Have you ever seen something that just seemed to contradict its own existence? I mean there are so many different aspects that it seems impossible that anyone could have created it. I’m thinking of something like this:
I took this photo almost a year ago, but I recently noticed that the graffiti is still there. And it’s still puzzling me.
First of all, it's got a 1950’s sense of humour. That's not something you usually see in graffiti. Henny Youngman must be <checks Wikipedia> rolling in his grave. Maybe graffiti was like that in the 1950's, but even then, I doubt you had graffiti written from the perspective of a married man.
On top of that, this is an anachronistic joke with a reference to modern technology in it. Even if it were in a less-strange context, that's weird. It's the joke Benny Hill would do if he'd made it to the twenty-first century. Is Andy Capp still going? Maybe it does jokes like this.
And now it's at least a year old, and neither the owner of the wall, nor other graffiti artists have covered it up in all that time. And did I mention that this is the parking lot for a sushi place? Lots of people have been staring at this, confused, for months. Probably feeling like they should blame a generation, but they have no idea which one.
Was it done by an abnormally young-at-heart Boomer, or an abnormally sexist Millennial? I'm wracking my brain to figure it out. At least, using whatever part of my brain is not currently trying to pun Banksy with an old comedian's name. Whatever Sherlock instincts I have left say that it was done by a Baby Boomer. Yes, it mentions Wi-fi, but it has that joke-referring-to-something-I've-heard-of-but-don't-understand style that launched a thousand late-night routines. So I feel safe blaming them. I'll just add it to the list.
One result of the LRT construction here in Kitchener-Waterloo is that it's forced people to take new routes, and see parts of the city they might not know about. For instance, I've had to drive miles out of the way to avoid closed roads every time I return to the city. And that's introduced me to a new pet peeve in the city's notoriously confusing roads. Take a look at the sign showing you how to leave the expressway to take Highway 7 to Guelph:
That looks nice and simple. The right two lanes just branch off and head to Guelph. Now here's what the roads actually look like:
You have to take one exit into the collector lanes (they have collector lanes for two exits, isn't that adorable?) Then take another exit from there. That doesn't turn into Highway 7, or even go to Highway 7. It just dumps you on a side street beside a nail salon, and you have to take a left and a right to get onto Highway 7.
I've mentioned before that I'm amused at the differences between my own Kitchener-Waterloo and London, Ontario. Both are similar size and close together, yet there remain distinct differences. We're seeing some of those differences played out right now, as both communities are going though the process of building new transit systems, with KW building the "Ion" Light Rail system, and London planning a Bus Rapid Transit (buses in dedicated lanes) system. They're at very different stages, though. London is still in the planning, while KW's is nearly finished.
We should keep in mind that when it comes to transit, KW has an unfair advantage: it's several communities that have grown into one (a conurbation, as the urban planers call it) so it's evolved into a long, thin community with a few urban areas more or less lined-up. Thus, it's always been fairly obvious how a single transit line would link the community.
London, on the other hand, has a layout that's more typical of Canadian cities: a small urban core, with lots of suburbs stretching off in all directions. So it's not immediately clear how transit lines can serve the whole city. They've gone for two lines; one in an "L" shape, and the other in a "7" shape, with the two "corners" meeting at the centre.
Looking back at our effort to get the system built, I have to say that I'm amazed at how easy it was. I know some people would be furious at hearing it called "easy", but stepping back and seeing that we accomplished this in an unprecedentedly-small, largely-suburban community in a time of constrained budgets, all in about a decade with no major roadblocks, that's pretty impressive.
London's plan has run into some problems. I'm not that familiar with the project, but what I find disturbing is that two big opposition groups are downtown businesses and property developers. That's troubling because they should be leading proponents: the system would bring more people downtown, and raise the value of land near stations. One has to wonder which groups are going to push the proposal forward if these two groups are not on side.
And although it's still early in the process with no shovels yet in the ground, setbacks now could cause an avalanche of problems: Submissions have already been made for approval and grants from higher levels of government, and changes to the plan would mean re-submitting and starting the process over. At best, that would introduce a year of delays; at worst, it would mean they'd be applying for massive public transit grants from a new Conservative government.
I'd like to claim that the difference in the two communities' experiences is the result of our being a little more forward-thinking and open-minded, but I don't think that explains it. We in KW have a kind of benevolent apathy towards civic government. Sure, people complain about local government, but they don't do anything about it. That seems unusual these days. In other communities, the voters periodically elect a human tantrum, while we just rubber-stamp the same folks over and over.
