Red Skies at Night

Peering out the window as we tucked the little people in earlier this evening, I noticed another colorful sky shaping up in beautiful, suburban London. I guess all that pollution has an upside.

So I grabbed the digicam - again - and ventured beyond the backyard for another non-film shooting experience. No, I can't tell you when this bizarre optical experimentation of mine will end.

The results reminded me of a song, Red Skies at Night, from one of my favorite seminal '80s bands, The Fixx . Unlike most songs from that era, this one has aged wonderfully.

So as I let that song settle into the recesses of your musical brain, here's the result of my bedtime tangent. Looks like this one's a sailors' delight.

Oh, the Irony

Sometimes, I wish I could be a headline writer. Then I could come up with beauties like this: China vows stiff penalties for Net porn

Cancer: Compelling and Personal

A long time ago in a city far, far away, I worked at an FM radio station now known as Mix96 (back in the good old days, stations simply used their call letters: CJFM.) I was associate producer of a now-defunct noontime news and public affairs program called Hour Montreal Magazine. It was some of the most challenging, rewarding work I've done in broadcast media. And I got to do it during and immediately following journalism school. It was the ultimate trial by fire, and it helped shape many of the edges that define my writing - and my life - to this day.

Along the way, I crossed paths with an eclectic mix of people. Some were broadcast professionals. Others were wannabes. Some were simply sad little people. I learned something from all of them, including one whose love and knowledge of international music convinced me there was room in radioland for more than the programmed-to-death sound that typifies so many stations today.

I didn't know Daniel Feist all that well - bumped into him in the hallway every week or so and chatted with him whenever I could. But he always impressed me as someone completely devoted to his craft. I was a young journalist in my first major media job, and he left an impression on me as one who wouldn't succumb to the cookie-cutter machine.

Fast forward to now and news from home was not good: he was diagnosed with cancer. He has decided to write about it for Montreal's daily paper, The Gazette. Click here for the unfolding series - as poignant a piece of first-person writing as you are ever likely to see. Thank you, Daniel, and rest assured my prayers are with you as you fight this fight.

In a similar vein, Jerry Gladman, who passed away this past June from ALS, wrote this award-winning series on his own battle with an unfathomable illness. I was honored enough to have my name appear on the same Canoe columnists home page as his. I'll be lucky if some of his wisdom rubs off on me.

Why do I care? Simple: everyone has been touched by cancer in some way. Our daughter is named for my wife's uncle, who suffered from brain cancer in the final years of his life. I just have to believe that good comes from tragedy. Sometimes, it comes in the form of great writing.

Acceptable Smokers' Rights: None

Here in Canada, we have a government-funded program called Medicare that, in theory, provides equal access to health care for all Canadians. Although it has been under attack in recent years for its cost, it remains a model for other nations - can you hear me, America? - looking to set up their own system.

To that end, I've long questioned the fairness of smokers placing increased demands on an overburdened public health system. It's one thing to be afflicted with disease over which you have no control. It's quite another to willingly expose yourself to increased risk. Why governments can't look to private insurance - where wacko drivers who rack up tickets and insist on driving sports cars pay significantly higher premiums than the rest of us - and apply a similar ethos in the public sector is rather beyond me.

So I stumbled into this article, Smokers 'should not get NHS care', on the BBC's site earlier today. OK, I lied. My RSS reader delivered it to me. But you don't care about my techie toys...and I'm digressing yet again. Regardless of delivery method, the article summarizes my recent rantings on the topic. Let the debate begin.

Interestingly, I wrote this piece in the Free Press recently that more or less parallels this topic. No, I don't smoke. I'm tired of long waiting periods getting longer because of people who do.

AOL: Don't go there...

Anyone who knows me knows how I feel about Internet Service Providers like AOL and WebTV. Commonly disparaged by the technorati as Internet for Dummies-type services, I find them no easier or cheaper to use than conventional ISPs. They are, however, infinitely more frustrating in their propensity to overload the experience with a torrent of badly-designed and slow pop-up windows and other mindless sludge that destroys the user experience.

