Fruitography

My photographic tour of the fruits that make us taller and stronger continues. I took the apple pic on the same trip as the orange pepper pic first seen in a post earlier this week. I was simply looking for color - indeed, any color that caught my eye - but didn't initially think green apples were really worth my time. The list specifically said Red Delicious, and my daughter helped me pick the best ones.

While we were busy discussing what made a good fruit and what made a stinker, little brother Noah was sitting quietly on the other end of the cart. He spotted the green apples next to the Red Delicious display and commenced the familiar chant of the 4-year-old: "I want..."

Normally, it would be some kind of more-sugar-than-cereal cereal. But this time, he was asking for green apples. And knowing how much our little guy likes them, I couldn't in good conscience say no to him when he was asking for...fruit! So we rolled the cart a couple of feet over and I repeated the scene with both of them.

As we picked and judged, their greenness jumped out at me and I knew a picture was brewing. So when we had filled the bag and carefully tucked it into the far end of the cart - to avoid bruising, y'know - I did the photographic two-step and snapped off some views of the apples that didn't quite make the cut.

Unlike the now-lost buildings I failed to shoot earlier this week, I know apples will always be abundant at the supermarket. So it's not like I wouldn't have been able to get a similar picture on any other day.

But that moment, when my kids and I first explored for the perfect red and green apples, was unique. I'm glad I recorded it with my camera and my pen.

With apologies, and thanks, to Wheelson for coining the term that graces this post.

A missed opportunity

I've been taking a lot of pictures lately. That's not really a big deal for me, since I've always been rather photographically inclined. Since I learned my way around a darkroom at summer camp a whole lot of years ago, I've found great comfort in capturing the world around me with my camera.

But this week, I can't stop thinking about the picture I did not take. Sure, I wanted to take it, and made one mental note after another to toss a camera in my bike bag so I could snap it on the way to the office. But I never did. And now I'll never be able to get that picture, for the object of my photographic curiosity no longer exists.

Some background: London is home to the University of Western Ontario. This renowned institution contains some of Canada's top faculties in business, medicine, law, and countless other fields of study. It is a center of research, and an integral part of the broader community. During the week, I ride through the campus to get to work. Weekends, the campus is a place to reflect and think.

The student population has grown significantly in recent years. Ontario's abolition of Grade 13, combined with the general trend toward greater post-secondary enrollment rates, has put a lot of pressure on UWO to grow, and grow fast.

This has had a direct impact on London's housing market, which has struggled to put more student housing units on the market to meet this soaring demand. The school has been actively building residence buildings since we moved here almost eight years ago, and the process shows no sign of slowing down.

Which brings us to a stretch of houses on one of the main roads on the edge of the campus. Most recently, they housed a daycare that catered to university families. They were fairly non-descript by anyone's architectural standards: they looked much like oversized side-splits. Nothing to write home about.

They sat across the street from a unique, home-made concrete round house that was once featured in the paper's architectural column. It was bulldozed a couple of years ago for a student apartment building that looks just like a half-dozen other such buildings within a four-block radius. It wasn't far from a running track that once surrounded a wonderfully lush athletic field. It was paved over two years ago and turned into a parking lot. Two weeks ago, the bulldozers crossed the street and started taking down the old daycare facilities.

When only one old house was left standing, I thought I'd take a picture and write about how important it was to take pictures of stuff – no matter how seemingly inconsequential said stuff seemed – because after it was gone, there would otherwise be no way to remember what was there. It's like when you come back to a neighborhood you haven't seen in months and there's a parking lot where you know there used to be a building. Only you can't quite picture in your mind what that building looked like because you never took the time to commit it to memory. Or film.

I wanted to get a picture of the last building standing. But I got busy this morning and left the house without the camera. As I came home in the damp, dark evening, all I could see was a forlorn pile of rubble topped by the still-extended arm of the backhoe. The scene, surrounded by a temporary chain link fence, was backlit, making it seem even more melancholy. Now, nothing stands between this site and the multistorey residence that will rise there in the months to come.

So, in the end I didn't get that picture. Over time, how I remember the buildings that stood there will gradually fade as well until, eventually, the corridor created by the ever-expanding march of block-long, five-storey buildings will define the streetscape and push any memories of what once was into the oblivion of forgotten memories.

