Who's Your Embarrassment?

Richard Florida is an urbanist and author of The Rise of the Creative Class, and Who's Your City? Like previous star of the urban planning literati, Jane Jacobs, he is an American who had chosen Toronto as his home. So you can imagine that Rob Ford is a disappointment to him on many levels.

But that disappointment became especially apparent in a recent tweet, in which he said,

Canadian friends used to ask me if I was embarrassed by George W. Bush, I am far, far more embarrassed and disgusted by Rob Ford.

I found that shocking, though I'm not sure why it should. While it's true that Bush did more real damage than Ford, that's really only because Ford doesn't have access to an army. If he did, I'm sure he would have found a reason to invade Hamilton by now.

This brings up something I've noticed: while we hold most of our politicians to very high standards (too high, I'd argue.) We give municipal leaders a pass on so much. Yeah, I know, there's the angry suburban taxpayer, writing letters-to-the-editor crying poverty over sub-inflation property-tax increases. But for most people, there is little known about what the local leaders do. And it seems to be a matter of faith that local leaders are inherently better than the more distant politicians at higher levels of government. Turn-out for municipal elections is consistently lower than other levels.

As I claimed earlier, Ford's conservative credentials are not as good as his supporters think they are.  But the same is true of Bush, what with his unfunded extension of Medicare. When you look at it, there's no question that Bush is a more pleasant human being. Both put on an intentionally dumb façade as a way to connect with gullible voters, though I suspect Ford's public face is closer to reality than Bush's. While Bush will be forever linked with a war started on flimsy evidence, I have no doubt that Ford, in that position would have left the truth far behind. Speaking of which, Ford is willing to play much dirtier: I don't see even Karl Rove accusing a journalist of being a pedophile out of nowhere.

So I have to agree with Florida: on almost any measure, Bush is preferable to Ford. And I, too, am guilty of being soft on local politicians.

Turns Out Very Little News Is Fit To Print

In today's paper, there was an article about the new sport of Team Figure Skating. I'm not much of a fan of figure skating, but I'd heard a brief mention of this team event as one of the new sports at these games, so I read the article to learn more about it.

So they talk to some of the skaters involved, who say they're looking forward to it, mention that Canada is expecting to do well at it. Yeah, but what exactly is it? You say men, women, and pairs are involved, but are they all on the ice at once, or separately?

The article talks about how well the skaters involved have been doing this season, and how that bodes well for the team event. Yeah, but what about the event: if they do compete separately, is it based on just the performance for their usual events, or do they do separate routines for the team event?

Then they point out that the event is open to only the top ten countries, and only the top five counties in the competition advance beyond the short program. That's nice, but do all the skaters participate in the short program? Do they get to choose which ones? And what about the ice dancers? Are they involved with this?

In the end, I gave up and Googled it. One of the first results was a page from the Canadian Olympic Committee, which explained how it works. That leaves me wondering: if I can't get the information I want from the newspaper, and have to go to the source, what do I need the newspaper for?

Redefining Canada

Last week I made a map of Canada based on Google searches of province names.  That was inspired by a similar map of the U.S.  Well I've seen another American map going around the Internet.  In this one, they searched Google for "Why is <state name> so" and put Google's top autocomplete suggestion on the map.

So I did the same thing for Canadian provinces.  I've included all the suggestions I was given.  Unfortunately, there was no suggestion for, "Why are the Northwest Territories so" regardless of how I played with the awkward pluralism in that phrase.  Once again, the title is the suggestions for "Why is Canada so":

Notes:

1. Somehow, for B.C. it suggested the rather formal, "Why is B.C. so named?"
2. For Manitoba, it left a blank, suggesting the koan, "Why is Manitoba so?"
3. That is, the only suggestion for P.E.I. was, "Why is P.E.I. soil red."

Take Me To The Place I Love

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. 

Changing Clothes

Apparently the 90's are back. I noticed a few months ago when I passed a clothing store and realized it was completely day-glo. This after all the day-glo material in the world had disappeared, except for that little bit the Seattle Seahawks have on their uniforms. So congratulations, Seahawks, you not only won the Superbowl, you've also lived out the male fantasy of keeping clothes long enough for them to come back into style.