WebTV - which dispenses with the PC entirely in favor of a television set-top box - is even worse because it doesn't allow pages to be cached locally. Combine the bloat of today's typical web site with a slow dial-up connection to arrive at one really frustrated power user.

Incidentally, you need not be a power user to experience a doubling in systolic blood pressure while using one of these services. A mere mortal with a need to get a bit of work done sometime before the current millenium runs out and/or the HMS Titanic is refloated from the floor of the North Atlantic will feel similarly thwarted.

And that, in a nutshell, is my research analyst's rant. Which brings me to this latest find, the AOL CD Preservation Guild and Museum. If your mailbox has been assaulted by unwanted AOL CD mailers over the years, or, worse, if you've ever received a panicky phone call from a relative because he/she received an AOL CD and thought it would be cool to put it into the PC, this site's definitely for you.

Other anti-AOL resources that have brought a lewd little smile to my face include:
- Reasons to hate AOL (& Compuserve & Prodigy)
- Things to do with your AOL disks
- Tech Support Guy forums on why you hate AOL
- Article: AOL sets new record for (in)security
- Usenet Newsgroup: alt.aol-sucks

We Interrupt This Broadcast

I was all set to go to a movie this weekend, but I decided to stay home and watch CNN's coverage of Hurricane Frances instead. I didn't learn more than I would have gleaned from a six-minute surf through the major online news and weather resources, but the spectacle of a 24-hour news channel trying to fill airtime with a Big Weather Story was too good to ignore.

It's not that this hurricane is any different than any other hurricane that's come before it. The cable network - the only American all-news outfit we get in this part of Canada because Fox News has been banned at the border - never fails to trot out the same tired tricks of the trade whenever bad weather rolls into town. Here's a quick look at the cast of characters:

REPORTER-DOING-STANDUP-OUTSIDE: Camera shows a barely-visible journalist in the middle of an abandoned street. While wrestling with his microphone, he struggles to remain vertical while gusting winds alternately paste his soaked raincoat to his head and puff up the sleeves and make him look like a little Michelin Man. All the while, he struggles to fill a whole lot of airtime with interesting tidbits about the storm. "As you can see, I'm having a very hard time standing in one place because hurricanes pack really, really strong winds." Right, I wouldn't have known that otherwise. He also taught me that hurricanes bring lots and lots of rain. Yes, I feel so enlightened now.

OVEREXCITED-WEATHER-ANCHOR-IN-STUDIO: Her usually perky voice has been driven up an octave or two thanks to a backstage shot of adrenalin. She speaks so fast that you need to use the slow-mo on your TiVo to follow what she's saying. She stands in front of impossibly complex full-screen radar maps of the region and endlessly repeats the same mantra about the eye wall, the storm surge, the big second punch, and any other hurricane-related term that she just memorized from her Big Book of Big Weather Tidbits. She breathlesslessly introduces the now-branded weather technology toys - this time, it's a gadget called "VIPIR", and, no, I don't know or care what that stands for - and zooms up and down the coast trying to explain all the bright colors to us morons with the good sense to live anywhere but Florida. When she finally pauses long enough to take a breath, the floor director senses the audience's general wish that she would quickly relocate to Fiji and finally cuts in with a Maalox commercial.

THE-SMARMY-NEWS-ANCHOR: She tells the on-the-scene reporters (see above) to "be safe" and "stay inside because getting the story just isn't worth getting hurt" but then laughs manically when said reporter stupidly goes outside for a standup anyway. "Wow, did you see how those trees are bending sideways? Gee, it must be getting bad out there. Hey, Gary, watch out for flying debris, will ya?" Every once in a while, she'll chuckle nervously in a vain attempt to diffuse the tension. Of course, she's hundreds of miles away from the storm, so she can afford to do whatever the heck she wants. Classic office-chair-journalism. Outside-reporter-man mumbles the occasional profane comment under his breath. Lucky or him and his agent, the wind drowns out his true thoughts.