I didn't take a picture of the round house, either. Nor did I snap the athletic field. And I won't be taking my camera to their old sites. The concrete and asphalt that has replaced them just doesn't seem photo-worthy. There is no history in them; only a bleak future of sameness, and an ever-present reminder that we have no understanding of the importance of our past.

Next time, I'll bring the camera with me. Just in case. I don't want to miss any more of where we've come from than I already have. I hope you'll consider doing the same.

More glimpses of the grocery store

I couldn't resist once again pulling out my camera on my last visit to the supermarket. As I learn the ins and outs of our digital camera, I'm getting better at overriding the idiot-proof auto-everything features (darn them!) Specifically, I've learned how to disable the flash and use available light instead. This increases my stealth factor and reduces the possibility of an apron-clad store employee busting me for fruity photography. Or vegetably. I know it's not a word, but it sort of fits here.

My wandering eye found some pretty neat bursts of color in the vegetable and fruit bins. I had our younger two kids with me on this trip, and as we wheeled around the corner and spotted the vegetable shelves, they said the orange pepper would look nice in a picture. My daughter then gave me a knowing smile as I quietly pulled the camera from my trench coat pocket (the right attire is critical for grocery store commando photography) and set up for the shot.

Not only were they correct (that orange just gets me!) but their suggestion proves they have already started thinking like me, spotting pictures in the most mundane of places. I don't know about you, but that both scares and excites me.

I'd best go now, since this is making me hungry.

Judgment under fire

By now, pretty much everyone has heard the news from Fallujah, Iraq where a U.S. Marine was videotaped shooting an Iraqi in apparent cold blood.

As armchair pundits everywhere - most of whom have become combat experts because they spend countless hours watching talking heads argue on CNN and Fox News - debate the issue, the power of the web as a journalistic medium has emerged.

Say what you want about journalism, but to me it is all about context. If we can paint a contextual picture that helps everyday folks make sense of the jumbled world of news, we will have done our job. More importantly, we will have succeeded to an even greater degree if, in our drive to help our audience arrive at this nirvana-point of sense, we went a bit further and actually helped them improve their own decision-making capacity.

It's a direct offshoot of the Five W Questions - Who, What, Where, When, and Why. To that I've always added How. In answering them all, journalists shed light on issues that may not have been clear. They balance our understanding of these issues, and bring us to the point that we can fairly draw our own conclusions.

Such is the case with the shooting in Iraq. On the surface, it may look one way. In reality, to those living through the hell of combat against an enemy whose concept of the Geneva Convention was never quite fully formed, it may need to be analyzed from a thoroughly different perspective.

With this in mind, I read an incredibly powerful account of the events by the journalist who witnessed them in the first place, Kevin Sites. His missive, called What happened in the Fallujah mosque, was first published on his personal blog, www.kevinsites.net, under the heading Open Letter to Devil Dogs of the 3.1. To its credit, MSNBC later picked it up and ran a link to it from the front page of its web site. It is an absolute must-read for anyone following this story.

The rest of his site contains more insight - through the eyes of a journalist with significant war zone experience - into what the environment is like, and how it shapes the decisions of those who are sent to fight there. It's compelling reading.

Similarly compelling is Rosie DiManno's column in last Wednesday's Toronto Star. The piece is entitled, Try to imagine the way U.S. Marine was thinking. As always, Ms. DiManno says it like it is and challenges us to avoid making the kind of snap judgments that those of us who live in armchairs seem content to make every day.

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Incidentally, I've noticed this blog is resulting in some bizarre behavior within the Google search engine. For example, type the words "Rosie DiManno" into Google and guess which site comes up as #1? Yup, this one. It works whether or not the search terms are within quotations. I guess I'm an even bigger fan of her work than I originally thought - and even a search engine algorithm seems to agree. Fascinating stuff!

Oldest man dies

The world's oldest man has died just shy of his 114th birthday. In a somehat poignant punctuation to his life, Fred Hale Sr. lived long enough to see his beloved Boston Red Sox win baseball's World Series.