And I recently saw an article about the Hypercolor shirts, the ones that changed colour depending on their exposure to heat. At the time the workings of the shirts was a mystery to us all, but now such secrets are just a web search away. What old mystery will the Internet ruin next, showing us how The Noid was animated?

Hypercolor shirts weren't that great. They really just looked like moody tie-dye shirts. Of course, now that I write that, I suppose it was apropos for the times. But it seemed kind of disappointing for the latest in clothing technology. About the only time you saw the shirts do anything interesting was when you could see the outline of a chair on someone's back when they stood up. I suppose you could have done some interesting things in conjunction with the Magic Bag which came out around the same time, but we weren't that clever.

Here's the question I did have about Hypercolor shirts at the time, and I would have asked on my blog then if such things existed: why would you want people to know how warm you are? You pay money for deodorant so that people won't know that.

A Second Act In An American Life

As you can probably guess, I have mixed feelings about Bill Gates. I admire the great philanthropist Gates for his tremendous generosity and willingness to bring new approaches and enthusiasm to efforts that had become moribund and cynical. But I hate the businessman Gates, with his mediocre and over-marketed products and business strategies of questionable legality. But we don't have to worry about the latter, now that he's retired and the founder's company founders.

The philanthropist Gates released his annual letter recently, in which he makes the case for aid to the developing world. It's a refreshing read, not just for its optimistic tone, but for the practical approach he brings to the subject. He doesn't fall into the rigid ideologies or extremism that dominate current politics, and faces it with intellectual honesty.

One might be tempted to see his pragmatic approach as a product of his background in software. But I find that many people from science and engineering are actually quite ripe for the picking by simplistic ideology. The exact-science nerd is used to intellectual discussions that don't have a lot of vested interest at stake, and trends to have an unrealistically simple view of human psychology. Thus they fall prey to neat and tidy political ideas that are not rooted in the real world.

So I think gates does deserve credit for his humanitarian work, in which he makes me feel like they're is some how for the world.  I never thought I'd feel the developing world has a brighter future than Microsoft, but somehow he's done it.

Tickets To The Big Game

So Canada is bidding for the 2026 world cup. That's the sort of thing that will be greeted with laughter both in and outside Canada.

I've always thought that it's not that crazy an idea. Most CFL stadiums could be expanded with end-zone seats, giving us plenty of venues without too much expense.  The missing element is a giant, 80,000-or-so seat stadium for the final.  But Toronto will need a stadium that big if it is ever going to host the Olympics or an NFL team, so it doesn't have to be a white elephant.

We have another thing going for us: pragmatism. For the last little while, the big sports events have been given out with the apparent belief that anything can be fixed by the vortex of money that follows major sports around. And for a while that seemed true. The 2004 Summer Olympics was given to debt-ravaged sentimental choice Athens. That didn't blow up until years after the games. The 2008 Summer Games and 2010 World Cup were given to Beijing and South Africa respectively, in spite of human rights violations and a high crime rate respectively.

Those worked out, but now the flight of fantasy is catching up to us. Giving this year's Winter Olympics to a southern city in a corrupt pseudo-dictatorship is looking like a bad idea. FIFA must already be regretting giving Russia the 2018 World Cup. That is, if they have any spare time while regretting giving the cup after that to Qatar, without considering the whole "desert" thing. You could forgive them for the looming disaster of the 2014 World Cup to Brazil - who would have believed that Brazilians have priorities higher than soccer?

So I figure that both FIFA and the IOC would be looking for someplace a little more reliable this time around, even if that means less exotic.  So we might have a chance. But having said that, it's still a crazy idea for the Canadian Soccer Association to spend any energy on this.

While I appreciate that hosting the World Cup would grow the game here, the fact is you need some basic level of support before you can deign to host the world championship of something. I figure the base requirement should be this: we only bid to host the World Cup when we we’re confident that Canada can play Italy in Toronto and the crowd will cheer for the home team. Right now we're nowhere near that.