It's so cheesy that it's funny. Which, in a way, is sad, because it undermines the seriousness of the story, and the real tragedies that are unfolding as these bozos struggle to keep our waning attention.

Raiding the Archives 6 - A Wheeled Tragedy

Most writers have at least a horror story or two about editors who have ripped their precious work to shreds. I've had a charmed life in that regard: with the exception of one bottle-addicted, shower-averting moron at a local paper I wrote for while in journalism school, my editors have
largely been gifted writers and mentors. Most of my work has been published in relatively unscathed form, and any changes have been deftly applied and explained. Good writers become great writers by building strong working relationships with their editors. The London Free Press is home to some of the best, and their subtle and careful shaping of my submissions has allowed them to be that much better in their final form.

I submitted this piece a year ago August, after a motorcyclist impaled himself on the back of a van a block away from our house. As I stood around the sidelines afterward, the senselessness of the loss really hit home. I wrote the article below, and my copy editor promptly called me to deliver some bad news: since the accident was being investigated by the province's Special Investigations Unit, I was highly constrained in terms of what I could and could not include in the article. The piece ended up having almost a third of its length slashed from the original submission. How my editor stepped me through the process and validated each change with me at every step will stick in my mind for a long time. I trusted my editor to deliver the goods that time out, and he did. With that in mind, here's the originally-submitted piece:

---
Submitted to the London Free Press on August 11, 2003
Edited version published August 13, 2003

Accident tragic on multiple levels

By Carmi Levy

It's always easy to quote statistics when you want to make a point about road safety. Numbers, after all, are great at putting opinions into their proper perspective.

Stats don't amount to a hill of beans when a motorcyclist doing 100 km/h in a residential area clips a pickup truck before ramming the back of a van. It happened in my neighbourhood last Friday night. As reported in this paper over the weekend, 29-year-old Kiley Evan Sutherland died.

Which is too bad for a whole lot of reasons. Bad for his family members, who have now lost three of four sons, and must grieve a loss that should never have happened. But does. Too often.

Bad for me, because I've always wanted to know why people put themselves and others at risk for no apparent reason. I would have liked to have spoken to him to find out what was so important that he felt compelled to try to squeeze between cars stopped at a red light. In baseball, it's called a suicide squeeze. For good reason.

Bad for the scores of onlookers who converged on the grisly scene. They, like my wife who, returning from picking up dinner with our kids, drove by just after the impact, will never quite be able to erase the sight from their minds.

Bad for the driver of the van, who thought some of his cargo had fallen out the back, and emerged to a more cruel sight.

There's something about a crumpled body lying in the middle of the road that just never leaves the mind's eye. Either that or the helmet that landed in the ditch. Or the boot that flew off after impact. Or the shattered motorcycle itself, part shards strewn everywhere as if smashed by a giant hammer.

Numbers don't have the same impact.

Every time I see people - motorists, motorcyclists, cyclists, pedestrians, whatever - misusing our roads, I want to ask them why they think it's acceptable to flout common sense, the law, and physics. If you think you're immune to any of these, you're dreaming.

At least you can still dream.

I hesitate to call this an accident. My Oxford Dictionary defines an accident as, "An event without apparent cause; an unexpected event." Sorry, but unless you're smoking some newly-legalized weed, the cause is quite apparent, and the end result was hardly unexpected. If you drive recklessly, you're going to get hurt. Or worse.

The province's Special Investigations Unit is investigating. The police say they had tried to stop him and he fled.

As difficult as it is to second guess the dead, I feel compelled to do so. How else will we teach others to make the right decisions in future?

The decision to stay or run was entirely within the Mr. Sutherland's control. Had he stopped, I'd be writing about the ice cream place down the hill. Every action in life has consequences. Some more dire than others.

And because of that, we continue to witness "accidents" with shockingly similar outcomes. I keep wanting to believe we're smarter than that, but I'm continually proven wrong.

