The “Golden Ears” part of the title refers to the Vancouver municipality of  Maple Ridge. The Golden Ears mountain summit is visible from most of the municipality (and from much of metro Vancouver), and is used to name many Maple Ridge businesses and features (such as the Golden Ears bridge, which spans the Fraser River between Maple Ridge and Langley).

The “Transition Initiative” part of the title refers to a network of community groups that are interested in addressing problems regarding climate change, energy consumption, food security and related issues. It is based on the premise that solutions to these problems lie in activities undertaken by communities. There are Transition Initiatives all over the place: Village Vancouver, Transition Falmouth in the UK, Transition PDX in Portland, Oregon, and many more all over the world.

The general principles of the Transition Initiative movement are described by Rob Hopkins in the book The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience.

Transition Initiatives provide a framework that enable community groups to gather under an umbrella. For example, in the Golden Ears Transition Initiative (GETI), there are groups interested in cycling, recycling, farming, water security, arts, and many more topics. Each of these groups is autonomous, but can use the GETI resources (such as the network of people and the website) to attract new members and further their area of interest.

My interest in Transition Initiatives started when I began attending meetings of the Ecological and New Economics Study Group of Village Vancouver. While I continue to attend those meetings (and, holy smokes, am I ever in over my head with that group) I am glad to be involved in a Transition Initiative in my local community (which, after all, is the whole point).

“Some people know how to operate a chainsaw. Others know how to make jam. Sometimes the jam-makers want to be the chainsaw operators and vice-versa.

“Want to learn something? Add it as a comment to the list. Can you teach something? Ditto.”

Anyone is welcome to join. Once we get a group of interested people, we’ll pick a topic and set a date for our first seminar.

Wanted: One Forever Farm

I learn a lot from this column. While some of the points are specific to The NY Times style guide, many are related to general usage and grammar issues. The examples given are representative of the complexity of everyday usage.

It’s the cart-before-the-horse problem: usually the grammar and usage examples that are given to illustrate a particular issue are simplified to make the issue clear and understandable. The problem is that normal usage is more complex, so it is illuminating to see grammatical analysis of complex sentences.

Further to this, Brian Garner’s Modern American Usage is an excellent reference that uses examples from print media to illustrate grammatical rules. It’s back-of-the-toilet interesting.

(via clusterflock)

photo credit: peterwalshprojects

I like this form of political discourse. I find it useful to see the candidates’ answers side-by-side, and I think it gives the candidates the opportunity to articulate substantive ideas (an opportunity that Allen De Genova’s pompous and opinion- and idea-free “blah blah blah my five terms as Park Board Commissioner blah blah blah my intention as mayor blah blah blah” failed to grasp).

Unfortunately, Mayor Sam Sullivan did not participate. (Nor did Raymond Louie.)

That is kind of a confession.

For example, there is only one kind of salt in my kitchen. (Ok, two. Oh, wait – three. But they’re not frou-frou salts. They’re all white.) I do not peel the skin off tomatoes prior to making a sauce. I don’t know how to lard a pheasant and neither favour nor disfavour durian (having never tried it).

As an occasional flicker-through of food magazines in the grocery store line-up and skimmer of food blogs, though, I am occasionally aware of the latest food fad. (Was food always subject to fashions? I don’t remember this as a kid, but, then again, maybe that explains the whole “Cooking with Campbells” cuisine of my childhood. Where fashion is concerned, we often look back in anger. Let that be a warning to us.)

My food fad alarm bells started ringing when I read Harold McGee’s recent column in the N.Y. Times on the health benefits of yak cheese. Harold McGee is a food / science writer whose work On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen should be distributed by The Gideon Society. (I stole that from Dean Allen.)

McGee’s article is about the general flakiness of testing standards that lead to dubious claims of health benefits for particular foods. Among other examples, he talks about a recent claim that yak-milk cheese contains higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids than found in Canadian cheddar.

Nutrition, whatever, yadda yadda – yak milk cheese?!?!?!

Initial reaction: FOOD FAD!!! Someday soon I will be at a cocktail party where everyone will rave about the fabulous yak’s milk cheese brought by some foodie trend-setter who special-ordered it from Nepal. Next I will be at some less chichi function and three people will bring yak’s milk cheese, purchased from Les Amis du Fromage or Granville Island. Next I will see it on sale at Safeway and someone will bring it on a cheese platter (adorned with Ritz crackers) to a family pot-luck.

Confession: I WANT TO EAT IT! Even if that makes me a hypocrite, one who both slags the fad and jumps on the band-wagon. I want to eat it because it is cheese; I want to eat it because it is weird; I want to eat it because it is made from a yak; and I want to eat it because it might finally, after all these years, get the awful, disgusting, gag-inducing taste of yak-butter tea out of my mouth.

There are times in your life when, no matter how much your stomach coils and your throat contracts and your eyes water and your mucous membranes make mucous, you have to eat (or drink) what is given to you. When kindly country people in a remote area of Nepal spontaneously offer their friendship and hospitality over a steaming cup of tea liberally laced with rancid yak grease and salt, you suck it up. Literally.

And you smile and silently reflect for a moment on the incredible good fortune that allowed you to experience the horrors of yak-butter tea.

Harvey, now retired, was a senior reporter with BCTV (which was later acquired by Global). (See Wikipedia for his bio.)

In response to questions raised by the post (disclaimer – they were my questions), Harvey wrote a post about why lighter stories are favoured (“Debating T.V. News … the Beauty of Blogging!!“). This prompted a response from Cameron Bell – “State of the News: Read it and Weep!“. (Cameron Bell was the highly respected News Director for BCTV who is credited (along with Assignment Editor Keith Bradbury and the news crew they assembled) with bringing BCTV’s news program to the top of the ratings.)

Harvey points out that it mostly comes down to money – the amount of money a television station is willing to spend on the news-gathering process. Cameron Bell, however, notes that smart organizations are willing to spend lots of money provided that it generates commensurate profits. Profits are determined by the amount of revenue generated from advertising, which fluctuates depending on the number of viewers. The key to attracting viewers is quality content.

However, the low-hanging fruit – the easy stories – are duplicated and re-covered by multiple news organizations. Cameron Bell points out that three major news organizations (one newspaper, two television) covered the warm-up suits for Canadian Olympic athletes. He charitably (in my opinion) gives the original reporter credit for producing an interesting story. I don’t agree – I think it was a travesty of news on the first report that just got worse on subsequent reports.

I find this all extremely interesting, from a news consumer point of view (although my exposure to TV news is mostly limited to clips I see via the internet). It’s sort of a relief to learn that the there isn’t a grand conspiracy to dumb-down the news or avoid certain topics. Instead, there are merely difficult management problems – human resources, finances, planning and “vision”, etc.