And that's the approach we've taken towards transit too. You heard people complain, but it never developed into anything meaningful. There were a few attempts at mounting political movements against it, but they didn't seem to get the quality personnel behind it, and they didn't really threaten incumbent councilors and mayors. Ultimately, it was hard for opponents to gain traction when the politicians supporting the LRT plan kept getting elected.
In contrast, complaints about London's transit plan have reached a critical mass that will make it hard to continue. I mean mass in a more literal sense, seeing as the latest meeting took place at Budweiser Gardens, the city's hockey arena. While attendance was nowhere near the venue's 9,000 seat capacity, it's still a far cry from the community centre spare rooms where Waterloo's transit meetings took place.
But it's also reached a critical emotional mass, which will be a big problem for proponents. An idea like this inspires some, terrifies others, but leaves most with a mixture of reactions: neither good nor bad enough to act. Something like that might pass if the support is passionate enough, since there are only a few who will fight it. But if you get just enough emphasis on the downsides, you push the conflicted majority onto the no side, or at least, onto the skeptical side. And for a big project like this, skepticism is enough to sink it.
In London, opposition is large and well organized, and has taken the initiative. Aspiring politicians are seeing it as a route to the top. Again, this has roots in the particular politics of the city; While Kitchener and Waterloo's civic politics are relatively quiet, London has been very antagonistic and divided for a while now. An expensive and highly-visible issue is the perfect situation to bring out more rancor. At this point, even if they get a good number of politicians on the pro side, I’m guessing both sides will dig in enough that the issue will stagnate.
Do you remember Consumers Distributing? If you're too young, or too non-Canadian, I'll explain that it was a catalog-based retailer. Their "stores" were little more than small warehouses with a few desks out front where you could order items. Then a sales person would go back into the warehouse and find they were out of your item and they'd have to order it.
Anyway, Consumers went under some time in the early 90's, and their stores became so many bingo halls. But I always thought that was such unfortunate timing. After all, who would be better positioned to take advantage of e-commerce, than a company who already had an ordering system and network of warehouses? If they could have just survived that early-nineties recession, they could have beat everyone to the market and ensured years of prosperity, instead of ending up as a retail footnote.
I'm reminded of how cruel business timing can be when I look at this:
This is a plaza near where I live. As you can see, it's seen better days. A number of businesses have come and gone, and it's mostly closed now. Its parking lot is small and hard to get into, it's off to the side of other shopping areas, and it's not the most prosperous neighbourhood to begin with.
The sad part is what you can see in the front of it:
It's a half-finished light rail station. Yes, this sad-sack plaza has suddenly become prime real estate, because it's right outside one of the stops on KW's new transit system. We've recently seen several other development projects started or announced near other stations, as they transform eyesores and vacant lots into hot properties.
So just think, if any of those businesses could have just hung on for a few more years, they'd be looking great right now, with a big source of foot traffic dropped right in front of them Instead, it will fall to new businesses to take advantage. Someday soon, the closed stores will be filled by over-priced coffee shops, whose patrons will be unaware of the ghosts of short-lived nail salons around them.
Years ago, I remember an article on computer usability. They had an example of an online form where you had to choose the city you were from. This form was used by people from all over the US, so when you type in the city name, if there was more than one city by that name in the country, it would have to ask which state before proceeding. The usability experts suggested that this was poor design, since the vast majority of people who type, "Boston" will be from the famous Boston in Massachusetts, but they will have to select it from a list of all the pokey little Bostons around the US.
This article suggested that web site should just send you to the page for Boston, Massachusetts, and make the citizens of other Bostons have to click a link to go to another Boston. (That's sort of how Wikipedia works: If you search for Boston, it sends you to the Boston MA page, and forces you to choose the "Disambiguation Page" to choose a different Boston.) At the time, I - being from a small town - thought that was an unfair approach. Yes, I know, I'm forcing the 4.6 million people in the greater Boston area to pick their city our of a list, just for the sake of a few hundred people from other Bostons. But hey, equality and all that. If Vermont gets as many senators as California, then Bostonians can make an extra click.
