(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.

– Lore Sjöberg, Wired columnist

Well, if you need somebody like this, I know somebody who will be available soon. And if you ask me very, very nicely (via a comment) and pass a rigorous battery of tests to prove that you are worthy, I might put you in touch.

Edit: Note that I manually approve all comments, so you can add a comment with your contact information and it will not be published on this site.

From Kim, by Rudyard Kipling:

‘When first I dealt with Sahibs, and that was when Colonel Soady
Sahib was Governor of Fort Abazai and flooded the Commissioner’s
camping-ground for spite,’ Mahbub confided to Kim as the boy filled
his pipe under a tree, ‘I did not know how greatly they were fools,
and this made me wroth. As thus -,’ and he told Kim a tale of an
expression, misused in all innocence, that doubled Kim up with
mirth. ‘Now I see, however,’ - he exhaled smoke slowly - ‘that it
is with them as with all men - in certain matters they are wise,
and in others most foolish. Very foolish it is to use the wrong
word to a stranger; for though the heart may be clean of offence,
how is the stranger to know that?’

Oi, soon to be part of the latest web meme.

Criteria:

- evening prime-time
- 74 channels

Content observations (in channel order):

military drama (guys in uniform, weeping women) … street racers and their pimped-out cars (with background Russian rap soundtrack) … a two-minute commercial for fur coats (guys in fur coats look totally silly) … football … overdubbed cartoon bears and mice - oh wait, it’s Garfield, in a FLAGRANT Bugs Bunny rip off, they should be ashamed … a commercial that is either selling kitchen renovations or haute couture, not sure which … Strepsils, Maybelline … women-in-prison drama, the warden is a profiteering lesbian - wait, the innocent female inmate with a black eye is cutting pictures out of Playboy magazine; this is apparently character development, moving on … talking head - ahh, “Victor Yushenka”, this is Ukrainian news … whale sharks, gentle giants of the deeps, being harrassed for their own good and our viewing pleasure by bronzed, sun-bleached scientists … more military drama (seems to be a theme) … home-improvements how-to (hey, I like “before” better than “after”) (cripes, what’s the appeal of these shows - “look, it’s a drawer” “look, a sink” “look, a vase of fake flowers”) … military drama, woah, this is a big deal here … a day in the life of a champion wrestler (luckily the children have not inherited the father’s prominent cranial ridges) … cripes, don’t these people have any sit-coms? no wonder they’re so depressed … weight loss commercial, “you too can have this ass” … overdubbed movie … football - oh, wait animated football, like in a video game … video-game style animated warrior battles … oh, hey, this is more like it - kids in folk costumes doing pop song-and-dance numbers with an aging 5 piece band in the background, emcee in white shoes, oh yeah, Euro-Vision here we come … leopards having sex, isn’t nature wonderful … violent psycho murder scene, good guy speeds away - wait a minute, that’s Vancouver! … sixties Bollywood movie, only the dialog is overdubbed into Russian, not the song-and-dance numbers …

Everywhere in the world is starting to look exactly the same.