For some ridiculous reason, I always have to have a journalistically-focused thought as well. I've never been fully comfortable with the way these oldest-person-dies stories are handled by the media. They're typically dropped into the end of a newscast as a kicker, a lighter-brighter topic whose inclusion is supposed to end the show with a bit of a human touch.

I have no problem with kickers, per se. Rather, it's the routine way in which lineup editors pull in the oldest-person-dies ones. Like clockwork, we'll see 'em about once a month, and they always take on the same generic tone that patronizingly refers to the usual litany of senior citizen stereotypes. Something about driving? Check. Something about outliving a spouse? Yup. How's about some comment about the individual's smoking or drinking habits? Check.

After a cursory check of who the newest oldest-person is - nothing like flagging someone as the next high-profile person to die - it's back to the trustworthy anchor who, before signing off for the night, nods his (yes, his...men are still overrepresented on anchor desks, but that's an issue for another day) head and smiles like the half-wit that he is to let us know that this is supposed to be a Happy Story.

Yeah, I'm sure the deceased's family feels Just The Same Way, Lloyd!

Beyond the cloying level of disrespect shown for someone who's just passed away, the entire exercise strikes me as lazy journalism. Am I the only Andy Rooney-type who feels this way?

Quite the recognition

Many thanks to Mellie Helen for an entirely-too-kind reference to me and my writing. If you haven't had a chance to visit Golly Blog Howdy, I'd like to suggest you do so - it's part of her regular Blog it Forward feature that regularly recognizes a blog of note. Like Paying it Forward and Random Acts of Kindness, it's one of those little things that people do that holds the potential to repair our world, a few well-placed words at a time.

For more info on the concept of Blogging it Forward, click here and here.

In case the Internet melts down and all of our links suddenly become the functional equivalent of a 1982 Lada after its predestined visit with the crusher, here's the actual text. In the blogosphere, this is about as nice as it gets:

Carmi receives this honor because he is a talented and gifted writer who takes the little things we all think and feel way down deep inside, and puts them into insightful phrases that we would use to describe them, if only we could. Reading his work is akin to hearing someone speak a foreign language that you are learning: you understand so much more than you can say yourself. Most every time I read Written Inc., I find myself nodding in agreement, “Yes, yes, that’s just what I felt about that subject!” Only I don’t write about it so eloquently – Carmi does. Example: A child’s playground.

My Neighbor to the North has the ability to reach across a couple thousand miles and touch my heartstrings in such a way that I feel like he’s a friend I’ve known for years, and who knows just what I’m feeling. He manages to take verbs, nouns, prepositions and the like that are just laying around, and weave them into a tapestry rich in emotion and description. While I take the same parts of speech and come home with a crooked pot holder.

Not only does this arteur de bon mots gift us with his writing; he shares his vision though intriguing photographs as well. Delightful.

Snowy fence

This is another one from my snowy walk to work last week. What caught my eye here was the nice little arc of the fence, and the warm color of the wood against the decidedly dull backdrop of the now-white and leafless forest. It's another one of those I-want-to-be-there scenes. Hopefully, I'll get to go back soon.

Cherish what you have

I've been closely following coverage of a house fire in a small town in eastern Ontario. A pregnant woman and her seven children all died when an overnight fire consumed their home. Husband and father Marc Woerlen is now left to live his life, alone. This is his story.

Whatever your situation, wherever you are, look long and hard at what you have, not at what you don't. Thank God or whatever being you worship that you have been so blessed. Think of Mr. Woerlen every time you think your lot in life is difficult. As you tuck your kids into bed tonight, kiss them an extra few times, and hug them tighter, and longer. They may not understand now, but they will, someday.

If you don't have kids, repeat the above with your significant other or anyone else who means something to you. Do anything to spread even a modicum of goodness beyond yourself. At the end of the day, it could be all that is left.

For one, I wish I could do more than simply write words that, while comforting, don't do a whole lot to concretely and obviously fix what's immediately wrong with the world. Their impact is felt over time - which is ironically all that a man suffering a loss beyond comprehension has left.

Life lessons from work

Warning: this is an uncharacteristically long post. I'm not quite sure why I'm so verbose in this one. I'm usually pretty clipped in my verbiage, but this time, I seem to have slipped into storytelling mode. Please read down to the bottom, as I'm looking for your feedback on an issue that's near and dear to my writer's heart - and to yours as well, I hope. Read well, and thanks.