Well, after another decade or so of filling in forms online, I take that back. Kitchener, British Columbia, I hate you. You may only be a few streets in the Kootenays, but some people seem to think you deserve to be listed in online forms, instead of rolling you in with Cranbrook. If it was, say, Kitchener, Saskatchewan, then we'd at least be at the top of the list by alphabetical order and we wouldn't have to scroll down. But no, we have to key down to miss the few hundred of you or whatever; I don't even know the population, because you don't even get your own Wikipedia page.
Look, "Kitchener" isn't a great name. It sounds weird, and it honours a really despicable man. So you'd think we could at least have it to ourselves. And unlike Ontarians, British Columbians are great at naming things. I mean, Kamloops, Nanaimo, Chilliwack, Kelowna. So please, leave us to our strange name.
I love pizza. I don't just love pizza itself, I love the idea of pizza. It's unpretentious, something we all have in common, and yet it's infinitely customizable. It's universal and individualistic at the same time. Also, it's become enough a part of Western culture that elites can't dismiss it as worthless pablum of the great unwashed, the way they might for hamburgers. But in the other hand, pizza's individuality defuses the one-upmanship that usually poisons food discussion: You may encounter some self-righteous foodie who insists that the best pizza is from Guido's at 9th and Broadway, and anything less is inedible cardboard. But you can always say you prefer deep-dish pizza; the foodie will be infuriated, but you'll have diffused his power of culinary elitism over you.
What's interesting is, I'm just starting to see how many types of pizza there are, even if we restrict it to this continent. Lots of people have heard of Chicago-style deep-dish pizza, but I was intrigued to find that is not the only kind of pizza that's unique to an American region. Detroit (deep-dish, rectangular, crispy cheese), St. Louis (thin crust, local cheese) New Haven (thin crust, bitter cheese, no sauce), Colorado (lots of toppings, extra thick rim) and even Iowa/Illinois's Quad Cities (nutty-crust, spicy sauce) have their own styles.
I recently read that the Detroit style of pizza is actually related to the auto industry. It's rectangular because it's made on a kind of tray that was originally intended for holding spare parts in car factories. And because it's in a tray, rather than on a sheet, the toppings can go right to the edge, allowing the cheese to get crispy.
And that leads to the really mind-blowing part: in the last few years, the Little Caesar's chain has started selling a square deep-dish pizza with crispy-edge cheese. Well you might assume that was just something they made up, but no, it's based on Detroit-style pizza, since Little Caesar's is from Detroit. Those weird ads with the creepy seventies-style disembodied heads? They're actually introducing customers to authentic Americana.
This all leads back to my never-ending quest to get unique and slightly weird things for Canada in general, and Kitchener-Waterloo in particular. First off, could Canada get its own pizza? Yes, many restaurants and grocery stores have "Canadian" pizza, but that usually just means regular pizza with bacon. Further research reveals that Nova Scotia is way ahead of us on this: Halifax has Donair Pizza (donair meat and sauce on pizza crust) and Pictou County, on the north side of the province has its own unique style (with a "brown" sauce made with a variety of vegetables, and thick pepperoni.) These are now spreading slowly through the country with emigrating Nova Scotians, though mostly in places where there's a critical mass of expats to support a business (like in Toronto or Fort McMurray.) So one day these pizzas could be as common as poutine. It's facinating to see Canada create a culture, even if it is at a glacial pace. Come back in a few centuries and we might have our own identity.
And KW? I can't find any pizza that's particular to here, but we could do our usual thing of adopting German stuff. They have a pizza-like bread called Flammkuchen. I also searched for Mennonite pizza, but that doesn't seem to be a thing. Surely in a city with two universities, an influx of different cultures, and precocious downtown eateries looking to make a name for themselves, we can come up with something unique.
You occasionally hear places described by their area codes. For instance, Toronto's satellite communities are often collectively called, "the 905." Toronto's original area code was 416, and it has since added a second one that I can't remember, but it apparently has a six in it, so Drake had decreed that henceforth, Toronto shall be known as, "The 6."
But outside of Toronto's cultural currents, the numbers don't come up much. For instance, I've lived my whole life in the 519 area, yet those digits just sit in my phone's contact list doing nothing.
Until now, that is. I've heard the evening news refer to the 519 region a few times as shorthand for Southwestern Ontario. I suspect it's just because in our world of consolidated local news, it's a convenient way of using the same report on CTV's London and Kitchener stations without anyone noticing.
