor unsuspecting ex-Saskatoonians?

I should mention that yes, while I was locally bred, I learned to drive in Winnipeg, the epicentre of cold and snow in southern Canada. If you’ve never been to Winnipeg, the only hills (besides an old garbage heap that was eventually turned into a park) are on bridges, overpasses, and underpasses, all of which are liberally coated with enough sand and salt to build a dozen new beach resorts on the Dead Sea. (In the spring, once the snow has melted, the city has machines to remove the sand dunes that have collected on boulevards over the winter).

I’ll tell you who all those “bad” drivers are: righteous central Canadians who think that they should not only drive, but continue to drive 25 km/h over the speed limit regardless of conditions, whether they be rain, snow, sleet, or dark of night (or most especially, all of those combined).

Never mind that Vancouver – quite justifiably for the miniscule quantity of snow we typically receive – doesn’t have an established infrastructure for ensuring your ability to imitate Mario Andretti on your way to the dog park. Never mind that prairie snow is typically dry and tends to pack into a tolerably textured driving surface, while Vancouver’s wet snow tends to pack into skating-quality ice the more you drive on it.

If Vancouver had a huge fleet of snow plows and sanding trucks; if Vancouver had a $30 million dollar snow maintenance budget; if Vancouver had dry snow and it remained well below zero for months at a time; if you spent a few hundred bucks for snow tires for the 4.2 days a year they might be necessary – if all of those things were true then you might be justified in driving as if it were July 17, and you might be justified in disparaging all the “other” drivers.

Otherwise, just shut up already!

Now, here’s something we can all – easterner or westerner – legitimately mock with abandon:

On Granville Street. From the Vancouver Sun. Photograph by: Ward Perrin, PNG”.

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If you’ve looked at this blog more than once or twice, you’ve probably noticed the infrequency with which new content appears upon (within?) it. And even then, no small number of posts have had the apparent primary purpose of describing some new blogging project, every one of which, as far as I can recall, never ventured beyond a tepidly ambitious announcement.

It occurs to me that part of the problem might be the word blog itself, or rather, the fact that I use it as a noun, and that only through a deliberate act of will am I able to think of it, let alone write about it, as a verb. Write, obviously, is the preferred verb. But write what? By what, I mean not what subject, but what physical entity (if one can think of something that exists only digitally on a server in Texas as an object)? It seems wrong to say “write a blog,” for isn’t a blog a sort of collective noun, if one thinks of it as an aggregation of blog entries, or posts? It seems to me that a software programmer writes a blog; a writer writes a blog post.

Then there’s the word post. It’s both verb and noun. Shall I blog a post, post a blog, or post a post? In this case, I’m thinking noun, for I’m using it as a synonym for entry. Entry? Where’s the exit?

Obviously, this linguistic semantics is an avoidance tactic, and avoidance tactics, despite unremitting urges to the contrary, are my speciality when it comes to writing. If you’d witnessed me trying to choose between “this linguistic semantic is”, “these linguistic semantics are”, and “this linguistic semantics is” (never mind whether to use British or American comma placement in relation to the quotation marks) you’d understand more clearly my handicap.

Another persistent problem is lack of focus. Both the blog’s and mine (obviously), but let’s deal with the former.

This blog has no clearly – or even fuzzily – defined scope: it has so far been about whatever happens to be rattling around in my head at any given moment. This works very well when I am travelling and making discoveries about people and places new to me, but in everyday life the rattling tends to get a little knotted up with too many things that I otherwise seem to let settle while living from a backpack.

It would probably be useful to pick a specific topic and stick to it – say, exchange-traded funds, mass-delusion, or Shih Tzu Poo appreciation. The thing is though, I’m interested in a lot of different things, but I’m not sufficiently obsessive enough about any one of them to warrant a dedicated blog for it. Really, I should probably abandon the blog concept altogether and write for some other medium or purpose, but if I abandoned all the 21^st century apparatus for which I have lacklustre enthusiasm I’d be coaxing oxen to pull a plow across a stubbly field.

Aha! There in that last paragraph is camouflaged the subject I had, faintly, in mind at the start but have successfully invested 500 words avoiding. If I were a more efficient pre-writer (ie: thinker) I might have arrived here much earlier and would have written what I’d had smouldering in my mind in the first place.

So what is the subject in question? Stay tuned. With luck it will get written before the spring equinox.

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Yesterday, as I do toward the end of every month, I logged in to my Vancity Visa account in order to find out my ending balance, so that I can then log in to my Vancity chequing account and pay it.

I was not deposited at my account summary screen as usual, however. Instead I was presented with a screen that demanded that I update my security settings. Specifically, I was ordered to choose five security questions. I use the words “demanded” and “ordered” because Vancity displayed this screen to me with no option to bypass or postpone the update, which forced me to answer the questions if I wanted to access my account.

Now, the whole point of having security questions is that they allow one to verify one’s legitimacy by answering questions that are a) easy for the legitimate account holder to remember, and b) unlikely to be guessed by a hacker. I tend to be a little sceptical about b), given the extent to which people post personal shit online these days. What, hackers can’t use Facebook?

Given the choice of questions provided by Vancity Visa, I can safely report that a) is not very reliable either.