The run-up to the end of the year always seems to spark a wave of introspection in pretty much everyone we meet. It's the kind of thinking that extends well beyond soon-forgotten new year's resolutions. Rather, it's a harder-than-usual look at ourselves and our immediate - and not-to-immediate - milieu, and the tabling of some serious questions about who we are, why we lead our lives as we do, and what else we could or should be doing to improve our place in the world.

The work world seems to have a profound influence on us in this regard. Now is the time when many of us have our performance reviews at work. Not coincidentally, it is also when many of us begin laying plans for a fresh career start in the new year. Even if you put on a happy face to those around you, I'm certain many of you are nodding your head as you read this. Although I don't have a webcam pointed over your shoulder as you peruse the Saturday morning paper, it's a safe bet that a good percentage of you are scanning the Careers section a little more closely than usual.

As these thoughts danced through my mind (yes, they do dance through my head...I have no control over them when they do) I received a link to a posting from the significant other of an Electronic Arts employee that throws this entire line of thinking into stark perspective. It's called EA: The Human Story. To make a long story short, the significant other (or "SO" in our acronym-crazy parlance) of a developer at this market-leading video game software firm wrote a highly detailed, highly emotional, highly effective critique of the company's work practices..

Although I can't say I have ever endured anything that comes close to the hell this person describes, I believe the thread is so unbelievably popular because it strikes a nerve in all of us. Regardless of degree, we have all experienced abuses at the hands of employers at some time in our respective career arcs. There's a little bit of truth in this person's message, and it's familiar enough that we all know how it feels and tastes.

This whole issue brings to mind some contract work I signed on for at a fashion magazine a bunch of years ago. I was still in j-school, but we were on break and I needed something to do. I called someone who was posting for writers on the school's bulletin board, and the next day I found myself in a nondescript building in Montreal's "Fashion District" - otherwise known as the Shmateh District - speaking to the publisher - a short, middle-aged ball of stress we'll call Herb - and his young, attractive editor who we'll call Charlene.

After the usual Reading Of The Resume and a stilted discussion of what a great writer I was, they proceeded to breathlessly share their "vision" of their magazine, a glossy, high-end rag that covered the latest happenings in kids' fashion.

The interview obviously went really well, because they offered me the job right there and showed me to my office. The writing was, frankly, not very challenging, and the overall project looked like a fun way to knock off a couple of weeks before school started again.

So I dug into researching the hot colors, fabrics, and designers of the season - mindless and fun - and had a fairly good first half-day. I turned in my copy just before lunch, at which point Herb and Charlene invited me to join them for the midday meal. Score, I thought.

I remember sitting down, ordering something simple, and watching their faces change from wall-to-wall smiling to dead-serious in the time it took us to reach for the partially-smudged water glasses the server had just brought. Herb, in a deliberate and serious tone, told me I'd better get ready for 24-hour days, and that he'd be bringing a cot in from home. Naive me, I thought he was joking.

Not quite.

I did my best to hide the visual impact of the blood rushing from my cheeks. I was all of, what, 20 years-old, and my work experience to-date - namely working as a lifeguard at my local pool - had been beyond charmed. Despotic bosses were alien to me. Until then, of course.

I remember feeling fear. Walking away seemed like a viable option at that point, but I really wanted to be published, and I didn't think a just-getting-started journalist could realistically walk away and hope to get hired in this town again, so I pretended to not be rattled. I said as little as possible through lunch, then followed them back to the office when we were done.

As I settled in at my computer for another afternoon of writing, I was suddenly jolted by Herb screaming into his phone. His partner was trying to rob him. His wife was a b---h. He hated his kids. Everyone he called seemed to get quite the profane, full-volume earful. My previously-virgin ears were assaulted by language I had only ever heard on the street in the rough parts of town, but never in an office supposedly populated by working professionals. Yeah, professionals: an apparent misnomer in this case.

When he meandered into my office after he was done, I held my keys in my pocket, ready to smack him hard if he came near me. Instead, he spoke to me in a soothing voice, telling me he hoped I didn't get the wrong impression of him (no risk of that, sir) and that publishing is an incredibly rough, dirty world, and you're always dealing with people who are trying to put you out of business. I nodded my head, thankful I didn't have to resort to a full frontal assault to preserve my person, and counted the seconds in the back of my head until he disappeared from sight.