But it actually makes some sense. After all, the 905 and 416 may be at each other's throats in elections, but they really have a lot in common. The 519 is really more distinct culturally and economically. Yes, I hate allying with our rivals in London (the Knights are going down in the playoffs!) But there I go: we both care about junior hockey, while the GTA shows little interest. That settles it: Shad, as the foremost hip-hop artist in the 519 region, it falls to you to popularize the region as, "The 9."
Our local McDonald's is closing. Of course, this being downtown Kitchener, it's not a conventional McDonald's; it's in Market Square. That's an urban mall that has its own depressing story, but suffice to say it's yet another Canadian downtown mall that hasn't done well in recent decades. It's largely empty, even though most of it has been repurposed for other uses.
But thanks to office workers' lunch needs, the second floor food court has hung on to life, much longer than it has any right to. There are local food vendors that have come and gone, a Tim Hortons that was replaced by a Subway, and a Chinese place that I don't think anyone has noticed isn't Manchu Wok. But the McDonald's has been consistently popular.
As I say, it's not an ordinary McDonald's. For one thing, the mall's attempt to reinvent itself has meant that this is one of the few fast food places directly outside a health club. (I've always wondered which of them benefits from that arrangement.) And being a mere counter, it doesn't even carry the full menu. Really, I think the whole place would fit in the ball pit at a suburban McDonald's Play Place.
But it's also unusual in its clientele. In an urban setting, the average wealth of the customers is probably a lot lower than your average. I've noticed that orders tend to be pretty small, many go for the free refills, and people pick and choose from the menu looking to stretch their cash. That gets pushed in your face when you're waiting for your order, and realizing customers have become experts in maximizing value.
Manager: I have three double cheeseburgers and an apple pie! Here you go sir. Who else is still waiting for their order? You sir, what are you waiting for?
Me: A Big Mac combo
Manager, to kitchen: Do we have a Big Mac meal for Mr. Big Spender here?
I guess that's a big part of why it's closing. Supposedly fast food places make their money in certain very specific items, like drinks, so I can image this place doesn't make much money. But I do worry about the many people who have been regulars. I know, as a lefty I'm supposed to blame McDonald's for exploiting the poor, but I don't see many locally-owned fair-trade artisan restaurants selling anything you could call a meal for just pocket change.
The BBC has an interesting page allowing you to find your city's "musical twin. " Here's the premise: someone's analyzed the information from Shazam, the music recognition app. Specifically, they've found which songs are most commonly accessed in each city. Then they've gone through all the cities, trying to find cities that look up the same songs. So now you can look up your city, and find another city somewhere else in the world that seems to have the same taste in music as your home.
So I looked up Kitchener, and I was surprised to find that out musical twin is Muar, Malaysia. It's a similarly sized city, about halfway between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. So there's an interesting but useless bit of trivia. Just to compare, I looked up other cities around southern Ontario. Toronto got Beer Sheva, Israel. But then London, Ontario got Sandakan, Malaysia. It's at the other end of Malaysia, but still, that's weird. So I looked up other cities nearby that were in the database. Windsor, Buffalo, Niagara Falls, NY, and Detroit were all paired with Johor Bahru, Malaysia, which is near Muar. Erie, PA was partnered with Malaysia's capital, Kuala Lumpur.
So what's going on? I was beginning to suspect that this study was a fraud, and they just put in a bunch of random cities from Malaysia because that would sound exotic and impressive. I tried cities from other parts of the U.S. and Canada, and there were still lots of Malaysian results, though not as completely as in this part of the world. And I tried some British cities, but they were mostly pairing with New Zealand.
So I have no idea what to make of this. Apparently we have a strange musical connection with people on the other side of the world. I'm sure you could come up with some impressive pseudoscience to explain it, involving the magnetic field of the earth's core to transmit our thoughts. And after you've explained that, try explaining why people all over the world need an app to recognize Adele's "Hello." Seriously, it was number one everywhere, probably even Malaysia.
Last week, Wilfrid Laurier University here in KW was locked down after someone online posted a threat of a shooting in the science building. Of course, locals were shocked: who knew Laurier has a science building?
Okay, that's just my UW heritage talking, sorry Laurier folks. Anyway, the person who made that posting was in London (England.) He got arrested, and just spent nearly three days in jail before posting bail. He was interviewed upon release, and it came out that:
He didn't think this would happen, or that it would be taken seriously
He doesn't know anything about Laurier, and was only copying it's name from another post.