Area residents hung around the scene until long after dark, watching the forensics team members go through their paces. I hope the kids in the crowd keep the images front and centre as they graduate from bicycles to more powerful modes of transport. If one someday thinks back to that night and decides to stop when he sees flashing lights in the rearview mirror, perhaps Mr. Sutherland's death will end up serving some higher educational purpose.

This is a tragedy on multiple levels. On the obvious one, a young man died. Not so obviously, the lesson died with him.

I hoped against hope he would survive. I wanted him to e-mail me with an explanation. I looked forward to chatting over coffee to better understand what drives people to take such unnecessary and, in this case fatal, risks.

Now we'll never know.

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Carmi Levy (carmilevy@msn.com) is a London freelance writer. His column appears every other Wednesday.

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Hi there...I'm back: Incidentally, a few weeks ago, someone put up a memorial beside a tree at the intersection where it all happened. Someone else left a bouquet of flowers. Whatever you're driving, whatever the season, may these informal roadside memorials give us all pause for thought as we set off on our own journeys. Safe travel.

The Banality of Google

It's the Friday before a long weekend. The weather is gorgeous - unless you're living in Florida staring down the barrel of Hurricane Frances - and here I sit tickling my keys in anticipation of a lovely long weekend with my extended family (more on that later.)

In other words, time for a funny.

Everyone's been buzzing about Google's recent IPO. The company's "dont be evil" ethos has prompted much speculation about whether or not going public will erode its sense of organizational charity. This has, in turn, driven lots of buzz about why companies exist in the first place. Are they on this planet to enrich society? Pad the bank accounts of their porcine executives? Feed the unending demands of their vaunted shareholders? It's kind of hard to tell most days.

Wherever you stand on this issue, Paul Ford's The Banality of Google page contains enough hilarious graphic and word-based imagery to keep you smiling throughout the upcoming long weekend.

So the final question remains: does Google's ubiquity have dire implications for the rest of us? Don't answer that until after you do a vanity search on your own name. The results might surprise you.

One Kind Soul's Random Acts

Today's Toronto Star includes a heartwarming story about a woman who buys coffee for the folks in the car behind her at the coffee shop drive-through. It's a Random Act of Kindness, and it's the kind of thing that makes you wonder why more people can't be sweeter on a smaller, day-to-day scale.

For more info on RAKE, visit the web site for the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation. You'll find it inspirational. Or, if you're like Dieter, the teutonic, self-centred moron-character I'm building in my novel, you'll wonder why you didn't just buy one for yourself.

By the way, for those of you not lucky enough to live in the overgrown country camp known as Canada, Tim Hortons is more than a huge chain of coffee shops. To some Canadians, it represents a form of java-fuelled religion. Scary in a way, but comforting when my wife and I are carting the kids yet again on the long road between London and Montreal.

But stay away from Tim Horton's in Quebec. Either the water there is substandard, or separatist minimum-wage-earners don't know how to make coffee. Either way, it's horrid there. Avoid at all costs - unless you're buying it for the person in the car behind you, of course.

RIP Snail Mail - Not So Fast

The Christian Science Monitor yesterday published a piece entitled In an electronic age, the letter endures. It's ironic that I'm using a blog to discuss paper-based communication. But the truth is we are in the process of losing something very important in our move from snail mail to electronic-based forms of interaction.

Yes, it is true that e-mail and its companion technologies facilitate a volume and speed of interaction that physical media will never even approach. It is also true that lower barriers to entry - namely cost-per-message and reduced logistical requirements to get said message from point A to point B - open up the possibility of communicating with folks who otherwise would have never heard from you.

But the immediacy of e-mail makes for an obvious dilution in the quality of our messaging. Compare the typical e-mail (or worse, instant message) of today with a letter from years ago. Letters forced us to sit up straight and think about what we said and how we said it. E-mail has turned us all into vocabulary-and-grammar-challenged slackers.

Beyond mere textbook knowledge and application of the language, the attics of tomorrow will have no shoeboxes filled with letters. Actual paper and ink represent a physical connection to the person who wrote you. No inbox can ever be as rich. And even if you think it is, and you want to burn your e-mail correspondence onto CD for posterity, the computers of tomorrow likely won't be able to read them anyway.