Still the naive, young journalism student, I came back to the office over the next couple of days. I marvelled at my ability to essentially say the same thing seven times, but to spin it in a fresh new direction within each article. Did you know gold and silver were going to be hot colors this year? Did you know that sportswear represented the emerging paradigm of chic? My writing skills sure kicked into overdrive that week, even as I knowingly cranked out the BS.

The yelling continued, though, and by mid-week, the little troll's outbursts were directed at me. My desire to go home at a reasonable hour and return the next morning didn't seem to sit well with Heart Attack Herb. I kept my keys in my pocket at all times, just in case.

His partner showed up Thursday afternoon and almost came to blows with Herb. When the dust had settled, the partner then quietly walked into my office, and whispered "Get out while you still can" to me before disappearing into history.

I went into the office Friday with every intention of quitting. When I told the woosome twosome that their employee satisfaction efforts seemed to be a bit misguided, they threatened to not pay me unless I lived in the building for the rest of the agreed-to-time. They also threatened to tar-and-feather me to every editor, publisher, and media outlet in Montreal. After a bit of back-and-forth where I threatened to bring in Quebec's workplace compensation board for a look-see, they saw my perspective and agreed to pay me for the time I had worked. I don't think I ever cashed a check that quickly.

I never again saw Herb and Charlene. I'm sure Herbie's aorta exploded sometime after the magazine folded - what, you're surprised that it tanked? - and Charlene never did reach the heights of publishing wizardry to which she aspired (I googled her once...she's a hack, and a bad one at that.) I, however, was left with a deep appreciation of the need to treat those with whom we work - in any context, at any level of the organization - with nothing less than absolute respect. It may sound trite and obvious, but it's just as easy to be a hero as it is to be a doofus.

The point of this meandering mess, then, is to ask YOU for your thoughts on the following:

• Do some employers take advantage of employees by making them work long hours for no overtime? Has it happened to you?
• If so, what was the nature of the abuse (or otherwise less-than-stellar treatment of employees)?
• What did you do about it at the time?
• Knowing what you know now, would you change anything about your reaction?
• What are some specific best practices employers should be using to ensure employees continue to remain engaged?

As I've said previously: Discuss...

Publish Day - Beslan, 2 months later

My latest column in the the London Free Press, Beslan suffering knows no bounds, focuses on the aftermath of September’s hostage-taking and subsequent massacre in this Russian town. Through a colleague who went to the wall to ensure I could write this piece (thanks, Olya!), I was lucky enough to gain access to someone who lives in a nearby city (Vladikavkaz) and has visited the stricken town often since

Her stories were unbelievably poignant, which left me with a feeling of enormous responsibility as I wrote the column. I felt my puny little words needed to somehow step up to the plate to do justice to what this stricken town had gone through - and will continue to go through for generations.

My colleague will be sending her a copy of the article: I hope when she reads it she realizes just how much people care.

Interestingly, I used the thesis of disposable headlines as the basis for the column. We tend to forget today's big story when tomorrow's headlines push it off of the front page - and out of our minds. Yet what's always bothered me as a journalist is how stories seem to go on for significantly longer periods of time, and are virtually ignored by the media. It's not a knock against journalism, though. Rather, that's just the way media works: there is only so much space to go around, and that space has to go to the top stories of the day. Ongoing, lingering, quiet suffering typically doesn't garner top-level attention.

I can't change the way the world works. But I can try to redirect the flashlight every once in a while. I hope that's the case this time out.

Scram!

This just in: NASA's last scheduled test flight of the X-43A supersonic combustion ramjet (scramjet) prototype has ended with the craft hitting at least Mach 9.6. Heady stuff indeed. Here's the early wrapup from ABC News

Comments following my earlier post on this admittedly esoteric topic centred on how little near-term impact this technology will have on our lives. I absolutely agree. We won't be boarding scramjet-powered airliners anytime soon, if at all within our lifetime.