He assumed that freedom of speech covered this sort of thing
That last part jumped out at me. It's a concept that a lot of people online seem to think: that freedom of speech is absolute and allows any sort of speech in any circumstance. Most people - both inside and outside the legal profession - will know that there are practical limits on free speech. The classic (i.e., quoted on Law & Order) example is that you don't have the right to shout, “fire” in a crowded theatre.
But now we have a couple of problems: in the Internet age, you can yell “fire” from the other side of the planet, and there's a lot of people who think freedom of speech means freedom from consequences. Actually, three problems: there’s also our increasingly fuzzy definition of irony. Afterall, our perpetrator said he didn’t think his threat would be taken seriously, since it was on 4chan, a site known for pranks. I can see how a person might assume that, since many things of questionable taste happen there without affecting the real world. But the flipside is that if a person were to plan a shooting rampage, an untraceable discussion board is exactly where they would talk about it.
We’re left with a big overlap between what people think is acceptable online, and what raises red flags for law enforcement. So we’re going to have to create some new understandings about what is legal, and someone is going to be very disappointed.
As you might guess from the title, I'm going to compare politics to parking lots: both seem to have a supernatural ability to make people stupid. They lose what sense they already have, and back-up without looking or vote for the candidate with the nicest smile.
Of course, I don't have great confidence in people's common sense. So if political stupidity were just a matter of people failing to successfully work towards their own self-interest, I would not be disappointed. But politics is the only place where you see people actively working against their own interests, then congratulating themselves for a job well done. A great example is this poster I saw in downtown Kitchener:
Yes, it's another in the long list of people who think that politicians will change as a result of low voter turnout. I'm assuming that they imagine the politicians changing their ways out of a sense of personal disappointment in how few people vote. But it's really not likely that political candidates - at a time when they are working hard for their job and their political ideology - will take time out to do something for a group that had already made it clear they will not help elect anyone. If you believe a boycott would work, ask yourself about young people: they mostly don't vote; do politicians for harder for youth concerns in a bid to entice them? A quick look at modern-day tuition rates would indicate they don't.
I don't know if you can see it in the condensed version of this picture - I didn't see it at first - but someone has written a note on the next sign down expressing disagreement with this boycott campaign, for the same reason. That remark uses some colourful language, but is still more politically aware than the poster. Then again, so is the ad for strip-club beer on which it is written.
Of course a real cynic would suggest that this sign was put up by someone cleverly campaigning against pro-working-class politics, to dissuade their opponents from voting. But I doubt that explanation, again on the principle that no one would be that clever in the political arena. It wouldn't occur to them to communicate through photocopies taped to a lamppost. They'd be more likely to create BoycottTheElection.com and then wonder why they aren't reaching any poor people. Or more likely, they're busy organizing their own campaign to boycott the election on the grounds that no parties defend the interests of the rich. In short, I'm embarrassed to admit that the most likely explanation for this poster is that a fellow member of my species is actually trying to encourage their own voting bloc not to vote, thinking that it will advance their cause.
But there is one positive I can take from it: If, like me, you have a concern for the plight of the poor, and worry about the consequences elections have on them, then you can take some solace in knowing that for at least a few of them, they deserve all they get.
A couple of years ago, St. Patrick's day parties in London, Ontario got out of control and resulted in a riot big enough to make the BBC World news crawl. As a resident of rival Kitchener-Waterloo, I have to admit to a sense of schadenfreude. But like the schadenforde from watching Toronto struggle with Rob Ford, an honest person has to admit that it could happen anywhere. London students are no more unruly than anyone else's, and here in a city with two universities and a college, it could just as soon happen in KW.
And sure enough, it is. It turns out that St. Patrick's day parties near KW's universities have been growing, to the point that police are taking notice. It's much like the end-of-school-year parties that used to trouble the same neighborhoods. So now they're trying to reduce the St. Patrick's parties using the same strategy: by setting up a more organized rival party to encourage less anarchic revelry.
But as with the Ford situation, there is also some genuine schadenfreude, and that comes from watching a problem blow up in society's face, after we collectively looked the other way for so long. We know that underage drinking is epidemic, and teens get trained early on that recreation means drinking, and drinking means drinking 'til you pass out. Then we send them away from supervision for the first time, and it's to a place where there's lots of stress and little time for relaxation, and where alcohol consumption is a big joke.
It's obviously a recipe for disaster. Rather than be surprised at the London riot, we should be surprised it doesn't happen more often. But instead we look the other way and pretend it's not a problem, or at least not a problem that affects us.