There are several questions on the list that don’t apply to me at all (I never had pets as a child, for instance). Others could be answered differently depending on interpretation. The worst are the three choices in question 2: I have no children, I don’t remember any high school teachers’ names let alone have a favourite, and since we lived in two different cities when I was in grade three we had two different addresses. Vancity, however, forces me to answer one of these questions anyway. Six months from now when they ask me What is the middle name of your oldest child? I’ll probably forget that I named the nonexistent her “Annie” and get locked out of my own account.

Irritating as the arbitrary question selection is, however, that’s not what irritates me most about these questions.

If you’re not entirely familiar with Vancity, it’s one of those sorta lefty-progressive organisations, in this case referred to by Board of Directors chair Virginia Weiler as a values-based financial co-operative. I won’t dispute this claim, for Vancity probably does do considerably more good work with its profits, based on values that I (in some cases) share, than mainstream Canadian banks. That’s why my extensive aggregation of personal wealth is stored there and not at the Imperial Bank of Colonial Majesty.

One of my ongoing dissatisfactions with the middle-class soft-left in Canada is that it often seems that there is a very narrow band within which it (if I may be forgiven for the moment for speaking of “it” as some sort of single-minded monolith) is willing to be progressive. The limited nature of the security questions provided by Vancity, I think, describes quite well what I mean. Here’;s the full list:

Security Question 1*
What was your childhood nickname?
In what city did you meet your spouse/significant other?
What is the name of your favorite childhood friend?

Security Question 2*
What is the middle name of your oldest child?
What was the last name of your favorite high school teacher?
What street did you live on in third grade?

Security Question 3*
What is your maternal grandmother’s maiden name?
In what city or town was your first job?
What is the name of your elementary school?

Security Question 4*
What is the color of your first car?
What school did you attend in sixth grade?
What was the name of your first pet?

Security Question 5*
What is your maternal grandfather’s first name?
What was the name brand of your first car?
What was the last name of your favorite elementary teacher?

Maybe if you grew up in some sort of comfortable, middle-class suburban ideal (cough, cough) Vancity’s security questions don’t sound particularly troublesome. But if you think about them a little, they represent a pretty specific sort of idealised western life experience. What about the people who had early life experiences that weren’t quite so idyllic and typical as these questions seem to suggest is normal?

What if your childhood nickname was “fatty zitface”? Do you need to be reminded of it by Vancity in order to bank securely? What if your first pet was skinned and roasted by your dad on your family’s third night in the refugee camp? What if you were sexually abused by the gym teacher in sixth grade? What if your maternal grandmother’s first name was Mieczysław and you’re dyslexic?

Extreme examples, perhaps, but maybe they’re useful as a reminder that there’s a lot more diversity to life experience in this country, in this world, than is represented in this boring list of inane questions that were apparently written by the glee club committee over at St. George’s school.

I don’t imagine that Vancity staff actually compiled these questions themselves. More likely, they’re provided directly by Visa, Inc. along with a turnkey website branded with Vancity’s logo (one hint is the American spelling of “favourite”). That just seems to reinforce my complaint about what is generally accepted as progressive, though. One might think that a progressive credit union forced to use a foreign company’s services might at least make an attempt to prevent the homogenisation of upper North American cultural references.

Vancity and Visa could avoid this whole problem if they’d just let me write my own damn security questions instead of feeding me a predetermined, largely meaningless list.

Herewith, I provide a set of possible questions more relevant to my own life experience and therefore, more likely to be remembered when needed:

Security Question 1*
What brand of cigarette did you first smoke when you were twelve?

Security Question 2*
What was the name of the gym teacher who called you a “fag” in grade seven?

Security Question 3*
What device did your mother use to apply “corporal punishment”?

Security Question 4*
On what kind of liquor did you first get sick from overdrinking?

Security Question 5*
What was the name of the bully who threatened to beat you up in grade eight?

Thanks, Vancity Visa! Once you’ve added these to my account, I know you’ll be my Card You Can Feel Good About!™

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Social is a WordPress plugin created by MailChimp that allows comment bi-directional integration between a self-hosted WordPress blog and social networking sites Twitter and Facebook.

Installation is straightforward, but if your site is hosted with Hostgator, it will not, by default, communicate successfully with MailChimp servers in order to authenticate with Twitter or Facebook.Instead of authenticating, you get a pop up window that displays a 404 error, in an attempt to reach

[http://www.mydomain.com]/?social_controller=auth&social_action=authorize&target=https%3A%2F%2Fsopresto.mailchimp.com%2Ftwitter%2Fauthorize&post_id=[yourpostid]

Solution: As described in this WordPress forum topic, contact Hostgator and have technical support whitelist a few mod_sec rules for Apache. Easiest is to go to http://support.hostgator.com/ and click “Live Chat” in the top left corner. You’ll need the email address and password associated with your HostGator hosting account.

The mod_sec rules that seemed to be relevant in this case were 999022, 340594, and 340162. However, if you just describe the problem to Hostgator, they should be able to look at the logs, see where your service is failing, and easily identify which rules need to be whitelisted. HostGator actually has pretty good tech support.

Note: there seem to be two components that need to be looked at separately: one is when you authenticate to the social networks from within the Social settings in the WP admin panel; the other is when a blog reader/commenter attempts to sign in as a commenter. Test both with HG while you’re chatting with them, or you’ll need to contact them twice, as did I.

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