But when the Wrights first lofted their Wright Flyer into the skies above Kitty Hawk, no one believed we'd all be routinely flying within a year or two. The implicit understanding was that a theoretical limit of technology had been surpassed, and that the commercialization of that technology would take a significantly longer amount of time to realize. It happened with flight, it will happen with private space flight, and it will happen with high-speed atmospheric flight. It's the way humans are, and I hope I'm around long enough to witness it.

I suspect this topic is a bit of a yawner for most folks, but it speaks to the geek in me. I hope it gives you a brief pause for thought to consider how all the technologies we take for granted today came to be, and how long they all must have taken to go from the hugely expensive, experimental and rare freak-stage to the anyone-can-buy-it-and-use-it stage.

Quite the journey we're all on, wouldn't you say?

Noah gets boosted

Little man reached another milestone in his young life today as he moved out of his car seat and into a booster seat. Please see the previous photo-post for some background on why we made the transition with just a touch of sadness in our hearts. My wife and I will be spending much of the week accepting the fact that he's not as small as he was just a few days ago.

Those footsteps in the sand seem mighty transient indeed.

A child's playground

I took the kids to the playground this afternoon. Although the stated goal was for them to have fun and blow off some pent-up energy, I think the ultimate - and selfish, I admit - benefit was for me to reflect on their rapidly-changing lives.

As they happily danced from the slides to the swings to the climbing tower with the red gabled roof, I quietly sat on a nearby bench and tried to snap endless mental pictures so as not to forget precisely what I was feeling.

It was, after all, just yesterday (or at least it felt like it) that I snapped a (real) picture of a then-two-year-old Noah climbing the rope ladder all by himself. He refused any help, and I stood uselessly a few feet away, holding my hands in front of me just in case he stumbled backward. He didn't. So I grabbed my camera and snapped the scene.

Today, he clambered up that same rope without a second thought. He's four years-old now. He'll doubtless get even better at this particular skill until, someday, he'll decide the playground just isn't for him any more. I dread that day. I love watching him play. I love the innocence in his voice as he dances around the sand, as he chases his big sister up the ladder, then down the slide. I love the way he belly laughs as he serves me "ice cream" from the little nook beneath the climbing tower.

He's got a few years to go before he tires of this game. But this year is almost over. The late-afternoon sun was already setting as we prepared to head back to the house. We zipped up our jackets and buried our hands in our pockets to ward off the sudden chill in an absolutely clear day.

Just before we left the playground, I pointed our camera at the sand and tripped the shutter. Little footsteps brought into stark relief by a low-angled sun. A day ends. A season ends. I hope we have ample reasons to return in the coming years before unbridled childhood play gives way to the stresses of real life.

A fish pic

I took my camera into the grocery store again today. Lately, I've had this near-demonic need to take weird pictures at the grocery store. I'm not quite sure what's driving this compulsion, but I'm pretty sure that in the not-too-distant future, I'm going to be asked to leave the premises. Until then, I'll do my best to capture weird and wonderful images like this one. Happy fishing!

The need for speed...interrupted

If you've ever flown hours and hours to visit grandma, and have been frustrated at how gosh darn slow those pokey Jumbo jets seem to have become – heck, in this day and age, even 600 mph is dog slow – you might be interested to know that research into The Next Big Thing in aviation (namely, scramjet-powered atmospheric flight) is well underway.

Of course, in typical U.S. government fashion, no sooner will NASA test-fly its X-43A scramjet prototype to the obscene speed of Mach 10 than the feds will cancel further funding for the project.

According to this article in Wired.com, the flight is scheduled for later this week, at which point flight operations will immediately cease. This will allow the political geniuses who run the country to free up funds for $500 wrenches, and for research into building a new moon-capable capsule that looks just like something the U.S. built and successfully flew a generation ago.

I love the irony. Sadly, however, it means we'll be waiting a little longer for that shorter trip to grandma's house.

How will you survive the wait? As Thanksgiving and Christmas grow ever-larger in our near-term travel plans, what are your best-laid plans for getting there – and back – in one piece? And, please, no one suggest riding shotgun on that Pegasus rocket this week, OK?

Think what it does to your insides

I just finished reading what I first thought was a funny article in The Guardian. It's called Things grow better with Coke, and it explains how farmers in India, fed up with paying high prices for commercially-available pesticides, have begun spraying Coca-Cola on their crops to get rid of bugs.