I applaud their efforts, though I'm not sure we can say it fully detonated. Hopefully our phantom knitters will work their way up to covering some other local items, like the old city hall clock tower, or Onkel Hans.
BBC World has been doing ads where their reporters talk about the cities they're from. They end by saying, "<insert city> is my city." I guess they're trying to seem really international, emphasizing their intimate knowledge with major cities around the world.
I'm not sure about the woman who ends it with, "Dubai is my city." Is there anyone who can really say that? Even if you're one of the hundred and fifty people who has lived in Dubai for more than twenty years, the current urbanism amusement park that is Dubai is hardly yours.
Me, I could never make a "this is my city" statement like that. My birthplace of Woodstock didn't reflect what I want in a city. While my current home of Kitchener-Waterloo is far more to my taste, I still don't feel that sense of ownership.
KW does have many things that I appreciate. A few years ago I got a pamphlet in the mail from the Perimeter Institute (of theoretical physics) telling everyone of their opening. It hit me: I just got junk mail from a physics institute - that doesn't happen in normal cities. That geekiness that comes of two universities is nice, as are other quirks like the insane road system, German and Mennonite heritage, and the odd collection of neighbourhoods created by three cities slowly colliding.
But there's also negatives: a big constituency of commuters who don't care much about a community they only sleep in, and an old guard that still sees the region as the collection of small towns it once was.
Then there's London (Ontario) down the road. It's about the same size as the combined size of Kitchener, Waterloo and Cambridge. Both cities seem to be struggling culturally between a conservative small-town heritage, a bland suburban present, and a cosmopolitan urge coming from our age of communications and globalization. So I've always thought everyone in both cities would be happier if we just had a big trade of citizens. Send all the forward thinking, intellectual techie yuppie hipster types to one city, and they can have their light rail and sushi and bike sharing. The white-bread keep-it-like-i-remember-it-as-kid crowd can have all the power centres and mini-mansions and tax freezes they want.
There's been a proposal for Victoria Park, near where I live. The idea is to build statues of each of the Prime Ministers of Canada.
There are plenty of reasons not to like the idea. For one thing, it's going to be expensive, at about $2 million (though most of it through grants from higher levels of government.) Also, I'm not sure statutes are the right thing for a park that is blessed with more wildlife than your average groomed and neutered city park. And of course, there's been a recent drawn-out debate over replacing the park washrooms, which has many locals sick of discussing the park.
And of course, it commits us to continually pay for new statues as new PM's come along. In our system, where a John Turner or Kim Campbell can pop in and out of office in a few months, that could get pricey. They could perhaps have a rule that you have to be in office for a couple of years before you get a statue. Or better still, the size of the statue is proportional to how long the Prime Minister was in office.
But what gets me is the number of people whose criticism just comes down to: The Prime Ministers are politicians, and politicians are the worst kind of scum.
I again say that we have to get over our dichotomy of politicians as entirely evil, and the rest of us are their innocent victims. I'm used to seeing the voters' persecution complex in the Letters to the Editor, but I still find it kind of shocking that our loathing of politicians goes back to people who have been dead for a century.
The Americans don't seem to have this problem; they hate politicians more than anyone, but I don't see any of them complaining about Mount Rushmore. But then the Americans mostly focus their hatred on the other party's politicians. Canadian society is not as divided, but incidents like this make me think there is just as much unfocused anger in it.
So I propose a statue of the hard-done-by taxpayer. Say, a statue of an anguished person turning their pockets inside-out. Perhaps a fat politician behind him, chomping a cigar, and stealing the taxpayer's wallet.
I don't know if you can see it in this photo, but someone has added masking tape to this motivational poster, attributing the quote to Lex Luthor. Also, that metal box you see on the bottom right is a toilet paper dispenser. That's right, this sign is in a washroom, hanging over the toilet. Specifically, it's a washroom at Communitech, an organization for promoting tech companies in KW. If you're in Canada, you may have seen the Communitech offices this week on The National when they went looking for reaction to Blackberry's troubles and found surprising optimism that the influx of laid-off tech workers would be a boon for other local companies.
I could ask what motivated someone at a non-profit organization to put up such a Type-A motivational slogan. Or I could use this as an example of the male-bias of the tech industry - the sign is over the toilet, not on the wall opposite. But instead, I'd like to talk about the idea itself.
