Took today off to go to the Queen City Ex with Shea and Pace. We just got home after nearly 10 hours (!) at the fair. Pace managed to stay awake in the car home but fell asleep one nanosecond after we put him in bed. His mom and dad won’t be far behind him.
I thought about doing a bulleted list of today’s highlights like I did for camping last weekend but instead, I’ll just leave this here…a highlight for Pace perhaps but not so much for his dad who is somewhat snake-adverse (although I was brave enough to touch it – it was softer than I expected – not slimey or scaley!)
This great video makes the case that we haven’t evolved to compete with each other but to empathize with one another.
I especially like how it builds the case of how our strongest connections grew from family relationships to tribes to religion-as-extended-family to nation-states-as-extended-family to the natural next step to a worldwide unity of purpose, facilitated by technology, as we drop away our artificial ties of religion and state.
I had such an amazing time camping this long weekend at Nickle Lake with Shea’s folks at their seasonal site, I thought I’d do a bulleted list of some of the highlights. (To set the scene, Shea’s parents have possibly the the nicest site in the entire campground. They’ve had it for nearly a decade and have continually made improvements. This year’s big addition was a permanent deck right off their camper.)
My parents also came down and we had lots of other family and friends as visitors as well.
Watching the wild clouds gather over a nearby playground then making it back to Dennis & Joan’s campsite just as the hail began to fall.
Going out on the deck after it was over and “skating” on the ice with Pace and Shea’s dad
Pace is out for a walk and has to pee so Shea’s mom gets him to go on the nearest tree…just as a police car pulls up and turns on the lights! (Turns out it’s a former roommate of Shea’s brother. The policeman has a site at the lake and just happened to be coming there after going off-duty!)
Going for a long walk with Shea and my parents late at night and looking at the amazing blanket of stars we so rarely see in the city
Everyone turning down steak that was planned for supper one night so we could have a weiner roast instead
The new boyfriend of a family friend who was visiting with her own family getting immediately into everyone’s good graces by bringing fixings for (and doing all the fixing of) smores.
Each day’s inevitable call of “It’s five o’clock somewhere” signaling the beginning of the adult beverages! (I’ve become quite partial to lime beers this summer.)
Tubing behind Shea’s dad’s boat with Shea and Pace then later, with my dad and Pace.
While I’m in the water swimming and the boat is stopped, a full-fledged water fight breaks out on board (I think Pace, who brought along a few of his water guns, started it!) which turns into a pretty wild one when a water soaker cannon thing comes into play and somehow ends up in my hands out in the water beyond the range of everyone else’s piddly water guns.
Not sure if it’s a highlight but watching my little daredevil lay forward in the tube instead of sitting back so the spray would whip into his face, try to stand up, and continually signal “faster!” after we showed him the thumbs-up hand signal for that command.
As the two grandpas napped in air conditioned comfort, everyone else sat with their feet in Pace’s paddling pool listening to Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. One of my favourite camping CD’s is their greatest hits album but here’s an even more countrified version of their best song than the one I know…
This hits home for me because 1995 was when I discovered the Internet as well. I was nearing the end of my undergrad degree when I ended up applying for (and being accepted to) an exchange program that the U of R Arts Department ran every year with the University College of Ripon & York, St. John in the UK (try saying that college name five times fast! Hmm, good to see they’ve actually shortened it to York St. John University!)
Anyhow, I could pretty much fill this blog with stories of the adventures (and mis-adventures) I had during that four-month exchange but for now, I’ll focus on the subject at hand.
UCRYSJ had done a lot to build exchanges with, not only small universities on the Canadian prairies, but institutions across the United States and around the world. As there were only five Canadians there, all from the U of R, we quickly expanded our circle of friendship to some of the other exchange students, especially the Americans.
And I still remember being in the dining hall and after we’d finished eating supper, a couple of the American students said “We’re going to check e-mail!”
HUH?
I followed them to the computer lab and they showed me how they were able to send magical messages to family and friends back home via this mysterious “Internet”. They also showed me search engines (Yahoo at that time was the biggie) and a few “web sites” where you could find out news and other happenings from back home. (I suspect the true addiction kicked in as soon as I realised I could get NHL scores – something that didn’t get covered in the Times of London!)
My sister was at U of R as well so I got in touch with her (I think I called which probably cost me about $10!) and she said she’d look into it and try to get an e-mail account for me…if the U of R offered such a thing!