The scientific community has yet to take time out from more pressing concerns - like, say, finding a cure for cancer or inventing an age-reducing cream that works - to investigate this vexing capability.

It gives me pause to think that if it's strong enough to kill bugs and we don't know how it accomplishes that, why do we wash it down our gullets with barely a second thought? Have we ever stopped to think what guzzling gallons of pop (sorry, it's an Ontario thing...I know the rest of you call 'em soft drinks or boissons gazeuses or something similarly local) to the exclusion of other, real drinks is doing to our bodies?

I have. But that's only because I've got a mind that churns through trivial matters as voraciously as a dog chews on its owner's sneakers.

If all of this isn't weird enough, India's Centre for Science and Environment last year discovered Coke and Pepsi were selling soft drinks laced with pesticide. How bad? Some 30 to 40 times the permissible EU guidelines. The story is here. Maybe it's a serendipitous way for the bugs to get back at us.

I'll be sticking to water, milk, and juice, thank you; though not at the same time. What are you drinking now? And why are you drinking that particular drink instead of somethiing else. I'd like to say enquiring minds want to know, but that catch phrase has apparently already been usurped by a publisher whose name I can't quite recall.

Raiding the Archives 10 - Remembering

The irony of freedom is never more starkly illustrated than on those days set aside to remember how fragile said freedoms can be.

Today was Remembrance Day in Canada, a day to remember the sacrifices made by our armed forces in the name of freedom. The cenotaph in London's downtown Victoria Park once again echoed with the footsteps of a generation that gave it all up so we could live our lives free of anarchy. Those footsteps grow more faint with each passing year as more of these heroes pass away, and those who remain find it increasingly difficult to make the journey.

I came along long after the war ended, so I always tend to feel incredibly inadequate when I'm amongst this group of people. My life, in comparison, seems trivial. After all, the worries of maintaining a career, a household, and a family seem fairly mudane when you consider a soldier's likelihood of never coming home, or coming home a shell of his/her former self.

I always wished that I could do something to show them how much we valued what they had done. Thankfully, my writing once again came to the rescue. They may be mere words, but if they bring comfort to one person who bore witness to war, they will have accomplished their goal.

The fact that I have the freedom to write whatever I wish because of their efforts is not lost on me. The fact that these witnesses to and participants in history are now passing away makes it even more important for those who follow - us - to pick up the mantle of remembrance and remind current and future generations why the passage of time should never erode the importance of the message.

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Originally published Wednesday, May 5 in the London Free Press.

Battle of Atlantic never forgotten

History can sometimes be tough to fully appreciate when you weren't around to witness it.

But watching naval veterans commemorate their involvement in a pivotal battle of the Second World War, it was easy to understand how their actions very likely saved the freedoms we take for granted today.

They gathered at HMCS Prevost last Sunday to remember the 59th anniversary of the end of the Battle of the Atlantic. It lasted from 1939 until hostilities in Europe ceased in May 1945, making it the longest battle of the war.

When fighting first broke out, German U-boats prowled the North Atlantic Ocean with near-impunity, picking off Allied ships with frightening efficiency. Had they succeeded in shutting down the sea lanes, Britain would have been choked off. And things might have ended up differently for the Allies in Europe -- and for us.

"We did it for freedom," said Walter Weston, who served aboard numerous ships during that time and never forgot why this mission was so important. "Britain would have failed if we hadn't gotten the supplies across. They probably would have lost the war.

"We had to get the food, oil, gas, tanks, ammunition and people over there."

To maintain the vital lifeline, Royal Canadian Navy ships began escorting the convoys across. By 1944, RCN vessels were the only units running the North Atlantic convoys. The supply lines for the Allied victory lay securely in Canadian hands.

But those hands suffered dearly. The Germans sent 24 Canadian naval ships and 70 merchant vessels to the bottom. More than 3,000 Canadian sailors and another 900 airmen died in the waters of the North Atlantic; a huge sacrifice for a country the size of Canada.

Despite the historic rationale for Canada's involvement, Weston remains humble.

"I'm a Canadian and I'm proud of our country," he said, shrugging his shoulders. "We did our share, and we did our duty."