I have no idea if Lex Luthor actually coined the phrase or if someone was just commenting that the over-bearing demand sounded like something from a supervillain. But I'm pretty sure the first time I heard the phrase it was from Bono a few years ago, when discussing a recent album. And then by am astonishing coincidence, he was on Letterman just a few days after I took this picture, and made the same point again.
Well I'm not sure the sentiment it's so true. Yes I get the basic point about having high standards, but I think the reverse is equally true: "great" is also the enemy of "good." And I say this based on Bono's own example: listening to U2's recent output, they do sound like they're trying hard to be great, and I think it's to their detriment. A lot of critics haven't been too excited by their recent albums, but I think they do have some good music on them, it's just buried under gratuitous vocal flourishes, and ornate fragments of melodies. They'd be better off with a more stripped-down, simpler production. In other words, I wish they would aim for good rather than great. It's a principle you sometimes hear in baseball, "if trying harder doesn't help, try easier."
Really, I suspect that most truly "great" accomplishments come from people who were trying to be neither good nor great. Great things are usually original, and created by people who weren't measuring themselves against any established standards.
Today in downtown Kitchener, there was a guy at speakers' corner (yes, we have one, at King and Benton.) Anyway, he was preaching. And not inspiring, Jesus-loves-you preaching, this was fire-and-brimstone stuff. That happens from time to time, but usually it's one guy speaking on his own. Today it was a big production. He had his own soundsystem, and people on each corner of the intersection handing out literature.
It's pretty common for charities to have people canvassing downtown at street corners. I'm sure I'm not alone in that I don't want to be rude, but I also don't want to get caught receiving a long, awkward pitch. Normally I'm good at using other pedestrians to avoid the canvasser in a basketball-style pick-and-roll manoeuvre.
But here I was a little worried, because I had to go to the diagonally opposite corner, which meant that I'd have to go past three of the folks handing out stuff. The first one handed me a pamphlet, and I accepted it politely but kept going. At the second corner, a woman tried to hand me a gospel-themed business card. I turned that down, showing that I already had the pamphlet. But I thought that was unusual, that they seem to have something different being distributed at each corner. So I look across the street to see what I'm about to be offered at the next corner, and I see a guy with a big wooden cross over his shoulder. I thought, great, how am I going to politely refuse that?
Lately a lot of people on Twitter have been discussing the idea of merging Kitchener and Waterloo. It's an idea that stays around even though there's not a lot of support for it. And indeed, the Tweets seemed to be against it too.
Personally, I think it would be a good idea. Usually the fear expressed by those against the merging is that Kitchener and Waterloo have different cultures, and we shouldn't mess with that by unifying them. I certainly agree that the two cities have distinct cultures, but I would posit that it has nothing at all to do with their separate governments, and everything to do with the fact that Waterloo has two universities and an economy built around insurance and technology, compared to Kitchener's no Universities and blue-collar background.
The fact is that all cities have distinct areas, and it's rare that their governance is what causes that. As an example, let's look down the 401 at London. If we were to arbitrarily cut the northern third of the city off and call it a separate city - let's call it "Elba" - we'd have to conclude that it has its own distinct culture. But that would be in spite of it having always had the same government as the rest of the city. Instead it would be because of the presence of UWO and a bunch of middle class and higher neighbourhoods, and suburbs expanding into small towns.
I've noticed that when the topic of merging comes up, people make the assumption that its all about cost savings. Really, I doubt the savings would be significant - they'd be mostly in the form of eliminating politicians, high ranking civil servants and buildings and other things that get taxpayers mad but don't really make up a big part of the budget.
I think the bigger reason for uniting is in decision making. As an example, take development. Both cities have committed to not sprawling any further than their current boundaries, but that commitment is going to be tested soon, because Waterloo is almost out of undeveloped land. The sensible way of dealing with this would be to encourage more development in Kitchener, which still has lots of land. A united city would probably make that decision, but Waterloo probably won't: once the fees from developers stop flowing in, the anti-sprawl agreement will be quickly forgotten.
But the merger won't happen any time soon, since the two cities value their cultures, feel superior, and don't want to take on each other's expensive projects (RIM Park and Kitchener's downtown.) And the region does elect some Conservative MPPs, so Hudak won't be forcing it on us as a cost cutting measure. Instead I'll dedicate my energies to preventing them from changing the name of Kitchener back to Berlin.