Technology advances every day. I'm not sure we're advancing along with it.

This Just In: Aliens Exist After All

Pretty exciting news out of England this morning. They're examining a radio signal from deep space that they suspect could be from an alien species. Of course, the good folks from SETI are denying it until the cows come home, but I'd rather be an idealist than a fatalist.

That's because I've never been so arrogant to believe that humans are the only life forms in the entire universe (heaven forbid if we are.) Of all the bazillions of galaxies, solar systems and planets, there's no way that Earth can be the absolute, only place that sustains life.

I'm also not so naive as to believe that life always takes on a hominid-like shape, with two arms, two legs, and a head. Sci-fi movie directors take note: you need to use a little more imagination in your future work, k?

The Origins of Carmi

In case you've ever wondered where I came from, wonder no longer. Here's a very recent picture of my illustrious parents, Miriam and Arthur. They're in for a visit, and I twisted their arms just long enough to get this picture just now. Our cat, Shadow, sits on top of the couch and ignores everyone. Say hi!

Raiding the Archives 5 - Why Teaching Matters

Now that August has segued painfully into September, all eyes turn toward the coming school year. I thought I'd share the first long-form piece I ever published in the London Free Press. It's from way back in 2000, and I wrote it after I heard my kindergarten teacher had passed away.

Today, my wife is getting her own kindergarten class ready for her new students' arrival next week. Any time anyone doubts just how precious a teacher can be in a child's life, I think of this piece, and the impact my own kindergarten teacher had on my own life.

---
Originally published Wednesday, April 26, 2000, in the London Free Press.

Learning about life and fingerpaints

The best teacher I ever had was my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Peligal. Like many teachers of her generation, she was a surrogate mother figure to all her charges.

She didn't teach lessons, per se. She set an example for all of us to follow. In doing so, she gently taught us the fundamental lessons we would continue to leverage for the rest of our lives.

She was so influential on my young life that for years after, I would visit her in her classroom after finishing my elementary school classes in the adjoining section of the school.

Somehow, seeing her in the increasingly small-scaled room made everything seem right in my increasingly complex world.

When I first received the news that she had died earlier this year, I reflected on how nine months spent playing blocks and finger painting with a woman over a quarter-century ago would continue to shape my now-very different life.

As trivial as the kindergartener's - and by association, the kindergarten teacher's - existence may seem, that first educational step helped me bridge the gap between Mom at home and a bunch of strange kids I'd never met in an overwhelmingly big place known as school. I grew up a lot that year.

As it was, I was a pretty sick kid and spent a good chunk of that year in the hospital. My return to the classroom was always a joyous event. Mrs. Peligal always took extra time to ensure I had everything I needed, and that I felt comfy being back with my classmates.

She used my absences as an opportunity to teach my friends about compassion and generosity. Living alone in a hospital was hard for a five-year-old to understand. But Mrs. Peligal made it seem easier with her regular care packages and calls. In that regard, among others, she was more than just a teacher.

I lost track of her after I got into high school. Typical for a teenager, I was too old and too busy to fully appreciate the lessons learned that year. She retired and moved far away. Life went on.

News of her passing made me regret that I never called or wrote to tell her how much I appreciated all she had done for me.

Only after I got married - to a kindergarten teacher - and had kids of my own did I begin to truly appreciate the lessons learned in that classroom and how relevant they are no matter how old we are.

Share. Say please and thank you. Appreciate what you have, not what you don't. Take the time to smell the flowers. Smile at someone. Draw a picture when the urge strikes you. Tell your Mom she looks pretty today. Take a nap when you're tired. Treat others as you would like to be treated.

These little rules of life seemed simple at the time, and they still do. Deceptively so.

Our five-year-old son now spends his days in his own brightly-decorated Kindergarten class. When we drop him off at school in the morning, I sometimes pop into the classroom to catch a glimpse of whatever it was that made me feel so secure so long ago.