Weston, a London native who retired from the reserves in 1961 and worked in the mechanical trades afterward, said despite enduring the hardships of shipboard life, he ended up with a lifelong extended naval family.

To many, the battle represented Canada's military coming of age. When Canada first declared war on Germany in September 1939, its tiny navy numbered less than a dozen fighting ships. As the war progressed, the RCN expanded by a factor of 40, and by 1945 was the world's third-largest naval force.

At 83, Weston remains actively involved in speaking to younger generations, whose only exposure to war has been via television and the Internet. He works with the Dominion Institute's Memory Project. The Toronto-based organization's mission is to improve Canadians' ability to remember and appreciate our common history. He regularly talks to students, sharing his wartime experiences and the lessons that remain applicable today.

"They don't teach nearly enough history in schools," he said. "We need to share what we know."

The ceremony, organized by the London branch of the Royal Canadian Naval Association, poignantly exhibited that sense of history and sacrifice. The bell tolled once for each of the 24

Canadian warships lost during the campaign. The echo of each barely had time to reverberate off the industrial green concrete walls of the gymnasium before the next ship's name was read.

The veterans in the colour party stood ramrod straight, flags high, throughout the ceremony. Their faces showed no emotion, but it was clear to anyone watching them where their thoughts were.

Afterward, they gathered in the officers' mess to quietly reflect and catch up with old friends.

I wasn't there in 1945, but for a couple of hours on a rainy Sunday morning, I was privileged to look through a window of history to better understand why it matters as much today as it always has.

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Carmi Levy is a London freelance writer. He may be e-mailed at carmilevy@msn.com.

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Carmi here: As I rode my bike to the office earlier today, I saw a number of vehicles with Navy or Army bumper stickers on them that were clearly on their way downtown for the ceremonies. I couldn't help but feel like I needed to do something to acknowledge them as they passed me. So as I pulled up next to one uniformed gentleman at a red light, I simply nodded my head - the standard cyclist's salute of respect - and said thank you. He smiled back, and made my day.

Everyone Generalizes

Discuss...

Winter's first

We had our first significant snow of the season yesterday. We went to sleep with big, fat flakes dancing in the dark skies, and woke up to impossibly soft fluffs of white perched on top of every vertical and near-vertical surface imaginable.

So I did what any OCD-suffering writer does: I dropped the digicam into my knapsack and headed off to the office. Along the way, I captured whatever caught my eye. Interrestingly, this picture is the least "snowy" of the few dozen that I took. But there's something about the s-curve of the bike path that makes this one burn in my brain.

It's a lovely summer-meets-winter message, and as I stood there drinking in the snow-induced silence of the scene, I half-expected someone on a bike to emerge from the top of the frame and ask me if I wanted my own picture taken. It didn't happen, and likely won't until spring. But it reinforces the notion that you never know who or what you'll encounter on these adventurous paths. And a new discovery often lies just around the furthest bend.

Incidentally, all the snow had melted by evening, and the scenes of that wintry, white-painted morning faded back into our collective memory.

Why Wired's worthwhile

I've never tried to hide my absolute adoration for Wired Magazine. The best way I can describe it is that it represents the ultimate meeting point of technology and culture. It goes well beyond the typically product/service-focused rag to examine the underlying societal issues which drive adoption of said technology in the first place.

As such, it was the first publication that first challenged us to ask why we use a given technology. Up until it burst on the scene, the assumption was that all technology was, by definition, good. And as a result, we should simply focus on the features and performance, and forget about the implications of said features and performance.

(Sorry, it's early in the a.m. I'm not feeling all that great, and I'm exhausted. So I'm rambling. Thanks for bearing with me.)

Incidentally, the Web site counterpart to the magazine is, surprisingly, called Wired.com. It's one of my must-reads every day, and has given me more ideas for technology and regular non-tech articles than virtually any other single site. If you want to think, and think hard, you can't afford to not add this site to your daily must-read.

Anyway, I've used up enough storage space on Blogger's computers for one night, so I'll get to the point: Wired Mag's article, The Decline of Brands, is a fascinating cultural commentary that is typically thorough in its intent and execution. It's feature writing the way I learned it all those moons ago. It's why I'll continue to log in, and why I'll continue to be impressed every time I do so.