A little while later, she let me know that she’d gotten me an account (which is now lost in the fog of time – I doubt it was something as straightforward as “jhammond@uregina.ca” but more likely something like “jham07@pine.zeus.uregina.ca”. From then on, I was able to use e-mail to keep in touch with home…and flirt with girls who were sitting right beside me in the computer lab! (Of course, the amount of time I spent in the computer lab probably influenced why these flirtations rarely went any further.)
But those are stories for another blog post. At any rate, it’s really mind-blowing to think how far we’ve come in fifteen years. Now people travel the world and stay connected with home via Skype, Facebook and yes, even e-mail.
I’ve managed to track down a few of the people I met during the exchange on Facebook since then but in some ways, I feel like I was part of the last group of people to travel overseas when it really was cutting the cord (and yes, I know I was in a prim English country town, not exactly the jungles of Borneo.) But still – I bet you can get wifi on the beach in Timbuktu these days so you can do FaceTime on your iPhone with your friends back home.
I’m currently reading a book called “Stampede! The Rise of the West and Canada’s New Power Elite” by Gordon Pitts of the Globe & Mail. This book came to my attention after winning a 2009 National Business Book Prize and, as you might expect given its title and author, it’s a fairly pro-business look at the rise of the west through the development of the energy economy.
Although the main focus is Alberta, the book really takes a cross-country look at the current state of the Canadian economy – from the impact of the oil sands on the people of Newfoundland to the fall of Ontario as a manufacturing centre (and subsequent shift of economic and political power to Alberta)to the unlimited potential of BC as a hub between the prairies, the American west coast and Asia as well as a retirement/leisure paradise.
Pitts also includes a chapter at the end which begins with the words: “In writing this book, I almost missed the real story” where he goes on to talk about how Saskatchewan is the province that’s poised to be the true tiger of the Canadian economy in the near future. Unlike Alberta which is so tied to oil and gas, we have everything here – not only oil and gas but potash, diamonds, all types of agricultural products and more. (In terms of our crop growing capabilities, he points out that oil & gas are finite resources but if you can always grow food, people will always need to eat.) He also reveals that Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan has a bigger market capitalization than Encana, Alberta’s biggest oil & gas company!
In talking about Saskatchewan, Pitts includes an interview with Paul Hill who is the third-generation head of Saskatchewan’s most powerful family. Mr. Hill makes a strong attack on Tommy Douglas who he labels as the reason that Alberta, not Saskatchewan, became Canada’s thriving oil & gas hub. (There’s possibly some truth to that but I can also imagine a history where we ended up with US-style healthcare system if Tommy Douglas hadn’t come along when he had so I’ll take that trade!)
Anyhow, having just about finished the book, it connected to something else I recently came across via The Accidental Jurist. Social democratic principles don’t need to be completely adversarial with the business world (after all, it was Lorne Calvert’s NDP government who revised our royalty rates that led to much of our current boom. And NDP governments have been the most fiscally responsible wherever they’ve held power across Canada.)
Former NDP leadership candidate, Ryan Meili, recently published an article about one of his pet ideas – SaskPharm – in the Canadian Medical Association Journal which shows that business acumen and socialist ideals don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
I’ve written about the “inter-connected beauty” of his idea for a Crown corporation in the business of making generic drugs before – how it could provide a permanent market for our agricultural crops, how it would provide even more impetus for our booming science R&D sector, how it could provide a revenue stream by selling generic brands to other jurisdictions and how it could help lower healthcare costs as we face an aging boomer population.
Like Medicare, it’s too good of an idea to let go and I suspect that in some shape or form, we may see something like SaskPharm at some point in the future. (You heard it here first!)
This article claims that the future success of libraries revolves around the need to allow for a “little chaos”. The author concedes that it’s hard to purposely engineer a chaotic environment but that the rewards, when this approach is embraced, is worth it.
I think that bravery based librarianship is the only future we have. At some point, we have to disrupt the patterns and set a new path. Many libraries are doing this already – our profession is, of course, much more responsive to change than most people realise. But fear-based librarianship, or at least caution-based, still seems prevalent. Many a decision is made in order not to upset the minority, rather than to potentially please a whole new majority. In many cases, this approach is taken with good reason. But we’re talking about the survival of our profession, here.