Time and distance have removed me from that first classroom, but I can still see Mrs. Peligal welcoming us all back, making us once again feel that all is right with the world.

Thank you, Mrs. Peligal. May your lessons always be heeded no matter how far-removed we are from your classroom.

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Carmi Levy is a London resident. He still colours outside the lines and builds Lego towers with his two young children.

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Chatting with Linus

No, not Linus Van Pelt from the Peanuts gang. Linus Torvalds, the guy who started the Linux revolution. SiliconValley.com has this well-written feature based on an interview with the quiet open-source hero. A good read whether you're into the technology or simply interested in the increasingly lost art of feature writing.

Do you do Linux?

Google Dorks, Unite!

The Google Hacking Database is a great resource for anyone who wants to explore the privacy-busting power of a modern search engine. Paste the entries into Google and see what confidential and/or otherwise sensitive material you can uncover. It is frightening from a socio-technological perspective, but it also represents a cool way to spend those otherwise-idle 45 minutes before the kids wake up on a Sunday morning.

Oh yes, the term, Google Dork, as defined by this site, is as follows: "An inept or foolish person as revealed by Google." Welcome to the new age, everyone.

More Photo Fun

London has these weird sunsets sometimes. The sky gets this incredibly yellowish tinge that literally bathes everything in an eerie tone. We had one of those nights this past week. Of course, by the time I stopped ruminating about the possible root cause of this phenomenon, fed the cat, finished my butterscotch pudding, read the kids a bedtime story, grabbed the camera and headed out the door, things had darkened appreciably. Still, the sky looked pretty unreal, and I feel privileged to have captured another one of those fleeting photographic moments.

A Peek at Us

Now that I've figured out how to upload pictures to the blog, I'll forewarn you that I may be a bit photo-happy for the next little bit. Here's a rare picture of our entire brood. To help people remember what we look like, we've evolved a family tradition: I hold the camera at arm's length, say a little photographic prayer and squeeze the shutter. Now that we're digital, we'll probably do it more often.

In case you've forgotten the family visuals, here's the lowdown:

• Bottom left: Noah, the happiest boy we know.
• Above him, in the orange shirt: Zach, aerodynamic in his reversed cap.
• In the middle, the woman responsible for it all: my wife, Debbie
• In the pink flowers: Dahlia (coincidence, you think?)
• Unshaven doof on the right: me.

For the Love of Pontification

I've been quoted again. This time for Processor.com, that American tech paper for which I pen opinion pieces (yeah, it's incestuous, but someone's gotta do it.)

Anyhoo, here's the link to my musings.

Blogging for Dollars?

I came across this interesting paradigm-questioning post in Ozzilyn Bean's blog. It got me thinking about the implications of commercial interest on different media types. Here's my perspective:

Every new technology seems to start with an idealistic premise. Think back to the heady early days of the Internet - pre- AND post-Web - when everyone sat around their 14.4 and 28.8 Kbps modems and sang kumbaya because they were so enthralled with humanity's newfound ability to send a text greeting to someone halfway around the planet.

It didn't take long before money entered the picture. And, with much ado, the commercial nature of the new medium soon predominated. (Think dot-com here and you're on the right path.) In a way, it is inevitable, and I don't say that in a purely perjorative fashion. It's more a point of fact: sooner or later, someone or something has to pay the bills.

And so it goes with blogging. A grassroots technology is evolving into a commercially viable medium - or FORM of medium...still figuring that one out. AdSense is likely the first of many such models that wlil be launched in the coming years. Most will crash and burn. Some will succeed and redefine how we incorporate this new toolset into our day-to-day lives.

Although the implications of commercial interest on free speech can be dire, they are no different in the blogging world as they have been on any medium which experienced a similar transition in the past.

We sure do live in exciting times. Bring it on.

Happy Birthday, Internet

Where were you 35 years ago today? If you're reading this, the piece of history in this link may be of interest. I apologize for not having any cake to mark the occasion. Maybe for double-chai next year.